[eweise]

I don't see what fairness has to do with WFH. Its in the company's best interest to maximize employee productivity. If an employee has to travel three hours per day to sit on zoom meetings, they might not be motivated to perform as well as they would for a company that treats them better.

[tomohelix]

I guess by using the word "fair" I may have caused the discussion to focus on the wrong idea.

It is about what is acceptable to both the employer and the employee. The employee would like the freedom to WFH but the employer consider it a benefit that come at their cost and thus do not want to grant it. As shown by other professions, the idea of WFH is entirely new and rarely if ever granted or expected to most professionals. Software devs are in a unique position to demand and potentially getting it does not make it any less exceptional and a huge ask for the other side of the negotiation.

Whether it is really good or bad is not the point I am making.

[consteval]

Employers only consider it a benefit because workers like it. If we all banded together and just lie and say WFH sucks, we'd then get it. Because that's how these things work. Often the metric to optimize for is employee control, and therefore a field I like to call "misery management".

The objective world does not always, and in fact rarely, intersects with the world of business management. In reality, WFH is cheaper across the board. In time, space, money... every aspect you can think of.

But a mutually beneficial nature makes is undesirable from a business perspective, because they don't want the implications of that word - "mutual".

Employees advocate for themselves because they have to. If you are not selfish in that manner, you are ONLY hurting yourself. Employers have discovered the art of selfishness thousands of years ago. You must push, you must be entitled. And, remember, the only reason you have what you have is because a lot of workers before you were very entitled. So entitled they often got what they wanted via violence.