The anti-remote work crowd needs to move on with their lives (RANT)

Many arguments against remote work require a slippery slope fallacy. By not being in person every day, you’re not going to hear every conversation, then you’re not going to be trained, then you’re not going to be considered for any opportunities, then you’re not going to have a fulfilling career. This is of course easier to manipulate younger workers with.

The others cherry-pick the slackers that ruin remote work and generalize that to all remote employees.

At this point, the biggest group that agrees with headlines like these are out-of-touch middle managers who can’t manage for shit and need their employees to be in their face managing them and project their incompetence on those same employees. Work replaces the part of their high school social life that was missing.

Granted, there are slackers who abuse it and don’t do any work and ruin it for everyone, but these would’ve been terrible employees anyways. I don’t think that’s a case against remote work; that’s just shitty employees who don’t give a shit abusing privileges.

For things like scheduled training or certain meetings, that makes sense to do in-person because from experience, it’s kind of hard to do that over a Zoom call. But if you’re a manager who just wants your employees to behave like goldfish in a fishbowl and spend 10 extra hours of their week commuting so you can have the ability to make chit-chat with them throughout the day, think about what that’s costing them and the actual value that is being added.

They talk about remote workers not being aware of certain opportunities in the company that come up or not being given tasks, but this sounds more like laziness and poor execution on management’s ability to communicate than it does there being an inherent disadvantage of working remotely. Again, it’s partly their dislike for doing their job properly being projected onto you. It’s not you, it’s them.

If you have a competent, motivated employee who prefers to work remotely, is pleasant, and gets their work done quick but can come in when requested and if there’s a reason that they need to come in, that’s much better than someone who comes in but is fucking incompetent.

It’s crazy that it’s almost 2026 and we’re having the same arguments that we had in 2022 about remote work.