Imagine this. The company recognizes that it has too many staff, therefore it offers early retirement deals and voluntary redundancy deals, which pay significan

Imagine this. The company recognizes that it has too many staff, therefore it offers early retirement deals and voluntary redundancy deals, which pay significant bonuses if you have been with the company for several years. But you need to get approval up the management chain, i.e. your manager, their manager, their manager's manager, etc. And it is refused. Six months later, the deal is offered again, you apply and it is refused. And again six months later, and again, until 3 years have passed. All these years you have hardly anything to do, i.e. your job responsibilities can be completed in 4 hours per week. You spend a lot of time browsing the web, reading research papers, gaining the equivalent of a university education. You spend some time on the corporate wiki documenting things, explaining stuff, collating a glossary of corporate jargon etc. From time to time you find someone else with a problem and help them out with it, in secret because that is not your job. And finally, after carefully crafting emails to everyone in your management chain, pointing out how you do nothing useful for the business and haven't for the past several years, and how there is no risk to the business because you have trained person X to do your 4 hours per week of real work, and built an automated tool as well, they accept your application. You get a check for 4 months wages, and never have to return to that place. Do you think such a person would ever recommend anyone to work there? The worst part of this is that when this happened to me there was another department that desperately needed people with my skillset and experience, but I could not be considered for such jobs without approval of my management chain. Somehow they got the idea in their head that I was an employee too valuable to lose, even though I did so little work that I "worked from home" 4 days a week so that nobody would notice if I took a nap or something. I have some sympathy with Yahoo and HP for wanting people to work in the office, but if they happen to have this kind of problem, I think that they are solving it in the wrong way. Instead, try zero-based budgeting for headcount. If you cannot justify every position in dollars and cents, that person is out of your organization and goes into a pool where anyone in need of their skills can bid for the headcount.