| What this article (and every other article advocating RTO) misses is that this is not about WFH / remote work. While yes, there has been a move toward fully remote companies (this existed before Covid - e.g. Gitlab), I've never seen this as something that would be broadly adopted - this suits a certain niche, it's great that it exists, I think that niche should grow, but I can't see it ever approaching majority. Leaving aside fully-remote working, the debate in most cases is about choice and autonomy. While many engineers had flexible working arrangements before Covid, many did not (and the vast majority of non-engineer office workers didn't either). Now these arrangements are the norm (despite managements fighting to remove them). Personally, I much much prefer working from the office. I have a nice work setup at home now (after much tuning over the past few pandemic years), but it will never be ideal for me. If I were working for a fully remote company, I would need to rent shared space to avail of some of the mental health benefits outlined in this article, and it would still be far from ideal as my work neighbours would not be colleagues. BUT... I absolutely would not be happy to give up the ability I currently have to stay home if/whenever I need to - it's enormously liberating and allows me to conduct my day-to-day life much more efficiently and happily. I don't think anyone arguing for WFH is really advocating fully-remote for all (which seems to be this author's assumption?). They're advocating for worker autonomy. |
In general I think that's true.
However, the flip side is you have people who want to go into a 2019 office. And they're going in and finding a ghost town. And at least some of them think it's the responsibility of their coworkers to fix that even if they're getting their jobs done perfectly well from somewhere remote.