There are a whole lot of issues around commercial property and corporate taxes that interplay to mean that occupancy is heavily encouraged.

Same reason they all had layoffs at the same time; activist investors want them to. Probably because these investors own a lot of commercial real estate as well.

Also, it's probably a good way for them to reduce their workforce without publicly announcing layoffs.

Power hungry middle managers mainly

There is a tangible benefit in certain jobs from being in the same space. I work in a place where we are constantly training new employees with OJT. Continuous improvement and learning new things from peers is important for our future capabilities. Knowledge sharing is a big part of my job.

We rotate in-office and work-from-home weeks and there is a considerable reduction in questions asked and just general training-type or knowledge sharing interactions. Being able to ask a question or provide guidance directly, in-person, and off the cuff is easier than messaging or calling. I definitely get more work done at home, but sacrifice future efficiency of myself, my peers, and the department as a whole because of the reduction of knowledge sharing interactions.

I think we have struck a good balance with the rotation in the time being. We could certainly try to figure out ways to make knowledge sharing and training easier and more effective to do remotely, but as our culture is now, working from home makes it less effective.

There's a thing that cult leaders often do where they make increasingly stricter demands on their followers, it reduces the number of members, but the one who remain are much more easily controlled (because they self selected for that trait. I think something similar is part of the picture for these companies. The people who simply do as they are told and come back (as opposed to looking for new jobs) are more easily controlled by the company.

Also you can't always assume that just because a company is really big it's always making the most best, always correct choices. Like GE managed with "vitality curves."

1. The companoes are locked into commercial real estate

2 ) Working at home is making the middle manager obsolete. I think google's ceo said that he didn't know how to promote managers he cant see. I personally think mamagement is corporate welfare.

I know someone who works in IT at a place where they found that keystrokes rose 40% in office and significantly more work was completed as measured by story points. Keystrokes aren’t a great way to measure productivity, but it’s very suspicious that people somehow had to type less when they have to type to talk to anyone and often don’t have to in office.

It’s not perfectly scientific, but businesses pretty much never have scientific data to work with and the evidence they have says people overall are more productive in office.