[zebraflask]

This doesn't pass the sniff test.

For a basic non-engineering example, think about B2B sales. How much of a typical B2B sales cycle involves phone calls and emails and video meetings versus how much involves in-person meetings? Hasn't the first part of that more or less been "remote" since well before the virus?

To an extent, I think a large part of this view, as other comments have noted, might involve things like expensive office leases, etc., and to a certain mindset - realizing that a company doesn't necessarily need much of a physical presence highlights many varieties of poor longterm decision-making.

[nostrebored]

I have done B2B sales since the shift to remote work.

The nature of the work actually highly lends itself to being in person. Even remote workers will be on some physical location the majority of the time.

COVID changed this, and not for the better. It is much harder to do remote.

[mulmen]

There's no reason for the sales staff to be in the same room as eachother. Plenty of B2B deals happen remotely, even pre-covid. I don't recall any customers coming on site at my last B2B company and there's no way sales had a travel budget. Remote workers are equally or better suited to occasional visits to customer locations anyway.

[KaiserPro]

> there's no way sales had a travel budget.

All the places where we had B2B sales, we've had a travel budget. Ironically the sales "offices" were usually one person in a territory. But they were very much out wining and dining big customers.

We also had a telesales team, who were centrally based, and they totally could be remote workers.

[rkk3]

> I don't recall any customers coming on site at my last B2B company and there's no way sales had a travel budget.

That sounds odd. Maybe the company was so big you weren't aware of these things or the company wasn't mature and only had low value contracts. But eventually all b2b software goes to enterprise and that means face to face time with clients, expense accounts for thousand dollar dinners & travel budgets large enough to get global services status.

[mulmen]

~30 year old company when I was there 10 years ago. 100 employees total, half of them customer service. I spent half my time supporting sales. It was pure telesales.