This is too “brilliant villain”. Too many chain links of logic to actually implement and make work.
I suspect it’s the far more evil banality of “we paid for this office space and it’s pretty awkward to explain to the board why we have this red line item for a ‘10 year lease - office space’ and nobody is in there, so let’s just force 100s of people to come back in against all common sense and metrics that show this is a bad idea.”
That’s surely a factor for remote work in particular, but we must also ask why engineering orgs that embrace globally distributed sites & happily span SF, SEA, and NYC allow for so few seats in places like Chicago, the Triangle, or the Sun Belt. It’s cheaper & the collaboration setup is no different!
I suspect it’s the far more evil banality of “we paid for this office space and it’s pretty awkward to explain to the board why we have this red line item for a ‘10 year lease - office space’ and nobody is in there, so let’s just force 100s of people to come back in against all common sense and metrics that show this is a bad idea.”