He mentions a few things about typical in‐office work versus home office work that I have noticed too. The push to force employees back into the nasty, central office is irrational and I have been trying to figure out what is driving it. At some companies it leaked out that it was partly to get people to quit so they didn’t have to fire as many in their upcoming cutbacks. I think this is the biggest driver: > Home offices also lower office real estate costs, so you’d think executives would love it, but they also makes employee surveillance harder. Turns out that if you’re core philosophy is authoritarianism, that surveillance and control matters more than anything else, including profits and business outcomes. He says home offices are only better for productivity than the crappy, open office spaces most companies use today. That may be true, but companies are not going to stop using those. Even if they are not authoritarian, they cannot go back to the much higher cost of office layouts that require more space. Nothing beats home offices in real estate cost savings. He mentioned that working from home leads to better sleep patterns, which is good for productivity. I will add something to that: removing the huge time sink and stress of daily commuting probably has measurable benefits in reducing employee stress. Lower stress means higher productivity. I like working from home because of the huge increase in quality of life—on top of it being a better work environment. I was speaking above purely from a management perspective. If all you care about is results working from home still wins. That is why I agree with the first section of that article. Managers do not care about results. They are narcissists. They want to feel like kings reigning over an empire of low status serfs. They can’t have the serfs working stress free from their own comfortable home offices. That makes the serfs look like they are of equal status to the managers. They want the serfs crammed together in harsh conditions where they can lord over them like a forced labor camp administrator. Unfortunately, that means there is no rational way to fight the return‐to‐office push. The only thing you have is your negotiating position in the labor market. If you are a low paid, easily replaceable employee you can be forced into their labor camp to appease their narcissism. If you have valuable skills, or are a key person in running their company, you can demand home office work. They’ll want to get something in return though; like a lower salary. By refusing to work in their abominable conditions they feel like you have taken something from them. As for the AI push, you might have to submit daily nonsense queries to your employer’s chosen LLM to show you are using it (they track that) until the bubble bursts and they pretend they never fell for the AI hype. If you want to benefit, try to time the peak and short stocks like NVDA.