There are specific things that are more efficient in person, mostly meetings with multiple people.

It’s easier to interject and the conversation flows better in person.

With zoom and the like you get to to the “no you go ahead” loops when people talk over each other.

Everything else is just fine remote.

"Where to go for lunch, you go out lunching everyday? We just bring our own lunch.

But yes I am generally less productive at home because I am inclined to do other shit while at work and considering I have to write hours on customers I cannot get away with working 5 hours and writting 8 hours (that's also illegal, but okay)

I didn't think that managers like Michael Scott actually existed.

As the election has shown us, these tech bros are not necessarily smart or thoughtful about their choices, and the real motivations tend to be related to personal financial gain. The level of push and coordination behind RTO and every company copying each other's policy probably come down from "on high", and i suspect that's investors with business real estate interests putting their thumbs on the scale to avoid a collapse in their markets

Would you be surprised to learn that business is actually a network of cargo cults, where the thing they're trying to superficially mimic is other businesses that don't know why they're doing what they're doing?

I work for an online edtech company that saw massive organic growth during lockdowns, and has been chasing that dragon since lockdowns were lifted. They spent millions expanding their workforce at the time, while they severely pared down their school outreach team. They made multiple moves that only made sense if you assume lockdowns would last forever.

I raised this with management a couple of times, and their only response was "everyone else was doing it, too".

I would qualify your first point. Parkinson's Law tells us that we have pointless bosses in huge numbers, and they need to justify their own existence. The people who actually produce things, everyone can see if they're working or not by looking at the output. But their supervisors, and especially their supervisors' supervisors, those people are desperate to make themselves relevant, to justify their pointlessly-large salaries despite a complete lack of utility.

1. that is true, but they love to do it to stroke thier own ego.

It's actually:

4. To ensure the corporate real estate market doesn't collapse like the the consumer real estate market did in 2008 despite the same problem with massive loan fraud inflating the value of business real-estate for toxic bank loans that are rated AAA, but are actually worth shit as no one needs corporate real estate post - Covid.

It's the 2008 housing crisis, but with corporate real estate. COVID forced work from home, which caught banks with their pants down, having no way to actually drive the demand back up for these buildings that will continually house less and less people from less and less businesses (Work from home + businesses not surviving Covid, now Tariffs.)

Our entire banking system is backed up by debt packaged with corporate real estate that's rated as AAA, but is just more toxic cat shit no one wants wrapped in dogshit that banks need. It's a bomb that's been growing as giant corporate buildings become ghost towns, and city centers become more horizontal than verticle.

Big companies with big loans from banks know they're fucked if the corporate real estate market collapses. So they force work from home as a band aid that gives their corporate property some value, or at least justifies it on paper. In reality, the cost to force workers into the office always offsets the billions in losses if their corporate office real estate ever followed real market forces and depreciated in value.

I love alliteration. And puns, especially the multilingual kind 👹

We should never have allowed people to be board members in two busineses.

Ding ding ding!

Correct!

But then we couldn't capitalism as hard, so... I'm sorry but that issue is a political non-starter.

... Where I grew up, literally every single city council board member just also ran a real estate holding company at the same time.

I figured out as a literal child that this was why our local government only made nonsensical spending and taxing decisions, its the definition of corrupt, but everyone acted like I was insane.

Oh well, we're all renters now, good job to all the people who kept voting for actual landlords to run the government.

They should rebrand the stupid “quiet quitting” as “quiet layoffs”

People generally don't give up their car or stop buying things when they work from home. Those taxes just shift away from commercial districts and toward residential ones.