A recession could kill the work from home revolution

After twenty-plus years of remote work, I've seen everything in this article.

In some cases, the leave or be laid-off incentive was relocation to a favored city rather than back to an office.

When shutdown happened in 2020, executives were grateful (and in some cases, openly surprised) that the work was being done and the corporate results were actually better than before. All the same I knew there would be an eventual backlash, and now it's here.

"Days in office" requirements are a thing again. "We just spent tens of millions on renovating our workspace, we have to recoup that investment." (if I want to sit outside in a garden, I already have one; don't need a "plaza"). We must build "relationship equity", which apparently no one can do over the phone or via chat. Back to the good old days, it appears, as when a senior veep bragged about snagging a major project not through nuanced presentation, but by chance button-holing a superior in a corridor. I remember thinking "so that's how these huge but questionable decisions are really made."

Not sure the youngest workers will buy into return of office culture, especially when they're required to buy gasoline or a monthly train pass, parking, and investing time in schlepping that could have been better used.

Some on-site workers tend to think we remotes spend all day at Costco or posting to HN. They're right, to a degree, but I'd bet a paycheck that none of them ever burn the midnight oil, or even the 8pm oil.

I suspect wfh will die when companies can hire what they need without it. Some companies will prefer the wider hiring range which would give them a talent advantage. The passage of time will decide winners and losers. But the workplace has evolved and tends not to go too far backwards…

Companies can save a lot of money with a wfh strategy, and also hire top talent from around the world instead of being limited to a smaller pool of talent living close to a physical location.