Comment by claytongulick 4 days ago
The problem with that strategy is that for the remote work crowd, the only people who stay are those with golden handcuffs or those that don't have better/other options, so you end up losing your best people to companies that are more flexible.
Or that management wants to make the most of the downturn in tech hiring to make sure the rank and file don't get the wrong ideas about who actually has the power. The extra attrition is probably the icing on the cake.
WFH is overwhelmingly popular amongst employees and has the most potential to be a topic tech workers band together on. Tech employees realizing that collective action can work terrifies execs. Therefore it's imperative to the moneyed class that RTO be normalized back as soon as possible.
I have made this point to my teammates. When I expressed concern about my job, several of them disagreed and said I was irreplaceable. I told them no one is irreplaceable. The company would be happier with someone who did 60% of my work getting paid 50% less. I am very good at my job in a position where being very good is no more desirable than just good enough.
> I am very good at my job in a position where being very good is no more desirable than just good enough.
This is important to internalize. There are jobs with more downside than upside. When in such a situation, it's often best to move on at your own schedule rather than hanging on too long.
Often the % quality/quantity of work your replacement can/will do is a lot harder to quantify than the 50% less pay, so they will even take 40% of the work for 50% of the pay.
I mean, anyone who hires L3s thinks this to some degree (compared to say, Netflix that has the majority of engineers L5/L6).
However, it's likely they will exempt the right people, it just matters how hard it is to get those exemptions.
Sometimes the goal is to shed some of your most expensive people to cut costs or open up some roles for churn to bring employees up. My employer occasionally does buy outs where they offer payouts to people with certain tenure at the company (and I think age combined) to leave. A few people take that then come back as contractors at even higher rates to solve the lost knowledge but that's for uncommon niches like mainframe people.
These strategies are so odd to me as companies have rigor on who they let IN, so why take an approach that has no tiger on who you force OUT?
Would be better to trim in the right division/department/team/performance ranking than just.. force random increase in departures.
One way it makes a bit of sense is to view it through the lens of avoiding the task of resolving the political dispute of where cuts should be. Business suffer internally from the same kind of paralysis governments can and sometimes market fads dictate you shed costs [0], bring people back to the office, or internal forces incentivize it because you have long term leases that look bad on paper if you're not forcing your employees into the office. [1] Ideally you'd have strong leadership to cut the right people from the right places but they're just people, often there because of other reasons so they struggle to evaluate that properly and the easy answer is to just quietly incentivize increased turn over.
[0] See the last 2-3 years of businesses cutting headcount for "the coming recession" that never came.
[1] Personally I think that's the reason behind my job's recent bump to ~50% in office time from ~25%. We have a number of large buildings either owned or on long term leases that are 'wasted' if they're not forcibly occupied.
Agreed, and not just a remote thing generally.
This is why one big and well communicated cut is always better than round after round.
Once your company tilts into the direction of getting worse, anyone with better options leaves. You end up with a lot of adverse selection as an employer if you take the slow burn approach.
Not necessarily better, at least for the company. The slow burn works out much better for them:
- Gets rid of employees who were on the fence of leaving anyway
- No need to pay out unemployment
- No need to pay out unused PTO (depends on the state)
- No need to notify months in advance (WARN act [1]) or risk heavy fines
- End up with "loyal" employees in the end
If they can get through the short-term pain of losing some good workers, it will eventually balance out, and the show will go on.
[1]
> so you end up losing your best people to companies
Management probably thinks they don't need the best people anymore, as mediocre employees + ChatGPT (or whatever they use at Amazon) will suffice.