Just middle to upper management and real estate investors conspiring to justify their phoney-baloney jobs at the expense of the worker.
this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2026
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It sure killed the last tiny iota I had left. My company had some WFH before COVID, we all did 6 years full WFH until just recently, they also announced a big "WFH is the future!" Thing last year. Then this year changed their minds and issued an RTO mandate.
I could MAYBE understand working in the same building if my whole team all worked directly together on the same project and we were all in the office, but a giant chunk of the company is all over the country, 3/4 my team is remote, but me and a few unlucky chumps have to drive in to join the video calls from a conference room that never connects correctly and is 10x harder to hear and communicate in.
But this is "for collaboration" we were told. It's been almost a year now and I have yet to have an 100% in person meeting or any meaningful collaboration or anything positive really. It's cost me more money, cost me and the company a lot of wasted time sitting in a car, it made work 10x slower and harder to do, my mental health dropped drastically and a ton of our best coworkers all left and the extra work got dumped on us that stayed.
It's hell. I also "quietly quit" because they don't even care about actual work getting done, only if everyone looks busy and the spreadsheet numbers look all pretty. I used to work hard and enjoyed my job, not anymore, and RTO + strict helicopter management is the cause.
I think we might work at the same place lol
Get a P.O. Box way away from the office. Say you moved. Open bank account in county of said P.O box. Bam back to wfh...and you don't have to move. If they ask why you still have your home, tell them your renting it out.
They hiring? I'm perfectly willing to come in to an office and act like I'm doing stuff in exchange for money.
Only if you're an AI agent. Humans, nope.
Could I just tell them I'm Artificially Intelligent? I'm awful at being human, but great at seeming intelligent and hard working for 30 seconds at a time with several hours between each instance.
Management material, right here.
I’ve grown to absolutely despise my employer over this. I work for the federal government as a “manager” in a call center, and over the last couple of years we’ve gone from full‑time WFH to being forced back into the office 80% of the time.
I understand that a lot of employers are doing this to push people out, especially now with budget cuts and mass layoffs happening in the government. But that wasn’t the original reason. They did it because corporations and wealthy business owners complained about losing downtown business in major cities. (They wrote an open letter to the government lol)
The fact that my employer is willing to make employees’ lives worse just to appease the rich is revolting. Fuck them and fuck the rich.
What makes me even angrier is how easily everyone accepted it. We could have pushed back. We could have simply continued doing our jobs from home, they can't fire everyone. Instead, people just complained but complied.
Personally, I couldn’t bring myself to go along with it. The idea of being used as a pawn to make the rich happy made me furious. So I just didn’t go. And I didn’t enforce the rule with my team either. For a while, this worked. My boss would talk to me, I’d explain that I was at least 60% less productive in the office, I’d promise to start going, show up for a month, then stop again.
Eventually they escalated things and dragged me into a fact‑finding meeting with HR. At that point, I had no choice, they were monitoring my attendance daily. I can’t afford to lose this job; the pay is good and there aren’t many alternatives in my area. But simply giving in wasn’t an option either.
So I started calling virtual doctors until I found one willing to properly fill out a duty‑to‑accommodate form. It cost me $150, but it worked. They approved me for full‑time work‑from‑home for medical reasons.
It sucks that it had to come to this, and it sucks even more that other employees weren’t willing to push back. But my mental health couldn’t handle going to the office just to be less productive and to satisfy the demands of people who already have more than enough.
The fed rto was just insane. (Obligatory “fuck elmo muskrat and his little doggies.”) Employees were being called back to buildings with no furniture, or no heat, or no internet; one person was called back to an “office” in the parking garage, another to a storage unit with a forest service boat in it, another to the front lawn of the building. Insanity.
The fall of an empire is never pretty
What makes me even angrier is how easily everyone accepted it. We could have pushed back. We could have simply continued doing our jobs from home, they can’t fire everyone. Instead, people just complained but complied.
This also frustrates me.
There's no labor organization or solidarity here. Some people are afraid they'll lose their job and then suffer. That's a real fear, because this is the bad place
But some people are just spineless
We need to come together as communities and take care of those that are fired. Then people will be more willing. It always comes down to solidarity and solidarity in a rabidly individualistic society is lacking.
We are lead by the emotions of idiots, and the greed of monsters.
We have leadership who do not understand how work gets done. They don't do work like their employees do. They don't code or do code reviews.
Its not just bad for the people that were working from home, but for the people that didn't have the option as well. Being able to come to work and put on music, having clean restrooms and space in the break room, the low amount of commuting traffic. Now everyone is forced back and it sucks so much being crowded again and spending twice the amount of time getting to and from work.
The data is clear. Workers are happier, and more productive at home. Huge benefits to society and environment as well.
The only exception seems to come from those who live alone and where work is their only physical social contact.
My work lost decades of experienced workers forcing people back to office with long commutes.
The idea of people hauling ass all the way in to the office only to sit on zoom calls—sometimes with people in the same office—simply blows my mind.
Gotta justify the $20k/month office lease somehow.
A close person to me is sueing their employer for ADA violations because they became disabled during the pandemic while working full time WFH but now the office is RTO and they won't give them an exception to continue to WFH which is a clear ADA violation because they could do their job 100% without the accommodation when they worked for over 5 years remote.
Having oversight is not an essiental function of a job if you have ever in the past been able to accomplish the work 100% remotely.
We need to pass a law requiring employers to pay twice the payroll tax contribution for any office worker that they require to work in the office.
Boy I hope they win this shit out of this.
I've been told it's a better experience to book conference rooms instead of us just being able to be remote on zoom or teams for things that require screensharing. Cause it's not like half the meeting is getting that room working 🙄.
But yeah in office is so much better
the people with the most options are often the first to leave. The employees who remain may not be the most committed — they may simply be the least mobile.
This has been called the Dead Sea Effect.
What remains, in all cases, is usually very salty.
Just work for companies that don’t have offices, simple as.
I asked my boss why the company insisted we show up three times a week. It was basically to justify the cost of putting the buildings there, maybe some kind of tax benefits. She called it "funny money". I quit my job.
My firm responded by remodeling the office to make smaller offices and a lot more communal workspace, and giving three of the six floors back to the management company.
Over-emphasizing metrics about employee submission and control is another clear sign of the decay of social order under capitalism. This is a society whose organizing functions have no direct concern for people’s wellbeing. These employers deserve every scrap of contempt they foster.
People had workplace trust?