“ The benefits of sitting together, collaborating in person, and solving problems as a team are clearer than ever in our post-Covid world.”
100%. Speaking only for myself, I was fully remote for a few years and that was a miserable experience. Now everyone is mandated to be in office 3 days a week and that works better for me. Uber is going one step further and structuring teams to be colocated with their manager. That solves the problem of team members distributed across multiple offices, which is still a real pain point in the hybrid model.
I know some people who strictly prefer fully remote setup. Over time, I think companies and employees will self sort themselves into those who prefer office vs those who prefer remote. That should work out for most of us.
I love how most any RTO-proponent always presents RTO as "well I'm glad you're back in the office with me because that's better for me". Ask most any WFH-proponent about going to the office and the answer will read like "do whatever works best for yourself, I prefer WFH myself, you can go to the office if you want". It's a very selfish mindset, really. If RTO-proponents cared about not imposing their will on others, they'd also advocate for WFH for anyone that prefers it, but they don't.
Well what do you expect? Holing yourself up in your home is something you can do unilaterally. In-person team collaboration requires... well, collaboration. It's not a unilateral action so there isn't unilateral advice.
Nah. 99% of meetings are fluff. Something that could have been just an short email. Meetings are for people who do not get anything done. for people who like to waste other peoples time. The actual good meetings are the ones that have a VERY clear context, and goes down to details that EVERYONE in the meetings know by heart. These are rare, maybe one a year.
> In-person team collaboration requires... well, collaboration.
You're confusing things. Collaboration doesn't require you to be continuously in the same room with people 5 days a week, 8 hours a day, and your personal needs to be in a room with someone else does not justify forcing everyone under payroll to commute to the office.
You already need to schedule meetings to be in the same room with someone, don't you? Why would anyone have to waste their time commuting to the office if you didn't booked a meeting?
You're misunderstanding my use of the term collaboration. I'm not using it as corporate speak for "teamwork". I'm saying that in order for me to go into the office with everyone, everyone needs to go into the office. That's an axiomatic self-proving statement.
As opposed to WFH where one can simply do that without other people also doing it.
> I'm saying that in order for me to go into the office with everyone, everyone needs to go into the office.
No. You feel you need everyone around you at the office, but that is you and you speak for yourself. Others have a say on that, don't they?
For you to be around people in a way you don't get in the way of everyone else around you, you need to coordinate. This means you need to plan ahead and schedule meetings with a specific agenda to discuss with the people whose time you want to waste. That doesn't require everyone else to drive all the way to the office 5 days a week,and then send there 8 or 9 hours a day. In some cases a simple message does the work. In some cases a call will do. For the rare occasions where you need to be at arm's reach of someone, you guys can plan ahead.
So why do you believe it's reasonable ti demand everyone around you to bend backwards to accommodate your peculiar requirements of proximity?
100%. The Linux kernel would have never grown and become so successful if it weren’t for everybody in the office all those years just collaborate-maxxxing … /s
When working a regular 9-5 I very much preferred office presence for the social aspect, especially when work is slower and no pressure.
But when I actually need to concentrate and deliver high quality work, it needs to be in a quiet place. And that is often from home, because open space office buildings are the devil's work and I will never forget how much people complained about them when they started becoming the norm a bit before the 2010s.
RTO steals one work day from me per week, at a minimum. When i work from home i can start 6am (or whenever i want to), and if im in a flow state, i can push to 5pm easily. I get SOOOO much done. Other days i can lax, have a few teams meetings and chill on the couch and quit work early.
When i go to the office it takes 2 hours from each day only for commute, add meetings, lunch breaks, and the office bullshit chitchat and non-stop blabber that distracts you. People on the phone, or just "hanging" out next to you.
Bottom line is when i have to work from the office i get 5% done of what i do from home. I get angry, and unmotivated. I usually also leave early.
> Speaking only for myself, I was fully remote for a few years and that was a miserable experience. Now everyone is mandated to be in office 3 days a week and that works better for me.
If you feel you work better at the office, more power to you.
That does not justify forcing everyone around you to do the same, particularly if the best argument you can piece together is that forcing others to do something against their will makes you feel better.
> That does not justify forcing everyone around you to do the same
Literally that's why I wrote: "I know some people who strictly prefer fully remote setup. Over time, I think companies and employees will self sort themselves into those who prefer office vs those who prefer remote. That should work out for most of us."
> Speaking only for myself, I was fully remote for a few years and that was a miserable experience.
Just out of curiosity, what did you find miserable about it? I've been working remote since 2008 and just have no desire to ever be consistently in an office, but I guess I did like it when I could pop over to SF (I live in NYC), stay in an apt my employer at the time had, and spend a week with people. Otherwise, I much prefer the freedom of being remote.
I get distracted at home, and home is no longer home - it's the office.
I work best when talking through my mental blocks with people. As a consultant I've never gotten over trying to poke my head in via Slack/Teams/etc. In-person huddles and brainstorming get more done in 30 minutes than phone back-and-forth usually does over days.
Being in the office allows some level of personal understanding occur between teams and people.
I like the idea of being able to live where I want, but I haven't moved since going WFH, and I find talking to people in person when I visit gets planning and training done a lot more efficiently. Learning from others and collaborating on problems is something mid-high level IT does a lot more than solo coding for hours at a time.
> And that issue is exacerbated in the U.S. with the worst parental-leave policy among developed nations.
NYC's TFR was 1.55 in 2021. London's TFR was 1.35 in 2024. Paris TFR was 1.27 in 2024. Other US cities are not really comparable to the European ones, but the broader point is that parental leave has nothing to do with TFR. Norway and Sweden have TFRs around 1.44 while the US has it 1.6-1.8
> it's more like "having a child could cost me my high-paying job so I better not"...having a child is an opportunity cost in an urban environment
At least in the US and speaking generally, people with high incomes in urban areas move to suburbs once they have kids. I would like to see a citation for your "opportunity cost" claim, because high income jobs also come with good benefits like generous parental leave policies.
> it's hard for me to understand why would anyone tolerate using it to this day
Apparently, they have 3B MAUs and 2B DAUs. So you are in some real bubble. While I don't use it, my parents and all their friends use Facebook to share pictures and exchange messages.
your comment is irrelevant and in fact contradictory in the context of the parent comment I was replying to: "if people don’t want to pay for a thing, it’s probably not worth a whole lot "
What is "worth" is ultimately decided by the market.
What should be allowed, like sacrificing children, is decided by the society. Two very separate topics.
> by now we'd probably have widespread p2p video chat
we still have it. WhatsApp video chat is the most widely used video chat app.
> we already had p2p calling with Skype; we've regressed in that area
Skype was barely present on mobile and got acquired by Microsoft before Mobile took off. Then it was as good as dead. So we have in fact progressed massively that anyone in Asia with a crappy handset and a decent connection can still have a video chat with anyone else in the world.
> Music, movies, TV could be mostly free if we had retained the original 28 year copyright period
And world would be so much better if no one was greedy. The fact is that we have not retained original copyright period and the reasons are beyond adtech, so what are you gonna do about it? Also, that doesn't solve the problem of long-tail content which is massively entertaining.
> The things you list are all free or nearly free to run with modern technology
Lol wut? Try running your own Youtube and you will discover massive technical problems (storage, network bandwidth, content moderation, discovery etc).
> Ads enable market capture
Google tried YT premium and look at its adoption numbers. It starts at 89 INR in India (less than a USD) and yet its adoption is minimal. 89 INR is cheap for at least a few hundred million Indians. People simply prefer ads over paying up.
My point here is that the reason any of this stuff is possible is because the underlying technology makes it extremely cheap. It's not ads that make it so anyone on Asia can have a video chat on a cheap phone; it's that even cheap phones are absurdly powerful and bandwidth is plentiful. Signaling a p2p call is cheap, and phone companies already do it for voice calls. Wasn't WhatsApp the one that had something like 100M-1B MAU charging $1/year on hardware from a decade ago? The actual cost of these things is trivial.
Ads don't make it possible for people to have cheap access to movies. The fact that it costs literally nothing (c.f. bittorrent) to distribute them does. Especially for older recordings that were already paid for generations ago. It actually costs more resources to centralize distribution to serve ads.
Yes it is expensive to run a giant worldwide monopoly on video distribution. But that's not necessary. And some of those problems (e.g. content moderation, discovery) don't exist when self-publishing or curating partners.
People taking ads over paying is exactly why they are anticompetitive. They allow below cost services, destroying competition from companies that just want to fairly offer a service, leading to everything having ads and surveillance, eventually driving up costs of everything.
> because the underlying technology makes it extremely cheap
underlying technology doesn't materialize out of thin air though. Google and Facebook have invested lots of dollars and engineering hours into making Youtube or Whatsapp video a seamless smooth experience for billions of users. That's why the technology seems cheap now. Early on, there were big concerns about Youtube profitability.
> it's that even cheap phones are absurdly powerful
Again, thanks to Android which was funded indirectly by ads.
> c.f. bittorrent
That is plain old theft.
> And some of those problems (e.g. content moderation, discovery) don't exist when self-publishing or curating partners.
Curating partners have economies of scale. That's how you get Youtube. And for self publishing, you can see that most of the "self publishers" on internet are at the mercy of adtech giants (Google and Facebook) for distribution.
> destroying competition from companies that just want to fairly offer a service
That's why I cite Youtube premium. Google offered an ad-free option at a fair price and yet hardly anyone wants to pay for that.
The underlying technology enablers are from companies like Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, TSMC, Micron, all sorts of ISP/cell providers, etc. They're the reason why computers are over 10x faster than they were 10-15 years ago, storage is 1000x faster, networks are 100x faster, etc. The technology is cheap because of actual technology companies. You don't need a centralized service for video calls. You need lots of bandwidth between endpoints and some relatively modest signaling servers (similar to voice calling, which already existed).
Bittorrent does not equate to theft, and the point is it demonstrates that actually distribution costs nothing. The production of most media was paid for generations ago. It can be free or extremely cheap because it's literally free on the provider side. The thing that costs money is monetization.
The fact that self-publishers are at the mercy of ad companies is the point. The ad companies destroy every market they infect. Because they use predatory pricing.
> The underlying technology enablers are from companies like Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, TSMC, Micron, all sorts of ISP/cell providers, etc
And they exist because of demand from the consumers. All those providers have no incentive to invest and upgrade their offerings if there is no demand. Said otherwise, without the likes of YouTube and Whatsapp video chat (and many other ad-funded social media apps), we would be stuck in 2010-era infrastructure.
> You don't need a centralized service for video calls.
Need is a funny word. You need a centralized effort to enhance the user experience of video calls which is very expensive. And very companies have resources to pull that off and offer a great experience for free. Only 3 I can think of - Google, Facebook, Apple (via Facetime). Only Apple is not ad-funded and they keep it to their devices only which is for rich people. Ad-funded products at least made it available to the entire populace.
> The ad companies destroy every market they infect. Because they use predatory pricing.
I gave you a counter-example to your thesis about Youtube Premium which was offered at a reasonable price. Its failure shows that predatory pricing is an excuse - real reason is that people simply prefer to not pay.
Those companies have been developing hardware with exponential improvements for generations now. They wouldn't have stopped if not for youtube. Youtube and Whatsapp became possible because of them, not the other way around.
Phone companies are literally a concrete, non-theoretical demonstration that call signaling doesn't need to be centralized for a good experience. There's also already XMPP which works like email: you can add your contacts and just start video calls over it just like you can just send emails. It works today. It scales today. You can use it right now, but the monopolists lock everyone into their networks.
Your "counter-example" proves my point: giving youtube away for free canabalizes youtube premium.
There are two parts - one which most of us would support (being against misogyny, racism, homophobia, etc) and one which most of us would oppose (defund the police, abolish ICE, trans women in sports, DEI quotas and promoting people because of their race or gender, etc).
Woke 1.0 lumped both of those buckets together and faced an appropriate backlash which resulted in Trump's reelection.
It is funny how your list of unpopular policies are all things that never happened except one, which was around for decades with minimal complaint before the right decided to make it a big deal.
Having watched the past years unfold from outside the US and reading papers across the media spectrum I would assert that most of the work of smearing the meaning of Woke to include supposedly advocating for litter boxes in classrooms for furries, etc was work gleefully carried out by the US conservative right wing media.
> and faced an appropriate backlash
which was the entire purpose of relentless 24/7 Woke strawmanning.
> was work gleefully carried out by the US conservative right wing media.
they own all media, mate.
the goal of the right since Bismarck is to get the left to combine the pursuit of economic change with social change as a way of muddling the discussion and splitting the effort.
Your second part is a list of fantasies that never existed in real life. So why bother listing them except to give right wing culture warriors something to hang their hat on?
Woke 1.0 was black culture, where the term originated, as far back as the the 1930s.
Woke 2.0 was when white liberals co-opted it and used it as an umbrella term for social justice in general, particularly in the context of online activism.
Woke 3.0 was when the right wing co-opted the term, as they tend to do with all leftist terms, and it became simply another pejorative. This is where we are now.
Democrats betraying their principles because they want to be in the cool kids club is nothing new. They basically threw the election to Trump because appealing to right-wingers was more important to them than having the stink of "leftism" on them. Meanwhile the other side is bathing in the muck and couldn't care less.
If "woke 2.0" (although actually it would be 4.0) means embracing some kind of milquetoast neoliberal centrism that seeks to maintain the status quo of respectability politics, capitalism and American exceptionalism above all else, I'll have none of it.
Point is that if wokism was so great and so popular, one of its most famous proponent who is eyeing a 2028 presidential run would not be running away from it. Woke 1.0 was a miserable failure and a lot of people have grasped that by now.
The point is that politicians are rarely if ever sincere in their espoused beliefs, and the Democrats are a center right neoliberal party which has never been comfortable with "leftist" politics because political power in the US has always been biased towards the right. They aren't "running away" from "wokism" because it's a "miserable failure" (whatever that even means, these are just Trumpisms) but because they're seeking power over principle.
People forget that Trump used to be a Democrat and a liberal and he was pals with the Clintons and congratulated Hillary Clinton when she became Secretary of State. None of these people are sincere.
And the Democrats fail not because "Woke 1.0 was a miserable failure" but because they alienate their base (which is actual leftists who do support trans people and defunding the police and the like) while the other side is willing to embrace even the most activist fringe of their base because that's never a risk for the right.
I know that the belief in the majority is a core part of our democracy, but I'd like to challenge it for a moment here. First, does common belief make sonething right? Lets say society A has a majority vote that says people who murder are horrible and should be executed. Society B says no, murder is okay, because the majority say its okay. So, is murder right or wrong? The point is that a crowd doesn't always have a right answer. Second, opinions are not homogenous, and popular opinion can be wrong (think geocentric systems, newtonian laws, disease, etc.). A morality by plurality is arbitrary and non-universal which seems to defy the point of moral frameworks.
> The point is that a crowd doesn't always have a right answer...
> popular opinion can be wrong
By that logic, all the laws, regulations and norms would possibly be meaningless. So if we were to ignore those, we all would descend into anarchy.
> A morality by plurality is arbitrary and non-universal
In fact, a majority of popular support is a necessary (may not be sufficient) condition for morality of a society. Something is not considered moral if it is not supported by most of the members.
> society A vs society B
irrelevant. Morality based laws in a society generally consider morality only of that society. That's why we have the notion of sovereignty.
> move to a cheaper city or country for retirement if your house goes up in price
What kind of life experience would lead to such a conclusion? It's almost like you have no idea what a community is - with one's friends, neighbors, familiar shops, clubs, church etc. Money is not everything in life. Any policy which forces people in their late 60's to uproot and go somewhere else to rebuild their lives is bound to face a very angry backlash. A mindset like yours is why we got prop 13 here in California.
100%. Speaking only for myself, I was fully remote for a few years and that was a miserable experience. Now everyone is mandated to be in office 3 days a week and that works better for me. Uber is going one step further and structuring teams to be colocated with their manager. That solves the problem of team members distributed across multiple offices, which is still a real pain point in the hybrid model.
I know some people who strictly prefer fully remote setup. Over time, I think companies and employees will self sort themselves into those who prefer office vs those who prefer remote. That should work out for most of us.
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