I suppose it makes sense. Musk tried to put a label around it by calling that group 'laptop class'. I have some pet theories, but those center around commercial real estate.
I know of at least one company with an RTO drive but leased the office, and the land owner doesn't have external shareholders. Also the company paid for quite a snack supply, so backsides in seats actively cost a relatively small but still not trivial amount of money.
It could be a non metric cost vs a metric cost. They RTO and deadlines slip but they can blame that on anything. Versus losses on the balance sheet from real estate holdings. I don’t necessarily think the real estate theory is right, but I do think calculations like that happen all the time by tech execs.
I think though there is a network of decision makers that when you take into account this high dimension of decision variables, there is an emergent alignment of self interest towards the office.
I work for a very small company and of course no one comes into the office. We are small enough and lack enough of those variables that we don't have to perform this office theater like bigger firms. The bigger firms don't really have a choice when you sum all the inputs.
This is the most echoed, low-effort theory repeated over and over on places like Reddit.
The vast, vast majority of people I know who want to return to the office have absolutely nothing to do with commercial real estate.
If you put any effort into the theory at all it immediately falls apart.
Some people just like working in the office.
No doubt. This isn't a one-size-fits-all thing. Some people absolutely love working in the office. Some people just prefer it. Others have a garbage home office and will never have any home setup conducive to work. I 10000% agree with this, and anyone who says otherwise is being dreadfully foolish.
That doesn't explain even a little bit why folks who do not like (or even very, very strongly dislike) coming into the office are being threatened, are getting cut off from any and all promotions, or even being fired for continuing to work from their home office.
> If you put any effort into the theory [that the "force everyone to come into the office with threats of removal from the promotion track, or removal from one's position" situation that's ongoing may be related to plummeting commercial real estate valuations and attempts to prop them up] at all it immediately falls apart.
Your anecdotes don't support this claim.
edit: Come to think of it, I understand the why. Up until now, it was all about 'productivity and collaboration'. The change in rationale would be rather jarring.