[throw_nbvc1234]

> of a broken company culture

I agree with this in a sense. Every time someone talks about how they've been able to make remote work and how every company should as well, the thing that pops into my head is "well why doesn't the company just completely change their culture".

Can companies to this, yes. Should they, (opinion). Can it be understandable why a company might be resistant to completely changing their culture?

Take your example of "incompetent managers". How many managers do you think a google/amazon type company would need to fire during a transition to a fully remote culture because they are unable to learn the required skills? How long would it take them to backfill those managers and what's the cost to the business in the meantime?

[ekianjo]

> completely changing their culture?

I thought we were already supposed to change our culture because of climate change?

Is making everyone commute again good for CO2 emissions?

[hedora]

> How many managers do you think a google/amazon type company would need to fire during a transition to a fully remote culture because they are unable to learn the required skills?

Zero that would be missed?

[A4ET8a8uTh0]

Parent's comment is mildly revealing in a sense. Management does not want to learn new things. It already thinks it has all the tools needed. It had them ready and polished since 50s and they work so well. So well. And them youngins come in and upset applecart with all that remote work. Stupid pandemic ruined managing.

FWIW, I am exaggerating, but only slightly. I did overhear an actual comment from a manager that they had to 'toss out their toolset' to deal with remote.

[hedora]

Yeah; it's hard to learn new stuff.

However, at a tech company that's targeting an ecosystem that changes every few years, managers that are unwilling / unable to learn new stuff are incredibly damaging to morale and to the business as a whole.

If Google was making widgets that were designed in the 1950's, and have undergone zero customer-visible revisions, then yeah, they'd need conservative managers that can keep cutting costs / defect rates a few percent every year while investing as little as possible in evolving the core business.

However, Google isn't there yet. They're facing an existential threat, where Internet search is going to be lights-out in a few years thanks to LLMs, their primary revenue sources are being outlawed in large swaths of the first world, and they are a distant third in public cloud, which is the thing that's driving economies of scale for server-side compute (meaning they're dangerously close to falling on to the wrong exponential curve when it comes to datacenter hardware innovation).

If a manager can't figure out how to manage via zoom + slack, I seriously doubt they'll be able to figure out how to incorporate non-human intelligence into their team workflows while also pivoting from surveillance capitalism to a privacy-respecting revenue model, and also becoming customer-focused (at Google!! Hahaha!!!) enough to court enterprise customers.

[LinXitoW]

I mean, most companies had 2+ years of changed culture. RTO office IS the culture change, not the other way around.