What's the root cause of these ridiculous decisions being taken at tech corporations? Constantly, they fall into fads like these that everyone with a brain knows make no sense but still many companies decide to follow them. For example: RTO -> what's the point of this shit? we never knew for sure but higher ups at most tech companies suddenly decided that RTO was the way to go forward despite all the downsides. Another example: DEI policies, some of them were very non-sensical.

I believe there has to be some downward pressure on these executives to take these decisions but I would like to know where it's coming from exactly and what's the logic behind them. Is it some big institution like Blackrock which has leverage on many of these companies? That's always been my bet but I never knew for sure.

Crappy managers don’t know (or actively avoid) how to measure business value from individuals. So they need you to be in the office so they can physically see if you are putting in the effort.

Tokens is just yet another proxy for business value.

The problem they face is if everybody is judge by business value in dollars, crappy managers are the first to go