The workers have spoken: They're staying home

I clicked in to this topic to make these exact same points, but you did a better job of it than I would have.

My employer mandated a minimum number of days in-office per week and then implemented the flex desk system with all of the drawbacks that you outlined. In my company's case it's a little worse: There are, in fact, often no available open desks in my workgroup. Furthermore there's no enforcement or discipline with respect to day-of desk reservations.

So this means that about half a dozen employees have permanently camped out at a "flex" desk, essentially claiming them for their own. Everyone I guess "knows" that those aren't real flex desks in practice, or at least nobody wants to stand out as the asshole who kicks Richard off his de-facto personal desk.

For the desks that aren't permanently camped nobody bothers to use the online tool to actually reserve them. They just show up at some point during the day, and if there's no jacket on the chair or backpack under the desk or something, they just sit down at it and start using it. If you reserve the desk in the tool before coming into the office often you'll arrive to find someone sitting there who hasn't bothered to use the tool to reserve it. So then you don't have a desk at all and need to camp out in a common area on your laptop, surrounded by 3 or 4 other people blabbing away on Zoom calls.

If you confront them to kick them off the desk they'll usually move, but that's a really uncomfortable thing to do and makes you look a little like a bully to everyone around. "Dude, you snooze you lose. Dick got there first. Why don't you just go to the common area where all the other late-coming slackers have to go?"

It's a productivity hellscape that I do everything in my power to avoid. I've resorted to dropping by the office a few times a week just to badge in and grab a bite to eat from the microkitchen so that I show up in the query that management runs once a quarter to make sure everyone's badging in often enough. I also make it a point to walk prominently by several other desks and saying "hi" to people to give the illusion that I'm "in the office" on a semi-regular basis.

The first time management tries to turn the screws to deal with my behavior I'm triggering my plan to move on to a role in another company that's fully remote.

Disagree.

With savings comes extra cash.

And extra cash can only sit on the sidelines for so long.

Until company’s are lured once again in to making bigger, larger, scalable bets.

You need engineers to explore new hypotheses, to drive growth, to explore these new possible markets.

Greed always returns. Idle money, stagnant growth helps no one.

You don’t scale a company with savings. You scale up by spending.

They actually did try (Facebook has shuttles everywhere, and tried to rebuild the decommissioned passenger railway near US-84), but economic concerns like layoffs, etc. ended up taking priority.

The main issue is it takes like 10-20 years of concerted effort in the US to approve/build a bridge, and nobody except the government is willing to wait that long. This is mostly a political problem.

I'm not sure if you got the memo, but you need to jump jobs if you want more money. This goes triple if you're not a top 5% worker.

BLS has been tracking this number and it has skyrocketed in the last generation (Number of Jobs Held in a Lifetime): https://www.bls.gov/nls/questions-and-answers.htm

I used to work for a company where we were in at least one day a week. In practice that mean arriving around 10.30 and leaving around 4 on wednesday, spending half of the time on meetings or whiteboard sessions, and the rest was pretty socialising for several of us. I didn't mind that - it was 30 minutes on the train and a short walk for me, and it broke up the week. Any more than that, and it'll take significantly more money to get me in.