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Comment by dry_soup | Hacker News Reader

It's quite clear to me that tech companies know that reneging on WFH will cause some employees to leave. I think that this is actually the entire point. You can do a soft layoff, without ever having to say the word layoff, and without ever getting "Tech company XYZ announces layoffs" headlines.

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The problem, I think, is what kind of employees may leave. If it's the best of the cream, then the company is in trouble. And frankly, the best employees can allow themselves to say "I want to work from home. You don't allow? Then goodbye".

dirty secret is, they'll just allow their best employees to work remote

Yeah either they do that or they'll burn a lot of good will

Yeah, there is an example of OpenAI: Sam Altman says people should work in the office, however they are ready to hire exceptional talent anywhere.

This was always so.

Pre-covid my entire team was office and I was the only remote. Without wanting to brag, it's factual: my Drupal knowledge made it worth for them to keep this up. Post-covid my entire team is scattered to the winds. You couldn't get them to come to the office because almost no one is within the same metro as the office.

It’s never bragging to say you work with Drupal ;)

Until this spreads and it backfires.

We had an example at our office several years ago where employee X was a great worker, nothing to say about that, that was having his own "working" rhythm (e.g., until late at night, mornings off, etc.), and was coming to the office only from time to time, just because the manager was really pushing hard, or for certain office events.

This spread and people started to ask - can I work from home? -> only 1 day Why? X does more than 1 day, and sometimes X is not available when I need.

... as a manager you can only "yes, but ..." that much. At a certain point people (who I would like to remind everyone again and again: most of the time are people with a high college degree, used to read books, papers, and do things, not 3 years old kids) connect the dots and say "alright, it's time to go". And before they go, they let the entire apple tree rot to hell. If that doesn't happen it might be because this spreads and goes to high management that asks the manager "WTF are you doing?"

That's when either more rights come in equally for everyone, or ... they need to let go of their best employee, or they need to find a compromise. Just having the nicely protected "best" employee is never a good strategy. Eventually people get pissed off and leave, and if they don't, congrats, you have just made the "non-best" employees even less motivated and less productive.

This was so before COVID. If you are good and productive you can often negotiate WFH like any other benefit.

Honestly it seems like it’s part of a tech career trajectory. Once you are very established and your skills are built up there are several tracks available to you. Two of those are WFH specialist or 5-10X experienced dev and WFH consultant.

The cube farm grind is something you go through to get your skills and network up.

I have seen the same in other knowledge areas: corporate law, finance, some types of editing and design, accounting, etc. WFH becomes one of the options at more senior levels.

The other reason it’s a more senior option is that senior people are seen as better able to self direct and thus requiring less micromanagement.

That seems to be true in my case, the first decade of my career was spent in cube farms and cramped offices. I learned a lot and made a few networks, and now I’m at a fortunate point where most jobs are available to me with a phone call if my current job sucks. Especiallly when I’m asked to RTO.

The dirtier secret might be that the remote employees aren't necessary the best employees.

In my opinion, above a certain size, companies don't really care about employee quality all that much. So long as they meet the initial hire criteria it doesn't matter who's a 5x or 1x dev anymore. It's just one FTE anyway in the planning.

At this point the company has become a bullshit churning machine whose effectiveness is measured by its rate of churn. They milk cash cows that gained traction in decades past, while most new work is just part of the churn.

I think you are 100% correct that they don't care, that doesn't make it a smart decision. It's a good way to die a slow death.

They are going to quickly discover that this is the case. I left Lockheed right after they started forcing everyone back into offices that didn't even have enough desks. Those whom were actually creating value there all had plans to leave to. Plenty of them left as soon as they got the news lol. Sure it's a way to do layoffs without saying 'layoff', but the impact is going to be felt much harder down the line.

I'm not sure that there is a terrible large correlation between "best of the best" and "refuse to ever work in office." When I think about the engineers that I most respect and admire, they are very split on wfh vs wfo opinions.

Companies keep making this mistake.

Nokia at one point started handing out very generous severance packages to get people out. The management thought that the bad workers would be the ones to take the deal.

Nope, the oldest and most experienced ones took the money and used it to start their own companies.

(As I always point out...) This is known as the "Dead Sea Effect" and it was traditionally associated with companies like IBM but now we're seeing it across the board with tech layoffs. The best people know they have options and they have a good network so once a company starts showing signs of slowing down they bail out.

http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/11/the-wetware-crisis-the-d...

Those headlines are usually associated with a bump in the stock price; it's unclear why they'd be trying to avoid them. Perhaps they think it undermines future hiring or retention, but so does RTO.

It can be bad optics for companies which took large sums of money from the government recently (say, for pandemic relief or major tax breaks of some kind) to then turn around and announce large layoffs. It guarantees that the CEO is going to have an unpleasant day or two in front of, say, a Congressional committee or maybe a state legislature hearing. And letting CEO's avoid unpleasant consequences of their own decisions is definitely an important factor in corporate decisions.

The problem with this is that they are more likely to lose their best talent first.

Aren’t those layoff headlines desirable if they bump your stock price?

It sounds perverse but surely conpanies notice how much the market likes them.

Even the serverance they save is a rounding error compared to a 10% bump in market cap.

It's situational - sometimes a layoff headline may push your stock price down.

I imagine current round[0] of layoffs is opportunistic - companies know they'll want to do some layoffs at some point, but when's a better moment than when everyone else is doing layoffs? The public at this point doesn't even care anymore - there's been too much of it going on, it's not novel, it's what everyone's doing.

[0] - I'm not sure if "round" is even a good term anymore - it's been what, half a year already, of ongoing layoffs in tech companies? I've been seeing at least one headline per week about some recognizable name in tech announcing/executing layoffs, since February, or maybe even January 2023.

The problem is they are leaking talent, as those who know that can pick another offer that suits their needs will do without thinking about it too much.

I’m beginning to think so as well. You can get significant layoffs without having a “layoff” event, and you don’t have to provide any of the support that is required when firing people.

It’s clearly not what an employment lawyer would call “constructive dismissal” but it sure feels like that is the intent.

> It’s clearly not what an employment lawyer would call “constructive dismissal”

Isn't it? I'm pretty sure this kind of forced change to working conditions constitutes constructive dismissal under e.g. UK law.

If it’s in your contract then yes but if you were hired to work in an office but allowed to WFH for some time because of company policy I doubt it would be seen as such even in the UK

think of WFH more like a defacto relationship.

At some point it becomes custom and practice, particularly in a case like this where they've pledged it would be permanent.

Sorry I'm habitually talking about us employment law that is generally as anti-worker as it is possible to be while still pretending that employees have rights.

It's also I realize kind of iffy. If Dell said explicitly "we will not ever require RTO", and you moved following that, then maybe your lawyer would be willing to bring a case, but in this case Dell is saying "if you live within an hour" you have to come in to the office. Given my employer's RTO has given me 3+ hours of commuting a day that seems in the region of what the US considers reasonable.

“Live within an hour” is interesting for Dell, given where their office is. At peak commute times this barely even covers north Austin, but off leash likely covers the entire metro area.

oh yeah - my mandatory RTO means I now need to drive for 2.5-4 hours a day.

Previously I could commute via public transit + work on commute buses, but given the lack of masking, vaccination requirements, or separation, driving is now the only safe option.

Not just for covid either: not going to the office meant I did not get sick for years - within a month of RTO starting I had one coworker saying that they would have been in the office but the (at the time) rules said you couldn't come to the office if you had flu symptoms even if you hadn't tested positive for covid. e.g. The only reason a coworker didn't come in while knowing that they work sick was because at the time it was explicitly prohibited.

where are they gonna go when few allow wfh?

Even if none allow WFH, they might go somewhere with less of a commute, or to a more trustworthy employer that doesn't backtrack on promises.

People are still acting like the current job environment doesn’t suck. Where are these trustworthy companies currently that aren’t also announcing layoffs or that you can count on not to have layoffs?

I don't think you can count of any company not to have layoffs, that's quite dependant on the economy, company performance, sector, etc.

If a company promised no layoffs ever, I wouldn't believe them. But if they promised to continue WFH, I'd believe them, since that's directly under their control.

No you can’t. But the odds are better for not having layoffs if they are actually profitable.

So many allow WFH. There's thousands of open software positions in SF alone, and plenty are ok with remote. Some are even ok with me being in the taiwan time zone. I'm managed to stay consistently employed in the Taiwan time zone with SF and NYC based jobs the last 2.5 years.

In my case, more than likely change industries.

Aside from FAANG, there's no evidence this trend is picking up.

In fact, I bet all the people that got laid off recently will be happily hired by remote first companies very quickly.

You mean all of the “remote first” companies that are profitable and not struggling?

Most employment is from small businesses, by the numbers. Most small businesses are struggling-to-fragile at best as most fail. The "not paying for office space is a sizable plus" contingent alone would give a substantial number of WFH jobs Counterintuitively there are loads of jobs from the companies who are struggling.

And how many employees at Dell would risk working for a small struggling employee in this market? Would that small employee pay as much?

This is my third time seeing this type of job market (2000, 2008 being the other two). This is the time where there is a “flight to quality”.

> And how many employees at Dell would risk working for a small struggling employee in this market?

The laid off ones.

In that case, they by definition aren’t “employees at Dell”.

No, I don't mean that.

Curiously, for some candidates, almost every letter of the FAANG, WILL give a full WFH offer, today, and they are willing to put this down with ink on paper.

Source: have a few of those on my desk right now.

Depending on the circumstances, couldn't that be tantamount to constructive dismissal in some countries?

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