Is the economic recession taking a toll on working from home?

Let me play the devil's advocate: Not if they manage to fire the low performers, bad hires, or those who are a poor fit actively hurting progress or those who are dead weight. Every big company has those people. It would be crazy to deny this fact. Especially in big companies where there's a disconnect between what's needed in the trenches and what the companies actually hire.

Some people have been poor hires that slipped through the hiring process. And some are just dead weight because they have nothing to do because they have been hired in the post Covid money printing boom with an insane growth in mind, growth which never happened last year and might not happen this year either (at least in most of Europe). Ultimately, every company has poor fits, so why keep them around?

I remember in one company, a project was getting delayed and they kept hiring more and more people thinking that would speed things up (you know, the classical have 9 pregnant women deliver a baby in one month joke), but the excessive hiring was actually leading to more delays, and an exec asked "how many more people should we hire to speed things up?" and my boss said "no, we gotta let some people go if you actually want to speed things up". We need to admit that some hires end up being dead weight or actively holding back progress so getting rid of them would actually improve things.

So, paying employees you don't need high six figure wages for a couple of slow years to sit around and do nothing just so you're prepared for the next money printing bull run is a poor unsustainable financial decision that no companies, other than those with massive war chests, like Google for example, can sustain.