Of course they did. Companies are looking to cut costs to appease shareholders, and this is an effective method for pushing people to leave rather than layoffs.
these same bastards get government money to build new factories and buildings. If you're taking handouts you shouldn't be allowed to cut workers just to boost the stock price.
I think we sort of knew this was the goal for some of these RTO orders: making the workplace unpleasant is a way to do a reduction in workforce without having a scary layoff. Management just shifts the decision to employees. Scummy, but not exactly a new strategy for trying to shed people without generating a ton of bad PR.
Also should let you disproportionately lay off working parents and people with long term health problems (who have higher healthcare costs on average) without technically running afoul of any laws.
Yes, but constructive dismissal is only relevant if returning to the office constitutes a hostile work environment, which it wouldn't if the original terms of employment included office attendance. Inconvenience isn't an argument.
WFH has been normal for almost half a decade now. I changed jobs and stipulated remaining remote in that time, and I suspect my employer doesn't care. They have begun talking about RTO.
Here's the thing: it's not JUST inconvenient. It's a pay cut, full stop. I have to pay to commute, one way or the other, in both time and money. Acting like this only has to do with convenience is some real bootlicker shit
It is also the most dangerous thing I do in a day. Nearly every single day, there is a traffic accident on my route. Through no fault of my own, someday that could be me smeared on the road.
> it's not JUST inconvenient. It's a pay cut, full stop.
Never mind the ongoing state income tax implications of being forced to work in a physical location, which can greatly impact the amount of take-home pay you have.
I'm considering the employer's position. If a bunch of my employees were working six-hour days and communication was suffering at the office, then I would feel justified to institute RTO. As long as it's not meant as an indirect layoff AND the employees were hired for on-site work originally, I genuinely do not see the problem.
Of course, one might argue that employers should "know" that employees will quit, but honestly, are employers supposed gauge the level of WFH cultishness before making a routine business decision? It's ridiculous.
Yes, one can argue that it's a "pay cut, full stop" just as the employer can argue that they are getting less effective employees during WFH, or that one's unearned "raise" during COVID is being rescinded. I'm not a cultist, so these are positions that need to be argued for and earned. No foot-stomping. The employers should get a say.
That may be the legal definition, but creating difficulties and hurdles for the employee so that they leave also looks very much like it, if you ask me.
If WFH was accepted corporate policy, and allowed for moving large distances away, then reversing back to RTO is not just an inconvenience, it's as much a life-upending disruption as moving for a new job.
It’s still not constructive dismissal in any state I know of. Management is allowed to change strategy, and deciding that having people in office is better for the business is sufficiently good cover.
Using return to office as a way to make people quit is also not a new strategy. Even before Covid, it was an often used tactic to trim headcount. Another common tactic is moving the office to a different location entirely, and that also is not constructive dismissal.
>but constructive dismissal is only relevant if returning to the office constitutes a hostile work environment
That's not true, constructive dismissal happens when any part of your job significantly changes and you are forced to accept it or quit. Changing a job from WFH to RTO is a very significant change, especially if you were hired directly to WFH and never worked in the office as part of the job. It won't stop them from firing you, but will stop them from blocking your unemployment claims.
RTO, means Return To Office, which means it's applying to people who started out working in the office. And by your definition, when jobs changed from the office to WFH, it constituted constructive dismissal, since it was a significant change; but that is just silly.
>RTO, means Return To Office, which means it's applying to people who started out working in the office.
Not necessarily. The company itself is moving it's workforce from home back to the office, but lots of people were hired during the WFH phase of these companies operations, so RTO is a new situation for them. We're what, 4 years into WFH now? A lot of companies have probably turned over half their staff in that time. Even the older employees might be 'returning' to a completely different building than they originally were hired to work in, since many companies gave up their leases or sold their buildings during the height of WFH.
RTO is often applied to an organization, even if elements of it were never in an office. Anecdotally, I've heard of quite a few people who were hired as remote, then their org did and RTO, and the HR response amounted to "tough shit, move on your own dime, or find work elsewhere".
Wrong. If only things were as honest as their labeling.
Source: me. Hired remote, was unfortunate to be within fifty miles of an office and placed in a new bucket. They tried to change the deal, I found new work and a higher salary instead.
I used to go on site to train people. I wasn't unreasonable, the business was. RTO proponents actually pushed me more remote.
Is it not hostile that they wanted a significant % of those they asked to no longer be employed there, spurred by the deliberate intentional actions of the company?
RTO in and of itself is hostile. Especially when there is still a highly contagious disease running rampant. It might not _legally_ constitute a hostile work environment, but it is _literally_ hostile.
Are you talking about covid, right now in August 2024? I wasn't aware that anyone was still living in fear of covid; my observation is that literally everyone, in every country has moved past it.
Immunocompromised people who have managed to survive are often still afraid of catching Covid. How little most people care means that those who are worried have a difficult time existing in public spaces. Especially with the constant social pressure to act like Covid is over. You're not going to see people who are worried about Covid as often, because... they are worried about Covid.
This was the case early on, too, though! Covid is _much_ more likely to kill people in marginalized groups. And while marginalized deaths still show up statistically, they are going to be more hidden in the day to day.
New Covid variants still cause severe long-term effects. From what I’ve read, the consensus seems to be “we have no idea what all of the long-term consequences will be, but they’re looking worrisome.” Covid is not reported on as much now, but this information isn't from like, fringe sources or anything. There is less news about Covid now because nobody wants to think or read about Covid anymore.
So, while most people may have moved on, I think the RTO movement is still hostile and coercive. Honestly, imo most people having moved on is also largely due to coercive forces.
Unfortunately we still live in legal environment where work from office is the norm, so if someone is just an employee not a contractor and not some b2b - all legal setup is that employer sets up where and how you work.
There is no way you can disagree and "expecting to work from the office" doesn't constitute "hostile work conditions" it is just the norm.
For full time employees all laws for remote work is quickly cobbled patchwork that employer can cut right away by saying now they expect RTO and I would be seriously surprised if any employee wins lawsuit.
This is kinda smart, maybe employees can be kinda smart too and try to call the bluff until they get moved into the place to make sure the office actually exists?
The problem is that the business has a centralized coordination structure, and for the employees, there isn't any apart from the business that connected them. Maybe a union is what could help.
the employees are private individuals though, they only have to coordinate themselves, not everyone will be willing to say “ok I’ll come into the office” and actually do it while job hunting, but it could be a way to call their bluff if you had in mind something that could benefit from that kind of evidence (though I think legal action is very rarely the first, or even 10th best option)
Whenever an employer implements policies that unpopular, you can safely assume trying to force attrition without paying severance is a goal, whether primary or secondary.
Of course, this has a cascade effect, where the people who have the most prospects and valued that policy not being true are going to leave, and then that has an outsized effect on organizational health, which pushes other people into leaving.
I heard it said once that someone on The Dana Carvey Show knew it was cancelled when they found the free food container in the break room, which they'd never seen anything but overflowing, was empty. I suspect that a number of executives are now discovering they have had similarly not-obviously-critical absences become the canaries in the coal mine for others, as well as how hard it is to change perception of whether people want to work for you.
The General Motors CFO basically said as much on an investor call in 2022 or 2023. That didn't get rid of enough people, so now they've implemented stack ranking because that worked so well at MSFT. That said, they get a "free" 5% workforce reduction every year that they want it, no severance, no buyout, just let go. There will be more of that coming, particularly in US automotive after the UAW deal and the current sad state of vehicle sales and the write downs on EVs.
Severance is a "we'll pay you to leave quietly" deal, not an entitlement. If the company plans to be continually laying people off (kind of a stupid idea because it makes your other employees nervous) they can find other ways to ensure silence from their victims.
perhaps this 5% is employees who were documented underperforming, breaking rules, getting into conflicts, gaming at work, etc. ehe company has every right to let them go without severance. usually referred to as "regretted attrition" which is ironic in this case because GM doesn't regret them leaving in the slightest.
And in my experience you run out of those individuals rather quickly and start cutting well-intended employees after only a few years. After that, you start firing hard working individuals who can’t or won’t play the game.
After that, you’re selecting for corporate psychopaths.
Pitting your employees in a hunger games-esque charade is sure to have unintended consequences.
Surely, if I was an employee here, self-preservation would be of the utmost importance. If I fix something to make my job easier, I will keep it to myself. If I have the opportunity to sabotage a teammate, I would. If I can lie easily, I will.
There is no entitlement in any country/state/province I've ever worked. You can quit at any time and your employer can fire you at any time - no reason needed either way
Which is exactly why they will try to bully you into quitting rather than fire you in jurisdictions with strong firing compensation/protection regulation.
They have a new performance rating system that says that 5% of every team should be ranked as "needs improvement" meaning an automatic PIP. When MSFT did this in the 2000's, it was a requirement to fire that group. Firings for performance do not entitle an employee to severance, but official "layoffs" generally do outside of bankruptcy. Net cost of this move is hidden in employees spending time updating resumes and doing job interviews, not in direct bottom line dollars from actually paying out severance.
The other hidden cost is the paranoia and backstabbing that is encouraged when someone in every team has to be fired even if everyone did objectively excellent work.
What happens if stack rank->pip is too obvious is that people and teams will not cooperate with newer fresh meat. They're incentivized to keep knowledge protected for their job. New people struggle to get above the pip mark and it becomes a revolving door.
Firings for performance do not entitle an employee to severance,
This keeps getting repeated on this thread but its not true. U.S. WARN laws require severance or 60 days notice for mass layoffs (which would definitely include 5% of a company as large as GM). Only terminations for cause are exempted, and performance is only grounds for cause in a very small handful of "right to work" states.
No, my point is that it's irrelevant whether they're underperforming or not; what matters for WARN purposes is the amount of workers being laid off.
Only for-cause terminations are excluded the WARN Act, and for-cause in this context means specifically behavior that violates the law, or the employee handbook setting forth company rules (which are binding on both the company and employee, which is why companies make you read them every year). Also note that companies can't make poor performance a violation of company rules; this has been tried before and smacked down pretty harshly even in right-to-work states.
Thus, those 5% laid off due to stack ranking are entitled to 60 days of severance, or 60 days notice of an impending termination.
You're missing the part where the WARN Act doesn't require the employees to be let go all at once.
And the part where rolling layoffs at a company the size of GM will all involve multiple layoffs exceeding the WARN threshold.
And the part where no general counsel will let their company knowingly subject itself to a $500 daily fine per employee, in addition to full back pay for the mandated period.
And the part where GM satisfies its WARN obligations by paying the mandated severance (or more) in lieu of providing advance notice...which is what most companies do...
Not who you asked, but where I live, the law prescribes three levels of severance pay (one to three months of pay, depending on your time with the company) for all layoffs. Obviously not if you get fired.
The sad state of vehicle sales has mostly to do with the outrageous increases in new car prices that go way beyond transmission of supply chain costs and dance right on in to price gouging territory. The prices still have not corrected to something sane according to the actual inflation curve.
The average price of a new car these days is $48K. This is insane. For that price tag to make any kind of sense at all, you have to have an income of nearly half a million per year. Median household income in the U.S. is around $75K meaning most of these households, if they're even purchasing a vehicle at all, would be buying used.
It would mean financial ruin to borrow two-thirds of your income for a car. The automakers have forgotten Henry Ford's lesson. He payed his workers enough so they could each afford the products he was selling. Our companies don't pay their employees enough to afford their products any more. <Surprised Pikachu!> Sales are down.
1000% agreed -- I worked for Ford and GM and now work for a different vehicle software company, and the salary I made starting out + the employee discount meant that vehicles were affordable, but not fun to afford. Now, I can't upgrade my F150 to something with more towing capacity and couldn't even while working at GM with their employee discount and somewhat lower truck prices in general compared to the other Big Three. The problem is corporate culture related, but it's also contributed to by the safety regs requiring every car to have a bunch of driver assist things that drive up total cost even on low end cars, meaning that the mid and high end need to be super profitable for overall fleet profit to be acceptable.
How is that average calculated though? If everyone switches from buying the $40k Camry to the $85k F150, prices didn't have to change for the "average price of a new car" to increase. This isn't a dismissal since we can compare every model year to the previous and see an increase YoY in prices without serious improvements to the underlying product. We have also seen everyone going from sedans to trucks though.
>It would mean financial ruin to borrow two-thirds of your income for a car. The automakers have forgotten Henry Ford's lesson. He payed his workers enough so they could each afford the products he was selling.
I agree but the problem is that business owners don't like how much money comes from that system and prefer competing for people's lines of credit, because an economy where everyone has $40k in debt literally has more money sloshing around it than one where everyone buys their car outright, and that means more profit, which is the entire goal of every CEO everywhere, so of course every CEO wants you to go into debt for them. Unfortunately, a lot of people can leverage themselves farther than they can actually afford for long enough that some CEO can extract profit before the entire system collapses.
A shitload of profit and CEO salary was made in the run up to 2008, and none of the people who extracted that wealth from the system went to jail, so why are we surprised they're trying to do it again?
Scientology managed to distill this down to the bones; They simply had people sign up for credit cards and max them out buying scientology stuff. Since the penalty for debt goes to the people who took it, instead of the place the money the debt went, there's infinite incentive to do this. CEOs look at that system and get extremely jealous.
> I agree but the problem is that business owners don't like how much money comes from that system and prefer competing for people's lines of credit, because an economy where everyone has $40k in debt literally has more money sloshing around it than one where everyone buys their car outright
It's even simpler than that, and "greed" doesn't come into the equation anywhere: any market where goods/services are subdized will lead to more expensive goods and services, by simple economics.
Even industries where companies are "good", and try to provide quality goods to customers at an affordable price point (while still turning a small profit) will see this happen, because the excess capital will push the apparent "affordable" point up - its effective, unwitting collusion for entire markets.
This is happening in healthcare (insurance that has transformed from being actual insurance in case of catastrophic injury, into cost-sharing), home prices (cheap mortgages), cars (cheap financing), and education (cheap student loans).
Debt needs to be more expensive. Insurance needs to only be for catastrophic events.
This comment laments about the rising prices of cars, but it doesn't offer anything to explain why they're getting more expensive.
"Greed" isn't the answer - we have greedy companies in every area of the economy, yet somehow the prices of phones, computers, desks, large appliances, televisions, and many other types of goods hasn't skyrocketed in the same way as cars.
What makes cars different? I know that the cost of labor has significantly increased (which partially motivates the stratospheric increases in education and healthcare costs), but I thought that cars were mostly manufactured in an automated manner.
100% Agree, We could have $10k electric cars in the US, specifically made in China. It's not going to happen anytime soon for enough reasons that could fill a HN comment section.
What are the basics? The "front end" (demand side) is that cars are effectively subsidized by cheap and widely available financing, but at a high level where is that money actually going on the "back end" (supply side) that makes cars expensive to manufacture?
Several things that aren't regularly talked about: to meet increasingly stringent emissions standards without massive losses in engine power (and resulting customer dissatisfaction), companies spend heavily on powertrain R&D to eke the remaining emissions improvements out (99.9% reduction to 99.99% reduction). To meet increasing safety standards, manufacturers have to have much more complicated base models than before, which drives up even the lowest car prices -- backup cameras, automatic emergency braking cameras and logic, immobilizer standards, etc. Then, for the products that everyone wants, some manufacturers aren't even making the new CAFE standards, so they buy "indulgences" (EV offset credits) from Tesla, which is literally a regulatory tax for the incorrect outcomes, but customers don't want GM and Ford EVs at the moment. Beyond that, some solutions to the above problems (hybrids) are simply insanely expensive (ballpark $20k extra manufacturing cost for a hybrid powertrain on some high end hybrid SUVs vs the identical engine without the electric components). All of that shifts parts of the curve to the right, some of it only shifts the high end, some of it shifts the entire curve.
Auto company profit margins provide further evidence supporting your hypothesis (modern car requirements are just inherently more expensive).
The auto companies whose profit margins I checked are in the single-digits, sometimes negative. If it was just greedy price gouging, we'd expect them to see much healthier profit margins.
I don't understand why people don't check these figures more often for these publicly traded companies when offering the 'companies are being greedy' narratives.
I listened to the entirety of the investor call and the GM CFO definitely does not call it a "free" workforce reduction.
The stack ranking is primarily about rewarding high-performing employees with higher bonuses. It also puts a low-performing employee at risk of getting let go, but it doesn't magically absolve GM of its unemployment law obligations, because any layoff pursuant to this planned workforce reduction would be grouped together and at GM's size the 5% reduction would trigger WARN Act obligations long before they got to 5%.
Seriously guys: if stack ranking were a magical way to avoid the WARN Act or other unemployment laws every company would be claiming that layoffs were performance based. That no company tries to claim performance as the basis for avoiding severance should tell you something about how the law works...
As a biz owner, this kind of decision making would stress me out.
No one knows what the quality of the people will be. The people okay with driving 2+ hours are going to stick around. What kind of person is that? A hard worker? Maybe. A dedicated worker? Maybe...
Or is it the people so untalented, they cannot find another job, and do this for survival?
I don't know the answer, and I'd be horrified to roll the dice on that. I'm unsure what the packages look like to cut your lowest performers, but at least you aren't rolling dice.
Side note: I can get nation wide talent way way way cheaper when I offer remote/flexible schedule. I kind of appreciate the big companies arent sucking this labor market, leaves me room.
You're taking a pretty black and white look at this.
You make the policy and then hand out exceptions (quietly) to the MVP's.
I have managed a few dev teams inside more "traditional" companies and you would be remisss to think the the corporate policy you set cause you have a CS team is going to get applied to engineers.
I've mostly worked remotely, whether at home or because I was traveling a lot, informally (except during COVID) for about the last ten years and with a mix of in-office and out-of-office before that.
My doubtless somewhat unpopular opinion is that I developed stronger professional connections with people I worked together with in person to at least some degree than those I never met in person. Some of this can be mitigated with off-sites and other events; the convergence of generally tighter budgets and the lifting of COVID restrictions didn't help. But I don't really agree with the 100% remote viewpoint in general.
What Naval was talking[0] about is that you start to know whom to trust when playing the long game, and people start to trust you in return. Which is exactly what causes those quiet exceptions to be handed out.
While it does not seem to be ‘fair’, this is how long term game actually looks like.
I was on dev teams inside industrial-age companies before I went to FANG, and I saw it go both ways.
In one company, the hourly customer service folks who sat adjacent to our patch of the cube farm (that's right, no noise isolation between the call center and the software development team) complained about engineers arriving half an hour after customer service shift start, so we salaried engineers were instructed to be at work by 8am or whatever. In another company, the hourly people were not allowed in the executive barbershop, the executive dining room, or the executive washroom and had to park in the surface lot instead of the garage. Actually, garage access was denied even to most software engineers but whatever.
I'm sure it's generally true that "MVPs" get exempted to varying degrees. My point is that the policies themselves are fairly capricious in the first place and the identification of MVPs is unreliable too. Performance management for managers is probably more difficult even than performance management for software engineers and my experience makes me highly skeptical about the whole prospect of professional management.
1. Why is “not the same” equal to “not fair”? Genuine question.
2. It’s human nature to give favor to those that you think are “on your side” — this can mean various things in a manager’s case.
3. I would counter “why don’t all ICs contribute equally?” They don’t, and usually it’s not even close.
Overall, I understand and appreciate your sentiment, especially in a large org in which most folks are effectively replaceable cogs in the wheel.
That said, as a business owner who uses sub-contractors, I would not be happy if I had to treat all of my sub-contractors equally since they often add vastly different amounts of value to my business (even in the same type of work).
Making exceptions isn't necessarily a sustainable position either.
Others have already commented on colleague resentment.
There's also the problem of being the only remote team member, or having to deal with company infrastructure which doesn't support remote work well "because we are all in the office anyways".
How much this matters differs from company to company, but often letting certain people continue to WFH while most of the company is RTO has a shelf-life before the WFH employee has enough of being a second-class citizen and leaves for a more remote-friendly company.
> You're taking a pretty black and white look at this.
As are you, to be frank. Rules for teams are well and good, but social dynamics are what they are. Dynamic. Individuals make these up. Not all offers are the same or as you expect.
I was offered something you might find reasonable, I find it untrustworthy. Favor given can be taken away, no thanks. I'll manage.
That’s a great strategy if you want workers to quit. But if you’re hiring, (like for instance if having employees makes you more money than the employees cost) what you want is the opposite.
The key insight is going to be: when they’re hiring again will those same companies continue to offer remote options. The answer is probably some will some won’t.
Theoretically it thins out the workforce by triggering resignations in the people who are the least invested in your company; the ones who really "get it" will stick with the company and RTO.
In reality, it thins out the workforce by triggering resignations in people who think they're going to have an easy time getting a job elsewhere at a remote-friendly company, which is typically your best people. On the balance sheet it looks great because they're often the top earners, but in reality you're losing some of the best talent you have.
It also thins out the workforce by removing anyone who can't return to the office, or for whom doing so is untenable; people with disabilities or health issues, single parents, and so on, regardless of how well those people perform or what they bring to the company.
Theoretically those positions can then be filled by people who are more talented or more interested in or passionate about the role, but in reality they'll be filled by people who don't mind RTO or who need the job bad enough that they'll put up with it.
I think it also kills morale while dismissing the fact that the majority of people don’t or can’t opt into finding a new job very easily. This leads to a slow culture death which affects sales much more IMO
I mean, the first problem isn’t just the view on the small portion of people that actually check out.
It’s moreso the majority than continue to suffer. It affects their own health, their families, happiness, life, society. I think macro now because the US work life is declining exponentially and no, I don’t mean the stock market.
Knowing stack ranking is in effect completely changes the work dynamics. Should I help my coworker through a problem? End of the month, my KPIs might be negatively impacted, whereas theirs were boosted. Performance now becomes singularly competitive where you would rather have some chaff losers on the team.
Work becomes even more performance art where you need to make the boss value you the most. All gameable metrics will be gamed.
This is exactly why the House That Jack Built (GE) was made out of cards.
To be fair, running a huge megacorp is really hard and there seems to be no easy answer to getting thousands of people to perform optimally, together, over the long term.
>To be fair, running a huge megacorp is really hard and there seems to be no easy answer to getting thousands of people to perform optimally, together, over the long term.
It's only hard when you're constantly trying to squeeze more money out and trying to cut wages and make people work multiple peoples' jobs.
> Should I help my coworker through a problem? End of the month, my KPIs might be negatively impacted, whereas theirs were boosted.
I feel like helping a coworker should be factored into your performance. "force-multiplier", or however the industry calls it. but then, I've never worked at a toxic, hyper-competitive rank-and-yank..
> feel like helping a coworker should be factored into your performance.
This is how you get voting rings where there's an old guard on the team who help each other get good reviews, and a steady stream of sacrificial team members who are doomed to be in the bottom x% regardless of their competence. "Hire to fire" is another symptom of this blight.
The better the KPIs are the more abstract they become, eventually being impossible to measure.
These are rough, rough approximations of the human condition. The idea is that you can lossily compress 40 hours of work into 1 number, about a centimeter across on a computer screen. You WILL lose a lot of data.
The side-effect is that the people who will be most willing to leave are those who are the most confident about their job prospects in the market. You could be silently laying off your top performers, while people with less knowledge or experience stay around because finding a new job will be harder for them.
I don't doubt that this happened, but what percentage of RTO efforts were about intentional attrition vs something else?
The intentional attrition strategy seems like it only makes sense if you have a lot of dead weight on your staff but are stable as a business. If the business is in really dire financial straits, I think you actually fire people.
If overall you have a healthy business and a revenue per employee is significantly above costs per employee (and if you previously observed that growing the team helped you grow revenue), boosting attrition will probably hurt you, right? You may improve margins in the next few quarters but eventually your decreased ability to build/sell will cut into your revenue growth. But I think there have been plenty of companies that seemed to be healthy and succeeding who didn't have a clear reason to want attrition, and who still pushed RTO, which seems like probably a bad move?
I do believe a fair share of execs did earnestly buy into the idea that employees are more productive from the office, and if employees were ok with working from the office 5 years ago and they're being paid more now, they would just accept it -- i.e. execs hoped they could mostly retain their staff but get more value out of them. And I further continue to believe that these execs were biased by largely isolated from inefficiencies in the open-plan-office / too-few-meeting-rooms before times.
- The CEO never had to scramble to find another room when an important conversation went long -- whoever had the room next was forced to scramble.
- If the COO felt that a meeting needed to be scheduled last minute, people around them made it happen ... meanwhile 3 levels down the org-chart, a design doc review meeting involving 3 teams can't be scheduled until the week after next because we need the 12-seat conference rooms in 2 offices to be free at the same time.
- The head of HR has an office with a door that closes -- for good reason! But for this reason they did not suffer reduced productivity when listening to music through their headphones for 8 hours a day simultaneously caused tinnitus and failed to fully drown out the sale bro one row of desks away.
> If the business is in really dire financial straits, I think you actually fire people.
Then it must be reported to investors who might think your business is in trouble. But if you hire contractors (who do everything a full timer does, just with fewer rights) or have high attrition you can fly under the radar.
The other aspect that was/is remains "funny" is how the C-suite often makes uneconomic decisions for the company that make their own commute comfort.
Notable how many companies opened HQ2 near where the CEO decided to buy a second home for tax purposes. Funny how the business case for HQ2 perfectly aligned with their personal interests.
There's often another reason. Some companies like Google own quite a bit of commercial real estate. Forcing people to use the office again is bolstering that investment in real estate. Is it working? Not really.
Not sure if meeting rooms are critical part of RTO efficiencies in anyone's mind. E.g. we are being forced to come at least 4 days a week and most meeting are still through webex before or now.
They are absolutely sure of their My way or highway policy. And besides groveling and whining about extra time to drop / pick kids employees are in no position to reply to management RTO mandate in language they understand.
> Not sure if meeting rooms are critical part of RTO efficiencies in anyone's mind.
No, it's not the point people bring up -- they like to talk about being able to just walk over to someone to ask them a question, or quickly form a huddle to resolve an issue. The claim is generally that people work more efficiently in the office.
Whereas my experience has been that (a) remotely, creating a slack thread is fast and easy but (b) in office sometimes when you want to huddle, there wasn't a room for it. My claim is that the office itself was often a bottleneck on productivity.
RTO is a tax scheme, the local governments give tax breaks to companies on their real estate in return employees are expected to spend money to commute and eat. It is just a tax transfer from corporations to employees. That's it. Well, that and the need to keep the working class under the thumb of tyrants.
RTO is a tool. A tool which I saw works very well against even a wiff of unionization. The remaining workers suffered for couple of months, but there is no union anymore.
Unless the employees came on under remote work it’s very hard for them to say the work policy is a change in working conditions, even if it fundamentally is.
For instance I now have to drive to work where previously transit was an option, so my commute has changed from work time to just an additional 12 hours of uncompensated labour and thousands of dollars in fuel, maintenance, and tolls.
I'm kind of confused about this, can't you just get yourself fired (without doing anything illegal) instead of quitting? Are people concerned with the civil law risk?
I'm doing exactly this at the moment. I'm in Europe. My lawyer says that there's probably not going to be any gain in it for me unless the company will cave and agree to some sort of severance. I don't have my hopes up, but I'm willing to take them to court just to expose their bullshit in front of the other people still working there in good faith.
* Company may deem you ineligible for future re-hire
* You may have lost the opportunity to have a good reference
* Lack of control of timing
* Embarrassing call with manager/HR
I don't see what upside there is to getting fired deliberately? In my location you aren't eligible for unemployment benefits if you are fired for cause.
I'm surprised that there hasn't been a class action lawsuit against companies implementing RTO given that many offices workers are returning to are shells of their former selves. Seems like companies still pushing RTO are using it to cover up issues, only some of which are HR.
Yeah, there's a difference between "getting screwed generally" versus "getting screwed against a contract."
Maybe if you had an employment contract stating that all commutes would be reimbursed at $X/hr you could sue for the missing money, but even that (on its own) wouldn't prevent the company from simply ending the arrangement.
Leadership at my former place publicly despised remote work. Only senior engineers were allowed to work remotely, and the rest had to work at one of those nasty startup coworking spaces 4x per week.
During my tenure, that policy didn't have the effect the CEO desired, and it led to the tech department shrinking, despite the headcount more than doubling. It was tremendously hard to find good engineers that were willing to put up with the CEO's antics, despite offering them above market average comp.
If your startup is uncool, one of the first few things you should review is your remote work policy. Some really crappy businesses might be having an easier time hiring competent employees just because they allow WFH.
According to the CEO, the only reason was that he struggled to attract senior engineers in the area. Eventually that didn't just happen in the area, though...
> This suggests that these departures are not just numerical losses but also qualitative ones, affecting team dynamics, institutional knowledge, and overall performance.
No crap Copernicus.
Why does management insist on believing that their workforce is made up of interchangeable cogs is it because the reality is just too uncomfortable?
If what the article says is true, it seems they rolled back about a decade and a half of diversity in tech initiatives. It also speaks to how little power those organizations have.
Since I can remember there have been nonstop “women in tech” clubs to encourage women to advance their career even if it’s not easy. And it’s not easy if you have to take care of a child. The company might have a monthly zoom call and schedule a female senior manager to give a speech about her career. Wonderful.
And then RTO hits. And some of those same senior managers are requiring their teams to commute to an office and sit at a desk for vague, unspecified, or otherwise underjustified reasons.
The result is predictable. People resign. But some people are more likely to leave than others. Single men with no other obligations are less likely to mind leaving at 8:30 and getting back at 6:30. Women may not be able to.
It turns out, those zoom calls were largely useless. It’s not a mindset issue. It’s a labor issue. Women in tech initiatives were tolerated as long as they positioned themselves as mindset or career growth within the company, and didn’t encourage organizing or asking anything of the company. But a truly effective movement would have gave employers pause before mandating RTO.
I'm not sure I buy into this super connected WFH and diversity argument.
Folks working to 8:30 are working to 8:30 from home or work, both are going to hit people of different backgrounds differently depending on their personal situation as much as anything else.
It’s not my argument, I am just repeating the results discussed in the article. Perhaps there are unrelated factors, but diversity did decrease after RTO.
Just as an example of how it plays out in practice, commute time is an externality the company just pushes onto employees. If you’re salaried, you aren’t paid for it despite it being required. This is time which could be used for other things. Of course this affects people more if they have responsibilities outside of their job.
My broader point is that these meetings effectively reframed collective problems, where many women (and men) had shared labor interests, into an individual “grindset” issue. Therefore an RTO mandate which should have been a major dispute was never really questioned.
Very simple: where do the kids go to school or daycare?
Unless you're significantly wealthier than your neighbors, most likely the public school for their grade level closest to your home, which you picked in large part for the quality of the schools.
And who is, in the end, the parent usually taking children to school and picking them up, and dashing over to pick them up if they get sick or injured?
The mothers.
For younger children, daycare arrangements were made based on where the primary caregiver (usually, mother) plans to work.
When that plan all of the sudden becomes "compulsory hybrid", you can't just split the kid's time between two daycares - in a lot of places, just getting that first slot was hard and expensive enough.
There's the simple fact that the daycare near your house might not open early enough or stay open late enough to accomodate your commute. Plus, I kind of want to do more with my little kid during the week than get him ready for daycare and get him ready for bed.
These aren't all the reasons that RTO pushes young (and young-ish) women out of the workforce, but are just the first examples that came to my mind.
If it were easier to fall back to part time but stay in tech for a few years, it wouldn't be as big a deal.
"And who is, in the end, the parent usually taking children to school and picking them up, and dashing over to pick them up if they get sick or injured?"
While this is true, this has done more to hurt women than the RTO policy. I grew up in New Jersey. When I was 5 years old I started Kindergarten. The first day of school my father walked with me, to show me where the school was. After that I was on my own. And all of the 5 year olds in my neighborhood were also on their own. We were expected to have enough maturity to get ourselves to school, and we did, everyday. We generally walked together, all the 5 and 6 and 7 and 8 year olds. School was exactly 1 kilometer from my house.
If you're looking for something that puts an undue burden on modern women, it's the modern practice that children cannot get to school on their own. They (the children) still somehow manage to get to school on their own in rural areas and in most countries: most of Europe, all of Latin America, Africa, nearly all of Asia.
We should be clear about where the real burdens are coming from. If we could get back to a situation where children could get to school on their own, the situation would be easier for women.
And obviously, if you expect workers to find a collective solution to their problems then you should also expect parents to find a collective solution to their problems.
DEI initiatives across all industries are considered luxury goods. They provide no measurable impact the bottom line. Ignoring that, I've yet to find someone who has thought hiring these DEI experts over more engineering or management to be the fiscally intelligent choice.
When money supply shrinks the fat gets cut. The DEI initiatives were excessive levels of fat and in a value-driven economy this stuff gets cut.
This doesnt mean that RTO wasn't used to get people to quit. It's just this anecdata is a thinly disguised political op-ed rather than what most major news has reported for the last 2 years. Correlation is not causation. The majority of the first cuts from 2021-2023 came from these initiatives (and HR in general) as paying someone 250,000 dollars to browbeat people at the company all-hands is neither productive nor fiscally responsible.
You don’t need to agree that DEI hiring is useful to see my point about sponsored women in tech clubs for existing employees. What is important is that for employees in the company who take care of children (many of them women), reframing their collective interests as individual problems essentially guarantees they won’t question leadership decisions. This is despite those decisions making their job more difficult, as evidenced by the fact that many women would rather quit than RTO.
Personally, I am more concerned with the cumulative drop in productivity that will control for all variables including this one. Again though, sponsored clubs for a particular gender are a luxury good. If these initiatives were self-organizing it wouldn't be a problem. However, the implication here is they are not.
On a numbers basis the rules still apply: there are N members of this club. Each are paid an average of X dollars per hour. If the meeting is only an hour a week thats still N x X x 48 annually. Add in a food budget, perhaps bringing in a guest or two once and while. This quickly gets unsustainable as N grows.
The issue I take with this reframing is that it is once again Men vs. Women in this completely fabricated war in tech (and only tech). RTO is a negative for everyone involved. The division here makes it sound like, once again, women suffer more than men for an isolated reason, not considering that men suffer in a different but comparable way. Or they are quitting at a dramatically higher rate over the baseline RTO quit-rate (and "women with children" quit-rate across industries). The actual reason boils down to simple MBA spreadsheet math.
Productivity be damned, RTO makes fiscal sense when you have a 15 year lease on a building you can't get out of. I don't agree with it, but I can see why you'd want warm bodies in seats when you pay 20,000 (or more) a month for your modern-tech cube farm.
Women with children in other industries that have never had these luxuries are clearly doing something that women in tech aren't. The question I have is - what is it? Is the actual solution an economic one whereby we could once again afford to live on a single salary so someone is staying home?
> Again though, sponsored clubs for a particular gender are a luxury good.
I think my point here is that a company-sponsored women in tech club is actually not that expensive and deliberately created to co-opt what would otherwise be a collective interest. It is certainly less expensive than giving concessions to women. That is the calculation. Imagine if women with children had organized and collectively refused RTO. Now you’re looking at either caving or finding replacements, depending on the feasibility of firing them.
> it is Men vs. Women in this completely fabricated war on tech
I agree, it isn’t men vs. women. It is various interest groups vs. management. One of those interest groups happens to be parents who take care of kids. Corporate friendly “glass ceiling” framing only came later to redirect attention away from management.
None of this is to say RTO wasn’t a burden for men either.
> Productivity be damned, RTO makes fiscal sense when you have a 15 year lease on a building you can't get out of. I don't agree with it, but I can see why you'd want warm bodies in seats when you pay 20,000 (or more) a month for your modern-tech cube farm.
Could you explain your thinking this further, please?
In your example the company is paying for accommodation whether it is used or not, it seems to be a sunk cost. The fiscal decision making should hinge purely on what gives the best ROI given that money has already been forsaken.
What you're describing seems to be more aligned to "it makes sense psychologically." A large and very visible commitment has, due to unforseeable reasons, been made partially unnecessary. Following through regardless saves face.
The "E" (environment) portion may sometimes be useful. Specifically, a more efficient or recycling focused approach, if common-sense in nature, may boost internal efficiency. Recycling (item X) means you don't need to buy a new one, means saved costs, means environment karma upvotes.
But it's not karma upvotes that causes company to do this, nor is it that our companies are governed by rabid hyperleft liberals. It's that one particular ibank, Blackrock, is governed by a rabid hyperleft liberal, thus anyone who wants his money, will also hit the "D" and "I" initiatives. And by "his money" I mean "all of our money" which is a massive collection of investments funds that blackrock manages and uses as a kudgel for these social initiatives. That's all to say, hiring XX people of YY skin color may result in ZZ concrete additional dollars of funding or stock price, which under certain circumstances may be a profitable transaction.
If blue collar worker single parents manage to somehow make things work, it's not unreasonable to expect the same from white collar people with much less demanding and strict jobs time wise
Blue collar workers often also don’t have any parental leave at all and might even be required to work the day after giving birth. Is the argument that because they “make it work” that no group of people should ask for better working conditions?
I don’t think we should look to the worst examples of labor standards to decide what is fair. People with healthcare can “make it work” without healthcare. People who don’t have to work 996 could “make it work” if they had to work Saturdays. Even before OSHA, most factory workers weren’t losing their fingers in meat grinders.
WFH benefits are apparent on their own for a individual. How WFH affects diversity in a specific company maybe a useful exercise , it doesn't change the benefits much.
What's overlooked is that today's workforce is not ruled by a cadre of hardcore company people any more. Work from home is generally enjoyed on every level of the hierarchy. Likewise, even your boss's boss will have a family and share childcare responsibilities, which creates strong demands for flexibility and autonomy that are hard to argue against. This means, leadership doesn't want to, and can't really enforce return-to-office all that well.
So, unless I am missing something big, heavy-handed measures mandated from the CEO ultimately won't change modern workplace culture.
(If you like WFH though please do your part: Be productive and communicative from home and argue against return-to-office at any occasion to the full extent of your influence within the organization)
That kinda assumes those CEOs will become subject to the same rules (and punishments) as the rank-and-file employees...
Moral suasion is nice to have, but plenty of corporate policies still get implemented without it.
In other words, I think you're overestimating the extent you which "bosses like it and do it" trickles down, especially when it's perceived as not enhancing the company's quarterly profits.
The real problem is that those which leave are those who have [better] options. So by utilizing this kind of strategy you select for the employees you least want.
This is likely only true for very poorly run companies — but a LOT of companies, especially big companies, are very poorly run.
It would be a disaster if such a high percentage of employees at my company quit. But my company is very lean and mean. The productivity of each employee is extremely high, and a big reason for that is most employees have been around a long time (10+ years). They know their jobs extremely well and the team is very tight-knit.
The company has to pay for that low turnover — we all get big raises every year without having to ask, bonuses, etc. — but they can afford it handily because the company is well run.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 224 ms ] threadHere's the thing: it's not JUST inconvenient. It's a pay cut, full stop. I have to pay to commute, one way or the other, in both time and money. Acting like this only has to do with convenience is some real bootlicker shit
Never mind the ongoing state income tax implications of being forced to work in a physical location, which can greatly impact the amount of take-home pay you have.
Of course, one might argue that employers should "know" that employees will quit, but honestly, are employers supposed gauge the level of WFH cultishness before making a routine business decision? It's ridiculous.
Yes, one can argue that it's a "pay cut, full stop" just as the employer can argue that they are getting less effective employees during WFH, or that one's unearned "raise" during COVID is being rescinded. I'm not a cultist, so these are positions that need to be argued for and earned. No foot-stomping. The employers should get a say.
Using return to office as a way to make people quit is also not a new strategy. Even before Covid, it was an often used tactic to trim headcount. Another common tactic is moving the office to a different location entirely, and that also is not constructive dismissal.
That's not true, constructive dismissal happens when any part of your job significantly changes and you are forced to accept it or quit. Changing a job from WFH to RTO is a very significant change, especially if you were hired directly to WFH and never worked in the office as part of the job. It won't stop them from firing you, but will stop them from blocking your unemployment claims.
Not necessarily. The company itself is moving it's workforce from home back to the office, but lots of people were hired during the WFH phase of these companies operations, so RTO is a new situation for them. We're what, 4 years into WFH now? A lot of companies have probably turned over half their staff in that time. Even the older employees might be 'returning' to a completely different building than they originally were hired to work in, since many companies gave up their leases or sold their buildings during the height of WFH.
The same people tried to tell me I could ignore it. I said, "Dude, both of you couldn't" and found work that works instead.
Happily remote and not wasting another productive second on this.
Source: me. Hired remote, was unfortunate to be within fifty miles of an office and placed in a new bucket. They tried to change the deal, I found new work and a higher salary instead.
I used to go on site to train people. I wasn't unreasonable, the business was. RTO proponents actually pushed me more remote.
It's not literally everyone.
Immunocompromised people who have managed to survive are often still afraid of catching Covid. How little most people care means that those who are worried have a difficult time existing in public spaces. Especially with the constant social pressure to act like Covid is over. You're not going to see people who are worried about Covid as often, because... they are worried about Covid.
This was the case early on, too, though! Covid is _much_ more likely to kill people in marginalized groups. And while marginalized deaths still show up statistically, they are going to be more hidden in the day to day.
New Covid variants still cause severe long-term effects. From what I’ve read, the consensus seems to be “we have no idea what all of the long-term consequences will be, but they’re looking worrisome.” Covid is not reported on as much now, but this information isn't from like, fringe sources or anything. There is less news about Covid now because nobody wants to think or read about Covid anymore.
e.g. a quick search gives me: https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/researchers-are-still-untangl...
So, while most people may have moved on, I think the RTO movement is still hostile and coercive. Honestly, imo most people having moved on is also largely due to coercive forces.
Reward the places that do it right with your efforts.
There is no way you can disagree and "expecting to work from the office" doesn't constitute "hostile work conditions" it is just the norm.
For full time employees all laws for remote work is quickly cobbled patchwork that employer can cut right away by saying now they expect RTO and I would be seriously surprised if any employee wins lawsuit.
If an employer is not willing to do that then it's not really a remote/hybrid role.
Once it's in your contract then it won't matter about RTO demands for the workforce, because they don't apply to you.
feels like a pill being used purposely for it's unpleasant side effects.
Whenever an employer implements policies that unpopular, you can safely assume trying to force attrition without paying severance is a goal, whether primary or secondary.
Of course, this has a cascade effect, where the people who have the most prospects and valued that policy not being true are going to leave, and then that has an outsized effect on organizational health, which pushes other people into leaving.
I heard it said once that someone on The Dana Carvey Show knew it was cancelled when they found the free food container in the break room, which they'd never seen anything but overflowing, was empty. I suspect that a number of executives are now discovering they have had similarly not-obviously-critical absences become the canaries in the coal mine for others, as well as how hard it is to change perception of whether people want to work for you.
Rank and yank originated at GE to the best of my knowledge. Where it also "worked well."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve
And in the medium and long term solidifies a self-serving culture rather than individuals working towards the group’s and firm’s success.
After that, you’re selecting for corporate psychopaths.
Surely, if I was an employee here, self-preservation would be of the utmost importance. If I fix something to make my job easier, I will keep it to myself. If I have the opportunity to sabotage a teammate, I would. If I can lie easily, I will.
https://www.ncsl.org/labor-and-employment/at-will-employment...
What happens if stack rank->pip is too obvious is that people and teams will not cooperate with newer fresh meat. They're incentivized to keep knowledge protected for their job. New people struggle to get above the pip mark and it becomes a revolving door.
This keeps getting repeated on this thread but its not true. U.S. WARN laws require severance or 60 days notice for mass layoffs (which would definitely include 5% of a company as large as GM). Only terminations for cause are exempted, and performance is only grounds for cause in a very small handful of "right to work" states.
Only for-cause terminations are excluded the WARN Act, and for-cause in this context means specifically behavior that violates the law, or the employee handbook setting forth company rules (which are binding on both the company and employee, which is why companies make you read them every year). Also note that companies can't make poor performance a violation of company rules; this has been tried before and smacked down pretty harshly even in right-to-work states.
Thus, those 5% laid off due to stack ranking are entitled to 60 days of severance, or 60 days notice of an impending termination.
Think of this is as a continuous process of evaluation -> pip -> fire. This means no WARN and no severance.
And the part where rolling layoffs at a company the size of GM will all involve multiple layoffs exceeding the WARN threshold.
And the part where no general counsel will let their company knowingly subject itself to a $500 daily fine per employee, in addition to full back pay for the mandated period.
And the part where GM satisfies its WARN obligations by paying the mandated severance (or more) in lieu of providing advance notice...which is what most companies do...
The average price of a new car these days is $48K. This is insane. For that price tag to make any kind of sense at all, you have to have an income of nearly half a million per year. Median household income in the U.S. is around $75K meaning most of these households, if they're even purchasing a vehicle at all, would be buying used.
It would mean financial ruin to borrow two-thirds of your income for a car. The automakers have forgotten Henry Ford's lesson. He payed his workers enough so they could each afford the products he was selling. Our companies don't pay their employees enough to afford their products any more. <Surprised Pikachu!> Sales are down.
>It would mean financial ruin to borrow two-thirds of your income for a car. The automakers have forgotten Henry Ford's lesson. He payed his workers enough so they could each afford the products he was selling.
I agree but the problem is that business owners don't like how much money comes from that system and prefer competing for people's lines of credit, because an economy where everyone has $40k in debt literally has more money sloshing around it than one where everyone buys their car outright, and that means more profit, which is the entire goal of every CEO everywhere, so of course every CEO wants you to go into debt for them. Unfortunately, a lot of people can leverage themselves farther than they can actually afford for long enough that some CEO can extract profit before the entire system collapses.
A shitload of profit and CEO salary was made in the run up to 2008, and none of the people who extracted that wealth from the system went to jail, so why are we surprised they're trying to do it again?
Scientology managed to distill this down to the bones; They simply had people sign up for credit cards and max them out buying scientology stuff. Since the penalty for debt goes to the people who took it, instead of the place the money the debt went, there's infinite incentive to do this. CEOs look at that system and get extremely jealous.
It's even simpler than that, and "greed" doesn't come into the equation anywhere: any market where goods/services are subdized will lead to more expensive goods and services, by simple economics.
Even industries where companies are "good", and try to provide quality goods to customers at an affordable price point (while still turning a small profit) will see this happen, because the excess capital will push the apparent "affordable" point up - its effective, unwitting collusion for entire markets.
This is happening in healthcare (insurance that has transformed from being actual insurance in case of catastrophic injury, into cost-sharing), home prices (cheap mortgages), cars (cheap financing), and education (cheap student loans).
Debt needs to be more expensive. Insurance needs to only be for catastrophic events.
"Greed" isn't the answer - we have greedy companies in every area of the economy, yet somehow the prices of phones, computers, desks, large appliances, televisions, and many other types of goods hasn't skyrocketed in the same way as cars.
What makes cars different? I know that the cost of labor has significantly increased (which partially motivates the stratospheric increases in education and healthcare costs), but I thought that cars were mostly manufactured in an automated manner.
The auto companies whose profit margins I checked are in the single-digits, sometimes negative. If it was just greedy price gouging, we'd expect them to see much healthier profit margins.
I don't understand why people don't check these figures more often for these publicly traded companies when offering the 'companies are being greedy' narratives.
The stack ranking is primarily about rewarding high-performing employees with higher bonuses. It also puts a low-performing employee at risk of getting let go, but it doesn't magically absolve GM of its unemployment law obligations, because any layoff pursuant to this planned workforce reduction would be grouped together and at GM's size the 5% reduction would trigger WARN Act obligations long before they got to 5%.
Seriously guys: if stack ranking were a magical way to avoid the WARN Act or other unemployment laws every company would be claiming that layoffs were performance based. That no company tries to claim performance as the basis for avoiding severance should tell you something about how the law works...
No one knows what the quality of the people will be. The people okay with driving 2+ hours are going to stick around. What kind of person is that? A hard worker? Maybe. A dedicated worker? Maybe...
Or is it the people so untalented, they cannot find another job, and do this for survival?
I don't know the answer, and I'd be horrified to roll the dice on that. I'm unsure what the packages look like to cut your lowest performers, but at least you aren't rolling dice.
Side note: I can get nation wide talent way way way cheaper when I offer remote/flexible schedule. I kind of appreciate the big companies arent sucking this labor market, leaves me room.
You make the policy and then hand out exceptions (quietly) to the MVP's.
I have managed a few dev teams inside more "traditional" companies and you would be remisss to think the the corporate policy you set cause you have a CS team is going to get applied to engineers.
My doubtless somewhat unpopular opinion is that I developed stronger professional connections with people I worked together with in person to at least some degree than those I never met in person. Some of this can be mitigated with off-sites and other events; the convergence of generally tighter budgets and the lifting of COVID restrictions didn't help. But I don't really agree with the 100% remote viewpoint in general.
This right here is exactly the kind of manipulation that's causing my generation to quit corpo jobs in record numbers.
It's BS and everyone knows it. Those quiet exceptions aren't as quiet as you would believe. We all see it. And we all understand what's happening.
Naval Ravikant was right. It's best to play long term games with long term people and have zero tolerance for anything less than 100% integrity.
While it does not seem to be ‘fair’, this is how long term game actually looks like.
[0] - https://nav.al/long-term
In one company, the hourly customer service folks who sat adjacent to our patch of the cube farm (that's right, no noise isolation between the call center and the software development team) complained about engineers arriving half an hour after customer service shift start, so we salaried engineers were instructed to be at work by 8am or whatever. In another company, the hourly people were not allowed in the executive barbershop, the executive dining room, or the executive washroom and had to park in the surface lot instead of the garage. Actually, garage access was denied even to most software engineers but whatever.
I'm sure it's generally true that "MVPs" get exempted to varying degrees. My point is that the policies themselves are fairly capricious in the first place and the identification of MVPs is unreliable too. Performance management for managers is probably more difficult even than performance management for software engineers and my experience makes me highly skeptical about the whole prospect of professional management.
Lots to unpack here.
1. Why is “not the same” equal to “not fair”? Genuine question.
2. It’s human nature to give favor to those that you think are “on your side” — this can mean various things in a manager’s case.
3. I would counter “why don’t all ICs contribute equally?” They don’t, and usually it’s not even close.
Overall, I understand and appreciate your sentiment, especially in a large org in which most folks are effectively replaceable cogs in the wheel.
That said, as a business owner who uses sub-contractors, I would not be happy if I had to treat all of my sub-contractors equally since they often add vastly different amounts of value to my business (even in the same type of work).
As one of them (well, I'm at least folk), I can only imagine the angst it causes those who didn't, and thus had to RTO.
Others have already commented on colleague resentment.
There's also the problem of being the only remote team member, or having to deal with company infrastructure which doesn't support remote work well "because we are all in the office anyways".
How much this matters differs from company to company, but often letting certain people continue to WFH while most of the company is RTO has a shelf-life before the WFH employee has enough of being a second-class citizen and leaves for a more remote-friendly company.
As are you, to be frank. Rules for teams are well and good, but social dynamics are what they are. Dynamic. Individuals make these up. Not all offers are the same or as you expect.
I was offered something you might find reasonable, I find it untrustworthy. Favor given can be taken away, no thanks. I'll manage.
In reality, it thins out the workforce by triggering resignations in people who think they're going to have an easy time getting a job elsewhere at a remote-friendly company, which is typically your best people. On the balance sheet it looks great because they're often the top earners, but in reality you're losing some of the best talent you have.
It also thins out the workforce by removing anyone who can't return to the office, or for whom doing so is untenable; people with disabilities or health issues, single parents, and so on, regardless of how well those people perform or what they bring to the company.
Theoretically those positions can then be filled by people who are more talented or more interested in or passionate about the role, but in reality they'll be filled by people who don't mind RTO or who need the job bad enough that they'll put up with it.
It’s moreso the majority than continue to suffer. It affects their own health, their families, happiness, life, society. I think macro now because the US work life is declining exponentially and no, I don’t mean the stock market.
Wonder how getting rid of the employees with the most agency and options will turn out for the office-heads.
Work becomes even more performance art where you need to make the boss value you the most. All gameable metrics will be gamed.
To be fair, running a huge megacorp is really hard and there seems to be no easy answer to getting thousands of people to perform optimally, together, over the long term.
It's only hard when you're constantly trying to squeeze more money out and trying to cut wages and make people work multiple peoples' jobs.
I feel like helping a coworker should be factored into your performance. "force-multiplier", or however the industry calls it. but then, I've never worked at a toxic, hyper-competitive rank-and-yank..
This is how you get voting rings where there's an old guard on the team who help each other get good reviews, and a steady stream of sacrificial team members who are doomed to be in the bottom x% regardless of their competence. "Hire to fire" is another symptom of this blight.
These are rough, rough approximations of the human condition. The idea is that you can lossily compress 40 hours of work into 1 number, about a centimeter across on a computer screen. You WILL lose a lot of data.
That's why you have mentoring as a metric.
The intentional attrition strategy seems like it only makes sense if you have a lot of dead weight on your staff but are stable as a business. If the business is in really dire financial straits, I think you actually fire people.
If overall you have a healthy business and a revenue per employee is significantly above costs per employee (and if you previously observed that growing the team helped you grow revenue), boosting attrition will probably hurt you, right? You may improve margins in the next few quarters but eventually your decreased ability to build/sell will cut into your revenue growth. But I think there have been plenty of companies that seemed to be healthy and succeeding who didn't have a clear reason to want attrition, and who still pushed RTO, which seems like probably a bad move?
I do believe a fair share of execs did earnestly buy into the idea that employees are more productive from the office, and if employees were ok with working from the office 5 years ago and they're being paid more now, they would just accept it -- i.e. execs hoped they could mostly retain their staff but get more value out of them. And I further continue to believe that these execs were biased by largely isolated from inefficiencies in the open-plan-office / too-few-meeting-rooms before times.
- The CEO never had to scramble to find another room when an important conversation went long -- whoever had the room next was forced to scramble.
- If the COO felt that a meeting needed to be scheduled last minute, people around them made it happen ... meanwhile 3 levels down the org-chart, a design doc review meeting involving 3 teams can't be scheduled until the week after next because we need the 12-seat conference rooms in 2 offices to be free at the same time.
- The head of HR has an office with a door that closes -- for good reason! But for this reason they did not suffer reduced productivity when listening to music through their headphones for 8 hours a day simultaneously caused tinnitus and failed to fully drown out the sale bro one row of desks away.
Then it must be reported to investors who might think your business is in trouble. But if you hire contractors (who do everything a full timer does, just with fewer rights) or have high attrition you can fly under the radar.
Notable how many companies opened HQ2 near where the CEO decided to buy a second home for tax purposes. Funny how the business case for HQ2 perfectly aligned with their personal interests.
They are absolutely sure of their My way or highway policy. And besides groveling and whining about extra time to drop / pick kids employees are in no position to reply to management RTO mandate in language they understand.
No, it's not the point people bring up -- they like to talk about being able to just walk over to someone to ask them a question, or quickly form a huddle to resolve an issue. The claim is generally that people work more efficiently in the office.
Whereas my experience has been that (a) remotely, creating a slack thread is fast and easy but (b) in office sometimes when you want to huddle, there wasn't a room for it. My claim is that the office itself was often a bottleneck on productivity.
Unless the employees came on under remote work it’s very hard for them to say the work policy is a change in working conditions, even if it fundamentally is.
For instance I now have to drive to work where previously transit was an option, so my commute has changed from work time to just an additional 12 hours of uncompensated labour and thousands of dollars in fuel, maintenance, and tolls.
Hooray!
So not really.
* Company may deem you ineligible for future re-hire * You may have lost the opportunity to have a good reference * Lack of control of timing * Embarrassing call with manager/HR
I don't see what upside there is to getting fired deliberately? In my location you aren't eligible for unemployment benefits if you are fired for cause.
Maybe if you had an employment contract stating that all commutes would be reimbursed at $X/hr you could sue for the missing money, but even that (on its own) wouldn't prevent the company from simply ending the arrangement.
During my tenure, that policy didn't have the effect the CEO desired, and it led to the tech department shrinking, despite the headcount more than doubling. It was tremendously hard to find good engineers that were willing to put up with the CEO's antics, despite offering them above market average comp.
If your startup is uncool, one of the first few things you should review is your remote work policy. Some really crappy businesses might be having an easier time hiring competent employees just because they allow WFH.
I can imagine legit situations where the Senior Engineers work well from home, but the vibe doesn't change...
This system kinda blows that apart.
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/27/4-in-10-companies-say-theyve...
No crap Copernicus.
Why does management insist on believing that their workforce is made up of interchangeable cogs is it because the reality is just too uncomfortable?
Since I can remember there have been nonstop “women in tech” clubs to encourage women to advance their career even if it’s not easy. And it’s not easy if you have to take care of a child. The company might have a monthly zoom call and schedule a female senior manager to give a speech about her career. Wonderful.
And then RTO hits. And some of those same senior managers are requiring their teams to commute to an office and sit at a desk for vague, unspecified, or otherwise underjustified reasons.
The result is predictable. People resign. But some people are more likely to leave than others. Single men with no other obligations are less likely to mind leaving at 8:30 and getting back at 6:30. Women may not be able to.
It turns out, those zoom calls were largely useless. It’s not a mindset issue. It’s a labor issue. Women in tech initiatives were tolerated as long as they positioned themselves as mindset or career growth within the company, and didn’t encourage organizing or asking anything of the company. But a truly effective movement would have gave employers pause before mandating RTO.
Folks working to 8:30 are working to 8:30 from home or work, both are going to hit people of different backgrounds differently depending on their personal situation as much as anything else.
Just as an example of how it plays out in practice, commute time is an externality the company just pushes onto employees. If you’re salaried, you aren’t paid for it despite it being required. This is time which could be used for other things. Of course this affects people more if they have responsibilities outside of their job.
My broader point is that these meetings effectively reframed collective problems, where many women (and men) had shared labor interests, into an individual “grindset” issue. Therefore an RTO mandate which should have been a major dispute was never really questioned.
Unless you're significantly wealthier than your neighbors, most likely the public school for their grade level closest to your home, which you picked in large part for the quality of the schools.
And who is, in the end, the parent usually taking children to school and picking them up, and dashing over to pick them up if they get sick or injured?
The mothers.
For younger children, daycare arrangements were made based on where the primary caregiver (usually, mother) plans to work.
When that plan all of the sudden becomes "compulsory hybrid", you can't just split the kid's time between two daycares - in a lot of places, just getting that first slot was hard and expensive enough.
There's the simple fact that the daycare near your house might not open early enough or stay open late enough to accomodate your commute. Plus, I kind of want to do more with my little kid during the week than get him ready for daycare and get him ready for bed.
These aren't all the reasons that RTO pushes young (and young-ish) women out of the workforce, but are just the first examples that came to my mind.
If it were easier to fall back to part time but stay in tech for a few years, it wouldn't be as big a deal.
While this is true, this has done more to hurt women than the RTO policy. I grew up in New Jersey. When I was 5 years old I started Kindergarten. The first day of school my father walked with me, to show me where the school was. After that I was on my own. And all of the 5 year olds in my neighborhood were also on their own. We were expected to have enough maturity to get ourselves to school, and we did, everyday. We generally walked together, all the 5 and 6 and 7 and 8 year olds. School was exactly 1 kilometer from my house.
If you're looking for something that puts an undue burden on modern women, it's the modern practice that children cannot get to school on their own. They (the children) still somehow manage to get to school on their own in rural areas and in most countries: most of Europe, all of Latin America, Africa, nearly all of Asia.
We should be clear about where the real burdens are coming from. If we could get back to a situation where children could get to school on their own, the situation would be easier for women.
DEI initiatives across all industries are considered luxury goods. They provide no measurable impact the bottom line. Ignoring that, I've yet to find someone who has thought hiring these DEI experts over more engineering or management to be the fiscally intelligent choice.
When money supply shrinks the fat gets cut. The DEI initiatives were excessive levels of fat and in a value-driven economy this stuff gets cut.
This doesnt mean that RTO wasn't used to get people to quit. It's just this anecdata is a thinly disguised political op-ed rather than what most major news has reported for the last 2 years. Correlation is not causation. The majority of the first cuts from 2021-2023 came from these initiatives (and HR in general) as paying someone 250,000 dollars to browbeat people at the company all-hands is neither productive nor fiscally responsible.
On a numbers basis the rules still apply: there are N members of this club. Each are paid an average of X dollars per hour. If the meeting is only an hour a week thats still N x X x 48 annually. Add in a food budget, perhaps bringing in a guest or two once and while. This quickly gets unsustainable as N grows.
The issue I take with this reframing is that it is once again Men vs. Women in this completely fabricated war in tech (and only tech). RTO is a negative for everyone involved. The division here makes it sound like, once again, women suffer more than men for an isolated reason, not considering that men suffer in a different but comparable way. Or they are quitting at a dramatically higher rate over the baseline RTO quit-rate (and "women with children" quit-rate across industries). The actual reason boils down to simple MBA spreadsheet math.
Productivity be damned, RTO makes fiscal sense when you have a 15 year lease on a building you can't get out of. I don't agree with it, but I can see why you'd want warm bodies in seats when you pay 20,000 (or more) a month for your modern-tech cube farm.
Women with children in other industries that have never had these luxuries are clearly doing something that women in tech aren't. The question I have is - what is it? Is the actual solution an economic one whereby we could once again afford to live on a single salary so someone is staying home?
I think my point here is that a company-sponsored women in tech club is actually not that expensive and deliberately created to co-opt what would otherwise be a collective interest. It is certainly less expensive than giving concessions to women. That is the calculation. Imagine if women with children had organized and collectively refused RTO. Now you’re looking at either caving or finding replacements, depending on the feasibility of firing them.
> it is Men vs. Women in this completely fabricated war on tech
I agree, it isn’t men vs. women. It is various interest groups vs. management. One of those interest groups happens to be parents who take care of kids. Corporate friendly “glass ceiling” framing only came later to redirect attention away from management.
None of this is to say RTO wasn’t a burden for men either.
Could you explain your thinking this further, please?
In your example the company is paying for accommodation whether it is used or not, it seems to be a sunk cost. The fiscal decision making should hinge purely on what gives the best ROI given that money has already been forsaken.
What you're describing seems to be more aligned to "it makes sense psychologically." A large and very visible commitment has, due to unforseeable reasons, been made partially unnecessary. Following through regardless saves face.
If we're trying to equalize traditional gender roles, how about getting more fathers home to take care of kids?
Better yet, remove gender completely and let WFH stand on it's own, which it clearly does.
But it's not karma upvotes that causes company to do this, nor is it that our companies are governed by rabid hyperleft liberals. It's that one particular ibank, Blackrock, is governed by a rabid hyperleft liberal, thus anyone who wants his money, will also hit the "D" and "I" initiatives. And by "his money" I mean "all of our money" which is a massive collection of investments funds that blackrock manages and uses as a kudgel for these social initiatives. That's all to say, hiring XX people of YY skin color may result in ZZ concrete additional dollars of funding or stock price, which under certain circumstances may be a profitable transaction.
It is very likely that blue collar hiring, firing, promotion, flexibility dynamics are entirely different to tech.
Tech competition might be much stronger compared to whatever competition exists in a very local workshop.
I don’t think we should look to the worst examples of labor standards to decide what is fair. People with healthcare can “make it work” without healthcare. People who don’t have to work 996 could “make it work” if they had to work Saturdays. Even before OSHA, most factory workers weren’t losing their fingers in meat grinders.
WFH benefits are apparent on their own for a individual. How WFH affects diversity in a specific company maybe a useful exercise , it doesn't change the benefits much.
So, unless I am missing something big, heavy-handed measures mandated from the CEO ultimately won't change modern workplace culture.
(If you like WFH though please do your part: Be productive and communicative from home and argue against return-to-office at any occasion to the full extent of your influence within the organization)
Moral suasion is nice to have, but plenty of corporate policies still get implemented without it.
In other words, I think you're overestimating the extent you which "bosses like it and do it" trickles down, especially when it's perceived as not enhancing the company's quarterly profits.
Unless the employees you want are those that can be easily controlled.
It's not unbelievable - I've worked at a few mediocre places before - but what a strange world we live in.
It would be a disaster if such a high percentage of employees at my company quit. But my company is very lean and mean. The productivity of each employee is extremely high, and a big reason for that is most employees have been around a long time (10+ years). They know their jobs extremely well and the team is very tight-knit.
The company has to pay for that low turnover — we all get big raises every year without having to ask, bonuses, etc. — but they can afford it handily because the company is well run.