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Comment by sys42590 | Hacker News Reader

If a company enforces RTO or other policies making many employees unhappy, it's the people with options to work somewhere better who are leaving. Having such options is likely correlated with good performance. So Grindr probably took a significant hit in the average performance per employee as well. And attracting new talent with a shitty work from home policy won't be easy either.

Of course there might be more to this story than what one can extract from the CNN article, there might be e.g. some cost pressure from going public some months ago...

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> it's the people with options to work somewhere better who are leaving

This happened at the last place I worked. It was so incredible to watch it happen. First the COO took off, and her favorite VP (who hired me) took off as well. Pretty much immediately my line manager, the 3 top-performing engineers in our division, and 4 of the 6 top-performing project managers on my team left as well. I left shortly after. I think the really crazy thing was watching how the remaining management literally lacked the competence to understand what was going on, or to even differentiate between people on our team and in our division in terms of who was good at their job and conscientious about client interactions vs. who was apathetic and under-skilled.

I've noticed that middle management and up don't really see humans or even differentiate between them except during compensation assessment (and even then, barely). It's all just a numbers/headcount game to them. Every human is equivalent in their given role when it comes to planning/org structure.

In bigger companies, this management layer is more concerned about creating domains of influence or "kingdoms" then they are in actually delivering value for the company. Not sure if this is just normal human organizational behavior, or something has gone off the rails in corporate culture - but it is what it is.

It's happening at my company as well, and particularly in my own org. I'm one of the people leaving for better opportunities away from politics and silly RTO mandates lacking any semblance of data grounding.

> Every human is equivalent in their given role when it comes to planning/org structure.

It's the Burger King approach to management: all employees are just generic worker bees, and you can just go down to Burger King and order a Whopper, some fries, and maybe six engineers. Problem solved!

Anyone who bothers to think things through can see the huge, obvious flaw: people are not all the same and that these are human beings, not robots or drones.

This flawed point of view, that you can just think of employees as widgets, fails again and again and again, and yet MBA schools apparently keep teaching it, and/or people keep trying to use it.

And in this case, the failed RTO initiatives: really, I would love for one of these CEOs to explain to me what the point is. You don't think people are productive from home? Based on what, your gut feelings or conjecture? Because the opposite is true. People in offices waste a ton of time—just watch them. They stand around and bullshit. They get up and look for people to talk to (about non-work things). They make disruptive noise. What they don't do a lot of is actually get work done. Meanwhile, you're paying for their office space and electricity and everything else it takes to keep an office running.

So what's the purpose of RTO? If I didn't know better, I would say it's 1- an attempt to justify sunk costs of office leases, and 2- a huge power trip.

Doesn't matter: it will ultimately fail because offices are counterproductive to actually getting work things accomplished.

We have the metrics to show our productivity soared when we were sent home a little over three years ago. It's only been improving.

It's funny - before the pandemic hit we'd already gone through a RIF. As things started booming back we've been hiring from all over the country. We now have teams that are wholly comprised of people from all over. There's no path forward to do an RTO at this point, and our productivity numbers are simply too high to warrant it.

My understanding is as our leases expire, we're not going to renew many of them. Where people are still in the office, and we have some of those folks and have had them all through the pandemic, we'll consolidate facilities in the same region.

> Anyone who bothers to think things through can see the huge, obvious flaw: people are not all the same and that these are human beings, not robots or drones.

Part of the problem with accepting this is that it cuts against the MBA ethos: that a good manager is a good manager in any industry, because specialized knowledge is not required.

Which, might be true for extremely high performing managers, who will seek out and rapidly learn any specialized knowledge needed...

... but is very much not true for the bulk of managers, who lack that amount of initiative and capability, and thus need more seasoning time and domain knowledge.

> In bigger companies, this management layer is more concerned about creating domains of influence or "kingdoms" then they are in actually delivering value for the company.

This. I have seen teams completely devastated in reorgs that did absolutely nothing but strengthen some manager's position. You don't have to fire anyone, just moving key people and reassigning ownership is sufficient.

I don't think it's "corporate culture" as much as "large org power games" as I've seen the very same thing happen in academia and administration at large schools.

Absolutely. They'll talk about "culture" and how you need to have an office in order to have it, ignoring the fact that most larger companies have multiple offices—so, what, each office has its own culture or something?

More to the point, though: what do they mean by corporate culture, and why do they believe that people need to be in the same room in order to maintain it?

I'll bet anything there is no real definition of "corporate culture". If there is, it has nothing to do with where the employees are at any given moment. Yes, I'm saying that "corporate culture" is just a meaningless buzzword thrown around by people who hope you don't stop to wonder what it is they actually mean.

In my experience, each office does have its own culture to a surprising extent. Maintaining a common corporate culture across different offices is a very hard problem. Probably even harder than doing it in a pure remote company. (And I think corporate culture is as meaningful a term as anything-else culture: shared values and expectations, behavioral norms, jargon, inside jokes…)

"don't really see humans"

Didn't you mean "resources" there? ;-)

You mean FTE? Full Time Equivalent.

Good point - "resources" are useful while FTEs are things to be cut?

It's the incentives, you'd be promoted because you built a large org so you had an incentive to just continue to grow the org itself so you could go up the chain, even if you weren't making anything productive as all these businesses were flush with cash.

At interviews managers are asked "how many reports did you have?" not "how much value did you deliver to the company?"

s/human/bis Bis - butts in seat.

So how can you tell who is apathetic and underskilled, but management cannot?

Very easy if you're one of the rank and file employees. There is usually 10% of the staff that do 90% of the work and everyone knows who those people are until you go up far enough in the management chain to where the VPs have no idea outside of what their directors and managers tell them which is that everyone is awesome and give us more money.

To put it simply, I work with my coworkers, and management doesn't. I can tell who solves problems faster, is kinder and more sympathetic, works harder, delivers more, and is requested more often by clients because I'm in the trenches with them, on their email chains, and in their network drives.

Conversely, other team members deliver subpar work with worse attitudes, and I have to make up for their slack by doing stuff I shouldn't have to do.

Seems easy to believe that non-management works directly with the affected people on a daily basis, which gives them much greater insight

Experience

I sometimes wonder what kind of state these people leave the code/docs/infra in.

Like, do they try to be conscientious about leaving the company in a good state? or do they leave deliberately misleading handover docs and release some subtly broken code before walking out the door...

If I were in this position, I would absolutely not sabotage anything. Besides being wildly unprofessional, the people it's going to hurt are my former coworkers and the poor suckers who are hired on to replace me & others. It also opens me up to litigation, or even criminal charges down the line!

But I'm also not exactly going to be excited to do a full brain data dump. At my current role, I try to document everything as well as I can; if I were in this situation, I certainly wouldn't go back through and make sure I didn't miss anything. You get what you get, and you don't get upset.

>Besides being wildly unprofessional, the people it's going to hurt are my former coworkers and the poor suckers who are hired on to replace me

Are you serious? Where's the hurt coming from?

I've been hired to take over a mess after people angrily quit more than once. The work I did took much longer than it would have if there had been a smooth hand over and there were tons of bugs and issues but the only people that were ever hurt by that were the shareholders and management with their deadlines and delivery schedules. I still got paid.

> Where's the hurt coming from?

From the stress and unhappiness of having to untangle a complicated mess. Yes, you still got paid, but wouldn't you rather have had a smoother flow of things?

I'd rather I didnt work for asshole union busters who would treat their employees like scum for a bit of extra profit.

If the company's site goes down because a guy who got fed up with that missed out step 3 on the deployment playbook I am just fine with that. It's not my site that went down and not my profit margin at risk.

I’ve never in my 13 or so years in this industry seen even the most disgruntled person leave anything in an intentionally broken state. Broken due to incompetence though? Plenty.

I got laid off while working to fix a nasty bug that kept crashing our servers. I never finished or checked in that code, and the corpus of discovery leading to the solution was all ephemeral on my machine, so when I wiped said machine, it went up in smoke.

I wasn't deliberately sabotaging anything, and had I been given more notice than a morning video meeting with the office manager before my access was cut, I'd have probably checked in at least my WIP with a good commit message. But I wasn't, so I didn't

Yeah, I've seen people get fired and it actually lessened the amount of work those around them had to do. There's people out there in big and small companies, doing negative work every day.

Code is useless without engineers. When the flight begins no one is going to do anything. Everyone checks out and spends their time fluffing their wings.

At GE the engineers know that engines don't fly without them (designs and specs are useless without engineers) so if they are in a position to do so they hold information close to their chest--tons of info are not in the design. They are very much dependent on a core group of engineers for each system. Just like any tech system, things are going sideways constantly for various reasons and they have to respond very quickly to customers and regulators. That response requires the tacit knowledge they hold in their head or under their desk. Not to mention the pet unicorn spaghetti code they develop to analyze sensor data which is crucial to projecting failure across fleets when one-offs are encountered.

Middle management has it's own game they play...it's wink and knod all the way down the chain...if they like you.

When this happens the chaos. First week everyone ignores you and 4 days left a panic around handover happens.

Leaving things in a good state doesn't really matter when they fire you unexpectedly why does it matter so much when you quit?

There are often just no docs.

Docs?? are you serious, you barely have docs with highly motivated people. best you can expect is nothing, worst is actively destructive behaviours

Missing component: when competent execs leave they can poach some of the best people for their new org.

As someone who’s been at companies with far less severe exoduses, it was incredibly demoralizing seeing engineers I considered to be “very good” leaving the company. I always looked at it as the canary dying in the coal mine. I can’t imagine seeing fully half the staff departing.

Management at Grindr are getting a live demo of the Dead Sea Effect.

TIL about the Dead Sea Effect. I've been talking about the effect for years without realizing it had a name. Thanks!

> Having such options is likely correlated with good performance.

That is a fairly big assumption without actual data.

If we are going to play that game.

In general people who want remote work care less about work and often are average or below average workers and are no stranger to looking for new jobs.

> In general people who want remote work care less about work and often are average or below average workers and are no stranger to looking for new jobs.

That is a fairly big assumption without actual data.

It's funny how many of the RTO companies (like Amazon) boast their data-driven approach, but when it comes to backing up their RTO mandate with actual data they're completely silent and even shun/mute employees that ask for this data.

Contrast this with their 'data-driven' claims of increased productivity due to remote work during covid.

That's their point.

There were many studies during covid that concluded remote employees are more effective [1]

I don't really put much trust in these studies, nor the studies that claim the opposite, but it's pretty obvious to me that both the WFH and RTO mandates have nothing to do with worker productivity. We've witnessed record levels of hiring at tech companies during the most remote working conditions ever. I've been in calls with higher level leadership where they essentially admit they have no objective data to track worker productivity. And I've witnessed great engineers, who've received nothing but great performance reviews and promotions during their WFH stints being fired for low productivity because their manager wants to have good RTO stats.

[1] https://www.vox.com/recode/23129752/work-from-home-productiv...

Yep, if there was compelling, rigorous data to show a major productivity boost from RTO - evidence strong enough to shut up the opposition, at least some companies would've revealed it by now. We've seen zip, nada, zilch.

The RTO mandates are a pure labor/capital power play. It's really not much more complicated than "we want to remind you we're in charge, and to show you just how we're in charge, we're gonna make you do something you don't want to do"

Where I work, I have access to the data. There is a clear drop in PRs, lines of code committed, and new documents created.

To further that we have moved to 3 days RTO, and have Monday and Friday as WFH. Guess what? Github activity and slack message counts are nearly non existence on Friday, and just a blip on Monday.

Companies have the data, they don't need external studies to tell them what they already know. This is why they can move forward with RTO without worrying about any of the nonsense the WFH crowd drone on about. WFH folks know they are wrong, and companies know the WFH peoples are wrong, and that is why every comment suggesting otherwise is a knee jerk reaction to mob anybody who suggest differently.

Good luck WFH folks, while I am at the office making impact, you won't even have a chance when it comes for review or promotion time, because you can't list "answered the door for a package delivery" as anything useful.

Many studies also said a handkerchief over your face prevented Covid.

> In general people who want remote work care less about work and often are average or below average workers and are no stranger to looking for new jobs.

There is over $120B of enterprise value in remote first or remote only companies. People who want remote want agency and control over their work arrangement, not the ability to slack off. Perhaps reconsider your mental model, assumptions, and the data.

(I own private equity in full remote enterprises, and am a supporter of the operating model based on the results, both financial and worker quality of life)

Let me make another assumption, having options to work somewhere else is likely correlated with having made a good impression on a significant number of other people in your past professional career.

Is it a big assumption? "Ease of getting a new job" hopefully does correlate with competence (which I equate with 'good performance' here). It's not saying "people who stay at a job with mandatory RTO must necessarily be bad at their jobs", so I don't see why you decided to insult those of us who enjoy remote work.

> In general people who want remote work care less about work

It's pretty weird to frame someone's care for their family and personal life as an insult.

Agree we would need data. I've seen both sides of this. Some people like WFH because they can totally slack off. Some like it because they can get more done. Some people have options because they have great social skills and know people from their fraternity or other social groups. Some people have options because they are good.

What do you mean by "care less about work"?

Do you mean they care less about the business? The two things overlap, but not perfectly. One can care about the business 100%, and be apathetic about the "work".

It might even be true that managers care about the "work" to the detriment of the business.

> it's the people with options to work somewhere better who are leaving.

As well as the people who aren't pulling their weight and who know that they'll be found out back in the office.

I've just found that to be the opposite. When someone is out of office their work is really easy to see. You can just look at their contributions. In fact, it's kind of on them to go out of their way to show the work because a lot of the natural "ah yeah I just got that done, that was tough" conversations won't happen.

The people in the office have a farrrr easier time relying on non-work to look good. They can have conversations, build relationships, etc very naturally. They look like they're working so it's just easier for them not to. I can sit at my desk all day reading HN and I look like I'm working, people will assume I must be. If I'm sitting at home all day reading HN, not so much, I'd better have something to show that I got something done.

> The people in the office have a farrrr easier time relying on non-work to look good. They can have conversations, build relationships, etc very naturally. They look like they're working so it's just easier for them not to.

Worked with someone really good at this. She'd walk the halls in the office with a very serious, determined look on her face, always with laptop in hand. Always drifting past where the Directors and VPs sat. Always striking up conversations with people above her on the totem pole (never, ever being seen talking to a lowly worker bee). Always visibly demonstrating vague "bustle" and "activity." A naive manager would observe her behavior and think to himself "Ahh, yes, the buzz of Business™ Being Done". People like this see their careers absolutely THRIVE in the office, and are desperate for RTO.

This is the Costanza Disposition, the idea that all you really need to do is look annoyed and people will just assume that you're super-busy and overwhelmed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wC8PzhNuh7w

Yes, exactly this! Forgot all about the Seinfeld reference. The more years I work, the more I realize how much of it is this ridiculous performance art / theatrics. And the most talented actors are winning.

Imo It’s easier to pretend to work at the office. Just walk around and chat with coworkers or play ping pong. Unlike remote workers, these workers tend to not be on call all the time.

Both sides of the argument are simultaneously flawed though because we don’t account for one thing: most people work in a mass surveillance environment since everything is connected to the cloud. We know who submitted what, when, and from where. Not to mention telemetry will get better and better. It doesn’t really matter if you work remotely or in office.

Also most sane places have hybrid schedules. I suspect the companies that are forcing RTO are really looking to do a soft layoff.

This is the experience I've made with remote work. Whenever I was at the office, I spent way more time hanging out with colleagues and socializing. When I'm at home, I'm way too worried about seeming like I'm slacking off to actually really slack off.

From my experience, most people who leave do so after finding another position. Those who leave without it, usually feel confident enough they can find another job.

Those that lack that confidence, wait. No point in skipping paychecks and giving up on possible severance when you feel you’re bad.

But believe what you want of course.

> As well as the people who aren't pulling their weight and who know that they'll be found out back in the office.

... and just how is this supposed to happen? Don't those people have deadlines? Deliverables? Or did we invent a sensor that requires one's butt to be sitting at the office?

Is hiding subpar performance that much easier at home than in an open plan office?

If someone is supposed to be spending 8 hours reviewing a proposal in detail, but they instead rubber stamp it after a brief look and head out to the golf course for the rest of the day that's pretty much undetectable. Especially if 99% of proposals are OK.

Unless you're the kind of micro-manager who records mouse movements per minute, demands webcams always be on, or duplicates employees work just in case they missed something.

Obviously for other sorts of work, the same behaviour can be much more detectable.

You haven't actually explained how this slacker is easier to find out in office. Sure they can't go off to the golf course, but there are a million ways people waste time while still being physically present. Instead the scenario you describe is exactly the kind of weak management that doesn't know how to properly evaluate their employees performance that ends up substituting measuring butt in seat time for proper management.

Shouldn’t there be a second person checking the work, at least every now and then?

https://effectiviology.com/brown-mms/ could help solving the reviewing a proposal problem.

I can't go for golf, but I can read HN whole day easily in the office.

Other way around.

No it isn't. You should still have deliverables and those don't really change no matter where you are.

Bingo.

In my experience, anti RTO folks are stacked to 1 actually good employe to about 5 slackers.

I work with a few remote folks today. They are always out of to loop, late to deliver and somehow always have a reason to not be at meetings.

The worst of them before the pandemic were the ones that showed up at 11:30 ate free lunch and was out by 1:30.

While there are genuinely good employees who don’t want RTO, it’s the ones who yell about it the most who are poor performers.

> I work with a few remote folks today. They are always out of to loop, late to deliver and somehow always have a reason to not be at meetings.

You work with bad folks, period. I have seen none of that.

If those employees are objectively poor performers - why aren't they let go? Claims don't add up.

> The worst of them before the pandemic were the ones that showed up at 11:30 ate free lunch and was out by 1:30.

So this is what they were doing with in office work and you think remote work is the issue?

So there's some magic where if they RTO they will suddenly come clean?

Slackers will still slack off. Maybe it's just you can't tell when you're in the office - that's all.

Nobody is "coming clean" the cry and fight for remote work is just an attempt to stay hidden and out of site so they can continue to collect paychecks while doing the most minimal amount of work.

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