The argument for dooming hybrid is much simpler than this. Hybrid work asks you to live nearby, and to commute; in return you get to escape your home life (kids, spouse, family), and you get access to free cans of soda and bags of chips.
That's all the pros and cons. It doesn't fundamentally change the work experience itself because in any given conversation at least one other person will be having their remote day, forcing the interactions to take place in a remote-friendly way. You can sit at home or sit in the office, but you're still a remote worker. Many people, especially younger ones, won't take the deal. They have no family burden to escape and everywhere else to be. Therefore the return to office is all or nothing.
Any company doing hybrid right now really wants to be fully in office. And they'll boil the frog to get you there.
More interestingly, what will new companies do? Financial momentum is in favor of remote work. The burden of proof is on new companies to justify why they should reduce their runway by 25% and limit their hiring pool by investing in an office in some place. If there really is an advantage or an efficiency to in-person work that could otherwise be remote, we will find it shortly.
>Hybrid work asks you to live nearby, and to commute
Only because people insist on defining hybrid as "n days per week in the office where n = 3 +/-1". Let teams and their leaders decide what works bet for the team. My team lives all over the country, and once every 2-3 months we meet in the office for a week. Yes, this involves flights and hotels, and I'm not saying it will work for everyone, but it's working for us in a way that 2-3X per week in the office absolutely would not have.
Get together a couple times a year was pretty much the situation with my broader team (distributed across at least a couple continents) pre-pandemic. (Travel is still more limited than it was.) I get that some people have an allergic reaction to traveling at all and spending nights away from family. Which is of course perfectly fine and they need to find a zero-travel job.
All that said, tech is something of a bubble with respect to this discussion while hardly completely unique. The few times I've had to go into the nearest major city (not to my office), my take is that rush hour traffic is essentially fully back to pre-pandemic levels--although public transit including commuter rail still seems pretty light.
That's all the pros and cons. It doesn't fundamentally change the work experience itself because in any given conversation at least one other person will be having their remote day, forcing the interactions to take place in a remote-friendly way. You can sit at home or sit in the office, but you're still a remote worker. Many people, especially younger ones, won't take the deal. They have no family burden to escape and everywhere else to be. Therefore the return to office is all or nothing.
Any company doing hybrid right now really wants to be fully in office. And they'll boil the frog to get you there.
More interestingly, what will new companies do? Financial momentum is in favor of remote work. The burden of proof is on new companies to justify why they should reduce their runway by 25% and limit their hiring pool by investing in an office in some place. If there really is an advantage or an efficiency to in-person work that could otherwise be remote, we will find it shortly.