I feel like one of the under-appreciated problems with modern society (1) is the sheer quantity of lies we are surrounded with. RTO is just the current most blatant example (2) in the American economy of people saying lies knowing that they will never be held to account for those lies. All of these lies together are corrupting and destroying civil society, destroying the sense of trust necessary for people to work together, to respect and trust institutions, and to build a better world.
As the excellent series Chernobyl put it (in the words crafted by a writer, not an actual scientist) "Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth" and at some point someone is going to have to pay all of those debts.
1: Here I'm focusing on Anglosphere/largely US and UK societies, as a monolingual American that's all I can effectively comment on.
2: 'this will make you more productive/more efficient/more creative' whatever
You hear a lot about how toxic the hierarchical Japanese workplace is, but the fact that people are willing to openly admit things like "product B is better than product A, but we're going with product A because our CEO is friends with their CEO" ends up being surprisingly refreshing.
I find this difficult to navigate sometimes because I find myself looking around the room and wondering "we don't really believe this, right?" but I can never quite be sure
It is a complete lie unless of course it is backed by firing people who aren’t good enough. But 99% of the execs who force RTO are really just trying to get people to quit - unfortunately this gets good people to quit and crappy people stay
The other day I came to the office to join a Google Meet meeting. Another person near me was also in it, with their laptop speaker on. I'm hearing my headphones and their speaker, plus also them acoustically when it's their turn to speak. So I picked up my laptop and buggered off to a small meeting room where I closed the door and sat alone.
My favorite part about working hybrid is that no matter what, nobody meets in person, except the managers once a week, everything else is a Teams meeting at your desk.
it's called collaboration, and thanks to those sets of complementary off brand noise canceling headphones that welcomed you back to a desk, it's clearly increasing!
I find it such a darn waste. I spend anywhere from one to two hours commuting on what some consider one of the deadliest highways here, not sure how I-4 fares against the rest of the country though. Accidents every single day it feels like.
I know a place doing RTO where most teams are at least 50% contractors from Central and South America. You can imagine how productive the office might be for those people, given that everyone is on zoom all day, and there's a whole 4 meeting rooms in a floor with 50 people.
I’ve not ever had to experience that particular management style, but I think it’s the one where they don’t give a rat’s ass about their employees or unique thought.
I’d also hoped that some major semiconductor company would NOT embrace AI, just so they could differentiate themselves: “Our shit may be too slow for the Terminator to use, but it was designed by and for humans to use as air-gapped spreadsheet running machines with USB-key sneakernet email.”
Given that there is a growing backlash towards LLMs by the general public (not just one writers’ guild), that might sell some stock.
Creatively? Yes, definitely, at least for Amazon. IMHO, for that company there is an internal battle what they want to be: a webshop filled with garbage or a cloud hyperscaler? The way the web shop is degrading, I strongly assume that Amazon will attempt to exit that business sooner or later.
As for Apple, I do love their hardware, but the software side has seen better days.
See my other reply in this subthread - the money and the moat they have prevents a financial collapse for many years to come, even if they do not improve. So, I doubt RTO is a good indicator for (financial) collapse.
> the money and the moat they have prevents a financial collapse for many years to come, even if they do not improve.
Unfortunately, you do have a point there. We let companies grow way, way too large - not only does any potential competition just about zero chance to rise against effectively infinite cash coffers, but it also removes any incentive to improve when the moat is so large that one doesn't have to care about anything...
I was being hyerbolic. I should have made that clearer. That said, there is a nugget of literal truth to my statement.
Market reactions are typically neutral to RTO announcements, which confounds some analysts who imagine that RTO adds some kind of value. However, studies have repeatedly shown that while the short-term impact of RTO is neutral these companies typically fair worse than peer companies over longer timeframes. To make it worse for the analysts, similar studies have also shown that companies which do embrace remote first work have outsized returns. Some estimates show that fully WFH organizations bring in about 7.5% higher annual returns on average than peer organizations that RTO.
Leaders continue to ignore the ever growing piles of evidence in favor of those analysts "common sense", and forget that "common sense" is just a laymans term for what scientists refer to as "making shit up."
Those same executives are most tempted to fall into this trap during times of duress, because being perceived as "doing something" is more important than long term impact on share price.
I can mostly agree with that, with an exception for giant corporations like the mentioned Apple and Amazon. Their runway for making wrong decisions (like RTO) is exceedingly long, due to their money and their moat.
You have a solid point. I also ignore the fact that RTO actually does improve the bottom line in some narrow scenarios, such as when it's used as a backdoor layoff in companies that don't mind losing the best and brightest.
Some companies don't see an appreciable difference in performance between those that can easily find work elsewhere and those who are otherwise unemployable. For those companies RTO is a great, though immoral, way to lower headcount without triggering the WARN act.
