[nostrebored]

Discrete individual contributions on individual days do not represent company wide performance. The people I know who are going in to the office are surrounded by junior employees who have no idea what's going on. The people I know who think they're more productive say they've "avoided interruptions" which are by and large productive for the company.

These large corporations aren't making decisions without the data. In fact, they tried this experiment for years and the results are in: full-remote is less productive.

That's not to say specific people shouldn't be remote. There's probably an optimal distribution that allows some slack for these ICs who are bad at being in the office.

[MattPalmer1086]

When we all went remote during the pandemic, we were told by senior leadership that our productivity had measurably increased.

Now they want us back in a few days a month, which isn't too bad I guess. But it really has nothing to do with productivity.

We do less work when we commute, socialise more, don't accept early or late meetings, etc. Our teams are distributed across India, the UK, the EU and the US. Most of our actual work takes place on webex calls, even pre pandemic.

Now, it may be that the leadership value intangible things like culture and have decided that those are also important things. But at least for our company, productivity is not the reason they want us back sometimes.

[cwkoss]

It is doubtful they have robust objective data. Much more likely, a suit asked someone to get data to justify RTO, someone found some metrics that look better within people who RTO'd voluntarily, and they are using it to justify their hypothesis without anyone having the balls/organizational clout to push back critically.

[Gigachad]

Place I work at ended up dropping all juniors because they hadn’t got up to speed after a year and a bit.

Personally I find myself thinking “I need to discuss this thing with this person, but I don’t feel like booking in a meeting and having a video call, I’ll just wait until we see each other in the office some time”