| Lots of companies are spending a ton of money on office leases and a lot of loans and debt are tied up in commercial real estate (feel free to google), so your choice is either get the proles back in the office or take a haircut trying to get out of your lease (and if enough companies do that, it's going to kick the legs out from under a huge chunk of the economy). And a lot of executives like LARPing Big Important Business Guys and walking the parapets to survey their domain which is much harder to do when everyone is on Zoom. Here is a true story from several jobs ago: it was a small company and the CEO was fond of saying "people don't work when they work from home." One day they were doing some construction on the building and the workers literally cut through the internet cable to the office. It was going to take a few days to repair. Even then we still had to come sit in the office even though we were an internet based company with an internet based product and even things like our code repos and all that were online so we couldn't do much of anything. He very begrudgingly let the customer service people go work from home but the rest of us had to sit in the office without internet just in case it came up. I, of course, had to say something. "Surely in this case," I say, "if we were to go home and do literally any work, it would be an improvement over the 0 work we can do right now. Like any work at all is an improvement, yes?" He sighed and shook his head because I, a fool, just didn't get it. "But you could work if we had internet," he said, and then grew larger and larger as he powered up to destroy me, "and anyway, people don't work when they work from home". |