[meta_ai_x]

If Remote Work is incredible and extremely productive, you can literally arbitrage away and create remote-first companies and crush your competition who insist on WFO. According to the logic of WFH backers, it should be incredibly easy to attract the highest talent and that talent should be working at peak productivity and should have no trouble in beating competition.

The fact that none of the companies can do it, means WFH is a massive productivity failure. The reasons are aplenty

- Self-Reporting Employees or Researchers simply can't measure productivity that matters.

- WFH research is typically done and funded by WFH-friendly entities skewing it's benefits. There are no neutral social science research.

- Startups, which are a better unbiased WFO/WFH study (because all startups have the same starting conditions allowing us to control more variables), clearly show that teams (both technical and sales) sitting in room can crush/outrun Startups that are remote-only.

- Productivity measures done by these studies are almost always individual, but team productivity and firm productivity are emergent properties and hard to measure

[therealpygon]

It’s not that companies can’t do it; plenty do. Companies are bad at hiring. The whims of managers and middle management decide the best person for a job. These people also frequently get duped by fast talkers and people who use AI. Companies have a hiring issue (sucking at it), so they use WFH as the excuse that they would have made better hires if they were in the office. And yet, Sally has been cruising on payroll for 10 years while barely doing anything and no one batted an eye until Sally wasn’t in the office and people started seeing she wasn’t working. The solution? Bring Sally back to the office because WFH is the problem.

Companies also realized that if all the jobs are WFH, suddenly how well you pay and your benefits become more important than corporate BSing. The major companies were all advised they should end work from because it will lead back to lower wages in the long run. Instead of having options, employees will be sucked back into a down labor market with artificially inflated numbers where there aren’t a lot of jobs in your area so you have to suck it up and take crappy pay and benefits so you don’t end up with even worse pay just to avoid becoming homeless.