[RestlessMind]

A simple first-order approximation of your first 3 paragraphs - hybrid model. Companies are discovering that offsites are in fact costlier for the value they provide. Hybrid would require an office and hence a higher cost, but it also has a much bigger bang for the buck.

> but there’s enough critical people who simply aren’t going back that it’ll be management’s job to figure it out

Pendulum is swinging, my friend. With a big recession looming, companies will have all the leverage. Elon has already paved the way and other big companies will soon follow. On the other end of the spectrum, a lot of startups will be bootstrapped in this recession and a majority of startup founders want to have the initial bootstrapping team to be together[0].

[0] Based on my first hand observation working as an advisor for a VC firm.

[benreesman]

Your point is taken about the macroeconomic situation (I'm not quite convicted enough to go short but it's a near thing, Q3 earnings are looking to be a shit show).

With that said, we've been through this before: companies always have leverage with many/most of their employees, and that is going even further up for awhile, but Google Search doesn't stay up without a meaningful number of people who have made enough money to not be pushed around.

This is the flip side of being one of the "CEO/VC class" and having a boom decade or two: most of the real pros made some serious money on stock and can't be herded like cattle the way new grads can be.

The American economy has become an experiment in how close you can get to indentured servitude for your working people without calling it that by twisting the macroeconomic knobs until the kid doesn't get medicine unless you hump that bullshit job. I'm sure the money guy who figures out how to do that to hardass infrastructure hackers or founder-caliber kids will be hailed as a hero (in private), but it hasn't happened yet alhamdulillah.