Every few weeks there's a post here about someone shocked that their company is mandating RTO. I want to offer a perspective from the other side of the industry that nobody seems to acknowledge.
I'm embedded/hardware. I have been my entire career. I have never once worked remote in any meaningful way. My job requires physical access to hardware, lab equipment, oscilloscopes, specific toolchains that don't run on consumer laptops, prototype builds. Remote is not a philosophical position for me, it's physically impossible.
Software engineers got a very unusual deal from 2020-2023. The ability to do your job entirely over the internet is a genuine exception to how most work works, not the default. The surprise when RTO comes back feels like not understanding that the last few years were an experiment, not a permanent state.
Now, I think fully distributed software teams work fine. I've seen it. I'm not arguing RTO is good. Specifically for SWE roles where the actual work happens in a laptop and a GitHub account, office mandates are often about manager comfort, not productivity. The research on this is not ambiguous.
But the entitlement baked into some of these posts. like 'I can't believe they're doing this' as if it's unprecedented. Hardware, manufacturing, biotech, lab science, retail, logistics. most of the working world did not get the fully remote window and is not having this debate. They're just going to work.
What you're actually negotiating is a class-of-work exception that software created during a particular moment. It may stick, or it may not. Plan accordingly.