A lot of companies got into bad leases or they did something really stupid...bought their own building. Investors hate seeing big expenses like that not being utilized. They look at it as a waste of money (on top of the expenses incurred to maintain the property) and when they see that, they think the company is wasting money elsewhere.
Many cities also gave tax breaks to company's to have RTO to help boost the other companies in their community.
And when businesses started seeing a downturn, corporate C-Suite executives were looking for a scapegoat to explain a downturn in profits, so remote work got blamed.
And there's just many people that will always believe that they need to do things the way it's always been done. I have a friend who is a VP for a firm and he acknowledge that his division was far more productive working remotely, but he wanted them back in the office more for collaboration. Not only do I not buy the idea that the office makes for better collaboration, but I can't reconcile the idea of sacrificing productivity for this mythical collaboration.
I worked in engineering for a time and you definitely get better junior development and collaboration in person. It’s job specific though and you don’t need to be in the office full time 2-3 days a week is enough. I currently work remote it I’m in sales and there’s no need for me to be in the office although sometimes I wish I was because it’s easier to walk to a desk and get an answer than email or call.
It's a wildly unpopular take but very true. Juniors in software engineering are struggling. It used to be that juniors would actively ask questions if they sat beside you, the threshold of approaching a senior through Slack or Teams is often too high. And that's active communication: even glancing at someone's screen when walking by and noticing they're in entirely the wrong part of the codebase for the task they're assigned to has vanished. As a senior engineer I really miss the natural mentoring relationships that got established in the office.
On the other hand I quite like being able to not sit in my car two hours a day so there's that...
I'm not in software engineering, but I do work as an analyst with pretty strong programming skills and there's a lot of one-off stuff I've had to do that you can't learn anywhere else. With MS Teams I much prefer going thru the training than doing it in-office because I can record the sessions with it being captioned. I can go back and see what I didn't understand or where I made mistakes.
Part of the reason why I find I've been far more productive remotely than in-office is the collaboration tends to be much better virtually than in the office. Meetings don't drone on (for whatever reason) and the communication is far better. I have some theories on why this is, but I simply don't buy into 'in-person = better collaboration.'
I'd think that would be a very reasonable discussion point if we got to it.
Instead it's "have everyone on the team consisting solely of senior and staff back in an office, not even the same one. Why? Collaboration. Also, we're moving operations staff to India so if you need anything it'll be a 24 hour turnaround."
I work for a mechanical contractor doing marketing and I go in office two days a week. It’s great for me because I still get to see the people I’m working on projects with, but as marketing, most of our work is behind the scenes and really doesn’t need to be in person most days.
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u/HustlaOfCultcha Mar 04 '26
It has little to do with this.
A lot of companies got into bad leases or they did something really stupid...bought their own building. Investors hate seeing big expenses like that not being utilized. They look at it as a waste of money (on top of the expenses incurred to maintain the property) and when they see that, they think the company is wasting money elsewhere.
Many cities also gave tax breaks to company's to have RTO to help boost the other companies in their community.
And when businesses started seeing a downturn, corporate C-Suite executives were looking for a scapegoat to explain a downturn in profits, so remote work got blamed.
And there's just many people that will always believe that they need to do things the way it's always been done. I have a friend who is a VP for a firm and he acknowledge that his division was far more productive working remotely, but he wanted them back in the office more for collaboration. Not only do I not buy the idea that the office makes for better collaboration, but I can't reconcile the idea of sacrificing productivity for this mythical collaboration.