It's cheaper to have a remote employee for sure, unless you've already bought an office tower or committed to a 15 year office lease. Then it's more expensive because you have to support them at home but still maintain the building and pay the taxes on the building.
Even with a lease, it's still more expensive to have them in the office. Or, to put it another way, if it's just about money – it's still cheaper to shut down the offices and pay to have them sit vacant since that's a sunk cost.
I think most people who run companies are sociopaths who don't care about their employees. That being said, I think this is a situation where there's no hidden agenda... I think it's fine to disagree with their decision, but ultimately they genuinely believe it's better for the bottom line to have people in the same place.
Not necessarily sociopaths, just people used to a certain understanding of power. Capital and power are tightly related (a more radical economic perspective might even consider them one and the same), and for millennia, land, space, and capital have been basically interchangeable. You have power over your domain, your domain is land.
To the people who spend most of their time playing in the high-levels of this power-capital-land game, a transition away from office work to work from home doesn't look like what they're used to. Sure, in reality their power has been in the form of command over huge amounts of labor and resources for ages, but there's always been the physical representation in the form of the office, the factory, the tower.
The elimination of this symbolic representation of their power plays on an anxiety about the legitimacy of their power. Their power is capital, control over resources, control that is granted to them via a web of social contracts that ultimately rely on tinkerbell logic, that is, it exists only so long as people believe in it. Any large scale change in the representation of that power comes with a (small, but not non-existent) chance that people might stop believing.
So, not sociopaths, just powerful people uncomfortable with the ever shifting landscape of what it means to be powerful.
> I think most people who run companies are sociopaths who don't care about their employees.
Another possibility: most people who run companies are actually aware of different types of jobs and employees where in-person interaction is needed, compared to loudest proponents of WFH on HN who may be projecting their unique situation (solo coder getting work done much more efficiently on small isolated projects).
>unless you've already bought an office tower or committed to a 15 year office lease
Not our problem.
"Don't buy things you can't afford" applies to capitalists, too. They insisted on cramming everyone into loud bullpen office spaces, decried WFH as "laziness" or a "privilege" for years, failed to invest in modern technology, and now their big dumb plan is backfiring. Sounds like a valuable lesson!
Neither is someone not finding a WFH job and having to RTO. Ultimately, it boils down to who has the most leverage.
My predictions for tech jobs: 1) most of the jobs will be hybrid in future because everyone loves Monday and Friday WFH. There will be a minority of jobs on either extremes (fully WFH, fully office). 2) Within those super smart people who will always be in demand, there will be all types of preferences (some WFH, some office, some hybrid). 3) For the rest who are mere cogs, they will meekly follow whatever their company dictates.
One way we can make the shit roll back uphill is by taking away our labor (which they desperately need). Do it by "laying flat" or "quiet quitting" or a general strike, whatever gets the goods.
