Amazing.
They order people to work in different offices than before, far away from before, or in offices that did not even exist before. They order people to work in offices who have only worked at home before.
And they call it “return”, and everybody seems to accept the audacity.
Nobody laughs out loud into their faces and calls them the dirty liars that they are.
Yeah this attrition is expected by Amazon. IBM and others did this earlier. If enough people choose to RTO they will do “real” layoffs and get a pat on the back in the news for not letting as many people go as they would have had to before. Optics I guess. IIRC this is the second round for Amazon.
Some are saying companies are doing this to keep their property values up but I think that’s only one facet. What I don’t see being called out often is companies doing this are hiring replacements overseas in tax havens and/or where they can pay less for talent. Real kicker is, those hires wind up being remote anyway to the anchor offices.
Because people who suck their tits need their milk.
Now this is a good point. During the time of remote work, everything became organized around it. In fact my employer just closed the local office I belong to, because everyone is remote and it just isn’t getting used. If they suddenly decided on RTO and asked me to work at an office 60 miles away that would not be a “return” nor practical in any way. I’m sure Amazon know this but are just saying “oh well,” because really they can’t do kick to solve it. It’s going to be a painful transition but I guess they’ve decided they are ready.
We should refer to this instead as Go To Faraway Office
I really do wonder if Amazon will run out of people willing to work for them someday. Their approach assumes there is an infinite supply of workers to burn through. Given everything I’ve witnessed from the company, I’d never work there. Do they at some point poison the labor pool against them?
When I joined Amazon, I was told that for some roles in the US Amazon received more applications than corporate employees worldwide - so I assume 1M+.
That number has probably reduced significantly, given we’ve now had two rounds of RTO. I know some recruiters are really struggling to find external candidates to join, and rightly so, but I don’t doubt that Amazon can find someone to fill these roles, or can find someone outside of North America or Europe to take that role.
The FAANG acronym was the worst thing to happen to tech, because people will flock to Amazon to say “I worked for FAANG”. Prestige is a powerful thing to some, and they’ll deal with some insane shit for the clout that comes from being here.
(FWIW, I’ve been at Amazon as a software engineer for close to four years now, and I’ve noticed zero improvement in opportunities afforded to me)
“FAANG” is interesting because it was initially only used to represent high-growth stocks that were leaders in their respective fields. It was originally just “FANG” - Apple was added later.
At some point, it changed to mean the best tech companies to work at. I’m not sure I agree with the list, though. I’d swap Netflix for Microsoft (TC is lower but it’s a more prestigious company and work-life balance is better), and I’d swap Amazon for another company. Not sure. TSMC, Nvidia, or AMD maybe?
It’s funny that Apple was added later given that it is the most valuable company by market cap … it’s seen the highest stock growth of any company on earth.
The FAANG acronym was the worst thing to happen to tech, because people will flock to Amazon to say “I worked for FAANG”. Prestige is a powerful thing to some, and they’ll deal with some insane shit for the clout that comes from being here.
The problem is that the clout boost is real. I never worked for a FAANG/MANGA company, but just having one relatively well-known company on my resume opened up options I never would have had. All my interviewers would mention it, even though it was almost 20 years ago.
MANGA
MAANA. If you’re going to swap Facebook for Meta, you also need to swap Google for Alphabet.
It might have been a few years ago, but having Amazon on my CV has offered almost nothing. If anything, I get fewer legitimate interview offers than I did before.
I used to work for MapQuest so it might be nostalgia on the part of my interviewers
It’s real and it can suck.
Any time someone has one of the ‘big names’ on their resume, they get to skip the line and call the shots. Problem is in many of these cases, they got fired from those big companies for very blatantly obvious reasons once you work with them. They will tank their new projects, and executives will just say “this can’t be right, Google is such a success” yeah, because they fired that guy…
Yeah, I’ve gotten multiple jobs in my industry based on a company I worked for like 15 years ago. Just because they’re a major player who is well respected.
You could also think this applies to all corporations in some degree. But no, there’s a fresh batch of bright eyed optimistic people out of school every year.
Another company I had contact with did a few layoffs. Afterwards the recruitment department had a lot more issues finding people. Experienced people would ask a premium because of that company’s reputation in the industry and the experienced people would usually stay a short time and leave. The other option was hiring fresh graduates and put effort in training them.
You could also think this applies to all corporations in some degree. But no, there’s a fresh batch of
bright eyed optimistic people out of schoolpeople desperate to not be homeless or starve every year.And if it happens : Rebrand-Time!!
I saw an article a year or two back that talked about this very thing. It was actually management people at Amazon saying that they predicted they would be “out of employees” before the end of this decade.
Iirc, didn’t the article say that was one of many hypothetical scenarios they try to plan accordingly for? Like you said, it’s been awhile since it came out, so I could easily be wrong. I imagine it won’t be a problem any time soon, though. There are always desperate people, and simply changing policy to allow rehiring people that had previously been fired/quit would open eligible candidate pools back up.
Or, y’know, they could just make working there not be miserable.
They were talking about warehouse workers, not corporate employees.
I never understood why anyone works for them at all. And I’m not even talking about warehouse workers. I’m talking about the tech staff. Amazon is known as a cutthroat workplace that drives people like a hammer drives nails. I would never choose to go there.
Agreed and they have an average tenure of like 1.2 years, but their stock vesting schedule gives you 5% in year one, then 15%, 40%, and 40%. So you’re pretty likely to never get whatever carrot they dangle in front of you.
Their strange stock vesting schedule makes me think that they’re aware that people won’t actually want to stay for four years. A back-loaded vesting schedule never benefits the employee, only the employer.
Other companies usually have an even schedule, for example Meta vests 25% per year (actually it vests quarterly instead of yearly). Google is an outlier too, but they do the opposite of what Amazon does - 33% in year one, then 33%, 22% and 12%. I suspect Google do this so they can list a higher total compensation (since total comp is salary, stock, and benefits for one year), but getting more of your stock sooner is a good thing.
FAANG looks good on the resume so people go there with intention to eventually leave for another company willing to pay for FAANG experience. unless you work in a very focused team (e. g Occulus) youre better off jumping companies for higher pay.
if you go to tech career fairs, especially in the silicon valley, the biggest example of this is working for Cisco. they have huge turnover and youre only going to work there to have Cisco on your resume because of how ubiquitous they are at networking for companies.
It’s pretty hard to beat FAANG pay though. Probably there are other factors involved as well. Like maybe they can command 90% of the pay but have 2x better work-life balance or something. But people do stay at these companies for long periods. I’m sure some are there to stamp their passport but not all.
We’re constantly producing new people that don’t know any better
This is why employers are ageist. They want naive employees.
Wow, it seems like the return-to-office mandate is causing quite the shake-up! Totally get why folks are jumping ship - flexibility has become such a big deal, especially after getting used to working from home. I read that 65% of workers now say they’d consider quitting if they couldn’t work remotely! It’s all about finding that work-life balance in a job that respects our needs. Hang in there, tech friends—plenty of companies out there understand the power of flexibility and trust!
What really gets to me is that during those two pandemic years the tech industry didn’t stop because, wait for it… everybody was working remote, and now they want to gasslight everyone into RTO with a bunch of bullshit arguments because it’s better?
I am glad this is happening. Fuck these people. Fuck em’ hard.
These tech workers are not Bezos. They are just developers and technical people that thought they had a good job with competitive salaries. It sucks they have to uproot their lives because management is being shitty.
They may work for a company without ethics, but that’s kind of the corporate landscape these days.
Let me reword what I wrote since I think I wasn’t clear.
When I said I am glad this is happening, I mean I am glad that the workers are standing up to Amazon by quitting and heading to a different company. And by ‘fuck em’’ I was referring to Amazon and other employers who want undue influence on the lives of their employees.
I am 100% on the side of the workers here. Always have and always will be.
With all the employees back in the office, they’ll have plenty of time to hang around the water cooler and discuss all the ways to unionize. Leaving the company is great as an individual, it sends a message. Unionizing helps to restore the balance of power vs rights and is exactly what Amazon doesn’t want. This (IMHO) is how you “F them hard”. Additionally, it’d send a message to the other companies who want to flex on the people who make the company work.
I didnt think about that. Thank you for telling me that.
What makes you think they aren’t
listening togathering training data from their employees? Next Amazon initiative: an Alexa at every water cooler and break area.
Sorry i misunderstood, thanks for clarifying!
Thank you both for a positive example of challenging someone’s post.
I’m not a big fan of overpaid tech workers either. Upper middle class SDE tech bros are not as bad as upper upper class tech CEOs, but that doesn’t mean they’re good.
Hey there! It’s definitely understandable why folks might be hesitant about return-to-office mandates, especially after getting a taste of remote work’s flexibility. Many studies suggest remote work can boost productivity and work-life balance—two big wins! Plus, it’s always tough to shift gears once you’ve settled into a new routine. On a personal note, I know a friend who left their job for the same reason and found a fantastic remote gig that fits their lifestyle perfectly. Change can be scary, but it often opens doors to opportunities we never knew existed. If anything, it’s a reminder of the ever-changing landscape in tech and the power of choosing what’s best for ourselves.
Sure, but workplaces that force return-to-office can go fuck themselves. Let people choose whether or not to pay the cost of commute.
That might’ve been the plan all along.
That’s a sell cue, for any shareholders reading along.
Why’d you have to post a pic of that dead-eyed muppet though?
Nah, the shareholders love this shit.
I mean, most of them. Please ignore my piles of AMZN.
I mean, realistically it’ll juice the stock in the short term until things catch up to them in 6 to 12 months.
I hope a significant number of them get new jobs and quiet quit to get that double paycheck for as long as they can.
I hope so too. Although the IT job market isn’t great right now, so I doubt the departures will reach a critical mass.
RTO = free layoffs
That and executive ass covering, a way to avoid admitting to shareholders that they wasted their money on useless commercial real estate.
It’s also shooting themselves in the foot. The first people to leave aren’t going to be the clock punchers, it will be the best and brightest who can easily find other jobs.
Idk about the whole talk of having an excuse to shareholders, I don’t think shareholders look into hey these offices are sitting unused I demand an explanation I think they care how much profit the company making and what are future predictions of profit.
That’s a feature, not a bug.
The best and brightest will challenge leadership. The shitty barely competent value engineer will say yes until they fuck up so bad they get promoted.
The first people to leave aren’t going to be the clock punchers, it will be the best and brightest who can easily find other jobs.
Yes. But some of them are also the most expensive ones, so when they leave costs go down. And you “numbers must go up” (=cost must go down).
So you’re left with departments full of clock punchers who don’t have vision or leadership. If you want to kill your Golden Goose, that’s a good way to do it. The remaining departments full of drone followers aren’t going to be making you the exciting groundbreaking products that make you money.
Of course then again I personally see value in employees, maybe business leadership does not or thinks they are all generic replaceable.
In my experience: the higher up the management chain, the higher the chance that they are just in for the bonuses - not for the company / industry. And those bonuses are always bound to these numbers which need to go up. When the numbers go down, these people are long gone.
That was probably the intent. It works as a soft layoff. Do something wildly unpopular, knowing that a bunch of employees will quit. The ones left will pick up the slack, because obviously if they had anywhere else to go they would’ve left with the first group.
Seems like a great way to lose all your talented employees
Which is why everyone who thinks they’re clever to call this a “soft layoff” is not as clever as they think. Amazon isn’t shy about doing layoffs and dismissing low performers. An unpopular decision like this will frequently eject the most capable employees because they are the ones who can most easily find other work. Meanwhile the dead weight employees stick around because they know they can’t find other arrangements as good. It’s a dumb way to reduce staff, and Amazon aren’t dumb.
No, I think we take Amazon at their word on this one. They are not just fucking around to try to shake 20% of their workforce loose. They genuinely don’t want to do remote anymore.
Unfortunately a dollar in cut costs is more valuable than employee talent these days.
It costs them more in the long run but those metrics are more difficult to capture and convey, and nobody would care anyway.
The wealthy in this world are just like my 4yo, they just want instant gratification. No amount of justification or considerations matter when your soul purpose is to get as much as possible while you can and fuck everyone else! The race to the bottom continues!
Why do you think a company like them would do a soft layoff, instead of just picking the low performers they think they should lay off and just dismissing them? What do they gain by leaving it up to chance and the decisions of employees? It could be a lot more disruptive that way, with no control over who leaves or when. If you’re going to say it’s all to save a buck by not paying severance, I’m not convinced that the lack of control and having to deal with the random effects is remotely worth it.
I’ve worked for companies that would leave it up to chance without a second thought. I’ve known people that worked there and Amazon doesn’t seem like it cares about its employees. Does it make sense? No, but there’s alot about corporate America that’s pretty dumb.
I don’t suggest Amazon cares about its employees - just the results they produce. But they need their best people in order to produce those results. Culling your staff randomly doesn’t make sense, and I don’t believe that Amazon are simply dumb.
Google, Microsoft, hell even Netflix and Capital One, will be bending over backwards for this tech talent.
Look at that Amazon east coast HQ in Virginia, just down the road from Capital One’s HQ. One of AWS’s biggest customers will bendfit from this.If it’s anything like my work and their RTO a few things.
- hR is well aware of attrition rates and I bet they’re through the roof
- Any new hires are probably not the best or brightest they could expect to hire
So expect quality at Amazon to decline. It may not be outwardly visible but mark my words for those that are still there it will devolve into a chaotic shit show of overworked employees that are left backfilling work for those who left and the incompetence that came in.
expect quality at Amazon to decline.
They’ll have to dig a new basement for it to get any lower.
I canceled my Prime membership earlier this year because of that decline in quality. I wish everyone could, but thanks to the loss of retail throughout the country many can’t afford not to have it.
I have a feeling the big impact is going to be in other services, namely AWS. Makes me wonder if some new global outages are coming, which are always fun to deal with.
Yeah, my entire project lives on AWS. Fortunately, it’s not my problem to keep things going, so I guess we’ll just roll with whatever punches come.
Yeah, there’s going to be hilariously bad outages at AWS within like a year.
Why? Amazon seems to have built an amazing system with AWS, but does it need the same amount of staff time to maintain it that it needed to develop it?
If Amazon acknowledges that it isn’t going to be developing new products to the scale it did for the past decade, it probably doesn’t need the headcount it had before.
Enh, the tech space is very much innovate or die. So yeah, they could probably throw everything in maintenance mode and make a reduced headcount work, but if AWS goes stagnant it’s entirely likely that Amazon goes the way of IBM and Motorol. Especially when someone (likely, Microsoft or Google) comes to take a slice of the AWS market share.
Yeah… I didn’t choose it, but some of the services from my employer run there. May be a good time to make some moves, we’ll see.
Not really going to be an issue I can fix obviously, but I’ll be making even more backups than normal…
good time to make some moves
To where? Google? Azure? There’s a reason we call them Frugal and Unsure at my side job. If AWS sucks in the next year, that’ll barely bring it down to their level. Hell, if AWS sucks ALL NEXT YEAR with a clown-car style outage every week, then maybe.
Prime is not a money saver. It’s a money waster that tricks you into buying more stuff just because “the shipping is free” but you can often get free shipping without Prime or Amazon. Just wait until you need enough stuff to meet the store’s free shipping threshold to make an order.
At this point, Prime doesn’t make sense if you want to save on shipping. It made sense because it included a lot of good stuff (video before ads, some music, shipping, games) but just for shipping, there were better options.
I basically overpaid but didn’t care out of convenience - partner sometimes watched prime, I ordered occasionally, played some included games. But the changes to video were so shady that I cancelled it.
Exactly. We weren’t using the other services much (we watched a handful of shows on Prime, but that’s it), so our only reason was the faster shipping.
So we cancelled Prime and now have to wait a few more days for our package to arrive. The impact was… pretty much non-existent and we’ve since moved a lot of our shopping elsewhere since shipping times aren’t a big draw anymore. I do kind of miss the occasional same-day or next-day deliveries (we live right next to a warehouse), but not enough to justify what we were spending on it.
Yeah. The rise of a monopoly until it starts to enshitify is interesting to watch eh? Reminds me of Walmart in the physical space. All the local options got pushed out and everyone’s quality was forced to drop due to their economic strong arming.
My relatively poor experience with Prime I attribute to deliberate bad choices rather than lack of workers. It probably doesn’t help to be sure, but even with the most awesome staff, I think Prime was going to suck no matter what. The whole economy is particularly “screw the customers over, get us money now, no need to attract or retain customers now”
Common theory l, that I have heard is that if business owns their office space then it’s value is inherently tied to profit margins. If office goes unused, value will drop, which affect bottom line, which affects boards willingness to pay out large CEO bonuses. So getting employees back into the office becomes vital for the leadership.
Even if they don’t own it, there is cost associated with downsizing an office. Selling off furniture is impossible at the moment. Leases are down. Subletting is much harder. But there places are, paying plant, hvac and cleaning, maintenance on virtually unused office space.
Most places just need a conference room, some temp offices and a bathroom.
Yeah but bringing people back is still more expensive because it means more maintenance, more cleaning, and in the case of Amazon paying more for the office perks.
I’m sure at some point, somewhere, someone forced people to rto because it was better for their real estate investment…but I just have not been able to make sense of the claims that this is driving factor.
IMO it’s worse than this. It’s likely to do with Seattle real estate only, because Amazon has their HQ in Seattle, most of the STeam is in Seattle, and it’s where most of the big decisions are focused. There is an acronym that has existed at Amazon for decades, NEWS (Not Everyone Works in Seattle). Sadly, like many Amazonian things, they’re not really a thing any more…
Seems right. I have a friend who works for Amazon and lives in Portland, OR. They’re asking them to relocate to Seattle to RTO. Now they’re debating if they even want to stay at the company. Supposedly they have until EOY to decide.
That’s a shame, and sadly it’s all too uncommon. Given Amazon’s history with layoffs, and the countless stories of people that moved from NYC to Seattle, only to be laid off days/weeks later, there’s no way I’d move for Amazon.
The funny thing is that many people in our Seattle team constantly complain about not being able to park at the office - and that’s without everyone at the office and more to come.
Burn, baby, burn!
Now they can replace them without paying unemployment and pay the new workers a lower wage. This is what they wanted to happen. Mega corporations are a problem we need to solve as a society.
I thought the same. Interesting strategy cutting the people who are good enough to get another job.
As long as it looks good on paper, somebody in higher management is getting a bonus for this.
To add to what others have replied, Amazon have an institutional belief that everyone who makes it through the Loop is better than 50% of existing staff.
It could be post-hoc rationalising of back-loaded share vesting, hire-to-fire, and their other many practices, but that’s the position. With that kind of thinking, it makes this behaviour, including it’s consequences, a no-brainer win:win to them.
Quality programmers are a finite resource. Amazon chewed through the entire unskilled labor market with their warehouses and then struggled to find employees to meet their labor needs. If they try the same stunt with skilled labor they’re in for a very rude awakening. They’ll be able to find people, but only for well above market rates. They’re highly likely to find in the long run it would have been much cheaper to hang onto the people they already had.
That’s the next executive’s problem. These executives will jump ship with their golden parachutes before any of that affects them.
Well then bring it on. If feels too big to fail, but if (hypothetically) Amazon were to go under, the world would be a better place.
Problem is for a company like Amazon, even if the brain drain will result in obviously inferior customer experience, it could take years before that happens and for it to be recognized and for the business results suffer for it. In the meantime, bigger margins and restricted stock matures and they can get their money now.
Particularly with business clients, like AWS customers, it will take a huge amount of obvious screwups before those clients are willing to undertake the active effort of leaving.
The whole problem with companies like Amazon is that hardly anyone in charge of them seems to care about long term sustainability. They all just invest enough effort to squeeze out some short term profits, earn their bonuses and then leave for another company to do it all again. Nobody is interested in sustainability because there is no incentive to. They’re playing hot potato with the collapse of the company.
They all just invest enough effort to squeeze out some short term profits, earn their bonuses and then leave for another company to do it all again.
Amazon is not at all alone in this. Much of 2024 capitalism, at least within the tech space, works like this pretty much everywhere.
100%
Now expand that to the entire planetary economy. Unsustainable short term gains is the entire industrial revolution.
We’re only 300 years in and most life and ecosystems on Earth have been destroyed and homogenized to service humanity. We’re essentially a parasite.
We kicked “this quarter” thinking into high gear when Nixon permanently increased inflation.
There has been efficiency gains throughout. Capitalism is amazing for that, far better than other systems.
The problem is too many people. If standard of living is to increase then the resource requirement is due to massive unsustainable population growth.
That and the fact the public hate externalities and don’t want them used at all never mind aggressively.
The problem is too many people. If standard of living is to increase then the resource requirement is due to massive unsustainable population growth.
They’re both important. And crucially, people in developed countries use a lot more resources than those in undeveloped countries. Just look at the resource utilization of our richest people. We have billionaires operating private rocket companies! If somehow, say due to really really good automation, orbital rockets could be made cheap enough for the average person to afford, we would have average middle class people regularly launching rockets into space and taking private trips to the Moon. Just staggering levels of resource use. If we could build and maintain homes very cheaply due to advanced robotics, the average person would live in a private skyscraper if they could afford it. Imagine the average suburban lot, except with a tower built on it 100 stories tall. If it was cheap enough to build and maintain that sort of thing, that absolutely would become the norm.
The only billionaire I know of that is launching rockets is Elon Musk.
That’s just evidence that capitalism is efficient. Because SpaceX has revolutionised space travel making the only reusable rocket doing something all the government agencies said was impossible. NASAs new unbuilt rocket is using tech from the 1970 that they are going to throe away into the ocean on every launch.
The rest you say is meaningless. How you expect this robotic skyscrapers to be built? Some MIT masters project or some capitalist experiment?
Bezos also has a rocket company. Plus there’s Richard Branson. And others.. And then you have private jet travel, massive mega yachts, and countless other extravagances. For a certain class of billionaire, having a private rocket company is a vanity project. These rocket companies are vanity projects by rich sci fi nerds. Yes, they’ve done some really good technical work, but they’re only possible because their founders were willing to sink billions into them even without any proof they’ll make a profit.
What you are missing is that as people’s wealth increases, their resource use just keeps going up and up and up. To the point where when people are wealthy enough, they’re using orders of magnitude more energy and resources than the average citizen of even developed countries. Billionaires have enough wealth that they can fly rockets just because they think they’re cool, even if they have no real path to profitability.
And no, the hypothetical of the robot skyscrapers is not “meaningless.” You just have a poor imagination. To have that type of world we only need one thing - a robot that can build a copy of itself from raw materials, or a series of robots that can collectively reproduce themselves from raw materials gathered in the environment. Once you have self-replicating robots, it becomes very easy to scale up to that kind of consumption on a broad scale. If you have self-replicating robots, the only real limit to the total number you can have on the planet is the total amount of sunlight available to power all of them.
The real point isn’t the specific examples I gave. The point, which you are missing entirely, is that total resource use is a function of wealth and technological capability. Raw population has very little impact on it. If our automation gets a lot better, or something else makes us much wealthier, we would see vast increases in total resource use even if our population was cut in half.
An awakening would mean they would analyze and understand the situation. They won’t. Amazon has and probably always had a bullish “my way or the highway” attitude - ask people what they think, pretend you care, then ignore everything they might say. Upper managers make decisions uniquely based off costs and short term vision, and are never held accountable for their consequences. I worked there for years and you really can’t imagine how bad the work culture is there, whatever you have in mine is worse in reality
in the long run
That’s a foreign concept for management, they only see one quarter at a time.
Quality programmers
Bold of you to think that’s what they want.
They may not want them, but with how many people are switching to things like AWS, they may find they need them.
And it will ultimately cost them more to find new people when they realize that they’re pissing off their customers with their poor new hires.
I will be happy to watch them squirm when they come to this realization. Karma is a bitch, Amazon.
And they want people off the vesting ramp as early as possible.
Amazon does 5-15-40-40
I’ve… never heard of such a vesting schedule. Doesn’t everyone else pretty much do 25%/year ?
Amazon is super stressful and I guess a lot of people quit the first few years. Maybe the 40% is to motivate them to stay for more hellish years.
I’m very happy not to work at Amazon.
It’s precisely because their working standards are absolutely absurd and unsustainable, so a LOT of people bail before full vesting. AMZN HR intentionally structures the vesting schedule like this because they have numbers to prove it works out in the company’s favor.
yeah, the only problem is that this results in the best talent leaving, you’re stuck with people who have nowhere else to go. it’s one of those short-term profits kinda things, which is why Wall St loves it so much.
They have a name for it: Dead Sea Effect.
Ooh, that’s good.
This isn’t what they want to happen. They know it will happen, but this isn’t the goal or objective.
Amazon is a big boy company, if they want to cut staff, they’ll cut staff. The problem with cutting staff this way, is that they don’t get to decide who they’re cutting. They don’t want to cut talented employees at random, they want to pick the low performers and let them go. This is kind of the opposite of that.
The higher skilled the employee is, the more likely they are to have been hired remote, and to feel they can find another job also. That means they’re effectively shooting themselves in the foot and getting rid of some of their talented employees for the benefit of bringing people into the office.
There has been a swing in the business opinion that work from home isn’t as efficient. This is basically the higher-ups falling in line with that opinion.
I think they do actually want to cut the high skilled talent. High skill means high pay, and now that they’ve achieved market dominance in pretty much every industry they’ve stuck their penis into they don’t need talent. Lower skilled, and therefore lower paid, employees can do just good enough to keep everything from burning down just long enough for the C-suite to get their bonuses and cash out. After that, who cares, they’re on to their next grift.
There has been a swing in the business opinion
Depends on where you read that info, it tends to be 50/50 pro/against really.
Yeah it’s 50/50 because the executives really don’t like it, but the actual data supports remote work being far more efficient. They’re working really hard to cook the books to make it look like the opposite to appease the execs but they can only do so much. Give them a few more years to cherry-pick data and bury inconvenient results and they’ll be back to the same bullshit that justified productivity destroying (but cheap) choices like hot desking and open plan offices.
