Some of us never knew that world, even when we were going in every day for years.

> people abusing the WFH flexibility

If that happens, or management is operating in response to fear, management is incompetent.

I am a manager of a fully remote team, and if people are not getting their job done they are replaced no matter if they are in office or remote.

Meeting goals? All is well. Missing goals, find out why, and adjust dates or resources.

In most cases those who abuse WFH for us have been staff augmentation contractors. I have a theory they may be working multiple contracts, but it does not matter because things were not getting done, and the solution is simple.

The team members who are performing the best with remote work are FTEs, who understand that the benefits of the situation come with responsibility. In fact, sometimes I have to encourage them to _not_ work as much because it is convenient. Unless there is a fire drill, close the laptop at the end of a normal business day.

I wonder how many managers realise working from the office doesn't mean working 100% of the time either... The real number is so much lower on average.

Heh. I worked remotely for most of my career (~20 of 25 years). In that time I frequently worked 50+ hours a week because I actually enjoy the work that I do (application security, including security testing, and the joy of popping a shell never gets old). RTO has impacted the amount of hours I work because I head to the office, and then when my work day is done, I pack up my computer and head home. Unless I am paged or have a meeting to support someone outside of normal working hours, I don't crack my work computer, it's easier to just sit at my home workstation. When I WFH my home workstation had my work computer set up, and I would default to logging into that, unless I was playing a video game or other working on explicitly personal stuff.

There are folks who abuse WFH/remote work (see the overemployed groups on reddit and other places), but companies are losing access to alot of extra, effectively unpaid, time by imposing an arbitrary start and stop time for people based on physical location.

The logical fallacy is assuming being in the office means 8 full hours of work. It doesn’t. Performance should be based on output, not attendance.

It's only abusing if work is measured by hours spent in front of the screen. For most tech workers this is a very wrong way to measure it.

My father once pointed out that salary should be normalized against total work required time, commute included.

At 40 hours & 5 days / week in the office, even a 15 minute one-way commute is a -5.8% change in comp-per-work-time. 30 min is -11.1%. 45 min is -15.8%.