Pattern Matching

Remote Work Isn’t the End of Silicon Valley, but It Is the End of Something

A golden era of tech offices sputters to a close

Employees work in Facebook’s “War Room,” during a media demonstration on October 17, 2018, in Menlo Park, California. Photo: Noah Berger/Getty Images

Welcome back to Pattern Matching, OneZero’s weekly newsletter that puts the week’s most compelling tech stories in context.

The notion that remote work is the way of the future is hardly new. It long predates the pandemic and went mainstream in the United States almost as soon as the lockdowns began. (I made the case in early March that the coronavirus response would be a preview of society’s self-isolating future — a future that threatens to exacerbate class divides, among other far-reaching effects.)

Still, it’s remarkable just how suddenly some of the world’s largest tech companies have embraced that future. Last week, as covered in this newsletter, Twitter announced that it would allow its employees to work from home permanently. This week, the floodgates opened.

The Pattern

You can take the techies out of Silicon Valley…

• In 2013, Yahoo’s former CEO Marissa Mayer made a controversial move to ban her employees from working from home. The idea that remote work was antithetical to collaboration quickly gained traction in the corporate world, and by 2017 it…