[ItsMonkk]

You seem to think if your company is offering WFH that you still can't come into the office. I don't see why that has to be the case. It it work from ANYWHERE in the world, including your office, vs work ONLY in your office. Every other point you make no longer holds.

As an introvert who does understand those points you make, society should pick up the slack with third spaces. What's holding those third spaces back? Lack of cheap access to space. Once the offices are sold they will become third spaces, and we will get the best of both worlds.

[popularonion]

These days more big companies are implementing anti-workcation policies limiting your freedom to travel, allegedly due to tax/immigration liabilities.

The model they’re pushing for is that your primary residence address is your “Home Office” and you have to keep your butt in your seat there, just like the RTO employees have to badge in at the office.

And yes they can enforce this whenever they decide to, especially if you have a corporate issued laptop.

[tpmoney]

>These days more big companies are implementing anti-workcation policies limiting your freedom to travel, allegedly due to tax/immigration liabilities.

It's at least in some part a very valid concern. There are a number of regulations that are based on you having >=X number of employees in a given location. The WARN Act and FMLA being two very notable examples. Employers are obligated to withhold taxes from your pay checks. If you're working in another state for an extended period of time (usually ~30 days or more), they both need to know that and now have to work out new tax withholding for you. Indeed, a vast number of labor laws apply specifically to the employee in the state they are working, regardless of the home office of the company. As an easy example, California reasonably would not be happy if a company chose to pay all their CA based employees minimum wages from Kansas just because that's where the company office is. So just the very fact that you're working in a different state can dramatically change how you are required to be compensated.

Obviously any or all of these things can be worked around and through, but it's pretty clear that it will require work and for any large enough employer, it will require policies and hard rules on what is and isn't allowed.

[tpmoney]

I don't think anything other than I'm tired of being used as a symbol for other people who don't want to go back to the office. This whole discussion around RTO is (and has been) full of a lot of people pontificating about other people's motives rather than just talking about individual preferences and the pros and cons in a constructive manner. If a given situation works well for an individual, that's something we can talk about. If a given situation has negative effects on a group, that's something we can talk about. But just blindly declaring the the "other side" is just "extroverts wanting to extrovert" or "introverts wanting to introvert" as if they're some monolithic group without individual preferences is both unfair in that it's wrongly stereotyping "your side" and it's equally dismissing all the possible valid concerns the "other side" has for reductive, cutesy sound bites that do nothing to further understanding or compromise.

That said, there are a number of perfectly valid reasons why "everyone can just do what they want" isn't necessarily true.

For example, I worked with a junior developer who absolutely needed to be in the office. They personally preferred WFH, and while I sympathize, they were also the sort of developer that gets deeply sucked into rabbit holes and would disappear for DAYS at a time coming up for air only occasionally at which point you discover they've spend the last week solving for a 0.0000001% edge case that was completely unnecessary to solve for and have made no real progress on what you actually needed them to work on. What needs to be understood is that they were a good developer. And when we worked from the office, it was much easier to catch them going sideways and re-direct them. But now we're faced with a developer who does not want to come to the office, thinks they're doing just fine from home, but whose individual (deliverable) productivity is definitely waning because of it. Some people really don't have the self awareness or introspection necessary to correctly gauge their WFH vs WFO productivity levels.

Or there's the fact that an office requires some minimal number of people for the benefits of being in the office to take hold. Otherwise it just becomes remote work with more steps. Early on when we first started going back to the office, there were days I was one of 3 developers on a whole floor. That did nothing to improve any of my prior concerns other than freeing up the space at home.

Related to this is that even if you split things up, a number of the concerns I spoke about absolutely continue to hold. If you still need to log all your conversations with your co-workers into the permanent chat system so that your remote team members aren't being left out, you're still dealing with all the negatives that come from that. If every meeting still requires a video camera and conference call, the concerns about recordings still remain. How much or little these concerns affect you and your team largely depends on how much of your team is remote, and how much or little you were doing with this tech before.

As for selling offices for third spaces, if offering WFH means that I'm still allowed to come to the office, it means the company still needs an office, so it's unlikely the office is getting sold. Beyond that, why would any third spaces want to be setting up in a dead business district if no one goes there anymore?

Again, I think a flexible policy is probably best overall. I certainly benefit from having flexibility and I largely believe in hiring smart people and getting the heck out of their way and letting them decide how they accomplish the mission to give them. As I said, I'm just really tired of being used as a symbol for other people to dismiss very valid concerns about the negatives of a WFH culture.

[ItsMonkk]

> And when we worked from the office, it was much easier to catch them going sideways and re-direct them.

I regularly work with people on my team who need to go into an office, but it's a different office than mine. RTO does not solve this issue.

> why would any third spaces want to be setting up in a dead business district if no one goes there anymore?

SoHo, Manhattan in the 1970's matches this description. That environment is a perfect breeding ground for communities to flourish.

> so it's unlikely the office is getting sold

Sure. Some will, some won't. Still means less demand and cheaper prices. Still means some workplaces will use a shared model with other companies.

[erik_seaberg]

Recording is visibly opt-in and retention is limited by default for the same reasons as chat and email—the US legal discovery process is a big burden even for the innocent. The only time I see it happen is a planned presentation to a group where future reuse makes sense. Some of our all-hands org meetings even take anonymous questions.

[themoonisachees]

Not to be that guy but companies aren't gonna stop offering offices to their employees, clearly. If you wish for RTO, then do it, but TFA clearly states that advocating for everyone to RTO is useless.

This is gonna sound far fetched but actually: this is the same argument as the abortion debate. Pro-choice people want you to be able to work from your office or your home, anti-choice people want you to return to the office. The argument is the same, the stakes are just higher in one instance.