> It's clearly a leading indicator for company collapse.

So, Amazon, Apple, ... are close to collapse?

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.

As the previous poster was talking about finance and the stock market I doubt some kind of "creative collapse" was meant.

Creative collapse can lead to financial and stock market collapse. Particularly Apple has gone through that already once.

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.