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My friend is CTO of a smaller company say ~250 people, and RTO constantly comes up in the C-suite. He is only able to fend it off by pointing out that they do

My friend is CTO of a smaller company say ~250 people, and RTO constantly comes up in the C-suite. He is only able to fend it off by pointing out that they do not pay as well as their larger competitors, so the remote flexibility is a recruiting advantage. He describes the push for RTO from the rest of the C-suite as basically a combination of unspecific vibes that it must be bad if employees like it, and of course.. because they can. Just like many rules at companies. Likewise many companies in my slice of the industry point to one of the big leaders RTO policies as the reason to do the same, as a sort of cargo cult. However, what the big leader actually does that differentiates is paying 30% premium to have their pick of talent at every level of the org.

the_gipsy 1y ago
> unspecific vibes that it must be bad if employees like it omg that explains so many things!
- steveBK123 1y ago
  The way these people think - if employees like it, it must be a perk/benefit. Therefore with the current job market we don’t need to be generous with it. Related - JPMorgan is opening a new HQ with a big nice gym, and plan to charge employees to use it, lol. Thanks I’ll just leave the building Jamie.
  - j-bos 1y ago
    No way, they're going to charge for the gym in the office? That's like something out of the onion.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  - danaris 1y ago
    > if employees like it, it must be a perk/benefit. Or, for those who have bought into the utterly toxic mindset that employees are always trying to get as much out of the company as possible for as little work as possible, "if employees like it, it must be a scam on us."
    - selkin 1y ago
      Many hold that mindset because that is what they do themselves, and hence believe others must be the same.
  - throwaway2037 1y ago
    I saw a few clickbait articles highlighting that JPMorgan's new world headquarters in Manhattan (270 Park Ave) has a gym but will charge employees to use it. Why is this so interesting? I have worked in many different tall office buildings in my career. I saw a variety of setups: (1) company gym, (2) third party gym, (3) no gym. You always had to pay a fee to use the gym. Why does requiring employees to pay trigger such a hostile reaction from people? Also, the people working in this specific building are very well paid. They can easily afford the fees. Some other points that people don't mention: If it was free, it might be overloaded. That building is expected to have 14,000 employees! Also, no gym can possibly provide everything that everyone wants. In Manhattan, you are spoiled for choice with gyms. I am sure that a few people will reply to say: If the gym were free, then more people would use it, and the company would benefit from lower healthcare costs. (Specific to the US: Most large corporations are self-insured for healthcare, but use third party providers to administer the programme.) Maybe so, but difficult to prove. If that is true, the company should also provide healthy lunches, etc. The list goes on and on. And Internet randos will have a never ending list of things that a "good company" must do for their employees.
    - steveBK123 1y ago
      If you're going above&beyond the industry average and demanding full 5-day-RTO, and pointing at how you just built a brand new HQ with great amenities so suck it up, then don't charge for those amenities? Anyway, I've recruited with JPM a few times in my career, my spouse worked there at one point, and I know friends who have been through. So I like to pick on them as a good example of a company using their brand as an excuse to have bad pay/benefits relative to rest of industry. Good for investors I suppose, but don't work there.
alexashka 1y ago
> unspecific vibes that it must be bad if employees like it Chef's kiss.
myth2018 1y ago
> Likewise many companies in my slice of the industry point to one of the big leaders RTO policies as the reason to do the same This also explains other things, not only RTO. Like when the mass layoffs started about three years ago. Overstaffed big-tech fired a few thousand allegedly idle employees and (not surprisingly) saw no impacts on output. That was enough for many smaller companies, some of them understaffed, to go on and do the same, surely encouraged by their investors. I have friends in a half dozen companies complaining about permanent overtime and severe project delays after the layoffs. Yet, referred companies are either not hiring, or doing it in a very leisurely pace.
- keeda 1y ago
  > Overstaffed big-tech fired a few thousand allegedly idle employees and (not surprisingly) saw no impacts on output. The part that's always glossed over in this narrative is that the remaining workers were forced to pick up the slack to keep up the output ("do more with less") which resulted in toxic work cultures. Ask any employees across BigTech companies and they'll tell you of this happening everywhere all at once -- formerly collaborative environments suddenly becoming cut-throat and competitive; high pressure and unreasonable goals for delivery; hiring being scaled back (except in offshore teams!) and new candidates being severely downleveled compared to their experience. This was not a coincidence; Sure, there were slackers scattered everywhere, but the waves of layoffs were completely disproportional to that. The real intention was to bring the labor market, overheated during Covid and ZIRP, back under control (a power play, as other comments indicate.) And who better than Elon to signal that change with his shenanigans at Twitter. If it seems surprising that output was not impacted (although I would argue a close look at Twitter shows the opposite) one just needs to look at the record levels of burnout being reported: https://leaddev.com/culture/engineering-burnout-rising-2025-layoffs-reshape-tech-industry https://leaddev.com/culture/engineering-burnout-rising-2025-... https://www.forbes.com/sites/bryanrobinson/2025/02/08/job-burnout-at-66-in-2025-new-study-shows/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/bryanrobinson/2025/02/08/job-bu... https://blog.theinterviewguys.com/workplace-burnout-in-2025-research-report/ https://blog.theinterviewguys.com/workplace-burnout-in-2025-... https://thehill.com/lobbying/5325471-burnout-erupts-among-professionals/ https://thehill.com/lobbying/5325471-burnout-erupts-among-pr...
chii 1y ago
> unspecific vibes that it must be bad if employees like it I read it as the feeling that they know somehow that the employees are not putting in 100% of their attention at home on the work assigned. And i do believe it to be true - lots of people claim that WFH means they can "do the laundry" and/or go to the post office. The fact is that there's very few self-starters and intrinsically motivated employees. Most are just there for the pay cheque, and will do the minimum work that is required of them - esp. if not under strict supervision. Not to mention the fact that it is indeed much harder to have collaborative discussions that are spontaneous and unplanned in a WFH setting, compared to the office.
- wpm 1y ago
  > Not to mention the fact that it is indeed much harder to have collaborative discussions that are spontaneous and unplanned in a WFH setting, compared to the office. This is a culture thing that is easily fixed by mandating cameras on, buying everyone good microphones, and a consensus that you can ping someone with a question, go back and forth, and know that you aren't imposing by throwing a /zoom into the Slack DM and saying "let's just meet about this". My team is small, sure, but we are cameras on 100%, we know to pause a sec after someone stops talking for latency, and have a spoken agreement "fuck slack just open a room i'll hop in". We have met in person numerous times and each time it feels identical to work in person as we do remote. When I meet with other teams, people are in their fucking cars driving, cameras off the whole time (but chewing into the mic), can't figure out how to share their screen (still!), like, no shit that isn't productive, you're putting no effort into it!
  - ecshafer 1y ago
    I have found the same with remote. Cameras ON is a huge improvement in how much people are in on the game. Constant communication, frequent ad hoc meetings, screen sharing. Its totally doable, but most people don't do it. There is no feeling worse than presenting an idea to a meeting room of 10 people with all cameras off, and when you ask a question you get crickets. Too many people are phoning it in.
  - chii 1y ago

the_gipsy 1y ago

> unspecific vibes that it must be bad if employees like it omg that explains so many things!

steveBK123 1y ago
The way these people think - if employees like it, it must be a perk/benefit. Therefore with the current job market we don’t need to be generous with it. Related - JPMorgan is opening a new HQ with a big nice gym, and plan to charge employees to use it, lol. Thanks I’ll just leave the building Jamie.
- j-bos 1y ago
  No way, they're going to charge for the gym in the office? That's like something out of the onion.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- danaris 1y ago
  > if employees like it, it must be a perk/benefit. Or, for those who have bought into the utterly toxic mindset that employees are always trying to get as much out of the company as possible for as little work as possible, "if employees like it, it must be a scam on us."
  - selkin 1y ago
    Many hold that mindset because that is what they do themselves, and hence believe others must be the same.
- throwaway2037 1y ago
  I saw a few clickbait articles highlighting that JPMorgan's new world headquarters in Manhattan (270 Park Ave) has a gym but will charge employees to use it. Why is this so interesting? I have worked in many different tall office buildings in my career. I saw a variety of setups: (1) company gym, (2) third party gym, (3) no gym. You always had to pay a fee to use the gym. Why does requiring employees to pay trigger such a hostile reaction from people? Also, the people working in this specific building are very well paid. They can easily afford the fees. Some other points that people don't mention: If it was free, it might be overloaded. That building is expected to have 14,000 employees! Also, no gym can possibly provide everything that everyone wants. In Manhattan, you are spoiled for choice with gyms. I am sure that a few people will reply to say: If the gym were free, then more people would use it, and the company would benefit from lower healthcare costs. (Specific to the US: Most large corporations are self-insured for healthcare, but use third party providers to administer the programme.) Maybe so, but difficult to prove. If that is true, the company should also provide healthy lunches, etc. The list goes on and on. And Internet randos will have a never ending list of things that a "good company" must do for their employees.
  - steveBK123 1y ago
    If you're going above&beyond the industry average and demanding full 5-day-RTO, and pointing at how you just built a brand new HQ with great amenities so suck it up, then don't charge for those amenities? Anyway, I've recruited with JPM a few times in my career, my spouse worked there at one point, and I know friends who have been through. So I like to pick on them as a good example of a company using their brand as an excuse to have bad pay/benefits relative to rest of industry. Good for investors I suppose, but don't work there.

alexashka 1y ago

> unspecific vibes that it must be bad if employees like it Chef's kiss.

myth2018 1y ago

> Likewise many companies in my slice of the industry point to one of the big leaders RTO policies as the reason to do the same This also explains other things, not only RTO. Like when the mass layoffs started about three years ago. Overstaffed big-tech fired a few thousand allegedly idle employees and (not surprisingly) saw no impacts on output. That was enough for many smaller companies, some of them understaffed, to go on and do the same, surely encouraged by their investors. I have friends in a half dozen companies complaining about permanent overtime and severe project delays after the layoffs. Yet, referred companies are either not hiring, or doing it in a very leisurely pace.

keeda 1y ago
> Overstaffed big-tech fired a few thousand allegedly idle employees and (not surprisingly) saw no impacts on output. The part that's always glossed over in this narrative is that the remaining workers were forced to pick up the slack to keep up the output ("do more with less") which resulted in toxic work cultures. Ask any employees across BigTech companies and they'll tell you of this happening everywhere all at once -- formerly collaborative environments suddenly becoming cut-throat and competitive; high pressure and unreasonable goals for delivery; hiring being scaled back (except in offshore teams!) and new candidates being severely downleveled compared to their experience. This was not a coincidence; Sure, there were slackers scattered everywhere, but the waves of layoffs were completely disproportional to that. The real intention was to bring the labor market, overheated during Covid and ZIRP, back under control (a power play, as other comments indicate.) And who better than Elon to signal that change with his shenanigans at Twitter. If it seems surprising that output was not impacted (although I would argue a close look at Twitter shows the opposite) one just needs to look at the record levels of burnout being reported: https://leaddev.com/culture/engineering-burnout-rising-2025-layoffs-reshape-tech-industry https://leaddev.com/culture/engineering-burnout-rising-2025-... https://www.forbes.com/sites/bryanrobinson/2025/02/08/job-burnout-at-66-in-2025-new-study-shows/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/bryanrobinson/2025/02/08/job-bu... https://blog.theinterviewguys.com/workplace-burnout-in-2025-research-report/ https://blog.theinterviewguys.com/workplace-burnout-in-2025-... https://thehill.com/lobbying/5325471-burnout-erupts-among-professionals/ https://thehill.com/lobbying/5325471-burnout-erupts-among-pr...

chii 1y ago

> unspecific vibes that it must be bad if employees like it I read it as the feeling that they know somehow that the employees are not putting in 100% of their attention at home on the work assigned. And i do believe it to be true - lots of people claim that WFH means they can "do the laundry" and/or go to the post office. The fact is that there's very few self-starters and intrinsically motivated employees. Most are just there for the pay cheque, and will do the minimum work that is required of them - esp. if not under strict supervision. Not to mention the fact that it is indeed much harder to have collaborative discussions that are spontaneous and unplanned in a WFH setting, compared to the office.

wpm 1y ago
> Not to mention the fact that it is indeed much harder to have collaborative discussions that are spontaneous and unplanned in a WFH setting, compared to the office. This is a culture thing that is easily fixed by mandating cameras on, buying everyone good microphones, and a consensus that you can ping someone with a question, go back and forth, and know that you aren't imposing by throwing a /zoom into the Slack DM and saying "let's just meet about this". My team is small, sure, but we are cameras on 100%, we know to pause a sec after someone stops talking for latency, and have a spoken agreement "fuck slack just open a room i'll hop in". We have met in person numerous times and each time it feels identical to work in person as we do remote. When I meet with other teams, people are in their fucking cars driving, cameras off the whole time (but chewing into the mic), can't figure out how to share their screen (still!), like, no shit that isn't productive, you're putting no effort into it!
- ecshafer 1y ago
  I have found the same with remote. Cameras ON is a huge improvement in how much people are in on the game. Constant communication, frequent ad hoc meetings, screen sharing. Its totally doable, but most people don't do it. There is no feeling worse than presenting an idea to a meeting room of 10 people with all cameras off, and when you ask a question you get crickets. Too many people are phoning it in.
- chii 1y ago