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Comment by dd82 | Hacker News Reader

Three things missing from this article:

* Overhiring adjustment without paying severances or doing official layoffs

* Monkey see, monkey do. Management is highly unoriginal, and loves to copy what others are doing without thought.

* Ego and power. Management loves in office, can't imagine anyone else not wanting to be face to face. Crack the whip, people respond and do what you say, so there's an ego boost

edit

* This article is assuming that management cares about their staff over their own personal priorities. Everyone is replaceable, and there's no reason for any loyalty, whether down or up the chain.

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> Monkey see, monkey do. Management is highly unoriginal, and loves to copy what others are doing without thought.

This is what I have noticed. Management says that GOOG and MSFT are doing it so it must be right. Follow the herd. Lemmings. It just reinforces to ICs that management is just totally incompetent and useless at their jobs. They steal a wage.

These are huge factors. I work in an industry where a couple firms that are very well run, have large investments in tech/infra and also, were the hardest RTO pushers.

A lot of also-rans that have made piddling investments in tech/infra are now following along and saying things like "well our competitors have RTO".

It's doubly funny because they pay less well, and therefore could have instead used flexibility as a hiring incentive. Instead the offer is - we pay less, and make you come into the office just as much! It's like explicitly screening for second-best employees.

Yup -- the Valley has been around long enough to get infected by MBAs. Even executives who have an engineering background get their brains eaten by this b-school mindset, where every worker is a cog who falls into performance buckets. Once you internalize that outlook, of course the answer to every problem is more process, more structure, etc.

Naturally the MBAs themselves are indispensable, irreplaceable, special snowflakes.

> "Monkey see, monkey do. Monkey see, monkey do. Management is highly unoriginal, and loves to copy what others are doing without thought."

Having seen hordes chasing whatever the latest software industry fashion, fad, and get-rich-quick scheme is for a couple decades now, I'd say software developers are even more "highly unoriginal, and love to copy what others are doing without thought", dohohoho.

Spoiler alert! Nearly everyone is monkey-see monkey-do. The number of genuinely original ideas I've encountered during my 25+ year career can probably be counted on at most two hands. In engineering, it's kind of expected: You build off of others' research, implement using safe, known design patterns, stick with what works and is reliable. But in leadership it's poison. Too many companies spend all their time looking at their competitors for ideas of what to do next.

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