Sam Altman says era of remote work is over

At many large companies there have been a ton of mergers and acquisitions over the last 10 years, and most meetings are already on Teams/Zoom/etc because the workers in the team are in different cities and often different continents. Even in the office many of us are just on Zoom/teams/etc for meetings.

Companies have already had mostly distributed teams for a while; this is just about control.

I’m approaching the point where I feel similarly about WFH deniers as I do about vaccine deniers. We performed an immediate GLOBAL switch to fully remote work and corporate life went on largely unaffected. We have the experimental data strongly supporting that it does not hurt the ability of most workers to function (exceptions apply).

What’s more annoying, is that the execs confuse their own 0.0001% career experience with that of their typical employee. Yes, if you’re running a company and in board meetings and such, then it makes sense to be face-to-face. For your SDEs, DEs, and scientists in the trenches? Not so much.

My interactions with my manager are great and keep me focused. We have zero problems communicating over video. Most other interactions are generally neutral or net-negative, a distraction from the work I would be doing for my manager.

I like these little side interactions, and I enjoy talking with my coworkers, but I don’t think it’s ultimately as beneficial to the bottom line as people think. I can move quite fast when I’m left alone to my own devices.

The era of remote work is not over. It’s just arrived. We overshot the equilibrium point by a lot during the pandemic height and that will regress back to something closer to long term trend.

No matter how much the HN crowd vociferously defends remote work, it’s simply an inferior mode of operation for many creative jobs.

People are not machines. We’re evolved to congregate and share space, to read body language, share meals, interact with zero latency.

Those things are valuable, and barring some huge leap in technology, we give them up when we go remote.

For some jobs and work cultures, those things don’t matter as much — those companies can self select into remote work and save on office costs.

But for American engineers especially, the more you encapsulate yourself into an interface of pull requests and slack messages, the more you’re handing power to corporations in the long run.

I can and have hired quality developers in EU, GB, and South America at heavily discounted rates because without an office, what’s the difference?

Even interviewing and managing people in Asia is much easier as a result of zoom, slack, figma, etc.

I find it so odd that American software engineers don’t see this. Time zone is not a moat, I promise you.

That's troubleshooting really, not mentoring.

> I assume he’s got either direct or indirect links to commercial realestate; as an owner or investor or something else.

This isn't necessarily the case.

Most of the people calling for an end to remote work do not, I suspect, fall into this category—they're managers and execs of all kinds of companies.

What they get out of it isn't more money. It's more control. It's a return to a world where "verify by eye that the employee has their butt in their seat" is an acceptable method of "managing". It's a validation of their worldview that employees are all lazy slackers who are constantly looking for ways to defraud the company.

And underlying all of that, it's simply a return to the world they knew before. This new world, where workers get to work remotely and be responsible for themselves, is Different, and therefore Confusing and/or Scary.