“I Dunno Susan, Figure It Out!”

We have spent way too much time since 2021 discussing WFH vs. RTO. But at the crux of the whole discussion is one unavoidable truth.

I don’t want to belabor this point, so I will try to keep it relatively short. We have spent a lot of time since 2021 debating the relative merits of WFH (work from home) vs. RTO (return to office), and most of the debates have been classism and nonsense. Have you ever met a bartender for Chili’s? They don’t have the same where-to-work options as an Engineer 5 at Microsoft, ya know? I’ve seen it stated that 51% of the American workforce cannot work from home, and honestly that seems kinda low to me. It’s been a class warfare discussion all the way.

Obviously, managers and executives hide behind the idea of “spontaneous collaboration” and “team-building” when the real reasons are more akin to:

• Surveillance
• Concerns about how much is being spent on real estate
• Wanting to be worshipped by peons in-person
• General need for control

I think what you’re seeing right now, and what we’ve been seeing since mid-2022, is that bigger companies are forcing a RTO (Amazon is the latest example, which apparently caused some form of professional exodus). This makes sense, as bigger companies tend to be (a) run by men and (b) love to showcase how they can control other human beings. At the intersection of…