Another way to look at it is that during lockdown people realized that millions driving through rush hour every day to sit in a cubicle was a drain on the time of employees and a waste of company money in renting the building. I don't care if commercial real estate took a hit outside of impacts to pension/401k. We have the technology now and the pandemic proved it, so we can now evolve in that area. No need to be stuck in that hell loop forever.

Exactly this.

The curtain was pulled back and people realized the lies they were being fed by companies.

Turns out the business won’t fold if people are remote, and if you’re out sick that immovable deadline gets…moved.

Maybe it won’t collapse but maybe everything is only working 70% as well as it used to. It sure feels that way.

If purchasing power falls 30% it’s only fair that things are only working 70%.

Spoiler alert: purchasing power fell way more than 30%, so we are actually lucky things work still as much as they do.

Or another way to put it, if 50% of everything is bullshit, you can cut out quite a bit and still not really effect anything.

The number of TPS reports filed is not the actual value to the economy, but it gets counted in the GDP.

So the comment above admits that people are taking more time off and working less. So is your argument that the majority of work that we lost didn’t matter anyway?

Basically yes. There's a lot of useless beauracracy at pretty much all companies and the 40 hours took that into account. It seems like with remote work that some folks just started working like 35 hours and focused on the priority items which still got done. The mostly just skipped the useless meetings that were only there for the beauracracy. So the net effect hugely helped the individual, while having minimal impact on actual goals being achieved.

The biggest negative from WFH was it being more challenging to onboard new folks (a legitimate concern). It's less easy for someone new to pop into your cube, ask a question, and then get back to it. Now they have to do it through IM, or schedule a virtual conference. It's not all that much harder...just a bit of additional friction since things are more asynchronous. Maybe the senior engineer you need to talk to is sleeping in late and then working late and you're doing the opposite.

I'll add one additional negative is that WFH may interfere with our natural need to be social. This is extra hard on extroverts, but I think even introverts are impacted. They may be quiet, but I've talked to many that don't miss the disruptions or commute, but do miss just being around other adults to a degree. Some introverts struggle to find social outlets outside of work (especially outside large cities), so they spend a lot of time alone and naturally get lonely and this impacts their mental health. Everyone is different though and none of this is significant enough to force a return to office.