[jmye]

Is this a serious response? You talked about moving the entire office. Clearly the owner neither wants to live in Bangalore, nor wants to sell the company to someone who does, ergo, the entire business does not move. On the other hand, he has an entire QA team working from home and sees no reason not to offshore them.

I feel like you’re being intentionally obtuse in not understanding why one scenario is fundamentally nonsense, and not the pedantic gotcha you think it is.

[jodrellblank]

I feel like you're being intentionally obtuse and pointing at the obvious case so you don't have to address the point. Yes yes, Billy Bob CEO isn't going to replace himself with someone else, but a company big enough to employ offshore workers and deal with international taxes and employment regulations is big enough to have more than one department and more than one office which could be offshored wholesale. And the financier quoted above, if they can get the same development from an offshore company for less, is going to finance the offshore company instead of Billy Bob.

That is, the implicit threat "if you don't RTO, we will offshore you" comes with the counter "if you do RTO, we won't offshore you" - except if offshore was actually tempting, they could and would offshore your entire office even after you RTO to it, and "the market" would/will offshore the whole company.

To the extent that doesn't happen, "you working from home is indistinguishable to an Indian working from India" isn't true. Timezone, language, culture,

"RTO because we need the extra productivity of everyone in the office - but if you don't, we'll accept the reduced productivity, just with other cheaper people" is also nonsense - then why not offer the WFH American less money to stay WFH? No? Because it's a punishment and not a real business decision.