Several years before the pandemic I was forced to move several states away after my local office was shutdown and the company was looking to force everyone to a few larger offices. It didn’t make any sense. Within my little 10 person team, we had people in 5 states and at least 2 counties, spanning multiple time zones. I was on the phone, tethered to my desk, all-day every-day. I saw very little point to being in the office. If they are going to push for office collaboration, at least organize the teams so all the team members are actually in the same office. The whole thing was madness.

I do see the value in meeting people face-to-face, but I also think they could be done with the occasional company event. I have to imagine having a few events where people can meeting and build some rapport is cheaper than maintaining offices year round.

▲ ghostpepper 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

> If they are going to push for office collaboration, at least organize the teams so all the team members are actually in the same office.

As far as I can tell this is what apple does, and it actually makes a lot more sense than "you must be in some office but we don't care where".

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losteric 5 days ago | parent [-]

I’m sure geographic consolidation is the end state, we’re just taking incremental steps.

	▲	goalieca 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Many companies with > 1500 employees were not consolidated in the decade before. Especially those which had grown through acquisition.

▲ throwaway2037 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

    > I was on the phone, tethered to my desk, all-day every-day.

I am curious: What was your job? Sales? Support?

	▲	simoncion 4 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		If by "on the phone" we mean "in a voice and/or video call", I was in a similar situation to the OP. I'm a programmer. RTO made no sense for our very geographically distributed team, but the mandate came down anyway. Most of us were staring down the barrel of a multi-hour commute to hot-desk in a notably overcrowded office with underprovisioned Internet service to execute the task of being on the phone all day, every day with a very geographically diverse set of colleagues. Such collaboration, such synergy, much wow.
	▲	al_borland 4 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Software engineer, who was often also filling the role of product owner and scrum master as well.