Forcing people back to the office was a choice. I’m making mine.

Here’s why I won’t RTO.

I cleaned out my desk a little over five years ago. It feels like last week.

I was leading engineering at ForUsAll, a fintech company that seeks to make it easier for small businesses to offer retirement plans for their employees. The co-founder, David, had been wearing a mask around the office for a month; he was following the growth of COVID-19 closely. The then-CEO agreed to close the office if the number of cases in San Francisco went beyond some small threshold; when it did, we picked up our laptops and left.

Of course, we all know what happened next: lockdowns, sourdough starters, and remote working on a scale never seen before.

I prefer remote working and always have. My first startup was mostly remote: my co-founder was in Edinburgh for a while, and spent some time in Vancouver, while I was in Oxford with occasional long stretches in California. I worked at my kitchen table, drank my own coffee, and set my own hours. It was flexible depending on what was going on at the time, and undoubtedly productive. When I joined a startup based in Austin but worked from Edinburgh and Berkeley, it felt like a natural progression.