Kunal Shah Makes the WFO Case — and He Has a Point Developers Should Hear

In a long-form podcast conversation, CRED founder Kunal Shah made an argument that has circulated widely in India's startup and developer communities: working in an office environment accelerates professional growth in ways that remote work structurally cannot replicate. His specific claim is not about productivity — it is about learning. When you sit near people who are better than you, you absorb how they think, how they communicate, how they handle problems, and how they make decisions. This absorption happens passively, without deliberate instruction. Remote work eliminates the environment that makes this absorption possible.

The argument is older than the pandemic debate that intensified it. But Kunal Shah making it carries weight in the Indian tech context: CRED operates in Bangalore, India's most remote-work-friendly city, and Shah has built a reputation for contrarian clarity in startup culture. His framing — that you learn from the environment, not just from explicit teaching — deserves examination rather than dismissal.

## The Osmosis Argument: What Shah Is Actually Saying

The core claim is specific: there is a category of professional knowledge that is tacit rather than explicit. Tacit knowledge cannot be documented, taught in a one-on-one meeting, or transmitted over Slack. It is absorbed from environment.

Examples of tacit knowledge that transmit by proximity:
- How a senior engineer talks to a customer who is angry about a production outage (tone calibration under pressure)
- How a founding team member frames a bad quarterly result to the board (narrative construction for difficult information)
- How a principal engineer pushes back on a bad architectural decision in a room with a CTO present (the politics and courage required)
- How a product manager kills a feature that they personally built (intellectual honesty)

None of these can be taught as a lesson. They can be described in a mentorship session, but the description is a poor substitute for watching the real thing happen in real time, reading the room, seeing the reaction, and absorbing the model.

Shah's argument: when you sit near people who are excellent, you get thousands of these observations per year. Remote workers get zero, or near zero. The career growth gap between those two populations compounds over time.

## The Counterarguments: What the Remote Work Advocates Get Right

The remote work case is not without merit, and any honest analysis has to engage it:

**Deep work advantage.** Software engineers in particular do their most valuable work in extended states of focus. Interruptions in open-plan offices — the casual conversation, the someone-needing-five-minutes — destroy focus in ways that are well-documented. Cal Newport's "Deep Work" framework argues that the ability to do sustained, uninterrupted concentrated work is the primary source of value in knowledge work. Offices, especially open-plan startup offices, are hostile to deep work.

**Talent pool access.** Remote work allows companies to hire from anywhere. A startup in Bangalore can hire the best backend engineer in Hyderabad, the best data scientist in Chennai, and the best DevRel in London. This expands the talent ceiling. Companies that mandate office are constrained to people who can physically commute.

**Asynchronous documentation.** Remote-first companies tend to write things down because they have to. Decisions get documented. Architecture decisions get written in ADRs. Context gets shared in wikis. The osmosis that Shah describes — the hallway conversation where a decision gets made without being recorded — is actually a bug in office culture, not a feature. Remote-first documentation culture creates institutional memory that survives employee turnover.

**Equity.** Remote work disproportionately benefits workers with long commutes, caregivers, people with disabilities, and workers in lower-cost geographies. Mandating office is a de facto benefit cut for anyone whose commute costs time or money, and it systematically favors people who live near office clusters (typically the already-privileged).

## Who Shah's Argument Actually Applies To

Here is the nuance that gets lost in the WFH vs WFO debate when it becomes binary: Shah's osmosis learning argument is strongest for specific career stages and roles, and weakest for others.

**Where WFO osmosis has genuine force:**
- **Early career.** The first 2-3 years of a professional career are the period of maximum tacit knowledge acquisition. This is when you are building your fundamental mental models of how work happens. You have the most to absorb from the environment and the least ability to self-direct that absorption. Early career remote work is a genuine disadvantage.
- **Management track.** Management is almost entirely tacit knowledge. How to give negative feedback, how to manage up, how to read a room in a difficult team meeting — these do not transmit well through explicit instruction. Managers who learned their craft in office environments develop these skills by observing other managers, both good and bad.
- **Sales and business development.** Relationship-based commercial work has strong in-office benefits. Watching senior sales people handle objections, observing negotiation tactics in person, absorbing how relationships are built over time — these are tacit skills that the office environment transmits efficiently.

**Where WFO osmosis argument is weaker:**
- **Deep individual contributor roles (mid to senior engineers).** A principal engineer writing an architecture for a distributed system is doing cognitive work that benefits from uninterrupted deep focus more than from environmental osmosis. The value they create is in the quality of that architecture, not in observing colleagues.
- **Senior or principal contributors with established mental models.** Once you have absorbed the foundational tacit knowledge of your domain — how engineering decisions get made, how to handle technical debt conversations, how to work with product — you benefit less from environmental osmosis and more from deep work time. The balance tips at approximately 5-7 years of career for most technical roles.
- **Highly structured roles with clear deliverables.** If a developer's output can be measured by pull requests merged, features shipped, or bugs fixed, the correlation between office presence and quality of output is weak. The observable professional environment has less to teach a mid-senior engineer than it has to teach an analyst fresh from college.

## The India-Specific Context

Shah's argument resonates particularly in the Indian startup ecosystem for reasons that are specific to India:

**Bangalore commute reality.** The osmosis argument for WFO implicitly assumes that the office environment is worth the cost of getting to it. In Bangalore, median commute time exceeds 60 minutes each way. The actual question is whether 5+ hours of weekly commute time generates learning value that exceeds 5+ hours of additional work, reading, and skill development that the same time would enable at home. Shah's answer is yes. Others would disagree.

**India's apprenticeship culture.** Indian professional culture — particularly in the first-generation-into-professional-work population that constitutes a significant portion of India's developer workforce — is more strongly apprenticeship-oriented than Western tech culture. The guru-shishya (teacher-student) model of learning by proximity and observation has deep cultural roots. Shah's osmosis argument maps well onto this cultural frame: the office is where you find your guru. Remote work removes you from that environment.

**Startup stage considerations.** CRED operates as a growth-stage company where culture, alignment, and shared context matter enormously. The osmosis Shah describes is most valuable in a high-context culture environment where unwritten rules, implicit priorities, and team dynamics drive outcomes. An early-stage startup is exactly that environment. A remote-first enterprise software team with detailed process documentation is less dependent on environmental context.

## Our Take as a Developer-Focused Platform

The WFH vs WFO debate has been running for four years since the 2020 pandemic forced the remote work experiment. Enough data exists to make some non-obvious observations:

**The productivity framing is wrong.** Studies that measure "productivity" in remote vs office settings measure the wrong thing. Coding output (lines of code, commits) goes up slightly in some remote studies. But tacit knowledge acquisition, management development, and early-career skill building are not measured in productivity studies. These are long-cycle outcomes that take years to show up in career trajectory data. The productivity debate misses the point Shah is making.

**The correct question is not WFH vs WFO — it is at what career stage.** The strongest version of Shah's argument is that early-career professionals in offices grow faster than early-career professionals working remotely. The strongest counterargument applies to senior individual contributors who do their best work in deep focus. These are compatible positions.

**Remote work and AI tools may change the calculus.** As AI coding assistants (GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code) absorb more of the routine work of programming, the remaining high-value work for human engineers shifts toward system design, architectural decisions, cross-team alignment, and product judgment. These are exactly the domains where osmosis learning is most valuable. The AI transition may actually strengthen Shah's argument for senior engineers in ways that were not true when senior engineers still spent 40% of their time on implementation.

**The hybrid model is not a compromise — it is the right structure.** Two to three days per week in office captures most of the osmosis benefit Shah describes while preserving deep work days for remote individual contributor work. The debate is not really about five-days-in-office vs pure remote. It is about whether zero days in office is the right choice for career growth, particularly in the first several years of a career. Shah's argument lands cleanest there: zero days in office is a real disadvantage for people early enough in their career that they still have significant tacit knowledge to absorb.

## What Developers Should Actually Do With This

The actionable read from Shah's argument, mapped to career stage:

| Career stage | Years | WFO recommendation | Reason |
|---|---|---|---|
| Early career | 0-3 | 4-5 days/week if possible | Maximum tacit knowledge absorption period |
| Mid-career IC | 3-7 | 2-3 days/week hybrid | Balance deep work and team context |
| Senior IC | 7+ | 1-2 days/week minimum | Maintain relationships; deep work majority |
| People manager (any tenure) | Any | 3-4 days/week | Management is tacit-knowledge-intensive |
| Founding team / startup | Any stage | Maximum feasible presence | Early startup culture is 100% osmosis |

Internal link context: The AI tools question connects directly. [Claude Code, Cursor, and AI coding assistants](/blog/world-cup-2026-round-of-32-bracket-predictions-usa-messi-path-to-final) are changing what senior engineers spend their time on — with autonomous coding absorbing implementation, the remaining human work skews toward judgment, architecture, and relationship management. All three of those benefit from office presence more than pure implementation did.

## Key Takeaways

- **Kunal Shah's core argument:** Office environments transmit tacit knowledge through osmosis — observation of how excellent people handle real situations — in ways that remote work structurally cannot replicate
- **Tacit knowledge examples:** How to manage under pressure, how to give difficult feedback, how to read a room, how to make good judgment calls in ambiguous situations — none of these transmit well over Slack or Zoom
- **Where the argument is strongest:** Early career professionals (0-3 years), managers at any level, and startup founding teams — all roles where unwritten context and observational learning dominate growth
- **Where the argument is weakest:** Senior individual contributors doing deep cognitive work — principally engineers who create value through extended concentration, not environmental observation
- **AI tools shift the calculus:** As AI absorbs routine coding implementation, senior engineering work shifts toward judgment, system design, and alignment — domains where WFO osmosis has more value, not less
- **Practical hybrid:** 2-3 days/week office for mid-career ICs captures most osmosis benefit while preserving deep work time — the debate is not five-days-in vs zero days, it is about whether zero days is defensible for career growth