It's technically optional right now... although currently there isn't an office to go back to for my department. The company decided to remodel during the pandemic (smart, imo), but the construction company ended up having to shutdown during Nov/Dec/Jan due to Covid so they're behind schedule.
New tentative date is September.
Based on what management has talked about thus far... seems we'll be going back to some sort of hybrid model. Though no details have been released yet.
oooo... interesting question. I'll give it a shot though.
In my opinion, a tech company is a company whose primary products/services are digital electronics, e-commerce, software, hardware, and internet services.
Netflix, in my opinion, is not a technology company. It is a media company that uses a digital content platform to deliver their product. Uber is also not a technology company, it is a transportation company that uses an online platform to connect users with their drivers. Both of these companies could use other means to deliver their products/services, but they've chosen to use a digital platform.
That said, I'll admit that it is very hard to clearly define the line nowadays. Almost every major company has a sizable IT department, an internet footprint, and/or a data center. So if those were the bar to entry, then nearly every company would be a tech company.
If the audience is other developers/engineers (which it sounds like it is)... I like to document the code within the code itself and use automation to generate that documentation. If it fails to generate or documentation is missing, the pipeline itself will fail and prompt the developer to write docs before it gets merged.
I'm usually programming in Ruby or Golang. For Ruby my tool of choice is the Yard gem... and for Golang it would be GoDoc (built into Go itself). But most languages have their own equivalent tools.
If the audience is business folks and not developers... oofffpppph.
I work for a US-based company that has been trying to expand overseas for a decade or so by acquiring smaller companies overseas.
When we expanded into South America we bought a Brazilian company. I guess it didn't work out because within 2 years the company decided to shut down the Brazilian office and (unfortunately) all of the Brazilian-based developers were let go.
The website was handed over to us, and we were tasked with updating it to reflect the office was shutting down. It was written in a PHP framework I've never heard of, the dev and the prod websites were running on the same server, and it was obvious development was completed via SSH on the box itself. No git repo or pipeline or testing framework or anything like that.
We tried saving it but after 2-3 days we gave up and converted over to a static site hosted via S3.
New tentative date is September.
Based on what management has talked about thus far... seems we'll be going back to some sort of hybrid model. Though no details have been released yet.