I can see this as the main reason why. Top level executives didn’t even have a standard work from home exception for bad weather (I’m in New England) and we had to work individually with our direct manager to get WFH approved when it was blizzard conditions. Luckily my manager isn’t a douche.

For a tech company, they are very slow to adopt modern convenience benefits for their employees outside of “free drinks and cafeteria food.”

"Treating you like peasants demanding whatever they can get away with" is exactly how I feel about having to spend 4-7 hours every day on Zoom. Collaborations involving remote participants are excruciating and move very slowly. The workload hasn't decreased to compensate. We've just privatized onto everyone the costs of remoteness, in the form of longer hours and Zoom fatigue. Any union contract I'm going to accept needs to protect me from that.

This job used to be about solving hard problems with brilliant people, now it's about barking dogs and echo cancelation artifacts.

This past year or two would have been prime time to do that while labor power was at an apex, but once the recession hits that opportunity will be long gone. When the trend flips back to employer power dominant then WFH will no longer be as prevalent as it has been. Not to mention the chipping away at untold amounts of perks and benefits that tech workers, primarily Silicon Valley ones, have taken for granted for the past decade. This was a lost opportunity, a real "the ants and the grasshopper" situation.