Defaulting to the office is giving up

The claim that the era of remote work is over turns out to be narrower than the headline suggests and worth reading in full before you react to it.

What was actually said is that one of the industry’s worst mistakes was assuming everybody could go fully remote forever, that startups didn’t need to be together in person and that there’d be no loss of creativity from it. The claim is that the experiment is over and the technology isn’t yet good enough for people to be fully remote permanently, especially at startups.

Two things in there change the shape of it a lot. He’s talking about full remote which leaves hybrid entirely on the table. And he’s talking mostly about startups rather than established companies which is a much smaller claim about a much narrower set of situations. With both caveats in place it’s a lot less controversial than the headline wanted it to be.

It’s still a bit a shame though and the a shame part isn’t the conclusion. It’s that this reads like giving up.

The argument identifies real problems with remote work for creative teams which do exist and which you’ll have felt if you’ve tried it. Then instead of thinking about how to solve those problems, it defaults to putting everybody in a room which is not much better for creativity and a lot worse on every other axis. That’s a weak place to land.

This is somebody with an enormous amount of experience of how startups actually work, across a lot of companies, over a long period. The suggestion that he’s never seen a distributed team work well and can’t think of anything to try beyond everybody being in the same building, isn’t an exciting contribution to the question. If that’s the state of the art from someone with that much exposure to the problem then the problem hasn’t really been worked on.

The thing that would be interesting is the specific failure. Which part of the creative process degrades when people aren’t together. Is it the unplanned conversation, the shared context, the speed of a decision, or something about who feels able to interrupt whom. Those have different fixes. Some are solvable. None of that gets said because the conclusion arrived before the diagnosis did.

What makes it slightly funnier is that the remarks were made in an office, to a room of people who had travelled to be there. That’s the most creative environment available, apparently and it produced this.

What you’re left with, if you run a team, is that nobody senior is going to hand you a worked answer to this. The honest position is that fully remote has real costs, offices have different and larger ones and the interesting work is in finding which specific thing your team loses and buying that back deliberately rather than reaching for the building as a blunt instrument.

The part that should bother you most is what an argument like this does when it comes from somewhere with authority behind it. Plenty of people running teams will read the headline, skip the caveats about hybrid and about startups and use it to justify a policy that was already decided for reasons involving a lease.

That’s not the fault of whoever said it. It is the predictable use of it and anybody making an argument at that volume knows how it will travel.

If you’re on the receiving end of a policy like that, the question worth asking is which problem it’s meant to solve, and what would count as it having worked. A policy nobody can attach a measure to is usually a preference wearing a business case.