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I cleaned out my desk a little over five years ago. It feels like last week.
I was leading engineering at ForUsAll, a fintech company that seeks to make it easier for small businesses to offer retirement plans for their employees. The co-founder, David, had been wearing a mask around the office for a month; he was following the growth of COVID-19 closely. The then-CEO agreed to close the office if the number of cases in San Francisco went beyond some small threshold; when it did, we picked up our laptops and left.
Of course, we all know what happened next: lockdowns, sourdough starters, and remote working on a scale never seen before.
I prefer remote working and always have. My first startup was mostly remote: my co-founder was in Edinburgh for a while, and spent some time in Vancouver, while I was in Oxford with occasional long stretches in California. I worked at my kitchen table, drank my own coffee, and set my own hours. It was flexible depending on what was going on at the time, and undoubtedly productive. When I joined a startup based in Austin but worked from Edinburgh and Berkeley, it felt like a natural progression.
When the pandemic hit, I couldn’t wait to return to that mode of working. I had another reason to feel like working from home was a silver lining: my mother’s health had been up and down following her double lung transplant, and now I could spend more time with her. What had been a regular Sunday visit became a much longer weekly stay. My dad was the primary carer, but I could help out. Many nights, I would help her up the short flight of stairs to her bedroom, help situate her in her bed, with brushing her teeth, and so on. Working from home gave me extra time with her, and I treasured that.
More recently, it allowed me to buy a house. There was no way I could buy in the San Francisco Bay Area. For literally half the price of a two-bedroom house in a troubled part of Oakland, I could get a house that would fit my family in Pennsylvania. We walk our child to and from daycare every day, have a garden and a driveway, and, although there’s no doubt that the house needs work, generally feel safe and secure.
I’m far from alone. Working from home has been a boon for carers, parents, and anyone who felt like they weren’t able to get on the property ladder in major business hubs like San Francisco and New York. It’s spread wealth from industries like tech to neighborhoods across the country, and in turn allowed tech companies to hire from anywhere, giving them access to talent that would previously have been out of reach. According to official figures from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, productivity rose.
For remote work to be successful, communication, internal processes, and norms need to be explicit. Companies that had never spent much time thinking about culture now found that they were forced to, which was a positive outcome for their employees, many of whom had been suffering in silence. A renewed focus on employee power — in conjunction with the rise of social movements like Black Lives Matter — also led to a rise in unionization efforts, which also aimed to improve worker quality of life. Despite the overhead of the pandemic itself, these changes felt like they were part of a cohesive, positive movement.
So I read stories like this one in the San Francisco Standard with something like a sense of dread:
“Two years ago, I could not get anybody to go into the office a couple days a week,” said Jaimie Feliz, principal at San Francisco recruiting firm The Hire Standard. “Now, across the board, it’s pretty standard for companies to ask for a minimum of three days in office — it’s very rare to see any less than that.”
Many tech companies are suspending hiring and promotions for workers outside of their hub cities, and there’s an assumption that, over time, employees who remain outside of those hubs will be laid off.
Given the negative impacts on carers, parents, people who have bought homes outside of those hub cities, and on the productivity of those companies, this feels like a regression.
This is doubly true when you look at the underlying statistics. One of the big reasons for calls back to the office is to perform backdoor layoffs: management understands that a substantial percentage will quit. Research also suggests that it’s about control:
RTO mandates may reflect a desire among certain leaders to reassert control and authority within the organization […] This perspective highlights the role of organizational power dynamics and the potential for RTO policies to serve as instruments for reinforcing traditional hierarchical structures, at odds with the trend towards greater autonomy and flexibility facilitated by remote work.
The perceived gains aren’t evidence-based or in the best interests of company productivity; they’re more about CEO peace of mind. For companies that never stuck the landing on building intentional cultures, returning to the pre-pandemic status quo may feel reassuring.
Frustratingly, I now feel like these changes are inevitable.
Not everywhere, of course. There are some companies that have always been remote, and others have managed to establish strong hybrid cultures. But the majority will choose to simply snap back to the world as it was in 2019.
This is to their detriment: adding perspectives from across the country, and from people who would have been shut out of a traditional office job, was clearly valuable. A workforce made up only of people who can afford San Francisco’s $3,400 average rent is inherently less diverse — and less representative of the company’s customers — than one that is geographically diverse. Regardless, it is happening.
For companies that choose to stay remote, there are benefits to be made. There will be an ever-increasing workforce of potential employees who don’t want to move back to those hubs, with experience at tech companies like Google and Meta, who will be looking for new positions. That’s a competitive advantage.
On the other hand, for people who want to stay with their current employers, there are hard choices ahead. Do you move away from your comfortable house, or find ways to offload some of your caring or parental duties, in order to stay on the payroll? Depending on your salary, stock options, or tenure, there might be reasons for doing so.
But it’s not a choice I would make. I have a toddler these days, and I want to be more present, not less. I get a lot of value from in-person collaboration, but I prefer a hybrid model: I’ll gladly travel into the office for a few intense days to advance some specific goals and then go home. I’ve got little interest in doing so to make management feel at ease, but there really are some kinds of time-limited collaboration that are better in person.
I also know that some people can’t travel — for health reasons, because their caring commitments are too great, or these days, because they’re worried about their documents being stripped or suffering violence because of their identity. So even though I’m willing to travel, I don’t expect everyone else to. Even in specific, time-limited collaborations, hybrid accommodations must be made.
For these reasons, I’ve made the decision that I won’t work for a company that requires everyone to come back to the office. Should I start another company, I will not mandate that people work from the office, although I might provide one as an optional collaboration space. This is to protect my quality of life, and to ensure that I can hire the best people for each role, regardless of where they might live or what the rest of their life might look like.
It’s not a decision I take lightly. It’s limiting: it means, should I leave my current job, that there will be fewer places I can go and work. It might limit my salary and future prospects, or even the investment I can raise for a future venture. But I care about being home and present, and I care about building representative workforces.
The bottom line is this: forcing people back into offices isn’t a neutral decision. It’s a choice to exclude and disadvantage anyone who doesn’t fit a narrow definition of what a “worker” looks like. I’m not willing to join in that discrimination.
