Any company that forces a return to office is going to lose some of their best employees, as those are the ones who will have the easiest time finding a better job. RTO is basically just a backdoor layoff, only they end up losing the people they should be desperate to keep. What's worse is there's no good reason for it, it's just a power play by execs who are kind of bad at their jobs.
> What's worse is there's no good reason for it, it's just a power play by execs who are kind of bad at their jobs.
In the end it's more a financial thing IMO. When you just entered a 10 or 15 year lease right before Covid hit, you're now stuck with paying 7 years for an office you're not even using - that's objectively bad for any company's financials (and in some cases, bonuses for decisionmakers tied to stuff like "cost per employee").
The other side of rentals, the entire REIT industry, has it even worse, they're in pure panic mode: there are a lot of projects that got completed shortly before, during or after Covid... and that now lack renters while interest rates for refinancing keep going upwards as the free money ran out and central banks imposed serious rate hikes.
And if that's not enough, cities also have a problem... when people don't commute by car, they don't pay road tolls, endangering their financial calculations. When they don't commute by public transport and don't pay subscription tickets any more, the transport authorities get into financial trouble. When storefronts of bakeries, coffee shops and other ancilliary services for office drones get boarded up as no one is in the office any more to buy all that stuff, blight sets in.
Side industries are also hit: when people demand fast Internet at their homes to work efficiently or utilize other stuff such as water, electricity or trash more (because they'd have to expand their long-outdated, barely adequate service), utility providers have to invest serious amounts of money. Car insurances tied to distance driven per year lose money. The list of economic activities directly tied to an economy dedicated to people commuting from their homes to their office is really fucking long.
Hence, there are massive financial interests putting up serious efforts, both political and medial, to push for people to come back to the office even though largely only the already uber-rich profit from that.
>In the end it's more a financial thing IMO. When you just entered a 10 or 15 year lease right before Covid hit, you're now stuck with paying 7 years for an office you're not even using - that's objectively bad for any company's financials
That's the definition of the "sunk cost fallacy".
"Hey, I commited to paying for something I don't need. I better force and inconvenience myself to use it then, despite this not having ANY difference in my having to pay the amount anyway".
I think about this all the time. I cannot count how many times I've heard this narrative about RTO being driven by commercial property leases.
But I'm not sure it makes sense. Why is it that CEOs were totally fine saying "oops we done goofed and overhired, sorry gotta do some layoffs now" when post-pandemic inflation hit, but they're not comfortable altering or nuancing their strategy in response to what we learned about remote work during the pandemic?
I think this is a just-so story. There's more layers to this onion.
First: It's a power issue. Employment is at will so ceos feel they have more power (or at least leverage) and can say they're firing ypu for a reason. Leases have the power with the landlords so ceos feel they need to be more circumpect.
Second: it's a positioning issue. Ceos are usually thinking about their next gig. Layoffs because we overhired: agressive, good ceoing. Too much real estate: bad ceoing, doesn't look great on the next job search.
Absolutely a power issue.
My current employer has been reasonably lenient on RTO, however..
They periodically keep asking people to come in more while actually not even having enough desks in 2 of our major offices.
The desk shortage is bad enough you have to beg for consultant desks and every couple months we get a mass mail ordering everyone to stay home next week to accommodate some visitors.
So on the face of it, would seem that our company is at full utilization of office space given COVID era remote hiring & hoteling, and yet they still want to nag. They really just want employees in "how high sir?" mode, with tears in our eyes.
> I think this is a just-so story. There's more layers to this onion.
IMHO, all the amount of issues correlated with RTO are far more complex than an onion. I'd rather compare it with a wool cloth, everything is linked tightly with everything, and the tensions that came from Covid have left some parts permanently deformed.
it's a pithy, feel-good explanation that lets the anti-RTO camp feel superior without having to delve into complex topics such as talent development, informal learning, meeting effectiveness, etc. that do not trivially lend themselves to the RTO argument in quite the same way.
100%.
When the alternate to remote is a return to hodge hodge seating in an open floor plan - or worse, hoteling in an open floor plan.. its all theatre.
Seating staff level engineers next to the desktop support row, or C-suite admin row, and other loud areas with no virtuous "informal learning" overlap was the norm at my last company.
You also get to sit near idiots who want to debate politics all day or talk about the latest TV shows and sportsball. A day in the office without top of the line noise cancelling headphones is essentially a negative productivity day.
CEOs want to treat many of us like cattle into pens.
I don't quite think this falls into the fallacy part, though it's definitely a sunk cost.
If companies don't have any financially viable ways to offload the real estate costs they have to weigh the pros and cons. Remote work comes with its own expenses, from software licenses only needed for remote teams to home office stipends and team off sites. None of these are required obviously, but expected by most remote workers in large tech companies.
I expect it turns into a bit of an actuarial process, trying to estimate how many quality employees you will lose versus the additional expense and potential inefficiencies of remote.
Theres also the fact that this is a perfect excuse to cut a number of employees without officially doing layoffs. If you over hired for a few years while the money rolled in you might be happy for an excuse to see people leave.
A business is stuck paying for that lease regardless of how many butts are in seats in it. That is a fixed sunk cost they can't do anything about.
However, every employee not in the office isn't using office pens, putting wear on office furniture that will need replacement, filling office trash cans that need to be emptied by someone, burning out office light fixtures that need to be replaced, and using office toilet paper that will need replenishment.
Bringing them back to the office doesn't make the lease any cheaper, but it does make operating the space more expensive.
Also I've heard many stories of people leveraging return to office policies for raises. If an important and productive team-member says "cover my increased costs or I'm leaving" then most managers who have the discretion to pay that person more will. Managers don't want their good employees to quit. Maybe large corporations aren't taking that cost into account, but they probably should.
Ultimately though, I suspect return-to-office policies are not driven by current financials at all. They're driven by the emotions of senior management. Probably a combination of feelings - concern that they can't see their employees, fear (whether founded or not) that remote work is less productive, fear that some employees are doing no work and getting away with it, desire to impress someone higher up the tree who cares about presenteeism - just the usual stuff that drives big corporate decision making.
From what I've read the majority of commercial leases do not have anything covering breaking the lease, so it defaults to whatever state law says happens when there is no prior agreement.
That commonly says that (1) the landlord must try to find another tenant, and (2) the leaving tenant has to continue paying until that happens or they reach the end of the lease.
Trying to find another tenant does not mean that the landlord has to take any extraordinary actions to do so. They just have to list the property as available and show it to people who show interest, just like they would with any other empty property they have.
Thus, it comes down to what the market is like. E.g., when I moved from Seattle I broke a lease, but my apartment was next to the University of Washington. There are always people looking for apartments next to UW so the landlord easily found another tenant.
A lot of cities right now have a glut of commercial office space available, with listings staying open for months or years. Someone breaking a lease on office space in such a city would likely finding themselves having to pay to the end of lease.
> you're now stuck with paying 7 years for an office you're not even using - that's objectively bad for any company's financials (and in some cases, bonuses for decisionmakers tied to stuff like "cost per employee").
If your goal is to force employees to come back, and many of them quit as a result, now you don't have employees to fill your empty office with and you still owe the same money for the lease. It doesn't take a rocket surgeon to see that coming.
> when people demand fast Internet at their homes to work efficiently or utilize other stuff such as water, electricity or trash more (because they'd have to expand their long-outdated, barely adequate service), utility providers have to invest serious amounts of money. Car insurances tied to distance driven per year lose money.
Sorry, what? The water company is hurting because I flush the toilet a couple extra times a day on one side of town instead of the other? What extra garage am I producing sitting in my office? An extra wrapper from some lunch? The power that they use in the office almost certainly comes from exactly the same source as the power used by your home.
And the whole point of pay-by-the-mile insurance is that you get it because you don't drive very much and want to save money. The insurance companies that don't get paid more when you drive more are the ones that hurt, because you're more likely to get in an accident and you're not paying extra.
None of these "side industries" are hurting, and they probably haven't even noticed.
> The water company is hurting because I flush the toilet a couple extra times a day on one side of town instead of the other? What extra garage am I producing sitting in my office? An extra wrapper from some lunch? The power that they use in the office almost certainly comes from exactly the same source as the power used by your home.
The problem is usage patterns. Residential, sparsely populated districts have lower diameter water mains and sewage pipes, lower electricity feed capacity, small garbage cans with (bi-)weekly pickup, and often times not even enough Internet uplink for people to watch Netflix in decent quality.
High density office districts are the exact opposite, and utilities make quite the amount of money on them.
But usually people are either at home or at the office at the same time. So if the pipes can handle everyone being at home when they get up in the morning and shower at the same time to make the office at the same time, they could probably handle everyone being at home at noon. It might even be better, since now they can shower at different times. Ditto for electric, since people are more likely to stagger their laundry and whatnot.
The only one that seems to apply is garbage, and possibly the internet pipes.
> The problem is usage patterns. Residential, sparsely populated districts have lower diameter water mains and sewage pipes, lower electricity feed capacity, small garbage cans with (bi-)weekly pickup
> So you're saying we should lower the quality of our life so we can protect the interests and assets of the wealthy?
I think the last sentence of my post should show what my opinion on this entire matter is. I merely wanted to provide a more detailed explanation than "CEOs be power trippin'" on why we're seeing so much RTO bullshit being pushed the last months.
It’s mostly done. You can work in several of the buildings, and the restaurants are doing practice runs and training. Free meals last week if you time it right.
It's funny how "very overinflated prices are going just slighly less overinflated" is a catastrophy... Less renters? Lower the price. Many people would like to live in <popular city>, but not at the over inflated pre-covid prices. Commercial realestate? Louis Rossmann has a whole series of videos on youtube about the overinflated mess in NYC. Less traffic jams? How is that bad? Utilities are paid by (water, power,...) usage, and upgrades will be done where there is usage, even "at homes". Car insurances with less distance per year will also pay out less damages, since less distance == less crashes.
There are some American nuances here, although that's 100% relevant for Amazon, I have to put here that some of that business models do not exist in Europe.
Stuff mentioned is chiefly state or city owned in Europe and works in different ways. There are no toll booths outside of motorways, the roads are free. People commute by public transport, which is mostly not private. Utilities also; although open market exists, it's always the main company (in most cases owned by country) and alternatives.
In my area 15 y.o business space lease doesn't exist. My family company had a 5 year lease contract in the 90s. Nowadays owners want even lesser contracts because the property market is very volatile and prices tend to surge up and not down. This creates problems for normal living space rental, because most of people do not want long term tenants. They want to raise the price every year.
Although these kind of models suffer losses in quarantine, they don't suffer managerial loss of profit and they don't have same goals. The point of a city owned bus transport company is to exist and provide decent service for lowest amount of money. There is not a "this is not feasible for me anymore, not bringing enough profit" situation.
> There are no toll booths outside of motorways, the roads are free. People commute by public transport, which is mostly not private.
Note, I'm German (living in Munich) myself, but most of the problems are valid here just as well. Public transport for example... the Deutsche Bahn, Berlin's BVG or Munich's MVG, they all have complained that they continued service during covid at a ridiculous expense and didn't get reimbursed for a large part of the expense, and on top of that now the Deutschlandticket is cutting into income even more.
I know of lots of European cities where you have to pay to drive into the city.
People commute by public transport
Again, while less common than in the US, commuting by car is incredibly common in Europe as well. I can see one of the main roads into my city from my window and it is bumper to bumper traffic every morning and afternoon.
Can you give me example of private highways (like in Texas) in EU? Is it even possible for a private entity to gather land and build road in Europe? As far as I followed (no expert on the topic), it's always state that buys land and then gives concession to the private operator, that's sometimes done for motorways.
Yes commuting by car is common worldwide but there are no megapolises in Europe that have acute public transport issues, example L.A. area.
Nothing is absolute of course, but EU is far more friendly towards non-car usage than USA. You can set a range between best and worst. Worst would be rural mid America and Balkan/eastern parts of the EU, where you need a vehicle 100% if you want to be on time on destination. Best part of the EU would probably be Benelux where you can move with train/bike combination seamlessly everywhere. That part has no analogy in USA.
> In the end it's more a financial thing IMO. When you just entered a 10 or 15 year lease right before Covid hit, you're now stuck with paying 7 years for an office you're not even using - that's objectively bad for any company's financials
Amazon is a different beast - as they're more like Walmart and less like Google and Apple.
The rest of the big tech companies people actually want to make at have ~40% profit margins, and <5% of expenses come from office space. If their offices are underutilized by 50% - that's a rounding error.
And beside Microsoft - basically none of the big tech companies have anywhere near enough space.
You've got people make $800k with less space than people who work in universities making $30k.
The bygones principle does not always accord with real-world behavior. Sunk costs often influence people's decisions, with people believing that investments (i.e., sunk costs) justify further expenditures. People demonstrate "a greater tendency to continue an endeavor once an investment in money, effort, or time has been made". This is the sunk cost fallacy, and such behavior may be described as "throwing good money after bad", while refusing to succumb to what may be described as "cutting one's losses".
Everything you have pointed out is a direct result of car centric transportation in America and underscores the bad city design.
> When you just entered a 10 or 15 year lease right before Covid hit, you're now stuck with paying 7 years for an office you're not even using
This is priced in. The “cost per employee” metric you cite or hypothesize will stay the same regardless of whether it’s used or not. Also companies that do use this metric for bonuses are outdated. As such this is a “me” problem.
> other side of rentals, the entire REIT industry, has it even worse, they're in pure panic mode:
They wouldn’t be in “panic mode” if American cities weren’t built with these mono-zones, single purpose use (ie, “commercial only” zones, “resident only” zones, SFH only zones).
> enough, cities also have a problem... when people don't commute by car, they don't pay road tolls
Cities don’t give a shit about whether or not you take toll roads. That money is sent to the toll operator which is often sent to the state OR a private entity. Not using local road infrastructure is actually a benefit as maintenance is reduced and city workers can focus on other items. City can also defer replacing expensive local roads for just a bit longer.
> When they don't commute by public transport and don't pay subscription tickets any more, the transport authorities get into financial trouble
I guess people only take the bus for getting to and from work… For everything else, TAKE THE CAR!!1
Sadly, for many Americans this is a reality.
Again, this is a direct result of poorly designed cities around car centric transportation. Cars as the only means for getting groceries, getting to/from entertainment districts, general living.
> When storefronts of bakeries, coffee shops and other ancilliary services for office drones get boarded up as no one is in the office any more to buy all that stuff, blight sets in.
Wouldn’t be a problem in a mixed-zoned region. Walkability is key.
> when people demand fast Internet at their homes to work efficiently or utilize other stuff such as water, electricity or trash more (because they'd have to expand their long-outdated, barely adequate service), utility providers have to invest serious amounts of money.
Urban density is what pays for a large portion of these services. It’s when cities are forced to increase coverage for suburban and low density areas is where it begins to fall apart. This has been happening for decades and long before the “remote worker” demand.
Again highlighting here that car centric transportation is the main cause for these race to build suburbs. Heavily subsidized highway infrastructure is fueling the demand.
> Car insurances tied to distance driven per year lose money
This is not an issue. As a matter of fact, insurance companies hope you drive less. This deceases the likelihood of an accident and thus having to pay out. It’s when they payout claims is when they lose money. Otherwise the premiums they collects is essentially “free money”
I could say the same about not making the move back to the office. Some of their best employees will prefer the office and will look for places where the culture is for everyone to be in the office.
I think I'm not alone in dreading working from home and being by myself in the office is not much better. What I really want is to work with other people at the same place.
I work for a company that has multiple offices world wide. We also have a pretty sizeable, entirely remote workforce as well. You can do both.
I think the rub is that often the office crowd, in order to get their office, have to drag the remote crowd with them otherwise they're not getting what they want out of the office experience.
Personally speaking, I will never work in an office again. I get more done working from home, I video chat with my colleagues all the time - even pairing, I meet up with them in cool places 2-4 times a year, and I have way more time for gardening, house projects, pets, and my partner without a 1-4 hour commute in a 24 hour day.
> I think the rub is that often the office crowd, in order to get their office, have to drag the remote crowd with them otherwise they're not getting what they want out of the office experience.
There might be a good business opportunity: Offer a "staff" of paid actors to go into a business, and walk around, having hallway and water cooler conversations, maybe drawing on whiteboards, and imitating the "buzz" of a robust office environment. That way, the people who like the office can bask in the ambience of a busy office, without having to force employees into the office that have no interest in that ambience!
Yeah, Amazon is big enough that they could have a full stack group of employees always in the office and another one always remote. Almost like two companies. That's not the reality of most places though. Usually one has to pick.
The reality is it's easy to accommodate both. There are a ton of hybrid companies out there. If someone wants a desk in an office by all means give them one. Supporting both groups of people gives you the best talent pool to work with.
People who demand their coworkers come into the office though- well, it's not something I've personally seen, but it would make me think the person is a bit of a control freak.
And yet, having some people work from the office while others work from home, might actually be the worst of both worlds. A meeting works great if everybody is in the same room or everybody is online. It's awkward when half are in the same room filling one screen of an online meeting and being barely audible there.
Everybody at home and using online chat tools to connect and work together works great, having your coworkers sitting next to you so you can have spontaneous meetings about technical details works great. But having two in the office and one online is awkward.
Maybe we should separate into fully remote and fully at the office companies.
For the record, WFH works great for me, but I also appreciate our one day per week at the office where I can see (nearly) all of my coworkers in real life.
At least for people who like to come to the office (like me), this is even worse than working from home.
You still spend lots of times in meetings in front of your computer, can't take those meetings in person, often can't solve quick issues on the way to lunch, and can't socialize with the people you are working with (which leads to getting to know people much quicker which IMHO makes working with people a lot easier).
That's weird because I work remotely, socialize with my colleagues all the time, regularly solve problems for them in quick meetings, and generally don't encounter any of the concerns you do.
Companies with bad cultures are going to have bad times regardless, culture definitely has to be managed. It is possible to build a remote or hybrid culture that works though.
How do you socialise? Do you have a zoom call with them over lunch when everyone eats together? If you need to draw something in a piece of paper to explain a concept or how a function behaves, how do you do that? Do you share your screen and draw everything with your mouse? If you want to show someone something you're writing do you start a call and share your screen with them? Then how do you and they point to stuff? What if they want to type in something? Do they just dictate?
It's obviously all doable, but some people find that setup impersonal and annoying. Meanwhile, I have no trouble going to the office. It's nice to get out of the house, walk a bit. See other people going to work as well in the public transport. It all feels good to me.
Work is part of social life. Your whole social life doesn't have to revolve around your best friend or wife or whatever people you chose. Living and socialising with people you didn't choose is important.
I don't think hybrid is really accomodating to people who wants to be in the office. The main point in being in the office is to have all your colleagues around with you. My current place is hybrid, but thankfully my team is mostly always in. I really dislike when I need someone and I have to use slack or zoom to contact them. It's always a bit of a pain.
A company where remote work is the exception (you need to wait for a parcel one day or something like that) appeals to me much more than a hybrid model. A full remote job I'd only consider it I were desperate.
Even 20 years ago coworkers were AIMing the person 2 cubicles over from them. It may not be for everyone, but remote messaging has been useful long before Covid.
For me there's a big difference between that and 6-8 hours of remote video calls in a day. Video calls are both mentally exhausting for me and highly unengaging.
6-8 hours of meetings in a day is unpleasant. 6-8 hours of meetings _every_ day is probably an indicator that WFH vs RTO is the least of your organization's problems.
I tend to think you're in more meetings when you WFH and they last longer. Mostly because they are inefficient. But also because people don't get to overhear what you said with someone else and end up eventually calling you on something you just had a conversation about.
That's how I feel about meetings in general, regardless of whether they're in person or on video. At least with video I can turn off my camera when I need to blow my nose.
Sending a message to someone close to you is fine. There are several reasons to do that. What's bad about remote work for me is that it's the only option.
> I really dislike when I need someone and I have to use slack
Woe betide you if you try that even sat next to me in an open plan office. Your convenience is not my top priority when I have other things I want to be doing. There’s a reason that noise cancelling headphones are such a common sight in such places.
One of those situations where a good balance seems to matter. But hey, people quit Amazon all the time, voluntary or not. And as long they are not low level logistics folks in a FC somewhere, there shouldn't be any difficulty in finding a job. Not sure why that even deserves an article.
At work we are hybrid but the reality is that very few people likes to go to the office, single digit % I would say. Sometimes I'm literally the only person in the entire building.
It's not about the correlation, it's that higher performing employees have an easier time finding alternatives.
And even if they mostly prefer the office, they might not like the heavy-handedness with which management is pushing through RTO right now - who knows what else they might force next that directly affects them?
As such, everybody is kept on somewhat shaky grounds with these ever-changing decrees, and the people the companies should be most motivated to keep are best suited to leave.
That the best typically find it easier to leave is generally true but doesn't really imply a company shouldn't have policies. Could companies finesse these things better, sure. But a sufficiently large company will work even if some top people leave - everyone is replaceable.
In my experience, 10x employees don't collaborate much with others because they're playing in a different league. You can turn that into an a priori argument, that by definition being exceptional implies riding solo. So WFH will look more tempting.
Maybe, but a large number of the 10x employees I've worked with are 10x *because* they are good at collaborating in ways that increase their contribution. Someone who writes 10x as much code in a silo may not be more productive than someone who writes a lot of code but gets 10x delivered because they are incredibly good at working with everyone else.
This is a very narrow view of the situation. There are any number of reasons why some people may prefer working from an office.
Take myself as an example. I live alone, in a small apartment. My home "office" is a corner of my living room. I'm not "rich" and unfortunately cannot currently get a place big enough to have a dedicated room for an office. As a result, over a long period of time of working from home I end up getting the feeling that I'm living at work. In general, I prefer a strict home-vs-work separation, so going to a physical office elsewhere to work over the longer term helps me.
Other reasons include that some other people who prefer working from an office outside their home may just in general like the in-person social aspect that comes along with it.
It's shocking to me to now see a narrative like what you're trying to push that labels people who want to go to the office as terrible people. Jeez, wow!
> Other reasons include that some other people who prefer working from an office outside their home may just in general like the in-person social aspect that comes along with it.
This is exactly why a lot of us DONT want to go back to the office - people holding their coworkers hostage because they don’t have a social life outside of work.
Exactly, I like to choose who I socialise with and have a vibrant social life outside work. I prefer to work from home and communicate over teams and get my work done than have to sit next to a random office bod who I may have nothing in common with, or worse has some kind of personality issue.
But what you're saying is NOT what the person I was responding to was saying, 'nor was it what I was responding to. I don't know if you read their post or not before replying to mine. Frankly, I'm not even sure if you even fully read my post if this is what you're zeroing in on ...
Not sure why you're downvoted because I have worked with a bunch of these people and their enthusiasm for doing anything other than going home at the end of the day always astounds me
That is a very crude view. I have found training people for certain things much easier in person, for example, as I could see them struggle well before they reach out, i.e., can shorten learning cycles.
Not really, in my case. They closed the town centre office during covid, and opened a new one in an out-of-town business park I cannot easily walk or cycle to. My commute used to be a three-minute walk, but no longer. So I'm stuck at home, which wouldn't be so bad if I had a proper home office, but I don't.
With people I personally know (so I know it's anecdotal), it's mostly going away from the family (or just changing the physical environment) for work, and stuff like lunches with other people. Having your direct teammates with you doesn't matter as much, as not having screaming kids around you, someone to talk to during lunch and the easier mental switch, to move to "work mode" when you come into office, and back to "non-work mode" when you leave.
>Perhaps they like being in an office with their team mates
Maybe find some of those people that like it so much, and go to a coworking space together then? I'm pretty sure the company would be OK to reimburse.
No need to burden the company with renting an entire office for everybody, or force it onto others, when just some of you need a shared office.
Bonus: each subset of colleagues can find co-working spaces in areas that conveniences them, instead of a single forced upon everybody company-wide office location.
Some people also like ice cream, and ice cream sales are correlated with forest fires, so we should probably force people to stop consuming ice cream if we want to keep our forests
She is a "talent manager" hardly what we call an important employee for the company.
As part of the ongoing internal shifts in companies, they are actually happy to see these people leave and focus on the workers that actually build their products.
From what we can see in the trends, the era of bloated HR seems to be at an end.
Despite several rounds of layoffs and a general economic downturn, companies are still competing hard for talented people.
You know those nightmare hiring scenarios that keep getting posted on social media sites? Where companies ghost people at the offer stage, or retract offers? That's caused by incompetent talent management.
Companies that can't grow an retain talent, and the narrative that you need to job hop to grow in your career? Incompetent talent management.
This article is written from the POV of a person who was dealing with disabilities, and had challenges at work, but was still able to remain at Amazon despite several rounds of layoffs. That is a pretty solid indicator that her leadership team found her to be an effective employee.
It may not buy into the lean startup ethos, but contrary to popular belief, HR does a lot more than hiring & firing, and covering the companies butt on policy issues.
Keeping employees happy is probably one of the most important things a company needs to do, so I would say, yes, talent managers are important to the company.
I'm going on a limb here, and state that 99% of actual developers, would get much happier to have the salary this person takes divided amongst them, than to have her sticking around coming up with "happy" activities.
While I do agree, I think that this might be too general to be correct in every case.
I do wonder however if the COVID lockdowns and WFH made the remote work market worse. The amount of remote positions available skyrocketed but so did the amount of people wanting to work remotely. Now, the combination of layoffs and RTOs might make finding a remote job harder than it was before the pandemic - amount of remote jobs shrank and the remote talent pool grew. Would love to see some data / opinions on that.
> Any company that forces a return to office is going to lose some of their best employees, as those are the ones who will have the easiest time finding a better job.
Will they? These people are also (usually) going to be the best at knowing their own value, and they can negotiate exceptions to the policy (or their managers will know their value, and get them exempted preemptively).
As a way to do soft layoffs it seems pretty ingenious.
