I guess online meetings just aren’t good enough. Even Zoom is requiring people to go back to the office. You would think that Zoom would stick to remote work just to eat their own dogfood but I guess not.

The bit in the article from an economics professor at Stanford is strange, especially from an economics professor. He says that “If you are paying for office space and high Bay Area salaries it makes sense to operate on a hybrid schedule.” Aren’t these sunk costs? Isn’t this analysis an example of the sunk cost fallacy?

It’s reasonable to say, “you will have improved productivity by going hybrid” as a rationale, but you aren’t avoiding these costs either way so they are irrelevant. In fact, you might be able to save on some of the cited costs over the long term so it’s a poor decision if productivity is the same either way.

Hybrid seems like a good model so I’m not arguing with Zoom’s decision here, but the rationale is incorrectly argued. In any event, I can’t think of more solid declaration that the pandemic is truly over than Zoom going hybrid.