待翻译：What RTO Means for AI

AI 服务暂时不可用，以下为来源正文，待恢复后补全翻译。

Disclosure: These views are my own and do not represent my current or any former employers. Executive summary The COVID-19 pandemic forced a large part of the North American knowledge workforce to work from home. The change was introduced as an emergency measure, not as a planned experiment in organisational design. It still revealed something important. Remote work did more than move office tasks into spare rooms and kitchen tables. It expanded the range of lives that could coexist with an engineering career. People could work without relocating to a small set of expensive cities. Disabled and neurodivergent workers could shape their environments around access needs. Parents and other caregivers could recover time previously lost to commuting. People whose responsibilities, communities, or ways of living did not fit the conventional corporate schedule could remain in demanding technical work. I experienced that change on my own farm. Working remotely allowed me to care for animals when they required attention while continuing to meet the responsibilities of engineering work. The farm was not a distraction from professional life. It was part of a life that made sustained, high-quality work possible. This paper calls the broader value lived experience engineering: the contribution made when engineers can retain meaningful contact with the bodies, families, places, responsibilities, and communities that shape how people encounter technology. Return-to-office policy is therefore more than a decision about location. It is a workforce-selection rule. A requirement may be written equally for everyone while imposing very different costs. The employee with a short commute and few care obligations receives one policy. The employee managing a disability, a farm, childcare, elder care, or a long journey receives another in practice. The available evidence does not show that offices are useless or that remote work is always superior: A randomised trial of 1,612 professional employees found that two work-from-home days per week reduced resignations by one-third without harming performance, promotions, or software engineers' code output.[4] United States studies of return-to-office mandates have found lower employee satisfaction, higher turnover, loss of senior employees, and increased hiring difficulty, without clear evidence of improved firm performance. Several of these studies remain working papers and should be treated accordingly.[5][6][7] Peer-reviewed United States research found that the post-pandemic increase in working from home explained 68 to 85 percent of the rise in full-time employment among people with physical disabilities.[9] Canadian data show that the number of employed people with disabilities receiving work-from-home accommodation more than doubled between 2017 and 2022.[10] In-person proximity can improve feedback, mentoring, weak ties, and some forms of creative idea generation. Remote work can make collaboration networks more siloed if organisations do not deliberately compensate.[15][16][17] Most quantitative workforce evidence in this paper comes from the United States. Canadian public data and international studies are identified where they are used. There is no direct causal evidence that return-to-office mandates produce worse AI systems. This paper does not claim otherwise. The argument is narrower. AI systems inherit choices about users, risks, data, evaluation, acceptable failure, and the meaning of harm. Those choices are made by people. Policies that change who can enter, remain in, and advance through engineering organisations may also change the range of experience available when those choices are made. The proposal is not to close offices. It is to stop treating routine attendance as evidence of contribution: Use offices for work that benefits from physical proximity. Make attendance role-based and task-based rather than universal. Preserve remote access for work that can be performed well remotely. Build mentoring and cross-team connection deliberately. Make information, promotion, and influence available regardless of location. Measure who leaves, who stops applying, and whose career progression changes after a policy shift. Evaluate engineering outcomes rather than badge activity. The important question is not how many people returned to a building. It is what experience, judgement, and capability the policy caused the organisation to lose. 1. A life that fits the work My working life does not end at the edge of a corporate calendar. I live on a farm. Animals sometimes require attention at times that are inconvenient to a conventional office routine. Remote work gave me a practical way to meet those responsibilities without lowering the standard of my engineering work. I could handle what needed to be handled, return to the problem in front of me, and work in an environment that supported concentration and judgement. This was not an arrangement where personal life replaced professional responsibility. Work still had deadlines, incidents, meetings, decisions, and people depending on the result. The difference was that the structure of the day did not require me to pretend the farm and the engineer were separate people. That integration made my working life more sustainable. It also made my work better. The experience is personal, but the principle is wider. People bring many responsibilities and conditions to work: children and other family members who need care; disabilities and chronic illnesses; sensory and communication needs; long or unreliable commutes; rural and remote communities; religious and cultural obligations; volunteer work and public service; homes, land, animals, and local ties; lives built outside the corporate centres where large employers tend to locate. The office model often treats these facts as private exceptions. The worker is expected to arrive as a standardised professional unit, available at the same place and time, able to tolerate the same environment, and prepared to keep the rest of life outside. Some people prefer that separation. Offices can provide focus, social contact, reliable facilities, and a boundary between home and work. The problem begins when one arrangement is treated as the definition of commitment. Remote work showed that a broader range of lives could support serious engineering careers. Return-to-office mandates risk narrowing that range again. 2. COVID-19 became an accidental inclusion experiment Before 2020, remote work was often treated as a special arrangement. The pandemic turned it into infrastructure. The change happened unevenly and under terrible conditions. People worked through illness, grief, closed schools, inadequate space, and social isolation. Emergency remote work should not be romanticised as a clean test of what well-designed distributed work could achieve. It nevertheless demonstrated that many activities previously described as office-dependent could continue elsewhere. In the United States, full days worked at home accounted for 28 percent of paid workdays among people aged 20 to 64 by mid-2023, around four times the 2019 rate.[1] In Canada, the share of workers performing most of their hours from home rose from about 7 percent in 2016 to 40 percent in April 2020, then settled near 20 percent in November 2023.[2] This persistence matters. The emergency ended. A substantial change in how work is organised remained. Remote-capable work is not universal The benefits described in this paper are not available to everyone. Dingel and Neiman estimated that 37 percent of United States jobs could be performed entirely from home, representing 46 percent of wages.[3] The difference between those figures reflects an important inequality: remote-capable work is more common in professional and higher-paid occupations. Nurses, builders, drivers, retail staff, hospitality workers, laboratory workers, and many others cannot move the essential functions of their jobs into a home office. A remote-work argument that ignores them can become another account of professional privilege. Even within remote-capable work, access to quiet space, reliable broadband, suitable equipment, and a safe home environment is unequal. Flexibility should include access to an office, not replace one compulsory location with another. The appropriate conclusion is not that remote-capable employees should lose flexibility because other jobs require presence. It is that workplace policy should begin with the work actually being performed. The presence requirements of one role should not be imported into another merely in the name of consistency. Equality of scheduling is not equality of work. The experiment revealed hidden feasibility Before the pandemic, organisations could reasonably say they did not know whether large-scale remote work was possible. They know now. The relevant question has changed from whether remote-capable work can happen to where particular tasks happen best, what controls are required, and how organisations preserve learning and connection. A return to universal assumptions is not a return to evidence. It is a choice to disregard what the experiment revealed. 3. The worker the office assumes Every workplace is designed around an implied worker. The conventional office assumes a person who can: live within commuting distance or relocate; travel at fixed times; remain in a shared physical environment for most of the day; organise care outside working hours; tolerate the office's noise, lighting, temperature, and social demands; be visible when leaders are visible; separate professional identity from the rest of life. No single worker matches this template perfectly. Some are much closer to it than others. The template becomes powerful when organisations mistake compatibility with the office for professional merit. Conformity consumes attention Kenji Yoshino and Christie Smith described covering as the pressure to downplay aspects of identity in order to fit mainstream expectations. In a survey of 3,129 employees across seven industries, 61 percent reported pressure to cover some part of themselves at work.[14] Covering did not begin with the office, and remote work does not eliminate it. Digital workplaces can reproduce the same norms through cameras, schedules, language, and access to leadership. Physical offices can make conformity especially visible. Clothing, food, mobility, speech, family interruptions, sensory needs, and social habits are continuously observable. A person may spend part of the working day managing how their life appears rather than applying the knowledge that life has given them. The cost is not limited to comfort. Yoshino and Smith argued that people were included on terms that required them to manage identity in ways dominant groups did not. That management can weaken commitment and conceal useful context. Flexibility can carry a career penalty Remote work can also create a different form of pressure. A 2024 United States survey experiment involving 518 employed parents found that respondents expected remote workers to receive fewer job rewards, including pay and promotion, even while expecting greater family satisfaction.[13] This is the flexibility stigma. A worker may be permitted to work remotely while being treated as less serious for doing so. The result is a false choice: return to the office and absorb the personal cost; or retain flexibility and accept reduced visibility, influence, or progression. A credible remote or hybrid policy must address both location and power. Access to a laptop is not inclusion if decisions, sponsorship, and promotion remain office-centred. 4. Return to office is workforce selection Return-to-office debates are often presented as a contest between employee preference and managerial authority. That framing is too na [truncated for AI cost control]