The problem, I think, is what kind of employees may leave. If it's the best of the cream, then the company is in trouble. And frankly, the best employees can allow themselves to say "I want to work from home. You don't allow? Then goodbye".
In my opinion, above a certain size, companies don't really care about employee quality all that much. So long as they meet the initial hire criteria it doesn't matter who's a 5x or 1x dev anymore. It's just one FTE anyway in the planning.
At this point the company has become a bullshit churning machine whose effectiveness is measured by its rate of churn. They milk cash cows that gained traction in decades past, while most new work is just part of the churn.
We had an example at our office several years ago where employee X was a great worker, nothing to say about that, that was having his own "working" rhythm (e.g., until late at night, mornings off, etc.), and was coming to the office only from time to time, just because the manager was really pushing hard, or for certain office events.
This spread and people started to ask - can I work from home?
-> only 1 day
Why? X does more than 1 day, and sometimes X is not available when I need.
... as a manager you can only "yes, but ..." that much. At a certain point people (who I would like to remind everyone again and again: most of the time are people with a high college degree, used to read books, papers, and do things, not 3 years old kids) connect the dots and say "alright, it's time to go". And before they go, they let the entire apple tree rot to hell. If that doesn't happen it might be because this spreads and goes to high management that asks the manager "WTF are you doing?"
That's when either more rights come in equally for everyone, or ... they need to let go of their best employee, or they need to find a compromise. Just having the nicely protected "best" employee is never a good strategy. Eventually people get pissed off and leave, and if they don't, congrats, you have just made the "non-best" employees even less motivated and less productive.
This was so before COVID. If you are good and productive you can often negotiate WFH like any other benefit.
Honestly it seems like it’s part of a tech career trajectory. Once you are very established and your skills are built up there are several tracks available to you. Two of those are WFH specialist or 5-10X experienced dev and WFH consultant.
The cube farm grind is something you go through to get your skills and network up.
I have seen the same in other knowledge areas: corporate law, finance, some types of editing and design, accounting, etc. WFH becomes one of the options at more senior levels.
The other reason it’s a more senior option is that senior people are seen as better able to self direct and thus requiring less micromanagement.
That seems to be true in my case, the first decade of my career was spent in cube farms and cramped offices. I learned a lot and made a few networks, and now I’m at a fortunate point where most jobs are available to me with a phone call if my current job sucks. Especiallly when I’m asked to RTO.
Pre-covid my entire team was office and I was the only remote. Without wanting to brag, it's factual: my Drupal knowledge made it worth for them to keep this up. Post-covid my entire team is scattered to the winds. You couldn't get them to come to the office because almost no one is within the same metro as the office.
They are going to quickly discover that this is the case. I left Lockheed right after they started forcing everyone back into offices that didn't even have enough desks. Those whom were actually creating value there all had plans to leave to. Plenty of them left as soon as they got the news lol. Sure it's a way to do layoffs without saying 'layoff', but the impact is going to be felt much harder down the line.
I'm not sure that there is a terrible large correlation between "best of the best" and "refuse to ever work in office." When I think about the engineers that I most respect and admire, they are very split on wfh vs wfo opinions.
I don't think this is correct. It is a little hard to tease out perfectly (e.g.: school computers having gone to chrome books in a big way might not be the statistic you want), but globally Windows marketshare has gone from 90% a decade ago to ~%75 now:
I'm not a part of this space personally so I can't say for certain, but one answer could be the not-PCs and cloud. Some people find a tablet with a keyboard perfectly adequate for their all-office needs. Even if the "sys-admins" still need PCs that is still a very substantial conversion of the market share away from PCs. If you reflexively scream at the notion of how horrible that would be for your working process, I do not blame you but note it could work for some.
Do you really need to be part of “this space” to know that Microsoft has a 90% share in PCs and most of corporate America and even personal computers are running Windows?
Even the people who like tablets are still buying Surface laptops - running Windows.
They aren’t buying iPads and definitely not Android tablets.
Even a lot of iPad aficionados are moving back to Macs now that they have a lot of the advantages of iPads - slim, lightweight and ridiculously long battery life.
