[JohnMakin]

> I go to work in exchange for currency, which is required to acquire goods and services

Social currency is also a thing, which is much more difficult to gain in a remote setting - if not impossible. I don't go to work to socialize either, but I'm not naive enough to think that without an extremely established career and reputation at an org that I'll be promoted or employed strictly on merit. there is always some degree of social-ness involved in those kinds of decisions. I'm not saying that's how things should be, it's just how they are.

[benreesman]

There will always be some social-ness, but let’s be real that it’s out of fucking control right now. I’ve been doing this professionally for more than 20 years and “who you know not what you know” hasn’t run this badly amok in that entire time.

The industry is very unsettled right now: credible (or at least loud) opinions on AI range from “fancy autocomplete nothingburger” to “programmers are obsolete starting now”, RTO is in some weird ass place where it’s really unclear the merits or lack thereof, consolidation of half the S&P into ~7 companies and the whole startup pipeline running through guys who fit in a banquet room is uh, not highly not a working free market.

This is how you get a chorus of “talent shortage” on one side and a chorus of “CS is cooked fam” on the other: software engineering jobs are experiencing a market failure, price discovery isn’t happening, and shit is going to be weird until the market starts working again.

[CptFribble]

Megacorps being naturally risk-averse, and the lion's share of the rest of the capital being held by that banquet room, it's going to take one or a few scrappy startups hitting it big while also committing to WFH/etc to get the banquet to loosen the purse strings a bit and kick off a new wave of investment a la Web 2.0 post-dotcom-crash (which was coincidentally also post-oh-noes-outsourcing-1.0)

That plus a few years of new successes might get the megacorps to start hiring en masse and possibly see the value in WFH again, but it'll take a lot of these stars aligning to produce several new unicorns that can eat a few lunches to get there, which will probably take the rest of the 2020s and possibly part of the 2030s (based on the last time this happened, going from 1999 crash to the 2010/2011 renaissance)

If I was a betting man, I'd guess the first wave of new startups will be unifying a huge dataset of local info with AI into like the AirBNB-of-local-whatever personal concierge sort of thing, like OpenTable on steroids. but I'm frequently wrong, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[intended]

RTO is studied and found to be equal to, or less efficient and profitable than, hybrid.

My guess is that RTO mandates act as a lay off.

[iugtmkbdfil834]

But even if that is true, why would the companies feel comfortable losing their most competent workforce ( because those are the ones, who can pick up their toys and leave in US )? I was in corporate way too long and I know a lot can be done with warm bodies, but some of the stuff on the horizon will require people with at least some institutional knowledge that this lay off would generate.

Unless, and I do mean unless, because I did not work at JPM, JPM is so well run, that it truly does not matter.

[intended]

there was an article shared here on HN which was great about this. It talked about how we often reverse logic behavior, and assume firms will be making the optimal choices.

We dont know. Ive gone through at least 3 research papers, all of which come to the same conclusion, hybrid outperforms RTO. Whatever decision is being made, its not based on the economic evidence. We will find out eventually.