This is the culmination of short-term-profit thinking, and I'm shocked people like YC's @paulgraham support RTO.

What's the long term game plan? It's like hotels and taxis resisting uber and airbnb. there will always be the old way of doing things, but people don't want to work from the office unless they have to. You've become the disruptee instead of the disruptor at that point.

I've been both productive and unproductive while WFH as well as in the office. In either case it was a product of managerial decisions.

I think they expected people to "just be productive" on their own, and then they install surveillance crap on their devices, measure bullshit and deduce RTO isn't needed.

The older way of defining a couple of performance indicator metrics and using that to mange people no longer works, RTO or not. So now, most managers have resorted to a "vibes-based" management technique, where the numbers can be made to mean whatever you want them to mean, so long as the vibe feels right.

So if two people are just as unproductive, but you turn on one of their camera and see a person working from their bed in their pajamas, the vibe will such, so RTO makes sense in their mind.

I don't think RTO will backfire any time too soon, but in the long term, the US has bigger problems in terms a decline as a nation. But if we overcome that somehow, there really is only one game in town: competition.

Can your company be competitive while implementing RTO? Your competition that figures out how to make their people happy and WFH will beat you. not only that, they'll pay their people less money for that privilege.

Technology infrastructure is still a growing thing in most of the world, but i suspect in a decade or so, WFH would be ideal for most humans in the world.

I also speculate that remote-controlled automated things will become very popular. not just waymo support driving the care remotely as needed, but even things like janitors and manual labor jobs could be done via robots controlled remotely.

For office work, it requires a different style of management, in a generation the older people too used to office work will be out of the workforce, but that transition will mean companies with a younger management workforce (who gets paid a lot less typically) will have a competitive advantage.

Teams not performing well with WFH -- with a millennial or younger manager would be a real shocker to me.

The return-to-the-office trend backfires