> Statu quo seems to be hybrid work for many big companies.

That’s the status quo until they rescind that as well. The companies who transitioned to hybrid early have been ending it since mid-late 2023 and the efforts have only ramped up in 2024.

Hybrid is a great way to cripple remote work too: remote work requires good communication hygiene in the company, hybrid makes that falter by reinstating the old direct back-channels, now you can degrade systematic communications and hobble remote workers, then justify RTO on those grounds.

And then remote work and quality of life is back to being a perk of upper management, “as it should be”.

And I’ll just preemptively jump in and nip this in the bud before some HNer writes their anti-RTO manifesto in the replies:

Not all organisations or executives have a vested interest in commercial real estate. Especially this late in the game when plenty of orgs have had an opportunity to let their leases expire.

Not all RTO action is due to some perverted desire by incompetent managers to see subordinate butts in seats, either.

There is a sizeable contingent of leadership that legitimately sees in-person work as the best means of eliciting productivity from their staff, and are willing to trade off taking a hit from some staff not being happy about this, and potentially leaving. You might not agree with the strategy. You might strongly feel that it’s wrong. But the reality is that they believe it.

Furthermore there is certainly a sizeable contingent of staff that would prefer a hybrid role to full WFH. I’m not talking about faceless sales leadership extroverts as techies often put it. I’m talking about ICs. I’m talking about developers.

And there are certainly, certainly people that just don’t feel as strongly about it as a lot of the people here.

I’d love for just one WFH-related thread to not devolve into faux-intelligent basically-xeroxed screeds about commercial real estate and dumb management.

And yet just today I read an article about how more than half of tech CEOs now are allowing workers to work fully remote if the choose, which is up from closer to 35% a year ago. It’s possible some of the RTO push was to get people to leave, or that management, underestimated how unpopular it would be with employees, or perhaps the simplest explanation: management is mostly a cargo cult just throwing spaghetti at the wall, with no real rhyme or reason behind their decision making.