alt Hacker NewsThere have never been "company hours" in tech. Until recently (before badge tracking became a thing) asking your manager what time you were expected to come in and leave would be met with blank stares. "We don't enforce set hours here, just get your work done". And conversely "I came to the office and worked 8 hours a day like you asked" is never going to be accepted as an excuse when you fail to meet your targets at the end of the quarter or miss a page in the middle of the night. Heck you can't even work on your own projects after hours or patent your own ideas because the knowledge in your head is company property. Simply put - they are hiring you for your skills and your output, not for warming a seat at an office for 8 hours a day. Tech companies have always treated employees like adults and expected adult behavior in return, and both sides have benefited greatly from this arrangement. Sadly it seems like the new crop of tech leadership seems adamant on making their companies more like a call center.
So you'd think right? Nobody would like anything better than to just get output without worrying about hours or location or anything like that. But if you were in a management position when WFH started, you would've seen velocity go through the floor and stay there. And to be fair, there are absolutely a limited set of employees who are perfectly capable of working remotely with no issues whatsoever. But for the majority.. the feedback we've gotten is there is too much temptation to just do the laundry or dishes or "my wife needs a hand with X", and output just continues to stay low. And while it would be great to separate employees into groups based on who can be trusted to WFH and who can't, it feels too discriminatory and would cause way too many headaches.
So, as I'm sure you've seen in the news stories over the last few years, basically every large organization everywhere has enacted some sort of RTO mandate. I'm sure there are a few smaller startups kicking around who want to keep trying things the other way, but for the most part, the industry has spoken. We can keep complaining about it but short of another pandemic it's unlikely covid-style work is going to make a comeback IMO.