Why do so many people want us back in the office?

I've always been competing with developers all around the world - it's not like outsourcing is new.

I think that this may be the key thing that the pandemic has accelerated: A re-evaluation of what kind of management is appropriate for modern work, and whether that management can be performed by the self, another person, another company, or perhaps even by a tool.

Managing work, in an idealized sense, is wasteful because it’s not actually production. Of course, in the real world we need all sorts of management of our work, from well informed decisions by individuals all the way up to strategic alignment of whole organizations. But how we actually get that management done, and done effectively, feels like it’s taking center stage now that our old routines have been up-ended.

Edit: Note that an individual’s preference work at home, for or against, is in a sense a vote for a certain kind of management. As the article points out, work at home can be interrupted with Zoom And Slack just like it was in the office with in-person meetings and office chatter, so the at home/at office debate kind of masks the real issue: We all want better management. Now we just need to invent it.

Most of the advantages that individual knowledge-workers attain from an office — work-life separation, and meeting rooms in which to come together with others for a scheduled semi-private conversation — already have a relevant institution that will provide those to almost anyone on Earth, free of charge: the public library. Everyone[1] sitting at the tables in a public library is being productive. And almost all modern libraries have bookable meeting rooms as a free service!

[1] If your library is full of noisy people, find a different one. This mostly only happens to the one library per city nearest to the projects. I suggest a public library near a college; or, for that matter, a University library, if it’s public-access.

Yes, there’s also coffee shops, but those only solve work-life separation. Most coffee shops don’t offer bookable spaces for private meetings. I guess you could combine coffee shops with booths at restaurants, but that gets expensive quickly. Libraries are free! And, unlike the coffee shop where sitting there all day with your laptop will annoy the employees, being productive all day in a library is the point, and you have every right to ask the library employees to shush anyone interfering with your productivity, because productivity is what they want the library environment to foster.

——————

Who doesn't think libraries are a valid substitute for offices?

• Sales people and call-center workers, obviously. Anyone who needs to make phone calls all day. But these people were never really suited to ordinary office space, either. They need sound-proofed rooms/booths, really. You can build those anywhere — podcasters and journalists are currently building these at home. You really do need a separate space for this, though, and that might not be tenable in a small bachelor apartment. I have a feeling we might see the rise of specialty coworking spaces consisting of floors of small, rentable recording-booth rooms. (Some fancier public libraries have these too — again, for free.)

• Managers. Specifically, middle-managers. In-person, off-the-record conversations are how you "build your team", i.e. how you build loyalty to yourself and ensure that your team-members are working for you, rather than for the company, such that you can later take credit for their achievements and they won't call you out for it. This role is dying, and most of the visible backlash is likely coming from here. It's like the death throes of aristocracy when centralized government rises to replace it. Good riddance, I say. (Team-allocated executive assistants can perform the project-management tasks of a manager just as well, without also becoming feudal lords. These don't mind remote work at all, because they're fine with everything they say happening on-the-record on Slack/email/etc.)