Comment by jmyeet

Comment by jmyeet 3 days ago

> Companies forget this.

No, they don't. It's intentional.

Someone quitting over an RTO mandate is cheaper than a layoff. And if someone doesn't quit, they're likely to put up with a whole lot of other grief too. Unpaid extra work (to cover the people who quit), not asking for raises, etc. It's purely money-saving and to instill fear.

In the 20th century, IBM and the Welch era brought in a lot of tools to extract the most from employees like the "up or out" mentality or simply firing the bottom 5-10% of employees every year.

Tech has simply reached that point. You are a replaceable cog. Tech is now in permanent layoffs culture to suppress wages. Laying off 5% of the workforce every year is now a permanent fixture of your company.

Personally, I think engaging in layoffs means you, as an employer, have demonstrated there is insufficient need and you are ineligible to sponsor a work visa in any broadly related area for 24 months. "Broadly related" here means if you layoff a software engineer, you can't sponsor another software engineer. I don't care if one does C++ and the other does Python. I guess you'll have to train somebody.

mrweasel 3 days ago

> Someone quitting over an RTO mandate is cheaper than a layoff.

That might be a thing, but I can only speak from personal experience, and I'm an area of the world where there's still a pretty big shortage of IT workers, so it doesn't make sense to drive them away.

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jmyeet 3 days ago

In hiring threads there's disconnect people have because the employer's goals and the potential employee's goals are different. Candidates often think the employer wants the best employee so will bemoan things like whiteboard coding because some people don't do well in that situation. They're correct about that but wrong about the employer's goals.
The employer is simply filling a role. They're looking for someone sufficient. They don't need to be perfect in this process.
It's the same here. You are replaceable. Never forget that. You may be thinking the company is losing a good employee. And they might be. But it doesn't matter because keeping particular employees is almost the goal. There are very few people who are truly irreplaceable.
If out of 20 employees, one quits over the RTO mandate then their work gets spread around the other 19 who now do 5% more work for less money because they're not asking for raises and there's no severance to pay. It's win-win-win.
The company would rather understaff and underpay to any other outcome.

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