Think you did By Apple. In the year It’s April 2022. You’re being told by higher-ups that you need to get back to the office – by which I mean you read a Slack message on your laptop. Your bosses seem to understand that you can do this job remotely, so you go about your work day feeling angry.
Then someone sends you a YouTube link to a nine-minute commercial telling stories of people who quit their companies after being forced back into the office. The ad is from Apple, which is currently promoting Back to Office. You punch your desk so hard that your screensaver doesn’t work.
The irony is that the companies that have made the most money from remote work seem to be allergic to it. Google, which literally lets you run a company in a browser, is forcing its employees back into the office three days a week.
Meta, Apple and Google are industry leaders, yet they are leading their industries backwards – back in offices doing the same things people did at home.
Meta, who lost billions to keep us living in computers, has put people back in the office. In a year of research reading every telecommuting article published, I have yet to find a single compelling argument for why employees should return to the office.
If you live in Narnia and believe in magical creatures, “human cooperation” and “serendipity” are words that have meaning. In fact, office environments resemble our distant lives, with more annoying meetings and the chance to sniff out our coworkers’ lunch choices.
The tech industry looks disruptive, but it’s following a path blazed by veteran firms like Goldman Sachs. How can Apple and Google, the companies that effectively enabled us to work remotely at scale, sound like they’re reading from a generic New York Times anti-remote op-ed?
