> The more I think about this, the more it seems like something really bizarre is going on.

That's only because people refuse to accept the obvious. Executives, whether correctly or wrongly, genuinely believe having employees colocated in the same geographical space is beneficial for their companies.

It's not even such a stretch to imagine this because we absolutely know they believed this before the pandemic. In fact, most SV companies were willing to pay employees located elsewhere huge sums of money to move to the Bay Area.

Or executives believe it is beneficial for themselves. I've seen plenty of managers over the year manage by "perceived busy-ness", and managers who liked walking the floor and to get a feel for whether people are busy have to actually do real work to check when people work from home. Or execs are more likely to be extroverts who like their job because it provides an opportunity for them to be at the centre of a group of people. Or enough board members are also on the boards of companies that make a living from commercial real estate.

There are many options, and many of them can be true to various degrees at the same time.

When you fundamentally change a balance of anything you're likely to run into all kinds of odd entrenched interests you may never have thought about, in part because many of them may never have needed to assert themselves before.

> Or executives believe it is beneficial for themselves.

I don't disagree with this. I do get that feeling that this is part of it...

But executives are often the ones trying to squeeze an extra dollar out of every line on the ledger. Are they really willing to spend so much extra for this perceived personal benefit? Are their bosses willing to indulge them like that?

These aren't insignificant costs. For gigantic companies, the big skyscraper headquarters in some world class city must comprise just as much of the budget as a more modest building for a more modest company in Oklahoma. They're spending millions for it.

But it's a cost they don't bear, it typically ends up in a different section of the balance sheet. And as soon as somebody else pays for it, personal benefit (perceived or real) takes the front seat. See business class pricing in travel, for example.

If their bosses do the same it won't be seen as indulgent. And indeed cargo cutting what their boss does might well be another aspect of it.

>Or executives believe it is beneficial for themselves.

It doesn't matter, the end-result is the same, and it's completely up to you to either recognise it, or be delusional about it. We all make that choice, it's just the majority of commentators choose to engage in semantics.

Motivations matter for those who want to understand how to address it.

There is a lot of in the office abuse too. Time shooting the shit with colleagues, popping out for a coffee or just goofing off in front of a desk. Probably half the comments on this very website were probably written by someone who was being paid to work.

Now when I'm working from home and not feeling productive I have options. Go for a lie down if I'm tired. Get ready and go for a run if I'm frustrated. Go downstairs and have a cuddle with my 1 year old etc.

> The fact that WFH advocates get emotional, nonsensical

Interestingly, the person you are responding to is very reasonable in their point.

You, on the other hand, sound pretty emotional and nonsensical about "WFH abuse".

If you can't measure productivity of your remote team, that is really a "you" problem.

"it just seems like an opportunity for them to short this crap and make money sabotaging real estate."

Shorts have the other side. You can't just ambiently short against nothing and nobody on the other side. Even naked shorting involves taking a bet against those who are long, you just skip the step where the shares you are selling actually exist. There can't be a market that consists only of short sellers, so there are going to be people interested in keeping values up.

You seem to be having a lot of difficulty separating out various separate interests in the real world. Of course companies are trying to cut office space spends. If office space were free those of us against RTO would already have lost. Office space costs are our biggest ally. But those are nearly completely separate people from the people vending the office space. (They're completely separate if the office space vendors ironically have gone to WFH themselves...) If you try to lump the vendors and consumers together you're going to have a very hard time understanding things, which may be why you're getting confused.

Managers tend to be older than workers. The higher level of management, the older.

Older people are more comfortable having a face-to-face meeting rather than an online chat or video call. They're more comfortable managing people they can see in their seats, rather than having to judge only by the amount of output.

This is true even for many larger software companies.

Is this all of what's going on? Maybe not. But I suspect it's at least part of it.

this is just meaningless ageism. you could just as easily argue that older people benefit more from WFH, since they're more likely to have nicer places to live that are further from the city centers.