Every day or so, I receive 3 or 4 notifications about the same article, usually from the New York Times or CNBC.com. For the most part, they’re annoying but harmless — Kevin O’Leary is annoyed at quiet quitting, or some sort of piece about why the office may or may not be dead. These pieces are frustrating but have become a form of white noise — I do not believe they actually harm anyone anymore, because they are so nakedly, cravenly agenda-driven, pushed by outlets and editors that see an opportunity to support their advertisers or friends who have not experienced a moment of real work in their lives.

In the last 24 hours, though, I have experienced true mental heat-death at the hands of the New York Times, with the single least-knowing piece on remote work I’ve read in a year, entitled “So You Wanted To Get Work Done at the Office?”

For some history — the writer, Emma Goldberg, has been part of the Times’ anti-remote standard bearing for a while, but had improved over the course of a few months into someone that at the very least tried to speak with workers. Sadly, this latest piece is, and I do not say this lightly, one of the silliest things I’ve ever read, especially in the context of it being written by someone who has championed anti-remote causes for the best part of a year.

Let’s dig in!

… when more than 50 million people started working from home in March 2020, some of them discovered a luxury their companies couldn’t offer: peace and quiet. As executives tighten their return-to-office policies, workers are finding their days filled with more interruption. The workplace, they’ve discovered, isn’t always the ideal place for doing work.

“I have my larger to-dos but I just have to address things as they come up,” said Jennifer Choi, who manages finances and operations at an arts nonprofit in New York, and finds herself fielding office maintenance, technology and human resources questions during the four days each week she spends in the office.

Gee fucking whiz! It’s almost as if the straight year of “we are inevitably going back to the office” created a situation where, based on absolutely nothing, people were forced back to the office. And despite the obvious warnings from millions of people working remotely, nobody at the Times considered that — egads! — working at the office isn’t great for productivity!

As managers try to draw people back to the office, they’re wrestling with how to rebuild a sense of community without taking away the focus that often came with remote work. Meanwhile, some workers are getting nostalgic for the silence they had at home, especially because many of the office changes aimed at bringing people back often make it harder to concentrate. (One company, for example, added a rock climbing wall.)

Research tends to back up the squishy sense that people get more done outside the office. A study from Stanford of a 16,000-person travel agency found that call center employees working remotely were 13 percent more productive than their in-person colleagues. Another study of 1,600 professionals found that they wrote 8 percent more code working a hybrid schedule compared with being fully in the office.

I want to scream when I read “the squishy sense that people get more done outside the office,” because it suggests that the data cited in the following sentence is somehow trying to prove something strange or questionable, rather than “a thing that 50 million people did.” To be clear, Goldberg has been writing on this subject month after month under the guise of “fair and balanced reporting” that mostly equates to “I found enough senior people who like the office to continue suppressing remote work.”

But what if she were wrong? Horribly wrong in a way that was immensely predictable?

“We freed people of group think, we freed them of some exclusion and disrespect, we freed them of micromanaging, deafening and distracting noise,” said Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. “We have literally a mountain of evidence that if you let individuals generate ideas alone, you not only get more ideas, you get better ideas.”

But many executives feel strongly about the benefits of the office: the opportunities to find mentors, build relationships and brainstorm. Some workers also struggle to be productive at home, especially those with care-taking responsibilities. So companies are going to extremes to bring quiet into the office.

I want to pause here and get even angrier, because in the same article where Goldberg and the Times say that “remote work is squishy, as proven by this massive study and millions of people doing it,” she then proceeds to say that the office is good for mentorship, relationship development and brainstorming with absolutely no academic foundation. While remote work’s efficacy is “squishy,” the office is good, important and useful. No need for evidence here, just take her at her word.

The offensive part about this article — and the articles that I’m sure will follow — is that it acts as if nobody could possibly have seen this coming. The Times, Journal and other major media outlets have spent a year saying that we “need” to and “must” return to the office, and that if we don’t return it’ll be bad for reasons that they promise are salient and not entirely fictional.

My next prediction for the workplace media is that we’re going to see a slew of articles like these — befuddled pieces that say “why isn’t the office working?” filled with anecdotes about how the office isn’t quite as productive “as it used to be,” with absolutely no foundation in data to suggest it ever was.

What will truly boil my blood — and the blood of every remote worker — will be how this is quickly turned on those who championed remote work. Remote work will be blamed for “the breakdown of the office,” as “demanding” knowledge workers will be held accountable for destroying office-based mentorship and camaraderie that never existed.

We are now in the post-office world, where the corporate interests that own vast real estate empires are now looking for a way to gracefully accept defeat. And they’re going to do so by blaming people that are pushing for a more positive, equitable and productive workplace.