I think they’re missing the point that remote work is just another step in the direction of a massive trend toward distributed work. If you work for a big global megacorp, your entire life is passive online meetings with way too many people invited from across the world and across the hall. You go into work just to sit in a conference room with one other person or fight for a private phone booth by yourself, but inevitably take calls at your desk and annoy everybody else around you. You have an advanced degree in whatever, but your workplace resembles a multilingual call center and you’ve never spoken to your cubicle neighbors. There are social spaces to make the place look hip, but the latest trend is always social avoidance. They’ll allow 1 or 2 days per week remote and people will make is 4 or 5. The effect of the pandemic is to normalize remote, but more importantly, scatter all teams so that in-person is impossible. I don’t think productivity is measurable in an environment of massive economic chaostimulus, but commercial real estate costs are, and now you have high-salary workers arguing against their own best defense from offshore outsourcing. Now that offshore workers can join any team directly, managers will dedicate their budgets to packing their org charts with cheap workers to justify promotion to second level. I expect a lot of visa workers will return with their higher-salary jobs secured remotely, and engineering will gradually shift to asian hours. So this all just looks like acceleration to me, nothing new.