And the employees most likely to quit will be ones with responsibilities that make it difficult to do the commute 5 days a week - kids to pick up from daycare, health issues to manage, a social life in the evenings, travel plans - basically the exact category that a company like Meta would want to replace with a younger, more exploitable bunch.
> And the employees most likely to quit will be ones with responsibilities that make it difficult to do the commute 5 days a week
Or senior people who have a dozen offers waiting in their inbox that they've neglected responding to because they're reasonably happy where they are...until the prospect of commuting.
That's not how the job market is right now. There's like 5 companies in the world that can compete on compensation while allowing remote work with meta.
I would take a lower comp for remote work and a better work environment. They will never pay me the amount that would make me choose 2h in traffic everyday instead of having enough time to cook breakfast to my family, take my kids to school, have lunch with my wife, etc.
I live in Utrecht and despite living very close to Utrecht Centraal, it still takes me 45 minutes to get to Amsterdam where my office is. Count late trains and general rush hour, so for me it can take 2h out of my day easily if I'm unlucky (thankfully where I work we count commute time into the work day, the very first time I saw my manager I saw him sprint out the door at 3PM on the dot because he had a lengthy commute lol)
Long commutes are not unique to the US. I'm spending 1.5 hours one way in the UK. It's depend on your personal circumstances. If you are young and single it's usually possible to rent a studio or a room with reasonable commute time. E. g. if you have a family and/or own a house then moving close to the office in response to RTO mandate may not be an option.
Dozen offers to try to go through 5+ stages of recruitment process without any feedback and possibility to be ghosted after each person. How good senior people are with leetcode?
Yeah but RTO takes real time and money. Sure you can earn a paycheck, but if you're commuting 2 hours a day total, you're still losing those 2 hours until they fire you. And that kind of stinks. And that's assuming you don't need to move. Moving for a job you hate is the worst.
Reduce workload, get in a bit later and go home a bit earlier.
Avoid attending meetings involving people dialling in from a different office (that’s not in person collaboration, so it’s worthless work. Sorry, I don’t make the rules) and be present at the meeting (keeping the chair warm it’s all it counts after all) while browsing HN in the ones you really cannot get out of it.
You think this is the tech job market to leave your job, and then what? Try and get in at someone else about to return to office? Freelance? IDK about anyone else, but I haven’t considered a contractor since AI Coding hit hard, I had poor experience with contractors anyhow, now I’m not sure I see the point of rolling those dice again.
It’s kind of a soft market unless you are working directly on AI models.
So, is this IG looking to cut fat by keeping what they considered the most committed employees? Maybe. Is it because most of us can admit that it takes the right people to work remotely and that isn’t a majority? That’s more my take.
We are observing the most valuable people leaving, because they easily can get a job at place where they care more about value you get to company than the bonus you will get as C-level after firing highly paid workers.
In the cases we know (I have a group of people working in different small and medium corps in Poland and Germany) - the people that are staying are either too lazy to change work or they are just not enough to get remote job.
If you’re the C-suite making this decision without realizing your best remote workers will quit even in this job market because they’re your best employees, you shouldn’t be the C.
If you do realize this, as you most definitely should since it is not rocket science in any way, your projections about short and long term value of institutional knowledge these folks take with them better be accurate.
On number one, sure, take all the risk yourself. It pays off sometimes. And when it comes to hiring people you need to work as hard as you do, you can tell them they can work from home.