AT&T and Amazon have the right idea. Conference calls with offshore teams are far more effective when done in an open office environment, surrounded by people from unrelated teams doing the same thing.
The collaborative energy of hundreds of tightly-packed people trying to focus on different things together is amazing.
> The collaborative energy of hundreds of tightly-packed people trying to focus in different things together is amazing.
Imagine this. You are trying to write a Python script to produce another report for your manager. You can sit anywhere in the amazing open office. You accidentally sit next to the Anti-Money Laundering team, and have to listen to that.
The next day you choose a different floor. Your manager shows up wearing a mask and says she has a flu. The rest of the day, you listen to small talk, while trying to focus on implementing the report.
Whenever you walk to the coffee machine, people stare at you and wonder who you're sleeping with.
Finally, you revolt and refuse to come in to the office. Then you don't have a job.
The office where I work we have a whole section of one floor that is strictly no talking and phones must be on mute. If you want silence you can sit there. I cannot imagine that we are the only company that has come up with this idea.
That being said, I still work from home when I feel like it.
Personally I find home more distracting than the office. The office is a clean work space with a desk with only my work computer and work stuff and everybody around me is also working.
Home has chores and errands and 'fun' and all kinds of other Not Work stuff to tempt me away from working. Plus once my kids come home from school, quiet concentration time is effectively over.
But as I said, I'm not advocating for mandatory return to office, and I do work at home 1-2 days a week.
> Home has chores and errands and 'fun' and all kinds of other Not Work stuff to tempt me away from working. Plus once my kids come home from school, quiet concentration time is effectively over.
It's funny how serving one's employer has become the highest duty.
Work not done? After-hours issue? Then work overtime. Kids are home? Go to the office to avoid being distracted from work.
Or, I go to the office, focus for 6 hours uninterrupted, get done what needs to be done, and then go home and not think about work at all for the rest of the day.
> I cannot imagine that we are the only company that has come up with this idea.
In a company I used to work for, 2 floors were (completely) unoccupied but some were insufferable. 2 floors worth tens of thousands of dollars monthly were just completely unused whatsoever.
Last time I was in the amazon office, I got to see how absurd it is, especially since this has all, supposedly, been in the name of productivity.
The office my team is in is setup so there's a long hallway that has the security corridor, then a coffee shop, then a convenience store then the elevators. Anyone coming into the office has to walk through all of these to get to the elevators to go to their floor.
Last time I was there, they'd put desks in hallway between the coffee shop and the convenience store, and they were always full.
You'd think if they were doing this for productivity, they wouldn't be sticking desks in the hallway everyone has to walk through all the time.
Okay, I want to be super clear on this one: Do you have to pay for the coffee once you pass security / they know you work there? Or is that coffee shop not part of the company and just so happens to be onsite?
> Okay, I want to be super clear on this one: Do you have to pay for the coffee once you pass security / they know you work there? Or is that coffee shop not part of the company and just so happens to be onsite?
Don't know about Amazon, but there are two coffee options at my employer (past security):
1. A chain coffee shop you have to pay for. No discount that I can perceive.
2. Free coffee machines.
#1 used to be extremely popular when #2 consisted of Douwe Egberts machines that used some weird coffee concentrate that made terrible and weak coffee. Now I think #1 closes early and has low staffing because the #2 got upgraded to espresso machines that use decent beans and can also do basic espresso drinks (Americano, Latte, etc).
Ah, for context, to encourage people to RTO during the pandemic, coffee there was free. Once we started an RTO mandate it changed to one coffee a day was free. Now that we're moving to mandated 5 day RTO, even that is gone.
Things get shittier and shittier in a company known to be shitty to it's employees
Our metric shows that AIs productivity improved 20% compare to workers ever since return to office. The conclusion is inescapable, AI likes it when developers cluster together in glass towers and improves.
The right idea? These companies have no problem outsourcing American jobs -- outside of the US!
RTO my a$$, the strategy was and always will be displacement of American workers through attrition by hiring remote Asian workers -- 1 FTE = 4 Indian workers.
'Most' of these are American companies selling American products and services to Americans. If they like Asia so freaking much, leave the US and go sell your $hitty products and services over there!
Every time I hear news like this, I think âhmmm layoffs coming to XYZ soonâ.
For some reason, the idea that RTO is caused by out of touch execs is pervasive, but I really donât think thatâs the reason. These companies need people to leave. The cheapest way to do that is for an employee to leave voluntarily after they have gotten another job. Hell, if enough people leave, you might not even have to do layoffs.
We can bitch about it all we want, but these execs know what theyâre doing. They arenât stupid or out of touch.
EDIT: I will add that Iâm also curious about the long-term implications of this kind of trickery. It doesnât seem like a good long-term solution, you canât just order RTO and then allow remote work year after year. Everyone is going to have to find something that works long-term eventually.
It also means they've done the arithmetic, and know that it's worth losing their top X% of people - the ones who'll have the easiest time finding a better job.
Obviously you've never worked for a big corporation before. Corporations don't want top employees. In a corporate environment, top employees are a nuisance much of the time. Most managers, if given the choice, would rather have an employee who shows up, does their work (but not too much), doesn't care about anything (and thus will do whatever they are told) and will accept whatever is given to them, and someone who is not at risk of leaving and can be laid off or fired easily/cheaply when the time comes.
Top employees often have an axe to grind, an ego to satisfy or a ladder to climb. This is the last thing a corporation wants or needs. When I was a manager in Corporate America, I was instructed to screen out overly ambitious or eager candidates. They are just too much trouble for what amounts to normally a 10-20% increase in performance over a regular candidate.
It would be really interesting to see if they take that into account when they make these decisions. Iâd have to imagine that the top X percent are also the highest paid, so maybe thatâs actually a benefit.
I would guess they looked at who is mostly likely to leave based on forced RTO and they liked the answer. Probably something like parents of young children, mostly women, people who are caring for an elder or disabled family member, so again mostly women, and people who have a disability themselves.
A smart employer is already paying their best employees more than they can get elsewhere.
After all, I know Alice gets things done fast and to a high standard, she can be trusted to deliver important projects, and she's very familiar our most important systems.
All anyone else knows is her job title is "Level 17 Engineer", she's got a firm handshake, and she knows how to find a cycle in a linked list.
It'd be pretty absurd for me to let myself get outbid on salary by someone with less information.
I don't think they really care, or feel that they have to care. The way that I've seen it work is they'll make rare exceptions for individuals they absolutely can't lose or wan't to hire but that's it and the exceptions truly are rare.
I absolutely agree that they dont' care on an emotional level, but they're going to find it difficult to run a business when 90% of the senior staff leave and take their institutional memory with them.
Yeah, anyone that assumes these people care if it hurts the company in the long run is just mad, all they want is to see the stock go up after the announcement.
Sadly I think you're right. As some say the cruelty is the point. I also think much of the AI boom is just an excuse to get rid of people and get them to accept worse conditions. At the local IBM office they cut half the staff with the reason given being that AI would replace them, then told the other half they would need to work unpaid overtime to cover the lost staff (what happened to the AI?).
Programmers have been an expensive cost to companies for awhile and it's been obvious since outsourcing attempts decades ago that CEOs would like to do whatever they can to break their backs.
So, you say as a return to office employee, if i boycott local services by bringing my own food, making my own coffee and not going out for lunch, i can render political pressure moot?
I doubt execs care at that point. They, much like most of us, only care about getting people off their back. "Hey, I got the employees back into the office like you wanted, it's your problem now."
I know that RTO is offensive to many, and not mildly so... but if they were trying to force people to quit of their own accord, wouldn't we also see an escalation of tactics beyond RTO? If it's a good strategy, why stop there?
They're not out of touch they know exactly what they're doing, following orders while these centibillionaires are jockeying for position on the Forbes 100.
The strategy was and always will be bottom line: Displacement of American workers through attrition by hiring remote Asian workers -- 1 FTE = 4 Indian workers.
'Most' of these are American companies selling American products and services to Americans. If they like Asia so freaking much, leave the US and go sell your $hitty products and services over there!
I don't disagree with your statement per se, but neither "being more profitable than last quarter" or "the current CEO needs to be successful" imply "these companies need people to leave".
That is one of the possible ways of making "line go up".
But when I hear that a company __needs__ to make an X number of employees go, it gives me the impression they are in the red, and/or the organization will suffer great damage if they don't proceed with it. The organization doesn't even need to be a business per se.
Saying "those companies want to fire employees to increase profits" IMO is more accurate, even if a bit more verbose.
This seems on brand for an old tech company like AT&T. But Amazon is a puzzle to me. itâs been a decade since people started talking about how terrible it is to work there, and how all of the squeeze they put on employees is for short term gain, but they have clearly had immense growth since then, and (while every company has failures) considerable innovation. How are they âgetting away with itâ? Shouldnât all of the high performers have left by now?
They simply can afford to pay more high performers. And since they have sustainable growth, there is no reason to switch course of action.
Compare this to consulting which is known for squeezing their employees to the max. They simply pay enough that there is a steady stream of new highly qualified and highly capable candidates.
These are two wildly different companies. AMZN still has some upside and pays a lot in equity. The only reason to own T is for the dividend while your capital sublimates.
That said AMZN is a lot more like the old model, they never really subscribed to the Microsoft & Silicon Valley ways of doing things.
> itâs been a decade since people started talking about how terrible it is to work there, [...] How are they âgetting away with itâ?
Some companies have tough working conditions in some areas of the business, and not others.
You work for Amazon as a delivery driver or a warehouse picker? They'll probably be breathing down your neck about performance all the time, and not paying all that well, and you'll have to stand and walk a lot, lift heavy things, and endure heat and cold, and work unsociable hours, and they'll be mad if you call in sick. Maybe they tell you you're "self-employed" and you never know how much work they'll have for you each week, you get no sick pay, no holiday, and you're subtracting the costs of your own car, fuel and insurance from your pay packet.
On the other hand, if you have a white collar job in the retail division of the business? You'll still have demanding targets to meet, and the pay might not be great - but you'll know you're going to get paid each week, you'll be working normal hours in a nice air-conditioned office, and you'll be able to take sick leave when you're sick.
And if you've got a white collar job in AWS? levels.fyi claims after a single promotion you'll be on US$275,000.
> Shouldnât all of the high performers have left by now?
What I hear is that the pay is really good, and worth it if you can tolerate the high workloads. I assume most FAANG high performers who also are workaholics would do well in Amazon's environment.
Another decision that affects the workers, made by people who don't have the workers' best interests in mind.
I assume anyone who tries to fight over this will be harassed, and attempts to organize against it will be frowned on and, often, actively sabotaged.
Other posters may very well be correct in assuming this harassment through policy _is_ intentional and meant to make employees leave 'voluntarily' rather than doing a layoff.
They are not the only ones, I interview remote engineers all the time for jobs that they are way overqualified for because they are happy and most of the time, they were remote BEFORE the pandemic, its only this ridiculous meme of RTO that forces people to change who already had proven success.
It genuinely tells you that whoever makes these calls is running the business on ego instead of using their brains.
Same thing happened to a coworker of mine. They closed the branch for his office, mandated in office attendance, but they didn't fire him, just told him "well you'll have to come into office every weekday, nearest office is 500mi away".
Discussing this with some friends last night there was some consensus that sometimes this may be to force a significant cut in the workforce that is cheaper to do by firing due for cause, as compared to making roles redundant and dealing with redundancy packages. Probably not true in all cases, but maybe in some.
Companies are now in a cycle where they want to lay off ~5% of their employees every year. Why? To suppress wages. And to get people to do more work for the same money. People in fear of losing their jobs aren't going to demand raises or say no to extra work.
RTO mandates are cheaper and easier than severance.
This has been the case in Corporate America for decades at this point. The rude shock for many on HN is that the veneer of Big Tech being rogue disruptors is gone. Working for Big Tech is getting increasingly indistinguishable from working for Boeing, Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman.
The difference is the customer for some of those companies demands cutting edge tech and is willing to pay handsomely for it. Because if they don't have the best, the adversary will and that is unacceptable.
Yeah Big tech is running out of ways to grow profits YoY. So the next solution is the consulting approach of just laying people off. Eventually it will catch up to them and they will become the next IBM/Boeing/etc. where people ask what happened to these companies they used to be great.
Bezos said in an all hands one time amazon would go out of business in 50-60 years and that is happens to every company eventually. I think you get too big and too bureaucratic where everyone is just looking out for themselves because you are more worried about getting laid off or fired than you are building great products.
> Bezos said in an all hands one time amazon would go out of business in 50-60 years and that is happens to every company eventually.
Thatâs a weird thing for him to say because a) itâs patently false and b) he might still be alive at that point and would need to liquidate his AMZ holdings before everyone else who believes his prediction does.
> you are more worried about getting laid off or fired than you are building great products
Just like the government: you are more worried about your re-election campaign than serving your constituents. Where those two align, great, but the priority is remaining in office.
The crazy thing is that younger generations think that's actually how in-office work looks like (because they haven't experienced anything else): You come in, have teams calls all day with people distributed all over the world, get a coffee, leave office. I swear to you, it wasn't like that a decade or two ago.
Two decades ago I was having WebEx calls all day with people distributed all over the world. Back then in order to do this well it took somewhat specialized hardware and Internet bandwidth beyond what most employees had at home, so it was only practical to do from an office conference room. It worked well enough.
Even just 7-8 years ago, the pre-Teams solutions (like Skype4Business!) were so abysmally bad, nobody were using them for anything but occasional meetings. And essentially never from your own desk, it was 3-20 people in one room calling 3-20 people in another room.
There is a lot of snark here. My non-cynical take is that they are aping the practices of top AI labs. OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic, and many other AI startup darlings have a culture of in-office work. People in non-hub offices are encouraged to travel a lot.
Yes, it will take a lot more than RTO to create an innovative culture like paying more for one, but one can reasonably hypothesize that working physically together is a necessary but not sufficient condition.
this is an ongoing ploy to get older, more experienced and therefore much more expensive and less manipulable workers to just quit, so they can replace with cheap, young and easily manipulated new hires. this is the oldest play in corporate america
OK, fine. But give me an actual office, not the open plan that's like standing in a train station with a constant loud noise level (I'm from the US - I have to imagine that horror). If I wanted to be around people, I'd be in marketing or management, but I like to pretend I'm actually useful and that means I need the quiet of a graveyard so I can concentrate on actually getting work done.
Hopefully applicants will remember these decisions in the future when job market turns better, and go elsewhere. Companies like this deserve only employees that treat their employer with equal contempt, or are otherwise plain bad at their jobs.
after COVID the number of companies that either did not renew commercial leases or defaulted on existing leases jumped significantly. banks saw this and quietly extended commercial leases and relaxed payment dates and penalties to stave off a crisis in 2023. Joe Biden even injected ten billion dollars in assistance to commercial real estate and publicly demanded all federal workers "return to office." the government owns its real estate by and large, so this was largely an expression of solidarity with the landed gentry.
moving into 2025...it does not appear to be working. Many corporations are not falling in line to prevent the collapse and instead are seeking short-term gains as they realize massive savings by ditching commercial landlords. productivity and worker satisfaction is also improved. even climate change is impacted positively by work from home efforts.
unpopular take: It is (financially) critically important that all workers return to the office. a crash in the commercial real estate sector would cause solvency problems for large cities dependent on cashflow from office workers. the auto sector (repair and sales) would also take a massive hit at a time when Stellantis is facing down a potential bankruptcy. the locus for most states in terms of homeless outreach and drug treatment is their city, which would receive serious cutbacks at a time when the opioid and fentanyl crises are still of great concern.
barring some sort of major shift in policy (which wont happen) at the federal level, the US economy was not prepared to move to a work-from-home model.
>the unspoken reasoning for these back-to-work efforts is to stave off a western financial collapse in commercial real estate.
If I asked some superintelligent AI to create the most wrong reddit theory possible, I think it might be this one.
Large companies (small ones too) have to spend money to give you a desk. Some will even go so far as to put a price tag on it, that facilities cost is $x per square foot or whatever. If they can offload that cost onto their employee, that's win/win.
Some real estate companies might do bad if that happens... even if none of their leases are going unrenewed, it puts downward pressure on prices. But those companies have almost no overlap with the ones doing RTO. And I've yet to see that people like Jeff Bezos or whoever have any significant holdings in real estate (even if they did, the positives of remote would outweigh the negatives, and you'd just see them divest).
There are winners and losers in a remote-work world, and the people who would win are or should be happy to let the losers lose. Something else is going on.
>a crash in the commercial real estate sector would cause solvency problems for large cities
Mayoral politicians are so powerless I can't come up with a witty way to describe it. They're Vice President-levels of worthless (and not the Dick Cheney sort either). They have no influence or mojo to swing this. If this would hurt large cities (and it might), then those cities will just be hurt.
We've done something very wrong as a society if we need to kneecap ourselves to prop up property investors. My life feels like nothing but "once in a lifetime" financial problems.
No, the unspoken of motive behind this is to put more money in investor pockets while centibillionaires jokey for position on the Forbes' 100.
This is complete bullshit!
The strategy here is to displace American workers through attrition by hiring remote Asian workers -- 1 FTE = 4 Indian workers.
These companies have no problem outsourcing American jobs -- outside of the US!
'Most' of these are American companies selling American products and services to Americans. If they like Asia so freaking much, leave the US and go sell your $hitty products and services over there!
I don't know anyone who works 5 days a week... Sure wages aren't as high as in the States but folks live comfortably enough (evidenced by the fact you can find Dutch tourists from Cambodja to Canada).
I think there is a relatively simple explanation.Overall, it appears you have time to breathe. It doesn't look like you are burdened by as much existential fear about survival, it seems that you get medical care whether you're employed or not, you don't have to worry about medical event driving your to bankruptcy and ruining your life, and most of all, you have much better food especially coffee than we do. American cappuccinos suck. Cappuccinos I've gotten from coffee stand in the middle of the park in Finland were orders of magnitude better.
I know it's not all unicorn farts and sprinkles. You still have right-wing civilization shredders in your political system. You have a boatload of bureaucracy, and it appears to be more difficult for a small business organically to a medium-sized business.
The strategy here is to displace American workers through attrition by hiring remote Asian workers -- 1 FTE = 4 Indian workers.
These companies have no problem outsourcing American jobs -- outside of the US!
'Most' of these are American companies selling American products and services to Americans. If they like Asia so freaking much, leave the US and go sell your $hitty products and services over there!
Funnily enough I wanted to order three books for Christmas yesterday and for the first time ever got a server error with broken HTML that wiped out my shopping cart. Umm... wasn't that exactly what Amazon was famous for as it supposedly would never happen?
Crazy how fast the enshittification seems to go nowadays. Ordered on a different site without problems.
I do. And I have a door. Everybody in my company has a private office with windows and in a way it's the best of both worlds. Collaboration and impromptu discussions are possible, we sometimes have lunch together, and I can close my door when I want. We also have the option of working from home Tuesdays and Thursdays.
I've only ever worked for one company that had an open office plan - a big room with a bunch of desks loosely organized into teams - and I wonder if money saved on real estate is worth the productivity loss? I assume the big companies and consultancies have measured this, but I'm skeptical.
AT&T and Amazon have the right idea. Conference calls with offshore teams are far more effective when done in an open office environment, surrounded by people from unrelated teams doing the same thing.
The collaborative energy of hundreds of tightly-packed people trying to focus on different things together is amazing.
> The collaborative energy of hundreds of tightly-packed people trying to focus in different things together is amazing.
Imagine this. You are trying to write a Python script to produce another report for your manager. You can sit anywhere in the amazing open office. You accidentally sit next to the Anti-Money Laundering team, and have to listen to that.
The next day you choose a different floor. Your manager shows up wearing a mask and says she has a flu. The rest of the day, you listen to small talk, while trying to focus on implementing the report.
Whenever you walk to the coffee machine, people stare at you and wonder who you're sleeping with.
Finally, you revolt and refuse to come in to the office. Then you don't have a job.
But how is your manager going to get the immense health benefits he gets from constantly making your life hell?
Be considerate of his feelings, you selfish child.
The rest of the day, you listen to small talk
The office where I work we have a whole section of one floor that is strictly no talking and phones must be on mute. If you want silence you can sit there. I cannot imagine that we are the only company that has come up with this idea.
That being said, I still work from home when I feel like it.
But what's the point of being at the office? I can get the same at home
I can get the same at home
Personally I find home more distracting than the office. The office is a clean work space with a desk with only my work computer and work stuff and everybody around me is also working.
Home has chores and errands and 'fun' and all kinds of other Not Work stuff to tempt me away from working. Plus once my kids come home from school, quiet concentration time is effectively over.
But as I said, I'm not advocating for mandatory return to office, and I do work at home 1-2 days a week.
> Home has chores and errands and 'fun' and all kinds of other Not Work stuff to tempt me away from working. Plus once my kids come home from school, quiet concentration time is effectively over.
It's funny how serving one's employer has become the highest duty.
Work not done? After-hours issue? Then work overtime. Kids are home? Go to the office to avoid being distracted from work.
Or, I go to the office, focus for 6 hours uninterrupted, get done what needs to be done, and then go home and not think about work at all for the rest of the day.
After a day of work at the office I would never have left the kitchen as dirty as a day of work from home.
> I cannot imagine that we are the only company that has come up with this idea.
In a company I used to work for, 2 floors were (completely) unoccupied but some were insufferable. 2 floors worth tens of thousands of dollars monthly were just completely unused whatsoever.
I can top that with 11 floors in one building by one company unused.
Last time I was in the amazon office, I got to see how absurd it is, especially since this has all, supposedly, been in the name of productivity.
The office my team is in is setup so there's a long hallway that has the security corridor, then a coffee shop, then a convenience store then the elevators. Anyone coming into the office has to walk through all of these to get to the elevators to go to their floor.
Last time I was there, they'd put desks in hallway between the coffee shop and the convenience store, and they were always full.
You'd think if they were doing this for productivity, they wouldn't be sticking desks in the hallway everyone has to walk through all the time.
> ... then a coffee shop ...
Okay, I want to be super clear on this one: Do you have to pay for the coffee once you pass security / they know you work there? Or is that coffee shop not part of the company and just so happens to be onsite?
> Okay, I want to be super clear on this one: Do you have to pay for the coffee once you pass security / they know you work there? Or is that coffee shop not part of the company and just so happens to be onsite?
Don't know about Amazon, but there are two coffee options at my employer (past security):
1. A chain coffee shop you have to pay for. No discount that I can perceive.
2. Free coffee machines.
#1 used to be extremely popular when #2 consisted of Douwe Egberts machines that used some weird coffee concentrate that made terrible and weak coffee. Now I think #1 closes early and has low staffing because the #2 got upgraded to espresso machines that use decent beans and can also do basic espresso drinks (Americano, Latte, etc).
Why is that material?
But to answer your question, the coffee shop is not part of the company, you do have to pay for your coffee and it is past security.
Thanks for the answer.
It's not all that germane to the article, more of an aside, so thanks for that indulgence.
The motivation is from this old post here: https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...
Ah, for context, to encourage people to RTO during the pandemic, coffee there was free. Once we started an RTO mandate it changed to one coffee a day was free. Now that we're moving to mandated 5 day RTO, even that is gone.
Things get shittier and shittier in a company known to be shitty to it's employees
Maybe itâs about the productivity of the lay-off HR team? Than desks in hallways sound like a good idea.
Our metric shows that AIs productivity improved 20% compare to workers ever since return to office. The conclusion is inescapable, AI likes it when developers cluster together in glass towers and improves.
The right idea? These companies have no problem outsourcing American jobs -- outside of the US!
RTO my a$$, the strategy was and always will be displacement of American workers through attrition by hiring remote Asian workers -- 1 FTE = 4 Indian workers.
'Most' of these are American companies selling American products and services to Americans. If they like Asia so freaking much, leave the US and go sell your $hitty products and services over there!
I would rather stay unemployed than be forced to work with other people like that
Every time I hear news like this, I think âhmmm layoffs coming to XYZ soonâ.
For some reason, the idea that RTO is caused by out of touch execs is pervasive, but I really donât think thatâs the reason. These companies need people to leave. The cheapest way to do that is for an employee to leave voluntarily after they have gotten another job. Hell, if enough people leave, you might not even have to do layoffs.
We can bitch about it all we want, but these execs know what theyâre doing. They arenât stupid or out of touch.
EDIT: I will add that Iâm also curious about the long-term implications of this kind of trickery. It doesnât seem like a good long-term solution, you canât just order RTO and then allow remote work year after year. Everyone is going to have to find something that works long-term eventually.
It also means they've done the arithmetic, and know that it's worth losing their top X% of people - the ones who'll have the easiest time finding a better job.
Obviously you've never worked for a big corporation before. Corporations don't want top employees. In a corporate environment, top employees are a nuisance much of the time. Most managers, if given the choice, would rather have an employee who shows up, does their work (but not too much), doesn't care about anything (and thus will do whatever they are told) and will accept whatever is given to them, and someone who is not at risk of leaving and can be laid off or fired easily/cheaply when the time comes.
Top employees often have an axe to grind, an ego to satisfy or a ladder to climb. This is the last thing a corporation wants or needs. When I was a manager in Corporate America, I was instructed to screen out overly ambitious or eager candidates. They are just too much trouble for what amounts to normally a 10-20% increase in performance over a regular candidate.
It would be really interesting to see if they take that into account when they make these decisions. Iâd have to imagine that the top X percent are also the highest paid, so maybe thatâs actually a benefit.
I would guess they looked at who is mostly likely to leave based on forced RTO and they liked the answer. Probably something like parents of young children, mostly women, people who are caring for an elder or disabled family member, so again mostly women, and people who have a disability themselves.
A smart employer is already paying their best employees more than they can get elsewhere.
After all, I know Alice gets things done fast and to a high standard, she can be trusted to deliver important projects, and she's very familiar our most important systems.
All anyone else knows is her job title is "Level 17 Engineer", she's got a firm handshake, and she knows how to find a cycle in a linked list.
It'd be pretty absurd for me to let myself get outbid on salary by someone with less information.
I don't think they really care, or feel that they have to care. The way that I've seen it work is they'll make rare exceptions for individuals they absolutely can't lose or wan't to hire but that's it and the exceptions truly are rare.
I absolutely agree that they dont' care on an emotional level, but they're going to find it difficult to run a business when 90% of the senior staff leave and take their institutional memory with them.
Yeah, anyone that assumes these people care if it hurts the company in the long run is just mad, all they want is to see the stock go up after the announcement.
Sadly I think you're right. As some say the cruelty is the point. I also think much of the AI boom is just an excuse to get rid of people and get them to accept worse conditions. At the local IBM office they cut half the staff with the reason given being that AI would replace them, then told the other half they would need to work unpaid overtime to cover the lost staff (what happened to the AI?).
Programmers have been an expensive cost to companies for awhile and it's been obvious since outsourcing attempts decades ago that CEOs would like to do whatever they can to break their backs.
I think itâs a bit of that coupled with:
* Not liking the idea of paying for office space that sits mostly empty.
* Even if they wanted to unload their commercial real estate and go fully remote, the market for that is not good.
* Local governments pressuring companies to bring employees back to offices because those employees in turn buy goods and services in the area.
You're forgetting:
The people calling the shots might also be investors in the real estate market, so have an incentive for it to not crash. :)
So, you say as a return to office employee, if i boycott local services by bringing my own food, making my own coffee and not going out for lunch, i can render political pressure moot?
I doubt execs care at that point. They, much like most of us, only care about getting people off their back. "Hey, I got the employees back into the office like you wanted, it's your problem now."
I know that RTO is offensive to many, and not mildly so... but if they were trying to force people to quit of their own accord, wouldn't we also see an escalation of tactics beyond RTO? If it's a good strategy, why stop there?
Many of these rto mandates have been followed by layoffs if enough employees aren't induced to leave by the degradation in working conditions.
> if enough people leave, you might not even have to do layoffs.
Signaling to stock holders that you're doing layoffs is the most important part of layoffs.
If done in secrecy it's almost useless.
The DOGE bros even said it publicly - that RTO is one of the cards up their sleeve for making federal workers quit.
The mask has come off. Everyone knows that these RTO steps are indeed part of their "make work so miserable that they'll quit" strategy.
They're not out of touch they know exactly what they're doing, following orders while these centibillionaires are jockeying for position on the Forbes 100.
The strategy was and always will be bottom line: Displacement of American workers through attrition by hiring remote Asian workers -- 1 FTE = 4 Indian workers.
'Most' of these are American companies selling American products and services to Americans. If they like Asia so freaking much, leave the US and go sell your $hitty products and services over there!
> These companies need people to leave.
Why? I don't have the impression neither Amazon or AT&T are unprofitable.
Not unprofitable is not a measure of success for a CEO. More profitable than last quarter is.
I don't disagree with your statement per se, but neither "being more profitable than last quarter" or "the current CEO needs to be successful" imply "these companies need people to leave".
That is one of the possible ways of making "line go up".
But when I hear that a company __needs__ to make an X number of employees go, it gives me the impression they are in the red, and/or the organization will suffer great damage if they don't proceed with it. The organization doesn't even need to be a business per se.
Saying "those companies want to fire employees to increase profits" IMO is more accurate, even if a bit more verbose.
This seems on brand for an old tech company like AT&T. But Amazon is a puzzle to me. itâs been a decade since people started talking about how terrible it is to work there, and how all of the squeeze they put on employees is for short term gain, but they have clearly had immense growth since then, and (while every company has failures) considerable innovation. How are they âgetting away with itâ? Shouldnât all of the high performers have left by now?
They simply can afford to pay more high performers. And since they have sustainable growth, there is no reason to switch course of action.
Compare this to consulting which is known for squeezing their employees to the max. They simply pay enough that there is a steady stream of new highly qualified and highly capable candidates.
Yeah Amazon has to some extent had a reputation for working people to the bone but as far as I can tell it hasnât hurt them.
I wouldnât want to work that way but if it is as competitive to work there as they say âŚ. Iâm probably not qualified.
These are two wildly different companies. AMZN still has some upside and pays a lot in equity. The only reason to own T is for the dividend while your capital sublimates.
That said AMZN is a lot more like the old model, they never really subscribed to the Microsoft & Silicon Valley ways of doing things.
> itâs been a decade since people started talking about how terrible it is to work there, [...] How are they âgetting away with itâ?
Some companies have tough working conditions in some areas of the business, and not others.
You work for Amazon as a delivery driver or a warehouse picker? They'll probably be breathing down your neck about performance all the time, and not paying all that well, and you'll have to stand and walk a lot, lift heavy things, and endure heat and cold, and work unsociable hours, and they'll be mad if you call in sick. Maybe they tell you you're "self-employed" and you never know how much work they'll have for you each week, you get no sick pay, no holiday, and you're subtracting the costs of your own car, fuel and insurance from your pay packet.
On the other hand, if you have a white collar job in the retail division of the business? You'll still have demanding targets to meet, and the pay might not be great - but you'll know you're going to get paid each week, you'll be working normal hours in a nice air-conditioned office, and you'll be able to take sick leave when you're sick.
And if you've got a white collar job in AWS? levels.fyi claims after a single promotion you'll be on US$275,000.
> Shouldnât all of the high performers have left by now?
What I hear is that the pay is really good, and worth it if you can tolerate the high workloads. I assume most FAANG high performers who also are workaholics would do well in Amazon's environment.
Guess some psychos take pride in hardship for hardship's sake. Think navy seals, but in tech.
Another decision that affects the workers, made by people who don't have the workers' best interests in mind.
I assume anyone who tries to fight over this will be harassed, and attempts to organize against it will be frowned on and, often, actively sabotaged.
Other posters may very well be correct in assuming this harassment through policy _is_ intentional and meant to make employees leave 'voluntarily' rather than doing a layoff.
They are not the only ones, I interview remote engineers all the time for jobs that they are way overqualified for because they are happy and most of the time, they were remote BEFORE the pandemic, its only this ridiculous meme of RTO that forces people to change who already had proven success.
It genuinely tells you that whoever makes these calls is running the business on ego instead of using their brains.
My theory is it's just a soft layoff.
Same thing happened to a coworker of mine. They closed the branch for his office, mandated in office attendance, but they didn't fire him, just told him "well you'll have to come into office every weekday, nearest office is 500mi away".
Isn't this a classic example of a constructive dismissal?
It is. I just so happen to live in a state with very little workers rights.
Discussing this with some friends last night there was some consensus that sometimes this may be to force a significant cut in the workforce that is cheaper to do by firing due for cause, as compared to making roles redundant and dealing with redundancy packages. Probably not true in all cases, but maybe in some.
It's absolutely true.
Companies are now in a cycle where they want to lay off ~5% of their employees every year. Why? To suppress wages. And to get people to do more work for the same money. People in fear of losing their jobs aren't going to demand raises or say no to extra work.
RTO mandates are cheaper and easier than severance.
This has been the case in Corporate America for decades at this point. The rude shock for many on HN is that the veneer of Big Tech being rogue disruptors is gone. Working for Big Tech is getting increasingly indistinguishable from working for Boeing, Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman.
And it's only going to get worse.
The difference is the customer for some of those companies demands cutting edge tech and is willing to pay handsomely for it. Because if they don't have the best, the adversary will and that is unacceptable.
Yeah Big tech is running out of ways to grow profits YoY. So the next solution is the consulting approach of just laying people off. Eventually it will catch up to them and they will become the next IBM/Boeing/etc. where people ask what happened to these companies they used to be great.
Bezos said in an all hands one time amazon would go out of business in 50-60 years and that is happens to every company eventually. I think you get too big and too bureaucratic where everyone is just looking out for themselves because you are more worried about getting laid off or fired than you are building great products.
> Bezos said in an all hands one time amazon would go out of business in 50-60 years and that is happens to every company eventually.
Thatâs a weird thing for him to say because a) itâs patently false and b) he might still be alive at that point and would need to liquidate his AMZ holdings before everyone else who believes his prediction does.
> you are more worried about getting laid off or fired than you are building great products
Just like the government: you are more worried about your re-election campaign than serving your constituents. Where those two align, great, but the priority is remaining in office.
Businesses love to burn through talent I've learned
Talent is expensive and the job of mgmt is to keep costs down
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
The crazy thing is that younger generations think that's actually how in-office work looks like (because they haven't experienced anything else): You come in, have teams calls all day with people distributed all over the world, get a coffee, leave office. I swear to you, it wasn't like that a decade or two ago.
Two decades ago I was having WebEx calls all day with people distributed all over the world. Back then in order to do this well it took somewhat specialized hardware and Internet bandwidth beyond what most employees had at home, so it was only practical to do from an office conference room. It worked well enough.
Even just 7-8 years ago, the pre-Teams solutions (like Skype4Business!) were so abysmally bad, nobody were using them for anything but occasional meetings. And essentially never from your own desk, it was 3-20 people in one room calling 3-20 people in another room.
There is a lot of snark here. My non-cynical take is that they are aping the practices of top AI labs. OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic, and many other AI startup darlings have a culture of in-office work. People in non-hub offices are encouraged to travel a lot.
Yes, it will take a lot more than RTO to create an innovative culture like paying more for one, but one can reasonably hypothesize that working physically together is a necessary but not sufficient condition.
TBF a lot of their staff probably have AT&T connections at home.
this is an ongoing ploy to get older, more experienced and therefore much more expensive and less manipulable workers to just quit, so they can replace with cheap, young and easily manipulated new hires. this is the oldest play in corporate america
OK, fine. But give me an actual office, not the open plan that's like standing in a train station with a constant loud noise level (I'm from the US - I have to imagine that horror). If I wanted to be around people, I'd be in marketing or management, but I like to pretend I'm actually useful and that means I need the quiet of a graveyard so I can concentrate on actually getting work done.
Hopefully applicants will remember these decisions in the future when job market turns better, and go elsewhere. Companies like this deserve only employees that treat their employer with equal contempt, or are otherwise plain bad at their jobs.
> when job market turns better
Now that's optimism. At least, these companies are betting it won't, and it's in their interest to work against it.
Related:
Amazon Delays RTO Mandate for Workers Due to Space
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42453041
the unspoken reasoning for these back-to-work efforts is to stave off a western financial collapse in commercial real estate. https://hbr.org/2024/07/u-s-commercial-real-estate-is-headed...
after COVID the number of companies that either did not renew commercial leases or defaulted on existing leases jumped significantly. banks saw this and quietly extended commercial leases and relaxed payment dates and penalties to stave off a crisis in 2023. Joe Biden even injected ten billion dollars in assistance to commercial real estate and publicly demanded all federal workers "return to office." the government owns its real estate by and large, so this was largely an expression of solidarity with the landed gentry.
moving into 2025...it does not appear to be working. Many corporations are not falling in line to prevent the collapse and instead are seeking short-term gains as they realize massive savings by ditching commercial landlords. productivity and worker satisfaction is also improved. even climate change is impacted positively by work from home efforts.
unpopular take: It is (financially) critically important that all workers return to the office. a crash in the commercial real estate sector would cause solvency problems for large cities dependent on cashflow from office workers. the auto sector (repair and sales) would also take a massive hit at a time when Stellantis is facing down a potential bankruptcy. the locus for most states in terms of homeless outreach and drug treatment is their city, which would receive serious cutbacks at a time when the opioid and fentanyl crises are still of great concern.
barring some sort of major shift in policy (which wont happen) at the federal level, the US economy was not prepared to move to a work-from-home model.
>the unspoken reasoning for these back-to-work efforts is to stave off a western financial collapse in commercial real estate.
If I asked some superintelligent AI to create the most wrong reddit theory possible, I think it might be this one.
Large companies (small ones too) have to spend money to give you a desk. Some will even go so far as to put a price tag on it, that facilities cost is $x per square foot or whatever. If they can offload that cost onto their employee, that's win/win.
Some real estate companies might do bad if that happens... even if none of their leases are going unrenewed, it puts downward pressure on prices. But those companies have almost no overlap with the ones doing RTO. And I've yet to see that people like Jeff Bezos or whoever have any significant holdings in real estate (even if they did, the positives of remote would outweigh the negatives, and you'd just see them divest).
There are winners and losers in a remote-work world, and the people who would win are or should be happy to let the losers lose. Something else is going on.
>a crash in the commercial real estate sector would cause solvency problems for large cities
Mayoral politicians are so powerless I can't come up with a witty way to describe it. They're Vice President-levels of worthless (and not the Dick Cheney sort either). They have no influence or mojo to swing this. If this would hurt large cities (and it might), then those cities will just be hurt.
We've done something very wrong as a society if we need to kneecap ourselves to prop up property investors. My life feels like nothing but "once in a lifetime" financial problems.
No, the unspoken of motive behind this is to put more money in investor pockets while centibillionaires jokey for position on the Forbes' 100.
This is complete bullshit!
The strategy here is to displace American workers through attrition by hiring remote Asian workers -- 1 FTE = 4 Indian workers.
These companies have no problem outsourcing American jobs -- outside of the US!
'Most' of these are American companies selling American products and services to Americans. If they like Asia so freaking much, leave the US and go sell your $hitty products and services over there!
I guess AT&T have a need to slim down the rank and file a bit!
I don't know anyone who works 5 days a week... Sure wages aren't as high as in the States but folks live comfortably enough (evidenced by the fact you can find Dutch tourists from Cambodja to Canada).
I think there is a relatively simple explanation.Overall, it appears you have time to breathe. It doesn't look like you are burdened by as much existential fear about survival, it seems that you get medical care whether you're employed or not, you don't have to worry about medical event driving your to bankruptcy and ruining your life, and most of all, you have much better food especially coffee than we do. American cappuccinos suck. Cappuccinos I've gotten from coffee stand in the middle of the park in Finland were orders of magnitude better.
I know it's not all unicorn farts and sprinkles. You still have right-wing civilization shredders in your political system. You have a boatload of bureaucracy, and it appears to be more difficult for a small business organically to a medium-sized business.
This is complete shit!
The strategy here is to displace American workers through attrition by hiring remote Asian workers -- 1 FTE = 4 Indian workers.
These companies have no problem outsourcing American jobs -- outside of the US!
'Most' of these are American companies selling American products and services to Americans. If they like Asia so freaking much, leave the US and go sell your $hitty products and services over there!
Funnily enough I wanted to order three books for Christmas yesterday and for the first time ever got a server error with broken HTML that wiped out my shopping cart. Umm... wasn't that exactly what Amazon was famous for as it supposedly would never happen?
Crazy how fast the enshittification seems to go nowadays. Ordered on a different site without problems.
I'm honestly shocked WFH has lasted as long as it has. I thought we'd all be back in the office full time in 2021.
Why? WFH has been a thing for a long time before the pandemic. I've been a fully remote worker for over a decade now. No plans to change that either.
Laughs in freelancer
You guys have an office?
I do. And I have a door. Everybody in my company has a private office with windows and in a way it's the best of both worlds. Collaboration and impromptu discussions are possible, we sometimes have lunch together, and I can close my door when I want. We also have the option of working from home Tuesdays and Thursdays.
I've only ever worked for one company that had an open office plan - a big room with a bunch of desks loosely organized into teams - and I wonder if money saved on real estate is worth the productivity loss? I assume the big companies and consultancies have measured this, but I'm skeptical.
Yeah, the one upside to this stuff is I feel like the next few years are going to be prime for consulting.
Abandoned projects, AI slop, etc.
Can't wait for next pandemic....
I think conditions are pretty good for another one quite soon