[Jubijub]

This. I am a manager, and frankly, getting a bit tired of people who just cast some degree of in person presence as “pure desire for control”. People require coordination (that’s partly why manager / project manager / product manager roles exist), and that coordination is orders of magnitude easier and faster in person. Sometimes just in the course of going from meeting A to meeting B, I will solve <=3 minutes stuff that would take me 2-3x the amount of time via chat or quick ad hoc meetings.

I am against full RTO 5 days a week, because for focused tasks, WFH is way more productive. But hybrid is not entirely stupid. Sure, if 100% of your work is focused work (say SWE work for instance), anything other than full WFH is a loss to you. But unless you work 100% alone with nobody else, 100% optimal for you may not be 100% optimal for the project / product / organisation. And I’ve seen first hand how conflicts brew when people can’t just go in front of a white board and hash out differences in person

Tl;dr : it’s wayyyyyyyy more nuanced than “RTO is stupid you control freak”