Employers losing 'key' workers because of forced return to office | Hacker News Reader

Employers losing 'key' workers because of forced return to office

theregister.com

33 pointsAissen9 comments

The push for RTO is one of the factors that is making me seriously consider leaving the industry. Not the biggest factor, but a factor nonetheless.

What industry would you shift to, though? This seems to be endemic amongst most industries right now (that could work from home).

It is making me consider shifting to going freelance again. Can't force myself to go to the office that way.

Or try to start my own business I guess, but I don't really have enough saved up that I'd feel comfortable making my family go through a prolonged period of no income.

That's an excellent question, and I don't have an answer yet. Programming is the only marketable skill I have.

Learning a trade such as plumbing or being an electrician is something that I've been thinking about.

I have started several businesses of my own over the decades, and doing it again is a real possibility. At least, it's a reasonable fallback position.

yeah, i only hire plumbers and electricians that are remote.

I don't hire plumbers or electricians that need to commute 2 hours each way.

Plumber and electricians don't work in cube farms or horrible corporate campuses.

The deadlines are imperative and unmoving, projects are at high risk of failing due to recent layoffs and low morale, but we need you remote folks to quit on top of that to reduce headcount. It all the remote folks left, including myself, our current project would fail spectacularly.

You don't need to leave software dev on that basis. Just change to somewhere which was mostly remote before covid.

I suppose some remote first firms went through covid, watched their competitors stumble as they adapted, and afterwards concluded they'd like to cripple themselves to match. It's hard to imagine any of them would still be trading at this point.

I know of quite a few teams that have lost extremely good engineers and managers because of mandatory RTO that no one except micromanagers and those who use work as a surrogate social life want.

I really don't understand the people who defend mandatory RTO acting like the alternative is mandatory WFH. The people who don't want pointless commutes and RTO aren't saying no one can work from the office. The only people forcing their choices on others are the mandatory RTO people.

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