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Comment by marcosdumay | Hacker News Reader

> Large companies mandating everyone work in office is purely a flex for control and probably to save their property investments.

It's a hidden layoff.

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As a layoff strategy, I would expect it to be counterproductive. The people most likely to quit skew toward high-performing individuals who feel confident in their ability to get a remote job elsewhere. And vice versa.

A lot of companies aren't trying to hire the "best" programmers. Places like Amazon won't let engineers use highly-skilled techniques anyway.

The high-profile RTO places tend to hire in bulk for programmers that will do as product tells them. Weeding out people who value quality over conformity is a goal.

I work with an Amazon engineer who has been working on storage systems since 1990 (NT kernel) and is an absolute wizard. He could probably write a durable concurrent B-tree in an afternoon.

Those deemed essential get exceptions!

> Places like Amazon won't let engineers use highly-skilled techniques anyway.

I’m curious what you mean by this.

Prob need a few dozens to build the frameworks and a few hundreds to glue them to the services that require them.

Layoffs in profitable companies are always counterproductive.

At best, it signals the company is done with growth and is going for a high-profit, low investment (including low innovation) policy.

That's not always true. Layoffs can spur growth if you are dropping dead weight, for example by eliminating under performing business units, consolidating redundant functionality, or simply correcting previous bad decisions that led to over-hiring.

If you are looking for freeing resources that you can redirect, firing your "resources" won't help redirecting them... unless you think you don't need the people that are working for a while at your company and can get better ones by hiring.

But if it's the second one, well, you'd be stupid and my best possible explanation up there doesn't apply anymore.

Firing 50 employees with skillsets you don't need to hire 50 employees with the skillsets you actually need will very much help redirect your resources. It's pretty tough to transmute an accountant into an engineer.

Those aren't layoffs - at least as they're commonly implemented - they're performance based firings. Layoffs are done in a mass manner and tend to be highly inaccurate - they're often based off of BS kpis.

Performance based firings are when you fire individuals for their performance. Every example I gave is a layoff where large numbers of positions are eliminated and the employees let go regardless of their performance.

Depends on how it is measured as to whether it is a success.

Sample of one, but around me best engineers came back to work soon after Covid ended, show up every day, communicate and collaborate.

The less productive are the ones dragging their feet, coming up with excuses to stay home and hide as much as possible from peer scrutiny.

Almost like best engineers enjoy coming and working with the team, while the worst dread it.

I’m sure the ones who love to suck up and don’t have a social life were chomping at the bit to come back, no doubt.

You have a point: the best engineers do tend to have an underdeveloped social life. On the other hand, the ones that love to suck up are the ones with the great social skills.

Again, sample of one, so take with the grain of salt, do not draw generic conclusions, etc.

Oh, I'm certainly taking it with a giant pile of salt alright, because what you said was insulting nonsense pointed directly at remote workers. And you can't say don't draw generic conclusions when you tried to do exactly that.

The very first words of my initial message warned you I am talking strictly about my team.

I do know excellent engineers working solely remote. Not on my team though, and they are freelancing contractors. Different organizations, different dynamics.

Bingo

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