RTO vs The REAL Revenge Of The Nerds

New RTO regulations in the tech industry are emerging at an interesting time. Just as new technology is transitioning from pure research and development to early adoption (AI), we are debating whether working in an office truly constitutes "work." I predict that the opposition to RTO will not come from middle managers struggling to balance work and home life, or from new employees unaccustomed to the joys of long commutes, but from the core of the tech industry: the Nerds.

You see, as somewhat of a Nerd myself (yes, I did attend a Star Trek convention in my youth, and I have held a giant turkey leg at a Renaissance Faire), I long ago learned to respect the awesome power and creativity of collective Nerddom (Nerdhood? Nerdhente?...nevermind). Throughout history, when faced with overwhelming challenges, human civilizations have turned to the boffins, the outliers, THE NERDS for solutions:

• Need to build a temple in the Andes mountains? Turn to Inca Nerds.
• Want to create a giant wall to keep out invading Mongols? Han Chinese Nerds
• Interested in creating pyramids with complex chambers to guard the treasures of your royal dead for millennia and also serve as a gateway to other star systems? Egyptian Nerds. Ok, that last bit I borrowed from "Stargate," but you get the picture. Plus, the?scene where James Spader figures out that the cartouches on the Stargate are constellations is Peak Nerd.
• There are numerous other examples, including the hacks to save Apollo 13 and the decoding of the Enigma machines.

The point is, when faced with a new technological advance, or when trying to solve a hard problem, it's not the "managers" who change the world, but the Nerds. In that vein, I expect the Nerds to take RTO mandates head on because:

• Nerds need flexibility to work at their speed, on their terms. The smartest people I know live rather odd hours, and have learned to optimize for their creativity. My first employer, Oracle, figured this out decades ago, as Larry Ellison realized he was far better off giving every employee a VT220 terminal and modem (yeah, I know, ancient) and letting them dial in from anywhere to work at their speed, when it was best for them. That even entailed letting key developers work from their homes in Lake Tahoe or other healthy, creative locales.
• Nerds hate the inefficiency of corporate overhead, institutional processes, and the pressure to conform. Once free to create with fewer restrictions, it will be a challenge to get Nerds to accept the structure of RTO hours and activities willingly.

Where this gets interesting is that at the same time as RTO is being pushed, AI is giving us new ways to automate tasks, crunch large amounts of data, and synthesize responses. In certain cases, the same people pushing this frontier are being told that they can only do this great work in an office Monday through Friday.

My prediction: The best people able to both develop and utilize AI will vote with their feet or find creative ways to game the system. That colleague who appears to be in their office on the Zoom call might turn out to be an AI-generated replica responding to remote prompts from a Nerd sitting by Lake Tahoe.

Bottom Line: In the inevitable conflict between RTO and WFH/Hybrid, I will bet on the Nerds.