Think of your work output as a vector. It has a magnitude - how much work you can get done in say a quarter. It also has a direction - what is the project you're working on, and does that line up in an economically productive way?
The reason we have corporations and management is to get all those vectors to line up in a certain direction. They're like magnets, aligning the productivity vectors of each IC so they don't compete with each other and instead contribute to a common goal. Almost every IC is less productive in terms of magnitude when working in a big corporation, but because there are thousands of them, the overall product becomes very hard to compete with.
WFH effectively reduces the magnetic force on each employee. Their productivity magnitude increases - they get more individual work done per unit time. But their alignment suffers. It's harder to identify when two IC's work is not going to line up perfectly, and harder to catch problems and complications early, and harder to set a direction in the first place.
And that's where WFH is going to suffer. As long as people can basically continue on the same direction they were going pre-pandemic, it's an improvement. But as soon as a direction shift becomes needed, corporations that have gone all-WFH are going to quickly find that the reason they're a corporation has gone away. They won't be able to adapt and chart a new course, and their employees will all quit and join new startups that are already pointed in the right direction.
Think of your work output as a vector. It has a magnitude - how much work you can get done in say a quarter. It also has a direction - what is the project you're working on, and does that line up in an economically productive way?
The reason we have corporations and management is to get all those vectors to line up in a certain direction. They're like magnets, aligning the productivity vectors of each IC so they don't compete with each other and instead contribute to a common goal. Almost every IC is less productive in terms of magnitude when working in a big corporation, but because there are thousands of them, the overall product becomes very hard to compete with.
WFH effectively reduces the magnetic force on each employee. Their productivity magnitude increases - they get more individual work done per unit time. But their alignment suffers. It's harder to identify when two IC's work is not going to line up perfectly, and harder to catch problems and complications early, and harder to set a direction in the first place.
And that's where WFH is going to suffer. As long as people can basically continue on the same direction they were going pre-pandemic, it's an improvement. But as soon as a direction shift becomes needed, corporations that have gone all-WFH are going to quickly find that the reason they're a corporation has gone away. They won't be able to adapt and chart a new course, and their employees will all quit and join new startups that are already pointed in the right direction.