Depends on the person and their lifestyle and savings. I'm sure some well off single/DINK households can simply weather the recession while making a few concessions, waiting until the market shifts to an employee's market again.

But in the normal case, you are right. Google had extra rounds of layoffs because RTO didn't self-cull enough people. People know this isn't the market to make a stand in without significant leverage.

Sadly, and we all know that butt on chair while doing Teams calls with the offshoring and nearshore teams, is a large improvement in productivity. /s

I love how most any RTO-proponent always presents RTO as "well I'm glad you're back in the office with me because that's better for me". Ask most any WFH-proponent about going to the office and the answer will read like "do whatever works best for yourself, I prefer WFH myself, you can go to the office if you want". It's a very selfish mindset, really. If RTO-proponents cared about not imposing their will on others, they'd also advocate for WFH for anyone that prefers it, but they don't.

When working a regular 9-5 I very much preferred office presence for the social aspect, especially when work is slower and no pressure.

But when I actually need to concentrate and deliver high quality work, it needs to be in a quiet place. And that is often from home, because open space office buildings are the devil's work and I will never forget how much people complained about them when they started becoming the norm a bit before the 2010s.

> Speaking only for myself, I was fully remote for a few years and that was a miserable experience.

Just out of curiosity, what did you find miserable about it? I've been working remote since 2008 and just have no desire to ever be consistently in an office, but I guess I did like it when I could pop over to SF (I live in NYC), stay in an apt my employer at the time had, and spend a week with people. Otherwise, I much prefer the freedom of being remote.

> Speaking only for myself, I was fully remote for a few years and that was a miserable experience. Now everyone is mandated to be in office 3 days a week and that works better for me.

If you feel you work better at the office, more power to you.

That does not justify forcing everyone around you to do the same, particularly if the best argument you can piece together is that forcing others to do something against their will makes you feel better.

People whose primary job is to "coordinate" often, either in a well-meaning attempt to be thorough or just to be relevant, try to pull as many different people into any decision-making as possible.

So instead of me just getting approval from my manager, I need to get approval/buy-in from departments A, B, and C.

In that case, firing the "coordinator" person increases velocity because parts of the business processes they prop disappear.

That's how I read it, too.

They pinpointed the problem of over-coordination to the messenger (coordinator) instead of the teams demanding final approval over launches (coordination).

Won't merging different teams under a single owner only push the problem further down the org chart?

There were too many meetings, so they got rid of the people whose jobs were to create lots of meetings.

The coordinators enable extra coordination that is not worth doing. The coordination itself is the problem.

I think the idea is that if you go from 10 decision makers to 5 decision makers, coordidination and securing a decision will become easier

Sure, but the use of "decimated" is used approximately correctly in most cases, even if not precisely right. And it is a cool sounding word, and it's one word.

"Orders of magnitude" is three words when one would do, it's used to sound sophisticated, and it's use is off by... an order of magnitude or so... in many cases

That and when people use "exponential" to mean big.

You can't give a concrete and nonsensical way Uber has grown 100x (minimum number of "orders") while revenue tripled.

Cannot be miles. Can't be riders. Can't be drivers. Revenue is top line, by definition.

This statement is as bad as the original. There is no need for hyperbolic statements that one doesn't even understand. "Uber has grown significantly" works. Why the need to sound so sophisticated and use terms like "orders of magnitude" ? It erodes trust by signaling "we are full of sh*t".

I thought it was common knowledge that

1) there was a hiring glut during COVID-19 for SWEs [0] that is now seen as a period of overhiring

2) private equity and larger institutional shareholders are seeing their commercial property investments bleed out [1]. research points to increased (or at least not diminished) efficacy of being fully remote [2] so there's obviously a trade-off that's pushing companies to assume that risk and personally I'm not convinced that it's due to the anti-social desire by execs for high-control alone

[0] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineer-jobs-fi... [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/COMREPUSQ159N [2] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/intentional-insights...

Claude, de-schitzo this post.

Because AI is now a monstrous political issue, and the valence has flipped -- literally the irony I was pointing to :)

Whoosh