Pre-covid - an entire working team is clustered in the same office and have desks near each other. People collaborate via in-person meetings, hallway conversations and general proximity.

During covid - hiring is mostly remote since companies figure they don't have to be constrained by geography anymore. Employees work at home and collaborate over Zoom meetings. It's difficult at first but everyone adjusts. Productivity is allegedly lower, partly due to the remote nature, partly because employees are slacking off.

Now - employers start mandating return to office. Teams are still distributed, so rather than collaborating via physical proximity employees have to spend their day trying to find meeting rooms and sitting on Zoom, just in the office instead of their homes.

Is the company actually more productive now? Some McKinsey consultant has a slide deck showing that it has gone up from 6.5 to 7.2, so the bosses all pat themselves on the back.

> Pre-covid - an entire working team is clustered in the same office

Just a reminder that there were plenty of great distributed teams long before Covid. I had had only a few "in office" jobs in my pre-covid career (and generally found collaboration better on remote teams, though goofing off has a bit harder to organize).

I also find it funny that somehow software engineers completely forget about the existence of open source software which worked in a more extremely distributed fashion than any remote company I've worked for at a time when IRC and email where the only tools for remote communication. Most of the most used and most successful software was written by globally distributed teams that only met face to face every few years if ever.

This timeline you are presenting applies only to large corporate jobs, where my experience has been "work productivity" always takes a back seat to organizational theater.

I literally had a customer decline a meeting today with this as the reason:

"Couldnt find a proper space to conduct the meeting"

I work in a post Covid office and even with about 1 to 6 ratio of desks to rooms, along just as many fart pods, it can be a struggle to find space during peak hours.

None of these executives are using data driven decisions. It’s said as much in the memo. It’s vibes based.

I suspect there’s more at play with this. Maybe they’re expecting attrition from this and that’s their actual goal. They never reveal their core intentions.

A lot of us have worked remote for a long time - I did it 2004 - 2007, and 2015-present. Sometimes across many time zones. The issue is with (lack of) leadership, and specifically lack of accountability for leadership.

My personal experience has been that teams were not in close physical contact since about 1994. Basically since the internet became ubiquitous. In 1999 I was working in an office in Silicon Valley and realized that I never sat across the table from any of the people I was working with. Some were in other buildings around the campus. Some were in France. Some were in the field. Some were down the hall on the same floor, but if you wandered over to talk to them chances were they weren't in their cube. So I decided to move to Montana. COVID occurred 21 years later.