[clnq]

In my opinion, remote work is here to stay in the long term. Many tech companies now jumping on the RTO trend may not yet fully comprehend the costs they will eventually incur. A number of their senior engineers are departing and finding high demand for their skills from remote companies. Not to mention that many are establishing their own startups, offering even greater flexibility in the workplace. In my sector of the industry (games), there are articles every week in the news about ex-leads building their own studios; can you guess why? What is more, anti-remote companies can't attract this talent with their headhunters anymore.

There will always be entry-level candidates willing to do whatever it takes to get a tech job and ambitious career makers gunning for those vacant leadership roles. But the costs of losing decades of institutional knowledge will catch up with these companies. They are harming themselves for an RTO whim and many won't make it in the long-term with his type of leadership.

WFH for engineers is a no-brainer however you look at it. Whether it's about quality of life, work and life balance, convenience, savings on office space and utilities, or being able to attract top talent. Why would I, as an engineer, apply for a job that will ask me to relocate, make my spouse quit their job to move with me, pull my kids out of school and make them find new friends elsewhere, abandon all my responsibilities to my community and put my house up for rent for a company when there are plenty more that don't ask me to do it? And most will still have a small office to come into if I so insist.

I don't think cunning malice or power plays can explain the decisions of leaders forcing RTO on their employees. There does not seem to be anything calculated about this to me. I reckon they just don't understand what happened to their business during the pandemic and they want to get back to the good old ways instead of finding the actual root causes of their problems. When the damage of RTO becomes clear, some will revert their decisions, and others will double down. Either they will go back to WFH or make space for others on the market. Doing work that can be done from home from the office is an unnatural state of things, it was only normal in very recent history, and hopefully briefly.