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Comment by PheonixPharts | Hacker News Reader

I'm suspecting that we'll see forced return to office as a way to implement layoffs without as much bad PR. Stock will go up since costs will drop, but management will be able to say that is more an issue with return to office rather than a company failing. "We're doing great, it's just that some employees don't share our commitment and focus on doing things well, and making our mission a priority."

There has been a sudden uptick in return to office talk (despite plenty of reporting that covid is actually much worse than people realize now). Other people on HN have mentioned it and all of a sudden the leadership at my office, who were always extremely pro-remote work have suddenly started making mention of how valuable in-face communication is.

So the feeling of a "soft layoff" might be the intended effect.

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The main issue with that approach is that you basically also lay off all of your good workers who prefer remote. Maybe it's worth the cost for employers. Idk. We're remote-first and hiring. Looking forward to chatting with these employees once companies try and implement their in-office policies.

Been through a couple of layoffs at a variety of different companies through out my career and personally managed to dodge the bullet each time (so this isn't a sour grapes type response). It is very important to recognize: who gets laid off has nothing to do with whether or not they are a "good worker".

The "good worker" narrative is there to justify management's decisions and reduce survivor's guilt, but you'll see when layoffs come amazing talent and mediocre talent are equally removed. Management has zero problem laying off incredible people en masse.

Yes but in this case we're talking about returning to the office, which doesn't have the exact same dynamics.

In the case of the return to office dynamic, you're specifically filtering out high-quality workers who also prefer to be remote, and the results are retention of all low/medium quality workers regardless of remote/office preference, and high quality workers who don't mind or have some reason that keeps them in the office. You don't filter out low-quality workers whatsoever because they'll at least go to the office to keep their job assuming they don't have options (or else they'd be higher quality workers or maybe they just leave the work force).

> you're specifically filtering out...

...everyone for whom a full return to the office is a breaking point. You assume that correlates with capability of the employeeto perform their job well.

That does seem reasonable, but it remains just that: an assumption. And you know the thing about assumptions : they make a donkey out of U and MPTIONS.

No, he's assuming that low performers would have a harder time finding a new job with equal or better pay. Which may or may not be true.

Why would they be looking for a new job if this wasn't a breaking point or final straw for them?

They wouldn't be, which is why I believe this forced return to office action just filters out high-performers who wish to remain remote and it retains almost all of the low/medium skill workers and almost all of the high-skill no preference or work in office preferred high skill workers.

As a fly on the wall, I think you both agree! Both of your points are very good and aren’t mutually exclusive at all. Quite the opposite.

Keep in mind though that Elon can just say this, even send the memo... Then fire who he wants anyway, keep whoever is still remote and kept and pitch to the market that this "realignment" has made the company stronger by sucking right up to the expectations of your average distrustful exec.

How true is the claim that a hybrid WFH/in-person setup is worse than either pure WFH or pure in-person? I’ve seen many claim that it causes a cultural disconnect. I’ve wanted to defend the hybrid scenario, and yet I’ve also seen many problems with communication in a hybrid setup.

Personally, I think all three are equal. Each have merits and pros and cons. What we should do is leave people to decide what arrangement works best for them. Though companies can also decide what they think works best for their organization, in which case employees may have to leave or join new organizations depending on their work preferences or their options.

All this to say here in response that I'm increasingly irritated at the, what's the right word? Polarization? Radicalization? Politicization? Of work options and how those options are creating new tribes and battlegrounds.

Here's the covid sewage data for Silicon Valley:

https://covid19.sccgov.org/dashboard-wastewater

A week or so ago, it didn't look too bad. It is indeed much worse than I realized right now.

I think the parent poster might also be talking about consequences, such as this gem that the CDC dropped recently. 20% of the working age adult population possibly having new onset long term health effects. Oops! (And that's not even getting into things like whether certain chopped up viral fragments might be seeding protein tangles and thus Alzheimer's or Parkinson's.)

>These findings translate to one in five COVID-19 survivors aged 18–64 years, and one in four survivors aged ≥65 years experiencing an incident condition that might be attributable to previous COVID-19.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7121e1.htm

Eh, this limitation mentioned in the study seems pretty huge to me:

> Finally, the study only assessed conditions thought to be attributable to COVID-19 or post-COVID illness, which might have biased RRs away from the null. For example, clinicians might have been more likely to document possible post-COVID conditions among case-patients. In addition, because several conditions examined are also risk factors for moderate to severe COVID-19, it is possible that case-patients were more likely to have had an existing condition that was not documented in their EHR during the year preceding their COVID-19 diagnosis, resulting in overestimated risk for this group.

It also seems very possible that people with COVID diagnoses would be more likely to be on edge about their health / long COVID type symptoms. It also would have been nice if they differentiated things that can actually be tested for vs. things that can’t.

I’m not saying there isn’t an effect. I had bad cases of COVID twice. The first time I didn’t have any apparent effects afterwards other than my sense of taste taking a while to come back. After the second time - Delta - I definitely had some after effects.

We just need to be careful about claiming how many people get them. People are placeboing themselves into actually having symptoms (or thinking they do), and it’s hard to design studies to get around that.

For sure, that overall number could vary a lot, and this really needs further breakdown that distinguishes between more minor, annoying effects versus fairly life altering ones (like new diabetes or significant kidney damage). There was another one about breakthrough outcomes that did distinguish a difference in risk reduction for various severe and non-severe post-acute effects (the TL;DR being, vaccine breakthroughs are less severe but still far from harmless):

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1529477481127759872.html

Many of these are amenable to direct observation though. Research has already had many objective findings such as lung fibrosis, kidney function damage, abnormal liver function tests, shrunken brain matter (UK biobank study), etc. So the overall number might be debateable, but this is almost certainly going to have a significant impact on the number of healthy workers, not to mention the personal tragedies behind those statistics.

Risk is the product of probability and severity. The OP is talking about severity being corrected upwards, while the GP is talking about probability increasing too.

The data from my country looks like if there was a new immunity-escaping variant that causes even less grave symptoms than omicron. It's... well, it's not "good", I guess "validating" is the word here... so, it's "validating" to see other places following the same trend.

Here hospitalization and deaths are not following the infection curve at all. They are still following the end of the earlier omicron curve.

Anecdata: Everyone I know with kids in elementary school is reporting major outbreaks at school for the first time in the era of Covid. This includes my family. The transmissibility (specifically among kids) appears to be significantly higher than before. And the symptoms fortunately appear to be light for everyone I know who's caught it recently.

Meh. Wastewater has everything in it, but not things aren't checked for. Covid is now too broad a term that includes far less dangerous variants.

You need to draw a line between Covid and colds, or else count colds like Covid.

Biochemist here: the test for wastewater is quantitative PCR, which is specific to COVID. It's not COVID and "other viruses".

Here's the protocol: https://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/surveillance/wastewater-sur...

The data matches a spike in actual cases. See https://covid19.sccgov.org/dashboard-cases-and-deaths

For all intents and purposes, right now COVID in a particular area is either going to be 100% a single variant, or a variant in the process of outcompeting another variant. There hasn't been a situation where there's been equilibrium between multiple variants that I'm aware of.

Also, there is no common variant of COVID that is anywhere near as mild any virus we call "common cold". In the best case (Omicron for a young, boosted individual) it's comparable with influenza in terms of severity.

Elon has in the past talked about a growth-pruning cycle, so this is likely part of that - planned to some degree.

I imagine, too, if there are "100x engineers" (or whatever their role is) there may be compromise otherwise that's not generally applied; I would however think that someone who's that production - unless it's somehow a mostly solo role - would necessarily need to be on-site to utilize whatever resources necessary.

But at this point everyone knows. It’s already become mainstream business news. If other companies try this, the market will absolutely know they’re lying, and additionally lack the transparency and morality to actually admit they need to do layoffs.

I'm not convinced this is a case of "soft layoffs". You'll save on severence costs, but those costs are so small compared to the cost of having no control over who decides to leave.

this might be a good excuse for companies under-performing but others doing (rather) well, will be (are) able to save a lot of costs (office spaces is #2 expenditure for software companies). And then the added possibility to recruit talent worldwide (and paying those in developing countries a fraction of resources in US / EU :-) )

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