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They're trying to get as many people to quit as possible so they don't need to do more layoffs.

I think layoffs would be way better than trying to force out one group of people, but the people at the top don't care about what's good for the company - they care about themselves.

C'est la vie.

The objectives have changed.

Previously, large tech companies were interested in hoarding employees to slow competition.

Now, that is no longer a necessary strategy as the environment has changed and smaller startups have many other headwinds (difficult to raise $, etc).

So as the previous strategy is unwound there will be more pressure on employees and attrition is definitely part of the plan. A side benefit for the companies is less upward pressure of salaries and operational savings.

They never "needed" to do layoffs in the first place.

With AI having more employees no longer matters (unless they can train AI systems).

And pro- "not jamming everyone into unaffordable cities" which makes real estate costs for the employee untenable....while increases in remote-work enable growth or at least maintenance of current population in smaller towns and regions. If one wishes to see their own small town non-major-metro area thrive and not continue to lose population, work from home is a clear win for that goal.

Speaking of real estate costs, what really gets me about all these corporate lies about community being the goal is that these directives are more likely about corporate real estate investment.

How so? Those are sunk costs.

The circle is squared by realizing what isn't sunk yet, but will be, is the tax revenues from corporate real estate and commerce lost if the city centers lack people.

Work from home decimates some of these areas if people simply aren't there any more and all the 2nd order effects of other businesses going away as well. So I think it's wrong to assume all of the pressure comes only from the corporations themselves and not also the local governments putting pressure on the corporations to to change work from home policy because otherwise their budgets are busted.

Now, this is one of those "you problems" for the local governments; workers themselves should care about their own interests and lives and none of that changes just because some city you don't want to live in is harmed by the trends. But this dynamic should be understood when discussing the issue.

I completely agree but I think there’s more to it.

Cities are concerned bc New York of the 1970’s is staring them all down bc tax revenues take a dive and the equivalent of structural unemployment is hitting city revenue models.

That said, anyone who’s lived in the main cities can likely attest to the following. These places are corporatized shells of what they once were, and what they once were is why NYC is considered cool in the first place - live music, local bars, “scenes,” that unique city approach to local community. Sometime in the 2000s, while they lost the gnarly crime, they also started to lose all that for 7/11, Chase banks, and mom and pops owned by PE. Essentially rich person playgrounds. Nyc of 2013 was a lot of fun but also more an amusement park for wealthy millennials or NYU kids cosplaying as one. Same with SF and techies.

So these cities simultaneously bemoan the loss of that character and exponential cost of living increases, but also want back all the conditions that caused both.

If Manhattan gets it’s actual artists and culture people back from outer Brooklyn or Ohio, and it takes a dive in tax revenues and a grungy NYC for a bit, that seems a good thing. NYC of the 7/11-Chase Bank height really sucked.

Respectfully, I don't really agree at all. The crime wave that these cities are willingly welcoming and not stopping, is going to create new Detroits, or St Louis, or Baltimores...but actually probably just worse.

I don't think you need to have crime, open drug use, harassment by mentally ill and homeless...all sorts of things that are pushing corporations, and workers, to simply move out of the cities, abandon projects or large retail presence (Whole Foods, Hilton San Francisco Union Square, Parc 55 etc).

I think gentrification is good, actually. Having a nice safe clean productive city with wealth and investment flowing in vs out is good actually. Having crime, degradation, and flight is bad. If law and order was established across many cities, then even in lower income neighborhoods and housing units there could be safety and stablity; it wouldn't have to come at a premium.

I mean I'm sure there is a type that likes everything you describe, but personally it just seems like nonsense to me. I'd prefer to not have harassment on public transportation or in the streets walking home at night. And if I made good money working in the city, then good for me. If the selling point going forward is, "Come to the big city..it will cost more than your smaller town, but at least we have crime and grunginess to go with it!", I think these cities and businesses and productive people that stick around there (they won't) are going to have a bad time. Part of dynamic during the era you describe is there was 0 remote work for all industries, while being centered in certain metros. Now people won't put up with that bullshit like they had to back then.

For people that liked wonderland in a city vs a city, this is certainly the mindset.

That said, drugs and crime and… aren’t a forgone conclusion if NYC gets cheaper and local businesses can afford to come back and cultural folks can find places that aren’t 3k.

Both are likely to happen if nyc tanks a bit. The crime isn’t necessarily likely. A lot of other cities manage it.

Gentrification is not the opposite of crime. If anything, it incentivizes it, because there’s a concentration of wealth surrounded by depressed, displaced and discontent people. Peak Gentrification is when only gated communities with a lot of armed guards don’t have crime, and everyone else is a hellhole. That’s how it is already in many developing countries’ rich neighborhoods.

Not really. It rapidly causes increased pressure on local LEO to increase presence while at the same time voting for policies that increase taxation and cost of living will drive the poor out of the area.

We are saying the same thing. The poor don’t dissolve in thin air. They are still there. Only with less quality of life, and with a high concentration of wealth nearby, in what used to be “their” place. Put two and two together.

I think it's more about local government budgets, decline of tax revenue, and everything that comes with workers (and then area small businesses) leaving en masse. The corps are implementing proxy policy because of pressure from governments panicking at what happens when WFH continues.

This is almost certainly the actual topic, I agree. And don’t disagree it’s a serious point.

I have no respect for the RTO side of the argument though bc it’s proxied by a corp using scummy arguments. It is obviously about 1950’s org culture and extroverts who buy into it (who cares if this survives), short term possibly cataclysmic decline of cities (this certainly should concern everyone), and generally rejiggering a large part of how the US works due to the WFH diaspora (this is just a slice of what the internet is doing overall, can’t fight it).

Instead of leadership, we get corps doing proxy messaging. And the last several years showed they don’t deserve to be listened to IMO. I will listen to the first public service leader or newspaper who frames it in an honest way. I was told the environment matters expect for when it’s the entire country commuting to the office.

I agree. Even people who live in big cities have greater flexibility in finding a job without having to uproot the family. I live in Washington DC. A few years ago, I interviewed for a job in a different country. I think it's better for employers and workers.

Not to mention the added hypocrisy that at nearly every company I've worked at, big and small, C-levels are almost never physically in the main office building. Sometimes they're traveling the globe to work on making deals, but sometimes they just want to be at home with their family, or take a semi-vacation.

If you can run a company on the go or at home, certainly I am capable of shipping quality code at home.

We had a “Company webinar” where they explained that it was impossible to do work when out of the office, so forcing everybody in was the only choice.

Of the five directors on the call, one was in the office. Three were at home. The CEO division of support employees were also exempt from the requirement.

Ah, the old 'do as I say, not as I do' routine! Leading by example!

If you lead from the rear then you can't be surprised when the front line breaks ranks as a cannonball comes in.

Which is exactly what is happening. This is public science, so pretty safe for them, but from the company survey 40% of employees are planning to leave in the next two years (one of the Directors said they had probably just misunderstood the question), many have left already, they actively withdraw jobs where the candidates say they want to work remotely, but still manage to find highly paid remote-only positions for their friends.

We’re asking for half a billion from the government, I wonder how closely they will look.

I was once at a start up where management decided that progress was inadequate. In truth progress was inadequate, but it was a hard science problem so the amount of work done is not necessarily the main factor here. They insisted that everyone work till at least 7pm (the place had a 9am sharp start time so that amounts of a long day with dangerous chemicals and sensitive equipment - this is the equivalent of staying till 9pm for software folks who amble in at ~10:30am). In order to avoid having to stay late themselves, management adopted a rotation whereby one manager would stay late one night a week while the rest took off on time (now early). Someone found a copy of this schedule in the printer, made a few extra copies and posted them around the office which scrapped that policy. Long story short the company was never going to make it anyway.

On a positive note I think you can get this without being C-suite (although I also think it shouldn’t be hard to get for anybody!)

I work at an HFT firm as a C++ dev as a junior. Finance loves the office. I go in 5 days a week.

The one person that doesn’t come in at all? My boss with 15 years of experience. He wrote most of the trade engine himself, the firm would fall apart if he left.

So he can set his terms and he is home 100% of the time.

>He wrote most of the trade engine himself, the firm would fall apart if he left.

I get that he's probably good at what he did, but to be fair, if you as an organization leave such a high bus factor open, having the company's livelihood depend on one developer, you're dysfunctional at best and asking for trouble at worst.

Ideally good leadership should want that knowledge spread around or just not let it get to that point from the start.

I worked at a similar company before. Management don't care about that at all. We had our fundamental stone quit due to getting married and moving abroad. They just found another heavily specialized engineer and made him an obscene offer. Didn't take long for him to be on top of the systems either.

The one thing that I am still in awe is that the new engineer had his PhD in chemistry, and never attended a CS class once, but was nevertheless a world class engineer and hacker. Miss working with him.

>They just found another heavily specialized engineer and made him an obscene offer

That's unfortunately not something that most smaller companies can afford to replicate and still be alive.

If you've got unlimited money sure, everyone's replaceable as the problem boils down to having enough money to poach the next best replacement, but hiring the best of the best with guarantee they can take over the most complex codebases quickly without impacting operations, is an endeavor that can sink small companies if the bus factor hits their core.

HFT prop shops are different. The usual tech company stuff doesn't apply because if you can't afford the best guy you're dead in the water anyway.

Sure, but not all SW companies are HFT shops yet too many SW companies have open bus factors.

> having the company's livelihood depend on one developer, you're dysfunctional at best

This is the sort of banal nonsense that seems to be obviously true on its face but bears no semblance to reality. In fact, it illustrates the classic East coast vs Valley divides. The original team of secdb was half a dozen people. Each of them was invaluable & their code managed literally a few trillion USD of the world economy. person who wrote the proprietary graph language & compiler for that system was 1 single hotshot c++ guy on the standards committee, who also wrote a chapter in the programming pearls book. gs continues to use secdb & the firm is over 150+ years & counting. Meanwhile, the Valley startups I worked for since - they had this idea that everybody must know everything, all knowledge is diffuse etc. Lot of time taken in teaching backend programmers javascript, frontend guys system infra...all out of goodness of their heart. End result, neither the startup nor the programs we wrote lasted even a decade, even in the best case. In fact, median tenure in these places was under 2 years, whereas most east coasters are lifers.

>In fact, it illustrates the classic East coast vs Valley divides.

I don't live in the Valley neither on the East Coast, I'm from Europe which is where my vantage point for my argument lies. Maybe Valley companies can afford to do that because they pay the highest salaries in the world therefore they can always fix any problem because they can throw enough money at them.

>Lot of time taken in teaching backend programmers javascript, frontend guys system infra...all out of goodness of their heart.

That's equally dysfunctional. Reducing the bus factor doesn't mean that the front desk lady must know your codebase, it just means that there shouldn't be any master in the team who holds the keys to the knowledge kingdom and doesn't sahre his knowledge with the rest of the team.

> there shouldn't be any master in the team who holds the keys to the knowledge kingdom

that's exactly what i'm disagreeing with. It sounds like a good feature on paper. In reality, it seldom is. Most east coast companies of significant size, if they do anything sufficiently complex, will have 1, sometimes 2-3 guys, who hold the keys to the kingdom & know everything. The kind of domain knowledge that cannot be transferred in kt sessions. In all the IBs I've worked at, there was always the point person who knows everything about one thing, & if he got hit by a bus, man you were in serious shit. Its just the cost of doing business in that domain, can't really derisk it by writing everything down. otoh most Valley firms do very generic shit, with young troops recruited every so often, who stay just long enough to make the jump to the next faang. Even in the Valley, you have L8,L9s whose disappearance can cause significant damage. Its simply not possible to transfer all knowledge to rank and file. some things are just very hard. Code has a way of getting very convoluted very fast. End of the day, SWeng is a very young field. There are no rules like multiple people must know your codebase. There are actual prop funds in chicago running out of 1 big R file written by the cofounder. Whole fund runs out of a single R program! No joke. Big world out there.

I think the point you are missing here is documentation. There’s no reason to have all the bus-factor — it’s just laziness on the part of organizational structuring and lack of mandate to create quality infrastructure with good documentation, you don’t need to be a Fortune 500 to do this. Spoken as a catfish programmer who spent many years repairing the products of “rockstars” after they fucked off to wherever they went. Also if your stuff is too “complicated” to write down that’s a smell — people have documented far more complex pieces of tech than any software only shop has created look at medicine field or any mechanically engineered system. People love to make excuses about not writing stuff down, turns out you only have yourself to blame once you pull the trigger on your foot gun. Also your characterizations of the East and west coast are criminally juvenile — I’ve worked on both coasts and in Europe, sure there are a few orgs like you say all over the world, those are the ones where the contract is not worth the headache of dealing with an org that can’t tell their own asshole from a hole in the ground because “it’s in jimmys head”

> hypocrisy that at nearly every company I've worked at, big and small, C-levels are almost never physically in the main office building. Sometimes they're traveling the globe to work on making deals

That’s not hypocritical. To be effective in those require that they meet in person to make those deals, rather than zooming in lot a call from home or a tropical island.

It is very reasonable to expect different jobs/roles benefit from different operating modes.

Why did you omit the end of the sentence?

", but sometimes they just want to be at home with their family, or take a semi-vacation."

> The other is pro-people in seats, pro-commercial real estate, pro-commuting, pro-certain type of manager, pro-one type of extrovert who can’t find friends outside of work.

I think it's great if everyone can work where they prefer. I miss the days when I could see my colleagues in person in the office. But on days when I work from home, I can totally see why they prefer it.

I do think that newer employees can benefit from being in an office with experienced team members. However, if this is the new way of things, then I suppose they will need to adjust.

Hear, hear!

Personally, I favor WFH for scores of reasons. That said, I am aware of the pluses (and the minuses that often cannot be clearly delineated) of having people together in locations. A fair amount of the benefits are subtle, and fairly unquantifiable. These factors balance off against often similarly subtle drawbacks. Most of this comes out of human psychology and social traits / elements of social cohesion.

To provide at least a little specificity, some examples that spring to mind:

On the plus side, you have little bits of useful information, quick answers / responses, knowing who knows something like 'where to find X', ... even being able to SEE how people look day-to-day - that colleagues seem healthy and well, and to ask them in person how they are... lots of little cues, small semi-random interactions of these types.

Of course, these can also be minuses to some / to some degree. I.e., the interruptions that come with semi-random interactions, digressions in conversations (of overly substantial length) about current events &/ recreational activities etc., the "talking behind the backs of others" gossip, ...

It's a very mixed bag.

Now, as always, people are constantly changing too. Generations replace generations. And, those who have grown up with text messages and all sorts of other channels for keeping in touch, ... well, it's another factor in how useful / important "physical presence" may or may not be.

Ultimately, though, for me, WFH has been substantially more efficient and productive most of the time. I didn't even have a long commute or some of the other hassles of many, but, cutting out the commute, transitioning between environments time, random interactions and potential for distractions (ADHD being a factor), etc., has been beneficial to all parties. I agree with your points to a very large degree ... the objective advantages to (substantially) reduced "company office presence" are generally quite clear, and are mostly to be contrasted with more subtle human / social factors including the needs of some "managers" to feel like they are "in control" and are "the employers".

The "MBAs" may have won the "round" starting in the 70s and 80s of decimating unions, but, the environment has changed yet again - including in terms of demographics in as basic a way as sheer quantity of workers available (vs. roles to be filled).

I look forward to more power returning to labor, so-to-speak, even as someone who is involved in running several businesses and operations.

> Of course, these can also be minuses to some / to some degree. I.e., the interruptions that come with semi-random interactions, digressions in conversations (of overly substantial length) about current events &/ recreational activities etc., the "talking behind the backs of others" gossip, ...

I keep thinking about the many recent theories that these "minuses" of office work were essential to the systems to maintaining an illusion of a scarcity in labor and maintaining a controlling grip on employee time inside and outside of work. As things got more automated companies knew that they didn't have 8 hours of work each day for the average employee, so they built fortifications of busy work and moats of "social life". It provided defense structures against labor asking for more time off, longer weekends, shorter work days. (In US at least, the 5-day, 40-hour workweek was never the compromise, the preferred request of Unions at the time that was established was 4-days, 20-hours which more closely resembled useful productive hours and provided better family time/family planning. The hoped-for compromise was 5-days/30-hours or 5-days/35-hours and the hard won 5-days/40-hours was the bare minimum they asked for. 5-days/40-hours is the bar line for "human exhaustion".)

Of course, in no economy would any company admit that they were concerned about being "Too Productive" nor would any MBA program overtly have courses like "How to Sabotage Productivity and Get Away With It".

But there's so many little things built up in the systems and norms and practices and rituals of "office culture" that seem to only exist to waste time, to give the appearance of work without the productive essence of it. These seem like "bugs" in the system, but they are so ubiquitous it is hard not to wonder if these didn't become accidental "features" somewhere along the line (even if we can't ascribe intent or malice to them) and why they became so ubiquitous. Especially in a time like this when so many companies seem so desperate to return to that old known to be buggy status quo. Especially in a time when many of those same companies seem adamant that the impossible and weird choice is between "layoffs" or "return to office work" or "iteratively both until 'morale improves'".

woah, I was with you until you brought chipotle into this. Hopefully we can agree that it's valuable to support your local chipotle over the financial district's chipotle, since it's also keeping people employed in their communities.

I think most people would agree that you should support the local version of a business over the financial district version because you want to keep people employed in your community, but at the same time I personally would rather support locally owned and operated restaurants over chains and franchises.

Businesses fail and are replaced with other businesses all the time, it's part of the normal flow of capitalism. Within a specific community, as businesses come and go, as long as the old one is replaced with a new one then employment opportunities are still around. Eventually something will open up that is a home run and then that store will flourish in the community, which will likely create even MORE employment opportunities and if it's a local store then a lot of that money will stay local in the hands of employees, owners, local government (taxes).