[quacked]

> it's the people with options to work somewhere better who are leaving

This happened at the last place I worked. It was so incredible to watch it happen. First the COO took off, and her favorite VP (who hired me) took off as well. Pretty much immediately my line manager, the 3 top-performing engineers in our division, and 4 of the 6 top-performing project managers on my team left as well. I left shortly after. I think the really crazy thing was watching how the remaining management literally lacked the competence to understand what was going on, or to even differentiate between people on our team and in our division in terms of who was good at their job and conscientious about client interactions vs. who was apathetic and under-skilled.

[blindhippo]

I've noticed that middle management and up don't really see humans or even differentiate between them except during compensation assessment (and even then, barely). It's all just a numbers/headcount game to them. Every human is equivalent in their given role when it comes to planning/org structure.

In bigger companies, this management layer is more concerned about creating domains of influence or "kingdoms" then they are in actually delivering value for the company. Not sure if this is just normal human organizational behavior, or something has gone off the rails in corporate culture - but it is what it is.

It's happening at my company as well, and particularly in my own org. I'm one of the people leaving for better opportunities away from politics and silly RTO mandates lacking any semblance of data grounding.

[area51org]

> Every human is equivalent in their given role when it comes to planning/org structure.

It's the Burger King approach to management: all employees are just generic worker bees, and you can just go down to Burger King and order a Whopper, some fries, and maybe six engineers. Problem solved!

Anyone who bothers to think things through can see the huge, obvious flaw: people are not all the same and that these are human beings, not robots or drones.

This flawed point of view, that you can just think of employees as widgets, fails again and again and again, and yet MBA schools apparently keep teaching it, and/or people keep trying to use it.

And in this case, the failed RTO initiatives: really, I would love for one of these CEOs to explain to me what the point is. You don't think people are productive from home? Based on what, your gut feelings or conjecture? Because the opposite is true. People in offices waste a ton of time—just watch them. They stand around and bullshit. They get up and look for people to talk to (about non-work things). They make disruptive noise. What they don't do a lot of is actually get work done. Meanwhile, you're paying for their office space and electricity and everything else it takes to keep an office running.

So what's the purpose of RTO? If I didn't know better, I would say it's 1- an attempt to justify sunk costs of office leases, and 2- a huge power trip.

Doesn't matter: it will ultimately fail because offices are counterproductive to actually getting work things accomplished.

[taylodl]

We have the metrics to show our productivity soared when we were sent home a little over three years ago. It's only been improving.

It's funny - before the pandemic hit we'd already gone through a RIF. As things started booming back we've been hiring from all over the country. We now have teams that are wholly comprised of people from all over. There's no path forward to do an RTO at this point, and our productivity numbers are simply too high to warrant it.

My understanding is as our leases expire, we're not going to renew many of them. Where people are still in the office, and we have some of those folks and have had them all through the pandemic, we'll consolidate facilities in the same region.

[ethbr1]

> Anyone who bothers to think things through can see the huge, obvious flaw: people are not all the same and that these are human beings, not robots or drones.

Part of the problem with accepting this is that it cuts against the MBA ethos: that a good manager is a good manager in any industry, because specialized knowledge is not required.

Which, might be true for extremely high performing managers, who will seek out and rapidly learn any specialized knowledge needed...

... but is very much not true for the bulk of managers, who lack that amount of initiative and capability, and thus need more seasoning time and domain knowledge.

[outworlder]

> In bigger companies, this management layer is more concerned about creating domains of influence or "kingdoms" then they are in actually delivering value for the company.

This. I have seen teams completely devastated in reorgs that did absolutely nothing but strengthen some manager's position. You don't have to fire anyone, just moving key people and reassigning ownership is sufficient.

[SoftTalker]

I don't think it's "corporate culture" as much as "large org power games" as I've seen the very same thing happen in academia and administration at large schools.

[area51org]

Absolutely. They'll talk about "culture" and how you need to have an office in order to have it, ignoring the fact that most larger companies have multiple offices—so, what, each office has its own culture or something?

More to the point, though: what do they mean by corporate culture, and why do they believe that people need to be in the same room in order to maintain it?

I'll bet anything there is no real definition of "corporate culture". If there is, it has nothing to do with where the employees are at any given moment. Yes, I'm saying that "corporate culture" is just a meaningless buzzword thrown around by people who hope you don't stop to wonder what it is they actually mean.

[wrs]

In my experience, each office does have its own culture to a surprising extent. Maintaining a common corporate culture across different offices is a very hard problem. Probably even harder than doing it in a pure remote company. (And I think corporate culture is as meaningful a term as anything-else culture: shared values and expectations, behavioral norms, jargon, inside jokes…)

[arethuza]

"don't really see humans"

Didn't you mean "resources" there? ;-)

[darrylb42]

You mean FTE? Full Time Equivalent.

[arethuza]

Good point - "resources" are useful while FTEs are things to be cut?

[mlinhares]

It's the incentives, you'd be promoted because you built a large org so you had an incentive to just continue to grow the org itself so you could go up the chain, even if you weren't making anything productive as all these businesses were flush with cash.

[jonny_eh]

At interviews managers are asked "how many reports did you have?" not "how much value did you deliver to the company?"

[innagadadavida]

s/human/bis Bis - butts in seat.

[lusus_naturae]

So how can you tell who is apathetic and underskilled, but management cannot?

[7thaccount]

Very easy if you're one of the rank and file employees. There is usually 10% of the staff that do 90% of the work and everyone knows who those people are until you go up far enough in the management chain to where the VPs have no idea outside of what their directors and managers tell them which is that everyone is awesome and give us more money.

[quacked]

To put it simply, I work with my coworkers, and management doesn't. I can tell who solves problems faster, is kinder and more sympathetic, works harder, delivers more, and is requested more often by clients because I'm in the trenches with them, on their email chains, and in their network drives.

Conversely, other team members deliver subpar work with worse attitudes, and I have to make up for their slack by doing stuff I shouldn't have to do.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

Seems easy to believe that non-management works directly with the affected people on a daily basis, which gives them much greater insight

[paulddraper]

Experience

[pydry]

I sometimes wonder what kind of state these people leave the code/docs/infra in.

Like, do they try to be conscientious about leaving the company in a good state? or do they leave deliberately misleading handover docs and release some subtly broken code before walking out the door...

[pavel_lishin]

If I were in this position, I would absolutely not sabotage anything. Besides being wildly unprofessional, the people it's going to hurt are my former coworkers and the poor suckers who are hired on to replace me & others. It also opens me up to litigation, or even criminal charges down the line!

But I'm also not exactly going to be excited to do a full brain data dump. At my current role, I try to document everything as well as I can; if I were in this situation, I certainly wouldn't go back through and make sure I didn't miss anything. You get what you get, and you don't get upset.

[pydry]

>Besides being wildly unprofessional, the people it's going to hurt are my former coworkers and the poor suckers who are hired on to replace me

Are you serious? Where's the hurt coming from?

I've been hired to take over a mess after people angrily quit more than once. The work I did took much longer than it would have if there had been a smooth hand over and there were tons of bugs and issues but the only people that were ever hurt by that were the shareholders and management with their deadlines and delivery schedules. I still got paid.

[pavel_lishin]

> Where's the hurt coming from?

From the stress and unhappiness of having to untangle a complicated mess. Yes, you still got paid, but wouldn't you rather have had a smoother flow of things?

[pydry]

I'd rather I didnt work for asshole union busters who would treat their employees like scum for a bit of extra profit.

If the company's site goes down because a guy who got fed up with that missed out step 3 on the deployment playbook I am just fine with that. It's not my site that went down and not my profit margin at risk.

[dclowd9901]

I’ve never in my 13 or so years in this industry seen even the most disgruntled person leave anything in an intentionally broken state. Broken due to incompetence though? Plenty.

[paradox460]

I got laid off while working to fix a nasty bug that kept crashing our servers. I never finished or checked in that code, and the corpus of discovery leading to the solution was all ephemeral on my machine, so when I wiped said machine, it went up in smoke.

I wasn't deliberately sabotaging anything, and had I been given more notice than a morning video meeting with the office manager before my access was cut, I'd have probably checked in at least my WIP with a good commit message. But I wasn't, so I didn't

[meepmorp]

Yeah, I've seen people get fired and it actually lessened the amount of work those around them had to do. There's people out there in big and small companies, doing negative work every day.

[datavirtue]

Code is useless without engineers. When the flight begins no one is going to do anything. Everyone checks out and spends their time fluffing their wings.

At GE the engineers know that engines don't fly without them (designs and specs are useless without engineers) so if they are in a position to do so they hold information close to their chest--tons of info are not in the design. They are very much dependent on a core group of engineers for each system. Just like any tech system, things are going sideways constantly for various reasons and they have to respond very quickly to customers and regulators. That response requires the tacit knowledge they hold in their head or under their desk. Not to mention the pet unicorn spaghetti code they develop to analyze sensor data which is crucial to projecting failure across fleets when one-offs are encountered.

Middle management has it's own game they play...it's wink and knod all the way down the chain...if they like you.

[ipaddr]

When this happens the chaos. First week everyone ignores you and 4 days left a panic around handover happens.

Leaving things in a good state doesn't really matter when they fire you unexpectedly why does it matter so much when you quit?

[re-thc]

There are often just no docs.

[Lacerda69]

Docs?? are you serious, you barely have docs with highly motivated people. best you can expect is nothing, worst is actively destructive behaviours

[tmpz22]

Missing component: when competent execs leave they can poach some of the best people for their new org.