Senior employees, ordered back to the office, are jumping ship
computerworld.com
computerworld.com
Since then, my team has halved and the senior leadership at the site have almost all left to competitors except for a couple of people closing on retirement anyway. We're struggling to get the bare minimum done and have to ZBB almost everything that isn't core work. It's miserable.
It's just the most baffling time to force such a radical shift, and the executive team were pretty much entirely against it; except for the new CEO who was a transfer from the bigger corp. During the midst of a spin-off where everything needs migrating from systems the wider organisation used - HR and legal, our internal Wikis, product tracking systems, Salesforce, customer comms, forums, documentation, the whole bloody lot - this new CEO decides to make their mark by hamstringing the company in the middle of one of the most important projects of the companies history potentially. They've had to cut a couple of things off the product roadmaps that have been worked on for years simply because we now don't have the staff to drive them to completion. Just madness.
That it results in more experienced people leaving is just a bonus to the all-governing excel chart that gives orders to the CEO.
One of my bosses while being absurdly smart for work related things, has no clue about how to deal with millenials and younger. He still lives in the world of loyalty to the corporation, and it works with X-gen and above. The younger laugh and leave
You grow up in a different time with different norms. It may be easy enough to understand at a more surface level what younger generations seem to care about, how they talk, etc but it's much harder to deeply understand what it's like to be that younger generation and how, therefore, to fundamentally adjust the way you work and interact or even view the world yourself.
Of course, this leads to the opposite problem of never trusting the younger generations, which is equally if not more problematic. Because a fresh perspective may not always be correct, but often it does have some kind of value that needs to be extracted and acted on.
On a more serious note, they can't take seriously they have to be available on weekends or holidays, so they prefer to change jobs rather than confronting or negotiate with their manager. It looks that our future is one of overworked seniors training short term juniors for our competition: extintion in 10-15 years.
Recently one of our juniors asked for a day per week working from home, and was denied because "team building" or something like that. Since them, I have the impression he's on a quest on how many days per week he can go without talking to anyone (avoiding team building), and I'm 100% sure he's now hunting for a fully remote job.
I was there when we gave up on SQL. It wasn't because we wanted to. It was because we had a terabytes of data that needed to be accessed in micro-seconds.
SQL in 2006 was simply incapable of that. Looking at what a modern machine can do is ridiculous by comparison. Try and do it on a 8 year old phone and you will have as close to the experience we had back then.
In that instance it seemed like leadership was focusing too hard on making sure the more junior members had their voices heard and, I think, expected that the team would be able to just figure out how to handle the concerns raised later. Pros and cons to everything, but at least in that one instance it was really odd to see senior engineers' proposals and reasoning be thrown out with a focus almost entirely on protecting team dynamics or something similar.
Scenario: Say you're a Zoomer, affluent parents, everything material you could want, security and opportunity, all the college prep and application angles covered, Stanford, Leetcode, FAANG, substantial war chest, now founder, family seed money and connections and safety net... designing a consumer tech product targeted foremost at "other" Zoomers in general...
In that scenario, you're going to have huge cultural blind spots, among your generation.
You might be best off throwing away the well-to-do fratbro culture-fit hiring funnel, and hopefully get a diversity of perspectives.
Throwing away the well-to-do fratbro hiring funnel would actually be a mistake though, wouldn't it? We should be adding more, different hiring funnels to try to better capture diversity of thought and background. Throwing out one funnel entirely and replacing it with another would still have a blindspot, it's just the opposite blindspot that they had before.
That only barely worked when corporations were a little bit loyal to employees. There's not one of those left now.
But youngers doesn't care, and I have the impression they actually fear being for too long, say more than 5 years, in the same place. They value the novelty of knowing new people and ways to get stuff done.
Their view was way less favorable and more comprehensive than mine, and they’ve seen more of them and from bigger companies than I have. They talked about them like they’re toddlers.
Human psychology is wild, when employees do something unusual, it is always presumed that it’s because they are stupid or lazy
When executives do something unusual, it’s rarely assumed that they’ve lost touch with reality and factory floor. Responsibility never seems to land on them in personal and individual capacity
Somewhat because people don't want to know that the people who lead them are idiots. They'll go so far as to bury their heads in the sand to not hear it.
But excel models of operating costs have stronger staying power than CEO fads, at least from my experience.
I've even seen once spinning off a new company as a way to avoid the word "layoff" or "firing" for cultural reasons. Every few years the company would spin out a new one, moving all the parts they wanted to keep, then liquidate the old.
- the first two were conducted while we were in the thick of the pandemic and loathe to be near anyone outside of our pod. WFH made sense then, and I’m sure people were more comfortable knowing they wouldn’t get Covid WFH
- the third was in 2023 when the world opened up, but studied call center operators. Yes, I can see how they would be more productive at home. However, imho any position that requires collaboration and many interactions between staff is more productive in the office and this study doesn’t address that.
So it seems that there are numerous studies that show WFH is beneficial to productivity, that are done before pandemic.
> because the organization's culture stays synchronous and in-person-oriented
Asynchronous does not mean slow, but it is different and requires structuring your work differently. Remote works much better asynchronously, but at an organization that has too few remote employees will never learn to do that.
It's not that you're doing something wrong or that they are, it's that your organization is designed to be incompatible with remote workers. If you're not willing to adapt, then you're absolutely on the right track by phasing out remote, but don't take your anecdotes from working in an organization that refused to change as evidence that remote doesn't work.
> When our senior engineers are physically available I can put myself in their office or at their desk and demand they help me.
Slight tangent, but this is exactly why a lot of people like myself will never go back into an office. I don't want to be paid to be at someone's beck and call whenever they want to interrupt me, I want to be given a large chunk of work that I can work on independently without interruption unless I'm specifically designated to be on call as part of a regular rotation (at which point you can interrupt me just as well on slack as you could in the office).
> It's not that you're doing something wrong or that they are, it's that your organization is designed to be incompatible with remote workers. If you're not willing to adapt, then you're absolutely on the right track by phasing out remote, but don't take your anecdotes from working in an organization that refused to change as evidence that remote doesn't work.
This is wishful thinking. Not all work can be done asynchronously, and often the most important work is important because it's a blocker for other things. In practice this kind of mindset simply increases the critical path of the project, which is the most important part, and in many cases senior engineers are on the critical path. But hey, if you're able to be productive at scale with remote work, guess you'll have a large pool of talent to draw from, so I'm hoping to see many successful companies replace FAANG.
> Slight tangent, but this is exactly why a lot of people like myself will never go back into an office. I don't want to be paid to be at someone's beck and call whenever they want to interrupt me, I want to be given a large chunk of work that I can work on independently without interruption unless I'm specifically designated to be on call as part of a regular rotation (at which point you can interrupt me just as well on slack as you could in the office).
Yes, this is what YOU want. It's not for the benefit of the company, no matter how remote people try to frame it. But hey, if that's my only choice, then we should hire top talent in Bangalore or Warsaw instead of remote mid talent from high cost areas.
Precisely. I don't want to work for you, you don't want me to work for you, so it's a win-win: I'll keep doing good work for a company that appreciates what I can do and is happy to give me the flexibility that I need to do it well. You keep hiring people who don't mind being interrupted by a boss who values their physical presence over all else. Everyone's happy!
This sounds like a project management failure. One of the cardinal rules of the remote programs I run is: Never let the critical path be blocked by one person having to physically do some synchronous task. If Task X requires Person Y to approve it by Date Z, then you obtain that approval asynchronously, waaaaay before Date Z, where you would otherwise become blocked.
> In practice this kind of mindset simply increases the critical path of the project
I mean, I think that's what you're getting at here, so design your business processes just like you'd design a multi-threaded program: such that there are no locks and mutexes.
2. You can't always parallelize work, and even if you can, that doesn't mean it will be faster/more efficient
Wow, this seems like a horrible way to manage your people. A decent engineer will not accept this kind of treatment, remote or not. They will quickly move to better managed environments and you will get stuck with subpar engineers.
I never had a boss who did this. Even when I worked in office, all my managers were respectful and almost always they scheduled meetings ahead of time even when they needed to ask minor questions. Only time they would swing by my desk would be if it was truly an emergency (rare) or if they they just wanted to chit chat.
If you treat your coworkers with anything approximating the dismissive, demanding, and entitled comments you've been leaving here you are making yourself a lot of enemies at work, and if you're not the boss you won't get away with that forever.
But just because everyone is in the office, doesn't mean you will get help. In our industry, sadly, there are very few companies with good onboarding/mentoring programs. I have seen new bright engineers who think their task is the most important task at the company and they constantly disrupt others eventually get ignored by everyone. I have been there, I was one of them, luckily, I had good mentors who taught me how to work with others without being disruptive.
> I make demands of my senior engineers(and managers) because their job is to enable me to actually make the product.
If this is how you actually perceive your relationship to these people then they will notice.
I'm a lower level TL, and we just got an intern for the summer. They needed help figuring out how to set up SSH, and they came to me. Is my work more important? Yeah, but that doesn't matter. I don't want them spinning on this while waiting for me to grant them an audience. If I truly don't have time, that's my decision to deprioritize the work, or send it somewhere else. Same with the people above me.
> A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. - https://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
Having to constantly put out fires is always a sign of larger issues, especially in an engineering context.
When an employee's in a meeting and not at their desk, what do you do?
If they're not at desk, I'll wait there.
The point isn't that the project will fail if I don't get my solution right now. The problem is that having you remote, on the whole, will make it fail.
That's a figment of your imagination.
What is going on in your organization?
Some would say that's an issue with the tools, but the tools aren't ever going to get better if the WFH people don't acknowledge the deficiency of the current system.
"Zac Brown Band"
Obviously! (j/k - I was also lost, and tried the web search, and was still lost.)
Budgeting doesn't have to mean asking the question of whether you need all the people you have, it's just asking what the priorities are and how to allocate capital. Priority number one should always be maintaining the best team possible, any other priority is going to fail anyway if there's no trust and everyone at the company is worried about getting fired just for budget.
If that's the main issue with ZBB for a company, budgeting really is the least of their problems in my opinion. Employees need to trust leadership and leaderhsip needs to both earn that trust and trust their employees as well.
This is actually really similar to a problem I have with how OKRs are done. They should be done from the bottom up not the top down. The idea of OKRs, and agile, sound great but they're just used as a mechanism for top down control because the company is fundamentally lacking trust.
Employees would need to know their jobs are secure and the company is just going through a regular process of deciding where to invest. As long as the perception, whether true or not, is that companies are always willing to fire employees to save a buck then no one really has incentives to honestly propose budgets and priorities.
You mean 4 days in the office, not a 4-day work week, right?
But turns out the overlap between someone willing to write code all day and adhd is pretty strong so my team all put in the paperwork for ADA exceptions and got them, literally the only reason I'm still here.
I'm not shocked that an exec would think this. But I am shocked that one would say this publicly.
Some want slaves and to ensure them, to reach the "in 2030 you'll own nothing" they need the city, tall buildings used less than half of the day moving between them for the rest of the day only to keep people busy and unable to own. This is simply untenable: a city can't really evolve and we are in changing world and in a changing society, cities to change needs to be rebuild, something impossible for actual available resources, we must be no more than 3 billion to have enough planetary resources to evolve in cities, while we can be the double to live spread and have more intelligence and ideas being more in a spread model where we can evolve and sustain the climate change as well.
That's why ruling class want cities https://kfx.fr/articles/2024-04-26-onnewdealexp-contrapolis/ and we should say no thanks.
> ZBB
Microsoft?
In our bigger cities we have public transit that is popular.
A large percentage of people have to switch between different routes to get all the way home. And my commute is quickly more than an hour, between ride time, waiting for the next ride.
Some are fortunate to live in immediate proximity to lets say a subway station that has a line that takes them directly to the office, that can be super efficient.
¹ """This is playing out now in companies around the globe. And with neither side willing to give in, the fight will continue to bubble up this year and perhaps even next, leaving employees frustrated and on the hunt for new jobs — and companies in danger of undermining their best assets: their workers."""
The headlines that imply that companies in the US are decimated by employees leaving after RTO are clickbait. The job market here (and everywhere) is very tight. Even the people upset about RTO are forced to do it.
The RTO topic is a hot button issue. Journalists know they can get a lot of clicks by writing articles about companies suffering high attrition after RTO mandates, but if you look closely they use a lot of “weasel words” to disguise the actual numbers and let readers assume the worst.
Read this article, but closely and click the links. The article plays tricks like saying 36% of seniors are leaving their jobs due to RTO, but then you click the link and realize it’s from a survey where people claimed they planned on leaving their job, not that they had or were actively doing it. It’s also just a self-reported survey, and large numbers of people always say they’re going to leave their job when you survey them.
These two sentences don't make sense together, so I think you meant something different, but they're both actually true.
The overall job market is quite tight, but with remote tech jobs it's quite loose, and loosening further. Many of the people upset about RTO are indeed forced to do it.
And, they'll only stay until the job market gets into the hot part of the cycle again. I think the only reason the numbers are as low as they are is that RTO mandates dovetailed right into a bear hiring market. Once hiring picks back up, I bet a lot more people are going to be comfortable enough to bail.
Every job opening attracts an incredible number of applicants. Big Tech is going in and out of hiring freezes and even laying more people off still.
People are shuffling around, basically.
Also, I do it in a sense so that I can then go live/work in a cabin for long stretches during the winter, without people really "noticing" my absence as they think of me as someone mostly in the office. I did about 10 weeks of this this winter, skiing during the middle of the day when the sun was up etc., was great.
So I like the flexibility, and WFH is important for me in the job I choose, but I don't mind going to the office when I don't need to be home. I feel I get the best of both worlds this way, the connections of being in the office, but also the freedom of being remote. It's easier to work remote when you know the people well, which again is easier to do in the office.
In the UK and the US workers are treated more like serfs who are told to assemble in offices regardless of how long/arduous the commute, how shitty the city is, how little the boss cares for your quality of life etc. etc.
Someone I know worked for a company that instituted wildly unpopular policies across their entire workplace, just to try and get three people to quit. They suffered massive attrition at every level of the org, this went on for something like 9 months, and in the end only one of their "targets" left voluntarily.
I cannot fathom how this was less expensive than just laying off those three with severance packages.
Not sure if they teach second-order effects in those MBA-mills though.
I can easily imagine that HR was never told about the purpose of the changes. I can also imagine that HR has bills to pay, and a lack of desire to quit without another job lined up.
If you are like "please will <direct report> just quit or leave!?" then just start the process to fire them.
No need to drag out everyones suffering. It's hard firing people but suffering together is always worse.
Then combine how that person might piss off the rest of the team... It's a no brainer.
Also there is a financial downside and legal risk to firing vs. just getting employees to quit.
Western ideals have given the masses this belief that they matter at all in the grand scheme of things. The reality is nobody really matters but a select few people that turn the crank and the rest of us are just here to act as grease. Amassing as much wealth as possible is the key to escaping this grind.
Corporations are run by real humans, as far as I know. They are the definition of human qualities but they give a pretty good mask to the guys doing the job, so they unleash their full humanity.
Then maybe they shouldn’t have many rights real humans enjoy, like anonymously owning property or filing objections to planning permission for ‘ruined view’
All in all, "RTO to get X to quit" seems like an amazingly bad plan.
> No need to drag out everyones suffering. It's hard firing people but suffering together is always worse.
> Then combine how that person might piss off the rest of the team... It's a no brainer.
Firing people can piss the rest of the team too.
I've had coworkers who had sudden "family emergencies" and the like who really just took a better offer.
Of course people are never this substituteable in the real world. however you need to do your best to make them so.
To make everyone's life more miserable, hoping that your high performers don't leave, that's just shooting yourself in the foot because "I can still walk eventually".
"If you've inherited (or built) an office that needs a real house cleaning, the only sure cure is move the whole thing out of town, leaving the dead wood behind. One of my friends has done it four times with different companies. The results are always the same: 1) The good ones are confident of their futures and go with you. 2) The people with dubious futures (and their wives) don't have to face the fact that they've been fired. "The company left town," they say. They get job offers quickly, usually from your competitors who think they're conducting a raid. 3) The new people at Destiny City are better than the ones you left behind and they're infused with enthusiasm because they've been exposed only to your best people." — Up the Organization
I think "RTO to make people leave" has the same idiotic thinking at its base.
"Pack up and leave once people are on to you, only the true believers will follow and the people at the new city will only interact with them so they will think you are great as well!"
Layoff is what a company wants to do, but they need to do at least something to show the layoff was random. They can't just lay off one person who is bad, they need to get rid of a lot of people.
I want the old in-office comraderie and collaboration but I'm not willing to give up WFH benefits.
My company went so far as to remodel huge new office for me. I thought it be great but then a four day onsite rule popped out of nowhere that applies to people with offices. I'm seriously considering leaving.
there is such a thing as hybrid. Having an office available for use, and schedule meetups deliberately in the office, and do it regularly (but not all the time - for example, once a fortnight is a good cadence imho).
The days you do meet in the office, you will do an all day "workshop", rather than regularly scheduled work - bounce ideas, talk about stuff, etc. Face to face discussions can be done there, and it's more productive.
And in exchange, you remove things like "status meetings" etc, to make time. A project manager or really, anybody, will need to come into the office on those scheduled days in office and chat in person, if they want a status update!
EDIT: I'm completely serious, persona.
Six out of eight of the board members are involved with companies located not just in the same state but clustered around the same area. Three of these companies have buildings in the same business park. All these companies have inflicted similar RTO mandates on their employees.
I went through our financial statements -- commercial leases were set to expire this year, they've renewed them for another thirteen (!) years and committed $100M to office space improvements. They've frozen hiring, they're cutting costs wherever they can, but they found it reasonable to dump $25M each quarter on leasing costs?
Whenever something like this is "difficult to comprehend" as the article obediently avoids scratching the surface, my first guess is that someone's making money off it. Is it board members with real-estate investments? Is it organized crime? Is it Blackrock and Vanguard (majority shareholders btw)? At this point, why not all three?
They get paid enough to have double-shift coverage on children, or they don't have children at all. Since they don't have to be home as much, they aren't. They don't mind the commute because they get to drive a fancy car, park in a reserved spot, and are usually on the road before the traffic starts. They get all their jollies from being in an office, talking to other people with the same lifestyle, and they can't imagine why anyone wouldn't want to be in an office (aside from malice or laziness). And they derive their energy from seeing all the activity -- people going to meetings, milling about, etc. They see that stuff and conclude that yes, problems are being solved, innovation is happening, and that gets them excited. It's all just vibes. No one actually doing the math on this stuff has seen a slam-dunk case for draconian in-office policies.
Most institutional shareholders are.
When business interest align no conspiracy is required.
Tech management is often bad, for any number of reasons (not the least of which is non-technical peoples' complete lack of understanding about what their people are doing). At least when these managers are beyond physical reach of their workers, the workers have a better chance of creating a productive environment and shielding themselves from distraction and nonsense interactions.
Many of these managers actually do very little beyond low-value talking and meeting. They are figureheads who are recognized by figureheads who likewise provide little actual value.
Meanwhile, a team of 1 product/project management skill + 2 devs + 1 designer, when all agreeing on the goal, can do what a corporate organization of 100 people cannot do.
This is why most new value is created by small independent teams who are then bought up by laggard giants that can no longer do anything beyond manipulating the system to maintain some form of monopolistic control.
Therefore, if your company is demanding you come back to the office, you can bet they are not a place you want to work at (unless your goal is _only_ money).
Meta targeted middle managers in their recent layoffs, and by all indications it was a brilliant move. Netflix is famously flat. Amazon is much flatter than the majority of corporate America. Google as well.
Bureaucracy continues to thrive in corporate America because of a bug (the politics of people).
If you've ever worked in an org that is very hierarchal, you've probably experienced the following:
- More meetings than heads down time
- Answering to multiple bosses/managers
- Answering the same question multiple times (a symptom of too many managers)
- Competing projects
- Everything is a priority one task
I truly believe that companies start to die, when more than ~10-15% of the org is management.
I actually agree with most of your points, but if you think of the market as an ecosystem and companies as lifeforms, you'll find many species employing completely different (successful) growth strategies.
I've been on teams that were undermanaged, I've been on teams that were over-managed, organizations with incredibly effective management, and organizations where management was comprised of politicians and fools who actively harmed the effectiveness of the teams they were supposed to lead.
It's relatively easy to hire great ICs. You ask them some questions to make sure their resume isn't bullshit, try to gage their enthusiasm, attitude, and friendliness, then pay them what they want.
It's really, really hard to hire great managers, because even if they've succeeded in past positions, it has little bearing on whether they'll succeed in this particular position, working with these particular people. And it's even harder to build an organizational culture whereby the right people get promoted internally to management. Almost every company screws this up, and the big companies that get this less-wrong are much less stressful to work for and more effective than their peers.
If he ordered RTO, he would surely lose some people, but if he kept WFH, he would be able to hire the talent escaping RTO at other firms.
So he kept WFH and all went fine.
it is, but WFH also does hamper new hires like grads, since there's less opportunity for them to learn via osmosis. Zoom meetings aren't quite the same imho.
They should have at least added a note that their data was 1+ years old and that RTO mandates changed during that time
It’s not surprising that people left MSFT for companies that pay double or triple. The part that’s more interesting is if people are willing to take a 50% pay cut to go remote. I haven’t seen any research on that yet
So far the data shows RTO makes people leave, but it makes them leave to other RTO companies, not fully remote ones
In terms of on-site/remote, I'm not firmly for or against either. I see benefits in both. Similarly - it's interesting to see this from the manager PoV.
I've been primarily WFH since ~2016 after doing the traditional thing for longer. I'm not new to either. Then the pandemic came/went... and how we kept working remained a hot topic.
I saw executives above me (with more pull) get put in a tough spot: sell their new homes and relocate, or find new work.
Then their peons/reporting managers tried to convince me that I'd be safe - appealing to pride saying I was too important to be lost to things like that.
Yeah, right. As strange as it sounds... my shields were forced down out of preservation. It took over a year of (communicated) discontent before the shields finally went down for good.
Nobody else did this - it was the business/leadership. I was productive despite most of the job not being about the work.
It just so happens there are places requiring less work (relevant to the job or not) while being more rewarding. Loyalty is a funny dynamic.
There's efficiency and leniency for everyone involved by choosing to not bike-shed over things like 'Where Are My Adults'. Doing the job you hired them for. I hope.
(Also when negotiating a new contract with a working-from-office company, there's a better chance of getting a hybrid model than if you're already an employee.)
It would also be interesting to see if there are preferences when given equal pay. I suspect most people have a number where they're willing to go into the office every day, it's not surprising to me that people are willing to RTO for multiples of their current pay.
It all gets a touch weird when comparing comp, though. If someone takes a 50% pay cut, but they move from SF to somewhere that costs something like 60% less, have they taken a pay cut or not? That feels subjective to me, and I've heard both sides. Their ability to save may have gone down, their quality of life may have gone up, it feels like a wash.
Another factor that may be weighing on people is stability of infrastructure and of the remote work job market. I grew up rural and would like to return to the country (not for farming, I already know I hate that from experience). I'm also fully remote, but haven't moved back.
There are too many uncertainties. Will the remote work job market hold up, or will it collapse and I have to keep the same job for forever or uproot my whole life? Will Starlink continue to be a reliable provider, or are they going to enter the race to the bottom in 5 years?
In the end, I work remotely, about a 15 minute drive from the office, because of the certainty it brings. I don't have to watch the news with anxiety, waiting to see whether the life I've chosen has become unviable or not. That undercuts the kind of peace I'm looking for in moving to a rural area in the first place. It's probably less of a concern for the digital nomads, who seem to live in relative chaos generally (not a moral judgement, I can see the appeal, it's just not for me at this point in my life).
From 2007 through 2010 I worked in an office in a job I didn’t particularly like and repeatedly turned away recruiters from Google. In 2010 I joined Oracle (Solaris org) remotely. As the Solaris org wound down, I continued to turn away the google recruiters with positions that would have required a move. Since leaving Oracle I’ve held two other remote jobs. If any of those remote jobs would have required me to move within commuting distance of an engineering office, I would have left.
First line of the page. The entire development of the article hinges on this being true but I see no sign of justification or reasoning behind this affirmation.
With all the recent layoffs, right now many companies might be OK with some attrition. It's one of the least ugly ways to reduce payroll costs. It's not as bad for PR or morale as layoffs would be. And you don't have to pay severance.
And if you lose more employees than you wanted to, it should be easy to hire new people because of laid off people who haven't found new jobs yet.
Sure, losing valued senior employees will have a negative impact. But they're also usually paid a lot, so I doubt business people will cry very hard about it.
Fixed that for you. When times are good it is hard to find people and so they care about them. However the real test is when times are not good. If retention was a concern it will show up when times are bad - but it doesn't so we know that it isn't a real concern.
Of course if it is a concern management has a much harder job. They can no longer hire as many people in the good times as they would then have to let good people go. Much easier to give them a cheap foosball table or something that makes it look like they care without making their job hard.
It isn't good if you are a senior engineer who doesn't want to go into management - you have no career path to advance.
However the effects are felt a few years down the line, and these big orgs usually praise the CEO for doing this genius maneuver and saving a bunch of money, only to later leave in a few years when shit is about to hit the fan. Overall its a weird time. And to note, I do like working from the office, so I happen to be in the minority who likes hybrid. Though even I cannot deny the benefits of being able to WFH and get to a doctor appointment or take care of my kid when she's sick.
> Gartner research released in early May found that 36% of senior-level job seekers who have received an RTO mandate from their current employer are leaving their jobs as a result
Versus the actual Gartner report:
“Gartner HR Research Finds One-Third of Executives Given a Return-to-Office Mandate Plan to Leave Their Employer” https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2024-05-0...
Last time I checked, “senior-level” is not synonymous with “executive”.
> A January 2024 Gartner survey of nearly 3,000 candidates found that 36% of senior-level job seekers who have faced a return mandate at their current employer said that factor influenced their decision to leave their job. One-third said they had discontinued a hiring process in the last year due to expectations that employees would return to a physical workspace.
Sounds like what happened here is that the author of TFA read the whole report instead of just the headline.
The first group will almost never go office-first, whereas the second group will revert to its “original DNA” unless a deliberate culture change is made. It has to be a complete change in operational procedures, communication culture, etc. It’s much much more than simply using Slack and having Zoom calls instead of office meetings. If that doesn’t happen, the switch to remote won’t stick.
So if you like working remotely, pick a company that’s always been remote.
Google wasn't competing with other mega-corps; they saw themselves as competing with the best and brightest going into business for themselves or staying in academia, because it was comfortable and you could work at your own pace. The founders of the company knew they were just two chucklefucks who decided to monetize an idea they had in college; they saw that as possible for most smart folks in the world, and believed that's what they were competing against.
Looks like a generation of software leadership after them has lost sight of that, and it'll be interesting to see what happens as the bluff is called. Working for yourself can be extremely hard.
But the snacks are good and the bathroom is always close by.
(Even if you personally didn't move, lots of other people did and made houses more expensive for you. Yay)
Putting that question-begging aside, cynically, for a company on an AI kick it could be intentionally designed to make clearing out the old guard who aren't all in on AI easier and without severance.
In fact, it stands even without the everything-is-now-about-AI journalism gloss. The expensive, grumpy seniors with the pointed questions in meetings are largely the ones who feel most able to risk jumping ship in 2024 and treating them like naughty children or unreliable juniors really winds them up.
The wisdom of driving out senior staff, well, that depends on who you're asking and what are their metrics for success!
(a) their business is comoditized, so they're just making their companies obsolete
(b) they will go down (or pivot to the next thing) as the AI hype hits its peak and tapers off
Large, established companies is ofc a different story.
This has the energy of wanting candidates with five years of experience on a two year old framework.
Except if you're fully remote, which I am-they aren't requiring those people to come back. However, if I were badge in on-site, my employee account would get flagged and I would be expected to start coming back. Which is weird. I never go in, I am nearly 2 hours away so it doesn't make sense, but I can't go in for a day, even if I wanted to, or I'd have to keep going back in. Or ensue in a huge battle with HR.
The industry (tech, others) has never given up trying to transform employees into a cog in the machine and, while software engineering has so far apparently escaped being caged onto a cog-like structure, I believe it's a matter of time.
Any tips on which software-related industries that hasn't happened, if any?
Seems like another world to me, but maybe there is some company somewhere that hasn't gotten the memo yet and still runs that way.
These are now stuck with the desperate second rate employees who are forced to RTO because they're not good enough to find a job elsewhere, and the ones who love RTO because they're all for office politics and wasting time at meetings and the water cooler.
Stupid shit like this is how companies commit suicide, and smarter companies end up eating their lunch.
From another comment here:
"My company recently spun out of a much larger corporation and has just implemented a 4-day week policy after nearly 5 years of flexible work (ie. come in when you need to be in to do your job). Since then, my team has halved and the senior leadership at the site have almost all left to competitors except for a couple of people closing on retirement anyway. We're struggling to get the bare minimum done and have to ZBB almost everything that isn't core work. (...) They've had to cut a couple of things off the product roadmaps that have been worked on for years simply because we now don't have the staff to drive them to completion. Just madness"
It's always that. My opinion is it is more likely is that most people hate job seeking and don't want to switch unless truly forced. So you end up with people quitting and dissatisfied workers.
I have nothing to back this up but the majority of people I suspect don't think of themselves in the "bad" group and thus this argument is mute by default (as it assumes the employees know they cannot or will not find a job).
This assumes that RTO is the one and only factor top people consider. Which for most people isn't true. There are usually dozens of factors that go into the equation of should I quit.
My current company is doing a small RTO (2 days), which I don't love, but also don't mind that much. Everything else being equal I'd rather not do that.
But I have awesome coworkers, very good management, many growth opportunities and the company has a nice product. I'm not giving all that up to gamble on a different employer who might turn out to be toxic despite all the promises during the hiring process (BTDT).
If I'm sitting there thinking I could more or less work anywhere else, I would be the first one to take a hike, go find employment elsewhere, say to myself, "I don't need to put up with this shit."
They are usually most valuable to the company.
They rank you by pay and tenure. Then decided if they can do without you. It almost rarely has anything to do with how good you are. But more 'my project would not finish in x time if y was gone'. Then they decide to keep the whole project or not and if they get rid of the project that means maybe 15 other people can go too.
After a particular level in many large companies you become a cost number instead of a person.
What you are working on may seem important. At least it is to you. But in the grand scheme of things most of what we work on is ethereal. I have been in this industry coming up on 30 years now. Very little of what I have ever worked on is even in production anymore. Thousands and thousands of lines of code, just gone, of no use anymore. I just hope whatever I did work on can help me with the next few thousand.
The structures and shackles are for the mid employees.
Much more so than the senior people I find. Post Covid, as soon as we were first allowed back to the office if we wanted, I observed that the under 30s were the first to return.
Because?
There’s nothing wrong with a company deciding it wants workers in office. It might be a decision with negative outcomes and it might not be.
Some senior employees may enjoy working in the office. Some may not.
I don’t see why remote work is treated as some sort of default-correct position here on HN. Just like in-office work, remote work is neither inherently right nor inherently wrong.
If your employer makes a decision you dislike it’s up to you to decide whether it’s something you can stomach and continue to work there over.
Like all things, it takes time for the zeitgeist to turn over as old folks die out and young folks enter the labor pool.
This should be obvious but current employment isn’t a guarantee of future employment (both employee and employer can’t guarantee the behavior/decisions of the other).
You can quit. The same as the company can’t force you to keep working there regardless of what they do.
You can try to do whatever you want. But that’s where you figure out if you’re valuable enough to get away with it.
EDIT: @gedy Appreciate the ground truth, thanks for sharing.
I will say that with respect to WFH, younger folks I've dealt with seem to be ones wanting RTO more. Mostly seems because they have no home, family, and use office for social outlet.
Neither represents progress they just represent different opinions.
I don't agree with this, but I'm also not willing to argue the point and pollute the thread with someone who has already made up their mind. My apologies in advance.
I mean haven't you made up your mind already? because that feels like a more solid position than mine.
Change takes time. If you don't think it's a right, is it possible for me to change your mind? Unlikely. Therefore, time passing for those beliefs to age out while new workers age into working who do believe this is a right is the only path forward, no? Certainly, my emotional component is "workers deserve agency" but I'm also data informed, and the data shows remote work to be, if not better, not worse than pre-pandemic work arrangements.
https://globalnews.lockton.com/new-remote-working-legislatio...
(i attribute my position to being a high empathy human and seeing the status quo around work arrangements and control for what they are, ymmv)
No. I think it should be up to the company to decide whether to offer remote work – outside of the situations where they must offer remote work by law.
> my emotional component is "workers deserve agency"
Workers have agency! They can go work somewhere that offers remote work. If remote work is so great then many companies will offer it.
It is not for everyone.
Why does every argument against working in an office end in a (at best thinly veiled) insult that these people must have no social life?
Is it that hard to believe that a person who enjoys working in an office also has a social life outside of work?
> Your scenario can only work with no family
Obviously false. People with families have successfully (and unsuccessfully) worked in offices for decades.
GP said they get three meals a day at the office, and live 30 mins away.
I assert that this is incompatible with family, and with a social life centered around people who are not coworkers.
I've lived that life! No judgement. Single, new city, growing company. It was great.
But it was then, for me. It could not be now. My point is that, as a perq of RTO, those things could be compelling for a subset of employees only.
> I assert that this is incompatible with family
If you're saying that you can't have a family and live 30 minutes away from the office then I understood you. And it's just not true lol.
I assert that you cannot eat three meals a day at the office which is 30 mins away from home, and still be a part of your family, yes lol.
How are you eating breakfast and dinner with your kids if you eat three meals a day at the office?
No parent misses breakfast with their kids most days. Nobody’s ever sat with their kids and not eaten. Nobody’s ever had a little snack while somebody else ate a full meal.
Yes, if you’re taking this as a challenge to avoid your kids and eat literally every meal at work, yes having what most would consider a “normal” family life will be challenging.
But the idea that it can’t be done is nuts.
I didn’t say it was easy. But the idea that a 30-minute commute to a cushy tech job office that provides 3 meals a day is somehow incompatible with family life is a bananas take IMO.
These families are dysfunctional ime
No, you can't, if you are not present at meal times. Kids don't eat when Dad gets home. Kids eat at normal times, and if Dad is eating three meals at the office, Kids eat without Dad. For several early years, they then go to bed shortly after eating, and so they do not see Dad at all that day. s/Dad/Mom/g or whatever, of course.
> Plenty of parents leave for work before breakfast and get home after dinner.
Absent parents are not parenting. Providing maybe, and that's important, but not parenting.
If the other parent is doing all the parenting work, it is almost certainly not happily so. And if the parenting work is done by hired help because both "parents" are working during all weekday hours of child wakefulness, then these people have made compromises that are not compatible with parenting.
Some families have no other choices and that is unfortunate. But for those of us who do, if we choose to become parents at all, we should try to do a good job of it.
> But the idea that a 30-minute commute to a cushy tech job office that provides 3 meals a day is somehow incompatible with family life is a bananas take IMO
The job providing meals is fine. The employee eating three meals a day at work for extended periods, is incompatible with maintaining active participation in a family life. Being present is a big part of it, and you can't phone it in.
Anecdotally, I've only ever seen three types of people who tried to consistently mix 12+ hour office work days and parenthood: people in bad marriages who were hiding from their family, selfishly-deluded wantrepreneur overachievers, and addicts. All hetero men obviously. Sometimes more than one trait in a single person, and leading to divorce in most cases, which I'll argue is not necessarily a bad thing since at least one partner didn't want to be present in the family anyway.
(... everyone. Everyone could have seen this coming. So much so that it's hard to believe this isn't a naked way for corporate America to legally loyalty-test their employees and clear their payrolls of what they imagine to be more expensive "dead weight" in favor of younger, cheaper talent).
A great salesperson looks for a win-win so both sides are happy and return to do frequent future business.
Sales<->customer isn't that different from employer<->employee on this.
Would do exactly the same.