Why do so many people want us back in the office?

Darwinian fitness was never solely about “braun” but the ability to adapt. If these people cannot adapt, then maybe they weren’t the right people to hire for the job.

The hidden factors you mention are based upon conjecture. You are right remote work proves that you can hire anybody in the world. However, that doesn’t mean companies should pay a person that lives in another country a lower wage than the American counterpart.

The platitude of “you get what you pay for” really shines in this discussion. I have witnessed amazing talent from all across the globe that produced excellent results for the team and company. At the same time, I have also seen dog shit work produced by Americans and abroad. In the latter group, I noticed the individual was paid much lower than expected or in a bid for contracting companies the company took the lowest bid offered.

I have seen numerous projects fall significantly behind schedule due to buggy features or just constant re-work of terribly implemented features because someone at the project management level thought they could convince poorly paid people to push out quality work.

"The commute" is a massive societal inefficiency. How many hours, how much time (and how much CO2) is just wasted?

Those businesses may fail, but the money will go somewhere else, somewhere else that doesn't involve me wasting four hours a day.

I occasionaly worked on my commute, but most of the time was wasted, and now I'm free to use the time how I want.

I mean, if you simplify this to its most fundamental level, the article is about not wanting to work (not just the office part). Or it's about not wanting to do the unpleasant aspects of work. And citing some random studies to support his position.

But jobs / companies are mechanisms for getting people to do things they wouldn't feel like normally doing, because they get paid to do it. That's the definition of work!

Of course no one wants to go back to work when they've been allowed not to for a while.

The author lists all the things he hates about being in the office. Namely the things that are work. He wants some fairy tale home environment where no one bothers him, there are no deadlines, and he gets to work on only the things he wants. For high pay and 0 stress.

If anyone has been able to find that in life, god bless you and treasure what you have. If the author was not getting paid right now, you best believe he'd have a different attitude.

Eventually people will have to go back to work. This "work from home lala land" imaginary utopia is not going to be possible forever.

1. Real estate interests are extremely wealthy and powerful in nearly all nations, and in every OECD nation. Commercial real estate especially so. Take a look at the wealthiest individuals in a nation, and a big chunk of them are connected to real estate. It is realistic instead of cynical to expect these interests to hammer for a return to status quo ante, regardless of the actual benefits to those who must follow such diktats.

2. In the US at least in my experience and from observing my clients' organizations, after two decades of relentless offshoring, for high-wage roles we're nearly scraping the bottom third percentile of the talent barrel globally for available replacements for on-shore talent, without accreting significant technical, organizational, support, maintenance, goodwill, and other types of intangible debt that CxO's increasingly recognize as burdensome friction to rapid innovation. Gains to be had offshoring are measured in inches and not yards now, with lots of attention-to-detail work to achieve it; the gains exist, but are just as hard to accomplish anywhere in the world, domestic or offshore. Just recently here on HN we were discussing management/promotion engineering/demotion, with a significant sidebar conversation on hybrid tech lead roles; there aren't that many people wired for that kind of balanced hybrid, and throw that on top of the complexities we normally deal with, and it is no wonder it is hard to recruit no matter where you look in the world.

3. Lots of "I need that separation" reports are very familiar to those who have been doing remote work for a decade or more. It takes anywhere from a year to multiple years to work out accommodations and find your groove when remote working. Finding that separation is part of it. Some people never adjust to it, and that's okay.

4. We have plausibly reached beyond the observer effect-type improvements in productivity [1] from the remote work change in habits, so this mass social experiment shows there is something substantive to remote work compared to traditional office work.

5. We have not yet reached critical mass on the time everyone has been working from home to internalize the effects of their new normal. Remote workers who have successfully made the switch have reported this takes between 6-18 months typically. This takes different forms in people. For some an intense loneliness sets in, others depression, others are happier, others find more energy. This is the Remote Work Great Filter.

6. We flipped the switch and paused a system that has taken literally centuries of refinement upon office work, and started a remote equivalent under emergency conditions from scratch in many instances with (from initial indications) no productivity hit, and some even claiming a small productivity increase. What kinds of productivity increases lie behind further remote work refinement?

7. A "grey system" of hybridized remote and on-prem office presence can unlock interesting benefits. As expensive as offices are, the pandemic response shows that they aren't so unbearably expensive that companies would wholesale leap at the slightest opportunity to unload them. This might change with the depression barreling down upon us, but for now, there is the opportunity (and perhaps even requirement) to use long-term commercial lease agreements (or even more long-term capex real estate purchases) to double or triple the amount of space in company offices. A soft turn away from the open office plan.

8. As flawed as the response was in the US, a lesson I drew from it is the qualitative change in information infrastructure since only a couple decades ago enabled private entities everywhere (not just the US) to rapidly route around many kinds of damage in many, adaptive, different ways. Very rapid, Net-based, decentralized, decoupled decision-making like depicted in some futurist visions is already here in a proto-form.

A lot of the response depends upon organizational culture and individual psychosocial makeup. I agree with the author, a hybrid grey response seems the most realistic. Remote work has the potential out of this experience to go from a marginal recruiting tool to an integral part of capex and opex plans.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect

You've identified it. We're talking about productivity gains, so that accountant gets as much done as they did before, minus the commute time. At a bare minimum, that's doing 8 hours of work in 8 hours, versus 8 hours of work in 10 hours, or whatever your commute is. People who drive (most people) cannot usually perform economic activity during their commute. Better yet, maybe that accountant figures that they really work for 4-6 hours of the day and the rest is kind of wasted on chitchat or looking busy. The autonomy to quietly get work done in less time will grant that worker even more hours in the day.

There may be GDP effects that counterbalance this. Less money spent on gas or at small businesses near the employer. However, as suburbs have more at-home workers, more lunch spots will pop up nearby so I doubt the GDP effects are big. Sure, some might spend their productivity gains enjoying an extra bowl of cereal, but there's nothing wrong with that.