The drive to push US workers back into offices is fizzling out, according to Stanford economist Nick Bloom.

Bloom, one of the academics behind WFH Research, recently proclaimed return to office (RTO) mandates a dead end. His evidence? Stats showing the decline in the percentage of paid full days worked from home since the height of the pandemic has flatlined. In 2023, that percentage stayed steady at around 30%.

Supporting remote workers falls squarely into IT’s lap, and polls have shown tech workers tend to be particularly enthusiastic about working from home, so RTO’s ultimate fate is one of the most important factors shaping the future of work for IT and cybersecurity specialists. IT Brew chatted with Bloom about why he thinks RTO “died at the end of 2022” and won’t be coming back anytime soon.

On why RTO is “hugely profitable”

A typical firm, the numbers are it costs about 50% of somebody’s annual salary to have them quit, get a new person, train them up. So if you have a $100,000-a-year worker, and because you forced them back to the office five days a week, they quit, and you’ve actually just lost 50k…

Read more here.—TM

Do you work in IT or have information about your IT department you want to share? Email [email protected]. Want to go encrypted? Ask Tom for his Signal.

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Don’t bansomware.

That’s the message from the majority of respondents to a Washington Post poll asking cyber experts if banning payments to ransomware gangs at the government level is the right move for the industry. The findings were published December 19.

Ban bans. Three-quarters of the experts surveyed—74%—were against a ban, telling the Post that such a move would only make it more likely that victims of attacks would pay the ransoms illicitly. Amy Hogan-Burney, Microsoft’s general manager and associate general counsel for cybersecurity policy and protection, told the Post that whether or not to ban payments was a “complicated issue.”

“While government should empower companies to avoid paying ransoms, a total ban runs the risk of penalizing cyberattack victims,” Hogan-Burney said. “In some cases, critical infrastructure, like hospitals, face no choice but to pay so that they can keep vital systems running.”

Read more here.—EH

Do you work in IT or have information about your IT department you want to share? Email [email protected].