Forgive me for not giving a crap what a banker says.
I work in IT and 6 of the last 8 years of my life I worked fully remote. When I first started my career, I commuted 27 miles to the west side of LA. My average drive time was 1.2-1.5 hours each way, and that was me leaving at 5:45am going and around 2:30 returning. What were my alternatives? Move to the west side for double to triple my current rent? Take the train that goes nowhere? Working remote saves me 3 hours of my daily life that I am not being paid for and saves me having to pay the already outrageous gas prices in CA. If I didn't have ties to family here, I would've moved to a state with less taxes and been able to keep my remote position. My salary might have dropped by 10%, but my housing costs would have dropped by 50-70% with a higher quality of living. Retaining a high salary and reducing your cost of living to take that savings and investing it is the only way to generate wealth in today's world. Especially for someone like myself who is only an employee. Back before traffic was unbearable, the way was to commute into the cities and live in the suburbs.
Granted remote work is not for every field, but if you have good employees their productivity will not suffer. If anything, the constant contact-ability can burn out your employees. These bankers don't like this because their commercial real estate/VC capital urban apartment assets are going to crap since companies are downsizing their footprint and employees are moving to cheaper suburban areas. This trend isn't going to reverse no matter how hard Dimon cries. Why would I pay 5k a month rent to live around a city of homeless encampments? This city has turned into gotham city.
