Remote work is faltering —Slack and Zoom might be to blame.

Why our remote tools fail to live up to their potential, and how they easily could.

Sean Dexter
12 min readMay 26, 2024

The dream of a fully remote tech industry is dead.

The pandemic that was a once-in-a-lifetime inflection point for that dream now sits squarely in the rear-view mirror. Return-to-office mandates are taking their turn to sweep pathogen-like across our industry.

Already on the RTO list:

  • Meta
  • Microsoft
  • Amazon
  • Morgan Stanley
  • Bank of America
  • Goldman Sachs
  • JPMorgan Chase
  • Wells Fargo
  • John Deere
  • …and many more.

…and the list is only growing.

“Fully remote” may soon again be a niche perk that some startups offer to compete against the big guys, which is a pretty a far cry from the“industry default” that some imagined would be our new future post-pandemic.

How did we get here?

Well, various CEO’s all seem to echo each-other when describing RTO as better in the following ways:

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Sean Dexter

Staff Product Designer @ Walmart Data Ventures. Prev: Meta, HubSpot & Cigna. I write about UX, agile, & product. linkedin.com/in/seandexter1/