[ryandrake]

I don't understand how all these companies issue these sorts of policies in lock-step with each other. The same happened with "Return To Office". All of a sudden every company decided to kill work from home within the same week or so. Is there some secret CEO cabal that meets on a remote island somewhere to coordinate what they're going to all make workers do next?

[ambicapter]

CEOs are ladder climbers. The main skill in ladder climbing is being in tune with what the people around them are thinking, and doing what pleases/maximizes other's approval of the job they are doing.

[asa400]

It's extremely human behavior. We all do it to some degree or another. The incentives work like this:

    - If all your peers are doing it and you do it and it doesn't work, it's not your fault, because all your peers were doing it too. "Who could have known? Everyone was doing it."
    - If all your peers _aren't_ doing it and you do it and it doesn't work, it's your fault alone, and your board and shareholders crucify you. "You idiot! What were you thinking? You should have just played it safe with our existing revenue streams."

And the one for what's happening with RTO, AI, etc.:

    - If all your peers are doing it and you _don't do it_ and it _works_, your board crucifies you for missing a plainly obvious sea change to the upside. "You idiot! How did you miss this? Everyone else was doing it!"

Non-founder/mercenary C-suites are incentivized to be fundamentally conservative by shareholders and boards. This is not necessarily bad, but sometimes it leads to funny aggregate behavior, like we're seeing now, when a critical mass of participants and/or money passes some arbitrary threshold resulting in a social environment that makes it hard for the remaining participants to sit on the sidelines.

Imagine a CEO going to their board today and going, "we're going to sit out on potentially historic productivity gains because we think everyone else in the United States is full of shit and we know something they don't". The board responds with, "but everything I've seen on CNBC and Bloomberg says we're the only ones not doing this, you're fired".

[steveBK123]

Agreed about peer following conservatism as well re: RTO. What is interesting though is how few of these supposedly meritocratic winners fail to have any level 2 thinking.

CTO friend at what you might call a smaller tier 2/tier 3 shop told me about some recent C-suite debates. CEO/COO types concerned that "the office is too empty". One notes that "our compensation costs are very high" and "maybe if we made everyone RTO, productivity would be higher and we wouldn't need as many developers".

One could just as easily & more logically argue - you are a smaller shop that pays less than market, your flexibility re: remote is a "free" benefit you can offer to get senior talent that might not otherwise be able to attract. Enforcing the same RTO as your higher paying and larger competitors opens you up to adverse selection your best talent trading up.

Of course telling your peers that your firm is a scrub is a different challenge.

[artnoir]

I have wondered the exact same thing. It's uncanny how in-sync they all are. I can only suppose that the trend trickles down from the same few influential sources.

[steveBK123]

> Is there some secret CEO cabal that meets on a remote island somewhere

I mean.. recent FBI files of certain emails would imply.. probably, yes.

[strange_quark]

Probably yes? Definitely. See also articles like this one [1]. These guys all run in the same circles and the groupthink gets out of control.

https://www.semafor.com/article/04/27/2025/the-group-chats-t...

[chung8123]

It is investor sentiment and FOMO. If your investors feel like AI is the answer you will need to start using AI.

I am not as negative on AI as the rest of the group here though. I think AI first companies will out pace companies that never start to learn the AI muscle. From my prospective these memos mostly seem reasonable.

[goatlover]

If AI is the answer, then there's no reason for a top-down mandate like this. People will just start using as they see fit because it helps them do their jobs better, instead of it being forced on them, which doesn't sound much like AI is the answer investors thought it was.

[basket_horse]

No, because as discussed AI also changes the nature of your job in a way that might be negative to a worker, even if it’s more productive. Ie, it may be more fun to ride a horse to your friends house, but it’s not faster than a car. Or as the previous example, it may be more enjoyable to make a shoe by hand, but it’s less productive than using an assembly line

[whiplash451]

You might be misreading negative sentiment towards poor leadership as negative sentiment towards AI.

[teeklp]

I agree that a lot of the current push is driven by investor sentiment and a degree of FOMO. If capital markets start to believe AI is table stakes, companies don’t really have the option to ignore it anymore. That said, I’m not bearish on AI either. I think there’s a meaningful difference between chasing AI for signaling purposes and deliberately building an “AI muscle” inside the organization. Companies that start learning how to use, govern, and integrate AI thoughtfully are likely to outpace those that never engage at all. From that perspective, most of these memos feel fairly reasonable to me. They’re less about declaring AI as a silver bullet and more about acknowledging that standing still carries its own risk.