The free market only works when you have sufficient competition. The phone market is absolutely not trivial to enter, so your first sentence is plain and simply false.
Also, given that iphones almost already pass the requirements, where is the harm to innovation?
There are hundreds of phone choices made by 10+ manufacturers. What lack of competition are you referencing? You can still buy a flip phone if you want.
The harm to innovation is not today, but in the future for some as-of-yet built product. That is.... what innovation is...
I think these conspiracy theories about RTO are really unhelpful and actually harmful to the viability of hybrid work arrangements.
Please work in a day as a oil rig technician or a nurse. "I should be able to work anywhere and my employer must accommodate me" is an extremely privileged and elitist view of thinking.
A few of your notes are actually just wrong as well. Salaries jumped during covid due to over-hiring and software booming. "Productivity" is not a number, but a business-by-business decision. The vast, vast majority of people don't want politics at work, and it's exclusively the viewpoint of the laptop class who demand that stuff. (Again, people who work toiling jobs for 10 hours a day don't create petitions and demands like that)
At the end of the day, if you don't want to work in an office, you don't have to. But, believe it or not, many many people, including young people, like the office environment.
>Please work in a day as a oil rig technician or a nurse. "I should be able to work anywhere and my employer must accommodate me" is an extremely privileged and elitist view of thinking.
To highlight just how stupid this is, here it is from another angle:
"I have to work on site so everyone else must work on site"
What is the logical conclusion here? That the workforce should be equal in every sense? Come on
Poor in the US and around the world often don’t have access to the healthcare they need. If you get cancer, are you turning down chemotherapy so you don’t seem soft? Are you turning down your next raise because some teacher somewhere is getting underpaid?
If you want substantive rebuttals you should make a substantive argument first.
Do you understand how rig work or nursing is? These are very flexible jobs. There is demand for nursing everywhere. You can be a travel nurse and go find work in HI or CA or Las Vegas right now if you want. Temp agencies that place you so you don't even need to really hunt either.
Rig work it is weeks on weeks off sort of deal where you then get off that rig back to, quite literally, anywhere in the world where you live otherwise. You could live in the middle of the Amazon rainforest and make six figures a year on a rig in the middle of the ocean (well, maybe US jurisdiction is preferred from a tax perspective for employer payroll).
I'm not sure I understand the point. The vast, vast majority of jobs simply cannot be done remotely. So I have little patience for the entitlement of people thinking they "deserve" it or yell about conspiracy theories about why it is going away.
There is a reason YC is in person. There is a reason why the top companies are in person.
You say entitlement, but the reality is you have sour grapes about people who can have a flexible work arrangement. Some people pick jobs that are not able to be flexible, that’s a choice. Pick better. People work to live, not live to work, they should not tolerate how they should have to work because some manager or c-level is lucky to be in their position of power.
The UK provides by law the ability to seek and obtain flexible working arrangements on day one of a job [1]. Certainly, the US is behind as it always is, but it will catch up eventually, if only because of structural demographics and total fertility rate declines across the developed world creating perpetual labor shortages in various verticals. We’re just arguing window of time.
YC isn’t a good example, they simply sell lottery tickets to founders and early investors as a confidence play. You say top companies, but that’s an opinion without evidence. According to what metric?
> As of March 2025, approximately 22.8% of U.S. employees worked remotely at least part of the time, equating to about 36 million individuals. This percentage has remained stable between 21% and 23% since early 2024, indicating that remote work has become a consistent component of the workforce.
> What this means: Remote work has stabilized at about one-fifth of the US workforce—this isn't a temporary trend but a permanent shift in how work gets done.
> Approximately 90% of companies plan to maintain or increase remote work options moving forward, indicating a lasting shift despite some return-to-office mandates.
> What this means: The vast majority of companies recognize remote work as a permanent feature—even those mandating office returns are keeping some flexibility.
What say you to the fact that there are companies that work remote today and are competitive and doing fine? Anomalous? Or maybe your prior assumptions need adjustment?
Why can't they be? Chances are in 1989, most companies weren't set up to work well with computers either. 5 years later everyone had a desktop an email account.
A whole lot of outliers then. Top companies are in person? I only know a few people in FAANG but they all work remote. Maybe different for certain tasks like on site hpc work. They are in software engineering though.
YC in person doesn't mean anything to me. These bay area types often have a screw loose and do things like have people live on site maybe even in tents during sprints. Megalomaniac behavior, not a lesson to follow.
To expand upon a particular point; near as I understand WFH, or rather more broadly _not_ "RTO" (ie. endure office bound work) has a strong backbone of people wanting to maximise home/work life balance.
The point about rig work, FIFO mine work, nursing (again, FIFO) et al is these are jobs that are a priority choiice for many that are living that somewhat off-grid lives with a big home-life component dream .. and have been doing that for many decades now.
I'm over 60, have worked in a majority of countries across the globe (geophysical exploration field work), and have avoided offices like a plague for the entirity of my career - I enjoy 24/7 field work with weeks off at home to work projects there or to code / build for various projects from home.
We've even built up resource and energy intelligence services and sold them on to FinTech companies that way.
And met and talked to many people that way.
So, from some PoV's you chose the worst possible examples of jobs that supposedly tie people to an office grind.
What's actually really unhelpful and actually harmful to the viability of hybrid work arrangements is RTO.
> "I should be able to work anywhere and my employer must accommodate me" is an extremely privileged and elitist view of thinking.
Nope! You totally missed the point. "You must accomodate me" is a demand, that you can place on your employer, when you have labor power, as an employee. The acceding is what we're talking about here. That is not cultural; it is a matter of market power.
> At the end of the day, if you don't want to work in an office, you don't have to.
What are you talking about? Did you read my post? Yes, I have to! Because of RTO!
Yes, these are some extreme beliefs in a grand, coordinated conspiracy.
As if a bunch of people in suits are sitting around a table in an evil villain’s lair shouting “we need more control over our workers” or needing to prop up commercial real estate prices.
> Should an employer not be able to see what their employees are doing at work?
There's a difference between visibility into work progress and just mass surveillance of all activity. The only metric that actually matters is the delivery of value.
Monitoring isn't an effective way to lead. It only reinforces employees to optimize for "looking busy" rather than being effective. If you have to audit your employees daily actions to know if they are doing their job, you've failed as a manager at defining their role or hiring the right people.
A good manager defines the what and the when, and leaves the how to the professional being paid to do it.
I mean, maybe. But a company that spends all of it's time "surveilling" their employees rather than adding value will go out of business. So I'm not sure what the point really is when people bring this up when talking about WFH. If someone doesn't want to be surveilled at work they can quit, right?
Not really. Workers produce the thing the company sells. Those workers are mostly trapped so they deal with whatever nonsense management is up to. Management, mostly useless, maintains its control and viability by asserting that workers need policing and they're the ones to do it. If the policing is relatively easy with WFH, they'll do that. If it's much harder, or less demonstrative of their fake value, screw that, they'll just pass that burden on to workers with RTO mandates.
By "excuses for layoffs" I suspect what they meant was that there was an pre-existing desire to reduce headcount and RTO was used under the expectation that some percentage of employees would quit voluntarily so that the company can avoid going through the relatively more costly process of laying them off.
Of course the downside of this approach is that the company has less control over which employees leave, which may result in them losing the employees who have the best alternatives.
> What do you mean by "monitor and control"? Should an employer not be able to see what their employees are doing at work?
I don't see any reason to get into a discussion about how much an employer should or shouldn't be able to monitor and control their employees. Some businesses are simply more trusting of their employees and allow a great deal of independence, while others aren't. Those that aren't will naturally face greater barriers to monitoring and controlling employees who are working remotely.
> What is an "excuse" for a layoff, exactly?
It's no secret that when the return-to-office movement began, many businesses used it as a means of achieving a headcount reduction. Employees who could not (or would not) return to the office were let go. Parting ways with difficult employees looks much better to investors than layoffs.
If you deliver all tasks in a timely manner, is productive and helpful in a team setting, contribute to discussions and initiatives beyond your immediate assignments... What exactly should I monitor? How many minutes per day your butt is in a seat? If you did a school run and woked a bit more after hours to compensate? If you had a headache and took a short nap after lunchtime?
There's big conspiracy here. They just don't matter to most people.
And this regulation is really bad and will harm innovation for very little to no value.
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