Dell tells remote workers that they won't be eligible for promotion (arstechnica.com)

The only reason I was on the radar is because I knew who to socialize with and what they wanted. After early senior engineer every promotion thereafter is typically political.

My first order of business at any company is to sort people into buckets of "they can help me" and "they cannot help me" and focus entirely on the first bucket. Those "after work beers" (or the remote equivalent) is where most of the work is actually done, imo. That is not to say I am without merit. But the assertion I am making is I could've probably bullshitted my way into even more positions if my moral compass was just a little bit more skewed.

I suppose changing the way you act around a certain person with power is a skill and the reward is the promotion. I know several people at or above my skill level that were promoted either later, or not at all, due to not realizing (or not caring) that merit means almost nothing. Of course, merit is what seals the deal - but "managing your manager" is more important than merit. Similarly, I've used a promotion of my own to put people I like on the right person's radar. It pays to know people. In this case, literally.

tho the parent poster could mean the skill in the job, rather than people pleasing skills.

Of course, it's a meme now-a-days, that meritocracy is how you (don't) get promoted, which is what the parent poster is lamenting.

Biggest investors are Vanguard/Fidelity/etc (anyone who can vote with clients’ 401k shares). $10,000-100,000 doesn’t buy you any influence or control. Some companies like Meta are still 51% controlled by the founder.

The people directly managing the investment are unlikely to also be holding REITs, so your assumption is valid. I think it's basically that: - The people who care about company profit are the asset managers, who will tend to implement their ideas by selling/buying shares, rather than trying to encourage a given company's management towards better practice - Corporate governance itself is therefore usually outsourced to proxy voting companies, who are quite conservatively-minded (and spread quite thin) and so won't tend to micro-manage, they'll assume that profit maximization is the job of management - The only thing the proxy voting companies will tend to have a say on is ESG-related, and WFH doesn't really fit into that

Few investors want RTO. I am a shareholder (vested) in a large tech company that communicates about the WFH/RTO matter with investors less than they do with their employees.

I can only imagine that executives want to please REITs and RE hedges so they don't dump the stock, even they own relatively little, as many executives are constantly cashing out at a slow rate. It's not for the good of the business because the days of equity financing and attracting investment is far in the rear view mirror for most large tech, and because we know this harms companies in the long-term. It might just be personal greed.

By my rough estimate, Sundar Pichai sold an average of $1.8M of Alphabet stock every month since 2015. A 3% dip on the stock would have made him make perhaps $50k less pcm. Wallmine says he's now selling at a rate of $16-40M a month. 3% is $0.5-1.2M loss every month. At that scale, the downsides of RTO to these executives pale in comparison to their personal losses if they don't please REITs.

All the other employees with peanuts in vested equity probably see it differently. I know I do. I'll take a $1k hit to not make all my colleagues go through RTO when they've moved away during the pandemic, have them pull their kids out of school, move out of their dream house, abandon their parents who need care, etc.

Your framing is over-broad, in that it could be applied to any policy within the bounds of legality. I.e. it sounds like a purely legal opinion. Yes, I think it's despicable, subjectively. That's my opinion. Just because somebody is "free" to engage in a behavior, does not somehow make that behavior immune to a moral description like "despicable".

I also think "just switch jobs" is often (and in this case) a fallacious defense except as a purely "free market" idea, which, again, is another narrowing of context.

Employers have more power than employees. It is much easier for an employer to find a new employee than vice versa, in general. I don't mean statistically easier - I mean easier in the sense that humans use the word. The disruption to a business of finding a new employee is usually incomparable to the disruption to an employee's life of finding a new employer, on average.

Edit: I also am not particularly interested in the "is it despicable" conversation in the first place, hence why I allowed room with the "or maybe you disagree!" qualifier. "Despicable" as a moral judgment of policy is probably not something one is going to casually convince another person to switch sides on. I was primarily interested in critiquing your use of their honesty as the sole factor in arguing that "this is good", not critiquing your personal opinion on whether the policy itself is good.