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A Funny Thing Happen on The Way Back to The Office
The big Return to Office (RTO) is not going to plan
I live in the Seattle area and for those that don’t live around here (It really does rain a lot), may not know that it has become like a second Silicon Valley mainly due to the presence of Microsoft and Amazon. Many of the high-tech companies that are based out of Silicon Valley have made major moves into the Seattle area to feed off the readily available engineering talent. Google, Facebook (Meta), and Apple all now have huge offices here with thousands of employees. As you can imagine, our traffic was getting substantially worse right before the pandemic set in.
When Covid hit, the downtown core emptied out to the chagrin of so many businesses that catered to the large workforce. The interstates that feed downtown Seattle became empty as people stayed home. Now, in 2022 things are slowly coming back to pre-pandemic levels. Recently, things have started to speed up as more and more companies request that their workers come back to the office. My company (that is not in tech, but I am a software engineer in IT), also gave us a warning that we would be required to come back to the office one day a week. Same with my wife who works for one of these large tech companies as a manager. She was supposed to go into the office 2–3 days a week to “be with…
