Almost all remote-work news is negative now but was positive in the beginning of the pandemic. Have you noticed this or am I going crazy?

It's because a huge amount of business is centered around made up things for going to work.
Things you need to work in an office: suits, dry cleaning for the suits, dress shoes, a car (because public transportation is woefully inadequate for this reason), gas for the car, maintenance for the car, lunch, daycare, a dog walker, you have less time so you are more likely to eat out for dinner, also more likely to hire maids, you are stuck in a commute and radio is awful, so a music subscription, maybe a new phone, and might have to go out for drinks with the coworkers on the way home.
Staying at home, and much of the country on highly limited income, taught us how much we spend on the "privilege" of work. Everyone is still shocked at the emotional and opportunity cost work had, we're just starting to realize that most of what it sold to us either isn't real or isn't needed.
If people don't go back to work a sea of businesses will fail.
- You missed the most important thing. Real estate investments that aren't allowed to go down in value, which they would if offices became superfluous. Just imagine how many buildings would become "worthless"/could be used for something else.
  
  Yeah, this is BY FAR the biggest reason. Pretty much all the rich people and most big companies have huge investment in portfolios that contain a lot of commercial office spaces. If we were all allowed to work from home those investments would plummet and all the rich people and big companies would take MASSIVE losses on those investments. Which is why all the media and even companies like Zoom are trying to pull a 180 on working from home.
  
  That is a huge pressure, but it's less obvious why a company in a business unrelated to real estate would want real estate prices high.
  The secret is that companies aren't in the business of making a good or providing a service, they actually are just giant schemes for raising money for "investments". For example, airlines don't make their money off of selling tickets, but through prospecting jet fuel. Most companies aren't as direct and clear about what their business actually is.
  Also the link between real estate and all of jobs isn't very clear and is very abstract. It's easy to see the costs and interactions with companies forced by working in an office, it's difficult to see how a building losing value effects anyone.
  
  In the Wall Street area of Manhattan, some of the biggest buildings are already being converted to apartments. It's been a trend for a while, because the older buildings are too expensive to rewire for computers/HVAC.
  
  A forward-thinking wealthy person would start buying these buildings at fire-sale prices and converting them to residential buildings.
- I love the "might HAVE to go out for drinks with the coworkers on the way home". This is my most dreaded fear.
  Edit: and clothes/getting 'ready' (hair, makeup, underwear, etc.) is double time for women.
- Pre-pandemic. Maybe 2005 [?] one of the big American news companies assembles a team of financial experts to study various big companies. Then they deicde to apply all that brain power to an average American family. Husband and wife with three kids, two jobs and two cars. Both have middle class jobs. After running the numbers, the experts told the wife to quit her job. The savings on childcare, running the second car, no fast food dinners, etc. more than made up for the second salary.
- This is why it costs a lot less than people think, to retire. A lot of the costs of working go away.

I don't care if remote workers are less productive (although I've seen no evidence that they are).
You can't convince me that spending an hour every morning travelling to get to an office, in order to sit in front of the exact two screens I have at home, is a good use of my time, nor is spending an hour getting home again.
That's about 450 hours a year for me. 18 whole days. Those days are mine now, and you're not having them back.
- I wish I had the same setup at work as at home. My home dev environment cost 5 times as much.
  
  Yeah when I was originally told I could just work from home forever I invested in a giant monitor and all kinds of tools. Now they changed their mind and want me to go in to an Office with shared desks. No thanks
- Ackshually, they're two distinct sets of two screens. Unless you're taking your two monitors to work and back home every day.
  (sorry for the pedantry I'm ashamed)
  
  If we wanted to take the pedantry to the next level, we could get into a metaphysical discussion about whether the word “screen” refers to the physical appliance displaying the content or the content itself. When you “share your screen” in a Teams meeting, you don’t box up your monitor and mail it to your coworkers. 🤔
  
  You are technically correct, the best kind of correct.
- I have at home, is a good use of my time, nor is spending an hour getting home again.
  Yeah, but those are YOUR hours and THEY don't pay for it, so those hours don't matter. In fact, it'd be better if you don't get those hours to yourself. Maybe you'll have more time to apply to other jobs or something.
- What about 2-3 days a week and an extra week or two of PTO to compensate? I'm trying to think of ways to incentivize more office work that will appeal to stingy boomer leadership and the younger 'fuck offices' crowd.
  
  I think the only deal I'd take to return to the office every day is a 4 day week. If I have to commute, I also want 4 weeks off.
- It's nice to have less traffic for blue collar as well.
  
  Ah if Hartford CT wasnt a traffic hell

I have noticed that working remotely really opened up the job market for me. Instead of being limited to where public transportation can bring me within 45 minutes, I can work for any company within Europe from the comfort of my home office. It makes switching jobs so much easier and I am willing to tolerate much less shit before I quit. That degree of freedom might scare companies. They can't trap me anymore with the costs of uprooting my life for a better job.
- I've never worked from home, but it seems to me that even if everything else were kept equal, you just saved an hour and a half commute plus the cost of doing so, every day! When you add in the lower cost of food and healthier diet eating at home and a whole host of other advantages. It's a huge win! Congrats.
  
  I worked from home for ~6 months full time, my experience was that I will never do it full time again. For me, it was waking up, watch the same four walls for 8 hours, eat dinner, sleep, repeat. Perhaps my office could have been better but because I was working with support and had to be available on the phone, I could not really leave my computer for an extended period of time (except for lunch break).
  A lot of people make it out to be heaven, working from home. I really missed having people to talk to. I believe that it would have been a much better experience if I could have worked from home 0-5 days per week as I saw fit. Bad morning? Work from home. Waking up fresh? Go to work. I'm assuming that you can walk or bike to work. Few things are worse than being stuck in traffic or being on a crowed bus/train, or missing the bus with 1 min, having to wait 15 min for the next one, when with the bike I can leave whenever I want.

The negativity comes almost entirely from two sorts of people
Rich property owners who are seeing their valuable office buildings plummet in value.
People who socialize primarily with work-mates and don't have other groups
To 1, fuck 'em. To 2, eh, maybe find a hobby now that you don't have to commute 2 hours a day
- One of my sups from my old job was recently complaining that people weren't required to come in more than two days a week and pushing to increase it because the office is lonely without them. She and people like her are the absolute worst. Main character syndrome doesn't even begin to describe them and I wish nothing but the worst for them in life tbh
  
  That’s not main character syndrome, that’s just sad.
  
  Some extroverts think it's everyone else's duty to energize them.
- For sure it is, but I at least feel with have to emphasize with them a little to solve this situation
- I say fuck em to 2. I hated those people in the office. They wouldn't leave me alone. It was irritating.
- Can't agree more.

There's money in real estate. There's even more in commercial real estate. There's less money in commercial real estate that's vacant because people work from home.
- It's not only real estate...cities give incentives to companies that meet a quota of in-office employees since it drives the local economy

Corpo news outlets are spewing out bullshit PR hitpieces to protect their investments on real-estate offices. COVID lockdown got them with their pants down and now are fighting tooth and nail to pull them back up lmao
- if you pay attention, a lot of it's opinion articles from insufferable people
- Yep, 100%. They're fucked too because smaller companies aren't shying away from remote work. They'll never kill it now. They reaped the fruit of their shitty investment strategies.

Reminder that Google itself is one of the companies that wants to end remote work so their real estate doesn't dive in value.
So don't be surprised about how search results reflect this bias as well.
When you've fully digested that, think about who owns the systems that keep capitalism in place.

I think it's partially rage bait at this point. At the start of the pandemic remote work was a new idea and it was easy to get views on an article about it. Now you need a shocking title that'll enrage people to get engagement on the topic.
- It wasn't a new idea and it wasn't rage bait. My company internally praised us for increased productivity during the pandemic, and now they're trying to gaslight us into RTO.
  This isn't about productivity. These companies are lying. This is 100% about real estate investments, tax breaks, and flexing power over their employees' lives. They were scared by how much employee power grew during the pandemic and they'll invent whatever bullshit lie they can to sweep that under the rug.
- New idea? I remember it being a new idea in the early 2000s
  
  Since companies adopted computers and the Internet it's been possible. I remember my dad working from home every now and then. But the idea that almost any desk job could be done remotely full time is new.
- If you could look into the investment portfolios of big companies and the rich people that run them you would see that the biggest sector is commercial real estate. In the UK pre pandemic, 40% of investments went into commercial real estate. So thats the main reason they are pushing it.

Yes and here is some irony I found.
My company requires us to take various learning course throughout the year. Some assigned - some pick your own. A lot of it is the usual B.S. that everyone has to do.
I was browsing thru the managerial list and picked one of the ones that sounded interesting the other day about ‘How to be a better Manager’ and smack in the middle of the first chapter was this big video with this woman giving this speech about being accepting of people who wanted/needed to work from home or telecommute.
My ears instantly perked up.
The video went on to throw up all this data showing how more and more people were doing this and it had this graph from 2012 on and how this was the natural progression in the workplace and how we as managers needed to be accepting of peoples position and feelings toward this and learn to be accommodating as we would see more of it.
I was like WTF??!
When the course ended I scrolled through it looking for a date and I believe it was 2017.
Amazing how the tune has changed but the data hasn’t.

Corpos actively trying to get people back to the office so middle management doesn't feel as useless.
Commutes are a detriment to the worker, but not to the company.
- I think it’s not so much about middle management. They implement the policies of the actual decision makers.
  I think it’s because the people who actually make these decisions perform their work mostly via face-to-face meetings, handshakes, projecting personal charisma, reading body language, and personal networking. This leads to an overestimation of how much of other jobs depend on time spent in the same room with others.
  The executive imagines the meetings they missed, leading to lost opportunities. So they see a loss of productivity.
  They don’t appreciate how much easier it was to edit that manual or analyze that data without Joe the human tuba trying to breathe around his phlegm in the cube next door, or without the folks three rows over arguing about which director’s vision of Superman was best.
  
  The executive imagines the meetings they missed, leading to lost opportunities. So they see a loss of productivity.
  This is a fantastic point, and one I had not considered.
  From this standpoint, the side pushing for return to office really does feel like they're in the right. I think I would argue that a subset of those folks are still pushing a return for the wrong reasons (e.g. thinking that remote work lowers productivity naturally, not just based on an observation of their own missed meetings or face time), but otherwise I agree entirely.
  
  This hits the nail on the head at my work. Immediate manager couldn't care less where we are, and has said frequently that the team is more productive from home.
  It's the higher ups that are pushing for return to office, constantly sending out surveys, arranging free-form "open door" meetings and things like that because they're lost without seeing people face to face.
  I can concentrate far more effectively at home, where I'm in full control of my environment, and I spend up to half of my day in video calls with people in different locations anyway.
- You are forgetting the value of commercial real estate portfolios. If the buildings are empty and no one wants to use them, they drop in value.
  https://www.newsweek.com/crash-worse-2008-crisis-predicted-commercial-real-estate-1792758
- Commutes are a detriment to the worker, but not to the company.
  It should be, count commuting in my eighth hour work day and let's see how much they prefer WFH.

I think allot of Banks have a ton of assets tied up in commercial real estate. This is the real reason they are pushing everyone to go back to work. A lot of powerful people will loss money if the commercial real estate market crashes.
- What I don't understand is, why do companies who don't make money from real estate give a shit? When everyone at my job who could work from home went home to work, our CEO's reaction was, "If everyone can work from home, why the hell were we paying all this money for rent?"
  To the extent possible, everyone is still working from home, and where the organization couldn't get out of leases, they're planning to let them expire. They're not spending more money to have people work on site just because they have sunk costs in a lease.

People working from home aren't consuming much anymore.
Of course there's commercial property leases and micromanaging bosses, but I think the uptick in this messaging is in response to people spending less money.
Less money on cars, gas, clothes, eating out, fancy coffee, hair/nails, dry cleaning, kid/animal care, gym (?), and probably so much more that I'm not thinking of.
And when we do spend money on those things, they're lasting longer and we're getting more discerning. When I do consider spending money on eating out, I'll def choose going hungry over getting something lower quality.
- Hell yeah. I eat out like twice a month now but both are carefully planned experiences at excellent restaurants.
  
  Same. I use reclaimed commute time to get groceries and cook now. Wife is thrilled now when I call it 'my' kitchen (it was hers by default when my commute + work had me out of the house 12-16 hours a day), and I can whip up a decent meal these days pretty quickly without having to go out

I'd say it's not all black or white. In my industry (software) most of my friends and colleagues have strong opinions about staying remote. It's mostly along the lines of "either let me continue to work from home or find someone else". Also most of the headhunter messages I get on LinkedIn offer up to 100% remote jobs. Of course this is all anecdotal and depends heavily on the field of work. But maybe it's worth considering that you have the power to shape your own future. If you do not want to work in an office, you'll find something else. Don't let those corporations fool you.
- I think remote work is here to stay exactly because of what you've said. Companies always want highly skilled workers and experts. Those people have a lot of leverage when it comes to offers and hiring. Offering and maintaining remote work is a big plus when weighing offers, especially when you consider who these knowledge workers are.
  They're at least 5 years out of college and many have started families. And they've realized that they want to spend more time with their family and kids and not waste it commuting to work. Most are probably 10+ years of experience in their relevant industry and with 12-15 year olds. I feel like that demographic had a massive awakening with COVID about where their priorities lie.
  I think it's unlikely for remote work to stay at just the experienced knowledge professional level. Hell with 3 years of semi relevant experience I was able to leverage +$5000 on my salary for a remote job. Companies need more and more skilled office workers. This opposition to remote work won't last, I think.
- See I'm in software dev and I am constantly getting recruiter calls asking me for in-office work. I'm the guy saying "you literally cannot pay me enough to go back in an office"... but I'd gladly take 2/3 or maybe even 1/2 my current pay for a 4-day, 32 hour work week.

You're not crazy.
Fact is, at the beginning, remote work was a requirement for companies to keep operating (aka, printing money for the execs and shareholders), so it was freely discussed as a positive thing.
Now that shareholders and execs can require RTO, the narrative is reversed. If you look at most of the articles surrounding WFH "not working" there's a very high chance that the motivation for such statements revolves around what management says about WFH, with no actual data to corroborate the message.
If you do your own research, a lot of what was true for WFH at the start of the pandemic is still true. The numbers and studies show that on the whole in the majority of circumstances, WFH increases productivity and makes workers happier overall. There are a few exceptions to this, I'm sure of that, and for each person, WFH or in office should be a personal choice, but it's not. You should be allowed to work where you feel most productive and happy. As long as it doesn't negatively impact your output, then it shouldn't matter, but to execs, it does matter.
IMO, the motivation for forced RTO is twofold: first, control. The company you work for wants to exert control over you, so you have to do something that maybe you're not a big fan of doing, simply because they say so. Additionally, they have more control over your day to day actions while you're at the office. When you get to converse with others, monitoring how much time you're spending away from your desk, the ability to walk up to you and grill you for any reason (or no reason). The second, is justifying office expenses. Either to be able to write it off, or pay their real estate owning buddies so those people can get money that could otherwise go to, IDK, wages (lol, it wouldn't, but you know), and by having the vast majority of their workforce in house all the time, they can keep that going.
I'm sure there's more to it, but that's my impression. Fact is, very few companies are allowing RTO to be just an option. Everything is either part-in-office (aka hybrid), or forced full time RTO. Full remote positions are evaporating.
- Companies exerting control is most of my issue personally. When you realize how much of your life they own and control, you don't want to give that back. And I never will.

My whole job revolves around cloud computing platforms, why do I need to be in an office? Yet it's looking like I'm going to be forced to make the choice of returning to an office I've never been to, or holding out until I find a new remote gig, while hurting my family financially.
The stupidest thing about the whole return to work things is that I've seen a lot of jobs and people who were remote prior to COVID are also being forced back into the office as well, creating financial hardships for those people. This is all just a shadow layoff, just a means to trimming the "fat", and I'm betting they're going to overcorrect and become even harsher with anyone that wants to not be in the office constantly.
- At my last job my entire team was spread across the country. So when they started making me go back into the office I would have to drive an hour to get to work, just so I could sit at a desk alone and telecommute with my teammates. It was basically a huge waste of time and money for me. So I found a new job and quit. They begged me to stay after I gave notice, despite the fact that I told them ahead of time that I was going to leave if they insisted I go to the office. I guess they thought I was bluffing. They agreed to let me stay WFH after I gave notice and I just laughed.
  
  This how they operate. Even though I work from home, I was being completely overworked and stressed out at the end of last year. As soon as my 401k match went through at the beginning of January, I turned in my notice without a new job lined up. I did do one video interview, but didn't get the gig.
  On my very last day of employment I was contacted by a zone vp and asked to stay. He offered a new position for a pilot they were rolling out and about a $10k increase. I took it. It's been a lot better, but still sucks so I interviewed with someone else today. Point is, that these big corporations don't really give a shit about there employees. Regardless of what they say or the BS they plaster all over their websites and social media. You are disposable and they will take advantage of you at every opportunity.
  It's a shitty way to do business, but it's up to the individual to look out for themselves and be willing to take some risks. Work hard and learn as much as possible. Make yourself invaluable and you'll be in a lot better position to make it
- Refuse the RTO and start looking for another job. Don't quit. They won't fire you right away, it will take a while. They might even cave if they need you.

That easy, beginning of the pandemic: Companies panic that all their employees would call in sick. Or some even die (not that they'd care, but a lot of companies have a bus factor of one). So remote work gets tolerated or praised, everything works great.
Now the pandemic is "over", it's safe to go back into the office. Companies have massive real estate costs, so they want to put their employees back into the office. Besides middle managers being afraid of their jobs as they seem to have become useless if they can't look over your shoulder and micromanage you.
It's never about facts, it's always what the companies and managers want in the moment.
- I agree with this the most.
  
  Me too, what I have learned is to avoid all media promoting going back to office, since they are just PR tool and can not br trusted.

Businesses wanted to seem like they cared about people's health and safety at the beginning of the pandemic, now commercial property values are tanking and that means the ruling class loses a vector from which they can siphon wealth away from the working class.

It's called all the corporate leases on buildings in major cities. Wall Street bought up all the bonds surrounding those debts and with nobody needing to continue work in cities, those corporate real estate prices are about to crash really badly if they can't bring people back to cities. That means their balance sheets go out of wack and certain positions become untenable to maintain, not to mention they stand to loose a shit load of money. Hence everything saying its bad now, they need people to move back or their investments fall. It's not about productivity, emotional benefits, collaboration, but about wealth for the elites.
- poor management all around, grasping at short term solutions because they can't see past the next quarterly financial reports
  our company actually closed several offices due to low in-person turnout after the pandemic started to ease up, and they said they would just sub-lease out the buildings to recuperate money
  those of us in the office cities are now fully remote
  
  Well said. "Grasping at short term solutions beacuse they can't see past the next quarterly financial reports" is at the root of a lot of problems today.
  It irritates me that more investors and stock owners aren't speaking up about it. We should all want our corporations to make better choices.
- Most people depend on 401ks and IRAs for their retirements now so wall street affects almost all of us. Pension funds are invested also and good chunks of them are in real estate. It isn't just "elites".
  
  Your s and p 500 is not filled with corporate real estate bonds, the hedge funds shorting and pumping the market are using these bonds for collateral to play the opposite side of your investment. Stop acting like this has a negative effect on the general populace. If anything it would be a boost to the regular folks as those short the s and p would lose collateral and have to buy back in on their short positions, increasing the return of 401ks and the like. It harms the most enriched funds that short almost everything in our market after supplying unlimited VC funding to inflate the companies value before IPO. This particular problem is squarely an elite problem not a general one ffs.
  
  Your 401k makes $1. The elite gain $1000000.

Corporate pushback. C-Levels love to go on nationwide travel tours "visiting our campuses" - never mind how much in real estate ownership/leases costs the company.
My current company is hybrid, as we have a sales team that loves to spin ideas off each other in-person, so I get that. My office was just about to expand to a new floor when covid hit. The sales team got hit with covid pretty bad, as all the customer conferences during that period were in California when covid started really spreading fast. Everyone made out okay, but most of the teams were young with families and this spooked a lot of folks. We're a startup, so all decisions were handled locally and quickly, and coming to campus was strictly optional. Once the worst was over, folks that liked the office culture are back there, without mandates, either way. We can actually hire remotely now, and not be "siloed" into hiring talent that's local or has to be paid to re-locate.
My team's particular role is a perfect fit for remote work, and we're 24/7 so we can "follow the sun" for our customers, so it works for the various different teams. We meet on a 24-hour "Perma-Zoom", share screens for training and presentations. In emergencies customer can call into are lines nd we pick it up in zoom and handle the needfuls. Customers that want to see our offices can still do so, we announce the visit, and local remote folks gladly flock in that day because there's food everywhere for the vsiting diginitaries.
I work three states away from the office and used to visit quarterly, now about twice a year. Other than the crazy amount of snacks in the physical office that we miss, it's a good fit. I think if many companies looked at the money they save in physical office costs, they'd give up this "butts in seats" mandate metric that they think equals "success."
Dear C-Levels: Do what works organically for your company culture, but seriously keep an open mind to what works for your staff - happier workers are more productive, have less turnover (and thus less training costs for constantly new employees) more knowledge retention about past mistakes and successes and how not to repeat bad strategies. Happier staffers offer more engagement in the company's overall success.

It's about money and control. Money invested in and harvested from owning commercial properties. Control from making employees do things they don't want to, just to beat them down and "keep them in line". A lot of bosses exercise power for its own sake, unfortunately.
I have empathy for folks who want to collaborate, and/or be mentored, and/or socialize at work. I no longer want or need those things from my job, but....I came up that way so it would be hypocritical of me to say that others shouldn't want them.
On the other hand, cars are destroying everything and commuting in 2023 (if you don't truly need to) is just dumb. Progress always comes with some amount of pain and adjustment.

Working from home is legitimately amazing. My bud oes not need to sit at your desk with your lame chair and keyboard. He has a much faster pc at home with the big clicky-clackies. Ten hour work day? He will bring that shizz down to 6-8 with the same productivity and can play games on the side.
I get that it doesn't work for everyone, especially those with task management issues, but out of the 40 people I know, 2 do better in an office.

Real estate tycoons have a huge microphone

- But isn't 'quiet quitting' the act of the employee giving the bare minimum needed to achieve a paycheck? It sounds like you're talking about getting employees to flat-out quit so the company doesn't need to pay benefits that come with being fired.
  
  The concept of quiet quitting always struck me as bullshit in general. Like if your employees can do that, if they're able to just sort of log in and barely do anything, then they should. That's the manager's fault and responsibility to keep employees engaged or demand more from them. If the minimum amount of work isn't enough for the manager, then it isn't really the minimum, right?
- Quiet quit is something else.
  But I know what you're saying. For example twitter needed people to quit without being fired (due to how unemployment works in the US) and so it said no more WFH (without warning).
  I suspect a lot of other companies are doing the same thing.

The news is propaganda. Welcome to the club.
- The best is this article using AI to show what a remote worker would look like after 70 years working from home. So ridiculous it's laugable. The propaganda is strong. Lol
  https://www.indiatimes.com/trending/human-interest/model-shows-what-remote-workers-will-look-like-in-70-years-606226.html
  They also made another article about what the worker looks like after 20 years w life-size model too https://news.sky.com/story/life-sized-model-shows-what-office-workers-might-look-like-in-20-years-11843868

It's simple, during the pandemic they couldn't have workers come in but they couldn't have just no work force so they pushed for work from home and made it seem like a big positive to keep money flowing into their pockets. Now that they can have people come into the office they need to justify their leases and justify their middle management oversight so they need people coming back to the offices. It's not about whats convent or comfortable for the workers, it's what can make them the most money and justify expenses as to not spook investors. If the company could cancel even half of their leases they would and have most everyone work from home and maybe even cut back on middle management. However they got 20-30 year leases to save money(in month to month payments) and it'd be really expensive to exit the deal sooooo justifying the lease is more important.
- it’s what can make them the most money and justify expenses as to not spook investors
  Seems contradictory to me. I think they don't actually give a shit about making the company money, they're just straight scamming investors in favor of their own personal interests where they can get away with it.

Middle management wants to have a reason to exist. They want people driving to work spending money on the way there and back. Landlords care about their giant office buildings not being rented that should instead just be replaced with affordable housing.
- No doubt you're right about some middle management and I see this said a lot. Anecdotally I don't believe I've met any middle management that want to be back in the office. If I'm honest I don't think I've ever met middle management that enjoys middle management, it's a ton of fucking stress keeping senior management happy with heir batshit detached requests and interpreting it into something moderately sensible so individual contributors can be productive and actually achieve the shit that needs done.
  Meanwhile Steve can't seem to wrap his head round the fact that just because he likes formatting his code a particular way isn't a good reason to ignore the team coding standards, Cheryl and Sushant have decided to book expensive holidays for the same week without clearing the leave first - so I'll be spending Christmas supporting the app on top of everything else even though I booked it off in the system in January and ultimately I hate this fucking job because I can't do the thing I'm actually fucking good at.
  
  Preach. I hate almost every day as a manager of managers, and I don't give a rat's ass if any of them or their employees ever come into the office ever again. If their content is completed on-time and it's quality work, they could make it while living in Nepal for all I care, but of course we're being forced to come back to the office 50% of the time to do the same work we did at home for three years.
  I'm doing what I can to encourage people to apply for exemptions and approving all of them that I can before someone decides I'm "not supporting the return-to-work initiative" enough and fires me. Frankly at this point it'll be a relief.

Yes, I have observed this and it is very frustrating. In many cases, these "articles" are opinion pieces being circulated by those with a financial interest in commercial real estate (or someone carrying the water of someone who has such an interest). Those who have any sort of financial interest in commercial real estate are going to be against remote work for obvious reasons.
Cities and real estate moguls arguing that people have to engage in an absolutely fruitless, draining, exhausting, expensive commute to keep a handful of people rich. They want to punish you to keep some elite people rich.
What needs to happen is workers need to fight back as much as possible. If your job can be done remotely, make it a priority to work for a company that allows you to do your job remotely. There's NOTHING about my job that requires me to go into an office. I have worked successfully at home for many years and if my organization required me to come in, I would do everything I could to leave and find something else that allowed me to telework. If you're looking for a job and have the luxury of being a little bit choosy, let recruiters know you will ONLY consider remote options.
Anecdotally, I think these opinion pieces are way overblown. My spouse was recently contacted by a recruiter about a job. The job was not remote and my spouse told the recruiter they would only consider remote-only options. The recruiter sighed and said, "That is what I keep getting told."

I think the companies were lying to us when covid started. They said working from home was awesome and we could still do our jobs well so investors wouldn't get scared. But now they want us to come back to the office and they say working from home is bad for us. They are just trying to trick us into doing what they want.
- I mean, it's just capitalism. Beginning of the pandemic: thank god for remote work, don't worry investors we're not going out of business. End of pandemic: welp, I have to justify my position and why we're paying all this real estate get back in the office so I can micro-manage you and create useless meetings no one needs so no one realizes that I don't really do anything around here.

A lot of these companies are locked in to 5,10 or 20 year leases. If they were sensible they'd just eat the loss and take the extra productivity and happier staff, but that's not how the corporate hivemind works. They're paying rent so they have to justify it by having bums on seats, or they're bleeding money for what looks like no reason.
- Most of them get tax breaks from the city, but only if they maintain a minimum occupancy. So they've lost their tax breaks and they want them back. As always, it comes down to money.

Productivity was never the point of work. Increases in productivity thus was never a boon to those in charge.
- but the ai revolution though
  
  In a lot of ways it's still more marketing than a revolution. AI can't do my job yet. Not saying it never will but we're a lot farther away from that than most people think.

I'll be weird and say I absolutely prefer working in-office over from home in most cases. I prefer being able to build relationships with my coworkers, ask quick questions and give quick answers, and just actually being able to talk to people.
However, I don't think everyone needs to be in the office. My line of work requires it but I think it's dumb that companies are requiring them to go in when there's no reason beyond "we rent the space so we have to use it."
Also you're correct in how the headlines changed and it's really dumb, but it's mostly about the fact that real estate owners are trying to force people to rent their spaces instead of selling them.
- I think there's a balance for most people. I don't mind being in the office but I hate commuting there. If the office was down the end of my street then I'd go every day. Luckily I mostly work on my own work so I only need to talk to people occasionally.
  
  I can agree with the commute. I started working here by getting up at 6:30 and then traffic would put me at work at 7:30 and on some days it was extra bad. I got a dog who liked to wake me up at 5 so I ended up shifting my whole schedule and now I'm up at 5, out the door by 5:30, and then at work by 6 which means I leave at 3. The commute isn't as bad now but it's definitely not for everyone.
  My new "position" is product owner and team lead so I have to interact with my team all day long. It's definitely easier to talk to the folks at my location than it is to talk to the ones in different states just because I can turn around and go "Hey , what was that requirement you had a question about?" So much easier.
- Completely agree, especially about quick questions and small minutia. It's the little things that add up. It's so much easier to walk to someone's desk or office than chase them down with a text or trying to get them on the phone.

Search Bloomberg and remote lol
- I will not, but I'm guessing they're all opinion pieces by people who own massive business real estate holdings (directly or through a hedge fund they run) and think "getting back to work" is good for the American spirit, or something.
  
  It's much more ghoulish than you can ever imagine.
  Here's what one said with his real human mouth:
  Ross said. “The employees will recognize as we go into a recession, or as things get a little tighter, that you have to do what it takes to keep your job and to earn a living.”
  You have to do what it takes to earn a living. Spend 40m risking your life in a car every day to come back to my 8bln portfolio so it doesn't lose value. Or you won't be able to feed yourself.

- It's about money. Large corporations get city tax breaks to build their headquarters. The government gets a lot of money from the employees that report to those offices. The catch is that those tax breaks usually require minimum occupancy of the building. If everyone works from home then the government doesn't get all their road tolls, gas tax, parking fees, sales tax on food, speeding tickets, parking tickets, etc. Since the government isn't getting their kickback they stop giving the company tax breaks. So basically millions of people are being forced to do stuff they don't want to do, just so really rich entities can be richer.
  
  It is mostly about the commercials mortgage backed securities market
- I'm split in the middle. I manage projects and also help with sales administration. I prefer in-person meetings for bigger discussions because human communications are built for face to face.
  Deep discussions are just much more effective when you can read the room.
- Yeah I think its about the control too. So fucked up.

- Nobody hates WFH.
  
  Nobody hates optional WFH with no strings for doing so.
  Personally, I love WFH. I love being home and by myself. Additionally, I may end up not leaving my house until the weekend and I love it since I despise driving. But I understand that would drive people insane. However, for me, I needed to recharge my introvert batteries over the weekend instead of seeing friends. Now I'm a social butterfly in my off time ☺️
  
  Only a sith deals in absolutes
  
  I've got small kids, so while I generally like WFH, there have been times where I absolutely just wanted to GTFO and go into the office. Our company did full WFH for awhile, then gradually phased us back in to the office, but for me the best schedule we had was where we were one week in-office, one week WFH, that was the absolute best and gave me the best of both worlds. Without kids though, I would probably prefer WFH a good portion of the time, just so I could have some freedom during lulls in the workload to catch up on home stuff.
  
  I don't hate it as a concept, but I recognize that it contributed to my burnout during the pandemic. I would personally prefer a hybrid schedule over pure WFH.
  
  Mediocre executives loathe it with every fibre of their being.
  
  I really don't like WFH, it's not working for me personally, and I'm really glad that we have an office I can go to.
  
  Is it possible for me to love WFH but also avoid it most of the time because my productivity is shit at home?
  Having a nearby office with the option to work from home is the best of both worlds for me. I guess for those of you who do better working from home, you could take or leave the nearby office part!
  
  A lot of people hate working from home. People with kids, who want to spend some time of the day in peace. People living in house shares with bad neighbours. People living with abusive partners or parents. People with mental issues who feel more comfortable with people around them. Don't be an ignorant dick.
- Why? Just let people work wherever the fuck they want to, no reason to divide society. If anything, division is just a tool for companies to manipulate us into doing what they want us to
  
  I think it was forced because of covid. Now that covid isint an issue, I completely agree
  
  I think a lot of it is crappy control-freak managers, used to "managing by walking around", who feel lost when all the peons are out and working remote.
  The companies that let workers act on their own recognizance are most likely far more pleasant to work for, while the companies that have a million little rules and do things like forced RTO tend to be the ones with asshole bosses that are miserable workplaces.
  
  Because people are different.

I've actually still been seeing positive news

I changed jobs during the pandemic. I asked if I could work remotely permanently, they said yes. It's in my contract I work from home, not the office. I've been watching the "sea change" as working remotely has been removed from various companies and wondering why? If all the research points to it being better, then - again - why? The speculation about it being related to real estate is depressing!

Landlords trying to charge rent again. All of the real studies happening show employees are happier, more productive, and consider not going through a hellish commute to sit in a building with a bunch of people they don't know or like to be a benefit. It's only executives and commercial real estate owners desperate to get people into offices so they can feel useful again.

Mega corporations have been running dictating government policy and controlling news narratives for quite some time.

Yup, corporations need to justify owning the big-ass office buildings they bought out, so they’re paying to make their own opinions be reported on over the actual truth. As usual.
- It's not just the corporations renting those offices, it's the politicians of downtown areas that fear a downturn in tax revenue due to more empty offices and less people getting their daily coffee/lunch/after work drinks.
  And of course, if everyone's working remotely, this means it's a lot easier to find a better job without even needing to leave the house to interview, which gives employees a better bargaining position (downside is that employers will start looking at employees in lower paying countries as well).
  
  downside is that employers will start looking at employees in lower paying countries as well).
  Tale as old as time
  
  It's the commercial mortgage backed securities market.
  Remember 2008 when they bundled up all those home mortgages that were based on shitty unpayable loans and sold off securities to retirement funds etc? But then people couldn't pay and the entire economy imploded resulting in massive bank failures?
  Same deal. All those office space loans have been collateralized into securities. The 1% and the banking industry understand perfectly that if they don't force people to return to office, the entire system will implode again. Even after Dodd Frank the regulations on over the counter derivatives are still mostly non existent.
- I find it real fascinating how many people are blindsided by the fact that the people who own things that focus on making a profit skew the information they put out to benefit themselves. Did they think they were impartial or something? I mean they claim their neutral they don't ever show that they're neutral.

Commercial real estate owners strike back.

I work remotely at the moment since March 2020 and I'm over it, can't stand it anymore. I'm single with no kids and work a LOT. I'll frequently wake up, work twelve hours, go to bed, never leave the house. I'm looking for jobs in my field so I can at least get out of the house, go to an office and socialize a bit with colleagues and other office tenants, get lunch at outdoor cafes etc.
I also miss learning through osmosis from overhearing colleagues discussing technical concepts I'm unfamiliar with, and teaching others similarly about things I know that they don't.
My experience working with other people all fully remotely is that it's very difficult to coordinate as a group, and individually many people are terrible communicators. This is magnified by remote work. (Pet peeve: answer the phone and turn on your fucking camera, I want to know who I'm working 80 hours a week with ffs.)
All that said I totally agree that a lot of work can and should be done at home. A hybrid approach is difficult though unless everyone is at the office and WFH at the same time. Otherwise what's the point of me being at the office while you are at home and vice versa. It's very tricky and I'm not sure how to resolve.
- I don't know if I'm necessarily more productive in the office, but I do think I prefer that vibe for a workplace. Still, I'm going to go with remote for all the other benefits. I hated commuting.
  It's just different strokes for different folks.
- Sounds like a YOU problem. Why should we, WFH productive advocates, have to pay for your sins? Get therapy if you need it.
  "I need to get back into commuting, which involves time and money, just so Jane Doe doesn't feel lonely, because they can't socialise on their own".
  
  Jeez, who pissed in your Wheaties?

My manager wanted me to come to the office daily because the laptop I had couldn't handle the company VPN (which we need to access some systems, the alternative is of course being physically in the office and connecting to the office WIFI).
He gave me some crap about it and reminded me of the 'office first' policy at my workplace.
I looked him dead in the face and said, "You can't force anyone back to the office. You know that it's not going to fly with the employees. You can try but it won't work".
He didn't look too happy about that, but he knows it's reality.
Ended up finally getting an new old laptop for the VPN issue, which some other employee left behind, because the budget was "too tight" even though I couldn't do my work efficiently. And a few days ago I was told I'd be laid off. Also because of the budget.
So hooray!

I prefer work from office. Its better for me having kids & dogs and tons of duties at home. Work from home more than once a week is just a waste of time for me which translates to double workload or sorse when at the office.
Said that, i love WFH because i get things (real things, life things, not work things) done properly and timely... But just doping more than 1 day per week is twice as stressful for me than not.
My commute is 35km each way, so not even a short one.

It isn't propaganda to look at the real-world ramifications of this.
The hard drop in commercial real estate is going to end in a lot of big loans going unpaid. Might end in some bank failures.
The drop in assessed value is going to hit cities hard in the pocket as they depend a lot on these property taxes from commercial properties to pay theirs bills (social programs, subsidized public transportation, police, fire, public housing, roads, etc).
It will increase sprawl as more people can now live anywhere and push into wilderness areas and we lose more open space.
A lot of small businesses depend on those dense commercial areas. You'll see more contractors, restaurants, etc having to close and downtowns getting deserted like happened in the 70s as people fled to suburbs.
You see a lot of people saying "just turn them into residences!". It is very difficult and expensive to turn buildings designed as open office spaces into residences.
- Well... mabye they shulould have been nice to workers and have normal apartment prices.
  I wouldn't call those examples real world, they created their own problem. Real world is worker trying to live semi normal life.
- Re: Sprawl. The world is actually rather empty. A lot of changes are going to happen in domino fashion.
  
  Indeed. And work location is still only one of many reasons to prefer city life. Cinemas, grocery stores, bars, stadiums and playgrounds aren't going to instantly spread into our most rural areas.
- Good points. Regarding point 2, I think we're going to see cities shift to trying to attract people rather than corporations.
  Attracting an employer is now a less reliable way to attract their staff to a community.
  I suspect we will soon find that policies that attract great grocery stores into a walkable neighborhoods are more effective for cities than implementing lax corporate tax policies.
- But corporations have achieved very difficult things in a very short span that cost very many billions like - pivoted to AI which was very difficult until ChatGPT became popular.

Probably has a bit to do with how few people were working remote before versus now.
WFH was absolutely not a common thing for average workers per-COVID. Some did it, sure, but that was not even up for consideration for a huge percent of workers. So since businesses had really no choice, a lot of them just went along for the ride and tried it out. The media went along with it and played it up as the Next Big Thing.
But clearly many people abused the policy and aren't being as productive as they once were, so now the media is reflecting that reality and running negative stories..