Tragedy of return to hostile offices

I am curious that nobody has not mentioned a great movie "Office Space". A brilliant sarcastic comedy about office culture in the late nineties. I think the time is ripe for a sequel.

> They are trying to get people to work with them who don't want to work with them. This is exactly the same thing as RTO does to WFH people.

This is not at all the same. There is a clear difference, again, between the RTO position which requires positive action from other people (travel in to work, come into a physical location) and the WFH position, which does not require anything of their RTO colleagues beyond what the job requires anyways. How can you not see the difference here?

"They are trying to get people to work with them who don't want to work with them." What is this supposed to mean, concretely? Are you saying that because Bob is not in the office you don't want to work with Bob, but Bob is forcing you to work with him? This is not the argument WFH people are making. It is management that has a vested interest in requiring people to work together. I've never heard a serious proponent of WFH arguing that you have to work with them.

Are you saying that having remote team members requires you to use tools and practices that you don't have to in an in-person setting? I would counter that Jira, Zoom, Slack/Teams, Email, etc., all of these "remote/async" tools are not unique to remote workers. And they pre-date the normalization of remote working. Even in a fully on-prem model the vast majority of companies are still using these tools because of the convenience and control they give management, because they have offices distributed geographically, and because they want to be able to communicate beyond the in-office hours of operation. Again, this is not something that the WFH people are pushing onto the RTO people, it is something management at large has decided for the company.

Really, it's hard to take you seriously and I'm sorry for my attitude, but I can't help but see this as an extremely entitled position that is requiring other people to go out of their way to accommodate your desires. If I'm misunderstanding, please correct me and name a single positive action that a WFH proponent is requiring an in-office proponent take that would not be part of their regular job responsibilities in an in-office setting. Not a "they are depriving me of my preference because they just won't do what I want," but something they are actually requiring you to do.

Anecdotally, I am aware of people who seem to truly believe that. I used to think it is a question of age, but even that quickly got corrected as from within my professional circle there was no clear way to determine a good predictor for office/no office preference. It seems oddly almost evenly split, which seems very weird to me.

That said, the 'entitled young Americans' thing appears to be a common talking point I see on linkedin and other corporate safe spaces.

It is a classic for a reason. Consider watching "Corner Office". It is not in the same category and frankly it is a little weird, and the jokes are a hit or miss, BUT.. there are moments that capture office life a little too well.

What I mean by positive action is, you are requiring me to actively do something. I agree that we all have preferences, and often we cannot satisfy everyone's preferences, particularly when they are at odds as you have pointed out. Fair.

However, I see a very big difference between a preference that requires other people to take specific action to satisfy, and one that does not, and that's exactly the dynamic I see here. It is that expectation that other people will do things that they prefer not to do in order to satisfy your preference that I see as entitled.

As an aside, I'm not arguing right or wrong. I actually see many benefits to a good office environment (see my sibling comment in this discussion for the problem I have, basically that the majority of office environments are not good). I'm arguing coercion vs. freedom. My argument is that the RTO position is coercive in a way that the WFH position is not, that it's not the same.

I will take several simple example to try and explain how I see this difference.

Consider a Christmas party. I want to wear red and green. I don't care what other people wear. I'm not putting any restriction or obligation on other people. I can satisfy my preference through my own actions alone.

Now consider that I wan everyone to wear red and green. I am not going to be happy unless everyone is wearing red and green. In this example I cannot satisfy my preference without convincing or coercing other people to respect my preference. I am expecting my preference to win out over everyone else. I can frame the argument as "why should their (individual) preference to wear white supercede my (collective) preference that we wear green and red?" It is not the same because my preference in this scenario requires other people to actively change what they are doing.

Now, as you have said, this is not necessarily right or wrong (maybe we're taking theme photos, who knows), and I'm not making the argument that WFH is morally superior or necessarily more productive/better in any way. All I am doing is pointing out that your position is coercive in a way that the opposite is not.