[aspanu]

I find this type of argument about RTO to be pretty poor. I think it’s pretty lazy to crank out a vibes based article describing specific grievances and generalizing to an entire population. I think the real discussion about RTO, pro or con, is a lot more nuanced, and this type of argument does a disservice to the complexities.

In my experience, a lot of the compelling arguments I’ve heard are actually complaints about poor North American city design, rather than necessarily anti-being in a reasonable office.

[infotainment]

Completely agree; I think an argument can be made that there are a lot of benefits to in-person interaction. Most anti-RTO arguments I’ve seen boil down to “I don’t like my commute” which has less to do with RTO and more to do with America’s lack of meaningful transportation infrastructure.

[janosdebugs]

I believe, most of the companies that we hear instituting an RTO mandate have distributed teams, so that in-person interaction wouldn't manifest in these cases. Also, I live in a country with very meaningful transportation infrastructure, I still wouldn't want to spend 1.5-2 hours every day crammed into said infrastructure at rush hour for no good reason. Buying a car would have saved me 30 minutes tops and I find it irresponsible when public transport is available.

Thankfully, I no longer work for a company that mandates in-office work and even the telco (!) I used to work for had unlimited home office even before the pandemic, which worked beautifully and saved them lots of money.

Having an office to go to helps the more socially inclined employees, but doesn't boost productivity uniformly, especially when everyone is on calls all day anyway.

Just like home office, full in-office work needs a very special setup to be truly effective and given global hiring, may be harder to achieve that a remote culture.

[infotainment]

> I believe, most of the companies that we hear instituting an RTO mandate have distributed teams, so that in-person interaction wouldn't manifest in these cases.

I agree that RTO makes no sense if you’re going to spend your entire day in calls. That said, I would actually go a bit further, and argue that distributed teams themselves are a bad idea for that reason.

[janosdebugs]

That then becomes a hiring problem as that's limiting it to one geographic area. If it falls out of favor in 5 or 10 years, it's really hard to move the company. I've seen effective remote teams, but it requires a high degree of independence from everyone. Typically, it's also much harder for people early in their careers.

[loosescrews]

The pandemic helped me understand the cost of infectious disease and made me realize that I could work effectively remotely and that the cost of in-person on my health wasn't worth it.

I used to live right next to the office, but I wouldn't go today even if I still lived that close. Also, living in a more rural environment is pretty great.

[carbonguy]

Couldn't agree with you more, and honestly I think you're softballing it here:

> I think it’s pretty lazy to crank out a vibes based article describing specific grievances and generalizing to an entire population.

In that the article doesn't even describe _specific_ grievances, really; we get three quotes in this order:

- A Paul Graham tweet where he says "multiple founders" have changed their minds; the _personal_ opinion he expresses is that "he doubts things will go all the way back to the way they were before Covid, but it looks like they will go most of the way back." Nothing specific mentioned about why the founders changed their minds.

- A truly stripped-of-context quote from Keith Rabois that gets closest to saying something specific i.e. 'that younger workers “learn by osmosis,” which requires in-person interaction' (false as presented, and if this is a genuine reflection of his opinion then he doesn't actually understand training) and 'supervisors discover hidden talent by watching [younger employees]' (true enough, but presented as a problem with remote work when it's actually not)

- Absolute banger from Sam Altman: “I think definitely one of the tech industry’s worst mistakes in a long time was that everybody could go full remote forever, and startups didn’t need to be together in person and, you know, there was going to be no loss of creativity ... I would say that the experiment on that is over.” - the implied grievance here is that "remote work makes startups less creative" which is, to its' credit, an actual position for which one can make a coherent argument. He may even have gone to the trouble of doing this at some point, for all I know. The rest is pure sophistry, though - "one of the tech industry's worst mistakes ... was that everybody could go full remote forever" is just not an accurate reflection of what actually happened, and if he's exaggerating for effect, then I'd be interested to know what effect he was going for; he's also really softballing the reason why remote work happened in the first place: it wasn't an "experiment," it was a forced response to a world crisis with existential implications!

There's significant overgeneralizing happening here too, as you suggested; at best, you can say that these guys are referring to what's true of _startups specifically_, where they're at least domain experts, but even if their arguments ARE true of startups (and I am deeply skeptical that this is the case) you can't assume that they'll be true of OTHER organizational types.