The reason why there's no one publicly taking that position is that an honest argument perhaps wouldn't exactly be favourable to the person making that argument.
"I'm a petty control freak who needs to constantly supervise his subordinates in order to feel valuable."
Well, good for you sir!
The only arguments against remote work I keep hearing are the quite hazy "Face time is better." and "Water cooler talk is valuable." ones. Nobody making those arguments seems to be willing to substantiate them, though:
Why exactly is face time better? If it is certainly it should be sufficient to just occasionally have people talk face to face, shouldn't it? Then why have everyone in the same office every time, all the time?
If creative, serendipitous talk only happens around the proverbial water cooler you might have a deeper problem with the communication flows in your organisation. Perhaps information silos are your real problem in that case.
I think that reluctance towards remote work often points to more fundamental issues within an organisation.
I would also say in some cases, it's because their arguments are based on things people don't like to acknowledge.
"I require my workers to be in the office because if I don't constantly ride them, they will be on Facebook/Reddit/etc. all the time instead of working.
This is due to hiring second-string developers that I can pay less than self-motivated superstars.
I have consciously made this decision because I can extract more useful work for less money out of a larger team of underpaid developers than I can from a happy, higher-paid, but much smaller team."
Obviously this business model depends on the market, product, etc. but regardless of all of that, NO one in this scenario consciously wants to confront this, because it just makes everyone feel depressed.
They might not be able to hire that team of self-motivated superstars. Let's face it, some 95% of software development is likely boring, run of the mill CRUD stuff or similar. Those self-motivated superstars are going to gravitate toward companies where they can do interesting and novel things, regardless of the pay (those places do generally pay well, usually).
"I'm a petty control freak who needs to constantly supervise his subordinates in order to feel valuable."
Well, good for you sir!
The only arguments against remote work I keep hearing are the quite hazy "Face time is better." and "Water cooler talk is valuable." ones. Nobody making those arguments seems to be willing to substantiate them, though:
Why exactly is face time better? If it is certainly it should be sufficient to just occasionally have people talk face to face, shouldn't it? Then why have everyone in the same office every time, all the time?
If creative, serendipitous talk only happens around the proverbial water cooler you might have a deeper problem with the communication flows in your organisation. Perhaps information silos are your real problem in that case.
I think that reluctance towards remote work often points to more fundamental issues within an organisation.