The return-to-the-office trend backfires

RTO is about controlling labor, nothing else. Everything else is a smoke screen. Ask yourself the following questions and you'll understand what happened:

- why did RTO happen seemingly right after salaries jumped and labor became scarce?

- why did RTO happen virtually in lockstep across all of white collar employment?

- why did RTO happen despite no evidence that productivity had anything to do with it? (and in fact, lots of evidence that it made employees more productive!)

- why did RTO happen at the same time that critical equity/diversity viewpoints were increasingly being discussed at work?

- why did RTO happen at the same time that outsourcing ramped up? If businesses are so opposed to remote work, why are they outsourcing so aggressively?

It's not about AI. It's not about CRE. It's not about "synergy" in person. It's about disciplining labor. Businesses will happily tank productivity to prevent the power balance from tipping towards the employee.

In that 2020-2023 period, people started talking seriously about how much value they bring to the table. They started making demands of their employers (especially around diversity, equity, inclusion). They started interviewing at multiple places, seeing their worth, demanding more, and giving only as much effort as strictly required to get the job done. The sudden, overnight, incredibly strong reaction to this period, the hard right turn, that is the whip cracking down on labor.

My company gave us 3 months notice and said 100% RTO in January 2026. I warned them this was a dealbreaker for me. They said sorry, no exceptions. In January I submitted my two weeks notice, citing RTO. They accepted my resignation letter and then called me a few hours later saying they could make an exception. Now I'm back to 100% remote.

I wouldn't consider myself to be an irreplaceable superstar employee, but they folded almost immediately. Not sure what the point of this dance was.

The article has so many "it's this, not that" contradictions – I counted seven! – that I seriously consider it to be written with a lot of assistance from LLMs.

One thing not mentioned in the article is that now that many software engineers are back to their offices, we get the regular fall / spring viral infections spreading out between employees who feel obliged to go to the office even if they have mild cold symptoms. If RTO is about productivity, I wonder if anyone has accounted the productivity drop caused by viruses in workspace.

If RTO sacrifices a 1.7x revenue growth, where's the consequence for malfeasance or examples of the buck stopping with shareholders?

If I owned a share of these orgs, I wouldnt want revenue left on the table because some VP had an attachment problem.

This is the culmination of short-term-profit thinking, and I'm shocked people like YC's @paulgraham support RTO.

What's the long term game plan? It's like hotels and taxis resisting uber and airbnb. there will always be the old way of doing things, but people don't want to work from the office unless they have to. You've become the disruptee instead of the disruptor at that point.

I've been both productive and unproductive while WFH as well as in the office. In either case it was a product of managerial decisions.

I think they expected people to "just be productive" on their own, and then they install surveillance crap on their devices, measure bullshit and deduce RTO isn't needed.

The older way of defining a couple of performance indicator metrics and using that to mange people no longer works, RTO or not. So now, most managers have resorted to a "vibes-based" management technique, where the numbers can be made to mean whatever you want them to mean, so long as the vibe feels right.

So if two people are just as unproductive, but you turn on one of their camera and see a person working from their bed in their pajamas, the vibe will such, so RTO makes sense in their mind.

I don't think RTO will backfire any time too soon, but in the long term, the US has bigger problems in terms a decline as a nation. But if we overcome that somehow, there really is only one game in town: competition.

Can your company be competitive while implementing RTO? Your competition that figures out how to make their people happy and WFH will beat you. not only that, they'll pay their people less money for that privilege.

Technology infrastructure is still a growing thing in most of the world, but i suspect in a decade or so, WFH would be ideal for most humans in the world.

I also speculate that remote-controlled automated things will become very popular. not just waymo support driving the care remotely as needed, but even things like janitors and manual labor jobs could be done via robots controlled remotely.

For office work, it requires a different style of management, in a generation the older people too used to office work will be out of the workforce, but that transition will mean companies with a younger management workforce (who gets paid a lot less typically) will have a competitive advantage.

Teams not performing well with WFH -- with a millennial or younger manager would be a real shocker to me.

I suspect there's a selection bias from poorly run companies using RTO to cut headcount. Now they can have layoffs and put a positive spin on it with AI.

This is interesting because it does not jibe at all with the people I know and how productive they are. The friends I know working big tech hybrid jobs work maybe 25 hours in a good week, whereas the friends I know in office 4/5 days a week are easily at double that. I'd imagine there are some confounding variables here. I wonder if a lot of those hybrid companies driving high revenue growth are just profit machines that don't really rely on employees being productive to grow (i.e. Google). Either way surprising findings to me!

Any analysis that frames this as a productivity or talent-attraction issue is flawed from the start because that was never the point and still isn't.

The point of RTO mandates is to suppress wages. It's to get people to quit rather than having to lay them off. It's part of the permanent layoffs culture we're now in where every year 5-10% of the workers at a company will be laid off. Remaining workers will do more labor for the same money and won't be asking for raises because they're thankful to still have a job. And someone quitting is much cheaper than paying them severance.

Tech workers in particular saw massive wage growth in the 2010s due to tight supply. Companies are now in the business of clawing back thoat wage growth. It's why all these big tech companies started RTO mandates and layoffs at about the exact same time. It's a wink-and-nod collusion rather than overt collusion. We're a long way from the times when Google just hired all the engineers to deny them to their competitors.

None of this is necessary. All of these companies are still insanely profitable. But profits have to keep growing and ultimately that comes down to cutting costs. There's nothing else you can do.

Employers don't want you to be financially secure. They want you drowning in debt with declining real wages because then you're absolutely showing up to work and putting up with whatever they want.

What if I actually like the office?

I have a 40min walk to it or 10min bus ride, so no American commute, lol. (Your society is done)

I like my colleagues. Sometimes you want to meet and solve problems face to face, and not have it be planned.

I have a shift schedule, sometimes I am the only one in the office, that is bliss :)

But my work is 100% in office.

RTO because of Slackware faking while sleeping and walking dogs. Cheaters

I don’t know why they keep bringing “productivity” as the justification, it never was, never will, it’s about power dynamics, remote work shifted a lot of power back to employees, it also provided flexibility career wise. Another big reason why it got attacked quickly is it gave the people a window to escape the rat race and save money, when the employee doesn’t spend xyz on gas everyday, plus relocating outside of the crowded urban areas to cheaper smaller cities, rent/housing went down, landlords and banks had to lobby to end it, plus the government since less taxes are paid now as a result, all efforts made to bring back the status quo. It was fascinating to see how they gaslit the public, I was even talking to an employer before and the manager was trash talking wfh as “woke” and “real men” must grind 9hrs a day at least! Another employer was demanding a full camera on at least 6hrs a day if you wfh, or you are not “productive”.

Back in the 80s or 90s, working in the office or factory was the default and it made sense, no high speed internet, small town so not much commuting, cheap housing, and affordable life, so if the man worked in the office and the wife stayed home, they can live comfortably. That’s not the case now, wfh balanced that and increased the quality of life instead, so you can now stay with your kids saving the cost of daycare etc, while doing exactly the same work you would do at the office.

For something to "backfire" you first have to account for why it was done. This article assumes performance and retention are the only considerations. It does not account for things like commercial real estate value, a buesiness's ability to monitor and control its employees, or excuses for layoffs.