Big Tech Wants You Back in the Office

Zoë Schiffer: And I’m Zoë Schiffer, director of business and industry at WIRED.

Lauren Goode: This week, we’re talking about big tech’s, big return to office.

Michael Calore: Here come the employees back to work in the city.

[Archival audio]: The Bay Area’s biggest employer is asking their staff to come back to the office.

[Archival audio]: Salesforce one of the leaders in adopting remote work at the start of the pandemic.

Lauren Goode: 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 into the office? What’s behind it all? Okay, for today, we’re mostly going to talk about Amazon and also Salesforce. These are some of the biggest tech companies around. Salesforce isn’t as big as the others, but it is San Francisco’s biggest private sector employer. And combined, 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’s going to be a ripple effect. The fun times are over, folks. Do your laundry and actually see your kids time is over. Zoë, first tell us about Salesforce.

Zoë Schiffer: Salesforce asked specific teams to come back to the office four or five days a week starting October 1st. And this came after Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, said in 2022 that return to office mandates simply wouldn’t work.

Lauren Goode: Salesforce wasn’t the first though, because Apple, Meta, Google, they all started to change their work from home policies about a year ago.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, Apple was one of the first companies to actually have everyone work from home in the early days of the pandemic. But famously, Apple’s always been very pro in office work, and they’ve asked people to come back three days a week now. And they’ve been really strict on enforcement.

Lauren Goode: And Meta and Google, which are also some of the most influential companies in the valley when it comes to work culture, they now have similar policies. Mike, what’s the deal with Amazon?

Michael Calore: Amazon is going hard. They’re doing five days a week. If you work at Amazon, and I don’t mean if you work in the warehouse or if you’re a driver, but if you work in the corporate offices, like on the website building the infrastructure 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-

[Archival audio]: If it’s not for you, then that’s okay. You can go and find another company if you want to.

Michael Calore: Yes, pushing back on the pushback to five days a week by telling everybody they can just quit and go work somewhere else.

Lauren Goode: Yep. We have the upper hand here. Would you say that Amazon is no longer always day one, but always five days a week?

Michael Calore: You could say that.

Lauren Goode: Buh-dum-bump. What’s the word on the street? How are people in the valley feeling about these new mandates?

Zoë Schiffer: 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 a head during moments where something happens, national politics that people are talking about in the office and it’s creating a certain amount of tension or there are layoffs happening. There’s 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.

Lauren Goode: It sounds a little bit like what you’re saying is managers don’t like that all the kids are talking about them behind their backs. Do either of you feel like there’s just a little bit of hypocrisy in all of this from the tech companies? They make the software, they benefited greatly from how much we were all using their software during the pandemic. The promise of software has long been that it democratizes 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’re the ones saying, “Come back to the office. Butts and seats.” It just feels like the complete antithesis of the messaging we’ve heard for the past few years.

Michael Calore: 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 was Zoom, the company that makes the software that saved all of us while we were all working from home, is requiring some people to come back into the office a couple of days a week.

Lauren Goode: They are?

Michael Calore: Yeah. And to your point, Salesforce, which owns Slack, another tool that has enabled remote work to flourish around the world over the last five, 10 years is also requiring people to go back into the office.

Lauren Goode: Yeah, we all use Slack here. And it’s not like it was designed so that people sitting next to each other in their little cubicles could have better communication.

Michael Calore: Well, it works great for that.

Lauren Goode: It was designed because it says multiple channels that span the globe.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, it’s almost like these companies are saying we’re creating tools for other companies. But what we are doing is so important that we couldn’t possibly do it remote, we have to be in person face to face as often as possible.

Michael Calore: Yeah. I think one good outlier that we should highlight, there are several, but my favorite is Airbnb. This is a company that is putting its culture first in its workforce. Their whole idea is that you can go anywhere, you can travel anywhere, you can work from anywhere. They let their employees work from anywhere, which is pretty cool. Within limits, but pretty cool.

Lauren Goode: Is that because Brian Chesky himself wants to float around the globe and rent Airbnbs that have home gyms in them so he can keep up his weightlifting routine or whatnot?

Zoë Schiffer: Does have a strong weightlifting routine. I think Airbnb on paper does have the best policy. Theirs this very flexible. Employees can work from any office or their home. And they also have a certain amount of days a year that they can work from any Airbnb around the world, and any country around the world, which is cool. But I do think there are policies and then there are norms. And I would guess that at Airbnb, there are certain teams that just generally do come into the office every single day. And it matters if your direct manager is modeling remote work or if they’re coming in and then you feel the pressure to come in.

Lauren Goode: We should probably make a point to note that there’s a difference between what I like to say is atoms and bits, you’re a hardware company versus a software company. If you’re a Apple, Tesla Nvidia, if you make a car, an iPhone, a GPU, you need people there in office, in the labs, on the factory floor. If you’re building software tools, it’s probably a little bit different. And we’ve seen some of this ethos expressed from none other than, I’m looking at Zoë right now, your favorite person in the valley, Elon Musk. Take us there.

Zoë Schiffer: God, we really can’t get through a single episode-

Lauren Goode: No. No.

Zoë Schiffer: … without talking about him. We guarantee, for all of our loyal listeners of the new show, Uncanny Valley, we will probably be mentioning Elon Musk at least once a week.

Lauren Goode: Fortunately, he is a main character, as much as I hate to say it. But yeah, Elon Musk has never been a fan of remote work. And this makes sense because, as you said, his companies were building rockets and cars historically. But he took that ethos to Twitter when he bought it and basically forced a bunch of people to resign and laid them off by telling people that they had to come into the office. I remember one time he sent an email at 2:30 AM, and he wanted people in the office later that day. And he specifically said, “Even if you have to fly here.” And I actually had a source who was in New York at the time on a trip and bought a plane ticket later that day. I remember his girlfriend was pissed, and he was like, “We’re going to the airport,” and flew back instantly so he could make the time that Elon had laid out for everyone. And Elon really used it as a test. He was like, “If you’re hardcore, if you want to be part of this new culture, then you will be in the office. And if you don’t, then,” like the AWS CEO said, “there are other companies you can work for.” And he gave permission, I would say, to a lot of other CEOs to be a little more strict than they had been in the past. And this happened to coincide with a downturn in the job market. And so companies had a lot more leverage.

Zoë Schiffer: 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’m 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?

Lauren Goode: This is such a fascinating question because one thing that’s really struck me as companies have been emailing their employees and telling them to come in is they haven’t really been sharing a whole lot of internal information about Y. They say kind of high level things about the need to build culture in person and how it’s core to their identity to have people working, but they haven’t said things like, “Productivity has declined by X percent.”

Zoë Schiffer: When I talked to a head of people at one of the bigger companies, what they told me it was that the data is mixed. It’s not clear that working in person makes someone more productive than having a hybrid schedule. And in fact, when we look at the research, it shows that there are enormous benefits to hybrid work schedules. There’s a 2024 study from Stanford that found that, I’m quoting 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 too. And it does seem like hybrid schedules are the sweet spot.

Lauren Goode: When we were putting together our thoughts for this episode, I did post something on LinkedIn about RTO and how people were feeling about it. And someone from Yelp reached out to me. And apparently, for the past couple of years, Yelp has been doing some data analysis on remote work, and they think remote work is a good thing. They talked about how it promotes an engaged and inclusive workforce. And basically, it says that they thrive, their employees thrive. And I think that Yelp is not alone in that. Yelp is a big company, of course, but you’ll also hear from startup founders who say that their company would not exist if they didn’t have a, quote, unquote, “distributed workforce,” because that enables 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 tech companies, workers who are building families there, who are investing more into the local economy. How do both of you feel about working from home?

Michael Calore: When we all first started working remote all the time in 2020, 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 tech set up that you’re used to. And I’m sure everybody who has returned to the office is feeling this way. Now I have two mechanical keyboards, I have two monitors, I have two pairs of headphones.

Lauren Goode: You’re here in the office almost every day.

Michael Calore: Yeah, I’m here three or four days a week. And that’s another thing, 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 come into the office. I have no kids, I don’t have really any other obligations. And I should also note I have an easy commute. 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 child care reasons. And for them, it’s very, very difficult.

Lauren Goode: And Zoë, you’ve been remote for a while. You live in the central coast of California.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. Central Coast.

Lauren Goode: Is that what it’s called?

Zoë Schiffer: How dare you.

Lauren Goode: Is it called the Central Coast?

Zoë Schiffer: Southern California.

Lauren Goode: Is it SoCal?

Zoë Schiffer: Well, it depends. If you’re looking at a map or if you’re talking to someone from Santa Barbara, but-

Lauren Goode: Zoë’s next door neighbor is Oprah in Montecito. That’s what you need to know.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. We’re best friends. And our houses are the same size. Thank you for asking. 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 it 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 San Francisco, which was an hour each way to and from the office. Lauren, what about you? What’s your feeling on remote work?

Lauren Goode: Yeah, I think, actually, what you’re saying is what I’m hearing from a lot of tech people right now too. Those with families are just like, it was chaotic but also really nice to be able to spend more time with your family during the pandemic and the immediate time afterwards. And it’s killing them now to have to go back into the office, but I suppose they can just go work somewhere else if you’re the CEO 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 don’t see anything wrong with someone taking five, 10 minutes during a break in between projects or in between calls to go put a load of laundry in 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.

Michael Calore: Ice cream social.

Lauren Goode: I have to go out to a conference, that’s great. But otherwise, I like my routine at home.

Zoë Schiffer: I do think ideally, companies are hiring people that they respect and think of as adults. And they empower those people to make their own decisions about where they work best. But, as with everything, it feels like there are certain people who always are going to have more flexibility than others. And ultimately, lower level employees always have the least amount of flexibility. And even if they’re working from home, they’re often surveilled and they’re not allowed to go do laundry during the day.

Lauren Goode: Right. A lot of this is about surveillance, which we’re going to get to. But quickly, we should also talk about that enforcement, because I think what you’re describing, Zoë, is really important. There are these mandates, but we actually don’t know how evenly they’re being enforced.

Michael Calore: There was some recent research from a real estate company that was reported in the Los Angeles Times over the last couple of weeks that says that almost nobody enforces it. It’s less than 20% of companies with strict RTO 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 the more we hear about the lack of enforcement, the more enforcement there is likely to be.

Lauren Goode: 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 we’re also going to talk about how our somewhat romantic notion of the life of tech workers has changed. Welcome back to Uncanny Valley. This begs the question of why? Why is all this happening now? Why is it being demanded that tech workers return to the office? Zoë, as someone who has covered not just Silicon Valley but really the labor aspect of the valley, why is this happening?

Zoë Schiffer: My take is that these are really layoffs disguised as return to office mandates. Right now, companies have a ton of leverage because the job market just isn’t that great and people are scared of getting laid off, so when the companies say come back, employees are often listening. But I think that could change in the future. Lauren, you’ve done a ton of reporting on how wild tech interviews have gotten and why companies have as much leverage as they have, so let’s get into that a little bit.

Lauren Goode: Yeah. The layoffs are absolutely part of this. During the pandemic, tech companies swelled because they just started hiring up a bunch of people to try to meet demand for their products and services. And then immediately after the pandemic, I’m doing air quotes right now because it’s hard to say exactly when it ended, of course, they started shedding workers. And there’s this tracker called Layoffs.ai that I check regularly. It may not be wholly accurate or up to the minute, but it says that in 2023, 264,200 employees were laid off in the tech industry. And so far in this year, 143,142 people have been laid off. This gives employers a lot of leverage. And by the way, this isn’t consistent with the broader economy. Our jobs numbers as a nation are actually quite good. But this creates this 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 12 rounds of interviews. You’re going to accept a comp package that’s lower than what you expected. And, oh, by the way, it turns out we can demand you to come in the office three to five days a week.”

Zoë Schiffer: And yet everyone I talk to who’s being asked to come in that often is job searching. And so while 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.

Michael Calore: Yeah, 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 they mostly senior employees or people who maybe don’t have the ability to change their lifestyle as easily?

Zoë Schiffer: Exactly.

Lauren Goode: What about rents for offices? And let’s just call it the vibrancy of downtowns. If you’re Marc Benioff and you’ve got this grand tower in the sky, what are you thinking?

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, oftentimes these companies have signed really expensive leases. Rent is often the biggest cost behind payroll. And you get tax incentives for having an office in a city, and so it behooves the companies and the CEOs in particular to have an office downtown in one of these cities and to ask everyone to come in as often as they can.

Michael Calore: As Lauren pointed out 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 have heard that San Francisco is having a lot of problems right now. It’s true that commercial real estate is still struggling to get back up to pre-pandemic levels as far as how many people are in offices, so some days when I come into the office, it feels really hollowed out. A lot of the restaurants that we used to go to for lunch are no longer around. There’s a lot of the places in the neighborhood that we used to rely on are just gone. They’re closed and they’re not going to reopen. 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. If you used to drop off your dry cleaning at the place down the street or you went out to this fast, casual restaurant or if you like to go out for coffee, even, those things are gone in many communities. It makes it harder for people to come back.

Lauren Goode: Yeah. I have to say, in this way, I want to have my cake and eat it too. 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. I don’t know. We live in a great city. I feel like it could be greater.

Zoë Schiffer: Everyone else should have to go into the office.

Lauren Goode: Yeah, and that way-

Zoë Schiffer: … and Lauren should be able to work from home, God.

Lauren Goode: In that way, Marc Benioff and I really are similar. I can just be at my house in Hawaii and living the Ohana.

Zoë Schiffer: Ohana.

Lauren Goode: Is it the Ohana?

Zoë Schiffer: Yes.

Lauren Goode: Living the Ohana life while everyone else go… All the plebes go to the office in the sky. Thank you very much.

Michael Calore: Okay, that’s actually a good point, the difference between what the CEOs 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. If you’re in the office, I have eyes on you 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 surveilled and have our work checked and clock in and clock out from a remote location, being in the office 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 rank and file employees and the boardroom. And this trend that we’re seeing of companies demanding employees to come back is an attempt of the boardroom to reset the table.

Lauren Goode: You know what I think is a good sign of that too? The VCs are on board with return to office. And you know when the VCs are all about RTO, they literally want their returns. And Zoë, you kind of gestured at this earlier, but this idea of when people were working remotely, it was a little bit easier to be a rabble rouser too. And people started really expressing their beliefs in a way that CEOs maybe felt like they had to rein it in. Talk about that a little bit.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, it’s not totally clear to me that this is tied in a causal way the way that CEOs seem to think it is, but it’s certainly true that when everyone was working from home, it did coincide with this big swell in 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 recuperate their mental health. And I think CEOs and venture capitalists started to get a little resentful of that, and they wanted, to Mike’s 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 demanding more flexibility, and CEOs are demanding more from their side by saying, “Come in or get out.”

Lauren Goode: We have to talk about how different this all is from the Silicon Valley culture setting workplace of 20 years ago. When I think about the big protagonist of Silicon Valley, I think of Google. 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 the Google beanbag era, people walking around in Crocs, if they wore shoes at all, and having nap pods and free lunch and dinner. Really good food, by the way.

Michael Calore: Yoga classes.

Lauren Goode: Sure. It was like academia well into your thirties, basically, and felt like a campus, a place where people went to brainstorm ideas. And I think a lot of companies tried to emulate that and it was a very fuzzy side of the tech industry.

Zoë Schiffer: It was a zero interest rate phenomenon too. Companies were just rolling out all of these perks. They were trying to compete for talent by having the most outrageous perks and benefits. And work was becoming about more than just work, which it inherently has to be if you’re allowing people to not just work at the office but see their doctor, go to the gym, do 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.

Lauren Goode: It’s like Google is IBM now or GE.

Michael Calore: Harsh.

Lauren Goode: It’s a mature company. It’s incredibly unsexy. We’re no longer living in a googly beanbag world. We’re now firmly in the RTO era. Who loses out from these mandates? Who suffers the most? Who is this most punitive for?

Zoë Schiffer: I feel like From Beanbags to RTO is the title of some really bad book about changing all this. But on a serious note, 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 if they’re living in places like San Francisco, for all of the help they need to take care of their kids and run a household, and so it’s incredibly important for them to have flexibility, to be able to coordinate childcare, maybe make dinner once in a while. And commuting into an office just takes all of that away. It creates zero slack in the system and it hits working parents really hard.

Lauren Goode: And ironically, let’s bring it back to Elon Musk again, he’s been a very vocal, let’s call it, a pronatalist, someone who is lamenting the lowering birth rate and talking about the need for people to procreate, and yet his work policies are some of the most unfriendly.

Zoë Schiffer: Not only that, but he’s directly cut the previously generous parental leave policy that Twitter, now X, used to have.

Michael Calore: I think we also have to look at the people who made big lifestyle changes during the pandemic years. We had very low interest rates, so a lot of people went out and bought a home. And maybe they moved an hour away or even further. For myself, I was finally able to 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. I think a lot of people did. A lot of people sort of tuned back into themselves during the pandemic. And now, they are going back into the office, they’re commuting, they have less time for themselves, and they’re watching all of those gains slip away. May be speaking from experience here. But it is true that a lot of people like adjusted 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.

Zoë Schiffer: Or even if it’s not way better, it’s just better than the alternative. 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 trade-offs.

Lauren Goode: And Zoë, you bring up a good point about people who are paid high salaries in Silicon Valley. I also think this is very bad for people who are lower down the pay scale 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 San Francisco, they have to live far, far East Bay or even further away, just speaking about this particular metropolitan area. And now they’ve got to spend, what, two and a half hours on a bus to get into the office? How are you getting good work out of people when you’re forcing them to do that? 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 soon.

Michael Calore: Neither am I.

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

Lauren Goode: Maybe the AI boom will spur some of that too, as we see people fighting for talent. We’re going to take another quick break. Welcome back to Uncanny Valley. Mike, you mentioned earlier that when you had to work from home, you brought all of your gear that was in the WIRED office and you set it up at home. It’s a lot of gear; I’ve seen it. Now we’re seeing people do a little more hybrid work, and one thing we see a lot in San Francisco is people working from coffee shops. We were talking about this the other day, and so we thought, why don’t we do a little tech etiquette segment where we ask each other what you think is the appropriate… Not just the appropriate amount of gear you bring to a coffee shop, but what’s the general etiquette when you’re posting up there for hours a day? Mike, I’m going to start with you.

Michael Calore: I would say, if you can help it, don’t post up there for hours a day. Taking into account the fact that coffee shops are a business that require high turnover in order to make money, you buy your coffee, you drink your coffee, maybe you buy a second coffee, and then you split and you go somewhere else. Don’t sit there all day is one thing. I think if you need to make a phone call, you should step away, but 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 headphones. You can have your phone on the table, you can have your laptop on the table. Beyond that, I don’t think you need anything else. I see mice, mouses, computer input devices mouses.

Lauren Goode: Right. Not of the Ratatouille kind.

Michael Calore: Exactly. I see second monitors sometimes. People have the monitors that-

Zoë Schiffer: No.

Lauren Goode: Stop it.

Michael Calore: Yep.

Zoë Schiffer: Oh, my God.

Michael Calore: 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 need to plug in your laptop.

Zoë Schiffer: 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 for a long time.

Lauren Goode: Zoë, what are your personal etiquette boundaries around this?

Zoë Schiffer: I’m curious if… Because it seems like we agree on this. I’m with Mike; I think the only appropriate things to have at a coffee shop are your laptop and the drink that you bought at the coffee shop. It actually reminds me, Ezra Klein had this crime researcher on the other week, and he was talking about the politics of disorder. And he said, “Disorder is the domination of public spaces for private purposes.” That’s what it feels like to me when someone has their fucking riser and their mouse and their keyboard out at a coffee shop and they’re sitting there for hours and hours when people are milling around trying to sit for a second and grab a drink and chat with someone.

Lauren Goode: The way that you guys are describing it makes me think that there are people in coffee shops set up with massive multiplayer online game setups, like they’ve got their Alienware or something there.

Zoë Schiffer: It is literally their office. But this is my question for you guys. Is it elitist? Are we being dismissive of people who don’t have another space to work and that need the coffee shop as their office?

Lauren Goode: That’s what I was going to say. 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 applying for jobs or something and they really need to go sit somewhere and have access to wifi and maybe some sustenance to do that. I also tend to think 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, meeting a friend for coffee and catching up, you’re taking up the same amount of space. And also, some of the coffee shops we see here in San Francisco, they’re very precious about it. Mike, you and I went for coffee recently. I’m not going to blow up the coffee shop, but they do have rules around you can’t bring your laptops in on the weekends when they’re busiest and they’re probably going to have the most turnover. The signs are, “Please 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 silver unibody, aluminum thing because they upset the feng shui of the place. And be kind to your neighbor. And also, peace, love on earth,” or whatever. And I’m like, really? I just need to fire off some emails while I have a coffee.

Michael Calore: I think my big things are remember that you’re a 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, Lauren. Bring a power strip.

Lauren Goode: Oh, that’s nice. And share the love.

Michael Calore: That’s so nice.

Lauren Goode: All right, 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 pulling for you. Thanks for listening to Uncanny Valley. If you like what you heard today, make sure to follow our show and rate 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 uncannyvalley@WIRED.com. We can’t wait to hear from you. Today’s show was produced by Kyana Moghadam. Amar Lal at Macrosound mixed this episode. Jordan Bell is our executive producer. Thanks also to executive producer Stephanie Kariuki. Condé Nast’s head of global audio is Chris Bannon. We’ll be back next week with an episode about Silicon Valley’s obsession with living forever. Thanks again for listening.