A look at Twitter's plans for work from home, two years in the making, that created a wave of copycats, and the lessons it learned
Elizabeth Dwoskin / Washington Post : Tweets: @lizzadwoskin , @mccanner , @djthehrlady , @byheatherlong , @hellojesslasher , @heyjoshua , @apartovi , @gleesonmg214 , @vinnyeng , @sarthakgh , @t_lloyd , @mccanner , @ericriveracooks , @markseibel , and @lizzadwoskin Tweets: Elizabeth Dwoskin / @lizzadwoskin : Today we pubbed a story I've been working on for a while, that goes inside Twitter's work-from-home world. @Twitter was the 1st big US firm to send workers home. But few know it's been in the making for 2 years. Their experience has lessons for all of us. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... Erin Mccann / @mccanner : The thing about remote work is that the companies that are planning for everything to go back to “normal” in a year or two instead of spending this year learning best practices for remote work are going to be competing for a talent pool that has vastly better options. https://twitter.com/... DJ Wright / @djthehrlady : In 2017, with a Senior in High School, and a spouse finishing a PhD program, we moved to Seattle to advance my career. In 2019, I took a role at Twitter and we moved to the Bay Area. In 2020, Twitter said “WFH forever if you want” and we're FINALLY back home for good 🙏🏼 901🏡💙 https://twitter.com/... Heather Long / @byheatherlong : Some will never go back to the office (esp. introverts) Twitter is leading the way on how to do permanent WFH: -Hand signals on Zoom when someone wants to talk, leave early, etc -Re-worked performance reviews -Virtual watercoolers https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... @lizzadwoskin Jess Lasher / @hellojesslasher : I'm all for remote work but the tax law changed with the trump tax cuts to prevent any sort of home office write offs for W2 employees so we're gonna need to fix that. Otherwise we're paying our employers overhead out of pocket. https://twitter.com/... Joshua Cohen / @heyjoshua : The irony of this is that working at Twitter was the only time in the past ~15 years that I wished I was actually going to the office regularly. https://twitter.com/... Ali Partovi / @apartovi : This seminal report by @LizzaDwoskin chronicles Twitter's multi-year move towards work from home. My take: we'll never return to offices as they once were. COVID just accelerated a shift to remote work that was happening anyway. https://twitter.com/... Megan Gleeson / @gleesonmg214 : This! #proud “@simonsinek said many people “grossly misunderstand”... @Twitter's “progressive” approach. “Their policy isn't working from home. It's letting people work where they feel most productive,” he said. “They don't need to ask permission. They don't need to feel guilty.” https://twitter.com/... Vinny Eng / @vinnyeng : Exactly this - if it isn't safe for a 100k salaried worker it ain't safe for someone making minimum wage! https://twitter.com/... Sar Haribhakti / @sarthakgh : “..in January 2018, Dorsey, who is known as a freewheeling thinker, fired off a late-night email that took everyone by surprise...the email was originally written for his inner circle of senior executives, but he then unexpectedly forwarded it to the whole company.” https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/... T Lloyd / @t_lloyd : The most important part of @jack's decision is that it's rooted in CHOICE. A part of work is social development so it's NOT “we're never going back,” it's more “engage at your own discretion, have some autonomy over how you build your work day” That's cultural congruence at play https://twitter.com/... Erin Mccann / @mccanner : So if your company has decided it's really important to drag everyone into a Manhattan office or whatever five days a week, that's what's best for you great, but you've made a choice potentially not to compete for the best workers. https://twitter.com/... Eric Rivera / @ericriveracooks : This is exactly how I can tell if indoor dining is safe or not. Look at big tech companies and see if they're willing to bring their white collar employees back to the office. Amazon (non-warehouse), Microsoft, Google, etc... All have year long, if not permanent, WFH https://twitter.com/... Mark Seibel / @markseibel : I spent much of my career working with people who were remote or being remote myself. To me, it's always been a shock when people think it's a difficult way to work. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... Elizabeth Dwoskin / @lizzadwoskin : Other deets include the fact that Twitter's workforce is very divided on its future, with 70% (!!) saying they want to work from home AT LEAST three days a week forever. But younger single workers want to come in and parents don't.
Context & Ripple Effects
When Twitter sent its workforce home first among large US companies, it wasn't improvising — the policy had been two years in the making, and it triggered copycats almost immediately, most prominently Zuckerberg's pledge that up to half of Facebook could work remotely permanently. The Washington Post piece lands at the moment that experiment stops being an emergency measure and becomes a designed system.
The arc since then has been a partial retreat: [[a:976592|Parag Agrawal reopened Twitter's offices in March 2022 while still honoring Dorsey's work-from-home 'forever' promise]], and Zoom itself now asks nearby employees in two days a week. This story is the origin document for why those compromises look the way they do.
First-order effects
- Twitter employees gain a permanent individual choice, but internal data shows the preference splits by life stage — about 70% want at least three days at home, with parents favoring remote and younger single workers favoring the office.
- Competing firms that copied the policy inherit Twitter's lessons rather than running their own experiments, compressing their trial-and-error phase.
Second-order effects
- Even with permanent remote policies on the books, tech companies keep spending billions expanding US office space, betting the office becomes a collaboration hub rather than a daily destination.
- Full-time remote work creates the conditions for white-collar workers quietly holding multiple full-time remote jobs, a supervision problem Twitter's policy design has to anticipate.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the industry converges on a structured hybrid — permanent remote eligibility paired with deliberate in-person rituals — rather than either pole, with each company's exact mix set by its own workforce demographics.
- The retreat of the strongest remote advocates (Zoom, Twitter under new leadership) suggests the durable question shifts from whether people can work from home to which functions genuinely require co-location.
The trend: Big-tech remote work is settling into a managed hybrid equilibrium, where the pioneering all-remote policies of 2020 become negotiated schedules anchored by redesigned offices.