These moves are always about getting people to quit and nothing else.
Why would the leaders care?
It’s currently a buyers market for employees, they can flex as much as they want and desperate people will still flock to them.
The RTO mandates were not done with productivity in mind.
It's 2026.
If you are truly exceptional, you will get a WFH allowance in most organizations - that said, most developers are not.
If you want to be remote-first you will have to become mission critical, otherwise it is hard to justify not hiring someone in India, Israel, or Poland remotely.
The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.
How do you justify this assertion of yours? I would contend that the most efficient method is written down and shared widely in a doc. Otherwise, everyone is relying on their memory of what was spoken. For anything non trivial, I would want it written down.
It's one of the 12 principles of the original Agile manifesto.
Reading is significantly faster than listening. Writing is significantly more precise than speaking. You're gonna have to write information down so that it's not lost anyway.
Yes however speaking allows flexibility in communication, dynamics that text does not support and, crucial if there is no alignment, nonverbal communication.
It is much much easier to build trust in person, which is important for efficient teams.
In the end, both modes have pros and cons, but there is indeed a lot of research indicating remote teamwork is much more challenging on many dimensions
To me all of this reads like gibberish but I'll admit that it's likely just me (and "my kind" of neurodivergent people). Far as dynamics go (ability to interrupt) voice chat solves the problem fully as far as I'm concerned. Non-verbal comms are lost on me to the point that I don't know what you even mean, and I simply cannot trust anyone who is close enough to me to potentially punch me...
Again, granted -- I'm an outlier, but that also means that I can just operate at my full capacity when I work with text and cannot when I work "in person".
Did you remember to consider commute times, context-switching costs, office overhead and facilities staff overhead in your efficiency calculation?
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speak for yourself