Sam Altman says era of remote work is over

Long running trends unrelated to the pandemic:

Off-shoring, near-shoring. Where some of your colleagues are permanently virtual-only.

Cross-company collaboration. Specifically a lot of work involving dealing with external parties like vendors. Due to companies outsourcing many of their processes and systems.

Family situations becoming more complicated when couples both work, thus many work schedules no longer being a simple 5x8.

Commoditization of digital collaboration: email, chat, teams/zoom calls.

The rise of multi-tasking: many people are pulled in 20 directions.

When you add up all these effects, a return to the office is not a return to glory. I loved the way I worked 20 years ago: small group of people, local only, focused work, deep relations with co-workers, fun, spontaneous ideation, etc.

When I "return to the office" now, I see people with headsets in calls. Roughly 4-6 hours per day, and then there is messaging and email still. Working together barely seems to happen for the simple reason that actual work seems to barely happen. It's just calls and chat now. A productivity pandemic and I'm shocked how leaders do not intervene at all.

Maybe they can't. Maybe our world and work has simply become too complex.

I don't mind the article as I take the points as the location of work should match the stages and culture of the team/business. In a weird parallel to "the difference between a house and a home".

If I was being general I'd say that leaders need to focus on creating an environment where people feel secure, engaged and connected to each other. And people are empowered to create this environment for others.

What location this is done in shouldn't be the focus.

Offices, factories, beaches, houses don't have the above because buildings don't create it, people do.

never attribute to malice…

Sure, but they are usually not in a position to influence any decision making here.

I believe that's exactly what I was advocating for as the most productive. The ability to choose to go into an office at your convenience. It certainly was in my personal experience, and I wish it an option for everyone. I was simply pointing out how impractical and rare that situation tends to be.

And I also have a different perspective having worked from home "before it was cool" starting back in '98. I've spent far more time in my home office by a factor of 10 to 1 at least than in an office.

Keep in mind with WFH you are forcing everyone to your preferences just as much as work from office. There are far more dynamics at play than personal productivity - team and business productivity as a whole is far more important and rarely talked about.

Many times as a manger of a fully WFH team I'd force some grumpy sysadmin in for a few days a week for a month as we knocked out a project. Sure they got "nothing done" those two days according to them, but they unblocked critical projects for the rest of the team during that time that simply was not happening while they were in their "focus cave". To this day they will tell you it was a waste of their time and WFH would have been far more productive. I highly disagree.

As you say, everyone is different. As are situations. Some of the highest velocity teams I've interacted with were a handful of highly skilled seniors geographically distributed. There are projects I can think of I could call a few folks and form a fully remote team, and other projects I'd very much want to be on-prem "mostly office". It all depends.

There is something to be said about looking back the past 25 years. While I remember some fond moments from my spare bedroom, I remember far more from in-office interactions. I'm not sure how I'm going to feel about that fact in another 20 years.

Edit: I do wonder how opinions would differ if we invented free teleportation tomorrow. I wonder how much of this is commute vs. actual preferred work environment. For me it's mostly commute - give me a private office people respect and I'd likely prefer it with a teleportation pad in my living room.