> Instead, it is that the office is larger than it should be.

Yep, but rather than admit that having too big an office is a mistake, they double down on it and try to force employees back into the offices. For a certain type of personality, pushing the negative ramifications down to subordinates is easier than admitting that they need to solve the actual problem.

The problem is literal vested interests in commercial real estate. Not just in the sense that the company itself owns their offices, but many of the local businesses around those offices are popular investments for upper management. (Amazon in particular isn’t a free-lunch workplace, so at least when I was there, there were tons of lunch spots scattered amidst the Amazon campus.) If people don’t RTO, a lot of money stands to be lost, especially since Amazon was investing heavily in both their expanded Seattle campus in the Denny Triangle and HQ2 when COVID hit.

I would agree, but I have to ask: where's the cutoff?

If you let people "choose" and 99% choose to always work from home, do you think that's gonna fly? I don't. I think the in-officers would be very upset about that because that's not enough people to make their in-office experience how they like it.

No matter how you slice it, such a position is one born of control. You have to force some people's hand in where they work.

Perhaps extroverts who can only thrive when in the company of others should stick with careers that require the company of others, instead of those careers that can be accomplished hundreds of kilometers from society (in a cabin in the woods).

Why should I have to work from home just because I like engineering?

Why should I have to work from the office just because other people would like to?

I don't think you should. I just think that the in-between is quite worthless. Why not have fully WFH and full RTO companies for people to choose from according to their preferences? I realize that's not the subject matter of the article.

Because it wastes a lot of money catering to extrovert inclinations.

If 10% of the workforce loves pizza and the other 90% is lactose intolerant should we order pizza for the office every day and just let 90% of it go to waste? This is only really a discussion because working in an office was the norm for so long.

Why should the world of commerce and industry never do anything else other than cater to one subset's need to be amongst people at work?

"I need to have people around me to do my best work, and you are going to be one of them -- no matter how much that fucks you up."

I advocated for no such thing. I'm just asking why I should choose another career, one which necessitates RTO, because I'm an extrovert.

I apologize for callously extending your argument. (I'm still recovering from too many years on Reddit.)

I have some thoughts: Things change. Or at least, things can change. Or at least, things should be allowed to be able to change. (Usually.)

There was certainly a time when a news reporter worth their salt would never be very far from the office unless they were engaged in field work -- after all, the office was where the calls/faxes/wires/twice-daily mail/walk-in stories showed up, where the archives and typewriters and other business machines happened to be located, and where the copy editors and printers also were located.

But these days: A news reporter can potentially assemble their story from wire sources wherever they are. They can get a whiff of a scoop and be on an airplane to get closer to the source rather quickly, and can even continue to write their story and communicate the whole time that they travel. Sending a draft for review or editing is as simple as sending an email -- and this can be done without wires from just about anywhere on earth.

They don't need to go to the office anymore to find a scoop, or to report the scoop -- extroverted, or introverted, or whatever, and that's been increasingly the case for a rather long time.

And that's a pretty fucking neat marvel of technological enablement, I think. (Now, if only regular news would simply cease just regurgitating stuff they found on social media and actually get a scoop for themselves...but I digress.)

So, in the past few years: For reasons, we've broadly discovered that some people can do much of the same with engineering tasks at home, and that some appear to even be able to be more productive (in a dollars-vs-quality-output fashion) at such things without ever (or at least, without regularly) setting foot in a centralized corpo office. Some even report an increase in the quality of their life in general when they have this freedom to work...from wherever.

I think that this is a pretty fucking neat marvel of technological enablement, too.

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If an extroverted engineer requires people to be around in order to [try to] do their best work and live their best life, but some/most/all of their peers are working remotely because they found their own happy place, then: That's a conflict of goals.

Perhaps the correct resolution for the conflict is that the extroverted engineer should find a way to apply their abilities in tasks/careers where other people are both inherently and necessarily present, instead of one where other people may have broadly chosen to work in relative solitude or one where people are forced to be present in the office even when that isn't ideal for them.

I mean: Some of us introverts in many fields have been seeking increased aspects of solitude and freedom of movement for a long, long time -- and lately, we can achieve that more easily in a far broader selection of trades. That's good for introverts, and introverts are people too even if they're not necessarily very vocal about it.

But when that's incompatible with an extrovert's own proclivities, then: Perhaps things have simply changed, and perhaps the extrovert may need to change with them if they require people to be around to try to most-effectively live their own best lives.

That's fair! Thank you!