Articles that are basically, "Welp, we no longer need office buildings, covid proves it" are overreactions to the forced change in this conversation:

Employee: "Can I do my job from home?"
Boss: "No."
E: "Why?"
B: No reason/That's the way it's always been done/Because I said so.

I think it's safe to assume office spaces of the future will look different in layout, technology, size, & number of people in them. Will they go away completely? Of course not

Do we benefit from all being in the same room sometimes? Yep

Does it also not matter other times? Yep

The nice thing about this forced remote change is that companies have had to figure out how to make remote work, work. Plenty of companies figured this out years ago to save costs, to hire wherever, to take advantage of talent, or to just be remote for their own reasons.

Figuring out what work looks like post-covid is going to be a challenge. I think it should be looked at as series of low-cost experiments to the extent that a business can do them, based on what truly matters to make their business function and not as a big, scary binary choice.

This thread was inspired by a conversation with @_toddoh https://twitter.com/_toddoh/status/1260547129321426945