The workers have spoken: They're staying home

Ive seen it.

I see people take 25% pay cuts to have WFH/Flex hours.

I've done it and I've still made work friends. Heck, if it wasnt WFH, I would have been gone because there are closer places to work.

They have given us fuck all for raises during a period of rampant inflation and now they want to take away the one good thing that covid-19 did for workers.

That's the strategy. The places calling for return to office are mostly doing it to thin the herd. Make people voluntarily leave.

When someone says you must RTO to a place like San Francisco or Seattle just respond that you will require a 250% pay raise for real estate cost differences.

Might help change zoning policy in those cities too if managers and executives see that the entire local economy is basically an elaborate machine to funnel money to property owners with extra steps like employment.

I think that companies might have more success getting people back to the office if they had not also spent the past decade or two systematically updating offices to be beautiful to look at in CAD renderings but awful to actually occupy and try to work in.

This move toward not giving permanent desk assignments to people who are required to be in the office also makes it worse. Open plan offices are a bit of a productivity hit on a good day, but they're extra awful when every day it's a new set of voices to learn to tune out, and another half hour spent packing and unpacking all your shit, adjusting computer monitors to minimize glare from the overhead fluorescent lights, etc. And, if you want to actually take advantage of the co-location, 15-30 minutes spent figuring out where all your collaborators are sitting today, and scrambling for meeting rooms and huddle spaces, which are now in high demand since collaborators can no longer sit together in any sort of stable way and must instead fight for huddle space if they want to do any in-person collaboration. Alternatively you spend the entire day with headphones on (uncomfortable!) because you decide not to do that, and instead spend the whole day on team meetings because it's easier. And even headphones when you're not actively in meetings because everyone around you makes the same decision.

A couple years ago, I was eager for a return to office. That died pretty quickly after return to office happened, because the reality is that we're not returning to anything. Office life post-COVID is an entirely new thing that's worse than what office life was like pre-COVID in almost every way. And so the mandatory in-office days are, in practice, just the days that fully remote team members need to cut the hybrid members some slack for not being able to get anything done.