“Before we shut the offices I was talking to my head of [human resources] and I said if we have to shut these offices we’ll never be able to force people to come back in,” says Maggioncalda, 53. Speaking in a bustling London coffee bar, he is enthusiastic about the flexibility he has offered to Coursera’s employees. But he concedes he would probably have had to do it at some point anyway given the battle for tech talent. “There is such intense competition for engineering talent in Silicon Valley, that anytime a company comes up with a new type of benefit that the engineers like, they basically force all the other companies to adopt that benefit,” he says. If just one of the big tech companies such as Google or Facebook say you don’t have to come back to the office, “as soon as they say that our engineers are going to say, ‘Why do I have to come back?,’” he adds.
https://www.ft.com/content/b5869b44-0044-40f1-9b14-e7037086ba17
