Apple threatening action against staff not coming into the office 3 days a week
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
I only clicked this link because I thought BI might actually have done some work. The cynic in me says that they delayed publishing this copied article solely to ensure they get shared on sites without being marked as duplicates.
Companys keep having RTO policies. They keep escallating the pissy nastygrams & unspecific threats. But even when it's merely 2-3 days a week, people just don't show up.
We've had "quiet quitting" but this isn't quitting... it's a different resistance. And I think these RTO plans are going to keep crashing into oblivion. The tide has turned. This long-standing norm of being in-office all the time is dead, and no one has figured out a single useful carrot to dangle to get us back. Often the RTO is worse situations than when we left office.
This following rant is just me off-gassing & only semi-related. Our own company recently announced an upscaled RTO. As a city-dweller, it's a nearly 90m commute out to the suburbs (one way) via light-rail, after they closed our in-city office that was a 5m bike ride away. These fucking clowns don't give a rats ass & don't think for a second about the asymmetry of their ask. To them, it's like, oh, you're within 30 miles, this can't be a real burden on anyone. Because they're a bunch of out of touch suburban wankers who drive everywhere, with not the faintest fuck-all clue of how other folks live. To them, it's: 2 days, that's not bad.
But even 1 day is almost 2x the entire weekly commute I had, and by awful & expensive metro-rail versus a delightful on bicycle ride. To an awful business park, versus being inside a great city.
The people asking for RTO are useless. The asks are all hidden anonymous shitty figures. The workers, I hope, just don't do it. I've been doing 1 day a week, with the nod from my managers to just quietly subtract commute time from my work-day-hours. The clowns "in charge" realized no one had any respect for the RTO, & eventually realized tons of people just didn't show up. So now they're starting to tell the managers they have to keep attendance, that there's gonna be some real policing. But frankly it's the managers who skip the most. Tons of people have filed for exemptions for various reasons & fought to get exempted, but another 70% just don't show up reliably. And these companies are powerless to change that. Good luck threatening your actions, chums.
Even the highest tech company on the planet- perhaps especially the highest tech company on the planet- is going to have a hard as fuck time actually making the threat real, is going to keep looking like idiots. There's just no cause. There's no carrot, no sales-pitch why, no belief it's useful, and no threat imaginable that can actually scare compliance. This is a huge story, and I greatly look forward to the once-almighty power-structure being ongoingly roundly ignored. The old corporate hierarchy of control is dead, ring a ding a ding dong.
You can eat great, you can buy a fancy car, but housing?
I personally peg all my shit to housing. It’s not only the fact that the crappy SFH that was 1M is now 4M, it’s that you have the property taxes it perpetuity of a 4M abode that’s honestly pretty mediocre.
People will jump through all sorts of hoops for a better life/better things. But when those better things are so absurdly out of reach for even most people making 1%-er salaries, it discourages everyone.
And “you can eventually move to the Midwest” isn’t really a sales point (I’ve been told this by multiple managers/directors).
Why is it not? I have a number of friends that have done this: work in SF, make (literal) millions of dollars over the course of ~10 years, move to the Midwest with their new/growing family — and a nest egg it might take ~30 years to accumulate anywhere else. They seem pretty happy about it.
Because the way Tesla operates makes it more like Return To Factory, as large part of their staff works directly on plant floor.
For certain tasks you need to be on site, this is the case for many manufacturing jobs.
But he demanded it for Twitter, which had a permanent WFH policy before the acquisition.
Not like there is address verification. The whole thing is whack. Some people say they've moved and can't come in.
Like what's the point? Either force everyone to come in or don't.
Literally my entire squad is remote except for me. I love other coworkers in my department & it's fun to see them again. But there's no one on my squad to talk with. And now the office has a bunch of hybrid teams like my own, where the floor has multiple people on conference call every single minute of the day. It's awful. It's the worst in-office environment I've ever had.
That said, I'm still not going to lie about my address to the company. Just because I have a significant fear of dealing with taxes as it is, and this seems like an incredibly obvious way to make your tax-life unbelievably more difficult.
If people resist returning to the office, employers will stop demanding it. It is about control, it's always been about control and it's class warfare.
You'd think VCs would be all over this, perhaps conflict if interest?
You know how everyone whines about "a single bad hire is devastating" as a justification for whiteboarding, leetcode, etc.? Well, these were hundreds or thousands of bad hires for each company.
The other self-inflicted wound is that a hiring binge naturally raises employee compensation due to market forces, demand and supply. It's going to be difficult to undo the expectations that have been raised, to claw back the salary levels, because even if you lay off a bunch of people, the remaining employees are still making the higher compensation and will continue to expect it. If a company lays off a bunch of people and simultaneously attempts to cut employee compensation, they'll have a massive revolt on their hands. The damage has already been done, the compensation needle has already moved.
You mentioned "moving projects forward", but in addition to layoffs, many companies are also canceling or postponing projects, so it's not clear that temporarily moving projects forward added any actual value.
Will have to watch Intel closely to see, but I hear the layoffs quelled revolt about the paycuts
There is nothing rational about creating that effect within your organization because "money is cheap".
I don't get it, remote or not, if someone is not performing you can fire them. I mean, you can even make remote working contingent on a team's performance.