[kstrauser]

The preference seems to be highly asymmetric. People who want to RTO want to go back and think they'll be more efficient there. People who don't want to RTO may have things childcare routines, hell, even recent moves to distant cities, that make RTO a severe hardship.

I don't mind going in to the office to meet up with my coworkers sometimes. People who took advantage of the opportunity to move to cheaper locales may have an incredibly hard time with that.

[happytoexplain]

I don't know a single person who doesn't list "more efficient" in their list of reasons they prefer WHO. The different opinions are only asymmetric in that the advantages alleged for WHO are typically a superset of the advantages alleged for RTO. Practically speaking, both are mostly correct - it's the person who does better with one or the other, not the policy itself.

E.g. just looking at the efficiency variable alone, people who collaborate better remotely are not more or less hampered be being in-person with their colleagues than vice versa (unless you cherry-pick).

So there's no reason not to just allow both, other than those common petty motivations that poor leaders are susceptible to focusing on, usually for optics reasons or other bad second-order metrics.

[kstrauser]

I agree with you. I feel like I'm way more efficient at WFH. The most common argument I've heard in favor of RTO is a claim that it will boost efficiency. I don't believe it, but that's the claim.

Just pointing out that if someone wants to RTO but their office wants to WFH, that person will be slightly inconvenienced. If a person who built their lifestyle around WFH is required to RTO, they might face insurmountably major problems.

And I think that's why the WFH contingent, including myself, is so much more vocal. Even if it were true that there were roughly as many RTO and WFH fans, which I don't believe for a moment, the WFH group deals with way more hardship if they don't get their way than the RTO group would.