Big Tech Wants You Back in the Office
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Okay, guys, the worst commute of your life. Tell me a story.

definitely, when I was going, same things that go to palo to for a start up drop, just sort of college. I was a long commute that involved baking a cul train, cul train to paralo, biking to the office. But I will say that culture in was like the irl dating APP, because I was all Young people commuting to their jobs, and people were constantly asking me to their, yes, I did not have that experience on culturing. Well, you arent really infinite just on the culturing. That was my cat fishing technique.

What was your worst? Me.

there is a period of time in early two thousands, when I was living out in the sunset district of senators go, which there is like a couple of trains that can bring you downtown, but they take an hour. And I was like, pre mobile technology, so we had disk men, walkmen players, you know, like portable C, D players. So you had to bring, like, a little book of cds. And people read newspapers. Remember one, say, folks .

listening who don't remember these times, this was a local mode of train and .

you hand cracked the disk two hundred. B. C.

um I just remember there was so much stuff you had to Carry just for your commute. And like the new Harry potter book came out and everybody on the train was reading this like ten pound thick hard cover Harry potter book at the same time and talking about IT laun. You have to tell us your bad commute story.

There was peer to time on the east coast, where I was commuting on the metro north train. And then once I got into new york city, I had to help on subway and had .

the down town all street.

In a cinema he was long and IT sucked the life out of me. So while the pandemic was not a good thing, it's a good thing that you know, none of us had to go back and on the office anymore, right? We're done with that.

Welcome to uncanny valley from wired, a show about the people, power and influence of silicon valley posted by me senior or writer law and good and my co hosts .

i'm Michael colori, director of consumer tech and culture at wired .

and i'm so isa fer, director of business and industry at wire.

This week we're talking about big text, big return to office.

Here come the employees back to work in the city.

The bay areas is the biggest employers asking themself to come back .

to at the office on the leaders remote work. The started the pandemic tech companies have started to demand that some hybrid or fully remote workers get back to the office. And we are here to ask why? Why is everyone, well, mostly everyone, being forced back in the office? What's behind IT? all.

okay. So for today, we are mostly going to talk about amazon and also sales force. These are some of the biggest tech companies around salesforce isn't as big as the others, but IT is safran.

Cis goes biggest private sector employer and combine these companies, provide jobs for over a million workers around the world. Tech companies also have a lot of influence over work culture in general now. So when they start putting in return to office Mandates, people pay attention and wonder if there is going to be a ripple effect.

The fun times are over. Folks do your laundry and actually see your kids. Time is over. So we first tell us about salesforce.

So salesforce asked specific teams to come back to the office four or five days, started in october first. And this came after mark bennie, the C. E, O of salesforce said in twenty twenty two that returned off his Mandates simply wouldn't work.

Salesforce wasn't the first though, right? Because apple, ma, google, they all started to change their work from mom policies about a year ago yeah.

So apple was one of the first companies to actually have everyone work from home in the early days of the pack. Famous ly apples always been very in office work, and they ask them to come back three days a week now. And they have been really struck on enforcement and meet in google.

which are also some of the most influential companies in the valley. When IT comes to work culture, are they now have similar policies. So like, what's the deal with amazon? Amazon is going hard.

You're doing five days a week. So if you work at amazon, and I don't mean if you work in the warehouse or fear driver, but if you work in the corporate offices, like on the website building the structure of amazon, you have to be in the office five days a week. Something to note is that obviously, amazon employees were not happy about this.

And the amazon web services CEO, the division chair of amazon web services, told employees, if it's not for you, then that's okay. You can go find another company if you want to. Yes, pushing back on the push back to five days a week by telling everybody they can just quit and go over some.

Yes, we have the upper hand here. So would you say that amazon is no longer always day one, but always five days? You could say that, but I M so what's the word on the street? How are people in the valley feeling about these new Mandates?

So I spent the last few weeks speaking to managers at a bunch of different tech companies, and I was curious about their perspective in particular because I feel like we hear a lot from the ceos and a fair amount from the lower level workers who really don't want to come back into the office. But ultimately it's the managers who are being asked to enforce return to office policies and create culture remotely.

And what I heard from them was that creating culture remotely is really difficult. And IT comes to ahead during in moments where something happens on national politics that people are talking about in the office and it's creating a certain amount of tension or there are layoff s happening. There's like a moment of stress in the company. And when you don't have in person ties with people, it's just harder to weather those storms.

That sounds a little bit like we are saying as managers don't like that all kids are talking about them behind their backs, do either you feel there is a little bit of apocrypha all of this from the tech companies like they make the software. They benefited greatly from how much we were all using their software during the pendel c. The promise of software has long been that IT democractic zis access to information and makes these tools readily available to people all over the world, so they can all have a global workforce. And now they are the one saying, come back to the office, but seats, just physics, the complete antithesis of the messaging we've heard for the past few years.

I mean, IT is the irony is not lost on us, just like i'm sure it's not lost on any of the people working at any of these companies. I think the biggest example of this resume, the company that makes the software that saved all of us while we are all working from home, is requiring some people to come back into the office a couple of days a week. They are yeah and your point, sales force, which owns slack, yet another tool that is enabled remote work to flourish sh around the world over last five, ten years is also requiring people to go back into the office. Yeah.

we all use slack here. And it's not like IT was designed so that people sitting next to each other and their little cubicles can have Better communication.

IT was time because IT.

there's multiple channels to spend the globe. Yes.

almost like these companies are saying, we are creating tools for their companies. But what we are doing is so important that we could possibly, to a remote, we have to be in person, face to face as often as possible.

Yeah, I think one good outlier that we should highlight, uh, there are several, but my favorite is airbnb, right? This is a company that is putting its picture first in its workforce, right? Their whole ideas that you can go anywhere, you can travel anywhere, you can work from anywhere. So they let their employees work from anywhere, which is pretty cool, I mean, within limits, but prety cool.

I sad because brian chess kie himself wants to kind of flow around blue and red airbnb s that have, you know, home games in them so he can keep up with weight lifting routine or not.

does have a strong way lift doing team. I mean, yes, I think ibn bond paper does have the best policy. There is a very flexible employees can work from any office or their home um and they also a certain amount of dayer that they can work from any L B M B around the world in any country around the world. But I do think like there are policies and then there are norms. And I would guess that a airbnb, there are certain teams that just generally do come into the office every single day and IT matters if or direct manager is modeling room at work or if they are coming in and then you feel the pressure to come in.

We should probably make a point to note that there is a difference between what I like to say as atoms and fits.

If you're a hardware company versus a software company, if you are apple tesler NVIDIA, if you make a car and iphone a GPU, you need people there in office, in the labs, on the factory floor, a if you're building software tools, it's probably a little bit different, right? And we've seen some of the ethos expressed from none other than i'm looking at. So we right now, you're a favorite person in the valley, elon musk, take us there. We really can't get through a episode without talking about. And we guarantee for all of our loyal listener's of the new show on value, we will probably be mentioning a one must at least once a week.

Fortunate he is a main character as much as I hate to say, but elon mask has never been a enforcement work. And this makes sense because, as you said, his companies were building rockets and cars historically. But he took the ethos to twitter when he bought IT and basically for subunit of people to resign, and laid them off by telling people that they had to comment to the office.

I remember one time he sent an email at two thirty, I am, and he wanted people in the office later that day. And he specifically said, even if you have fly here and I actually had a source who was in new york at the time on a and like bottle plane ticket later that die, I remember his golf end was pissed and he was like, we're going into the airport and flew back like instantly so he could make the time that elon had layed out for everyone. And iran really used IT as a test.

He was like, if you're a hard core, if you want to be part of this new culture, then you will be in the office. And if you don't, that kind of like the AWS said, there are other companies you can work for. And he gave permission.

I would sight to a lot of other CEO to be a little more strict than they had been in the past. And this happened to go inside with a downturn in the job market. And so companies had a lot more leverage.

Yeah, I do believe that most of this is completely economically driven, and we're going to get to that later in the episode the why of why this is happening. But I also curious whether or not people actually are more productive in an office. We all have our personal experiences, but what is the data actually showing?

This is such a fascinating question because one thing that really struck me as companies have been emAiling their employees and to come in, is they haven't really been sharing a whole lot of internal information about why they've say kind of high level things, about the need to built culture in person and how it's core to their identity to have people working in face to face.

But they haven't said things like productivity has declined by x percent. When I talked to ahead of people at one of the bigger companies, what they told me, I was that the data is mixed. It's not clear that working in person make someone more productive than having a hybrid schedule.

In fact, when we look at the research that shows that there are enormous benefits to hybrid work schedules, there's a twenty twenty four study from stanford that found that i'm coding here. Employees who work from home two days a week are just as productive, likely to get promoted and far less prone to quit. There was an older study also from stanford that found that full time working from home can be problematic for various reasons, but working from the office all the time can to. And IT does seem like hybrids. Schedules are kind of the suite spot.

So when we were putting together our thoughts for the episode, I did post something on linton about rt o and how people were feeling about IT. And someone from yelp ached out to me. And apparently for the past couple years, the alps sen.

Doing some data analysis on remote work. And they think remote work is a good thing. They talked about how IT promotes and engaged and inclusive workforce.

And basically, he says that they thrive. Their employees thrive. And I think that yp is not alone in that.

Yelp is a big company, of course, but you'll also hear from started founder who say that their company would not exist if they didn't have a good quote, distributed workforce because that ables them to pay slightly lower salaries to employees who work in areas that have a lower cost of living. And also, it's pretty nice for those local markets too, to have. Ted companies, workers who are building families there who are investing more into the local economy. Yeah, how do both of you feel about working from home?

So when we all first started working remote all the time in twenty twenty, I brought home all my tech stuff. I brought home my monitor, my mechanical keyboard, my nice mouse. I brought all that stuff to my house and found a way to set IT up that worked for me.

And so returning to the office was painful, because when you show up at the office, you don't have your text set up that you're used to, right? I'm sure everybody who has returned to the office feeling this way now, I have two mechanical keyboards. I have two monitors. I have two pairs of headphones.

Know you're here in the office almost every day.

Yeah, i'm here like three or four days a week. Um it's that's another thing, right? The fact that my home can be noisy or chaotic, I split a workspace with my wife SHE creates youtube videos and needs silence so I can either work in the closet or I can come into the office, so I choose to committed the office.

And you know, I know kids, uh, I don't have really any other obligations. And I should also note, I have an easy commute. So for me, the friction has been greatly reduced, but I work right alongside people who have an hour and a half commute and need to get home early for childcare reasons. And for them, it's like very, very .

difficult though you've been remote for a while, right?

You live in the central coast of california. Yeah is so you know depends if you're looking if .

you're talking to on from neighbor is Opera .

and to that's what find our houses the same yeah I actually don't like working from home. And this might be just because I do IT and have done IT for years now. And I find that pretty painful.

But at the same time, I don't think i'd be willing to sacrifice the time with my kids that I would have to if I had the commute that I had in cement. Cisco, which was in our each way to turn from the office, learn what about IT? What's you're feeling?

Yeah, I think actually what you're saying is what i'm hearing from a lot of tech people right now to those with family is are just like IT was chaotic, but also really nice to be able to spend more time with your family during the pandemic in the immediate time afterwards. And it's it's killing them. Now I have to go back into the office, but I suppose they can just go work somewhere else for the C.

E. O of AWS. I like working from home as a writer, as an individual contributor who doesn't manage direct reports. I am just so much more productive and personally, I I don't see anything wrong with someone taking five, ten minutes, starring a break in between projects, in between calls to go put up a load of laundry and or something like that. I would like to go into the office on an events basis if someone was coming to town, if I had a specific meeting, if we were doing our wired happy hour, like we do sometimes on thursdays.

I al.

I have to go out to go a conference. That's great. But otherwise I I like my routine at home. I mean.

I do you think, ideally, companies are hiring people that they respect and think of as adults, and they allow they empower those people to make their own decisions about where they were best. But as with everything that feels like, there are certain people who always are gonna more flexibility than others and ultimately, lower level employees always have the least amount of flexibility. And even if they are working from him, they're often surveyed and they're not allowed to go to launch or in the day.

right? A lot of this is about surveilLance, which we're gna get to. But quickly, we should also talk about that enforcement because I think what you're describing so is really important. There are these Mandates, but we actually don't know how evenly they're being enforced.

There is some recent research from a real estate company that was reported in the last Angela's times of the last couple of weeks that says that that almost nobody enforces IT. It's like a less than twenty percent of companies with strict R, T, O policies are actually enforcing those policies. It's also noted in the story that, that may change. And I think that's probably true. I think you know the more we hear about the lack of enforcement, the more enforcement there is likely to be.

So we know what is happening right now with return to office in the tech world, but why is this happening? After the break, we're going to come back and unpack this complicated relationship between employers and employees in the tech industry right now. And worse are to talk about how are somewhat romantic notion of the life of tech workers has changed.

Hi everybody, i'm Michael colori, director of consumer tech and culture at wired.

I'm learn good, a senior writer at wired .

and i'm so he suffered director of business and industry at wired.

We are here to tell you about our new podcast, any valley. It's about the people, power and influence of silicon valley. Every week.

we get together to talk about a story or a phenomenon bubbling up in silicon valley and how that thing is probably affecting you.

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so you won't miss be. Welcome back to on Kenny valley. So this begged the question of why, why is all this happening now? Why is IT being demanded that tech workers return to the office? So someone who has covered not a silicon valley, but really the labor aspect of the valley, why is this happening?

My take is that these are really layoffs guise as return to office. Me, right now, companies have a ton of leverage because job market to system back, great people are scared of getting laid off. So when the company say come back, employees are often listening, but I think that could change in the future. Learn you've on a ton of reporting on how wild tech interviews have got in and why companies have as much leverages as they have. So looks good into that a little bit.

yes. So the layouts are absolutely part of this. During the pandemic, the company is swelled because they just started hiring up a bunch of people to try to me demand for their products and services. And then immediately after the pam, I am doing our school now because it's hard to say exactly when IT ended. Of course, they started shein workers and there's this tracker called layoffs dot AI that I check regularly and may not be wholly accurate or up to the minute.

But IT says that in twenty twenty three, two hundred and sixty four thousand, two hundred employees were laid off in the tech industry, and so far in this year, one hundred and forty three thousand, one hundred and forty two people have been laid off. This gives employers a lot of leverage. By the way, this isn't consistent with the broader economy like our jobs numbers as a nation are actually quite good.

But this creates its particular dynamic in the tech industry where people are just scrambling for jobs and the employers are basically saying, fine, you want this job. You're going to go through twelve rounds of interviews. You're going to accept a come package that's lower than what you expected. And oh, by the way, turns out we can demand you to come in the office three to five days week.

And yet everyone I talk to who's been asked to come in that often is job searching. And so companies have a lot of leverage right now. They also have very little loyalty. And my view is that when the job market gets a bit Better, we're going to see people jump to new companies and remote first companies really quick.

Yeah, it's it's definitely an incentive to be able to work remotely. And it's something that whenever a company demands that everybody comes back into the office, a lot of people leave and aren't mostly senior employees or people who maybe don't have the the ability to change their lifestyle is easily exactly what .

about runs for offices and delicious call IT the vibrancy of downtown wif. You're mark bn off and you've got this grant tower in the sky. What are you thinking? yeah. I mean.

often times these companies have signed a really expensive, as rent is often the biggest cost behind payroll. And you get taxi for having an office in a city. So IT behoves the companies in the CEO, in particular, to have an office downtown. And one of these citizen to ask everyone to, 嗯， as often as they can.

as learn pointed down on the first part of the show. I do come into the office a lot. I'm typically here around four days a week. And if you've been following the national news, you may heard that sanford isco s is having a lot of problems right now.

It's true that commercial real state is still struggling to get back up to prepare endemic levels as far as like how many people are in offices. So some day is when I come in to the office, IT feels really hollowed out like a lot of the restaurants that we used to go to for lunch or no longer around. There's a lot of the places in neighbor od that we used to rely on are just gone.

They're close and they're not going to reopen. So the incentive to come into the office is reduced. If you're one of those people who relies on things outside of the office during your day, like if you use to drop off your dry cleaning at the place down the street, or you went out to fast casual restaurant, if you like to go for coffee, even those things are gone in many communities that makes IT harder for people to come back.

Yeah, I have to say in this way, I kind of want to have my cake eda to, like, I want to be as a non tech worker. I want to be someone who can just work from home and do most of my writing for wired from the comfort of my home office. But I also would like to see a more viBrant downtown, just I don't know it's we live in a great city. I feel like IT could be greater.

Everyone else should have to go into the office yeah be able able to .

work for how like mark Better often. And I really are similar, you know, like I can just be at my house in hawaii and living the ohana. Is hahn a living the ohana? Well, everyone else go all the plea. Go to the office in the sky.

Thank you very much. That's actually a good point. The the difference between what the CEO can do and what the rank and file employees need to do. I am of the belief that the return to office Mandates are largely about power and control. And we want to know what you're doing to earn all this money that we're paying you.

Like if you're in the office, I have this I knew and I know how hard you're working, even though we have all of these tools that enable us to work from home and be surveyed and have our work checked and clock in and clock out from a remote location like being in the office is about, is about companies having control over their employees. I really think that's a big part of IT. And I think a lot of IT has to do with the fact that when everybody went home during the pandemic and started working there, IT really upset that baLance of power between the ranking file employees and the bedroom. And this this trend that we're seeing of companies is demanding employees to come back is an attempt of the board room to reset the table.

Know if I think is a good sign of that too. The VC are on board with return to office. yes. And you know, when the VC are all about R, T, O, they made literally want their returns. So you can adjuster that this earlier. But this idea when people were working remotely, if it's a little bit easier to be a rabel rouser too, and people started really expressing their bully in a way that you maybe felt they had to rain IT in.

Talk about that a little bit yeah, I mean, it's not totally clear to me that this is tied and a caul way the way that C. E. O. Seemed to think IT is.

But it's certainly true that when everyone was working from home, IT did coin side with the big in kind of worker power and worker LED movements, demanding that companies change a whole host of things from the products that they were working on and fewer military contracts to allowing people to have a day off a month to kind of recuperate their mental health. And I think eos and meta capital has started to get a little respect of that and they wanted to mix point to grab back power. But I think now we're having a much more honest conversation about what employees are there to do, what they mean to the company and how transactional that relationship actually is. And employees are trying to maximize their end of the transaction by the more flexibility and CEO are, the more from their side by saying come in or get out. We have to talk .

about how different this all is from the silicon valley culture setting workplace of twenty years ago. Yeah, like when I think about the big protagonist of silicon valley, I think of google like I think of google as an entity, I think of google as the company that fundamentally changed the way we access information. And I think of like the google bean bag era, people walking around in cross and if they wore shoes at all and having nap pods and free lunch, dinner, really good food.

by the way, yoga classes.

sure. IT was like academia, welling to authorities, basically, and felica campus, a place where people went to brain stem ideas. And I think a lot of companies tried to emulate that. And IT was a very fuzzy side of the tech industry. IT was kind of a .

zero interest rate phenomenon. Two companies were just rolling. Now all of these perks, they were trying to compete for talent by heavy in the most outrageous perks and benefits.

And work was becoming about more than just work, which is inherently has to be if you're allowing people to not just work at the office but see their doctor go to the gym to a whole host of other activities. Now again, we're seeing companies like google say, hey, we need to be focused. We need to be a lot more efficient.

And when employees are speaking out, we're seeing the executives come down on them a lot harder than they were previously. This was never a family, and now I think companies are being a lot more honest about that relationship. Employees are there to make the company money.

It's kind of like google is IBM now orgy harsh. It's a mature company. It's incredibly unsexy. So we're no longer living in A A google being back world. We're now in firmly in the R, T, O era.

Who loses out from from these Mandates? Like who suffers the most? Who is this most punitive .

he feeling from being bags to R, T, A is the title of some really bad buck about changing. But honestly, no, I mean, I think this falls hardest on caretakers, on working moms, people who are having to manage households, even people who work in tech don't have the money, especially their living in places like some friends, go for all of the help they need to take care of their kids and run a household. And so it's probably important for them to have flexibility to be able to court childcare, maybe make dinner once in a while and commuting into an office just takes all of that away and creates zero slack in the system and IT hits working parents really hard.

And ironically, let's bring you back to england. Musk again. You know, he's been a very vocal. It's called a pronaos, someone who was lamenting the lowering birthrate and talking about the need for people to procreate. And yet his work policies are some of the most friendly.

Not only that, he's directly cut the previously generous parental of policy that twitter now x used to.

I think we also have to look at the people who made big lifestyle changes during the pandemic years. Um you know we had very low interest rates. So a lot of people went out, bought a home um and maybe they moved an hour away or or even further for myself.

I was finally able to like pay closer attention to my health. I didn't have to commute anymore, so I spent that time running or I would make myself a healthy lunch. You know, I would think a lot of people did.

A lot of people sort of tune back into themselves during the pandemic. And now they are going back into the office, they are commuting, they have less time for themselves, and they're watching all of those gains slip away. Maybe speaking from experience here, but you know, IT IT is true that a lot of people like adJusting to working from home and said, oh, I like this. This is way Better. Now they're having to reckon with going back to the way that things were and it's quite painful.

Or even if it's not way Better, it's just Better than the alternative. Yeah, as one of those working parents, I would love to go into an office. And yet working from home is slightly Better given all of the tradeoff.

Yeah and so you bring up a good point about people who are paid high salaries and silicon valley. I also think this is very bad for people who are lower down the payscale who may have to commute from far outside of silicon valley, who may have to live two hours away from an office because that's what they can afford. They can't live in the heart of inferences co.

They have to live like far, far east by or even further away. And just speaking about this particular metropolis area, and now they've got to spend one, two and half hours on a bus to get into the office. It's just how are you getting good workout of people when you're forcing them to do that? So I think that there are a lot of ways that this is detrimental to the average tech worker. And yet, i'm not optimistic that it's going to change anytime.

My perspective is a little bit different. I think during moments where the job market has been really strong and it's for tech employees, we've seen workers have a lot more leverage. And I think we'll see one of those moments again. I think companies are competing for a talent. They're going to have to change their time.

Maybe the A I boom will spur some of that too. As we see people fighting for talent, we're going to take another quick break.

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Welcome back to un. Kenny vali, my human. And earlier that when you had to work from home, you brought all of your gear that was in the wire office, and you set IT up at home.

A lot of gear i've seen. Now we're seeing people do a little more hybrid work. And one thing we see a lot in differences go is people working from coffee shops. We were talking about this together day. And so we but why don't we do a little tech adequate segment where we asking another what you think is the appropriate not just the appropriate amount of gear you bring to a coffee shop? But like I was the general educate, when you're posting up there for hours a day, I going to start with you.

I would say if you can help IT don't post up there for hours a day um you know taking into account the fact that coffee shops or business that require high turn over in order to make money ah you know you buy your coffee, you drink your coffee, maybe you buy a second coffee and then you split you go somewhere else so don't see the all day is one thing um I think you if you need to make a phone call, you should step away.

But like you have to pick up your laptop to do that. There's a lot of people just making phone calls from the table in the coffee shop, and that's quite annoying as far as how much stuff you should bring. You need your headphones.

For the love of god, please bring your head phones. You can have phone on the table. You can every laptop on the table. Beyond that, I don't think you need anything else. I see my mouse, uh, you like a computer input devices .

mouses the ratio exactly.

I see second monitors. Sometimes people have the monitors, and yes, oh my god, yeah. People have the monitors that clip onto the top of the screen or sit next to the screen.

That's way too much. Don't do that. I don't even think you need power because I don't think you should be there long enough that you you need to plug in your laptop.

No, the coffee shops have spoken. Most of them don't even have outlets. They couldn't make IT more clear that they don't want you there a long time. So you what are .

your personal to kit boundaries around this? I mean, so i'm curious .

if because IT seems like we agree on this, like i'm with me, I think the only appropriate things to have at a cocktail or your laptop and the drink that you bought at the coffee shop IT actually reminds me as your kin had this um like crime researcher on the other week and he talking about the politics of disorder and he said disorder is the domination of public spaces for private purposes and that's what IT feels like to me when someone has their fluke and rise and their mouse and their keyboard like out at a coffee shop and they're sitting there for hours and hours when people are million around like trying to sit for a second and garbage drinking with someone.

The way that you guys are describing IT makes me think that there are people in coffee shops set up with like massive multi player online games set up like they've got their only and where or something there IT .

is literally the office. But this is my question for you guys. Is that a little test? Like is, are we being dismissive of people who don't have another space to work and that need the coffee shop is their office?

So that's what I was. I was going to say that there are people who don't have an office to go to, and maybe you really do have a home environment that is not fit for them to do work and they're like applying for jobs or something. And they really need to go sit somewhere and have access to wifi and make me some sustainable to do that.

Um I also tend to think that if you do that, if you're on your laptop for, let's say, an hour, which is typically maybe the amount of time that you would be there if you were just chatting with a friend like committing a friend for coffee and catching up are taking up the same amount of space. And also like some of the coffee shops we seen here in some Francisco there really very precious about IT. My you and I went for coffee recently.

I'm gonna blow up the coffee shop, but they do of rules around you, camping your laptops in on the weekends when they're busiest, and they are ably have the most turn over. The signs are like you a please like, bring, this is a zen environment. Please bring your most conscientious self to our sustainable coffee shop, where you will speak in muted tones. And also, we don't want to see any like silver unibody, aluminum m thing because they upset the function way of the place and be kind to your neighbor and also peace, love in earth or whatever. And i'm like, like, really, I just need to fire off some emails when I have a coffee.

I think my big things are, remember that you're human in the world and you're not here alone. This is not your living room. Fully recognizing that some people do need to be there for a long period of time, as you said, laun bring a power strip.

I was nice and share and share a lot of nice are IT. This has been really fun, I think, for us. I don't know about the folks who all have to head back into the office, but just know we're polling for you.

Thanks for listening to uncanny valley. If you like what you heard today, make sure to follow our show and read IT on your podcast APP of choice. Yes, we do read the reviews if you'd like to get in touch with us with any questions, comments or show suggestions, write to us at uncanny valley at wired dot com.

We can't want to hear from you. Today's was produced by kiana mogadon on our law at microsoft xx. This episode, Jordan bell is our executive producer.

Thanks also to producer Stephanie kau. k. Conde nast head of global audio is chis ban on will be back next week with an episode about silicon values obsession with living forever. Thanks again for listening.

Hi Emily, a fighter host to the new podcast wired politics lab. As the twenty twenty four election quickly approaches, conspiracy theory, disinformation campaign s and technological sands are everywhere online wire politics lab is here to cut through the noise and help you make sense of IT all join me every thursday as I talk to the people in the middle of the online political like twitch streamer hasan piker.

Every single aspect of a conflict has some kind of rational behind IT. You might not agree with that. You might not agree with the message, you might not agree with the means, but you have to look at IT as like a rational actor and make your analysis that way.

And pod save america, john favo and Tommy vitor.

I don't think we're going na fact check our way to Victory.

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