When large employers like Amazon, JPMorgan and the federal government tightened their office attendance policies this year, many younger workers appeared to balk. Opinion surveys from Gallup showed that they were generally more resistant than older workers to returning to the office full-time.
But the picture was more complicated. According to Gallup, the youngest people were also the least interested in work that was entirely remote.
New research sheds some light on why that might be. In a recent paper, a team of economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the University of Virginia and Harvard University found that younger workers suffered career-wise by working from home, receiving less training and fewer opportunities for advancement. The economists found that remote work even contributed to higher unemployment among younger workers.
They calculated that younger workers appeared to be responding accordingly, spending more time in the office than older workers over the past few years.
Aerlice LeBlanc, for example, breathed a sigh of relief when the Nebraska-based software company she worked for sent employees home near the start of the pandemic. Having struggled with ADHD, she felt it was easier to focus in the calm of her living room.
But within a few years, Ms. LeBlanc, now a 30-year-old I.T. business analyst, began to miss the office. She was working in a more collaborative role and had a hard time gauging when she could interrupt a colleague to ask for help. She became starved for social interaction and worried that she barely registered in the minds of her higher-ups.
“I got the sense there were conversations happening at work, about work things, that I wasn’t part of because I wasn’t physically there,” she said. She began going into the office a few days most weeks in 2023, even before her company mandated it.
In 100 responses to a New York Times questionnaire, many readers 30 or younger who were able to spend time working from home in the last five years said they still preferred that arrangement. But many others said they had sought to spend more time in the office in recent years. They often cited feelings of isolation as a reason, as well as a desire for more mentoring and feedback, and to improve the odds of a promotion.
“One of the things I was looking for was more in-office opportunity to learn and ask questions,” said Kenneth Sullivan, 30, a civil engineer based in the Seattle area who specializes in designing and inspecting bridges.
Mr. Sullivan spent just over two years beginning in 2021 working mostly remotely for a government agency before landing a job at a private engineering firm that required workers to spend more time on-site.
The economics research paper, first released in 2023 and recently updated with new results, corroborates these workers’ intuition that they pay a price for working from home. It finds that software engineers at a large e-commerce company received about 20 percent more feedback on their code when they sat in physical proximity to colleagues, and that the feedback disproportionately benefited younger workers and those newer to the company.
The economists observed that the engineers asked more follow-up questions when they sat near co-workers. Perhaps counterintuitively, many of the follow-up questions were online, suggesting that physical proximity leads to more digital communication, too.
Ms. LeBlanc echoed this finding, saying she felt more comfortable reaching out to colleagues, even electronically, after they had worked together in person.
“It went from, ‘You are scary people who I’m afraid to Teams-message,’” said Ms. LeBlanc, “to, ‘This is Ryan, he likes heavy metal music and Magic the Gathering. He’s the account manager for our biggest client. I can go ask him a question.”
The economists acknowledge that working from home can increase productivity, as other studies have concluded, but argue that the benefits are concentrated among experienced workers. They also found that the quality of work can suffer in remote arrangements, especially for younger workers. When it came to the quality of their code, for example, it typically took years for younger engineers on physically scattered teams to catch up to engineers of the same age who sat next to their teams.
Dr. Emma Harrington, one of the paper’s authors, said that scarcer mentoring and training also appeared to make young workers on scattered teams less likely to leave for better jobs at other companies. She said it could even make it harder for them to take on new roles within their companies, though the study didn’t assess that issue directly.
“It’s one thing to eventually learn how to be an effective software engineer,” Dr. Harrington said. “But will you ever learn how to be an effective manager if you’re only getting this remote interaction?”
Younger workers appear to be responding to these incentives. The economists noticed that, both at the company they studied and among white-collar workers nationally, younger people have spent more time in the office than older people from 2022 to 2024. The pattern held even when they considered only workers without children.
Mr. Sullivan, the engineer in the Seattle area, said one reason he left his job at the government agency was that he worried it would be more difficult to get promoted while working remotely. “I didn’t know anyone outside of my bridge team,” he said. “Anyone outside — in water resources, transportation, traffic — I didn’t have a relationship with them.”
In their more recent analysis, Dr. Harrington and her co-authors found that remote work led to at least one other large cost: higher unemployment.
According to their calculations, about two-thirds of the increase in unemployment for recent college graduates in the years after the pandemic can be explained by employers being less interested in hiring younger workers into remote or hybrid roles, or onto teams where a lot of workers are remote. Firms might figure those young people will not get the proper training and “decide to hire older people,” Dr. Harrington said.
After JPMorgan announced a new office mandate this year, Jamie Dimon, the chief executive, underscored this point in a town-hall meeting. “The young generation is being damaged by this,” he said. “They are being left behind.”
A recent survey by the real estate firm Jones Lang LaSalle found that more than half of Fortune 100 companies had asked “desk-using employees” to work in the office five days a week, versus 5 percent in 2023.
Forrest Hall, a data analyst who was recently promoted to team leader at a company in Utah, saw the problem up close. Mr. Hall, 24, briefly worked in the office at his current employer — while he was in college, in 2021 — and was then remote or mostly remote for more than a year. He said it was easier to navigate remote work after having been onboarded in person.
“When I asked questions, it was easy to get someone to check in,” Mr. Hall said.
His cousin, however, who asked not to be identified by name because he wanted to protect his job prospects, joined the company a few years later and quit within 12 months, partly because it was difficult to get up to speed remotely. Mr. Hall’s cousin said in an interview that getting answers to technical questions could be a time-consuming and frustrating process.
Still, both workers and workplace experts said that providing reliable mentoring and career opportunities for younger employees was not as simple as mandating that they return to the office.
Several younger workers who responded to The Times’s questionnaire said that they had been summoned back to the office only to discover that people on their teams sat on different floors, in different buildings or in different time zones. They were frustrated at having to sit in a video conference after putting on their office finery and enduring a morning commute.
“When I go to the office I sit at my desk with headphones on, on Teams calls,” said Abigail Voight, a 29-year-old software architect in Minneapolis. “I gain nothing.”
Even Ms. LeBlanc, who says working in the office gave her the inside track on a promotion with a nearly $15,000 raise, said she was ambivalent about her company’s decision to bring all salaried employees back to the office for at least three days a week.
When she first returned, she was one of only a few junior employees in the office and “I felt like I had a room full of mentors,” she said. But once almost everyone in her office of hundreds of people followed suit, the vibe changed.
“There were people who didn’t want to be there,” she said, “who didn’t want to talk to anyone.”
Noam Scheiber is a Times reporter covering white-collar workers, focusing on issues such as pay, artificial intelligence, downward mobility and discrimination. He has been a journalist for more than two decades.
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