Remote Work and the Default Human

Most return-to-office mandates aren't really about collaboration. They're about trust. Specifically, the absence of it. Presence has become a proxy for productivity, and that's a management failure, not a worker failure.

Measuring output is hard. It requires clear expectations, well-defined deliverables, and managers who know how to evaluate work by its results. That takes effort. Walking the floor and seeing bodies in chairs is easier. It gives leaders a feeling of control without requiring them to build the systems that would make remote accountability work. When companies say "we need people back in the office," what they're often saying is "we haven't figured out how to manage outcomes instead of attendance."

I've worked remotely and in-office across multiple companies over nearly 20 years. The most productive teams I've been on had one thing in common: clear expectations and measurable outcomes. The least productive? They had the most meetings. They had the most "visibility." And they had the most performative work. People showing up early, leaving late, and producing very little of substance in between.

Software engineering is uniquely positioned for remote work. The output is tangible. The tools are mature. You can see commits, PRs, deployments, test coverage. If you can't tell whether someone is working without physically watching them, you have a measurement problem, not a location problem.

The collaboration argument assumes a default type of person: extroverted, neurotypical, and comfortable in dominant-culture social settings. Then it treats that assumption as universal. It isn't.

Open floor plans, impromptu whiteboard sessions, lunch conversations that turn into architecture decisions. These things work great for some people. But for introverts, they're draining. For neurodivergent engineers, the sensory load of an open office can consume the cognitive bandwidth that would otherwise go toward the actual work. The "energy" that offices supposedly create isn't free. Somebody's paying for it.

I think about this a lot because I've seen it play out. The engineer who does brilliant async work but goes quiet in meetings. The developer who produces twice as much at home but "doesn't seem engaged" in the office. We've built a culture that rewards a specific performance of productivity rather than productivity itself.

And this isn't just about personality types. Not everyone walks into a conference room on equal footing. If you're the only person in the room who looks like you, every interaction carries extra weight. You're not just collaborating. You're navigating. Code-switching. Managing perceptions. That's an invisible tax on every in-person interaction. Remote work doesn't eliminate bias, but it does reduce the surface area for it. You get evaluated more on what you ship and less on how comfortable you make everyone feel.

Companies have massive, long-term leases on office space. Empty buildings are an embarrassing line item. That financial pressure is driving more of the return-to-office conversation than anyone wants to admit.

This isn't a conspiracy. It's just incentives. If your company signed a 10-year lease on a building that's sitting half-empty, there is organizational pressure to fill those seats. It may not be the reason stated in the all-hands meeting, but it's in the room. Real estate costs are a sunk cost that companies are trying to un-sink by mandating butts in chairs.

The best approach I've seen isn't "remote vs. office." It's intentional about when co-location adds value and honest about when it doesn't. Blanket mandates skip that conversation entirely.

There are legitimate reasons to be in the same room. Early-stage product ideation. Complex cross-team debugging. Mentoring junior engineers who benefit from proximity. I've experienced all of these, and I'll give credit where it's due. But those are specific use cases, not a justification for five days a week, 52 weeks a year. The most productive model I've been part of treated in-person time like a tool you use when it's the right tool, not a default setting you never question.

What companies could do instead of mandates: define what in-person time is for. If you need your team together for a design sprint, schedule a design sprint. If you want to build social cohesion, plan something intentional. Don't just require everyone to commute an hour each way to sit in Slack and Zoom calls from a noisier location.

The irony is that many of us spent the first year of the pandemic proving remote work works. Record productivity. Products shipped. Companies thrived. And now the same organizations are acting like none of that happened. Like we imagined it. That selective amnesia tells you this isn't really about the work.

Instead of asking "how do we get people back in the office," companies should be asking "how do we build systems that let all of our people do their best work?" For some, that answer includes an office. For many, it doesn't.

The companies that figure this out will attract the best talent. Not because remote work is a perk, but because it signals something deeper. It signals that the organization trusts its people, measures outcomes, and doesn't require conformity as a condition of employment. In an industry where the work speaks for itself, that kind of trust isn't radical. It's rational.