Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

> Today, as some companies are changing their remote work policies to be return-to-office, there seems to be a lot of resentment about this, and I don't really understand why.

Remote work availability and pay were often much lower. Further, if you were in my company, you had HR and C-Levels saying "Remote work is here to stay and will never go away" early on and often. It wasn't until about a year in that they started changing their tune and gaslighting us with "we never said remote work was here to stay, where did you get such a silly idea?"

I resent being lied to. Had they been more careful and put this out more as a "Hey, this is only temporary" I'd be far less disappointed. That's not how they rolled and they didn't even have the guts to simply admit "Hey, we just made a mistake here, remote work isn't working for us"

> the company has no obligation to keep an employee working in a remote context that the company doesn't favor anymore.

Some people who were hired in as permanent remote, now are being demanded to sell their homes and move to cities they’ve never been to before.

Companies have no obligation to keep any USA-based employee working (other countries may have different laws), but some reasonable severance payouts would be much more appropriate than firing “for cause”!

Before COVID there were a ton of people who wanted to work remotely but couldn't because remote jobs were few and far between. COVID finally gave them what they always wanted, but now it's being taken away, and remote jobs are getting harder to find again.

That's why there is resentment. There was resentment before too, but it was more below the radar because it was always shot down with "we work better in person" and there really wasn't much an argument to be had.

But now those people have hard data that they clearly work just as well at home or even better. So now they have data to back up their desires.

Times change and so should companies. It's also not unreasonable for people to expect more from their job than a simple transaction.

Before COVID, most places operated without tools such as Microsoft Teams and an assumption that remote work is untested and unproven to work in their setting. This is now not the case, and people are rightly questioning why a return is necessary. They've proven they can make it work and that they know what works, but are unjustifiably being told otherwise by people that don't actually know what works.

When the internet goes down, why aren't people simply just sending faxes? An example of pride in their work: Imagine being asked to work for a week on a project and once completed, being told to delete it without consideration because management irrationally decided to go a different direction before considering your project, you'd be understandably upset even though you were paid to do it.

If I was hired as a programmer and my employer decides they would rather I pickup dog shit all day, I'm damn-well going to complain about it.

Both TFA (and the comment you are replying to) are about people specifically hired for remote work prior to the pandemic; the status quo before COVID was those people working remotely.

It’s not that simple - it’s a stupid control thing.

When you have these top down mandates with measurements, now you’re introducing new surveillance and metrics that are both disruptive and counter-productive.

I’m not a remote zealot - I probably average two days a week, sometimes half days. I live a 20 minute walk/5 minute drive from work in a central business district. I’m a senior leader with hundreds of employees.

Personally, I’d prefer smaller offices with hotel space and generously equipped collaboration space. Require that people live or be available at regional hubs monthly or quarterly. My aunt had an arrangement like this for a airline in the late 90s - they setup a router and PC in her basement and would have meeting or two a month at the office.

For me, top down dictates that remove business unit autonomy and don’t understand reality are always a net negative. WFH flexibility reduced sick and family sick absences by 60%. People who’d take an hour off to go to the doctor now take a half day.

Now, I have two employees reporting on this stuff instead of doing something productive. So I’m losing thousands of man-hours to absences and spending 3000-4000 more to figure out how many asses are in chairs in dozens of facilties across the world. Managing professionals like fast food employees is dumb. The only winners are the CRE and banking people.

As a remote worker before the pandemic, I think the worst thing we could do is return to the status quo. I remember trying to find a new remote job before I moved across the country to Portland (pre-pandemic). I interviewed for a job in downtown Chicago, which would have required a 35-minute train ride to and from the city each day. I wasn't moving for a few months and I offered to work in the office before switching to remote. I even said "if you don't think I'm contributing enough value by the time I leave, and you aren't comfortable with me working remotely, let me know and I can stay with the company long enough to help you find my replacement". They still turned me down.

The status quo was "people that work from home aren't actually doing work", or "people that work from home aren't as productive", etc. I remember going to the dentist and telling the dental assistant that I work from home, and her response was "don't people think you're slacking off?" and my response was "no, because I'm an adult". There was an almost insurmountable stigma around remote work. As terrible as the pandemic was, it exposed an irrefutable truth about remote work: people can still do their jobs perfectly fine at home.

I spent most of my career working in offices, until I went fully remote about 2 years before the pandemic. There are aspects of the office that I miss. I'm not vehemently against going back into an office, but it would come with some pretty big caveats: the office has to be relatively close, there are no fixed days or amount of days I'd be required to come in, and I'd have the flexibility to come and go as I pleased. I doubt many companies would agree to that arrangement, mainly because of the real estate costs, which is why I stick to remote work.

I don't want to go back to a world where I have to convince a company that a remote worker can still provide as much value as one in the office. I don't want to be forced to stay late at an office to finish something that I could knock out twice as fast at home. I can only hope that we don't spend the next few years going backwards to arrive at a status quo that was misguided and not grounded in reality.

Edit: Grammar

I've always hated going into an office, I hate the drive, I hate the shitty coffee, I hate having to check which of the toilet seats ISN'T already caked in shit from the QA guys, I hate having to watch my smoking cowokers take the first 10 to 20 minutes off the start of every hour to smoke and the management allowing it because they also smoke. Then they bitch when I leave on time and they still have hours of work to make up. Now people can fuck up their own shit and I can just do work. Covid made it possible for companies to pull their heads out of their asses and offer WFH for more positions.

> Then COVID happened and companies worked fine for three years with WFH.

I don't think we have good data on that "worked fine" part. Personally I saw a significant degradation of our team performance during COVID remote.

Some people slacked a lot (difficult to catch, though), many people worked hard (perhaps even harder than in office), but the bad communication reduced the overall team productivity a lot.

I enjoyed the flexibility of WFH but I still prefer working with local teams in the office. There are pros and cons to both, but it's silly to assume everyone has the same preference as you just because your preference is strongly held.

This is my response to both your comment and TFA. There is less consensus on this topic than the very-vocal WFH crowd would have you believe. I know plenty of other talented engineers that feel similarly to me. They aren't dogmatic about it, but they prefer working with their teammates in the office.

I asked about WFH prior to the pandemic and was told 'oh it won't work for you, ask again when you're in a senior position; you'll never develop without peer-friendships and a senior worker a couple of desks away'. Then we were forced to WFH.

Now, we're being told to do hybrid, but there's no peer friendships because it's hotdesking, and the senior personnel are no longer nearby (they're at home or on a different floor) ... so there's no "return", we're not going back to what we had, we don't have our own desks anymore.

Management acknowledge that office days (we're hybrid) will be low in productivity, but no changes to productivity requirements. It's all about collaboration, except you're next to random people you've never met and you can't talk because it's open plan and you'll disturb everyone.

None of the reasons given for return fit the reality (in my office), but they probably make sense for senior managers (who seem unable to see past the end of their own noses).

There’s a flip side to this where you’re not observing the negatives coming to the company as a result.

It’s not all bad but it’s not all good either.

Just as an example, I see people complain (a lot) about “cameras on” policies. This is the result of a company trying to eliminate an issue that they are seeing from non-participation to potential instances of fraud. They want to do return to office, but this is a “let’s find a middle ground” step.

And yet, people will act as if it’s the end of the world. The alternative is being in the room itself. You have to pick your battles.

Some or many people are just as productive working from home, but also many are not and are more productive in an office environment.

There need to be better more reliable ways of measuring this and affording those who are able to be productive while remote the option. Those who aren’t as productive WFH don’t get the choice.

> This is not only about before pandemic remote workers. Once people enjoyed the flexibility they aren't going back.

I mean this is true in the scenario where demand for their skills outstrips the supply of available workers with said skills.

In a different scenario, where tech jobs are being reduced across the board (due to return to normal interest rates and VC funding slowing down), such an "aren't going back" ultimatum isn't necessarily going to be compatible with "I need a job."

And of course, if you believe Microsoft, ChatGPT is going to start eating tech jobs left and right any day now.

The economy runs in boom and bust cycles, and the winds are shifting. The tech environment from 2020-2022 was extremely weird, and the balance of power now is shifting back to management. Management knows that (at least some) workers highly value remote work, and they're not going to hand that out for free.

The only certainty here is change, and as tech workers lose leverage, "remote work" moves from a default assumption to an item that must be negotiated for (perhaps in exchange for some total compensation) - if it's available at all.

And why should they?

Why didn't you just move states and ask "forgiveness" later? Companies cannot tell you where and when to live and if they try it see who blinks first. I would certainly have ignored them and let them fire me or RIF me.

I think you are both right. An ultimatum can be a demand for someone to stop destructive behavior, but it's more often a demand to fall in line, with the idea that you are replaceable if you don't.

I think the latter is what OP referenced, if someone is telling you "it's my way or the highway" and they are OK with the highway option, you should listen. They are telling you exactly how much you are valued (or not), as well communicating that they feel they are in no uncertain terms above you.

The sentence you quoted didn't say an ultimatum is abuse, it said to reject an ultimatum if from "an employer or abusive romantic partner" with "power" over you.

As you say, an ultimatum isn't necessarily abusive. We all have things we want in life - and some of them are deal-breakers for a relationship. But if you read the sentence as written, I think it's solid advice - don't agree to something when someone is leveraging "power" over you if you can avoid it. That is abusive.

People who've been in abusive relationships can read the difference between a "this is make-or-break for the life I want, you need to make a choice" and "I'm abusing this situation to make you agree to something you don't want to do / is bad for you."

This is a refreshingly level headed response to read on the internet, I might quit while I'm ahead

I think it's assumed that it's within reason and in situations where the ultimatum has the purpose of pushing you into a situation you would prefer not to be in. The WoW example is an example of dysfunctional behavior and the HR example is a routine process and not unexpected from the recipient nor is the cost of filling it in extreme. Your examples don't apply and it should be obvious why.

Well, yes. Advice given to address one circumstance often does not apply in another, wholly different circumstance.

I assume all sweeping advice I’m given also comes with a dose of Aristotle’s “golden mean”, or the Greek maxim “nothing in excess”.

Yes, you can construct situations where the ultimatum is reasonable. Yes, you shouldn’t blindly apply this advise all the time without any consideration of the circumstances.

But still, on balance it’s good advise. We all tend to lean too far towards respecting ultimatums from people in power (even when it’s harmful for us). We should collectively shift that balance, and move our default more towards being skeptical of someone giving an ultimatum.

But, yes, when someone gives you advice that comes with a “never” or “always”, it’s usually worth assuming there’s a silent “almost” in there, unless they’re explicit that they mean no exceptions could apply.

It just reads like someone who hasn’t really had to compromise much in their lives.

When you say it, it’s an ultimatum. When I say it, it’s a boundary.

It's only weird if you assume any choice or dichotomy is also an ultimatum.

An ultimatum is a my way or the highway choice. "Submit or suffer".

Negotiating how much time you invest into the relationship isn't an ultimatum. "Quit WoW entirely or I'm getting a divorce" is.

Your comment is confusing; the point you are trying to make is not coming through.

Merriam Webster helpfully defines "ultimatum" as:

> a final proposition, condition, or demand especially : one whose rejection will end negotiations and cause a resort to force or other direct action

> Walking over and talking to someone is still far superior to any online communication.

This is an example of a local maximum. This form of communication is better for the person doing the walking, but worse when looked at through most other frames:

- worse for the person being asked, who was interrupted

- worse for the people who weren't privy to that conversation but perhaps could have learned or contributed except that they were OOO that moment.

- worse for the organization because knowledge shared this way is ephemeral & siloed by definition

- ineffective in large organizations, where teams often span offices

And all that's before considering the "worse" that comes from having your staff spend 5 hours a week (average in the US) commuting to the office.

In effect, the person walking over is burdening the other party and the organization rather than spend a little more time to craft a question in writing. Weak written communication skills are at the root of why so many organizations are bad at remote work. If oral communications is all that works at your org, then remote is going to be really tough for you (and your inter-office communication is also probably terrible and you should put the whole company in a single building).

> an office is superior for productivity.

If I'm forced to commute to and work in an office 8 hours/day, 5 days/week, then I will be more miserable, lament my job, and thus be less productive towards my day job. I will feel more like a wage slave worker bee who has little autonomy over their work, having to regress to the humiliating dynamic of having to ask my boss for "permission" to work from home. As a night owl, I'll be forced to conform my sleep schedule to the CEO's, and still show up bright and early on days where I didn't get enough sleep, and look busy until 5:30pm+ - maybe stretching out work that could've been done in a few hours to an entire work day because when you're stuck in an office there's little incentive to work faster since you're trapped their all day regardless. When I'm finally sick of it all I'll accept the offer for that remote-friendly company that doesn't care what time I wake up, what hours I work, or where I work, just that the work I produce is high quality.

If I have the flexibility to WFH, not waste hours/day commuting, and live wherever makes me happiest (as opposed to the city my company happens to have an office in, which is probably a city like NYC or SF which may not be my preference), then I will be happier with my employment arrangement, more productive, and more loyal. Also I personally find it easier to accomplish deep work when working under my own conditions, as opposed to some open office with no privacy, constant chatter, and the drudgery of wage slaves who clearly don't want to be there but have no choice.

There are far too many variables at play to be able to make that kind of blanket statement with such confidence.

> Walking over and talking to someone is still far superior to any online communication.

The reason it isn't, for me, is that I'm usually answering questions about Why we do something, or How something is supposed to work. I'm usually giving a quick response, with a link to a design, or a code snippet, or a git commit, or a Code Review link, or something online. So I have to provide an online response whether you ask me in person or not.

If I'm in a 1:1, yea I totally agree I'd rather just talk about career growth and that stuff in person. But.... I mean now we are walking down the already-well-discussed path of Manager/IC and how these jobs are just different.

I don't know for sure, but I think this is the experience of many senior developers.

[edit] > I twiddled my thumbs waiting for the required SME to come online

I mean, this isn't an RTO discussion. If your SME is slacking off that is a different problem. Assuming best intentions, you would walk up to that SME's desk and there would already be 5 people waiting with a question because the SME can only talk to 1 person at a time.

I can slack with several different folks, so long as they can just wait a second while I type. The worst people (so sorry, there are some great TAMs) are the ones who page you as soon as they need something because they don't understand you are busy with a different project.

Chat’s my favorite. Leaves a record so you don’t have to take notes or immediately record whatever you talked about so you don’t forget.

Screen sharing or pairing are better remote than in person.

In person’s good for a subset of types of meetings that some folks may find themselves in a lot. Brainstorming, product ideation, that kind of thing.

> In the office I just walk over to their desk. This is from the perspective of an engineer by the way, I'm not management.

One of the best things about WFH is this doesn’t happen.

Being interrupted while I work because someone walked over to talk to me, when they could have sent a message to request to talk to me, is the second strongest reason I refuse to work in an office. The first is that I am not paid to commute, and commute time is non-trivial.

Having multiple tasks on the go is good. I did it even when I worked in an office; it seems common practice to have many active repos hot on disk.

> Walking over and talking to someone is still far superior to any online communication. So unless you have a job that requires minimal communication on a day-to-day basis, an office is superior for productivity.

Nope! All this does is break the concentration of the person you're interrupting. This is precisely the "bullshit" viewpoint called out in the headline.

I commonly find these sorts of views espoused by people who can't type very fast. For most people who aren't Really Good With Computers, it's much easier for them to speak to someone than it is to type to someone.

I make all of my staff that don't know how to touch type learn to type their first week. It's essential.

> Walking over and talking to someone is still far superior to any online communication.

Hard disagree. That not only distracts that person, but also the six+ sitting around them. Most questions are fine as a chat message. We found people starting asking more questions to colleagues when Covid wfh started because they were afraid to earlier, communication actually improved.

The office is imo necessary for quite some things (onboarding new people, coaching juniors, people without a good place to work at hone, people who like the social aspect of the office) but walking up to someone for a quick question isn't it.

> So unless you have a job that requires minimal communication on a day-to-day basis, an office is superior for productivity.

If that’s the standard then the commute time should be billed to the employer. That way they can weigh the full benefits of the productivity gain of in person communication, against the dramatic efficiency loss of 100 employees commuting to work.

If employers want the productivity benefit of in office communication, they can pay employees for their drive/walk/transit time.

If management can tell which way gets more work done, then they don't have to rely on workers being honest about it.

If they can't tell the difference, seems to me they should let people have nicer lives.

> The people on the assembly line would look at you like the most spoilt people in the world.

It's not a matter of being spoiled or not. I'm talking about what is necessary to get the job done and the elimination of redundant rules that serve no purpose.

> The people on the assembly line would look at you like the most spoilt people in the world.

Ok, working standards and life in general have gotten better for people. Why is that a bad thing?

> It's a nicer life working from home

Again, why is people having a better life a bad thing?

> The people on the assembly line would look at you like the most spoilt people in the world.

I'm guessing the most spoiled people in the world wouldn't be working at all. This sort of contempt is a very specific and odd attitude to have.

The morale effect might be real for you, but for a large group of workers, their morale has improved since WFH. On my team of 24, only one chooses to work in the office...

>>>> The people on the assembly line would look at you like the most spoilt people in the world.

That's been part of workplace culture even when most people were in-office. The "office" and "factory" people had noticeably different working conditions. Moreover, the remote workers were largely invisible -- if we dealt with them at all, it was through their boss, or some kind of ticketing system.

>The people on the assembly line would look at you like the most spoilt people in the world.

Sure, then have then design a database schema with a half ass business spec, and the'll realize why.

> on your feet all day versus your office day job

I have a standing desk, so I am on my feet all day.

Erm, which subordinate was the one Bezos married?

Elon donated sperm to an executive at one of his companies. It's a bit different than "Elon Musk had children with an employee"

Teams avoiding security reviews are common cross-industry.

Incentives everywhere are “dodge” - the expected outcome for managers and engineers is missed deadlines and reschedulings on prior promises, frequent blame-focused meetings and late nights; and low prestige, high effort work unsuitable for making the company money, getting promotions, or maintaining agility in the future, as most security work is extremely mercurial and often only very marginally improves security, if at all.

Most “security fixes” at large firms are built on inscrutable black-box internal tooling which becomes a massive single point of failure and is rarely as hardened as implied, gets re-shuffled on what constitutes “best practices” every 12 months such that a feature team can spend literally all their time doing security work the team will be throwing out next year, are often not intelligently scoped to handle “this issue doesn’t specifically apply to my component”, and aren’t even the weak link when most hacks are

> An insider replied to the wrong email, or put a zip file into a thumb drive then ran off with everything his computer had downloaded, which was a lot.

Most teams grit their teeth and implement, but if the benefit isn’t there, just the requirement, teams remember and get a lot slower to pick up the phone.

8+ companies in 25 years? Seems like being remote first makes it very easy for your employees to jump ship, be taking interviews on the job, or even working multiple jobs.

Interesting that over those 25 years I can think of 1, maybe 2 start-ups that really succeeded being remote-first.

It is about being present in the office. As opposed to working from home, as in a house in the US.

I'll concede this point - it is primarily about communication.

In theory you can resolve this (I'm at a remote company now and think gathertown is a great tool for this), but the lift is high and I suspect the majority of remote companies are operating at a net negative vs. colocation because of this.

Even with these tools, some natural amount of human communication/interaction is lost. It mostly hurts spontaneous collaboration and junior engineers - the threshold for these (comms/collab) is higher than in the office even in ideal remote conditions. Normal human team bonding/relationship building stuff is also lost (and useful for building a high performance culture).

This is also assuming you're at least within mostly the same or close timezones, add that into the mix and it gets even worse.

Other people replying don't understand what I mean by the market solving this. If remote is truly advantageous then startups that are remote first should out compete those that aren't. Empirically this appears to not be true and at least in SF and AI (the sector with the largest return likely in the next decade) people are going back to being colocated because of its advantages (primarily around communication and cycle times).

Mostly I see motivated reasoning primarily as the argument in favor of remote being better. I get it, I work remotely - there are nice quality of life advantages, but I still think it's competitively worse for companies in almost all cases.

> "The market" is a bunch of rich assholes that act in their own self interests.

For instance, demanding that people commute to the RE they've invested in before their investments fall through the floor in valuation.

Lot of naysayers here claiming illegitimate "bias" when people point out their increased productivity when working from home (just the lack of interruptions and forced writing down of institutional knowledge are worth it), but will they admit there is plenty of bias from corporate officers owning real estate in the downtowns where offices are, or just managers at all levels feeling power to micromanage and lord over people slipping through their fingers?

You and I are also part of the market. We get to influence it with our decision about who to work for.

Having gone remote in 2020, I’ve noticed similar to things to what you mention. Or, it’s almost like there’s a set of soft skills that develop when working from home. Writing styles change, and people speak/listen in a different cadence during videoconference.

Once you learn it, you can become very productive and endearing, but it takes time. It’s not for everyone like you mention.

Remember that for a US-based startup, the "hiring talent from anywhere" is easier said than done.

You've got to register your business in every state you have somebody working, get unemployment insurance and workers comp set up there, make sure you understand the local labor laws, etc., etc., etc. That's not even considering hiring outside the US.

It's a total pain in the butt and may not be worth it for a small company with limited person-power.

I even think a quarterly off site is too much. Yearly is fine. Organizing flights, pet care, etc every 3 months is such a damn hassle, and I don't even have kids.

You could probably have people travel for what an office in a major metro area costs.

Reasons: language, culture, legal, accounting, taxes...

And no one would care. It's been an employers market for a year and will continue that way for the foreseeable future.

Why is this getting downvoted? The parent asked for critique and they got critique.

I worked for a company that did something similar to this, most of the day was spent “team building” and it was painful. The fun bit was going to the pub after.

I’d say the best thing to do is to not organise any activities and just make time and space for people to hang out. The people who want to come will come, and for the people who don’t, you aren’t gaining much by forcing them to attend, so why bother.

I think they meant, if you're going to work at all throughout the entire month, only 2 days would be onsite, the rest are WFH.

Even in February

What is the value of your comment?

That's not "being real," that's being insulting (regardless of whether you're right).

I can't speak for FaceTime, but I've found much better success with all of these platforms if everyone in the meeting is wearing headphones. A lot of the latency is from echo cancellation, and that turns off if there's no echo.

At my last company, I let everyone on my team expense comfortable headphones with a boom mic, and it made a huge difference on Google Meet. I've found Zoom to be similar. I can't speak to Slack's latency issues.

I'm also a big fan of Tuple[0] (the pair coding app) for extremely low latency screen sharing / pair coding and that was a huge advantage too.

[0] https://www.tuple.app

Are you using a VPN for work? It's possible that the network bandwidth is not decent enough to allow for lag free video conferencing.

When Zoom has issues system-wide, we get lag, but I'd say 98% of the time, there's no perceptible latency or bad audio quality.

Lag is one of the issues I've never had with any of those services. I think they all have their CDNs built up enough so thats not a real problem for the vast majority of people.

I agree totally. It makes having conversation between multiple people very awkward with many pauses, then suddenly people all talking over each other, then again awkward pauses. It feels like online meetings are way more "centralized" in the sense that only a couple of people speak, and most other people remain silent. There are other technical problems to video conferencing, but lag is one of the biggest.

I find FaceTime terrible. Takes 10 seconds or more to connect.

Agreed, people keep trying to push Teams, Zoom, WebEx and others, and everyone complains about how rubbish video meetings are. Google Meet work, and it works well every single time.

Not that I enjoyed using Google Chat much, but it did have one awesome feature: Click and the you where having a video meeting/call with the people you where just chatting to. The absolute simplicity of either planning or just setting up a spontaneous meeting using Googles solution is fantastic. I really don't get why more aren't using it.

I worked at Google for 4.5 years. If you are video calling into a meeting from MTV where other people in MTV are in person, you are probably not doing real work. It's not seamless and it's orders of magnitude less productive. Meetings take longer and rarely produce useful follow-ups if you're remote.

Exact same experience. Socialization is great but work is a solitary pursuit in an isolated space free from distractions.

> Audio calls also still suck. Commercials in the 90s advertised "crystal clear audio quality" - they stopped talking about it but it never materialised.

So this is a funny one because its definitely solvable but it's kind of a classic principal agent problem. There's a number of things that are going into 'clear audio quality'.

1. Receiver's audio output quality - This is rarely if ever the problem. People usually use their speakers/headset to listen to stuff besides corporate meetings, so they're motivated to have something at least good enough that they can enjoy their music, talk shows, whatever.

2. Bandwidth allocation - This... this really shouldn't be an issue, but it is because the user isn't paying for the bandwidth, whether that's classic cellphone calls, Teams voice, whatever. And so its in the company's best financial interest to compress the audio as much as is tolerable. This isn't really an issue if #3 isn't a problem and the user is in a place without too much background noise, but with open-plan offices, it is a problem if there's a lot of people talking.

3. User's mic quality - So in gaming communities, people will generally tell you if your mic sucks, because you're just some random stranger. And if your mic sucks and you want people to listen to you, you will probably buy a good mic eventually, tweak the settings etc. In a business context, my experience has been that the audio quality has to be pretty bad before anyone even says anything to the speaker. And then it's up to that person to either try to get it replaced by IT or pay out of pocket for a good quality mic. And this is assuming that they're technical enough to be able to pick out a good mic to begin with or even realize that its something they can solve.

They did get crystal clear on landline. Then we moved to cell phones where quality is still abysmal and the phone app barely works... It's aggravating to me

More like it de-materialized. Unless there was a physical line problem, regular old phone calls over copper lines ("POTS") worked well. They were circuit switched, not packet switched. You essentially had a dedicated path provisioned, end to end. Today, POTS is all but gone. Almost nobody has a real landline. Most phone calls are transported over IP. I converted my landline to VOIP almost a decade ago. It's fine.

I don't understand why audio quality is so bad on every device.

Phone calls are hit or miss whether it'll be clear or not. This happens alot with places like call centers, the whole point of its existence is to be on the phone communicating with voice and the quality is to the point where it's hard to understand.

Audio calls are fine on FaceTime and Teams (and, I suspect, most other products). But if you and (especially) your team are still talking to your screen instead of using a real headset, then yeah, the quality is going to suck. One doesn't need use the pricey headset and mic I normally use for music production, just something that doesn't have the software DSP constantly trying to filter out background noise while still picking up your voice.

But if you're referring to cell calls, yeah, we lost a lot of quality when we ditched landlines.

Encoding is fine now. Microphones are bad though. Megacorps cheap out on providing some semi-decent headphones to the employees, that's why audio can be bad.

One week per month in-person is probably too much. Either have short monthlies or longer for a couple times a year.

It doesn't really make sense to have the employee pay because some who are fairly close by will come in and cut the day short and those who have to pay for a flight/hotel will either shrug it off as essentially a commuting cost or will deeply resent it.

Some people make enough and are mostly fine with the mental accounting to pay for certain business expenses out of pocket but a lot of people absolutely are not--especially if it's required.

These wheels often take a generation or more to fully rotate. And I have no idea whether any collective or group action can materially accelerate the timeline.

What is the difference between "making a choice" and "accepting an ultimatum" in the case of an employee working at a company where an RTO policy is enacted?

The only point of a invective like the original article is to try to make people who are perfectly fine commuting into an office feel like they are traitors to some fictitious worker solidarity organization. Like some red-eyed Sauron entity with no motivation other than pure evil in their soul is threatening to steal the food from their babies mouths unless they comply. The blackness and whiteness of this moral viewpoint is extremely toxic.

If you have a strong preference to work from home and your employer springs an "ultimatum" on you then what you actually have is a choice. How you make that choice should be much more nuanced than "asshole exerting power" vs. "dehumanized submission". And if the balance of factors, whatever they may be, lead you to decide to go back to the office - don't let some ideological zealot turn that decision into some moral absolute.

It does bother me when that hate is directed at anyone who might make the decision to return to the office when faced with a RTO policy from their employer. The author is plainly saying such people are dehumanizing themselves.

I would hate to see that kind of contempt for others spread, especially for a compromise that a large majority of people will probably make.

I'm not a saint myself, but I would prefer if popular articles on the subject urged us to look at others with empathy.

> they want that collective environment that they thrived in pre-pandemic

Is there an issue with this? The pro-remote people want the environment they thrive in and the pro-office people want the environment they thrive in.

Such as? If RTO is happening I want every company to take back every “great job staying productive through the pandemic” email they sent over the last several years. Either we met the standard for productivity or we didn’t, it can’t be both.