I'm not saying accept it. I am a vocal critic of the RTO policy at my work and have been for years.

But keeping context and perspective is important. Even in your example, it would do the security guard some good to take a moment and be grateful that he does have that minimum wage job and a place to stay.

It's not meant to encourage you to settle and get screwed over. It's meant to remind you of what you have and often those things should drive you to fight harder for other people and yourself.

The thing I keep coming back to here is how we all must sound to the janitors, security guards, baristas, etc, who can't ever work from home.

I understand that most of us worked our asses off to get to a skilled position and that in many ways it makes far more sense to be able to work from home. I myself am being dragged back into the office 5 full days a week and it's a 45 minute one way commute on a good day, so I'm salty about that. But hearing people who live 10 minutes from the office in $450,000 houses complaining loudly in the lobby about being forced back into the office right near the minimum wage security desk is a little uncomfortable.

I guess the question is: Can it be rebuilt somewhere else as an open source tool? Maybe this should be Duckduckgo's next big reveal? Drop the AI stuff and go hard on academic papers?

I'm in the Atlanta area, so that's mid to high for a smallish house, yeah. Or at least it was. Prices have short through the stratosphere recently.

There are tiny little condos being built next to my office in northeast ATL that are going for a STARTING rate of over a million.

I agree, and I've argued vocally against RTO from my privileged position because I have that value that makes me hard to replace.

I just want to make sure that we're not forgetting the people who weren't able to become high-level ML engineers for various social and economic reasons and are locked into 10 hour hard days in person.