[rakoo]

I'll say it again: it's not about working better from home or from the office.

Of course you're supposed to be working correctly as a group, and your example is a dysfunctional group because one dev who wants to stay home doesn't play well with others.

The crucial point is that only the group can decide what is best for itself. If the group (you and your colleagues) decide the fix is to be full office, then fine, you as a group decide to come back to the office. If the fix is to alternate some days home with no collaboration and some days at the office where you concentrate all the discussions, then fine. Whatever the choice, it's yours and that's what matters.

The issue is not RTO, it's mandatory RTO.

[ShadowBanThis01]

The issue is people are paid to do what they're told.

It's incredible how infantile a lot of the reactions are here. This guy took an on-site job and is now whining that he has to go back TWO out of the FIVE days he EXPECTED to be there.

[cauch]

The point of my story is that Devs are sometimes really bad to decide what is best for their team.

The problematic dev was convinced their way of working and communicating was perfectly fine (even after multiple time where collaborators reacted). The rest of the devs team were also agreeing. They were measuring their efficiency as the number of tickets they were doing. As the same feature with small crucial tweaks were coming their way again and again, they were pretty happy with themselves: they were doing a lot of tickets, none of them too challenging. They were even saying that they are more efficient in remote than before.

But the persons outside of the team were noticing the problems and paying for it. The research and development team (that I was part of) had to wait a long time to see features we desperately needed put in production, as each time it was not what requested (and no, the requirements were correct, the devs just went in the wrong direction because they read half of it because they assumed they knew). Same for the other team having to collaborate with the devs. Same for the managers, who were seeing clearly that there is a problem, continued to explain to the devs and show them proofs that the work was not done properly, but the devs were convinced "a lot of managers are useless anyway, they just say that because they want to feel important, let's not change anything".

The problems were communicated clearly to the devs, but they just ignored it, and when we were forced to change the way of working, they complained that "it was done without any explanation" and "it is mandatory".

So, no, the opinion of the devs on what is best is not always trustworthy. And this is my point: someone said "We know why companies don't give explanations". I'm just saying: I saw plenty of devs saying exactly that while I saw myself that this was bs. I'm not saying it's never that or that it cannot happen, I'm just asking: do you have objective element to support this, or is it a "smart conclusion from the very very smart dev team who know better than everyone and yet don't understand how much inefficient they are"?

[helij]

I think you focus too much on this one person in a few of your messages here. The issues you present are easily mitigated no matter in the office or work from home. It takes

[cauch]

I'm forced to detail this one person situation because people reacts by re-inventing the situation so that it fits what they want to hear.

This one person is just one example, even a bit extreme, of a mentality that I keep seeing over and over again.

The problem is not this person, or "working from home" or "at the office", the problem is the mentality here: they are basically saying that asking someone to go back to the office can only be part of an evil plan from incompetent management.

As you say "the issues you present are easily mitigated". One way to mitigate s to ask the person to work at the office. The problem is this mentality of excluding this mitigation as if it is not as good and as legitimate as another one. All the other mitigation that you will come up with will have inconvenience for one or several actors. It is just biased to say "I can solve the problem by clicking on the button A or on the button B, but if they click on the button A, they are incompetent evil management, because after all, they could have clicked on button B. Button B has also some inconvenience, as much as button A has, but not directly to me, so it means it is objectively the best choice"