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I work in a large company that mandated 4-day RTO last year. Even taking a completely objetive point of view on the situation leads to the conclusion that somet

• fzeroracer 1y ago
  Same thing happened where I worked, though that was mostly from what I heard from coworkers since I maintained my WFH status. It's all CEO theater designed to layoff folks while also forcing people who RTO to take an effective pay cut. People need to recognize that and demand more from where they work, whether it's in the form of unionizing or otherwise.
  • ponector 1y ago
    There is always an answer to unionizing and other demands: hiring freeze plus offshoring overseas. Eventually even unionized people will be replaced with offshore buddies.
    • fzeroracer 1y ago
      Offshoring always ends in disaster, companies have tried this time and time again but the end result is an awful product that requires more money to fix than they needed to make it in the first place. And that also doesn't solve the problem of dealing with institutional knowledge loss if you decide to aggressively cull employees trying to unionize. In either scenario the solution is for union workers to become even more aggressive with their demands and force companies to acquiesce.
      • ThrowawayR2 1y ago
        Offshoring might frequently be a disaster. On the other hand, Microsoft and the rest of FAANG and other large tech companies have had overseas development centers staffed by full fledged FTEs for many years now with, as far as anyone can tell, success. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any reason they couldn't expand those.
        • typewithrhythm 1y ago
          I'm not sure if it actually is working out, or if the companies outsourcing are just absorbing the inefficiency. Every outsourcing effort I have seen at some of these massive companies has been pretty tragic, where the best that can be said is now there is a shit but cheap option to be used where the quality doesn't matter. This gets repeated across all the entrenched players simultaneously, while the product quality stagnates or declines (but the stock goes up).
        • bluGill 1y ago
          when most of the people offshore are employees it can work. The biggest thing is you need to start with good managers there who hire good people. In india good engineers are paid more than their peers in germany, but that is the price you pay for the quality you need for good people. If you don't hire good people you can get plenty of terrible people for really cheap, but the results will be poor quality. Take your pick.
        • wkat4242 1y ago
          Yeah that's why it's called a multinational. Offices everywhere. And yes it's a success.
        • holowoodman 1y ago
          I'm guessing that there is a difference between "offshoring, while still having the offshore people picked and employed by you" (let's call it "pure offshoring") and "offshoring and outsourcing to a local company" (let's call it "outsourcing to offshore"). With pure offshoring, you do have control over who you pick, what their mode of work is, whom to fire, etc. With outsourcing to offshore, the local company hires people, usually on the cheap, to only just fullfill your contract and no more. If people underperform, you may complain, and maybe they'll be moved to a less prominent and visible role, or maybe they'll be shuffled to the next customer of theirs. So things will be bad, because it is not in the interest of the local company to do one iota more than necessary. And you'll still have to have your own QA, architects, etc., to make sure you at least get what you paid for.
    • toomuchtodo 1y ago
      Ohio senator introduces 25% tax on companies that outsource jobs overseas - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45146528 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45146528 - September 2025 https://www.moreno.senate.gov/press-releases/new-moreno-bill-would-crack-down-on-outsourcing-fund-american-workers/ https://www.moreno.senate.gov/press-releases/new-moreno-bill... https://www.moreno.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/The-HIRE-Act.pdf https://www.moreno.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/The...
      • EricDeb 1y ago
        This would be very helpful for American jobs.
        • toomuchtodo 1y ago
          Call your Congressional reps, ask them to cosponsor.
• johnnyanmac 1y ago
  We should know by now that all these RTO initiatives are not grounded in any reasonable logistics nor financial reasoning. Right now all of tech is in cut mode, and RTO's are a great way to do layoffs without calling them layoffs. Note that when Google got "too many" people RTO'ing, they did layoffs anyway. If your office does try to make things stricter, it's another layoff attempt. I don't think it will work, because at this point we're in a "sticky" job market; those out of work are facing some of the stiffest markets in decades, those in work are holding on for deal life.
  • wordofx 1y ago
    [flagged]
    • deejaaymac 1y ago
      When I was a teenager I played World of Warcraft for 5 years. During that time we did "raids" where 40 people have to pay attention and communicate, sometimes for longer than 8 hours, with people from around the globe. If teenagers can do it, adults can do it. Period. And if they can't, skill issue I guess.
      • wordofx 1y ago
        [flagged]
        • bingabingabinga 1y ago
          [flagged]
      • mikewarot 1y ago
        This assumes productive work in a highly collaborative environment. Meetings aren't usually any of those things. The rest can be done remotely.
        • llbbdd 1y ago
• reaperducer 1y ago
  I suspect the C-suite has noticed the discrepancy between attendance and occupancy The solution is to downsize your physical plant. My company has a ton of faults, but every time one of these stories hits the HN front page, I thank God that my company remains committed to work from home. So much so that it recently sold its last building, and the few dozen employees whose roles require them to be physically present have been relocated to a much smaller building on a train line. The work-from-home policy comes very heavily from the top. I suspect it's due to two things: 1. We have no shareholders. So the C-levels don't feel the need to engage in performative monkey-see-monkey-do antics so they have something to talk about during investor calls. 2. The management is extremely female-heavy. If I had to guess, I'd say it's 4:1 female:male. And the biggest beneficiaries of work from home are caregivers, who are statistically more likely to be women. While I believe that 90% of the "work-life balance" speeches that come out of our HR department are a bunch of bullshit, I also believe that when it comes to work-from-home, management loves it not just for the massive cost savings they say it's provided.
  • wpm 1y ago
    >The solution is to downsize your physical plant. My company did this, then pulled 3 different departments into a 3d/w RTO they didn't even have the space for. Whoops!
• Consultant32452 1y ago
  Executives have done all manner of things which reduced productivity. Hoteling alone must have cost billions in lost focus. They’re suspicious of work from home because employees like it. If they were concerned about productivity they’d make deals where you can work from home but have to work 10% more hours or something to make up for whatever imagined productivity was lost.
  • cptskippy 1y ago
    That feels like a made up reason because you don't want to accept the two obvious explanations: 1) Mandating RTO is a compliance check that allows you to fire people with cause and avoid other more costly downsizing efforts. 2) Justifying a lease.
• willio58 1y ago
  This is why I stay at a company that’s 100% remote even though I’m sacrificing many thousands of dollars a year in additional income. I just can’t go back for so many reasons. But the most frustrating one in my opinion is exactly what you said, that all of this can be done remotely.
• 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago
  If I returned to the office I'd be working with teammates in India, Washington, Nevada, Minnesota, and Delaware and none of them would be in my office. I'd be essentially working remote from an office that I commute to. The worst of all worlds.
  • willio58 1y ago
    Funny/sad story, my friend works for the government making maps for watersheds. Elon comes along and forces people to go back to office. She’d been remote since she was hired 3+ years ago. So suddenly she’s assigned to the closest gov office near her, which is an ICE OFFICE in SF, about an hour commute from where she lives (each way). She’s massively against the goings-on at ICE and asks for an alternate spot. She now has to commute 1:15 each way to an animal holding office in SFO. She is currently zooming into work each day from an office full of transient animals and no humans related to anything she does, all in the name of government efficiency. Needless to say, her work efficiency has diminished greatly.
• shmerl 1y ago
  Office space / real estate owners don't care. It's their plot to increase profits and companies are colluded with them on it. There is no other obvious reason besides may be Big Brother monitoring mentality.
• bingabingabinga 1y ago
  If the company enforces RTO at least stop using zoom for meetings. If that means offshored employees can't participate then so be it. Let them come to the office.
• steveBK123 1y ago
  This is exactly the problem with a lot of the RTO push.. We are more geographically spread out than ever, and companies usually have, at best, 1/2 the conferences rooms required to actually collaborate properly. So in-office days are spent sitting in a big noisy open floor plan, wearing noise cancelling headphones trying to get work done.. in between producing lots of noise yourself on zoom. The other having-it-both-ways I see from employers is that in the last 5.5 years of COVID most people I know have expanded their work days to take calls earlier and later for timezone alignment purposes. This was tenable to expand your work day 1-2 hours when you had no commute. Now they think they can get the extra hours out and force a commute. My wife spends many of her in-office days dialing into 7:30/8am calls, heading into the office late enough to have tons of train delays, and rushing to meet the deadline to get the swipe in so it counts.
  • devnullbrain 1y ago
    It's worse now, but complaints about offices as working spaces were constant pre-pandemic too. Complaining about it then made you seem a bit... wet. But now the highest levels have brought the productivity benefits of RTO into their wheelhouse. So making the offices suitable also shouldn't be a responsibility punted to a relatively minor position.
• throwaway2037 1y ago
  If you are so miserable, are you looking for a new job that will allow WFH? I think that is the solution. Also, did you ask your line manager if you can WFH more often? That is a first step. If they say no, they go and find a new job.