> The costs for employers, however, can outweigh the benefits of attracting and retaining talent sometimes produced through virtual work policies: 85% of managers believe the shift to hybrid work “has made it challenging to have confidence that employees are being productive,” according to a study from Microsoft. I feel for them. Some people truly are less productive when they don’t fear someone is looking over their shoulder at all times. You leave them home alone all day with only the occasional meeting or check‐in and they end up web surfing and wasting time. I will never go back to commuting and working in a shared office space though. I was frustrated for years at the ridiculous answers I would get when telling managers we were all wasting time and money (lots of money). I was celebrating when the COVID lock downs finally forced those same managers to bite the bullet and let us work where we please. I will never work for any company that even suggests they might start demanding some regular in‐office attendance. There are a lot of people like me now. We are a pool of potential employees you lock yourself out of if you go in‐office. That’s what it comes down to with these managers. Some of them never let go of the idea of stepping out of their private office to wander through a noisy, shared office space they are forcing everyone else to work in (managers have private offices, of course). You have to make them experience painful thoughts of losing people whenever they imagine forcing us back into that noisy office fantasy.