Comment by throwaway240916

My company was

- Execs truly believe that culture and productivity are better in office (i.e., what they actually say in their announcements)

> Eng was a cost center, so the business side didn't understand and thought it unfair.

- An opportunity to force attrition without layoffs

> Eng was happy for attrition to meet a strategic goal of 50/50 India hiring

- Execs have strong data that productivity is higher in an office (seems unlikely, surely they'd have published it by now)

> Opposite: during the initial switch (we had a mgmt change later too), they found ppl were active more hours on slack, had better silly metrics like code commits, prs, pr reviews. Not the best measure, but since no one knew they were looking, likely to be relatively accurate. They were very confident in this posture.