Companies have been giving all manner of justifications in getting employees back into offices, but Peter Thiel has the most direct explanation as to why corporations seem to have soured on remote work.
Peter Thiel has said that Silicon Valley realized that employees working remotely weren’t actually doing much work. “Maybe we’re in a very different moment from five years ago, pre-Covid,” he said in an interview. “I think it’s the statistic is something like 94 percent of the (US) federal government workers are working from home. And you know what people learned in Silicon Valley where you had remote work for one or two years, was that remote work was not working,” he said.
“When people didn’t come into the office, they weren’t working. And initially it was a sign of how powerful the workers were. They could insist on not working. And then after two years, the companies just fired a bunch of these people and reasserted control because you realize, wow, there were all these people we hired and they’re not working. And it doesn’t matter, and we can just get rid of them,” he continued.
Thiel’s comments come a year after several tech companies, including Google, Meta and Amazon had collectively laid off tens of thousands of workers. The layoffs had come in late 2022, around when Covid had just ended. Thiel’s comments seemed to suggest that top tech companies realized that most employees working remotely were doing very little work at all. As such, it meant that it wouldn’t matter very much if they were let go, and thousands of employees were fired as a result.
It turns out that these companies were right — there was no discernable difference to the operations of top tech companies after they’d let go of tens of thousands of people, suggesting that these people weren’t doing anything very useful to begin with. After these layoffs, these companies began tightening the screws on remote work — Amazon officially ended remote work for all employees from the beginning of 2025, and Meta and Google too have been nudging employees back into offices. And with the biggest names in tech seemingly giving up on remote work, it appears that the remote work phenomenon might continue fading away as the pandemic recedes further and further into the distance.