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> Some of those employers will say "work at the office or quit, your choice."

Haha, god no, that’s constructive dismissal. “Quit or I make your working conditions worse, require relocation to a new area, or reduce your salary” is not something the law or the courts treat as a voluntary choice, they’re not quitting, you’re laying them off not-for-cause due to a shift in organizational strategy. You’ll be paying these people to go away.

The whole “RTO as a backdoor headcount reduction” has sort of been sold as this whole thing where it’s do or die, and the proper response is “well, if I choose not to do it, what does the severance package look like”?

The fact that you are making this offer org-wide and you don’t know who’s going to take it is your problem, it’s still a layoff like any other change in strategy.

That's a fair point. Depending on where you work you might have even more power than it seems at first.

A friend at IBM when they said "Okay, come back to work in the office" just nodded and gave positive sounding responses but never really went back to the office. Their manager decided not to push it to a point of separation. I suspect that IBM's understanding of their obligations in that situation were part of the equation.

> When <critical QOL factor> comes up empty though, what do you do?

As for anything, we settle.

Now, the physical circle example feels weird to me as we're talking about remote work. Sure no one is guaranteed to find a good remote work opportunity when looking for a job, but there is enough of choice for someone who was successfully employed for a while to find a decent remote position with reasonable trade-offs. It's at least a lot easier than finding employment at 200m of one's home.

> Consider firefighters

I'm not sure how relevant it is to our field, where very few people still have to physically move to a common place to do their job. Data center maintainers still have to go to the server racks to actually plug/unplug machines, but for most other roles we kinda see the reverse, where people can react to a crisis way faster from home than when having to go to an office in the middle of the night.

> this is a rare opportunity to suggest/demand they revert some of the things that made working in the office so awful

What's lost on me is this tireless search for a middle ground, when we have better options all-around. To get back to your firefighters example, there was a time they had contracts for specific buildings and wouldn't extinguish fires on places out of contract. Should we try to find a middle ground to bring back these contract systems in some way, removing some of the most awful parts ? Or are we ok to move on to a completely different system that better benefits the city as a whole ?

>Her solution was she would live in the Bay area for 6 months, renting an apartment, save her money and then fly back to Hawaii and live there for 6 months on the money she had saved.

so her solution was a gamble? get a job and hope they care enough to compromise in 6 months when she tries to move back? It's an interesting strategy, but not an ironclad one without a lot of street smarts. stuff that's hard to research when you're not a local.

>he employer has factors they can change and factors they cannot when creating an attractive place to work for people who can (in theory) choose to work anywhere. Some of those employers will say "work at the office or quit, your choice." with the expectation that some will quit but presumably most will stay (change is really hard after all and it's scary to jump into the abyss).

but it sounds like the executive of interest more or less lost this gamble as well. they hoped most people would stay, and they either didn't or it fell below expectations, perhaps lofty ones. I feel it's a two way road here: employers won't sympathize with an employee who wants to WFH when the company doesn't, why shouold it work the other way around?

Sorry but I can’t help but feel this comment smacks of consultancy. The facts of WFH don’t align with management desires. Management may think it’s the business but the business is bigger than management. This is true in two ways: 1) employees make a business and 2) investors begin a business.

Employees are happy to have a work solution that works for them. If you want the talent to make them productive you should come to terms with reality that WFH jsut works for a lot of people.

Investors are happy when a company is making money and a company is making money when it’s employees (not its management) are productive. Employees are productive when they are given a work solution that works for them

Saying “put a door” on their office completely negates what makes employees happy to come work for you given the new reality.

Adapt or die.

>I'm assuming you have done the whole draw a circle around where you live that represents your maximum willingness to commute and then apply for jobs in that circle thing? It was very popular in silicon valley during the dot com boom. When the commute circle comes up empty though, what do you do?

Well, no. There isn't many companies that need SE around me, let alone companies that pay well or do interesting stuff.

Before WFH I've worked for a few years at one company and then WFH arrived and I've started applying for interesting offers.