It might be efficient to work 60 hours week. Doesn't mean we should agree to it. Remote work improves quality of life. I don't care about company KPI or efficiency, I care about my own well-being first and foremost, as long as I have a choice. Companies should adapt and if it means that their efficiency will decrease, so be it.

> I think a lot of people are talking past each other.

Of course. Apart from the WFH majority there also vocal proponents of hybrid (and I believe some who believe in full RTO, although these seem to be very few).

The solution to this conundrum is to give people a choice. Yes, I worked for a few companies who do just that and everybody is happy! Those who want it, come to the office, those who don't, work from where they wish. Everybody's happy, and it's just that simple. The fact that most companies are afraid of even considering giving people a choice is a sign of... I don't know, a "tunnel vision"?

I totally agree with the core of your comment since that's exactly what I'm telling people when we have discussions around the topic.

But I'm surprised how truer and truer this part sadly is :

> I think a lot of people are talking past each other. I’ve mostly WFH since long before the pandemic, in many different capacities at many companies. A lot of people have tunnel vision and the reality is more nuanced than most allow.

Your comment was at the top so I read it first. Then I browsed through the other threads and... Yes, that's quite sad.

It's just simple empathy. You know what's good for you/what you want, that doesn't mean everybody should live their life the same way.

It really depends on the people you're dealing with and their motivation. I've been working from home 100% since early 2016. You can make it more efficient in almost everything (I don't do creative work - so I don't know how that would go). Add to it better wellbeing, lower environmental impact, better access to skilled workforce and lower cost for the company and there should be no doubt WFH works 100% of the time in 99% of companies. I often had small team leaders, or mid managers tell me, "but I don't really have that close personal relationship with some of the people WFH". Yeah, sometimes you don't. When you have a tough problem in the office and your boss comes down you can show him how everyone is so busy trying to resolve it. You have a group of guys looking very busy here, a loud meeting over there. And you can just run from one group to the other looking extremely involved.... When people WFH you actually need to know what they are doing (very rare a manager will have a knowledge to fully understand a deep tech issue at such level) or you just trust people are doing their best. And that is very difficult to do when you don't know if they aren't having a birthday party with their kid and pretending to work when your world is caving in. The solution? You have to have good technical team leads and you rely on them in such situations.

The horrible non-solution some companies try? Monitoring. Desktop casting, webcam always on. As long as you do that the productivity will plummet far below that of the office. Why? Because you give people another tool to show how busy they are "at work" other than the work itself. If you have no monitoring you have to prove you're working by doing actual work. We all know the products called "mouse jiggle" and such. If you cN get away with looking busy for the camera and moving the mouse many people will. All these people that pretend to work are a huge untapped economic potential. The key to utilising it is making them want to do the work.

This is a good comment and I had to think about it for a minute. I do agree with you in practicality, but I also think in person works because most people flat out can’t or won’t take the time to communicate effectively in writing. Put them in a room and they’re suddenly forced to do it. But that said, just because most people can’t effectively communicate and instead use async communications like slack zombies is not my problem. If lawyers can handle contract negotiations over email, you can handle managing people with a ticketing systems and well written emails. I mean, by the sounds of it you won’t, and that’s ok, but that’s either a skill issue or a choice and I’m tired of pretending otherwise.

What is an “IC work” and what does it mean “being an IC”? Can’t get the acronym.

WFH is best for focused work. Office is best for collaboration. I'm not sure I've found a tool that works for collaboration like a whiteboard. Digital solutions just never really worked in our company and we tried a few.

On the flip side, open source projects function just fine with 100% remote work in different time zones.

One thing I found with WFH pre-and-post Covid is the the 'Feynman moment'- "If you cannot explain something in simple terms, you don't understand it". Complex architectures in the minds of a few people, or the way creaky systems worked together, and so on. Or to put it another way, no documentation for offline folks, because no one considered it important. So much for all that boasting about business continuity plans.

Which is almost a justification for being in the office, just to ask 'those people' how things works. It should also be a big red flag to management that things need fixing. But that's in the category of the management not seeing the financial benefit of doing it as there isn't an instant measurable up-front saving.

(edit) 'those people' are typical senior devs, and senior devs are often most likely to want to, or can, WFH.

A lot of adult ADHD diagnoses came from the pandemic because a lot of people were suddenly without the structure of an office and became adrift and unproductive. The office provided body doubling, some executive functioning, some help with time blindness, a prosthetic environment and more and now they had to make it themselves without any direction while suffering from poor executive functioning. It was not good for many.

A lot of the value of being in an office is to reduce the barriers to social grooming and communicating. It's an emotional morale advantage, and some things are fixed faster or discovered faster when people talk to each other, and people do it better when in person than they do over shitty video calls, where the majority of people have crap setups, and despite your best efforts, will continue to have crap setups. Most people don't have the emotional ability and seriousness to compensate for the barriers that remote work brings up and make sure this important part of the work gets done.

Sometimes the most productive times in an office can be coworker lunch and coworker lunch over zoom calls sucks ass.

I know I will get a lot of people here who seethe 'but for ME, I HATE socializing with my coworkers', or 'my coworkers do socializing wrong and it's a detriment!' and I say to you, good for you, but have you considered that those things might be a negative thing for the rest of your team and the company. The company hired you for your total value contribution to the system of the company, not just your isolated measurable personal productivity alone and to not be self centered about is something to consider, hypothetical person.

You are the anomaly, not the norm. WFH takes discipline, work ethic and honestly the ability to manage a work life balance. Doing this is hard, like you said.

Problem is most people aren’t disciplined:)

Work from home is a productivity killer for me. While maybe I can get spurts of output, it's just harder to communicate and collaborate through digital means. (I'm on the spectrum and that has a lot to do with it.)

But I honor those who can do it. Good on you. I'm jealous lol

I am the exact same way.

I tend to be more on the hyperactive side, and I am far less distracted when I work from home sheerly because there are not others for me to go talk to.

I also have noticed that I tend to suffer from less mental fatigue in general when working from home. The only issue with working form home is that I tend to work longer. I might hyperfocus and pull at 12 hour day or something, but I try not to do this.

I think the top comment reflects this - I have adhd too and I can’t be productive at home. I suffer a commute every day because my job performance tanked when I worked from home 8 mo strait. I’m much more productive at the office - I just wish my wife would agree to move closer to the office.

The benefits of which you speak, are pretty much I've to say, too. My present situation offers me above-average flexibility, but not to the level as yours. Care to share whom you work for, or where to find such roles?

Any tips or reading you would recommend about organizing the workspace to improve focus? I recently switched from a self-imposed 5 days in the office (obscenely short commute, homeschooled kids) to a mostly WFH arrangement (the commute to the new office is two hours each way) and despite having an office with a door lock at home, my productivity could be better.

It's basic common sense. Cut almost 3 hours of commute+preparation and not only you have saved yourself half a working day but also the fatigue and exhaustion.

Yeah, at present I can't even imagine going back to the office. It feels almost crazy to me to go back to work in the office. Such a waste of time and efficiency.

Wasting time on looking proper, having to do everything at certain time, spending arbitrary hours at work even if there's nothing productive left to do, I would feel guilty leaving early so I just waste time in the office etc. At home I never have to "pretend work".

Weird how Covid overall worked out so very well for me. I wonder where I'd be without it. Of course it wasn't a positive event on the whole, but I can't lie that there weren't any positives.

> Globally much of the pro-office camp's public position is driven by personal leanings of CEOs who genuinely seem to have made the decisions without evidence

In some cases, the pressure is also coming from external to the company, from cities and VCs and similar who care about the commercial real-estate value of now-abandoned offices.

It’s unfortunate that it has gotten so black and white. I’m a big fan of WFH. But I also think it’s beneficial to see people in the office and interact on a regular basis. Why can’t we have both?

Working in the office could be pretty nice with reasonable commute times and actual office space for employees. Like earning a top 10ish percent salary but the parking lot is full and people use bike locks on their office chairs so they don’t get stolen because they aren’t enough chairs.

Give me an office with a door and a reasonable commute and I’ll be happy to go in to work every day.

“Cost optimize” your office space until it’s hell for me and it’s a no until you double my salary.

And cities don’t need to be designed like they are, seas of residential that are miles away from any workspace and all of the offices crammed together in unlivable downtowns that only have living spaces for single young people.

The issue seems to be less about wfh or not.

It’s just how well does a company culture support distributed work (many locations) or not.

We simply are not going back, period. They are fighting the trend. Ask your analysis team and marketing about what happens to people that fight the trend.

> This is more an opinion piece with some hand waving than actual proof

Pot, meet kettle. Kettle, this is pot.

Tell me where this dream job is and I will apply. For over 20 years I commuted to the office. Some days I stayed late in the office and pulled 12 hour workdays. Most of my time was stolen by coworkers and managers who constantly interrupted or insisted I attend a meeting about some issue I knew nothing about. When I left the office after only putting in 8 hours, I would end up working 2+ hours at home to catch up for the work I couldn’t do on the office. Now with WFH, when people try to interrupt me on Slack, I tell them to send me a meeting invite.

> when work is done, I leave, and it's done.

To quote Dilbert:

> Now let me get this straight. The time I spend in the shower actually thinking about solving problems is not "work." The time I spend at the office attending meaningless meetings is "work."

> when work is done, I leave, and it's done

This might speak to the whip I have worked under, rarely has this been the case for me. Just demanding jobs with too much to do. Office is where you go in super early (or WFH super early) to focus for two hours, then office to do a bunch of meetings and unfocused work, and then home is where you get to pick back up for the real work. One gig, I'd call in wfh simply because I was working before commuting and got too carried away (ie: late) for it to actually be worth going in.

I very much agree with the potential drawbacks. Not having a twice daily 40 minute bike ride was a very major adjustment.

I'm not trying to tell you that liking the office is wrong but most of what you said here applies to WFH. When I finish working, my laptop gets put in a bag and not taken out until I start working again and colleague interaction while remote is going to vary based on how your invested your company is in remote work. As far as your home being your workplace, you could always rent a cheap office to work from. The co-working space around me offers private offices for a few hundred a month.

Some counterpoints:

> when work is done, I leave, and it's done.

My experience from WFO is worse: task may be done earlier, but feels wrong to leave earlier, and colleagues may not take it badly.

>not using my resources (electricity / broadband / etc) for work

Gas is more expensive than electricity, so I'll take the tradeoff. Even better if you can reduce the number of cars in the family - purchase, annual fees and insurance, etc.

> easier interaction with colleagues

A pro and a con: good for collaboration, but also easier to be distracted when trying to focus.

I have the opposite experience.

Reasons I prefer staying at home:

- when work is done, I turn off the computer, and it's done. At the office if work is done I can't leave immediately without raising eyebrows or I don't have a train/bus to get home.

- not using my resources (money for train,/bus.. my time) to get to work.

- easier interaction with colleagues. It's much easier to hear my colleagues from home than in the openspace. Besides most of my colleagues are on other offices. Also everytime I'm in the office I need to book a meeting room just to ensure they are able to hear me and vice-versa.

I do think face to face interacting is extremely important on certain occasions. Specifically onboarding new people and then periodically (once a week or every two weeks) to maintain the relationship.

There are latent questions in your response. The fear is justified but equally, viewed from a distance, what is the "worth" of your price point, if the same job can be done and lift somebody out of poverty in the developing world?

I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm asking what an economist or social historian might say, much as if a Lancashire cotton worker asked if his job was disappearing into cotton factories in Bangladesh.

I share your fears btw. I'm just less sure I "deserve" the pay for my disappearing role(s)

I think you're onto something.

Even Indians are losing their IT jobs to Vietnamese. [1]

The squeeze is real.

Good time to start a business I guess.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/developersIndia/comments/1eckee9/oh...

Bingo! (Mostly, the AI stuff is a bit overblown)

This is already happening by large margins. Companies hiring contractors in India or Brazil to do the work that a full time employee used to do.

If WFH can be done in Arizona, it can be done just as easily in Colombia for half the price.

I don’t understand this argument. It was called “outsourcing” 20 years ago when there was no AI.

It seems much less likely to me that this wouldn't have the effect of raising the global south up to the level of the global north, rather than drag down the global north to the global south, which would be a huge win for human flourishing. So I can't say I oppose it.

Just as importantly: If you think this is likely to happen, why not invest in those countries now? If I'm right, they're likely to generate outsized returns as they catch up. If I'm wrong, the money you have invested in the global north will actually decrease as time goes on, while the money you have in the south stays steady, leaving you in a much better position than you probably would be otherwise.

> Going from 10 to 10,000 qualified candidates for a position allows a far more productive match

Yeah going from 10 to 10k qualified candidates means wages go down. As companies get better and better at WFH the pool gets bigger and bigger.

Personally I think some industries will go this way and others will go RTO, depending on how competitive they are (especially around R&D). Wages for relocation/RTO will end up rising.

On the flip side: I've heard people saying software is going to be offshored and has no future at least since the 90s dot-com bust, they were still saying it in the 2000s when I was in school, so I'm skeptical that the growth of WFH will overcome all the barriers to global hiring.

Ultimately I think WFH wages will go down/stagnate (of course w/ higher quality of life for many) and companies that want it will have to pay significantly more for someone willing to RTO.

I also think it only takes one unicorn to say "we did it by having everyone RTO!" to flip everything back around.

> How long until megacorps and SMEs actually execute this reality?

This is the best case scenario. As a country, you want your megacorps/SME to execute this somehow while keeping control. The alternative is that new megacorps/SMEs get spawned in the global south and there you have no job and no cash flow.

> If I can do my job at home, then surely somebody can do it in the global south in tandem with AI for peanuts.

This argument can be made for in-office work too. Offices in the "global south" are much cheaper to operate than in the first world. If the work involves interacting with computers connected via the internet, it can be done from any office.

Offshoring & distribution of remote work may be bad for you but very very good for humanity.

There will still be local opportunities and huge benefits of being in the first world due to better education and networks. Those benefits will be diluted by remote work/offshoring increasing, and others will benefit due to that.

Probably the increased productivity itself will boost everything for everybody (better matches of employees & employers = higher productivity & cheaper products everywhere... eventually) but in times of change it can be rough in the short term if your income depended on a tightly protected market and the protection just disappeared.

I mean, if you can do your job in-office, then surely somebody in the global can do it in their office? Or what if somebody could do your job in a branch office rather than in HQ?

Is your only differentiation really just being able to physically interact with management?

This was the perspective I was looking for to respond to my innate suspicions caused by the source of this post. Who are they signaling toward?

>If I can do my job at home, then surely somebody can do it in the global south in tandem with AI for peanuts.

>How long until megacorps and SMEs actually execute this reality?

You don't have to wait long, it happened around 20-25 years ago.

Hope for new job roles. A race to automate all the things needs a lot of human effort!

As for location... yeah shit may change. But hey at least we give poor countries a fishing rod not a fish. They get richer and you could always go live in cambodia. Digital nomad becomes something normal people do. Not travelling is for the rich!

I see an absolutely shocking number of managers promoted from the IC ranks, who not only have no preparation for management, but no experience at any other company.

My boss recently sent me from 5 days in office to 3, and on those two days WFH I get basically nothing done. Not because I don’t try, but my position in a small company is structured in such a way that I essentially work with my boss as her right hand, so if she isn’t there to guide me or give me tasks I essentially don’t work.

I am not sure if that is a failing of her management, the job we are doing, or the industry we are in, but the lack of being able to bug her about things is essentially cutting into my bottom line.

This is just as true in office. A bad manager is a bad manager no matter where they manage.

I'm an engineer in the process industries (oil/gas) and we are constantly collaborating and running stuff by other engineering disciplines with different knowledge to us, and coordinating with management, logistics, maintenance, operations, commercial and contractors. Isn't there a similarly high level of interdisciplinary communication involved in coding? How do you keep up the quality of communication?

(in my industry in Western Australia we essentially never did work from home because we were Covid-free)

It's funny how the internet became widespread which enabled what you say in theory but it wasn't enough, we needed a global pandemic to push us to use it as intended and get over the stone age type of culture we had before (remember doing your taxes on a frickin paper? Working only from the office? Having to sign papers with a pen?)

It makes me think about the other tech that's just waiting for the next catastrophe to become 10x more helpful.

I hope for WFH or hybrid to win the day.

It'll be determined by who can effectively train the next generations of employees.

Honestly, that I can't find that bet on polymarket is beyond me.

My experience aligns with this as well. I work hybrid, and if a coworker needs help, I would go to the office rather than staying home & online.

There's something about the lack of cues that makes online conversations' flow more challenging and harder to read. In person, Visual cues like body language & facial expression helps signal when someone is about to speak, and that helps me tremendously.

How is that different from just making a call? It's much faster and you can both be looking at your respective screens with the same information

I am not sure. Remote working allows you to instantly pair with someone. No shuffling keyboards. There are a lot of software tools that help. Things like Loom let you async stuff.

What isn't is as good is social connection. I have not seen going out to a restaurant emulated well remotely.

One on one knowledge sharing is the worst kind though. I can’t search through your verbal conversations.

I've found that Tuple and (if people are okay with it) screen recording makes me more productive from getting knowledge transfers at home. Whenever the CTO would go on a tangent, that tangent was recorded. I'd rewatch those recordings and learn a lot more than if I'd had just been sitting next to him IRL.

> getting leaders to make and follow through on decisions, and learning our way around customer ecosystems takes forever over Teams, slack, or email. If we knew exactly what needed to be done and were just cranking code I see how solitude works. But the constant streams of low bandwidth meetings to make decisions is brutal.

When I was doing that work, even in office, all of those things took place over IM, email or remote meetings anyway.

My customers were not in the same building as I was. The vast majority of senior management were not in the same building as I was.

Sure sometimes I might go out to the client in person, and sometimes they may have come in to see me. But the vast, vast, VAST majority of it already took place remotely. And how could it not in a global business?

> Hire expencive, qualified workers

> who don't require hand-holding,

> and you won't have to care where

> they work from.

But employees only get to that level of capability through early, engaged mentoring. WFH destroys that personal connection. So then you have new, or inexperienced, employees trawling through SharePoint trying to find some nugget of information about how and why X integrates with Y. Hours and hours are lost, I've seen it first-hand.

Whereas 15 minutes of face-time doodling on a page with an experienced analyst will accelerate the newbie's capability out of proportion to the time spent.

Aren't there some companies that consider this (where the employee lives) when calculating their salaries?

This is a good way to negotiate the value of your personal wfh arrangement.

But from the company R&D perspective, saving is kind of a loser argument. Cash is cheap. In pg terms we are trying to make the album that sells a million copies, not optimize the margins on nightly gigs.

Yes, as a well-paid, introverted, technical contributor who is internally motivated by their craft, with the luxury to afford good working space and at a moment in one's life where home haunts feel secure and supportive, you can't beat it. Like any tradesman in history keeping up their own shop, it's really quite empowering. I've been doing it for pretty much all of a very long career.

But it's worth keeping in mind that there are a lot of implied constraints there, and that the industries that drive the society we live in often rely on making the best of people who can't meet all those constraints.

There are people whose jobs need them work with other people dynamically, extroverts who need to be around others with a common aim to thrive, people with compensation to meager to carve out an effective home office, people who need on-site facilities, people with chaotic or draining home lives, etc

It's very easy to talk about why remote work can be extremely rewarding for some, but the big picture of a business or an industry needs to balance a whole bunch of other concerns -- some intrinsic and some simply inertial.

It's just not a single, simple topic where we can project our own experience as if it was universal.

I WFH 100% of the time. This allows my spouse and I to work. Without this one of us would have to leave the workforce to take the children to school. But because I WFH I can do the school runs and I realize I have it so good, it makes me unwilling to consider any other potential job offers.

And BTW, because I don't have to commute 3 hours like I used to I can now work as late if a task requires me to. So yeah the ability to WFH makes me LOYAL.

I think framing the WFH argument in terms of productivity is a bad idea. It’s difficult to win that argument and it might not even be true.

Instead, call it a benefit, like paid vacation or health insurance.

Nobody argues that employers contributing to an employees 401(k) plan is good for productivity. They do it to attract and retain talent.

Where you getting that free coffee from? I work from home but still have to pay for mine, although did recently get a good deal in sprouts in that yellow sticker section. Real good deal! But not free ;)

Free coffee? Dang, I have to buy mine at the grocery store :) at least I can drink my loose leaf tea at home though!

What do you do?

I will offer a counter-example despite being very much pro-wfh.

In my little corner of the universe, the company, its execs and some rank and file, who appear to genuinely either want to be in office or appear to bosses ( or both ) are not super keen some of the vocal anti-rto people showing others that they too could stay home, leave early.. you know, all those things management did not that long ago.

And the thing is, for me anyway, paradoxically I am waiting for the other shoe to drop by and, as a result, genuinely doing as little as possible ( 'cept for the ridiculous projects, can't do much about those ).

Companies had it. They had their gay little compromise in the form of hybrid, which I hated anyway. And now I am just saying meh. Funny thing is, I am clearly not the only one.

Nice article. Small nitpick I saw, your articles has date of MONTH/DAY without the YEAR. I’d have love that to be the full date. Yes, I did see the URL but would still love a full date.

> Meanwhile the most flexible companies can pick up talent easily, picking and choosing and building very tough rosters for quite reasonable prices.

While it sounds good on paper, hiring decent remote folks for a company is actually much harder, especially if you're a startup. It's way easier taking a bet on someone local where you don't have to second guess how productive they are. For similar interview performance, most companies would prefer folks who can come to office instead of full remote. Obviously, there are companies who have made it work (eg. Gitlab) for a long time, but I'd say they are the exception rather than the norm.

I do think there will be significant remote competition in the middle 50% ($101k-$167k) range [0], and at a given price point in this range the best candidates will be able to demand remote. But top talents can only get paid close to their market value at a few dozen companies structurally capable of affording them. These companies are competitive in the sense that they throw around a lot of money, but they tend to make HR decisions as a herd. Partly because they benchmark against each other, partly because they all copy Google and Facebook, partly because they illegally collude [1]. That's why everyone's waiting to see whether Amazon's move to 5 days starts a stampede.

For now there are notable holdouts, like Netflix and Airbnb, that pay in the levels.fyi scale but are still remote friendly. The other FAANGs are already at hybrid. If Netflix, the remaining FAANG-adjacent holdouts, and the HFTs go RTO then that is pretty much it for your chances of earning $300k+. It may still be worthwhile to leave comp on the table in exchange for the lifestyle and cost-of-living benefits, of course.

[0] https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes151252.htm

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

Won’t someone think of the commercial real estate investors?!

It’s an open secret that there is no data that supports RTO. If there was, at even one company, it would be screamed from the rooftops.

(I don’t believe it’s all covert layoffs either - it’s imho the more banal reason of c-level personal feelings and groupthink)

Same, home is associated with relaxation in my mind (and I have an apartment, so no "work desk"). Being quite depressed also makes a big difference, as work gives a social life I otherwise don't have.

No. Most businesses implementing RTO just want people back in the office, take the tinfoil hat.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle

> A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

>I'd really like to see how the American libertarian copes with the return to office mandates.

The American libertarian will just move to a job that allows remote.

>As the employers are closing in on them, they slowly start to understand that unless they collectively punch back they _will_ yield sooner or later.

Believe me, companies stand to lose a lot more with an empty dev team than any dev stands to lose moving to another company. RTO companies better have some damn good reasons to work there if they require asses in seats. Companies that don't (most) will struggle and wither.

> All I know is some people like it some don’t. It’s based on the environment they have at home. Some people’s home and psyche isn’t good for wfh for various reasons

Equally;

In office work, all I know is some people like it some don’t. It’s based on the environment they have at the office. Some people’s office and psyche isn’t good for in office work for various reasons

I worked for a firm at one point that prior to acquistion, was filled top to bottom with people that enjoyed a quiet working environment that allowed them to think and do deep work. We were an engineering heavy firm doing complex work for large multinationals. I'll admit it was shocking to me when I first joined, you could have heard a pin drop in this place, it took me quite some time to adjust to it, but in time I did.

After the original founders decided they wanted to move on and so sold up, we merged with another org that was the opposite. The office became a place of multiple indepedent bluetooth speakers blaring music all day, teams of people walking around from desk to desk and holding incredibly loud non work related conversations at random next to people trying to do deep work, everyone was crammed closer together to assist in "collaboration" etc.

One by one, all of the original staff departed as the office had for them become a living hell that destroyed their ability to do deep meaningful or productive work. They didnt dislike their co-workers, they were not against some occasional social interactions, but ultimately, they were engaged with what they did and just wanted a good environment to do it in, an environment that was removed from them by force and thus too was their capability to be as productive as they once were.

Some people do better work from office as you note due to the environment they have at home and their psyche, but the exact opposite is also true for a not insignificant amount of people.

The problem is that business is going to pretend only one of these groups exists.