11 ms·

Senior employees, ordered back to the office, are jumping ship

171 points by rustoo 2y ago

bfrog 2y ago
Seems like the goal of RTO is working
- occz 2y ago
  Exactly. Layoff without having to pay severance? What a bargain.
- me_me_me 2y ago
  i am not sure if the goal is to loose senior staff. They are usually most valuable to the company.
  - p0seidon 2y ago
    In my experience, the problem is that junior, extremely motivated people, who are often the ones doing the impactful work, cannot thrive and learn from experienced people in WFH environments.
    - asimovfan 2y ago
      do those junior extremely motivated people who are doing the impactful work want to work in the office?
      - p0seidon 2y ago
        Well, not everybody, but it's quite powerful to be around people who actually care in person about how you are doing. It's a beautiful dynamic. It depends on the actual company and situation, but yes, there are people who find it quite depressing to get a MacBook sent to their home address and never experience a great office. I'm not saying it's the only way. I can understand WFH is extremely practical for most people with kids. At the same time, it deprives people starting their careers of fast learning experiences. There are plenty of examples of extremely successful remote-only companies that attract young talent, but there are also examples of the opposite.
        p_l 2y ago
        Now if only there was actually a great office and not a shitty open space...
        p0seidon 2y ago
        Agree.
      - dagw 2y ago
        do those junior extremely motivated people who are doing the impactful work want to work in the office? Much more so than the senior people I find. Post Covid, as soon as we were first allowed back to the office if we wanted, I observed that the under 30s were the first to return.
        htrp 2y ago
        No life commitments and a social network in a new community built around their officemates
    - vetinari 2y ago
      Not sure whether intentional or not, but I read that as "those people with ambitions have no backs to ride on".
      - p0seidon 2y ago
        I rather meant to teach them stuff... It's not for everybody, but a substantial part of engineers, I would think, really enjoy teaching and passing on their experience and know-how. That's not only limited to engineers, of course.
    - blitzar 2y ago
      In my experience, junior, extremely motivated people, who are often the ones doing the impactful work, can thrive and learn in any environments. The structures and shackles are for the mid employees.
      - p0seidon 2y ago
        I would actually agree with that, notwithstanding what I have written. I still think the learning curve can be steeper in that case and actually more fun.
    - high_na_euv 2y ago
      >cannot thrive and learn from experienced people in WFH environments. Because?
      - p0seidon 2y ago
        I think it is common, especially early in a career, that it is more important to approach people proactively. There is a barrier to asking for help. It can be quite challenging if you are new and maybe a bit shy (not uncommon, as we know, in the STEM field) to get the most out of it. Just sharing my experience, not saying it's impossible.
  - bfrog 2y ago
    Bean counter types claim these people cost too much!!
  - sumtechguy 2y ago
    That is not how layoffs worked in companies I have worked at. The goal is to reduce 'head count' and in the real world cost. They rank you by pay and tenure. Then decided if they can do without you. It almost rarely has anything to do with how good you are. But more 'my project would not finish in x time if y was gone'. Then they decide to keep the whole project or not and if they get rid of the project that means maybe 15 other people can go too. After a particular level in many large companies you become a cost number instead of a person. What you are working on may seem important. At least it is to you. But in the grand scheme of things most of what we work on is ethereal. I have been in this industry coming up on 30 years now. Very little of what I have ever worked on is even in production anymore. Thousands and thousands of lines of code, just gone, of no use anymore. I just hope whatever I did work on can help me with the next few thousand.
  - fmajid 2y ago
    Perhaps they prefer docile to senior.
  - btbuildem 2y ago
    It really depends on the company. Where I work, a lot of the senior employees tend to be actively hindering innovation and progress, more concerned about having a say and being seen doing their little rituals. It's fascinating to watch them sideline and destroy project after a project. The best I understand it's because anything new and competitive puts their little wheelhouses in a bad light, so it cannot stand.
- coldtea 2y ago
  Whether companie they used it as a ploy to get people to voluntarily quit, or not, it hasn't really worked for them. These are now stuck with the desperate second rate employees who are forced to RTO because they're not good enough to find a job elsewhere, and the ones who love RTO because they're all for office politics and wasting time at meetings and the water cooler. Stupid shit like this is how companies commit suicide, and smarter companies end up eating their lunch. From another comment here: "My company recently spun out of a much larger corporation and has just implemented a 4-day week policy after nearly 5 years of flexible work (ie. come in when you need to be in to do your job). Since then, my team has halved and the senior leadership at the site have almost all left to competitors except for a couple of people closing on retirement anyway. We're struggling to get the bare minimum done and have to ZBB almost everything that isn't core work. (...) They've had to cut a couple of things off the product roadmaps that have been worked on for years simply because we now don't have the staff to drive them to completion. Just madness"
  - jjav 2y ago
    > These are now stuck with the desperate second rate employees who are forced to RTO because they're not good enough to find a job elsewhere This assumes that RTO is the one and only factor top people consider. Which for most people isn't true. There are usually dozens of factors that go into the equation of should I quit. My current company is doing a small RTO (2 days), which I don't love, but also don't mind that much. Everything else being equal I'd rather not do that. But I have awesome coworkers, very good management, many growth opportunities and the company has a nice product. I'm not giving all that up to gamble on a different employer who might turn out to be toxic despite all the promises during the hiring process (BTDT).
  - varjag 2y ago
    There is no evidence that WFH preference reflects on employee value or productivity in any way.
  - consp 2y ago
    > These are now stuck with the desperate second rate employees who are forced to RTO because they're not good enough to find a job elsewhere It's always that. My opinion is it is more likely is that most people hate job seeking and don't want to switch unless truly forced. So you end up with people quitting and dissatisfied workers. I have nothing to back this up but the majority of people I suspect don't think of themselves in the "bad" group and thus this argument is mute by default (as it assumes the employees know they cannot or will not find a job).
- zeroCalories 2y ago
  Our second line team lead is being threatened to RTO. No one is saying it, but I feel the excitement from other TLs about the upcoming promotion opportunity. Hope the TL didn't underestimate the difficulty in getting a job!
- JKCalhoun 2y ago
  Just re-watching the classic "Always Be Closing" scene from Glengarry Glenn Ross and thought, perhaps like RTO, what a great way to show your talent the door. If I'm sitting there thinking I could more or less work anywhere else, I would be the first one to take a hike, go find employment elsewhere, say to myself, "I don't need to put up with this shit."
3lit3krew 2y ago
Nobody wants to prop up the board's other investments in commercial real estate and nobody has to care that they're losing their shirts either. Make big cities safe and clean and affordable again, or they will just rot away and collapse in on themselves. I've been reading about the terrible situation in commercial real estate especially in large cities which are unaffordable and crime-ridden, it sounds like there's no escape for the people who have their wealth trapped inside the walls of buildings nobody wants to visit.
- malfist 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - CuriouslyC 2y ago
    Maybe if you stay in the heavily policed portions where rich people live. Try going downtown within 3 miles of the ubiquitous homeless encampments though...
  - 3lit3krew 2y ago
    Conservatives rarely talk about such things, they're a type of center leftist. I think you meant to say right wingers or, as it's being spelled now across the Internet for reasons I don't understand, rightwingers.
    - dkdbejwi383 2y ago
      They used a capital C, so could be talking about the tories and not small-c conservativism
      - malfist 2y ago
        Or Google's autocorrect randomly decided to capitalize a word on me. It's gotten really quite terrible
  - sofixa 2y ago
    This to an extent true - crime statistics are showing a downward trend in general. However, it cannot be denied that some US cities' downtowns are... not great. I was in San Francisco a year ago, and in Los Angeles a few months ago, and I wouldn't want to live in either of those. Mass visible homelessness, visible drug use, etc. are not things people want to see or endure (of course I doubt that the people living through that want it either, in large parts). And I'm saying this as someone living in the Paris area who has visited large parts of the metro area, and knows the "bad" parts around here - it isn't even close how horrifyingly bad LA and SF are.
shmatt 2y ago
The University of Chicago research was a little confusing. They added a May 2024 date to the top of the official paper, but they show most people moved to Meta and Snap. 2 companies who have been aggressively forcing people back to office and are also generally higher paying than their previous employer They should have at least added a note that their data was 1+ years old and that RTO mandates changed during that time It’s not surprising that people left MSFT for companies that pay double or triple. The part that’s more interesting is if people are willing to take a 50% pay cut to go remote. I haven’t seen any research on that yet So far the data shows RTO makes people leave, but it makes them leave to other RTO companies, not fully remote ones
- esrauch 2y ago
  Even if they leave a non-RTO company and join a non-RTO company its an interesting effect. It seems that being forced to RTO in the same role can lead to unhappiness and into 'shields down' (https://randsinrepose.com/archives/shields-down/ https://randsinrepose.com/archives/shields-down/), then people are more willing to look around to see if there's a better deal on offer somewhere else (even if the _other_ deal ends up also being in-office).
  - bravetraveler 2y ago
    This is delightful to read, thank you for sharing. Ham-fisted RTO was definitely my 'shields down' moment. The 'how' matters much like the 'what' or 'why'. In terms of on-site/remote, I'm not firmly for or against either. I see benefits in both. Similarly - it's interesting to see this from the manager PoV. I've been primarily WFH since ~2016 after doing the traditional thing for longer. I'm not new to either. Then the pandemic came/went... and how we kept working remained a hot topic. I saw executives above me (with more pull) get put in a tough spot: sell their new homes and relocate, or find new work. Then their peons/reporting managers tried to convince me that I'd be safe - appealing to pride saying I was too important to be lost to things like that. Yeah, right. As strange as it sounds... my shields were forced down out of preservation. It took over a year of (communicated) discontent before the shields finally went down for good. Nobody else did this - it was the business/leadership. I was productive despite most of the job not being about the work. It just so happens there are places requiring less work (relevant to the job or not) while being more rewarding. Loyalty is a funny dynamic. There's efficiency and leniency for everyone involved by choosing to not bike-shed over things like 'Where Are My Adults'. Doing the job you hired them for. I hope.
IMTDb 2y ago
> At a time when employee retention should be of a top concern First line of the page. The entire development of the article hinges on this being true but I see no sign of justification or reasoning behind this affirmation.
- Raed667 2y ago
  because companies keep claiming that retention is a top concern
  - bluGill 2y ago
    > companies keep claiming that retention is a top concern when times are good. Fixed that for you. When times are good it is hard to find people and so they care about them. However the real test is when times are not good. If retention was a concern it will show up when times are bad - but it doesn't so we know that it isn't a real concern. Of course if it is a concern management has a much harder job. They can no longer hire as many people in the good times as they would then have to let good people go. Much easier to give them a cheap foosball table or something that makes it look like they care without making their job hard.
- benterix 2y ago
  I don't get your point. High turnover means unnecessary costs. And especially in senior positions it might take years to get the necessary experience to get equally productive. So unless you really aim at the very bottom, you should care about employee retention.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    You and I know that, but I see no evidence that any management anywhere does. Thus there is the real possibility we are wrong. It isn't good if you are a senior engineer who doesn't want to go into management - you have no career path to advance.
- adrianmonk 2y ago
  Agreed. There's a lack of justification, and moreover I would expect the opposite. With all the recent layoffs, right now many companies might be OK with some attrition. It's one of the least ugly ways to reduce payroll costs. It's not as bad for PR or morale as layoffs would be. And you don't have to pay severance. And if you lose more employees than you wanted to, it should be easy to hire new people because of laid off people who haven't found new jobs yet. Sure, losing valued senior employees will have a negative impact. But they're also usually paid a lot, so I doubt business people will cry very hard about it.
forinti 2y ago
I recently had this interesting conversation with the CEO of a local company. After the pandemic, he pondered on RTO/WFH. His company is still growing and he needed to hire more people. If he ordered RTO, he would surely lose some people, but if he kept WFH, he would be able to hire the talent escaping RTO at other firms. So he kept WFH and all went fine.
- AlexandrB 2y ago
  Yes, WFH seems like a great differentiator to attract talent you couldn't get otherwise. Surprised more "underdog" companies aren't leaning into it. Then again a lot of CEOs are trend chasers. See also: stuffing AI into everything.
  - chii 2y ago
    > WFH seems like a great differentiator to attract talent you couldn't get otherwise. it is, but WFH also does hamper new hires like grads, since there's less opportunity for them to learn via osmosis. Zoom meetings aren't quite the same imho.
Ajay-p 2y ago
"Study finds a quarter of bosses hoped RTO would make employees quit" https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/09/rto_quit_study/ https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/09/rto_quit_study/
- bearjaws 2y ago
  I always wondered why our culture has devolved so much. If you are like "please will <direct report> just quit or leave!?" then just start the process to fire them. No need to drag out everyones suffering. It's hard firing people but suffering together is always worse. Then combine how that person might piss off the rest of the team... It's a no brainer.
  - sofixa 2y ago
    > If you are like "please will <direct report> just quit or leave!?" then just start the process to fire them. > No need to drag out everyones suffering. It's hard firing people but suffering together is always worse. > Then combine how that person might piss off the rest of the team... It's a no brainer. Firing people can piss the rest of the team too.
    - bearjaws 2y ago
      If you cannot explain or justify a firing to your team, you as the leader are the problem...
      - willcipriano 2y ago
        The problem is you can message the person who got fired on linkedin. I've had coworkers who had sudden "family emergencies" and the like who really just took a better offer.
  - voidfunc 2y ago
    Because companies are amoral entities... empathy and suffering are human qualities that don't exist in the corporate structure beyond the individuals themselves. Sometimes that manifests in corporate actions but usually it's totally lost amongst all the layers. Also there is a financial downside and legal risk to firing vs. just getting employees to quit. Western ideals have given the masses this belief that they matter at all in the grand scheme of things. The reality is nobody really matters but a select few people that turn the crank and the rest of us are just here to act as grease. Amassing as much wealth as possible is the key to escaping this grind.
gravescale 2y ago
> Finding AI talent, which more and more companies are going to need, is already a search for the proverbial needle in a haystack. Adding strict RTO policies to that scenario won’t make the talent search easier. Putting that question-begging aside, cynically, for a company on an AI kick it could be intentionally designed to make clearing out the old guard who aren't all in on AI easier and without severance. In fact, it stands even without the everything-is-now-about-AI journalism gloss. The expensive, grumpy seniors with the pointed questions in meetings are largely the ones who feel most able to risk jumping ship in 2024 and treating them like naughty children or unreliable juniors really winds them up. The wisdom of driving out senior staff, well, that depends on who you're asking and what are their metrics for success!
- coldtea 2y ago
  Building their business offerings on AI would mean two things: (a) their business is comoditized, so they're just making their companies obsolete (b) they will go down (or pivot to the next thing) as the AI hype hits its peak and tapers off
  - gravescale 2y ago
    Which also means that if a hypothetical company is indeed pivoting to AI, an AI-skeptical senior might be considering moving on anyway about now and a blunt-force RTO is one of the straws.
  - animuchan 2y ago
    If they sell before that, mission accomplished. Many startups don't plan ahead too far, they know they aren't exactly the next Amazon. Large, established companies is ofc a different story.
- supertrope 2y ago
  >AI talent This has the energy of wanting candidates with five years of experience on a two year old framework.
fifteen1506 2y ago
My guess is most companies now believe they have procedures which can keep a somewhat quality output with average, cheaper people. The industry (tech, others) has never given up trying to transform employees into a cog in the machine and, while software engineering has so far apparently escaped being caged onto a cog-like structure, I believe it's a matter of time.
- ElevenLathe 2y ago
  Wow, what niche are you in that developers aren't just swapped out like spark plugs at the whims of {,product} managers? Literally didn't know this hadn't happened everywhere yet. I thought this attitude of treating programmers as real professionals died with the dot com crash.
  - fifteen1506 2y ago
    Nowhere. I just assumed I had been unlucky so far. Appears not. Any tips on which software-related industries that hasn't happened, if any?
    - ElevenLathe 2y ago
      Yeah that was my point. Programmers are no longer viewed as "professionals". I've never experienced it, but my understanding is that this used to be the case, mostly before the 2000 crash. That's when we wore ties, had offices with doors, were allowed to talk to customers and upper management, weren't herded around by "scrum masters", etc. Seems like another world to me, but maybe there is some company somewhere that hasn't gotten the memo yet and still runs that way.
Aromasin 2y ago
My company recently spun out of a much larger corporation and has just implemented a 4-day week policy after nearly 5 years of flexible work (ie. come in when you need to be in to do your job). Since then, my team has halved and the senior leadership at the site have almost all left to competitors except for a couple of people closing on retirement anyway. We're struggling to get the bare minimum done and have to ZBB almost everything that isn't core work. It's miserable. It's just the most baffling time to force such a radical shift, and the executive team were pretty much entirely against it; except for the new CEO who was a transfer from the bigger corp. During the midst of a spin-off where everything needs migrating from systems the wider organisation used - HR and legal, our internal Wikis, product tracking systems, Salesforce, customer comms, forums, documentation, the whole bloody lot - this new CEO decides to make their mark by hamstringing the company in the middle of one of the most important projects of the companies history potentially. They've had to cut a couple of things off the product roadmaps that have been worked on for years simply because we now don't have the staff to drive them to completion. Just madness.
- matsemann 2y ago
  > 4-day week policy You mean 4 days in the office, not a 4-day work week, right?
  - Aromasin 2y ago
    Sorry less, I mean 4 days in the office, 1 from home.
- jack_riminton 2y ago
  Even more bizarre considering that there have been numerous studies showing that remote working is more productive and less costly
  - zeroCalories 2y ago
    Can you link these studies? I often feel like people greatly misrepresent what these studies find. Anecdotally, we've been happy to cut remote senior engineers and bring in local people, sometimes at a significantly higher total comp, just because they play such an important role in coordination, which is far more important than their trivia knowledge about our system.
paulcole 2y ago
Good, right? There’s nothing wrong with a company deciding it wants workers in office. It might be a decision with negative outcomes and it might not be. Some senior employees may enjoy working in the office. Some may not. I don’t see why remote work is treated as some sort of default-correct position here on HN. Just like in-office work, remote work is neither inherently right nor inherently wrong. If your employer makes a decision you dislike it’s up to you to decide whether it’s something you can stomach and continue to work there over.
- toomuchtodo 2y ago
  Worker rights issue. You’re not a slave to management, and it shouldn’t be unilateral. Like all things, it takes time for the zeitgeist to turn over as old folks die out and young folks enter the labor pool.
  - paulcole 2y ago
    Not being a slave to management isn’t the same as getting to do whatever you want. This should be obvious but current employment isn’t a guarantee of future employment (both employee and employer can’t guarantee the behavior/decisions of the other). You can quit. The same as the company can’t force you to keep working there regardless of what they do. You can try to do whatever you want. But that’s where you figure out if you’re valuable enough to get away with it.
    - toomuchtodo 2y ago
      That’s an opinion. There are other opinions. Like I said, progress is a function of how quickly the old guard dies out (1.8M folks over the age of 55 die every year in the US). Mental models are rigid, humans are emotion driven, etc. EDIT: @gedy Appreciate the ground truth, thanks for sharing.
      - paulcole 2y ago
        I mean, yes that is an opinion. Like I said from the beginning there’s no objective right or wrong on whether employees should be working remotely or working in office. Neither represents progress they just represent different opinions.
keiferski 2y ago
I’m still convinced that there is a distinct difference between companies founded as remote from the start and companies that switched to remote because of COVID or social trends. The first group will almost never go office-first, whereas the second group will revert to its “original DNA” unless a deliberate culture change is made. It has to be a complete change in operational procedures, communication culture, etc. It’s much much more than simply using Slack and having Zoom calls instead of office meetings. If that doesn’t happen, the switch to remote won’t stick. So if you like working remotely, pick a company that’s always been remote.
- burnedout_dc4e3 2y ago
  I thought that too, and joined a startup that was founded as remote first. However, we later acquired another company that was 100% in office, and also hired a couple key executives who didn't like remote-first. It's now incredibly painful to get anything done because most of the senior people who built that remote-first culture have been pushed out, and things have reverted to hoping someone overhears the information they need.
ThinkBeat 2y ago
Curiously this ¹ is not the case in Norway. Pretty much everyone returned ot work as they did before Covid. A majority enjoyed getting back to work and back to the office. Many do have more of an opportunity to work from if they need to. In our bigger cities we have public transit that is popular. A large percentage of people have to switch between different routes to get all the way home. And my commute is quickly more than an hour, between ride time, waiting for the next ride. Some are fortunate to live in immediate proximity to lets say a subway station that has a line that takes them directly to the office, that can be super efficient. ¹ """This is playing out now in companies around the globe. And with neither side willing to give in, the fight will continue to bubble up this year and perhaps even next, leaving employees frustrated and on the hunt for new jobs — and companies in danger of undermining their best assets: their workers."""
- tallanvor 2y ago
  Public transit in Oslo has only recently reached per-pandemic levels. I don't know what the overall numbers are, but I know that some employers have mandated return to office (at least 3 days a week). My employer has not mandated that people be in a specific number of days a week and has instead chosen to reduce the office space they're renting. Unfortunately this means the days that many people need to be in the office can be pretty horrible due to there not being enough desks for everyone.
- matsemann 2y ago
  I (in Oslo, Norway), like going to the office most days. Maybe 1-2 days at home during the week now. It's a nice bike ride, which is the main reason for going, heh. And it's nice to just be a part of things. But since I go often, I don't feel I miss out on the days I don't. Also, I do it in a sense so that I can then go live/work in a cabin for long stretches during the winter, without people really "noticing" my absence as they think of me as someone mostly in the office. I did about 10 weeks of this this winter, skiing during the middle of the day when the sun was up etc., was great. So I like the flexibility, and WFH is important for me in the job I choose, but I don't mind going to the office when I don't need to be home. I feel I get the best of both worlds this way, the connections of being in the office, but also the freedom of being remote. It's easier to work remote when you know the people well, which again is easier to do in the office.
theknocker 2y ago
[dead]
drdrek 2y ago
"Companies that think they’ve won the battle" What kind of garbage attitude is that? are you at war with your employer?
- rjbwork 2y ago
  Yes. The employer/employee relationship is inherently an adversarial one. Each wants as much from the other while giving as little as possible in return.
  - jjav 2y ago
    A decent salesperson goes to battle to beat the customer and extract maximum value. A great salesperson looks for a win-win so both sides are happy and return to do frequent future business. Sales<->customer isn't that different from employer<->employee on this.
jt2190 2y ago
This guy is really misrepresenting the numbers. Take this gem: > Gartner research released in early May found that 36% of senior-level job seekers who have received an RTO mandate from their current employer are leaving their jobs as a result Versus the actual Gartner report: “Gartner HR Research Finds One-Third of Executives Given a Return-to-Office Mandate Plan to Leave Their Employer” https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2024-05-09-one-third-execs-given-a-rto-mandate-plan-to-leave https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2024-05-0... Last time I checked, “senior-level” is not synonymous with “executive”.
- lolinder 2y ago
  From the body of the Gartner report: > A January 2024 Gartner survey of nearly 3,000 candidates found that 36% of senior-level job seekers who have faced a return mandate at their current employer said that factor influenced their decision to leave their job. One-third said they had discontinued a hiring process in the last year due to expectations that employees would return to a physical workspace. Sounds like what happened here is that the author of TFA read the whole report instead of just the headline.
Covzire 2y ago
Private bathrooms, better coffee, no annoying co-workers, no smelly co-workers, no commute, no chance of being mugged or stabbed, better decorations and access to cheaper / healthy homemade food are all reasons WFH isn't going away.
- shadowgovt 2y ago
  When new hires at Google were given the tour, one of the things mentioned some fifteen years ago was the philosophy of the free snacks. Google wasn't competing with other mega-corps; they saw themselves as competing with the best and brightest going into business for themselves or staying in academia, because it was comfortable and you could work at your own pace. The founders of the company knew they were just two chucklefucks who decided to monetize an idea they had in college; they saw that as possible for most smart folks in the world, and believed that's what they were competing against. Looks like a generation of software leadership after them has lost sight of that, and it'll be interesting to see what happens as the bluff is called. Working for yourself can be extremely hard. But the snacks are good and the bathroom is always close by.
- switch007 2y ago
  And only £750-1500 more a month on the mortgage for a bigger house. And those increases to property values will stick around for a long long time (Even if you personally didn't move, lots of other people did and made houses more expensive for you. Yay)
shadowgovt 2y ago
Who could possibly have seen this coming? (... everyone. Everyone could have seen this coming. So much so that it's hard to believe this isn't a naked way for corporate America to legally loyalty-test their employees and clear their payrolls of what they imagine to be more expensive "dead weight" in favor of younger, cheaper talent).
Justsignedup 2y ago
I often attribute this to free layoffs, but the problem is that if your _senior_ leadership and employees leave, the problem is that you're in a bad situation. Laying off some people who recently joined, are a bit underperforming, etc is a great way to do layoffs. But losing your top talent is the best way to sink yourself. However the effects are felt a few years down the line, and these big orgs usually praise the CEO for doing this genius maneuver and saving a bunch of money, only to later leave in a few years when shit is about to hit the fan. Overall its a weird time. And to note, I do like working from the office, so I happen to be in the minority who likes hybrid. Though even I cannot deny the benefits of being able to WFH and get to a doctor appointment or take care of my kid when she's sick.
michaelteter 2y ago
Most companies requiring in-office work, at least for most tech and many other skills, are showing themselves as being poorly managed places that one should avoid working at. Tech management is often bad, for any number of reasons (not the least of which is non-technical peoples' complete lack of understanding about what their people are doing). At least when these managers are beyond physical reach of their workers, the workers have a better chance of creating a productive environment and shielding themselves from distraction and nonsense interactions. Many of these managers actually do very little beyond low-value talking and meeting. They are figureheads who are recognized by figureheads who likewise provide little actual value. Meanwhile, a team of 1 product/project management skill + 2 devs + 1 designer, when all agreeing on the goal, can do what a corporate organization of 100 people cannot do. This is why most new value is created by small independent teams who are then bought up by laggard giants that can no longer do anything beyond manipulating the system to maintain some form of monopolistic control. Therefore, if your company is demanding you come back to the office, you can bet they are not a place you want to work at (unless your goal is _only_ money).
- rybosworld 2y ago
  It's not a coincidence that flat organizations make more money. It's expensive to retain 7+ layers of management. Meta targeted middle managers in their recent layoffs, and by all indications it was a brilliant move. Netflix is famously flat. Amazon is much flatter than the majority of corporate America. Google as well. Bureaucracy continues to thrive in corporate America because of a bug (the politics of people). If you've ever worked in an org that is very hierarchal, you've probably experienced the following: - More meetings than heads down time - Answering to multiple bosses/managers - Answering the same question multiple times (a symptom of too many managers) - Competing projects - Everything is a priority one task I truly believe that companies start to die, when more than ~10-15% of the org is management.
  - rrrrrrrrrrrryan 2y ago
    I mean Microsoft is pretty damn hierarchical, with monstrously thick layers of middle management, and they've been going strong for decades. And by all accounts, Netflix and Amazon are stressful to work for, at least partially because these employees are having to manage themselves in addition to performing their individual work. I actually agree with most of your points, but if you think of the market as an ecosystem and companies as lifeforms, you'll find many species employing completely different (successful) growth strategies. I've been on teams that were undermanaged, I've been on teams that were over-managed, organizations with incredibly effective management, and organizations where management was comprised of politicians and fools who actively harmed the effectiveness of the teams they were supposed to lead. It's relatively easy to hire great ICs. You ask them some questions to make sure their resume isn't bullshit, try to gage their enthusiasm, attitude, and friendliness, then pay them what they want. It's really, really hard to hire great managers, because even if they've succeeded in past positions, it has little bearing on whether they'll succeed in this particular position, working with these particular people. And it's even harder to build an organizational culture whereby the right people get promoted internally to management. Almost every company screws this up, and the big companies that get this less-wrong are much less stressful to work for and more effective than their peers.
deleted 2y ago
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vermaden 2y ago
Very healthy attitude. Would do exactly the same.
tootie 2y ago
Curious if anyone here has quit due to RTO and, if so, did you make it clear on the way out? I'm going through it right now. Our company is pushing RTO and the policy is really senseless. We're not purely a tech company and the CEO has gotten earfuls from across the departments and it hasn't budged him. I worry as much about the annoyance as I do about leadership being completely unstrategic. This is costing us cycles and we are just trying to understand what outcome he is trying to drive and there is no answer.
bluedino 2y ago
Here's one that's funny. I work at a F50 company, and the required "in office" days has slowly been increasing over the years. Except if you're fully remote, which I am-they aren't requiring those people to come back. However, if I were badge in on-site, my employee account would get flagged and I would be expected to start coming back. Which is weird. I never go in, I am nearly 2 hours away so it doesn't make sense, but I can't go in for a day, even if I wanted to, or I'd have to keep going back in. Or ensue in a huge battle with HR.

171 points by rustoo 2y ago

bfrog 2y ago

Seems like the goal of RTO is working

occz 2y ago
Exactly. Layoff without having to pay severance? What a bargain.
me_me_me 2y ago
i am not sure if the goal is to loose senior staff. They are usually most valuable to the company.
- p0seidon 2y ago
  In my experience, the problem is that junior, extremely motivated people, who are often the ones doing the impactful work, cannot thrive and learn from experienced people in WFH environments.
  - asimovfan 2y ago
    do those junior extremely motivated people who are doing the impactful work want to work in the office?
    - p0seidon 2y ago
      Well, not everybody, but it's quite powerful to be around people who actually care in person about how you are doing. It's a beautiful dynamic. It depends on the actual company and situation, but yes, there are people who find it quite depressing to get a MacBook sent to their home address and never experience a great office. I'm not saying it's the only way. I can understand WFH is extremely practical for most people with kids. At the same time, it deprives people starting their careers of fast learning experiences. There are plenty of examples of extremely successful remote-only companies that attract young talent, but there are also examples of the opposite.
      - p_l 2y ago
        Now if only there was actually a great office and not a shitty open space...
        p0seidon 2y ago
        Agree.
    - dagw 2y ago
      do those junior extremely motivated people who are doing the impactful work want to work in the office? Much more so than the senior people I find. Post Covid, as soon as we were first allowed back to the office if we wanted, I observed that the under 30s were the first to return.
      - htrp 2y ago
        No life commitments and a social network in a new community built around their officemates
  - vetinari 2y ago
    Not sure whether intentional or not, but I read that as "those people with ambitions have no backs to ride on".
    - p0seidon 2y ago
      I rather meant to teach them stuff... It's not for everybody, but a substantial part of engineers, I would think, really enjoy teaching and passing on their experience and know-how. That's not only limited to engineers, of course.
  - blitzar 2y ago
    In my experience, junior, extremely motivated people, who are often the ones doing the impactful work, can thrive and learn in any environments. The structures and shackles are for the mid employees.
    - p0seidon 2y ago
      I would actually agree with that, notwithstanding what I have written. I still think the learning curve can be steeper in that case and actually more fun.
  - high_na_euv 2y ago
    >cannot thrive and learn from experienced people in WFH environments. Because?
    - p0seidon 2y ago
      I think it is common, especially early in a career, that it is more important to approach people proactively. There is a barrier to asking for help. It can be quite challenging if you are new and maybe a bit shy (not uncommon, as we know, in the STEM field) to get the most out of it. Just sharing my experience, not saying it's impossible.
- bfrog 2y ago
  Bean counter types claim these people cost too much!!
- sumtechguy 2y ago
  That is not how layoffs worked in companies I have worked at. The goal is to reduce 'head count' and in the real world cost. They rank you by pay and tenure. Then decided if they can do without you. It almost rarely has anything to do with how good you are. But more 'my project would not finish in x time if y was gone'. Then they decide to keep the whole project or not and if they get rid of the project that means maybe 15 other people can go too. After a particular level in many large companies you become a cost number instead of a person. What you are working on may seem important. At least it is to you. But in the grand scheme of things most of what we work on is ethereal. I have been in this industry coming up on 30 years now. Very little of what I have ever worked on is even in production anymore. Thousands and thousands of lines of code, just gone, of no use anymore. I just hope whatever I did work on can help me with the next few thousand.
- fmajid 2y ago
  Perhaps they prefer docile to senior.
- btbuildem 2y ago
  It really depends on the company. Where I work, a lot of the senior employees tend to be actively hindering innovation and progress, more concerned about having a say and being seen doing their little rituals. It's fascinating to watch them sideline and destroy project after a project. The best I understand it's because anything new and competitive puts their little wheelhouses in a bad light, so it cannot stand.
coldtea 2y ago
Whether companie they used it as a ploy to get people to voluntarily quit, or not, it hasn't really worked for them. These are now stuck with the desperate second rate employees who are forced to RTO because they're not good enough to find a job elsewhere, and the ones who love RTO because they're all for office politics and wasting time at meetings and the water cooler. Stupid shit like this is how companies commit suicide, and smarter companies end up eating their lunch. From another comment here: "My company recently spun out of a much larger corporation and has just implemented a 4-day week policy after nearly 5 years of flexible work (ie. come in when you need to be in to do your job). Since then, my team has halved and the senior leadership at the site have almost all left to competitors except for a couple of people closing on retirement anyway. We're struggling to get the bare minimum done and have to ZBB almost everything that isn't core work. (...) They've had to cut a couple of things off the product roadmaps that have been worked on for years simply because we now don't have the staff to drive them to completion. Just madness"
- jjav 2y ago
  > These are now stuck with the desperate second rate employees who are forced to RTO because they're not good enough to find a job elsewhere This assumes that RTO is the one and only factor top people consider. Which for most people isn't true. There are usually dozens of factors that go into the equation of should I quit. My current company is doing a small RTO (2 days), which I don't love, but also don't mind that much. Everything else being equal I'd rather not do that. But I have awesome coworkers, very good management, many growth opportunities and the company has a nice product. I'm not giving all that up to gamble on a different employer who might turn out to be toxic despite all the promises during the hiring process (BTDT).
- varjag 2y ago
  There is no evidence that WFH preference reflects on employee value or productivity in any way.
- consp 2y ago
  > These are now stuck with the desperate second rate employees who are forced to RTO because they're not good enough to find a job elsewhere It's always that. My opinion is it is more likely is that most people hate job seeking and don't want to switch unless truly forced. So you end up with people quitting and dissatisfied workers. I have nothing to back this up but the majority of people I suspect don't think of themselves in the "bad" group and thus this argument is mute by default (as it assumes the employees know they cannot or will not find a job).
zeroCalories 2y ago
Our second line team lead is being threatened to RTO. No one is saying it, but I feel the excitement from other TLs about the upcoming promotion opportunity. Hope the TL didn't underestimate the difficulty in getting a job!
JKCalhoun 2y ago
Just re-watching the classic "Always Be Closing" scene from Glengarry Glenn Ross and thought, perhaps like RTO, what a great way to show your talent the door. If I'm sitting there thinking I could more or less work anywhere else, I would be the first one to take a hike, go find employment elsewhere, say to myself, "I don't need to put up with this shit."

3lit3krew 2y ago

Nobody wants to prop up the board's other investments in commercial real estate and nobody has to care that they're losing their shirts either. Make big cities safe and clean and affordable again, or they will just rot away and collapse in on themselves. I've been reading about the terrible situation in commercial real estate especially in large cities which are unaffordable and crime-ridden, it sounds like there's no escape for the people who have their wealth trapped inside the walls of buildings nobody wants to visit.

malfist 2y ago
[flagged]
- CuriouslyC 2y ago
  Maybe if you stay in the heavily policed portions where rich people live. Try going downtown within 3 miles of the ubiquitous homeless encampments though...
- 3lit3krew 2y ago
  Conservatives rarely talk about such things, they're a type of center leftist. I think you meant to say right wingers or, as it's being spelled now across the Internet for reasons I don't understand, rightwingers.
  - dkdbejwi383 2y ago
    They used a capital C, so could be talking about the tories and not small-c conservativism
    - malfist 2y ago
      Or Google's autocorrect randomly decided to capitalize a word on me. It's gotten really quite terrible
- sofixa 2y ago
  This to an extent true - crime statistics are showing a downward trend in general. However, it cannot be denied that some US cities' downtowns are... not great. I was in San Francisco a year ago, and in Los Angeles a few months ago, and I wouldn't want to live in either of those. Mass visible homelessness, visible drug use, etc. are not things people want to see or endure (of course I doubt that the people living through that want it either, in large parts). And I'm saying this as someone living in the Paris area who has visited large parts of the metro area, and knows the "bad" parts around here - it isn't even close how horrifyingly bad LA and SF are.

shmatt 2y ago

The University of Chicago research was a little confusing. They added a May 2024 date to the top of the official paper, but they show most people moved to Meta and Snap. 2 companies who have been aggressively forcing people back to office and are also generally higher paying than their previous employer They should have at least added a note that their data was 1+ years old and that RTO mandates changed during that time It’s not surprising that people left MSFT for companies that pay double or triple. The part that’s more interesting is if people are willing to take a 50% pay cut to go remote. I haven’t seen any research on that yet So far the data shows RTO makes people leave, but it makes them leave to other RTO companies, not fully remote ones

esrauch 2y ago
Even if they leave a non-RTO company and join a non-RTO company its an interesting effect. It seems that being forced to RTO in the same role can lead to unhappiness and into 'shields down' (https://randsinrepose.com/archives/shields-down/ https://randsinrepose.com/archives/shields-down/), then people are more willing to look around to see if there's a better deal on offer somewhere else (even if the _other_ deal ends up also being in-office).
- bravetraveler 2y ago
  This is delightful to read, thank you for sharing. Ham-fisted RTO was definitely my 'shields down' moment. The 'how' matters much like the 'what' or 'why'. In terms of on-site/remote, I'm not firmly for or against either. I see benefits in both. Similarly - it's interesting to see this from the manager PoV. I've been primarily WFH since ~2016 after doing the traditional thing for longer. I'm not new to either. Then the pandemic came/went... and how we kept working remained a hot topic. I saw executives above me (with more pull) get put in a tough spot: sell their new homes and relocate, or find new work. Then their peons/reporting managers tried to convince me that I'd be safe - appealing to pride saying I was too important to be lost to things like that. Yeah, right. As strange as it sounds... my shields were forced down out of preservation. It took over a year of (communicated) discontent before the shields finally went down for good. Nobody else did this - it was the business/leadership. I was productive despite most of the job not being about the work. It just so happens there are places requiring less work (relevant to the job or not) while being more rewarding. Loyalty is a funny dynamic. There's efficiency and leniency for everyone involved by choosing to not bike-shed over things like 'Where Are My Adults'. Doing the job you hired them for. I hope.

IMTDb 2y ago

> At a time when employee retention should be of a top concern First line of the page. The entire development of the article hinges on this being true but I see no sign of justification or reasoning behind this affirmation.

Raed667 2y ago
because companies keep claiming that retention is a top concern
- bluGill 2y ago
  > companies keep claiming that retention is a top concern when times are good. Fixed that for you. When times are good it is hard to find people and so they care about them. However the real test is when times are not good. If retention was a concern it will show up when times are bad - but it doesn't so we know that it isn't a real concern. Of course if it is a concern management has a much harder job. They can no longer hire as many people in the good times as they would then have to let good people go. Much easier to give them a cheap foosball table or something that makes it look like they care without making their job hard.
benterix 2y ago
I don't get your point. High turnover means unnecessary costs. And especially in senior positions it might take years to get the necessary experience to get equally productive. So unless you really aim at the very bottom, you should care about employee retention.
- bluGill 2y ago
  You and I know that, but I see no evidence that any management anywhere does. Thus there is the real possibility we are wrong. It isn't good if you are a senior engineer who doesn't want to go into management - you have no career path to advance.
adrianmonk 2y ago
Agreed. There's a lack of justification, and moreover I would expect the opposite. With all the recent layoffs, right now many companies might be OK with some attrition. It's one of the least ugly ways to reduce payroll costs. It's not as bad for PR or morale as layoffs would be. And you don't have to pay severance. And if you lose more employees than you wanted to, it should be easy to hire new people because of laid off people who haven't found new jobs yet. Sure, losing valued senior employees will have a negative impact. But they're also usually paid a lot, so I doubt business people will cry very hard about it.

forinti 2y ago

I recently had this interesting conversation with the CEO of a local company. After the pandemic, he pondered on RTO/WFH. His company is still growing and he needed to hire more people. If he ordered RTO, he would surely lose some people, but if he kept WFH, he would be able to hire the talent escaping RTO at other firms. So he kept WFH and all went fine.

AlexandrB 2y ago
Yes, WFH seems like a great differentiator to attract talent you couldn't get otherwise. Surprised more "underdog" companies aren't leaning into it. Then again a lot of CEOs are trend chasers. See also: stuffing AI into everything.
- chii 2y ago
  > WFH seems like a great differentiator to attract talent you couldn't get otherwise. it is, but WFH also does hamper new hires like grads, since there's less opportunity for them to learn via osmosis. Zoom meetings aren't quite the same imho.

Ajay-p 2y ago

"Study finds a quarter of bosses hoped RTO would make employees quit" https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/09/rto_quit_study/ https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/09/rto_quit_study/

bearjaws 2y ago
I always wondered why our culture has devolved so much. If you are like "please will <direct report> just quit or leave!?" then just start the process to fire them. No need to drag out everyones suffering. It's hard firing people but suffering together is always worse. Then combine how that person might piss off the rest of the team... It's a no brainer.
- sofixa 2y ago
  > If you are like "please will <direct report> just quit or leave!?" then just start the process to fire them. > No need to drag out everyones suffering. It's hard firing people but suffering together is always worse. > Then combine how that person might piss off the rest of the team... It's a no brainer. Firing people can piss the rest of the team too.
  - bearjaws 2y ago
    If you cannot explain or justify a firing to your team, you as the leader are the problem...
    - willcipriano 2y ago
      The problem is you can message the person who got fired on linkedin. I've had coworkers who had sudden "family emergencies" and the like who really just took a better offer.
- voidfunc 2y ago
  Because companies are amoral entities... empathy and suffering are human qualities that don't exist in the corporate structure beyond the individuals themselves. Sometimes that manifests in corporate actions but usually it's totally lost amongst all the layers. Also there is a financial downside and legal risk to firing vs. just getting employees to quit. Western ideals have given the masses this belief that they matter at all in the grand scheme of things. The reality is nobody really matters but a select few people that turn the crank and the rest of us are just here to act as grease. Amassing as much wealth as possible is the key to escaping this grind.

gravescale 2y ago

> Finding AI talent, which more and more companies are going to need, is already a search for the proverbial needle in a haystack. Adding strict RTO policies to that scenario won’t make the talent search easier. Putting that question-begging aside, cynically, for a company on an AI kick it could be intentionally designed to make clearing out the old guard who aren't all in on AI easier and without severance. In fact, it stands even without the everything-is-now-about-AI journalism gloss. The expensive, grumpy seniors with the pointed questions in meetings are largely the ones who feel most able to risk jumping ship in 2024 and treating them like naughty children or unreliable juniors really winds them up. The wisdom of driving out senior staff, well, that depends on who you're asking and what are their metrics for success!

coldtea 2y ago
Building their business offerings on AI would mean two things: (a) their business is comoditized, so they're just making their companies obsolete (b) they will go down (or pivot to the next thing) as the AI hype hits its peak and tapers off
- gravescale 2y ago
  Which also means that if a hypothetical company is indeed pivoting to AI, an AI-skeptical senior might be considering moving on anyway about now and a blunt-force RTO is one of the straws.
- animuchan 2y ago
  If they sell before that, mission accomplished. Many startups don't plan ahead too far, they know they aren't exactly the next Amazon. Large, established companies is ofc a different story.
supertrope 2y ago
>AI talent This has the energy of wanting candidates with five years of experience on a two year old framework.

fifteen1506 2y ago

My guess is most companies now believe they have procedures which can keep a somewhat quality output with average, cheaper people. The industry (tech, others) has never given up trying to transform employees into a cog in the machine and, while software engineering has so far apparently escaped being caged onto a cog-like structure, I believe it's a matter of time.

ElevenLathe 2y ago
Wow, what niche are you in that developers aren't just swapped out like spark plugs at the whims of {,product} managers? Literally didn't know this hadn't happened everywhere yet. I thought this attitude of treating programmers as real professionals died with the dot com crash.
- fifteen1506 2y ago
  Nowhere. I just assumed I had been unlucky so far. Appears not. Any tips on which software-related industries that hasn't happened, if any?
  - ElevenLathe 2y ago
    Yeah that was my point. Programmers are no longer viewed as "professionals". I've never experienced it, but my understanding is that this used to be the case, mostly before the 2000 crash. That's when we wore ties, had offices with doors, were allowed to talk to customers and upper management, weren't herded around by "scrum masters", etc. Seems like another world to me, but maybe there is some company somewhere that hasn't gotten the memo yet and still runs that way.

Aromasin 2y ago

My company recently spun out of a much larger corporation and has just implemented a 4-day week policy after nearly 5 years of flexible work (ie. come in when you need to be in to do your job). Since then, my team has halved and the senior leadership at the site have almost all left to competitors except for a couple of people closing on retirement anyway. We're struggling to get the bare minimum done and have to ZBB almost everything that isn't core work. It's miserable. It's just the most baffling time to force such a radical shift, and the executive team were pretty much entirely against it; except for the new CEO who was a transfer from the bigger corp. During the midst of a spin-off where everything needs migrating from systems the wider organisation used - HR and legal, our internal Wikis, product tracking systems, Salesforce, customer comms, forums, documentation, the whole bloody lot - this new CEO decides to make their mark by hamstringing the company in the middle of one of the most important projects of the companies history potentially. They've had to cut a couple of things off the product roadmaps that have been worked on for years simply because we now don't have the staff to drive them to completion. Just madness.

matsemann 2y ago
> 4-day week policy You mean 4 days in the office, not a 4-day work week, right?
- Aromasin 2y ago
  Sorry less, I mean 4 days in the office, 1 from home.
jack_riminton 2y ago
Even more bizarre considering that there have been numerous studies showing that remote working is more productive and less costly
- zeroCalories 2y ago
  Can you link these studies? I often feel like people greatly misrepresent what these studies find. Anecdotally, we've been happy to cut remote senior engineers and bring in local people, sometimes at a significantly higher total comp, just because they play such an important role in coordination, which is far more important than their trivia knowledge about our system.

paulcole 2y ago

Good, right? There’s nothing wrong with a company deciding it wants workers in office. It might be a decision with negative outcomes and it might not be. Some senior employees may enjoy working in the office. Some may not. I don’t see why remote work is treated as some sort of default-correct position here on HN. Just like in-office work, remote work is neither inherently right nor inherently wrong. If your employer makes a decision you dislike it’s up to you to decide whether it’s something you can stomach and continue to work there over.

toomuchtodo 2y ago
Worker rights issue. You’re not a slave to management, and it shouldn’t be unilateral. Like all things, it takes time for the zeitgeist to turn over as old folks die out and young folks enter the labor pool.
- paulcole 2y ago
  Not being a slave to management isn’t the same as getting to do whatever you want. This should be obvious but current employment isn’t a guarantee of future employment (both employee and employer can’t guarantee the behavior/decisions of the other). You can quit. The same as the company can’t force you to keep working there regardless of what they do. You can try to do whatever you want. But that’s where you figure out if you’re valuable enough to get away with it.
  - toomuchtodo 2y ago
    That’s an opinion. There are other opinions. Like I said, progress is a function of how quickly the old guard dies out (1.8M folks over the age of 55 die every year in the US). Mental models are rigid, humans are emotion driven, etc. EDIT: @gedy Appreciate the ground truth, thanks for sharing.
    - paulcole 2y ago
      I mean, yes that is an opinion. Like I said from the beginning there’s no objective right or wrong on whether employees should be working remotely or working in office. Neither represents progress they just represent different opinions.

keiferski 2y ago

I’m still convinced that there is a distinct difference between companies founded as remote from the start and companies that switched to remote because of COVID or social trends. The first group will almost never go office-first, whereas the second group will revert to its “original DNA” unless a deliberate culture change is made. It has to be a complete change in operational procedures, communication culture, etc. It’s much much more than simply using Slack and having Zoom calls instead of office meetings. If that doesn’t happen, the switch to remote won’t stick. So if you like working remotely, pick a company that’s always been remote.

burnedout_dc4e3 2y ago
I thought that too, and joined a startup that was founded as remote first. However, we later acquired another company that was 100% in office, and also hired a couple key executives who didn't like remote-first. It's now incredibly painful to get anything done because most of the senior people who built that remote-first culture have been pushed out, and things have reverted to hoping someone overhears the information they need.

ThinkBeat 2y ago

Curiously this ¹ is not the case in Norway. Pretty much everyone returned ot work as they did before Covid. A majority enjoyed getting back to work and back to the office. Many do have more of an opportunity to work from if they need to. In our bigger cities we have public transit that is popular. A large percentage of people have to switch between different routes to get all the way home. And my commute is quickly more than an hour, between ride time, waiting for the next ride. Some are fortunate to live in immediate proximity to lets say a subway station that has a line that takes them directly to the office, that can be super efficient. ¹ """This is playing out now in companies around the globe. And with neither side willing to give in, the fight will continue to bubble up this year and perhaps even next, leaving employees frustrated and on the hunt for new jobs — and companies in danger of undermining their best assets: their workers."""

tallanvor 2y ago
Public transit in Oslo has only recently reached per-pandemic levels. I don't know what the overall numbers are, but I know that some employers have mandated return to office (at least 3 days a week). My employer has not mandated that people be in a specific number of days a week and has instead chosen to reduce the office space they're renting. Unfortunately this means the days that many people need to be in the office can be pretty horrible due to there not being enough desks for everyone.
matsemann 2y ago
I (in Oslo, Norway), like going to the office most days. Maybe 1-2 days at home during the week now. It's a nice bike ride, which is the main reason for going, heh. And it's nice to just be a part of things. But since I go often, I don't feel I miss out on the days I don't. Also, I do it in a sense so that I can then go live/work in a cabin for long stretches during the winter, without people really "noticing" my absence as they think of me as someone mostly in the office. I did about 10 weeks of this this winter, skiing during the middle of the day when the sun was up etc., was great. So I like the flexibility, and WFH is important for me in the job I choose, but I don't mind going to the office when I don't need to be home. I feel I get the best of both worlds this way, the connections of being in the office, but also the freedom of being remote. It's easier to work remote when you know the people well, which again is easier to do in the office.

theknocker 2y ago

[dead]

drdrek 2y ago

"Companies that think they’ve won the battle" What kind of garbage attitude is that? are you at war with your employer?

rjbwork 2y ago
Yes. The employer/employee relationship is inherently an adversarial one. Each wants as much from the other while giving as little as possible in return.
- jjav 2y ago
  A decent salesperson goes to battle to beat the customer and extract maximum value. A great salesperson looks for a win-win so both sides are happy and return to do frequent future business. Sales<->customer isn't that different from employer<->employee on this.

jt2190 2y ago

This guy is really misrepresenting the numbers. Take this gem: > Gartner research released in early May found that 36% of senior-level job seekers who have received an RTO mandate from their current employer are leaving their jobs as a result Versus the actual Gartner report: “Gartner HR Research Finds One-Third of Executives Given a Return-to-Office Mandate Plan to Leave Their Employer” https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2024-05-09-one-third-execs-given-a-rto-mandate-plan-to-leave https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2024-05-0... Last time I checked, “senior-level” is not synonymous with “executive”.

lolinder 2y ago
From the body of the Gartner report: > A January 2024 Gartner survey of nearly 3,000 candidates found that 36% of senior-level job seekers who have faced a return mandate at their current employer said that factor influenced their decision to leave their job. One-third said they had discontinued a hiring process in the last year due to expectations that employees would return to a physical workspace. Sounds like what happened here is that the author of TFA read the whole report instead of just the headline.

Covzire 2y ago

Private bathrooms, better coffee, no annoying co-workers, no smelly co-workers, no commute, no chance of being mugged or stabbed, better decorations and access to cheaper / healthy homemade food are all reasons WFH isn't going away.

shadowgovt 2y ago
When new hires at Google were given the tour, one of the things mentioned some fifteen years ago was the philosophy of the free snacks. Google wasn't competing with other mega-corps; they saw themselves as competing with the best and brightest going into business for themselves or staying in academia, because it was comfortable and you could work at your own pace. The founders of the company knew they were just two chucklefucks who decided to monetize an idea they had in college; they saw that as possible for most smart folks in the world, and believed that's what they were competing against. Looks like a generation of software leadership after them has lost sight of that, and it'll be interesting to see what happens as the bluff is called. Working for yourself can be extremely hard. But the snacks are good and the bathroom is always close by.
switch007 2y ago
And only £750-1500 more a month on the mortgage for a bigger house. And those increases to property values will stick around for a long long time (Even if you personally didn't move, lots of other people did and made houses more expensive for you. Yay)

shadowgovt 2y ago

Who could possibly have seen this coming? (... everyone. Everyone could have seen this coming. So much so that it's hard to believe this isn't a naked way for corporate America to legally loyalty-test their employees and clear their payrolls of what they imagine to be more expensive "dead weight" in favor of younger, cheaper talent).

Justsignedup 2y ago

I often attribute this to free layoffs, but the problem is that if your _senior_ leadership and employees leave, the problem is that you're in a bad situation. Laying off some people who recently joined, are a bit underperforming, etc is a great way to do layoffs. But losing your top talent is the best way to sink yourself. However the effects are felt a few years down the line, and these big orgs usually praise the CEO for doing this genius maneuver and saving a bunch of money, only to later leave in a few years when shit is about to hit the fan. Overall its a weird time. And to note, I do like working from the office, so I happen to be in the minority who likes hybrid. Though even I cannot deny the benefits of being able to WFH and get to a doctor appointment or take care of my kid when she's sick.

michaelteter 2y ago

Most companies requiring in-office work, at least for most tech and many other skills, are showing themselves as being poorly managed places that one should avoid working at. Tech management is often bad, for any number of reasons (not the least of which is non-technical peoples' complete lack of understanding about what their people are doing). At least when these managers are beyond physical reach of their workers, the workers have a better chance of creating a productive environment and shielding themselves from distraction and nonsense interactions. Many of these managers actually do very little beyond low-value talking and meeting. They are figureheads who are recognized by figureheads who likewise provide little actual value. Meanwhile, a team of 1 product/project management skill + 2 devs + 1 designer, when all agreeing on the goal, can do what a corporate organization of 100 people cannot do. This is why most new value is created by small independent teams who are then bought up by laggard giants that can no longer do anything beyond manipulating the system to maintain some form of monopolistic control. Therefore, if your company is demanding you come back to the office, you can bet they are not a place you want to work at (unless your goal is _only_ money).

rybosworld 2y ago
It's not a coincidence that flat organizations make more money. It's expensive to retain 7+ layers of management. Meta targeted middle managers in their recent layoffs, and by all indications it was a brilliant move. Netflix is famously flat. Amazon is much flatter than the majority of corporate America. Google as well. Bureaucracy continues to thrive in corporate America because of a bug (the politics of people). If you've ever worked in an org that is very hierarchal, you've probably experienced the following: - More meetings than heads down time - Answering to multiple bosses/managers - Answering the same question multiple times (a symptom of too many managers) - Competing projects - Everything is a priority one task I truly believe that companies start to die, when more than ~10-15% of the org is management.
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 2y ago
  I mean Microsoft is pretty damn hierarchical, with monstrously thick layers of middle management, and they've been going strong for decades. And by all accounts, Netflix and Amazon are stressful to work for, at least partially because these employees are having to manage themselves in addition to performing their individual work. I actually agree with most of your points, but if you think of the market as an ecosystem and companies as lifeforms, you'll find many species employing completely different (successful) growth strategies. I've been on teams that were undermanaged, I've been on teams that were over-managed, organizations with incredibly effective management, and organizations where management was comprised of politicians and fools who actively harmed the effectiveness of the teams they were supposed to lead. It's relatively easy to hire great ICs. You ask them some questions to make sure their resume isn't bullshit, try to gage their enthusiasm, attitude, and friendliness, then pay them what they want. It's really, really hard to hire great managers, because even if they've succeeded in past positions, it has little bearing on whether they'll succeed in this particular position, working with these particular people. And it's even harder to build an organizational culture whereby the right people get promoted internally to management. Almost every company screws this up, and the big companies that get this less-wrong are much less stressful to work for and more effective than their peers.

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vermaden 2y ago

Very healthy attitude. Would do exactly the same.

tootie 2y ago

Curious if anyone here has quit due to RTO and, if so, did you make it clear on the way out? I'm going through it right now. Our company is pushing RTO and the policy is really senseless. We're not purely a tech company and the CEO has gotten earfuls from across the departments and it hasn't budged him. I worry as much about the annoyance as I do about leadership being completely unstrategic. This is costing us cycles and we are just trying to understand what outcome he is trying to drive and there is no answer.

bluedino 2y ago

Here's one that's funny. I work at a F50 company, and the required "in office" days has slowly been increasing over the years. Except if you're fully remote, which I am-they aren't requiring those people to come back. However, if I were badge in on-site, my employee account would get flagged and I would be expected to start coming back. Which is weird. I never go in, I am nearly 2 hours away so it doesn't make sense, but I can't go in for a day, even if I wanted to, or I'd have to keep going back in. Or ensue in a huge battle with HR.