| 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. |