[cosmic_quanta]

I will die on this hill: tech firms that mandated 5 days in the office was about soft layoffs, rather than a principled stance on individual performance under WFH.

My "evidence" is that trading firms that kept raking in the money, and that benefit from maximum productivity of their employees, still generally have a hybrid work culture.

[Swizec]

> I will die on this hill: tech firms that mandated 5 days in the office was about soft layoffs, rather than a principled stance on individual performance under WFH

“True work only happens in person with human collaboration! Everyone must come back”

2 years pass

“Oh wow we can replace everyone with a chatbot this is amazing”

narrator: It was the interest rates all along. Many of these tech businesses are fundamentally bad, the ROI is smoke and mirrors, energy shocks and bad macro-economics are coming, and investors are starting to ask hard questions.

[davidw]

Tech has never been perfect, but there was a time when it felt more hopeful and optimistic and about building cool stuff. There's always been give and take with the money side of things that's necessary to keep fueling the building, but it feels like it all kind of went off the rails somewhere.

I'd be fine with earning less (we're pretty frugal) to work in that kind of environment with good people.

[whatshisface]

You'd also be a lot more likely to keep that kind of job post-crash, by all means take it if you find one.

[UncleMeat]

I don't think it was interest rates. Tech just saw that workers were able to extract higher and higher pay and more and more benefits and the industry saw an opportunity to reverse this trend. And it has succeeded. The semi-coordinated action since 2023 has caused pay to stagnate, enabled businesses to remove benefits, and frightened workers away from changing employers.

[Corrado]

You know, I never realized the "human collaboration" against "AI can replace you" dissonance before but I believe that you are complete correct.

[quantified]

It was the 100% writeoff of R&D spending and software salaries mandated as R&D. As soon as that changed, very precisely, layoffs started.

[nixon_why69]

There's a second layer of abstraction here where it's way harder to measure a big tech exec's worth.

Trading firm managers are like sales managers, you've got one number, nothing else matters, the truth will set you free.

Big Tech is a bunch of people competing for influence over the big shared number coming in from ads or whatever, it's important to have good UX etc so you get more ad money, but how do you tell who's meaningfully contributing, or who's just really good at playing internal politics? This will bias towards different sorts of decisions.

[mitthrowaway2]

My guess is that it was a reaction to the pandemic-era trend of "over employment" where a small number of remote workers bragged about clocking in simultaneously to multiple jobs. Employers may have decided that their employees' physical body was the only unique identifier that couldn't be duplicated.

[redwall_hp]

They should start with over-employed executives in the C-suite of more than one company or sitting on more than one company's board of directors.

[ryandrake]

Yea, for some reason:

Rich people sitting on multiple boards and running multiple companies is A-OK

Poor people having to work 3 jobs to keep food on the table is A-OK

But, middle class office workers working at multiple jobs is fraud and abuse and must be stopped.

[salawat]

Well... Yes. The middle class haven't been rendered sufficiently replaceable yet. Make no mistake, once you're deskilled, you'll be treated exactly like the poor. Have you not been keeping up? What do you think the whole AI craze is about? Perfecting transmute money->code for the wealthy without requiring the burden of hiring.

[OnionBlender]

When I worked at BlackBerry, it pissed me off when CEO John Chen sent out an email telling employees that they need to be fully focused on their BlackBerry job. Meanwhile, he was on the board of directors of Disney and Wells Fargo while BlackBerry was failing badly.

[mcphage]

> My guess is that it was a reaction to the pandemic-era trend of "over employment"

I'm guessing the opposite: that these firms wanted to push back-to-the-office policies, and so either invented, or publicized, engineers doing "over employment", and that it wasn't a real problem that any of them actually faced.

[Tade0]

I may or may not know a guy who bought a laptop identical to his work machine from place A to do projects for B while still physically being at A.

[mitthrowaway2]

That trick only works until place B demands RTO as well!

(And this might be why the CEOs all seem to have coordinated changing back to RTO at the same time).

[Gud]

Smart advice!

[rennokki]

As long as someone finished the assigned tasks for the day, idc if they want office or remote.

[hknceykbx]

Not working from home is easier than from office. But in general why keep employees you can’t trust? At least on the scope of startups it shouldn’t be a problem. When you know each person face to face, everyone in the team knows if someone is slacking. Doesn’t matter if it’s wfh or from office.

[Cthulhu_]

Thing is, who decides how many tasks someone can do in a day? What if they get paid for 8 but only work for one, but the manager doesn't know they do, and they never communicate their workload is too low?

[nehal3m]

Why would you expect Homo Economicus to ask for more work? The companies they work for chase infinite profit at zero cost as a matter of principle, why shouldn’t employees?

This holds whether their butt is in a seat in some office or at home.

[rennokki]

I ain't mad at all. If someone can be a CEO to multiple companies, so can employees have multiple jobs.

> Homo Economicus

GOOD ONE

[section_me]

Same can be said for people using LLM agents to complete jobs faster than humans ever possibly can. It's not like they just fluked it. They've learned how to harness the capabilities of the tech. Now companies are introducing this stuff as a normal workflow but they are clueless as to how it actually works and expecting 10x output from people.

[rennokki]

It will all crash when they will see that people can't do 10x, even with AI. It requires too much expertise and knowledge in the field to actually make it work as a hired professional. Look at the AWS outages... and they are professionals, right? RIGHT?

[mikkupikku]

I wonder how the transition from classic hammers to nail guns went for carpenters / framers.

[rennokki]

Nail guns are tools, just like hammers. However, you have to know how to use it and to know how to adjust the pressure for the depth you need. It also costs money, much more than a hammer. And you can't use normal nails, you have to have a specific cartridge of nails, and you must know how to adjust it, and ultimately to not die.

Now compare it again.

[rennokki]

This is a management issue. They should be keeping an eye on the progress and see if the pace is enough for the deadline. Estimates are a thing too, I know. But you can see if someone is slacking and falls behind. If the workload is low, why would it matter as long as the things are done?

Companies should stop penalizing people for being work efficient, and increase their salary if the workload increases.

[apercu]

How is this any different from loafers who don't do anything? If you can do two jobs at the same time, you weren't really doing anything at first job to begin with.

[array_key_first]

If it is this, it feels very emotionally driven.

Realistically I think very little employees were doing this. And, of the ones that were, is it even a problem?

I mean, the idea is that they're such amazing developers that they can be 2 developers at once. So you still end up with 1 developer. So, break even, right? No harm no foul?

[gmerc]

Such a bullshit narrative in data driven companies

[marcyb5st]

Absolutely. Is about having people leave through attrition than pay severance and potentially get bad pr.

Additionally, I wonder how many CxOs have corporate real estate in their investment portfolio which might influence decisions.

[lizknope]

My company went back to 5 days in office in May 2025. Since then 8 people out of 100 in my office have retired. They were in the 55-65 age range and 3 of them directly told me that they would have stayed working if we stayed hybrid 3 days a week. So now we are hiring people and having to retrain them. Many of them are over 50 and were laughing at our 5 days in office. But our stock is high so I think they will stay for a few years and retire.

[bombcar]

There has always been a "retire, come back as a consultant" flow, but it's a bit stronger now. Perhaps the healthcare savings are worth it for the company.

[jasomill]

Doubtful it's healthcare, as unlike other benefits like stock options, consulting firms will have substantially similar healthcare costs that will be reflected in their fees.

[zer00eyz]

> 5 days in the office was about soft layoffs

Look at the last 3 years of the job market: No company has any issue with doing actual lay offs. The layoffs have been about reducing capital spend, and one wants to get rid of dead wood and redundant hires, not let fate decide who stays or goes.

> My "evidence" is that trading firms that kept raking in the money

If you're talking about "trading" as in financial, then this makes sense from a culture perspective. Its a group of people who, are about the job and not about any ones feelings.

It's harder for teams to be this way without the social lubricant of bonding over lunch and coffee and small "how are you" or "the boss sucks" social interactions. Things that are easy in person but more difficult when all your communication channels are owned by the company or result in "documentation" that can be used against you. It's much easier to be "professional brusk" (I need this asap) with someone you just ate lunch and talked about life with than it is for someone you DONT have those interactions with.

I have been a consultant (read: mercenary) for over a decade now. I have seen just about every team layout there is, and there are lots of distributed teams whos effectiveness is much lower than it could be. Its going to depend more on your product and ALL your teams willingness to be candid and blunt than anything else.

[abeppu]

I think some of it was just a belief that work you can see being done by a floor of people talking with their mouths and looking at screens in the same room is more real than the slightly less visible conversations in slack while looking at screens in their own rooms.

Open plan offices continue to be designed more for seeing the work happen than for doing the work. I spend a lot of mental energy on ignoring the distractions around me. No job has ever offered me a private office with a door that closes in exchange for being in the office 5 days a week.

[scruple]

My employer very successfully shipped a lot of brand new stuff during COVID when everyone was full-time remote. We made a lot of money off of those products. Then they sort of bragged about it. Then they instituted RTO. Now (I'm told, I'm at a megacorp so I'm far removed from these discussions) the executive team is bitching that we're not in office 5 days per week.

[apercu]

I think that's the question - did RTO increase productivity? I haven't seen any audited economic evidence that actually happened. Same as AI - I've seen a lot of PR and hype, but no audited company financials indicators.

Historically though, the data suggests that mass layoffs have a huge impact (negatively) on productivity after a short term "boost" by the survivors.

[LiquidSky]

I know that this is Hacker News and so all rich and important people must be geniuses making only rational moves, but consider the slim possibility that most aren't very good leaders and make poor decisions.

Maybe there's some 19D "soft layoff" motivation, but I suspect a large part is just about control and appearance. You spent all that money on offices so workers better be there. And what's the point of having your own nice big office if you can't look out on the peons toiling for you? And more fundamentally, some people just have this deep belief that work = something you do in an office and can't compute working at home as "real" work, no matter what the results show.

[edgyquant]

There’s some of that for sure, but also knowledge sharing is easier in person. The question is whether or not it’s that much easier to justify the trade off of in person work. I don’t think so, but even most remote workers I know would agree that in person has a certain collaborative nature that remote lacks.

[LiquidSky]

Sure, WFH has some downsides as does anything, but it's always funny to me that we have 150+ years of basically everyone who's ever worked in an office despising it as a place where productivity goes to die mired in pointless meetings, office politics, etc., but when WFH becomes a realistic option all of a sudden the office is now Plato's Academy reborn.

[array_key_first]

I dispute this in my case. While this is true theoretically, in practice we all go to an off to sit in front of a computer 8 hours.

I haven't had an in person meeting in, god, years at this point.

The only difference between my house and the office is the physical location. That's literally it. Oh, and I'm a lot less happy now.

... hard to feel that the "lot less happy" part isn't the motivation.

[epistasis]

This was a trend among boards and executives, people like GE's CEO would not shut up about it, and that started the trend of boards requiring even recalcitrant CEOs to do it too.

Then the executives come up with justifications, one of which is surely the ability to trim some hires in a tight financial environment.

[senordevnyc]

I know that this is Hacker News and so all rich and important people must be geniuses making only rational moves, but consider the slim possibility that most aren't very good leaders and make poor decisions.

Every single frontpage thread on WFH / RTO for years now on HN has dozens to hundreds of comments bitching about the obvious stupidity and narcissism of upper management to force RTO, which is obviously inferior in every way, at least according to HN.

[givemeethekeys]

There is also a whole cadre of Vice presidents that needed micro manager level oversight over their teams in order to feel fulfilled.

You don’t spend many billions on the offices for nothing.

I imagine there was some pressure from cities as well since many downtown businesses rely on foot traffic.

[pc86]

Maybe I'm just lucky but the worst micromanagement has always been from my direct supervisors, never VP-level. In my experience most at that level (especially when it's several layers removed from the ICs) do as little work as possible, and spend most of their time hanging out with other VPs and trying to move on to the next step.

Are the tech firms the ones spending billions on office buildings? It's certainly not the VPs.

What pressure are cities applying to companies to get them to move back into the offices, exactly?

[givemeethekeys]

When a company looks for a new office, cities give them subsidies to open office there. Those subsidies come with strings attached beyond, "please lease this office space". They expect additional foot traffic that the other businesses near the office would benefit from.

[pc86]

I don't think this is true, do you have a cite for this other than stories that make national news like Amazon's HQ? Even if it happens for more than outlier examples like that, this would only happen for huge companies that can meaningfully move the economy of large urban centers. So maybe top-5 level huge companies in mid-market cities, but 99.9999% of companies wouldn't qualify for that.

[givemeethekeys]

Alright, let's agree that it only happens for the top 5% of companies. Then the leadership of those companies come out and make big announcements on how WFH is dead.

... everyone else follows because, "Amazon's doing it.."

[pc86]

Just to be clear, I'm not saying nobody implements RTO just because Amazon implemented RTO and they're a bunch of lemmings. I'm 100% that happens for more than a couple companies.

I don't think any companies move into cities with agreements they will meaningfully increase foot traffic in large urban centers, certainly not with any sort of true repercussions if they don't. That just simply does not happen.

[expedition32]

IMO it is just American business culture. Big boss tells peons what to do- very hierarchy based despite the nice break room.

And culture does not care about logic.

[surgical_fire]

Of course it was. It's not even well hidden.

If they had a shred of evidence that RTO was the eminently more productive, they would smugly rub our collective noses in it.

They don't have evidence. They have vibes and a profound hatred for the labor class. It irks them that suddenly common people had access to a benefit exclusive to them.

[pydry]

If you're looking for a cheap way to lay people off, you probably dont want to have to make large investments in real estate to do so.

I think it was mostly about lack of trust and desire to regain a feeling of control over employees. The soft layoffs were just a bonus.

When my company WFH during covid the first thing they did was force-install invasive tracking software. You could practically taste the executive paranoia.

[Tade0]

Also not all "WFH" is from home.

I for one am renting a desk at an office. I have all the usual office amenities and an environment in which I can focus properly, but I don't have to involve myself geographically with the company I work for.

[roryirvine]

Data from consultancies tends to show that WFH and hybrid work patterns are correlated with a significant increase in billable hours compared to 100% in-office. My understanding that a similar pattern can be seen in law firms.

The "RTO is more productive" thesis tends to come from industry sectors where quantitative measures like billable hours aren't so readily available. At best, it seems vibes-based - but, like you, I suspect that it's actually disingenuous posturing.

[malfist]

I don't think it was a soft layoff, I'm sure that might have been part of it, but I think the majority of it was about telling the working class that the owning class is back in power and they want you to know it.

After all, not a single CEO cited published metrics for the productivity reasons for ending WFH, and almost all went about other power grab type moves later to show the working class the power they were able to wield during COVID was over and we were returning back to the old ways.

[pc86]

What are these other power grab type moves?

[apercu]

> I don't think it was a soft layoff, I'm sure that might have been part of it, but I think the majority of it was about telling the working class that the owning class is back in power and they want you to know it.

Or both.

[jleyank]

If they demand 5-in-office then they should stfu about climate and affordable housing. The commute offices tend to inflict on the staff makes such arguments bs.