6 comments

  • grose3 hours ago
    RTO usually seems like an indirect way to do some layoffs to me. Surely management must be aware of the attrition it causes.
    • meowfly3 hours ago
      I've struggled to buy into this hypothesis. It's always felt so clumsy as a strategy.

      How would that not make top performers want to jump ship? The employees who would struggle in a tight job market are the ones who will end up returning to the office.

      So to mitigate that you create exceptions for some employees which means everyone is going into the office yet still conducting all those meetings on Zoom.

      My theory is RTO is about satiating a certain type of controlling personality.

      • SketchySeaBeast2 hours ago
        It does feel like a shortsighted strategy, for the exact reasons you claim - the high performers can flee and you're stuck with those who can't jump. But, just because it's a bad strategy doesn't mean it isn't also the one being followed. According to at least one study[1], there is a considerable chunk of employers that hope that RTO will lead to voluntary turnover.

        [1] https://www.bamboohr.com/resources/data-at-work/data-stories...

  • flax3 hours ago
    Nah. It's a huge mistake, yes. But it's not the biggest.

    The biggest is overconfidence in AI coding solutions and attempting to replace programmers, while adding a huge expensive dependency on a third party to provide access to the AI models and cloud. It'll be some small schadenfreude consolation when these companies are shaken down by the enshittification of those AI providers.

    • SketchySeaBeast2 hours ago
      All these companies need to look over at OpenAI and see all the engineers and support staff they are hiring and then ask themselves some hard questions about what narrative they believe.
      • spwa426 minutes ago
        ... and then they should tell all those investors that the AI bubble #9 is going to go the way of AI bubbles #1 to #8, from Eliza and the IBM voicebox, to the pre-transformer convnet craze and fizzle out except in specific niches, cutting their stock price in half?
    • marcosdumay3 hours ago
      Are they really doing that?

      Because yeah, they say that they are doing all the time. But it's not something simple to do (I'd say "possible", but well...) and I'm yet to see anybody actually explain how.

  • madeofpalk3 hours ago
    19 days into the year seems a bit premature to call the biggest mistake.
    • Towaway693 hours ago
      Predicting the future has nothing to do with being right tomorrow, its all about convincing someone today.
  • motohagiography3 hours ago
    what if it's a category error to compare companies that have PMF, revenue or profitability with ones that don't.

    if you have PMF, remote is easy because it's pretty clear what makes things grow, and there are clear signals about whether something works. if you don't have it (as a company or dept.), then you need a way to secure your next round of either investment, funding, or budget, all while searching for market fit, and without an external feedback loop from a customer. this is a musical chairs game that requires players to attrit as a way to show progress.

    I would argue RTO policies mean your firm doesn't have market fit.

    A great counter-intuitive example of this is musk's twitter acqisition where he made people go back to the office, and where actually, twitter didn't have market fit anymore because it was mostly bots, served mainly state interests, and its major advertisers were only paying for brand protection from popular sentiment turning against them, and this was the business model of the safety team. It has users, but it is still looking for real, profitable market fit. All his companies have customers and huge investment, but arguably they are still in early stages looking for PMF.

    This is why he needs RTO, whereas it literally doesn't matter if FAANG companies do it because they have PMF and their massive growth phase is behind them. FAANGs should do remote because all their current upside comes from solving optimization problems on their existing revenue streams, where companies with steep growth still in front of them should RTO- with a huge caveat.

    The direction of causality matters, where RTO doesn't create growth, but it's what you have to do when you don't have it yet. Remote is suboptimal if you still have your massive growth in front of you, but hyper-efficient if you are in the optimization phase of a company.

    • cadamsdotcom3 hours ago
      Agreed with that and I’d add that it’s about the complexity of the problem you’re solving & thus how easy to communicate the focus areas you want the team moving in among the whole solution space. Post PMF, there’s just way less context to transmit to get people working effectively.

      But there are also certain companies where there’s less you need to talk about. For example companies or orgs doing fast follows. Once “What we do here” is well defined, let people WFH & work remote, they’ll be able to work it out.

  • Foobar85683 hours ago
    >Create spaces that foster creativity, innovation, and connection.

    Somewhere a CXO pat himself because he manage to creat all that through open office and 0 clutter policy cause flexible seat/desk. /S

  • 3 hours ago
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