Seems like the goal of RTO is working
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.
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.
The structures and shackles are for the mid employees.
Because?
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.