The study (PDF), published this month by University of Chicago and University of Michigan researchers and reported by The Washington Post on Sunday, says:
In this paper, we provide causal evidence that RTO mandates at three large tech companies—Microsoft, SpaceX, and Apple—had a negative effect on the tenure and seniority of their respective workforce. In particular, we find the strongest negative effects at the top of the respective distributions, implying a more pronounced exodus of relatively senior personnel.
Dell, Amazon, Google, Meta, and JPMorgan Chase have tracked employee badge swipes to ensure employees are coming into the office as often as expected. Dell also started tracking VPN usage this week and has told workers who work remotely full time that they can’t get a promotion.
Some company leaders are adamant that remote work can disrupt a company’s ability to innovate. However, there’s research suggesting that RTO mandates aren’t beneficial to companies. A survey of 18,000 Americans released in March pointed to flexible work schedules helping mental health. And an analysis of 457 S&P 500 companies in February found RTO policies hurt employee morale and don’t increase company value.
The C-Suite at this news: “This was a triumph! I’m making a note here: “Huge success!” It’s hard to overstate my satisfaction!”
This is exactly what they wanted to happen. Stealth layoff without having to give your most senior employees things like severance or unemployment. Senior employees cost more, and any way to get them all to flee without having to pay out for it is viewed as a big win.
They knew their best would fly the coop. They didn’t fucking care, that was the plan. Honestly, this shit should have been class action lawsuits under “Constructive Dismissal.”
Yup.
Sure, the long term productivity and quality takes a nosedive, but the shareholders don’t care about that as long as the numbers for the next quarter look better.
What’s worse is they’ll make young upstarts feel like “heroes” for figuring out a problem that wasn’t a problem until they lost all that senior staff.
Never realizing it wouldn’t have been a problem to solve if they company hadn’t purposefully shitcanned all that institutional knowledge and that they’re being way underpaid for solving the issue.
Then this same cycle will happen to them too, when they’re too old to change careers easily.
I’m not sure if this was actually some kind of sinister plot, rather than incompetence and ego. You’re not the first to suggest that this is a way to lay people off without “having to pay severance”, but what really throws a wrench into that idea is that in most states they didn’t “have” to pay severance in the first place. That’s really more reliant on the employment offer or contract. There really wasn’t anything stopping these companies from just laying people off the normal way. The only other justification I’ve seen is that it’s a way to “avoid bad press”. But clearly it doesn’t because we all still know this is happening and we’re all still just as unhappy about it. If anything, it’s better for a company to just lay people off and spin it as a “cost saving measure” to appease shareholders, than make it look like top talent is leaving of their own volition. The latter makes the company look bad to both the general population and its shareholders.
…and you don’t usually get into senior positions without stuff like severance being in the employment offer or contract.
Tesla is a car company that is valued way more than any other car company despite the fact that it makes a fraction of the number of cars and has horrendous build quality.
You think the market is fucking rational, here? I’ve got news for you, guy, regular people’s view of this means fuck-all to these people and the only thing that matters to them is the stock price.
The market absolutely props up “irrational decisions” and cutting employees to cut costs has been a bellwether for increasing stock price for forty fucking years now.
That’s my exact point. I don’t think this is some conspiracy to secretly lay off people. I think this is just a more straightforward case of C-levels blundering around with decisions that make sense only to them.
I think they absolutely thought RTO would be a benefit in some way, and after being proven wrong they just save face with corporate buzzwords.
I don’t disagree that the C-suite often makes boneheaded decisions not based in rationality or evidence, but…
Constructive dismissal and finding new, unique, and legally convoluted ways to get rid of people without having to pay as much to get rid of them has been something these companies have spent literally billions on studying over 60 years. I’m old enough to remember when they re-named it “Downsizing.”
There’s a reason they all turn to McKinsey. This is literally one of the few things where they follow the data.
I would be more receptive to this idea if getting rid of senior staff to cut costs hadn’t been the name of the game for six decades or more by now. I feel like this is one issue you can bank on with major companies, they love it when senior employees leave of their own volition.
We do what we must because we can.
For the good of all of us.
Except the ones who are dead.
The cake is a lie.
Milton knows.
Constructive dismissal is not illegal or anything. All it means is that “yeah, you didn’t officially get dismissed but with the other things they did you may as well have been. Here’s your $200 unemployment check for the month”
Senior professionals in high demand area are very hard to find and hire - when I worked as a freelance very senior software designer-developer some years ago were I was paid big bucks for it, in most of my contracts they had ended up hiring an expensive freelancer like me because the company simply could not find anybody with that level of seniority willing to either become a permanent employee or move jobs (it’s funny ´cause they almost invariably though it was temporary and they would find somebody and then generally I ended up working 2 years or so for them and eventually I would choose to leave because I was getting bored).
These people are also older and have families, not naive young men that will work crazy hours and take any shit.
This is IT, not some kind of early 20th century industry filled with employees for life who have “seniority” because merelly of how long they’ve working in the same company: they’re senior in the sence of their domain expertise being very advanced, not in the sense of being old (though such expertise usually requires one to be older because it takes time to accumulate, being older does not guarantee such expertise and always working for the same company actually makes it harder to keep on evolving as a domain expert into the most senior levels because all you know is one way of doing things)
So it makes a lot more sense to me that the executives in these companies which have a tradition of over-exploiting bright young naive techies, didn’t account for their most experienced staff (who are not only are past the age and insecurity about their skills that they will simply lie down and take shit but can also much more easilly find a job somewhere else than the less experienced ones) not just taking it and getting used to it and instead endind up prompted by these RTO policies to start looking for something else and eventually leave because, I repeat, it’s much more easy for them to find a place to leave to.
There’s an assumption that these companies actually value competency.
For many companies, once they established the brand value, competency becomes an expensive superfluous thing. From that point forward it’s about high margin while churning so the customers don’t immediately catch on that the good folks are gone. Especially once they’ve converted a critical mass of customers to renting their product, then the money keeps rolling in and the product can pretty much plateau.
In companies serving businesses, it can take a long long while before the right people at the customers catch on enough to care. When the product sucks for the users and they gripe to leadership, well a few rounds of golf with the vendor and that can is kicked down the line. The employees need to suck it up because this is the premier solution in the industry…
They value the job getting done efficiently with the minimum amount of confusion and risk, which is what good senior types will do and enable others to do (when doing something big or new, a team with only more junior types will fall into every pitfall and end up in every programming dead-end imaginable, but much less so if there’s a senior person around, mainly because such people already went through similar things and often recognize certain kinds of potential problems before they’re actual problems)
That said, plenty of managers in plenty of companies often don’t know what they have until they lose it, and I expect B2C companies and larger B2B - which as you point out are mainly Brand driven - are less likely to value predictable delivery which is much closer to what’s actually needed on the first release than smaller B2B, consultancies or in-house development were it’s a lot harder to shove inadequate shit out and then convince the paying customers or the business side (if doing in-house development) that’s what they want.
Certainly that’s my own experience.
IMHO, as long as the senior types in these companies aren’t fixated in staying in B2C, they’ll have no problem finding new jobs and may even enjoy it more, so as I wrote in the previous post, it’s easier for them to leave.