[rdtsc]

US tech company. Just as the RTO excuse ended it started with AI immediately.

RTO was used to squeeze as hard as possible to force people to leave and not pay severance ("You're not in the office a month from now across the country? Looks like you decided to resign, sucks for you!"). First it was "be in any office, as long as you butt is in a building with our logo on it" to "well, no, you gotta be where you manager is, so move again. Oh you can't? Sucks for you, you effectively resigned then".

Then the AI excuse hit. "We'll be so productive, we don't need people anymore at all". That's going on currently. Everyone is token-maxing to the limit to show how on board they are with AI to avoid getting pushed out.

In between they also managed to "cut costs" by moving jobs overseas the countries you're familiar with. This required some finagling, so they shut down one set of platform/products built in US and started building another one overseas. Then said "oh well, looks like this division in US is not needed anymore".

The strange thing is this is happening in multiple companies at the same time. It's like all the CEOs and HR reps met at some golf retreat and decided to follow a script.

Meanwhile I got only 5 or so recruiter emails in the last year or so. Before it was a constant stream, almost one every a few weeks.

[interactivecode]

> The strange thing is this is happening in multiple companies at the same time. It's like all the CEOs and HR reps met at some golf retreat and decided to follow a script.

I’ve gotten the same feeling. It’s too consistent to be a fluke. I get the feeling its a fashion thats being pushed by VC funds who are all neck deep in nvidia, openai and anthropic stocks. They must have realized they can pump this to their portfolio to inflate all the investments.

[xtracto]

>Meanwhile I got only 5 or so recruiter emails in the last year or so. Before it was a constant stream, almost one every a few weeks.

I've actually seen more and more LinkedIn posts from recruiters that [are proud of ] have been laid off themselves. You know things are bad when recruiters are the ones looking for jobs.

[qwertyuiop_]

How do you think they all had the same remote only work, then hybrid and then 5 days a week ?

They even talk and act the same at conferences with clasping seal hands.

They are mostly highly paid bots, paid by the real puppeteers - boards and above to execute the common mission.

[rdtsc]

CEOs have their own hierarchies. The little startup CEO knows they are a little startup CEO and looks up to big company CEOs, who look up to Amazon CEO or Google CEO. Amazon CEO does something stupid or daring and and then everyone sits and watches for a while then decides "Hell, Amazon is doing it, it must be good and we'll do it, too. Nobody can blame us now, we'll just point at "the industry" trends.

I's all about finding the next good excuse: RTO, AI are great excuses. They can tell those stories to the investors, the media, the workers who are pushed out, even to themselves to feel less stupid and guilty. "Industry shows working in the office is better, look at the trends!", "AI can do coding now, look at such and such, my nephew built a website with a prompt!". That's a whole lot better than "well shit, we over-hired like crazy and messed up, we're pretty stupid".

[irvingprime]

I've had a theory for years that the free market is mostly a myth, that really most business execs are herd animals who form their strategies by copying others. Usually they copy the ones in the same industry, making them all look pretty much the same.

That's one of the reasons we have economic cycles. It's because trends come and go in waves. When one wave bankrupts a bunch of companies, they start to dig out and then the next wave hits, endlessly.

[rafaelmn]

> The strange thing is this is happening in multiple companies at the same time. It's like all the CEOs and HR reps met at some golf retreat and decided to follow a script.

Industry trends spread in all roles ?

[Laurel1234]

This is a matter of public record, the joint is called Little St James.

[dimaaan]

RTO - Return to Office