No going back

In the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, the tech industry made two inferences that broadly informed strategy:

• Software is now going to eat the world at a massively increased rate
• Many people now like to work remotely and have a better work/life balance

The industry accepted this as a package deal: fine, we'll support remote work so we can hire thousands more people to get all this stuff built.

The first inference has unravelled over the past year, as much of the change that was expected to be permanent turned out to be temporary. And so the tech executives have moved to roll back the whole thing.

But, whoops, many people are unwilling to give up the new way of working; that part already persisted and can't simply be rolled back.

We're seeing the fallout from this as companies announce aggressive return-to-office policies. These are, in part, a tool to drive attrition, but it also feels like a bid to seize back the advantage from employees.

I can't help but feel they've way overreached, but we'll see.