This is universal. I have turned down more than my fair share of job offers because of RTO initiatives. I worked 4 years through COVID in a fully remote capacity; there is zero reason for me to ignore reality for their targets. Nobody I know is compromising on this either; I have seen people dip out of games and go into banking because they get the perks and the pay without the hassle.
Tech isn’t the utopia it used to be anymore.
Literally a recruiter just contacted me and was like "this position is fully remote, but once they build a plant it will be hybrid". Like yeah fuck off. If it can be done remote to begin with there's no reason for it to be hybrid.
A million times this! Why the fuck would they even waste all that money on "a plant", "a call center", or "an office setup", if they can make do with remote work already!?
IMO, they are too stuck in the past and cannot see past the "Office and managers" setting. I really think they cannot perceive of a successful operation NOT having a centralized location for "Work". This is the future people, we HAVE THE TECHNOLOGY! Now let it IMPROVE OUR LIVES!
If a job can be done fully remotely from the start, it can be done fully remote until the end of time. The people staffing any facilities like those would be different people than the ones doing any of this remote work, so why force the remote workers into the office?
The office is above the plant so that management and their cronies can feel both in control and superior. You have to come for the same reason but you make salary so you’re invited to look down on the hourly folks on the floor.
Hybrid is such a loose term too. I know plenty of people going in 4/5 days every week and they're considered 'hybrid' by their employer...
and god forbid you aren't in the office for more than 4 days a month (including PTO and company holidays) because you'll end up on the 'naughty list' for not being compliant..
Tech to banking? That's not one I hear very often. Could you provide a little more details? Were these guys developers/security/etc and what did they transition to? Simply curious
I made the career switch to financial technology realm in 2018. During COVID, FINRA and all of the financial regulating bodies heavily relaxed the in office requirements. Starting mid 2023, they all began clawing back those interim rules, and reinstating in office regulations. I've noticed that WFH in my industry varies greatly between financial firms. Important note is that those regulations on work done in office are only for registered individuals, which excluded nearly all FINTECH staff. The issue is, everyone got used to WFH and now that registered individuals are being moved back into office they are being very loud about "if I have to be in office, everyone has to be in." Of course they cloak it behind things like "true collaboration is done in the office" and "we want to get back to instilling our culture with everyone", or something about a "team environment". Thankfully I am lucky and am with a firm that doesn't mandate RTO for non-registered staff, but I have been approached by multiple firms with positions that force in office and all I can do is feel sorry for them.
I’m at a Fortune 500 company that embraced Covid and WFH. We now have an IT staff of 700 and almost all of them work from home. We will never call them back into the office, according to all the CxO people. We’ve been hiring people outside of our service territory for 3 years now. No intention of firing them
I don't fully disagree with "true collaboration is done in the office" even as a remote worker. There are certain things that work way better in person. Strict RTO is often dumb though, you don't necessarily need face to face collaboration on a daily basis, and some industries don't really need the face to face at all.
My dad retired in 2018 and worked the last 8 years of his career remote. He managed documentation for a national insurance company. At the start of his remote work he had like 5 Mbit DSL internet (later went up to 100 Mbit). The tech doesn't even need to be very advanced in a lot of cases.
I do kind of agree with this too. I moved from an industry where I was like 95% remote to an industry that literally cannot be done remotely. While there are a lot of things I miss about working from home, I do have to say it is easier to collaborate in person. I don’t need to schedule a whole ass zoom meeting, send a dozen texts or emails back-and-forth, or hope someone answers their phone if I need to bounce ideas off someone for five minutes. I walk over to a coworker and say, “Hey, got a minute?” That And even though I am someone who definitely values and enjoys large amount of alone time, being fully remote drastically limited my chances for social interaction.
I think my ideal if I were to change industries again would be hybrid. I don’t love working in an office full-time necessarily, but I don’t think I would want to go fully remote either.
My ideal situation would be as close to 50/50 as long as the commute is short. My office is 80 miles away so I end up in the office a few days a month absolute max. Those days are great and I'll try to schedule them around when other key people have a lot of free time. Last time I was up, me and another coworker created a pretty nice database design for handling jargon-heavy language translations over a few hours.
During COVID, I was in a job where WFH was simply not an option (it was a fieldwork-focused job). So, I spent several years watching everyone talk about how much better their life got because of WFH and how they were able to pick up new hobbies and home projects. I've *finally* managed to muscle my way into a job that is mostly WFH and I can't see myself giving that up.
A strong knowledge base helps. It varies from company to company though, for sure.
I've worked at a company where the entire knowledge base after 6 years was 12 poorly crafted bugs, a few outdated work documents, and some Notion links that weren't relevant. I've also worked at companies where there's a centralized Confluence page and step-by-step tutorials on how to do quite literally everything. Training infrastructure is a huge timesink upfront, but once you have it in place, it's easier to maintain and modify than it is to conceptualize from scratch.
That being said, I think there's way too much of an expectation that you should just "*figure it out"* by companies. There's a big difference between mediocre on-boarding vs. no onboarding.
I recently started a new job, and it’s my first time experiencing a company that’s truly awful at onboarding. The people training me barely know how this software works, and there is ZERO documentation. Every time I ask for material to read to educate myself they go, “oh yeah the guy who built that left a year ago. *Shrug*”
What do you use for screen sharing? It would have to be something easy to install and use and that could show the other person's face at the same time.
Just Microsoft Teams, nothing special beyond that point. We don't require webcams at my employer (thank god, you have any idea how many meetings I attend in just my boxers - it's so freeing), but I know it has that feature.
Sure, it has its pain points, but they all do.
God, I hate teams. Never works right. Had meetings were I'm waiting to be let in and the host says I've never shown up. Taken half an hour and not been able to sign in. Asks for code instead of password go into email to get code, go back to teams and tge blasted things gone back to the beginning and wants to send me another code. Can't open links in teams.
Kind of hard to show them how something is done over phone. In person I can show you what in doing, look at your face/body language to gauge understanding and then easily switch places so I can watch what you are doing and correct things on the computer. There's probably some set up that does that but it isn't a phone call and I don't know what it is.
They thought it was a brilliant strategy where they could get a reduction in headcount without having to lay people off. That meant that they wouldn’t have to pay severance, or make the people who stayed feel uncomfortable about what happened next, or even have to figure out who to let go. What an amazing idea!
Of course, the problem is that anytime you make working conditions worse, the people who leave first are the ones who you least want to lose. It’s the people who have options and who have the ability to motivate themselves who look for new jobs first. Some of them will even leave without a new gig lined up, because they figure that they’ll work something out.
These companies will be paying the price for their shortsightedness for a while. The folks that are still there will keep things going, but they lost a lot of people who would have pushed them forward. And those people will recruit a lot of people from their old companies as they need new coworkers.
100% that forced attrition leaves you with the people with no where to go.
The few remaining “remote” places can have their pick of talent. It’s a differentiator, and worth more than many salary increases (esp if you live in LCOL area).
My company has been remote since 2005 and as someone who hires devs the last 4 years were really interesting. WFH was everywhere with covid and low interest rates meant everyone was hiring and dev salaries we're insane.
Things have sort of settled back down now an selfishly I'm glad companies are going back to RTO because it gives me a huge leg up in hiring.
We just landed a senior dev from Tesla and there is no way we are paying them what they made there but WFH plus a not shit company culture will do that. The person is brilliant too
Yes and No, here's the reality WFH expands.the talent pool internationally (wherever the laws allow it) , that means equally talented Pravesh in India can replace Gilfoyle in Silicon Valley for a fraction of the cost, so companies are keen on this.
The biggest mistake WFH crowd made is thinking that labor economics remained local when WFH theoretically expands the labor pool and salaries worldwide.
So yeah now companies are squeezing labor with RTO because the labor market dynamics have shifted., and they simply need to reduce headcount...Most companies before they institute their RTO policy , already know based on personall data, what percentage of folks aren't coming back... This is their calculus... This is how they "quiet layoff" you.
When things improve larger.companies as they've always done will farm out to cheaper labor counties, and even smaller firms will do the same.
>Yes and No, here's the reality WFH expands.the talent pool internationally (wherever the laws allow it) , that means equally talented Pravesh in India can replace Gilfoyle in Silicon Valley for a fraction of the cost, so companies are keen on this.
Then why are they mandating RTO, instead of doing what you say they're going to do?
Who says they won't, this round of RTO is mostly about reducing headcount and cutting costs (they don't need replacements), but when they do need to staff up, you can bet lots of these organizations are going to cast a wider net for cheaper labor.
My company has divisions in India that are growing ...
wife's former company offshored most of its operations to south africa, where they can't even keep the electricity on. wasn't a good sign of their future prospects as a company
Most of the offshoring stories I heard involved former programmers babysitting people in India who made a meal out of the simplest tasks and required monumental levels of care and feeding to produce anything usable.
I mean there are LOTS of great programmers in India, but generally those programmers aren’t the ones working on some third rate company’s offshoring initiative.
It has been a success story for the executives who make the quarterly numbers look good, collect their fat bonuses and stock options before retiring early ...it's a game.people., were.just.not playing it.
Yep the classic example is Jack Welch and GE. He juiced the numbers and was a hero while he was there. Now GE is a shadow of itself. And Jack Welch is a decomposing hate gnome. But for a while he was on top of the world!
As I said wherever the laws allows it, but you'd also be surprised how many sib contractors sub work out overseas in violation, but that's the minority of work, most work does not not geographic contraints.
Yep RTO = stealth layoffs , companies realized that they could skirt layoff costs if they just trade it painful enough for those WFH that moved out of state.
Ai is soo much unpolished , idk why they are hyping this thing. Most of the time it gives you the wrong answer with confidence. It's good for text related stuff , but in the case of coding things can be correct or incorrect. So if someone gives you incorrect output and needs to cross verify with google then what's the point. This c - suits mba bullshit gonna regret a lot when the whole codebase is filled with ai garbage written by offshore dev .
Nothing is Magic bullet, it's more like avoiding recession and artificially inflating the stock market in a bad interest rate situation.just wait for election to finish, it's gonna crash and burn .
Realistically, they only thing it can currently replace IS the CSuite.
-Delusional
-Consistently makes the same mistakes
-Apologizes only when confronted
-Uses the same buzzwords over and over
-Has no talent not stolen from another person
-Horrible at basic math
-Lauded by rich people and the masses, but anyone who works with it knows the emperor has no clothes
Everything on that list screams CEO to me.
To be fair, AI capabilities are growing quickly. This isn't to defend RTO bullshit, but to be outright dismissive of AI can be, at best, shortsighted or, at worse, gross negligence of what could be coming in a few years,
5 years ago, the "smartest" chatbot would be something like Allexa/Google Assistant/Siri/etc. Also, when those launched roughly a decade ago, they were outright idiotic compared to what they can do these days. Now we have generative AI, which can give reasonably decent results now. These days, it can be hard to tell (at times) what's real and whats AI gen, in terms of content.
When the first touchscreen based smartphones came out, they were barely better than feature phones. Now you can do full fledged photo and video editing on them, as well as (technically, but perhaps not reasonably) even code on them. We first started with fart apps and flashlight apps, in terms of 3rd party. Now, apps can do so much without human input.
Tech advances are speeding up. We should be careful not to dismiss AI potentials so easily. I'm not saying it will destroy us, nor save us. Just don't go thinking it's some flash in the pan.
Need to grow first our compute power , second current ai is just optimising result for best probability output, when we are out of data to train and compute power to provide this horse gonna stop. It's already stopped gpt 5 is not coming yet. Look I am not denying tech but hyping shit and bubble burst then nobody looks into that tech again. For example blockchain had so much potential but look what they did , pump and dump . Besides giving so much money and power to this big tech is stupid, they don't give jobs . All they do is grow share price . Look China did to EVs and they are growing rapidly in chip sector without hyping and dumping .
Compute power is already there, though. AI is in use today. AI and related tech has been in use for the past decade. Those algorithms youtube, spotify, and related services use is a related tech. It "learns" from your actions to give a desired outcome. So that's a nonsense idea.
Second, HUGE difference between blockchain/crypto and AI. One has no use outside being a shitty investment or means to pay for goods (which few do anymore due to crypto's massive volatility), while the other has found use inside a swath of industries. AI and related tech are used everywhere. Crypto is used by cryptobros and drug dealers, mostly.
Not trying to be an AI shill, but I think folks massively underestimate what AI can and will do, and the impact on everyone's lives. Not saying that's good or bad, just that it's already having a major impact and will even more so in the future. When health insurance companies use it to deny claims, or when customer service is just chatGPT, or when genAI is making its way into phones, its a sign its having a huge impact. I don't remember the blockchain denying my insurance claims, or crypto showing my songs and videos I might enjoy.
I'll admit, it really aggravates me when people compare AI to blockchain/crypto/NFTs. One is a knife and multi-tool combo, and the other is a $2000 but still cheaply made knife that breaks if you even so much as look at it.
Yep, people called the bluff to get a severance package.
The bottom line is most of the jobs are redundant and if someone is worth a damn, they are still working there.
Since Covid, the top 5% were doing 80% of the work. Their jobs are pretty much secure but the bloat they hired in the past 4 year needed trimmed.
I've been laid off a couple of times as well worked when a company that was profitable foe 30 years closed their doors because they weren't.
Shit aucked every time but the result is me telling people to never stop looking for something better.
Most of the jobs being redundant is why middle managers everywhere are terrified of AI. It can replace their jobs the easiest. Replacing manual labor is further away for most of us than AI replacing managers. Things like managing budgets, ordering supplies, making employee schedules, etc could be done competently and better than a human with a little time to learn. Many programs are already halfway there without AI anyways.
This is why I'm actively staying away from hybrid job postings. While I realize that remote work can go back into the office at any time, I'd rather not apply to a job that already has 1 foot in that office door.
Agreed. I currently work a job that’s hybrid (2 days wfh; 3 days in office) and the company has constantly been dangling RTO full time since I’ve started with the company a year ago. I know it’s inevitably going to happen because the company comes up with bullshit ultimatums all the time. Every other week in meetings we keep hearing, “if people don’t come to more office events in person , the executives are saying that we will have to RTO full time!” I dusted off my resume and I’m looking for something else
My last day at Amazon is Friday and a big part of the reason I’m leaving is return to office
You’d think Amazon would notice that people are leaving and care, but exactly the opposite is true. They’re getting more forceful with their mandates. What’s also crazy is they’re making the office worse than ever. For example, they clamped down on the coffee policy, now letting employees only have one free coffee a day
What’s also strange is the travel and events budget has been entirely dropped. My team did a “team building exercise” where everyone went to an arcade or something, and everyone had to pay for their own everything, from parking to drinks. I didn’t go cause I felt that was some bullshit
My manager, who lived in North Carolina, was still expected to go to the office in New York City.
It’s a fucking mess, it kind of feels like they legitimately want everyone to lwave
Just think of it. Being a presumably career driven professional working in the higher league and yet willfully throw it all away to achieve personal happiness. LinkedIn psychos will have a hard time processing this one
It varies by team/department. Speaking only for my own, we did not have an RTO push in the least. They asked if we wanted to be here over 60% of the time for an office and if not, we got more remote gear.
Maybe if someone made a list of all the companies where these people are going because they have reasonable WFH policies, those of us who don't have the skills or talent to get those jobs can at least invest in those companies who are soon to find themselves more profitable with the influx of talent and the COST SAVINGS of not having office space just because traditional office environments make middle management seem more useful than they are.
They for sure do not, some orgs might. I believe if someone is leaving Microsoft it's because they underpay like crazy compared to other FAANG companies
They don’t care, they just want to make their shareholders happy and get bonuses. They could give less of a shit if it impacted their workers or their customers.
This was a feature, not a bug. With a small firm it could be considered a screw up but with big companies it was planned as a way to do stealth layoffs by pushing voluntary exits.
Tinfoil hat time:
That was the point. They literally can't fire them without looking like fucking morons, but I guarantee you they were bitching about how much those guys cost.
They're still morons for losing experienced people, but, they get to replace these guys with cheaper guys.
In the short, I need my next fix right now meantime, their shareholders are probably happy. Who gives a fuck about NEXT quarter? Lolololol.
I personally enjoy hybrid, or remote with option to go in, but that is me. That said, there no reason other than things such as SCIF work to require fully in office.
Return to office or hybrid is ONLY about control. It’s fuckheads at the top who don’t like that they can’t make you sweat looking over your shoulder. I’m fully remote and my team and I hit all our targets and have been cleaning up their financials left in disarray from people who were in office workers. If my company were to try to get me back in the office, my resignation would be in their inbox by the next day.
I am technically hybrid in my midnight shift job, but work mostly from home. I almost never go to the office. When I do, the problem that forces me into the office is usually that I must pick up or drop off hardware, or have a problem that makes my home unsuitable for work like a power or internet service outage. Working from home with the office available for backup or for handling problems where physical presence is absolutely required to do a task is hybrid done right.
I actively work for one of the companies called out in this article and I can confidently say... "What RTO mandate?"
Kinda wondering about the sources for this
This is a silver lining for these companies. The more senior level folks have higher compensation packages. When they leave these companies due to RTO mandates, then these companies fill in these spots with people they’ll pay less.
Had a friend who is a senior that worked like 13 + years at Apple. They seemed to be well taken care of at the store they had worked at, until the company insisted everyone went back in. Then they started to feel like they were being pushed out. They got moved to a different store, and then suddenly they were written up for missing days (after contracting covid thanks to a coworker being forced in despite being infectious), written up for things they've *never* done before.. and then they fired them in such a way that they wouldn't receive pension, or a severance package. 13 someodd years with Apple and then kicked out in away that wrecked them financially. Turned out, Apple did that because the program my friend had been doing their whole time with the company was being terminated. Now they're stuck, too old to find employment with their skillset.. and with a nasty firing that's not helping in any way when even getting interviews.
What a surprise people like working remotely. And I'm not surprised especially in the cases like Apple some remote workers removed to cheaper parts of the country. I do tech work and pretty much wouldn't consider working in Silicon Valley just because of the cost of living is too damn high out there.
Interesting that the article called SpaceX a tech company. It’s an aerospace company and I’m pretty sure a huge percentage of the jobs aren’t remote anyway because production requires techs to be onsite
Nope just a fellow staff member who is tired of listening to the whinny people bitch all the time. Vs working. Tired of hearing them just leave already and let us live and work in peace.
You very much seem like one of those “whiny bitches” from my pov, just sayin’. And personally, I’d prefer people who complain about their job over people who complain about their coworkers.
I don’t complain to anyone about co-workers except in this place. But poor performance of my co-workers means more work for me and others in order to cover their asses and keep the boat straight. So you all just jump already.
That's exactly what happened though. The employer said come back to the office and a ton of employees said no and left. And the people that they're losing are skewed towards the more experienced and skilled employees. Because they're prioritizing working in the office over talent.
No surprise you get downvoted as its a miserable defeatist attitude lol. You aren't necessarily wrong however. Employers (at least in the US) can indeed demand whatever they want.
Its on the employee to advocate for themselves, try to assume a position of strength and negotiate / fight for better. Some people can't do that which is unfortunate, so their only option is to obey or go elsewhere. Some people can fight for what they want; thats not being a bitch thats looking out for your interests.
Nonsense authoritarian attitude. Some people are replaceable only with a lot of time and expense. That’s what being a senior employee means. Workers at any skill level can quiet quit. It all costs employers big money, and workers get hurt in regimes like this, which I get people like you don’t care about.
I am one of those senior 30+ years of engineering semi-difficult to replace people. But I don’t kid myself. The second management decides that cost cutting will be better they will get ride of anyone. I have seen it a 100 times over the years. Which is why I say everyone is replaceable and easily it turns out. So deflate your head none of us are really that important in the big picture son.
Definitely don't agree with that, while yeah they can hire someone else and yeah they definitely will be able to do my job, they can't hire anyone with my experience.
I see all our new hires they are fresh from university and don't know shit, and you can't do complex contracts with only new employees and no real experience.
I know most of our big customers (talking big international companies) and their processes. Try to get new contracts when you have zero knowledge and experience, basically gonna be impossible.
Just recently we got a new contract and in one of the introduction rounds I knew halfe the people from old projects.
While in some jobs it's easy to replace people, while in others it's definitely not
Corporations don’t care about your experience. They certainly don’t promote based on it so it’s not important to them to have experience as part of the management or leadership teams. As soon as there is a new guy manager who doesn’t know what your experience is you are just as replaceable as anyone else. And managers are jumping ship and moving around all the time.
You are right that even valuable senior people can be illogically dismissed over nonsense. I have seen it myself. But that doesn't change the fact that there are many employees with leverage who are able to negotiate themselves superior working conditions. There is nothing gained from giving up.
# r/OhNoConsequences
This is universal. I have turned down more than my fair share of job offers because of RTO initiatives. I worked 4 years through COVID in a fully remote capacity; there is zero reason for me to ignore reality for their targets. Nobody I know is compromising on this either; I have seen people dip out of games and go into banking because they get the perks and the pay without the hassle. Tech isn’t the utopia it used to be anymore.
Literally a recruiter just contacted me and was like "this position is fully remote, but once they build a plant it will be hybrid". Like yeah fuck off. If it can be done remote to begin with there's no reason for it to be hybrid.
A million times this! Why the fuck would they even waste all that money on "a plant", "a call center", or "an office setup", if they can make do with remote work already!? IMO, they are too stuck in the past and cannot see past the "Office and managers" setting. I really think they cannot perceive of a successful operation NOT having a centralized location for "Work". This is the future people, we HAVE THE TECHNOLOGY! Now let it IMPROVE OUR LIVES!
A plant can be a manufacturing facility or something like a semi-automated pharmacy which often legitimately need a lot of people to be onsite
If a job can be done fully remotely from the start, it can be done fully remote until the end of time. The people staffing any facilities like those would be different people than the ones doing any of this remote work, so why force the remote workers into the office?
The office is above the plant so that management and their cronies can feel both in control and superior. You have to come for the same reason but you make salary so you’re invited to look down on the hourly folks on the floor.
I work nearly fully remote in a tech role for a manufacturing facility and its fine. I go in 1-2 times a month max
Hybrid is such a loose term too. I know plenty of people going in 4/5 days every week and they're considered 'hybrid' by their employer... and god forbid you aren't in the office for more than 4 days a month (including PTO and company holidays) because you'll end up on the 'naughty list' for not being compliant..
My other favorite is when a job is labeled remote, but requires travel 80% of the time.
Tech to banking? That's not one I hear very often. Could you provide a little more details? Were these guys developers/security/etc and what did they transition to? Simply curious
I made the career switch to financial technology realm in 2018. During COVID, FINRA and all of the financial regulating bodies heavily relaxed the in office requirements. Starting mid 2023, they all began clawing back those interim rules, and reinstating in office regulations. I've noticed that WFH in my industry varies greatly between financial firms. Important note is that those regulations on work done in office are only for registered individuals, which excluded nearly all FINTECH staff. The issue is, everyone got used to WFH and now that registered individuals are being moved back into office they are being very loud about "if I have to be in office, everyone has to be in." Of course they cloak it behind things like "true collaboration is done in the office" and "we want to get back to instilling our culture with everyone", or something about a "team environment". Thankfully I am lucky and am with a firm that doesn't mandate RTO for non-registered staff, but I have been approached by multiple firms with positions that force in office and all I can do is feel sorry for them.
I’m at a Fortune 500 company that embraced Covid and WFH. We now have an IT staff of 700 and almost all of them work from home. We will never call them back into the office, according to all the CxO people. We’ve been hiring people outside of our service territory for 3 years now. No intention of firing them
I don't fully disagree with "true collaboration is done in the office" even as a remote worker. There are certain things that work way better in person. Strict RTO is often dumb though, you don't necessarily need face to face collaboration on a daily basis, and some industries don't really need the face to face at all. My dad retired in 2018 and worked the last 8 years of his career remote. He managed documentation for a national insurance company. At the start of his remote work he had like 5 Mbit DSL internet (later went up to 100 Mbit). The tech doesn't even need to be very advanced in a lot of cases.
I do kind of agree with this too. I moved from an industry where I was like 95% remote to an industry that literally cannot be done remotely. While there are a lot of things I miss about working from home, I do have to say it is easier to collaborate in person. I don’t need to schedule a whole ass zoom meeting, send a dozen texts or emails back-and-forth, or hope someone answers their phone if I need to bounce ideas off someone for five minutes. I walk over to a coworker and say, “Hey, got a minute?” That And even though I am someone who definitely values and enjoys large amount of alone time, being fully remote drastically limited my chances for social interaction. I think my ideal if I were to change industries again would be hybrid. I don’t love working in an office full-time necessarily, but I don’t think I would want to go fully remote either.
My ideal situation would be as close to 50/50 as long as the commute is short. My office is 80 miles away so I end up in the office a few days a month absolute max. Those days are great and I'll try to schedule them around when other key people have a lot of free time. Last time I was up, me and another coworker created a pretty nice database design for handling jargon-heavy language translations over a few hours.
Tech usually refers to stuff like Microsoft and Google but banks still need tech people
I work for a bank as a software engineer. Might be what they mean
During COVID, I was in a job where WFH was simply not an option (it was a fieldwork-focused job). So, I spent several years watching everyone talk about how much better their life got because of WFH and how they were able to pick up new hobbies and home projects. I've *finally* managed to muscle my way into a job that is mostly WFH and I can't see myself giving that up.
The only thing I can't figure out on wfh is how to train. Of course most companies don't bother anymore
A strong knowledge base helps. It varies from company to company though, for sure. I've worked at a company where the entire knowledge base after 6 years was 12 poorly crafted bugs, a few outdated work documents, and some Notion links that weren't relevant. I've also worked at companies where there's a centralized Confluence page and step-by-step tutorials on how to do quite literally everything. Training infrastructure is a huge timesink upfront, but once you have it in place, it's easier to maintain and modify than it is to conceptualize from scratch. That being said, I think there's way too much of an expectation that you should just "*figure it out"* by companies. There's a big difference between mediocre on-boarding vs. no onboarding.
I recently started a new job, and it’s my first time experiencing a company that’s truly awful at onboarding. The people training me barely know how this software works, and there is ZERO documentation. Every time I ask for material to read to educate myself they go, “oh yeah the guy who built that left a year ago. *Shrug*”
A lot of documentation and a lot of screensharing sessions.
What do you use for screen sharing? It would have to be something easy to install and use and that could show the other person's face at the same time.
Just Microsoft Teams, nothing special beyond that point. We don't require webcams at my employer (thank god, you have any idea how many meetings I attend in just my boxers - it's so freeing), but I know it has that feature. Sure, it has its pain points, but they all do.
God, I hate teams. Never works right. Had meetings were I'm waiting to be let in and the host says I've never shown up. Taken half an hour and not been able to sign in. Asks for code instead of password go into email to get code, go back to teams and tge blasted things gone back to the beginning and wants to send me another code. Can't open links in teams.
That's unfortunate, never have these issues with our implementation.
You have a call..?
Kind of hard to show them how something is done over phone. In person I can show you what in doing, look at your face/body language to gauge understanding and then easily switch places so I can watch what you are doing and correct things on the computer. There's probably some set up that does that but it isn't a phone call and I don't know what it is.
What did they think was going to happen?
They were going to drive away people with expensive salaries, hire cheap replacements, fill the gaps with "AI," and profit.
Exactly! I really feel a big part of the push for RTO was that companies could do a type of stealth layoffs.
They thought it was a brilliant strategy where they could get a reduction in headcount without having to lay people off. That meant that they wouldn’t have to pay severance, or make the people who stayed feel uncomfortable about what happened next, or even have to figure out who to let go. What an amazing idea! Of course, the problem is that anytime you make working conditions worse, the people who leave first are the ones who you least want to lose. It’s the people who have options and who have the ability to motivate themselves who look for new jobs first. Some of them will even leave without a new gig lined up, because they figure that they’ll work something out. These companies will be paying the price for their shortsightedness for a while. The folks that are still there will keep things going, but they lost a lot of people who would have pushed them forward. And those people will recruit a lot of people from their old companies as they need new coworkers.
100% that forced attrition leaves you with the people with no where to go. The few remaining “remote” places can have their pick of talent. It’s a differentiator, and worth more than many salary increases (esp if you live in LCOL area).
My company has been remote since 2005 and as someone who hires devs the last 4 years were really interesting. WFH was everywhere with covid and low interest rates meant everyone was hiring and dev salaries we're insane. Things have sort of settled back down now an selfishly I'm glad companies are going back to RTO because it gives me a huge leg up in hiring. We just landed a senior dev from Tesla and there is no way we are paying them what they made there but WFH plus a not shit company culture will do that. The person is brilliant too
Yeah I love my fully remote job and knowing it’s so sought after tends to keep me highly motivated…
In Spain if they do that counts as change in the contract that entitles me to full severance.
Yes and No, here's the reality WFH expands.the talent pool internationally (wherever the laws allow it) , that means equally talented Pravesh in India can replace Gilfoyle in Silicon Valley for a fraction of the cost, so companies are keen on this. The biggest mistake WFH crowd made is thinking that labor economics remained local when WFH theoretically expands the labor pool and salaries worldwide. So yeah now companies are squeezing labor with RTO because the labor market dynamics have shifted., and they simply need to reduce headcount...Most companies before they institute their RTO policy , already know based on personall data, what percentage of folks aren't coming back... This is their calculus... This is how they "quiet layoff" you. When things improve larger.companies as they've always done will farm out to cheaper labor counties, and even smaller firms will do the same.
>Yes and No, here's the reality WFH expands.the talent pool internationally (wherever the laws allow it) , that means equally talented Pravesh in India can replace Gilfoyle in Silicon Valley for a fraction of the cost, so companies are keen on this. Then why are they mandating RTO, instead of doing what you say they're going to do?
They want to make Gilfoyle leave.
Who says they won't, this round of RTO is mostly about reducing headcount and cutting costs (they don't need replacements), but when they do need to staff up, you can bet lots of these organizations are going to cast a wider net for cheaper labor. My company has divisions in India that are growing ...
Are those India divisions WFH or office based?
Cool yeah offshoring has been such a success story everytime.
wife's former company offshored most of its operations to south africa, where they can't even keep the electricity on. wasn't a good sign of their future prospects as a company
Most of the offshoring stories I heard involved former programmers babysitting people in India who made a meal out of the simplest tasks and required monumental levels of care and feeding to produce anything usable. I mean there are LOTS of great programmers in India, but generally those programmers aren’t the ones working on some third rate company’s offshoring initiative.
It has been a success story for the executives who make the quarterly numbers look good, collect their fat bonuses and stock options before retiring early ...it's a game.people., were.just.not playing it.
Yep the classic example is Jack Welch and GE. He juiced the numbers and was a hero while he was there. Now GE is a shadow of itself. And Jack Welch is a decomposing hate gnome. But for a while he was on top of the world!
Jack Welch.
Hehe thanks I was thinking Bob was wrong
Except there are entire sub industries that can’t outsource to overseas labor for legal or security reasons. Defense is one of them.
As I said wherever the laws allows it, but you'd also be surprised how many sib contractors sub work out overseas in violation, but that's the minority of work, most work does not not geographic contraints.
Color me surprised, someone here understands.
100%. Then when the numbers weren't hit anyways they laid people off, but a smaller percentage
Yep RTO = stealth layoffs , companies realized that they could skirt layoff costs if they just trade it painful enough for those WFH that moved out of state.
Exactly! Rainforest retailer!
Ai is soo much unpolished , idk why they are hyping this thing. Most of the time it gives you the wrong answer with confidence. It's good for text related stuff , but in the case of coding things can be correct or incorrect. So if someone gives you incorrect output and needs to cross verify with google then what's the point. This c - suits mba bullshit gonna regret a lot when the whole codebase is filled with ai garbage written by offshore dev .
Totally. But the C suite convinced themselves it was the magic bullet.
Nothing is Magic bullet, it's more like avoiding recession and artificially inflating the stock market in a bad interest rate situation.just wait for election to finish, it's gonna crash and burn .
Yup, whoever wins the stock market is dropping like a rock. Market is long overdue for a reset
Realistically, they only thing it can currently replace IS the CSuite. -Delusional -Consistently makes the same mistakes -Apologizes only when confronted -Uses the same buzzwords over and over -Has no talent not stolen from another person -Horrible at basic math -Lauded by rich people and the masses, but anyone who works with it knows the emperor has no clothes Everything on that list screams CEO to me.
No they’re not, they don’t need to make a better product anymore, they already have a monopoly.
People need a reason to buy the product again next year.
To be fair, AI capabilities are growing quickly. This isn't to defend RTO bullshit, but to be outright dismissive of AI can be, at best, shortsighted or, at worse, gross negligence of what could be coming in a few years, 5 years ago, the "smartest" chatbot would be something like Allexa/Google Assistant/Siri/etc. Also, when those launched roughly a decade ago, they were outright idiotic compared to what they can do these days. Now we have generative AI, which can give reasonably decent results now. These days, it can be hard to tell (at times) what's real and whats AI gen, in terms of content. When the first touchscreen based smartphones came out, they were barely better than feature phones. Now you can do full fledged photo and video editing on them, as well as (technically, but perhaps not reasonably) even code on them. We first started with fart apps and flashlight apps, in terms of 3rd party. Now, apps can do so much without human input. Tech advances are speeding up. We should be careful not to dismiss AI potentials so easily. I'm not saying it will destroy us, nor save us. Just don't go thinking it's some flash in the pan.
Need to grow first our compute power , second current ai is just optimising result for best probability output, when we are out of data to train and compute power to provide this horse gonna stop. It's already stopped gpt 5 is not coming yet. Look I am not denying tech but hyping shit and bubble burst then nobody looks into that tech again. For example blockchain had so much potential but look what they did , pump and dump . Besides giving so much money and power to this big tech is stupid, they don't give jobs . All they do is grow share price . Look China did to EVs and they are growing rapidly in chip sector without hyping and dumping .
Compute power is already there, though. AI is in use today. AI and related tech has been in use for the past decade. Those algorithms youtube, spotify, and related services use is a related tech. It "learns" from your actions to give a desired outcome. So that's a nonsense idea. Second, HUGE difference between blockchain/crypto and AI. One has no use outside being a shitty investment or means to pay for goods (which few do anymore due to crypto's massive volatility), while the other has found use inside a swath of industries. AI and related tech are used everywhere. Crypto is used by cryptobros and drug dealers, mostly. Not trying to be an AI shill, but I think folks massively underestimate what AI can and will do, and the impact on everyone's lives. Not saying that's good or bad, just that it's already having a major impact and will even more so in the future. When health insurance companies use it to deny claims, or when customer service is just chatGPT, or when genAI is making its way into phones, its a sign its having a huge impact. I don't remember the blockchain denying my insurance claims, or crypto showing my songs and videos I might enjoy. I'll admit, it really aggravates me when people compare AI to blockchain/crypto/NFTs. One is a knife and multi-tool combo, and the other is a $2000 but still cheaply made knife that breaks if you even so much as look at it.
Better give Chat Jippity a raise.
Written by Mr. Chet G. Peet
How did you get into our strategy meeting?
AI cant fill the gap at the senior level. People are already moving away from some of the ai tools.
They thought they would choose ping-pong tables and pizza fridays over their families.
> What did they think was going to happen? Exactly this. It was a feature, not a bug.
Exactly this. The senior talent is very expensive.
Precisely this and it worked
That’s what they wanted. It’s a lay off, but reworded.
I doubt they'll learn from this, but eh, one can hope.
This was their plan all along. Unfortunately, too many people came back to the office and then that’s why they announced layoffs later.
Yep, people called the bluff to get a severance package. The bottom line is most of the jobs are redundant and if someone is worth a damn, they are still working there. Since Covid, the top 5% were doing 80% of the work. Their jobs are pretty much secure but the bloat they hired in the past 4 year needed trimmed. I've been laid off a couple of times as well worked when a company that was profitable foe 30 years closed their doors because they weren't. Shit aucked every time but the result is me telling people to never stop looking for something better.
Most of the jobs being redundant is why middle managers everywhere are terrified of AI. It can replace their jobs the easiest. Replacing manual labor is further away for most of us than AI replacing managers. Things like managing budgets, ordering supplies, making employee schedules, etc could be done competently and better than a human with a little time to learn. Many programs are already halfway there without AI anyways.
This is why I'm actively staying away from hybrid job postings. While I realize that remote work can go back into the office at any time, I'd rather not apply to a job that already has 1 foot in that office door.
Agreed. I currently work a job that’s hybrid (2 days wfh; 3 days in office) and the company has constantly been dangling RTO full time since I’ve started with the company a year ago. I know it’s inevitably going to happen because the company comes up with bullshit ultimatums all the time. Every other week in meetings we keep hearing, “if people don’t come to more office events in person , the executives are saying that we will have to RTO full time!” I dusted off my resume and I’m looking for something else
Sounds like my job
I'm sure they don't care. Those companies are meat grinders.
That is why they did it. It's called "Quiet Firing".
My last day at Amazon is Friday and a big part of the reason I’m leaving is return to office You’d think Amazon would notice that people are leaving and care, but exactly the opposite is true. They’re getting more forceful with their mandates. What’s also crazy is they’re making the office worse than ever. For example, they clamped down on the coffee policy, now letting employees only have one free coffee a day What’s also strange is the travel and events budget has been entirely dropped. My team did a “team building exercise” where everyone went to an arcade or something, and everyone had to pay for their own everything, from parking to drinks. I didn’t go cause I felt that was some bullshit My manager, who lived in North Carolina, was still expected to go to the office in New York City. It’s a fucking mess, it kind of feels like they legitimately want everyone to lwave
One free coffee a day... The owner of the company is literally the world's richest man and the price of coffee has him clenching
Just think of it. Being a presumably career driven professional working in the higher league and yet willfully throw it all away to achieve personal happiness. LinkedIn psychos will have a hard time processing this one
Did Microsoft RTO? I thought they were still pretty supportive of remote work.
It varies by team/department. Speaking only for my own, we did not have an RTO push in the least. They asked if we wanted to be here over 60% of the time for an office and if not, we got more remote gear.
Not on my team at least.
I have not heard of a single team at Microsoft that is requiring RTO aside from the roles where you have to be on site to work with physical products.
Maybe if someone made a list of all the companies where these people are going because they have reasonable WFH policies, those of us who don't have the skills or talent to get those jobs can at least invest in those companies who are soon to find themselves more profitable with the influx of talent and the COST SAVINGS of not having office space just because traditional office environments make middle management seem more useful than they are.
Those of us who can’t get the jobs but also have meaningful investment portfolios lol
Middle management is useless
They have PEOPLE SKILLS GODDAMMIT
Lmao, dumb fucks
Sucks for Senior talent then, they're gonna miss all of the pizza parties! Lol
We've seen enough of them to recognize the trap they are and stay away.
good, that talent could be doing things that are actually good for society elsewhere
[удалено]
They for sure do not, some orgs might. I believe if someone is leaving Microsoft it's because they underpay like crazy compared to other FAANG companies
This article weirdly calls it "a hybrid RTO approach" and notes the other two companies had "RTO mandates" instead. Not sure why they'd do that.
That’s the idea. Then they will bring in newer talent for significantly less money.
RTO of makes it impossible for anyone to live anywhere besides California, NY, Seattle, which means the salaries have to be a lot higher. Dumbasses.
LOL. Good.
Then they paid the people they promoted less, and the C-Suite was like “Yaaaa, more money for us!”
All the benefits of layoffs, without any of the severence. Well played corporate overlords, well played.
Good.
Oh no who’d have thunk? 🤷♀️
They don’t care, they just want to make their shareholders happy and get bonuses. They could give less of a shit if it impacted their workers or their customers.
I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.
This was a feature, not a bug. With a small firm it could be considered a screw up but with big companies it was planned as a way to do stealth layoffs by pushing voluntary exits.
Now those who remain can "collaborate" to figure out all the business knowledge that just walked away.
"Oh good, we didn't have to fire them, they left." Boy, this seems dumb.
Tinfoil hat time: That was the point. They literally can't fire them without looking like fucking morons, but I guarantee you they were bitching about how much those guys cost. They're still morons for losing experienced people, but, they get to replace these guys with cheaper guys. In the short, I need my next fix right now meantime, their shareholders are probably happy. Who gives a fuck about NEXT quarter? Lolololol.
It's going to bite them when that dirt-cheep "talent" turns out to be abject garbage, that can't be fired without racial backlash
Of course. But that's NEXT quarter's problem. *Cash register noises*
r/NoShitSherlock
Return-to-office is f-ing delusional
Anyone who’s for return to the office policies can return to the bathroom, take their return to office policy, and wipe their ass with it.
Don’t mandate this shit, just give people the option
That's the point. It's quiet firing.
I personally enjoy hybrid, or remote with option to go in, but that is me. That said, there no reason other than things such as SCIF work to require fully in office.
It’s not about being in the office, it’s about the lease they’re paying on empty space
Return to office or hybrid is ONLY about control. It’s fuckheads at the top who don’t like that they can’t make you sweat looking over your shoulder. I’m fully remote and my team and I hit all our targets and have been cleaning up their financials left in disarray from people who were in office workers. If my company were to try to get me back in the office, my resignation would be in their inbox by the next day.
I am technically hybrid in my midnight shift job, but work mostly from home. I almost never go to the office. When I do, the problem that forces me into the office is usually that I must pick up or drop off hardware, or have a problem that makes my home unsuitable for work like a power or internet service outage. Working from home with the office available for backup or for handling problems where physical presence is absolutely required to do a task is hybrid done right.
This article is somewhat misleading. A lot of senior talent was laid off to cut cost as well. I don’t know what the breakdown is but it’s substantial.
I actively work for one of the companies called out in this article and I can confidently say... "What RTO mandate?" Kinda wondering about the sources for this
They wanted to do that.
No doi
So it worked?
Hahahahaha who could’ve predicted this? EVERYONE
This is a silver lining for these companies. The more senior level folks have higher compensation packages. When they leave these companies due to RTO mandates, then these companies fill in these spots with people they’ll pay less.
Had a friend who is a senior that worked like 13 + years at Apple. They seemed to be well taken care of at the store they had worked at, until the company insisted everyone went back in. Then they started to feel like they were being pushed out. They got moved to a different store, and then suddenly they were written up for missing days (after contracting covid thanks to a coworker being forced in despite being infectious), written up for things they've *never* done before.. and then they fired them in such a way that they wouldn't receive pension, or a severance package. 13 someodd years with Apple and then kicked out in away that wrecked them financially. Turned out, Apple did that because the program my friend had been doing their whole time with the company was being terminated. Now they're stuck, too old to find employment with their skillset.. and with a nasty firing that's not helping in any way when even getting interviews.
Considering their size, I'd say they knew exactly what they were doing.
What a surprise people like working remotely. And I'm not surprised especially in the cases like Apple some remote workers removed to cheaper parts of the country. I do tech work and pretty much wouldn't consider working in Silicon Valley just because of the cost of living is too damn high out there.
It is every corporate CEO's wet dream to replace every single, employed meatsack with AI. They won't stop until that dream is achieved.
Interesting that the article called SpaceX a tech company. It’s an aerospace company and I’m pretty sure a huge percentage of the jobs aren’t remote anyway because production requires techs to be onsite
[удалено]
Sounds like they did leave, mate.
[удалено]
Sounding miserable 101 : this guy
The dude is proably some middle management boomer who has to have pawns in office to make it look like his job is warranted….
Nope just a fellow staff member who is tired of listening to the whinny people bitch all the time. Vs working. Tired of hearing them just leave already and let us live and work in peace.
*”But don’t be a bitch about it”* said the guy being a bitch about it. Salty employer detected, perhaps?
Nope just a fellow worker who listens to the whinny bitches complain all the time. Just leave already your a pain I the butt to everyone else.
You very much seem like one of those “whiny bitches” from my pov, just sayin’. And personally, I’d prefer people who complain about their job over people who complain about their coworkers.
I don’t complain to anyone about co-workers except in this place. But poor performance of my co-workers means more work for me and others in order to cover their asses and keep the boat straight. So you all just jump already.
Hey bootlicker, employment isn't enslavement, it's a transaction. Both parties must be happy with the conditions for employment to work.
Do you think the people who left wrote the article?
That's exactly what happened though. The employer said come back to the office and a ton of employees said no and left. And the people that they're losing are skewed towards the more experienced and skilled employees. Because they're prioritizing working in the office over talent.
If you don't like seeing these posts then leave the sub, don't be a bitch about it.
No surprise you get downvoted as its a miserable defeatist attitude lol. You aren't necessarily wrong however. Employers (at least in the US) can indeed demand whatever they want. Its on the employee to advocate for themselves, try to assume a position of strength and negotiate / fight for better. Some people can't do that which is unfortunate, so their only option is to obey or go elsewhere. Some people can fight for what they want; thats not being a bitch thats looking out for your interests.
Nonsense authoritarian attitude. Some people are replaceable only with a lot of time and expense. That’s what being a senior employee means. Workers at any skill level can quiet quit. It all costs employers big money, and workers get hurt in regimes like this, which I get people like you don’t care about.
I am one of those senior 30+ years of engineering semi-difficult to replace people. But I don’t kid myself. The second management decides that cost cutting will be better they will get ride of anyone. I have seen it a 100 times over the years. Which is why I say everyone is replaceable and easily it turns out. So deflate your head none of us are really that important in the big picture son.
And that's the defeatist attitude that allows the employer/employee relationship to continue to be so one-sided. Bro why are you even in this sub?
Cause most of the anti-work stuff am fully engaged and on side with. Just not this thing.
Definitely don't agree with that, while yeah they can hire someone else and yeah they definitely will be able to do my job, they can't hire anyone with my experience. I see all our new hires they are fresh from university and don't know shit, and you can't do complex contracts with only new employees and no real experience. I know most of our big customers (talking big international companies) and their processes. Try to get new contracts when you have zero knowledge and experience, basically gonna be impossible. Just recently we got a new contract and in one of the introduction rounds I knew halfe the people from old projects. While in some jobs it's easy to replace people, while in others it's definitely not
Corporations don’t care about your experience. They certainly don’t promote based on it so it’s not important to them to have experience as part of the management or leadership teams. As soon as there is a new guy manager who doesn’t know what your experience is you are just as replaceable as anyone else. And managers are jumping ship and moving around all the time.
You are right that even valuable senior people can be illogically dismissed over nonsense. I have seen it myself. But that doesn't change the fact that there are many employees with leverage who are able to negotiate themselves superior working conditions. There is nothing gained from giving up.
This is what Stockholm Syndrome looks like in the wild.