Let me save you the suspense. If your job can be done from a laptop and an internet connection, there is no good reason you should be commuting into an office during a fuel shock like this.
We already ran the biggest accidental experiment in remote work anyone could have asked for. It worked. The world did not end. Companies did not collapse. Projects still shipped, meetings still happened, and the entire knowledge economy did not spontaneously burst into flames because people were working from spare bedrooms instead of beige carpet boxes in the CBD.
The return-to-office push has been justified with a lot of words. Collaboration. Culture. Serendipitous encounters. Innovation. Mentorship. Water cooler conversations. The magic that supposedly happens when bodies occupy the same physical space.
It is all bullshit.
The office exists because managers do not trust you to work without being watched. That is it. That is the reason. Everything else is a story they tell to make the distrust sound reasonable.
Every struggling project in history has had some executive look at the timeline, panic, and say the same thing: “Let’s throw more people at it.” It’s such a comforting idea. More hands, faster work. More brains, better solutions. It makes intuitive sense, which is exactly why it’s wrong.
Fred Brooks figured this out in 1975 when he wrote The Mythical Man-Month. His observation was brutally simple: adding people to a late software project makes it later. Not a little later. Meaningfully, measurably later. And yet here we are, 50 years on, and companies are still making the same mistake. They see a deadline slipping and reach for the hiring button like it’s a panic switch.
Every morning at 9:15, a dozen developers shuffle into a room or log into a video call to answer the same three questions they answered yesterday. What did you do? What will you do? Any blockers?
We have been doing this ritual for so long that questioning it feels like questioning gravity. Stand-ups are just how teams work. Everyone does them. They must be valuable.
Except they are not. The daily stand-up, as practiced in most organisations, is not a communication tool. It is a surveillance mechanism dressed up in Agile clothing. And in 2025, with distributed teams and async-first tooling, it has become an actively harmful anachronism that we keep doing because nobody wants to be the person who suggests we stop.