I ended up painting a picture that, when considering just the costs of vehicular wear and tear, associated insurance costs, added food costs, lost time commuting, and lost economic opportunity in housing choice, that it would end up being approximately equivalent to a $30,000 USD pay cut (primarily due to housing and vehicle costs to preserve the existing commute, rather than searching further afield with a hybrid or remote schedule). I also added that, for the technology teams in particular, our follow-the-sun support model meant we were all incredibly scattered about anyway with no real colleagues in our local office to network with.

The response was to double-down: those outside of "hubs" were increasingly passed over for promotions and growth opportunities, hubs started enforcing mandatory in-office days (dictated by the VP), and - of course - the company's promise to support minority colleagues was effectively compromised to "encourage" relocation to Texas. It wasn't really surprising when I got RIFed, just incredibly disappointing.

Data alone is not enough to sway these people. They have their own agendas that have no concern for their workers' needs or goals. The solution will be collective action, rather than bargaining for basic empathy.

True. And, they have their own data that says workers love RTO. My company sends out employee surveys every six months. They claim that employees who work-from-the-office have higher workplace satisfaction scores, and therefore working-from-the-office must be better - the data proves it!

After a few cycles, I noticed that the top problems from the surveys always stayed the same. Then I noticed that the changes they were claiming to make were either half-hearted or were gross misinterpretations of survey results to push their own agendas. Of course the survey results stayed the same, nothing was done to address the problems.

After I noticed this, I still filled out the survey, if only because they would track me down and tell me the complete the survey (wait, I thought this was anonymous...). One year I answered 5/5 on every question. The next year I answered 0/5 on every question. The next year I quit.

No business is different than the others, not really. Absent accountability, the executives will always act in their own self-interest; since their compensation is mostly stock, that means they will sacrifice the future of tomorrow for the stock bump of today, every single time.

The most amazing was a pretty detailed and well conducted survey over a two year period. It showed that satisfaction was inversely proportional to both rank and tenure, and the decline started at 6 months. So an executive or senior IC would be immediately dissatisfied. A lower level employee or supervisor would start very happy, but the luster would wear down after about 4 months lol. Long tenured employees grew increasingly dissatisfied until their personal liquidity event.

They fucked up and broke out the data in a way that demonstrated that the division leads were dissatisfied to the point that it was affecting their health. No more public data presentation from that point forward.

Yes, and so does everyone else, including me, including you.

> since their compensation is mostly stock, that means they will sacrifice the future of tomorrow for the stock bump of today, every single time.

When investors discover that a company is eating its seed corn for short term gain, the stock crashes.

Not sure why you are being downvoted. I see lots of people who are acting in their self interest by wanting to remain remote.

>When investors discover that a company is eating its seed corn for short term gain, the stock crashes.

Maybe. Companies have been eating their seed corn with offshoring for quite a while now. M&A and cornering the market is a good antidote for such things. People still use Google and Windows and those products are horrible now.

For people who are being forced to RTO, put in your notice if you can, or at least look for another job. It's going to be a tight market for a few quarters at least.

Me, I tried shorting, and got my adze handed to me. I'm not smart enough to be successful at that, and so just stick with long positions.

Not a downvoter, but I suspect it's because we all know that people have a tendency to act in their own best interest.

But, we also expect leaders to consider the best interests of their charges, as a function of good leadership.

I see. It would be nice, but leadership like that are few and far between, and they probably get it beaten out of them. I don't think that's even taught at MBA school. When I started all this, someone told me, "they show appreciation through your paycheck." Not very satisfying, but there it is. If you're productive, they certainly miss you when you are gone.

we used Lattice in an organization of ~150 people. We had roughly 10 leaders (exec and non-exec), responsible for various functions. The most any one leader had in their reporting tree was ~40 (one of the Eng leaders)

For Lattice, at least from what I was exposed to, the surveys ARE anonymous. They know who has and hasn't submitted a survey because everyone gets a personalized link, but that is not aggregated up into some dashboard where UUIDs are mapped back to respondents. It's something like "Bill in finance has 4 directs, and 2 of those haven't pressed submit on their unique survey." But as you can figure, that does not matter AT ALL. Anyone with a modicum of attention can figure out who wrote what when you have a reporting tree that small. You will see the responses broken out by leader, by function (say, Sales for example), and then division, whole company. The only people who had access to all the results AFAIK were the CEO, the head of IT, and HR.

In short, it's anonymity theater if your leadership has any inkling of how you communicate. I knew exactly who wrote what from my teams, and so did my leadership peers.

You might be able to identify your direct reports based on communication style alone, but I don't really find it believable that this is a property that naturally transfers to your leadership, and from them up the chain to executives.

If that is true, then the "anonymity theater" only really extends to direct leadership, and not much further. This means that you, as a leader, would have to be complicit in any attempts to deanonymize any specific respondents.

So to rephrase: your ability to deanonymize your direct reports' responses does not extrapolate to the entire exercise being "anonymity theater", because your ability to deanonymize any given respondent only extends as far as your direct reports and maybe a free others. This becomes increasingly less true the larger the set of total employees surveyed.

Sure —- but then you know the exact answers of the last person to respond; it’s just the delta between the results before they responded and after, and you know who they are. So they’re fully de-anonymized. And of course that means you can de-anonymize the second-to-last respondent… and so on.

How many of these "executives" or "HR people" who contract these kinds of surveys actually have the a) time, b) interest, or c) acuity to perform this kind of exploit? Not many that I could think of.

The bar for exploiting this is high for non-technical people, and I don't think it's rational to conclude that it would be exploited in the majority of cases, much less a significant minority. I think the default usage of surveys like this is approximately: 1) come up with some questions, 2) put these into some survey software, 3) put in the employee email list, 4) blast everyone with a link and a deadline, then 5) check back in on the results when the deadline is near.

Ain't nobody got time to watch every result come in and do some computation to figure out everyone's exact answers. If that's what they were really after, they'd probably just remove the option to respond anonymously. There are far easier ways to achieve the same end than by some circuitous exploit, right?

Are elections rigged?

Or is it the same money pulling the strings of whoever takes the seat?

The illusion of choice is a very effective method for controlling people.

Also, voting records in the US indicate whether you voted or not, but not who you voted for; that part is anonymous. Perhaps his company was similar.

Surveys aren't a good way to do that.

I would guess the point of your parent comment was that the finding is more easily explained by people who like being in the office being more likely to go there.

Don't assume survey results that run counter to your anecdotal experience have been fabricated.

Leadership wants attrition. They want people to quit and if they don’t have to make you redundant and pay you out, fantastic. You just gave them good data points to indicate that a portion of people are likely to do just that.

If you upend your whole life and move to a hub then that means you need this job very badly. Guess when you’re getting promoted next? Not soon.

That was also promptly shutdown, in favor of two new tech hubs in cheaper countries and a smattering of MSPs.

The best solution to this is to create employee-owned private corporations like Huawei: All its shares are owned by its employee union, and the union democratically decides how much dividends to distribute to the employees every year. Easiest worker-ownership setup.

For some subset of people, work is the most important thing in their lives and it is largely how they identify themselves. As the tweet points out, the vast majority of execs are in this bucket. This is almost by definition - despite what has been popular talk in some corners of the Internet, most execs do work extremely hard, as do most people who get to the upper echelons of their profession. These people essentially want to work more. FWIW, while I'm not an exec, I would put myself in this bucket.

On the other side are basically the "work to live" people. While this is a pretty broad bucket (some people may want to spend as little time working as possible, but I think most people in this bucket care about their careers and want to do well, but they still fundamentally see work as a means to an end to achieve goals outside of work), these folks are much more likely to not be execs. They want to do a good job, get paid well, and then go home.

So I think both sides talk past each other because they fundamentally have different goals. For people in the first bucket (again, that was definitely me), I grew to hate full-time remote work. I felt incredibly disconnected from my work and my colleagues over time, and my motivation definitely waned over time, and as someone who really identified myself in the context of my profession, that was really tough. But I also don't have kids, and not a lot of responsibilities outside of work, so I can definitely understand the other side of it.

I don't think there are any easy answers, but saying "data alone is not enough to sway these people" I think misses the point, because you're only showing data that pushes the viewpoint of your "second bucket" group. Again, to emphasize, not a bad thing, but it doesn't encompass all of the concerns that are in play of the first bucket group.

I love remote because it saves me 100+ minutes of my life every day. Minutes better spent working. I do miss joining me peers for lunch and Watercooler talk but not worth it.

Just as it is with racial, age or sex discrimination. And before that child labour, slavery and indenture.

To learn they have to be beaten in the market place, or the floor of the legislature.

Grift and fraud. Nobody likes to talk about this, but many people are running grifts, from doing nothing, meetings in the supermarket or on vacation, to running multiple jobs. I had a couple working 5-6 different full time jobs together. Another was working offshore using a family member as “remote hands” to keep a device connected in the US. It’s difficult and expensive to police.

Hybrid decreases effectiveness. A remote only unit is great, a on-prem unit is great. “Permanent” hybrid is the worst of all worlds. Remote people rely on tools more and they don’t work as well with people in site. Meeting transcripts rely on the different clients to identify speakers, and work poorly in conference rooms, for example. It’s also easy for bad patterns to develop where remote people get cut out by people talking off the cuff in office, or vice versa.

The majority of the quality of life improvements are really about time freedom. You’d get most of it by giving employees sufficient paid time and allowing them to use it. Remote first by business unit makes sense too, but I think that the risk is the remote workers become like the folks in “provincial” branch offices.

Are the tasks getting done but are poor quality? Are you implying that you'd be fine with the shoddy work if they weren't working multiple jobs? If not why do you keep them, irrespective of whether thy have multiple jobs?

I want to say very clearly that I don't doubt that "grift and fraud" happens. What percentage of the workforce are engaged in this grift? If you have 100 remote workers in your average IT shop at BigCo, how many of them do you think are truly running a scam that would never pass if they were in person? My guess is 3 or less, but that's just a guess.

In case it's not obvious, what I'm working towards is: If 3% of your workforce is engaged in grift, but a lot of the other 97% are happier and more productive, is it worth pissing off a substantial portion of that 97% just to shut down the 3%?

> The majority of the quality of life improvements are really about time freedom. You’d get most of it by giving employees sufficient paid time and allowing them to use it.

This leaves out one of the main things to like about WFH for many (most?) Americans, at least: I get to avoid wasting 30–90 minutes of my day in a stressful commute that comes with its own share of expenses.

With employees, I agree it’s much lower, it’s mostly just lazy loafing that is harder to spot if the employer doesn’t have clear evidence of performance. The bigger issue for them are people who move away, lie and invent medical problems to avoid work rules.

The majority of my folks are in IT infrastructure and support. It’s pretty easy to spot on the operations side if you understand the tickets. The other side of the shop, who do more dev work relies on having good managers and leads. The documentation isn’t a fair evaluation— a single change may require weeks of work for a developer, so using counts isn’t fair unless you really understand the workflows. For those roles, hybrid makes hiding easier.

Don’t worry, people are perfectly capable of doing that in the office too.

For example, this employee who is supposedly spending 1/6th of their time on your job. If you say tried to capitalize their time such that you now have 6/6ths on your tasks, would the employee even accept this arragement themselves? You are effectively giving them 1/6th the pay for the same full time day of work they do anyhow. Squeezing this employee is not going to see you get more work out of them. It is going to see them leave your company and replace that job with another, leaving you shortstaffed and having to invest in vetting candidates and onboarding. Now you ask how much you get out of an employee you put the squeeze on given that this will lead to turnover and an overall loss of that full time work being done as you suffer through a period of short staffing.

When you have your wife sending proof of life texts and posing as you, pretending to have technical difficulties in meetings, not only are you not doing anything, you’re like a disease that saps the productivity of your colleagues.

With respect to kids and other “life”, we set clear expectations - you’re not paid to babysit. Personally, my expectation is that our folks are professionals and we all deal with incidental things. I was stuck waiting for a gas meter change all afternoon last week. My admin’s son had a snow day. But if your car breaks down every Friday, or your 6th grandmother has passed, that’s a problem.

What you are saying is this: how an employee spends their time is 100% the responsibility of their manager. That's extremely infantilizing - strong teams I have worked on expect employees to self-manage their time productively and deliver about "full time" bandwidth (minus time off, maintenance work, etc) on a consistent basis so we can effectively plan and execute.

I'm speaking from experience: I had to deal with a new hire whom I was assigned to mentor who tried to juggle just one other job and it was super obvious they weren't working when they said they were. It took a long time to work through the PIP process, and effectively that person stole not only the company's time and money, but wasted a good deal my own time and patience. Fuck them and their entitled mentality. If they had gotten their shit done on time and without sketchy meeting aversion, they might have continued enjoying the second paycheck. Frankly if they had done good work and in a timely fashion it might not have mattered if they had another job - but if you're employed (not contracted) ethically speaking that employer and those coworkers are correct to expect that job to be your first priority during the work week.

Its really simple -> give them assigned tasks. If they don't get them done and can't prove they actually worked on it (provided it was reasonable for their skillset) then fire them.

It is really that easy. But people continue saying this "grift" exists of employees abusing their companies. If this is really true, then all it says is that managers at these companies are really REALLY terrible at managing and they should be the first to go.

Kindly go away and chew on this while you do so: if everyone started their own billion-dollar business like you claim it’s possible (and plausible) to do, then that means the cumulative wealth available out there is literally infinite and currency has no relevant function.

So for currency to be worthwhile and billion-dollar businesses to be viable, there must be finite resources. Furthermore, since humans cannot be trusted to act in the interest of society, then regulation is needed to ensure equitable outcomes and minimize harms.

Now go away and leave me be.

I don't exactly agree with GP, but I would ask you to perform a similar thought experiment: if companies could work the way you claim they should, where are the examples of these companies? Why do even you portray the environment as being full of companies whose primary goal is to exploit their workers?

We live in a remarkable free time, so alternative models should have ample room to grow. And yet, I don't see a flourishing of companies that work under your "better model". Why?

Companies primary goal is to exploit /everything/, and why wouldn't workers be included/

Yeah, but this isn't true as a blanket statement. Sure, most companies want to be profitable, and I agree "being profitable" is inherently exploitative. However, companies also generally produce useful products, the demand for which is often the primary driver of said profitability (i.e. economies of scale). So, it must be true that companies can often (and frequently do) have a different primary goal: "make a thing which has high enough demand for us to become profitable".

So assuming every company is out to exploit their workers is both narrow-minded and pretty obviously untrue, when given a little thought. It also turns out happier employees make better things--else, why would we constantly have people pushing for better working conditions? Some companies, by definition must meet some minimum bar of providing for their employees. This is often dictated by law, otherwise they will eventually be stripped away in search of "efficiency" (i.e. "profit margins"). However, this is strictly not true of many companies. Many companies go above and beyond the bare minimum when it comes to benefits for their employees.

I know these things because I have experienced them firsthand. I am not the only one who has done so, either, so clearly not all companies are actually exploiting their workers to the same degree. I would even go so far as to point out that some companies do their best to not exploit their workers. Even if this is purely done to differentiate the company from its competition, and serves to attract good employees, this is still a benefit to the employees of said company.

So I pretty soundly reject your hypothesis that all companies' primary goal is to "exploit everything". Not every company is an evil megacorp, and portraying them all as such does no service to the companies that are actually working hard to not be an evil megacorp.

The problem is transforming the word’s meaning in the next sentence to imply they use the resource/personnel unfairly, which is demonstrably untrue as you point out (though it’s certainly the case that for some companies both meanings apply)

Nope - the 'free market' would just cause enough inflation to scoop away all that infinite money and make things end up exactly like how they are now. A tiniest minority at the top, living more luxuriously and comfortably than the feudal kings of old by doing less work, an overwhelming majority at the bottom struggling to survive.

Currency will always have a function because there will be certain services that will never be infinite, for example getting a massage from another human. Even with infinite resources and robots doing all jobs you can see how currency will still be worthwhile.

The only way dominance can be sustained is by using the government to throttle the competition.

For instance, IBM is a recognized mainframe monopoly. They are not valuable today not because they lost the mainframe dominance, but because mainframes are obsolete (or almost).

> What they won't do is lose to a competitor on their own terms.

Markets are always changing. Large companies tend to optimize for a particular market, and when it inevitably changes, they cannot adapt and get left behind. Often its their competitors that change the market.

See the classic book "The Innovators' Dilemma".

(The same thing happens in nature when a species over-specializes to a particular niche.)

Yes, because they don't NEED or WANT to do anything that jeopardizes their position in the executive group-think. Remember that every year they survive, they are going to get 10s of millions.

The cost of sticking out for their own reports is too high. They'd much rather their reports kill themselves and their own lives than forego the 10s of millions coming this year. Short term.

Also remember that they see their current position as a reward for sacrificing a lot in life. They feel entitled to boss people. People should bow to their command because they reached the top org chart positions. How dare people below them propose anything but loyalty to whatever they want?

Like many of the other responses in this thread, you're generalizing a small set of experiences to every company, and not even acknowledging that other companies may not work this way

I suspect this is due to not wanting "to do anything that jeopardizes [your] position in the [anti-]executive group-think."

I have worked for multiple companies that looked for feedback from employees, and claimed to use that information to better the company for those employees. Some actually did, and others did not.

Not all of them are the same, and many actually seek feedback in earnest. Meanwhile, you would have me believe that some of the companies I have worked for didn't exist.

Arent they? If those 'not same's constituted any tangible statistics, the landscape would be different. But it is how it is.

That is like saying "But there were good people among that overwhelmingly vicious bunch too!". Yeah, there may have been a small percentage of good people who never went along with the mainstream even in Nazi Germany, but the majority did and they did what they did. The example is not extreme - you can apply the same logic to every case in which someone tries to acquit an overwhelmingly negative majority by mentioning an insignificant number of positive minority gaming that majority.

It's entirely possible the landscape isn't different because the "good" companies are inherently uncompetitive with the "bad", but this is not something to be solved by just writing every company off as "bad" and then blaming the resulting system on that.

You have to start by understanding why, to paraphrase you, "the landscape is not different". I think writing off all companies as "the same" avoids answering that question entirely, which really cripples any logic you build on top of that premise, to the point where it leads to contradictory or invalid conclusions.

I disagree that the "bad" companies represent "an overwhelmingly negative majority", because I do not see the necessary proof to support such a statement. It appears to be a generalization driven by motivated reasoning.

In my career, I've had fewer "bad" companies than "good", and none of the "good" ones match any of your descriptions of what "companies are like". Am I to believe I've just had incredible luck? Maybe!

However, I reject the notion that the "vast majority" of companies are exploitative. This does not fit with my experience, or the experiences of my peers. I would say "less than half", if I were to really ballpark the number.

This, of course, puts your comments in a pretty poor light, for me. You're outright insulting the "good" companies I've worked for, by insinuating that they were only trying to exploit me for profit. I mean, they were "exploiting" me, if you really want to split hairs, but I understood the nature of the relationship and actively consented to it, because the relationship also benefitted me. I had a good job, good colleagues, challenging work, solid responsibilities, good benefits, good pay, and more. The fact that the "company" was trying to make more from the output of my work than they were offering to me as compensation is not an inherently bad thing. I could not, on my own, build the kinds of things these companies were building, nor would I have thought of the products/services on my own, so there is indeed value in being "a company".

I was also part of said company, and identified as such. My success was its success, and vice versa.

Your outlook on this topic is needlessly pessimistic.

This applies to both work location and number of hours per week. It's gotta be hard to understand and accept that lower-level workers have a different view and priorities from your own, especially when all your fellow execs share your own view.

And, as the tweet says, at a certain level you can afford to offset all the negatives of work location / work hours. No commute. Personal chef. All household chores covered. Full time individual childcare. It's a lot easier to come into the office for 50-60 hours per week when you don't have to also spend your time outside the office trying to balance sleep and survival. But, again, that's not what life looks like for an average employee.

Of course they did. If you want to convince a company doing RTO why it’s bad, you need to show the negative impacts to the organization. Everybody seems to approach this from their individual perspective.

There is a reason these are the same thing that should already be obvious: If you want people to take a job that costs them ~$30,000 more in expenses, you'll have to pay them more. If you split the difference, you both come out $15,000 ahead.

This before you even consider the costs to the company directly. If employees work from home you need less office space etc. That's not just rent but heat, power, security, insurance, internet, furniture, taxes, cleaning, lawyers and permits. That's a ton of money.

You could have 2 employees doing the same job, but one (Joe) has a 5 minute walk as their commute and the other (John) has a 50 minute drive in a personal vehicle. If there are enough Joe’s around to fill your roles, the costs associated with the Johns commutes don’t matter to the organization.

Facilities costs are actually pretty minor in the grand scheme of things…especially if your company has other roles that cannot be done remote. Incremental office space costs are minimal.

Your only hope to win the debate is to demonstrate with real productivity data. Perhaps things like demonstrating reduced sick time, turnover rate decreases, etc.

This doesn't mean they have different expenses. John is paying $2500/mo in time and commuting expenses, Joe is paying $2500/mo in additional rent to live in the downtown. Efficient market hypothesis says they're the same and anyway you care about the mean or median rather than rare outliers when operating at scale.

> Facilities costs are actually pretty minor in the grand scheme of things…especially if your company has other roles that cannot be done remote. Incremental office space costs are minimal.

Most offices are just offices. The jobs that can't be done remotely are the likes of data centers or factories, but these are different facilities in different places. If you're e.g. a tech company, your offices in San Francisco or New York contain entirely people who could work from home whereas your data centers might be in Oregon or Virginia.

So the costs are not incremental, they allow you to close entire facilities; and those facilities are the ones with higher costs per unit area; and the incremental costs are not trivial either. Things like rent and utilities scale approximately linearly with square footage or number of employees. Some are even super-linear because larger facilities succumb to bureaucracy, HR drama and combinatorial explosion in risk interactions.

> Your only hope to win the debate is to demonstrate with real productivity data.

I can win the debate this way too.

That two hours a day your employees were wasting in traffic? They're salaried employees, that's 10 hours a week they're not working.

They are still general living expenses. Those don’t go away based on employment or not, at home or not. They could decrease/increase some, but you can’t assume the whole amount is tied to employment only. Besides, if you don’t like your living expenses…quit or move.

> If you're e.g. a tech company…

What if you are not? what if you are a bank, a hospital, a factory, an insurance company, a processing center? You cannot make the assumption that every organization can just close “some” offices and leave others open. What about the HR and morale impact when 75% of your employees cannot work remote, but your SWEs can? Is it worth the office/desk footprint savings for leadership to create an elite group with a special benefits that pisses for every other person at the org? Probably not…

> That two hours a day your employees were wasting in traffic? They're salaried employees, that's 10 hours a week they're not working.

Now you are back to dealing with an individual impact here. If they are a salaried employee, the amount of work required for completion in a given week doesn’t change whether a commute is 10 hours or 10 minutes. That’s time the employee is investing by choosing to live where they live and work for the employer they work for. I have been on a salary for nearly 40 years…my employers have never expected me to work 168 hours a week. The expectation was an average of 40.

That wasn't the assumption. The assumption was that the difference was $2500/mo. Real estate in the heart of the downtown is significantly more expensive.

> Besides, if you don’t like your living expenses…quit or move.

At which point we're back to the efficient market hypothesis. If you live downtown, your rent is $2500/mo higher than if you live an hour away, but if you live an hour away you spend $2500/mo in time and commuting costs to get to the office.

But if you work from home then you live an hour away from the office, never go there and have no commuting expense, so you're ahead by $2500/mo and the company would have to compensate you for refusing to allow that.

> What if you are not?

Then you probably still have the same structure where the facilities that require in-person work are separate from the corporate offices:

> what if you are a bank, a hospital, a factory, an insurance company, a processing center?

A company is not a factory etc., a company has factories, or bank branches, or warehouses, or medical facilities. These facilities are generally already separate facilities from the offices where SWEs and other administrative staff work, because those facilities have different geographic requirements. Bank branches or medical facilities have to be near customers or patients. Warehouses or factories will be in places with cheap real estate or industrial zoning.

Offices have traditionally been in cities.

> What about the HR and morale impact when 75% of your employees cannot work remote, but your SWEs can?

This is a really dim view of people. Nurses and factory workers know perfectly well why they can't work from home. Why would they resent that someone else can when their job doesn't have the same requirements? Do they get mad at park rangers because their job allows them to spend time in the outdoors?

They might even notice that it's to their advantage because it gets 25% of the cars off the road so there isn't so much traffic during their commute, and stops them from being in competition with SWEs for the housing within reasonable distance of where they work.

> If they are a salaried employee, the amount of work required for completion in a given week doesn’t change whether a commute is 10 hours or 10 minutes.

You might expect that bosses would get away with giving you more work when you have more time, or that the quality of any given work might be influenced by how much time someone has available to spend on it. And nobody says you're working 168 hours a week, but a lot of people do more than 40, when they have the time.

> That’s time the employee is investing by choosing to live where they live and work for the employer they work for.

It's time the employee is being cost by being forced to commute into the office, which time would be available for other things in the alternative.

You also seem to have really limited experience with organizations that have in office work. My guess is your career started relatively recently (<5 years). Perhaps all you have known is remote—that would track with the strange perspectives you have posted on this thread.

They have to compensate you for the relative difference in value between working for them and working for someone else.

If another company allows WFH and you don't, and that costs the employee $30,000/year to not have, what do you expect them to do when the employer offering WFH offers the same salary? Or even $10,000 less? And what will you have to do in response?

No. They only have to offer enough compensation and benefits to attract enough people into the roles they need filled.

> what do you expect them to do when the employer offering WFH offers the same salary?

Does it matter what another company does if the other company can still fill the role without offering WFH? Your whole premise seems to hinge on this concept that a company offering an in office position can’t effectively fill the opportunities they are offering. That’s not the case in 2025 (at least in the US). Specifically with tech jobs every opening whether WFH or in office generates hundreds of applicants. Some people might prefer WFH, others might prefer in office, but if RTO is the trend, WFH opportunities will start decreasing and will fill up fast. My guess is that given the option between unemployment and employment in an office anyone and everyone who needs an income will opt for the latter and will not sit around stubbornly waiting for a WFH opportunity like a petulant child that has to eat their broccoli before they are allowed to get up from the dinner table.

In the absence of an infinite labor pool, in order to do that they need to outbid the other employers.

> Does it matter what another company does if the other company can still fill the role without offering WFH?

Of course it does, because you have the opportunity to be the other company. You would be able to hire the same person for thousands of dollars less by allowing them to work from home and they would still take the job.

> Your whole premise seems to hinge on this concept that a company offering an in office position can’t effectively fill the opportunities they are offering.

I feel like we've been over this. You can obviously fill the job by paying more, but since the difference in the amount you'd have to pay is more than the value of forcing people to come into the office, why would you throw away money just to have less satisfied employees?

> Specifically with tech jobs every opening whether WFH or in office generates hundreds of applicants.

Applying to job postings on the internet takes a matter of seconds. Have a guess what "hundreds of applicants" implies if the average applicant applies to hundreds of job postings.

Now consider that a lot of the applicants won't be qualified.

> Some people might prefer WFH, others might prefer in office, but if RTO is the trend, WFH opportunities will start decreasing and will fill up fast.

It sounds like you're saying employers offering WFH opportunities will find it even easier to hire at a given level of compensation.

> My guess is that given the option between unemployment and employment in an office anyone and everyone who needs an income will opt for the latter and will not sit around stubbornly waiting for a WFH opportunity like a petulant child that has to eat their broccoli before they are allowed to get up from the dinner table.

Surely this attitude will have no effect on morale or turnover?

Sorry to be blunt, but I think this is incredibly naive given the current market. Since the explosion of remote work I've seen a ton of offshoring to excellent software developers in Latin American and Europe. There is absolutely zero benefit to paying an American salary in those situations because everyone is remote anyway (and there is enough timezone overlap that everyone can work roughly the same hours).

Workers will simply get fired if they don't come in and execs really want RTO, they're not going to get paid more.

If execs really want RTO then people will quit and they'll have to hire new people, pay retraining costs, pay them more because other companies are still offering WFH, lose out on all those lower cost workers in Latin America (or Texas or Virginia) and still be paying millions of dollars for office space their employees don't even want to be in.

There have been 550k tech layoffs in the last 2 years. Pretty sure there are quite a few folks ready and willing to do a commute to work in an office to get a paycheck again.

I'm not following. How much is the difference? The difference to them is $30,000. But you forgot to specify what the difference to the company is.

In scenario A, Jim holds a remote job at Omnicorp.

In scenario B1, nothing changes.

In scenario B2, Jim is transferred into a job with the same responsibilities that is not remote. This raises Jim's expenses by $2,500 a month. It also raises Omnicorp's revenue by $X per month. X is the value you forgot to consider. What is it?

If, for example, it is -$500, then the total cost of transferring Jim is $36,000 per year. If we split that difference evenly between Jim and Omnicorp, Jim will receive a $12,000 raise... but Omnicorp will suffer a net loss of $18,000 per year, so it's hard to see why this would happen or who it helps.

If it's +$1,000, then the total cost of transferring Jim is $18,000 per year. Splitting that difference evenly means Jim gets a $21,000 raise, but again there is no reason this would actually take place, because the company is paying $21,000 a year in order to receive $12,000. Or, viewed another way, the transfer destroys value and you shouldn't expect it to happen.

If X is +$3,000, then the total cost of transferring Jim is -$6,000 per year. At this point the transfer makes sense and it should happen. Splitting the difference evenly means Jim will get a $33,000 raise.

At no point does it make any sense to consider leaving Jim where he is and giving him a $15,000 raise.

It is quite possibly a negative number. Remember that forcing Jim to show up to an office requires you to have an office, which is a huge, major expense that could easily overcome the benefits of having Jim in the office instead of at home. But let's continue with your assumption that it's of some actual value to the company:

> If, for example, it is -$500, then the total cost of transferring Jim is $36,000 per year. If we split that difference evenly between Jim and Omnicorp, Jim will receive a $12,000 raise... but Omnicorp will suffer a net loss of $18,000 per year, so it's hard to see why this would happen or who it helps.

This is the part where you're confused.

Suppose that Jim refuses to work from home for less than $8000/mo and refuses to work from the office for less than $10500/mo, because his incremental cost of working from the office is $2500/mo. Meanwhile the company values Jim working from the office at $500/mo. Since $500 is less than $2500, it does not make sense for Jim to work from the office, instead it makes sense for the company to pay Jim somewhere between $8000/mo and $10000/mo to work from home, because any of those numbers make both of them no worse off than paying Jim $10500/mo to work from the office. This does not depend on what Jim is currently being paid or even whether he is currently working from home.

If the value to the company of having Jim work from the office instead of from home is $3000/mo then the company should offer Jim anywhere between $10500/mo and $11000/mo to work from the office, for the same reason. But since $3000/mo is $36,000/year on top of their expenses for maintaining an office, that value to an ordinary company of having Jim work from the office is implausibly high.

However:

> instead it makes sense for the company to pay Jim somewhere between $8000/mo and $10000/mo to work from home, because any of those numbers make both of them no worse off than paying Jim $10500/mo to work from the office.

It can never make sense for the company to pay Jim more than $8,000 / month, because that is the amount he wants. As long as he's willing to work for $8,000 / month, the value of his work to the company can't exceed $8,000 / month.

You might notice that the value $15,000 doesn't occur anywhere in your most recent comment. How do you consider this comment related to your earlier claim that "If you split the difference, you both come out $15,000 ahead"? What difference have you identified that could be split this way?

The company doesn't know the minimum amount he's willing to work for. They have to guess. If they guess too low, he quits. If they guess too high, they pay more than $8000/mo.

The company also doesn't know exactly how much Jim values being able to work from home, so they have to guess that too. They can reasonably guess that it's in the thousands of dollars per month, but they don't know if it's $1000/mo or $4000/mo.

What they do know is that their cost for having him work from home -- arguably a savings to the company, but perhaps worth $500-$1000 in some cases -- appears to be less than this.

If they guess $1250/mo (i.e. $15,000/year) then they've guessed right in the middle between the start of the range and the actual limit, so each party gets half of the surplus. If the company's costs from allowing WFH are zero then they get to save $15,000/year, and Jim gets to save the $30,000 in commuting expenses in exchange for getting paid $15,000 less, which puts him $15,000 ahead too.

Even if the company's costs are non-zero they're still coming out ahead as long as they're not more than $1250/mo, so if they're $500/mo or $1000/mo and their guess of what he'll take is a reduction of $1250/mo then they'll still want to pay him that much less and let him work from home.

They might also make a better guess and get closer to the actual number of $2500/mo, but then they're running the risk that they overplay their hand and he walks away, and then they don't get the savings of thousands of dollars a year. So who actually gets more of the surplus from letting him work from home is down to salary negotiations, but it's in both of their interests to make it happen.

Before the pandemic there was a big push to reduce occupancy costs and get roles that did not need to sit in an office to subsidize their own offices, just like BYOD - but the dollars involved were orders of magnitude better than BYOD. During the pandemic we proved the costs came at the cost of net productivity on average. The reaction we see now is one against a cultural change that is off putting to people who succeeded in a specific emergent reality - the office culture. A 60 year old CEO has trouble using zoom because they didn’t grow up using it. They don’t know how to be effective over a remote relationship because they have developed exceptionally effective in person skills - that’s why they are where they are. They simply can not accept or fathom a world that is different than that. So they invent hand waving bullshit not based on data.

But economics wins based on data sooner or later. It is better share holder value to eliminate occupancy costs aggressive and offload the occupancy per employee to the employee. The company effectively gets free facilities in this scenario. There is no way the marginal per employee value of in person vibes out paces the marginal cost to shelter their bodies during the work day. The vibes thing is managed through adaptation.

Finally there’s this meme the Dimon and Trump and others use of people not working when working remotely. First that’s not true, second if it’s is, that’s a performance issue. Since when did we stop measuring performance ? The in office or not in office simply isn’t a productivity variable but not working and working during the work day is.

RTO is a cultural thing and you’ll never convince the executives of today by any argument conceivable because you’re telling them the sky is green when they know it’s blue. It doesn’t matter that in this case it’s not objective like the color of the sky. It FEELS objectively true.

However the economics will change, and the leadership will age away, and one day; maybe when the kids who graduated college having gotten their degrees online run the shop - we will offload the cost of housing the employee during the day to the employee because it’s what makes the most economic sense and we will adapt around the challenges.

It’s ok to not be a busy body. I’m not one because it makes me miserable . But these imaginary tradeoffs we invent in our heads are often just justifications.

You think kids are taking up all your time? They have more kids and volunteer at the school, and run a church group, etc.

The clock is secondary because using time efficiently, planning, and classifying which hours you are awake and available are all skills.

Similar patterns happen all throughout life. People have non linear capacities and performance.

There are certain tasks that people need to do every day that take time and, if you can afford to have someone do those tasks, suddenly you have more time you can do other things with.

Of course paying someone saves you time.

But the question is whether that’s the key differentiator holding you back from X, Y, and Z. And no it’s not. There are people who do X, Y, and Z and don’t have a maid.

Maybe on some psychological level getting help is the only way you personally will have time (feels true for myself), but you have to recognize there is significant personality and skill difference when it comes to being busy.

As with a lot of things: individually, yes, this is the only useful way to look at it. Statistically? Over a population? No, of course high levels of unpaid obligations keep people from accomplishing things, in the sense that if you ease those up they accomplish more.

More to the point, I didn't make this about how it was "holding people back" so I'm now seeing why you're so resistant to it, since you think that's what I was getting at: no, it's about attitudes from executives who live life on easy mode then complain that their underlings are lazy.

Perhaps he's simply pointing out that with the right set of skills, you (or others) could also move yourself up (down?) the bell curve, and that your position on the curve isn't necessarily fixed. Treating it as such is inherently limiting.

Laundry, cleaning, cooking, shopping, lawn work, home maintenance, car maintenance, hell even managing your schedule—for an awful lot of executives (among others) much or all of that is optional. They have more freedom with their time because they pay to make a bunch of problems go away (and if they don't, it's a choice). They come home from work and choose what to do—they may still be busy, by choice! But they have far fewer demands on their time. The people who work for them come home from work, work two to four more hours, then, maybe, choose what to do. And you better believe they work weekends, too.

If you have a lot of kids, after a certain age, the older ones can start to help around depending on age. It's how humanity survives in self-sufficient conditions.

For serial kid rearing families there is a plateau in difficulty, and then a steady decline (depending on the personality and health of the kids of course).

It’s still true that having two young kids is more time than and effort than one.

I don't think it makes me busy. It does.

> You think kids are taking up all your time? They have more kids and volunteer at the school, and run a church group, etc.

I'm not counting extremely-optional stuff.

> The clock is secondary because using time efficiently, planning, and classifying which hours you are awake and available are all skills.

Money puts this on extremely-easy mode, because for a huge variety of things "this is a problem that will take much time and attention" becomes "just pay someone to make it go away". I know, because I have enough money that sometimes I can do this (I didn't always, and I didn't grow up that way) and holy god, it makes life so incredibly easy when I can.

Yes they live different lives, but they know they are different from their average worker, they just don't care about them. Making money and their success come above all.

When they make these decisions it is not because they're out of touch. It is because they actively opposed people below them taking an inch. They know it fucks with them, they know they don't like it. They do it anyway.

As an executive this person is excellent albeit trained at corporate speak. They're trying to gather sympathy for execs and it is all bullshit.

How else would you want to motivate them? This is a for profit company after all.

> It is because they actively opposed people below them taking an inch.

In a functioning labor market with high mobility for workers they would just quit and find a better place to work.

> They're trying to gather sympathy for execs and it is all bullshit.

They're trying to hide the fact they've monopolized the labor market and they want you to assume this is all normal. It's a much higher level problem.

It's the primary market underpinning capitalism. Otherwise it's just feudalism or slavery. So, I'd hope you believe it's special.

> The truth is that "a functioning market with high mobility" is just a myth.

There is absolutely no truth in what you just said. I'd have to ask what set of evidence did you examine to arrive at this conclusion?

> The ones with power under capitalism are the ones with capital

Yes. Wealth and capital give you an _advantage_. However it's not exclusive. It's why we recognize things like intellectual property and performance rights. It turns out there's /tons/ of sources of advantage in competition.

> You can try to level the playing field with laws, but that's incompatible with the "small government" folks.

The size of the government seems to have zero impact on it's willingness to enforce laws that are already on the books. Your thesis is thin and based on inherited cynicism. I cannot take it seriously.

Not all, but most. Family members of mine at the VP/EVP level in “enterprise” type companies regularly work 12+ hours on weekdays and ~8 per day on weekends. It’s brutal and their families suffer for it, but it pays exceedingly well.

As another poster put it, it’s survivorship bias. Most people who work that long and consistently end up with a destroyed family life and eventually the collapse of their professional life as well. Those who “make” it by and large keep their family intact because they can afford to make it difficult to leave - or because they’re married to someone of similar lifestyle.

At that level, they’re in the club and guaranteed to advance as long as they don’t make enemies and get kicked out of the club (which is rare, but happens, and usually means they spend a year or so finding another club.) So while some of them do work long hours, they don’t have to. They’ve already been judged to be in the in-crowd and could work 10 hours per week from wherever they want, and they’d still make every promotion.

So why do they work so much, and why do they go to the office? Because most of those guys (a) mutually dislike their families, (b) have psychological disorders, and (c) have office affairs. To psychopaths, 70 hours per week sunk into high-stakes office politics is fun.

Or so you say. But it sounds like a rationalization of why that doesn't matter/makes them morally bad people. First it's "they don't actually do any work, lol", then it's "but they totally don't have to, they could skate by on 2 hours a day, they are already pre-selected for success".

But really, it's perfectly fine if you don't care that much and won't go to that length. You don't have to justify that by coming up with narratives that others who do are evil, mentally ill, or hate their families. You can just say "that's not for me".

Maybe they are "working" from a hotel downtown with their lover.

what are they actually doing? what are the deliverables? are they actual doing intellectual work 12 hours a day?

> As you can see, in a typical day of mine one can count some twenty-five separate activities in which I participated, mostly information-gathering and - giving, but also decision-making and nudging. You can also see that some two thirds of my time was spent in a meeting of one kind or another. Before you are horrified by how much time I spend in meetings, answer a question: which of the activities -- information-gathering, information-giving, decision-making, nudging, and being a role model—could I have performed outside a meeting? The answer is practically none. Meetings provide an occasion for managerial activities.

What do they do in all those hours?

My only experience with executives is the CEO at a "startup" (it really wasn't) in SF. He had to have his email password reset every week because he couldn't remember it. He was furious that asses weren't in all the seats at 9am, but he knocked off at 3pm on Fridays to go drink with his executive chums. I never saw any sign of leadership, vision, or actual work. Just demands on others.

Calling this “survivorship bias” though is like calling anything in evolution “survivorship bias”.

A person with a seriously work focused life is naturally going to excel and I have no problem with this. Someone that makes sacrifices in their personal life (paying to live in the city, not having children or too many etc) so they can be more available and work more hours may do better than me, even at the same level of skill and intelligence. This only seems fair.

They care about their own profits, which are mostly bonus-based, and prestige. If they think they get any extra by appearing doing first and last thing that could drive up share price (or win some extra points in some meaningless internal battles), they will go for it.

They are mostly pretty bad absent parents with laser focus on themselves and their careers only, and then it shows on kids. But in their mind nobody under them should be granted more.

After a certain number of years, handing your kids off to the babysitters so you can work an extra 10 hours a week becomes outright sociopathic neglect. Using your wealth to separate you from the things that actually matter is arguably the peak of corporate disillusionment.

But it's waaaay less useful if you are a worker bee just programming all day. Yes it's still better to talk to people next to a physical whiteboard, but it only matters very occasionally. My wife found it astounding that pre-covid I would sometimes go into the office and not really talk to anyone all day. Literally would just be sitting at a desk typing; the desk could have been anywhere.

If you're somehow a FAAaaaang executive reading this, consider making RTO only mandatory for the people you directly manage and talk to, and then let them decide the policy for their subordinates.

Though I love a good whiteboard sess, a tablet with a stylus and one of many "interactive whiteboard applications" can also be pretty useful. Hard to have a whiteboard session good enough to compensate for the grueling traffic of most HCOL regions a good portion of us likely work in.

Individual contributors in many cases do not benefit from this. In fact it can be an active hindrance. An ICs contribution and performance is easily tracked and captured through the outputs and metrics they produce.

I think the best organization will be one where leadership and managers spend a good deal of the week in the office. High ranking contributors (player coach managers, leads, etc) spend some so they can collaborate with other leads and leaders. And most ICs are optional.

> Remember, they live literally in another world. This doesn't necessarily make them evil, just disconnected. I do not want to be "out of touch" but it is important to acknowledge that this does happen over time.

No they don’t. We all live in the same world and it’s everyone’s responsibility to realize that and our impact on those around us as well as our environment. The ruling class’ personality disorders (detaching from the common folk) are primarily their problems and should be dealt with by them, not worked around by us.

It is physically impossible to be aware of the entirety of one's impact on others. One might be able to dimly perceive how the person across from you is feeling about something you said or did, but even in simple one to one interactions, there's frequent miscommunication and signal loss. If you extend this to making decisions that have an impact on not just one but hundreds or thousands of people, it's literally impossible to know the true impact of all those decisions on all those people. Good decision makers will intentionally cultivate information flows that provide them some insight but those are themselves imperfect.

No it isn't. You just need a shred of empathy.

Depressingly laughable suggestion.

Giving Jared (from Silicon Valley) suggesting “scream your name to your attacker so they are forced to recognize you are human” vibes.

But it's sugarcoated. The only part that makes sense is the fact they are sociopaths who only care about work success.

The rest of it is just sugarcoating the fact that they make these decisions because they simply couldn't give a shit what their peers below them think. They know it fucks with them and that they don't like it. It's not some "oh we don't understand cause we're too rich" sob story.

like fuck off with that, the data and the vibes all point to it being better for the employees and their productivity to work from home. too many "I went through it so you have to as well" types that aren't interested in evolving stuck in their old ways

https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/misuse-of-literally

Is it really so hard to imagine the struggles of someone who doesn’t have any of the benefits listed in the post?

Just sitting down and doing a quick calculation would immediately reveal time allocation dilemmas of prioritizing “return to office” for someone who doesn’t have the benefits.

Time is universally valuable! But even more so for someone who … has significantly less of it because they can’t hire legions of staff to manage their lives?

“What if I didn’t have this? How would that make me feel?” Pretty depressing. Empathy can’t run the business — but surely it is correlated with strong team cohesion and performance?

You also end up in these bubbles where you literally can’t empathize with people because you have no experience to fall back on.

Combine that with a sort of media and religious culture that will tell you you’re right to feel that way.

I’ve hear rich people complain about the fact that rich people are people to, d that poor people don’t appreciate them enough.

And actually, I think this is a common thread these days, that essentially the world’s problems are caused by the fact that rich people don’t have enough power and aren’t trusted enough by society. Marc Andreesen implied this in his Joe Rogan interview.

It's not like they have a choice, gaslighting the general population is their only hope of staying on top/alive.

How does someone make others care about him/her? Hmmm...

Yes, it is hard. While you can break down the struggles to analyze them, actually understanding their emotional impact is a whole different story.

> Empathy can’t run the business — but surely it is correlated with strong team cohesion and performance?

As someone who has recently shifted towards managing people, I am facing two big struggles: how to be empathetic without taking on their emotional burdens and how to respect their situation in life while ensuring they respect their responsibilities in the work place. And this is management at a very low level in the hierarchy. There isn't terribly much that separates myself from them.

I'm not suggesting that there is no role for empathy in a business. Apparently the person who came before me lacked it and survived ten weeks. I'm simply suggesting that it is difficult to balance.

During the TGIF (company all hands) discussing this, the architect of the policy, someone high up in the HR org, explained why it was necessary.

I don’t recall what they said, but I do recall that they happened to be working remotely at the time, after the policy against remote work had already gone into effect.

The brazenness of lecturing us on why remote work was harmful to Google while working remotely was shocking. Predictably, the internal anger over this was enormous.

Rules for thee but not for me, some animals are more equal than others, etc.

Being forced to RTO across the country, then immediately laid off after I uprooted my life to do so, all while knowing the layoffs were planned while they were telling me to move across the country, is fucked.

(also why employers are trying to staff up offices offshore in LATAM and India)

Edit: @tbrownaw all of the responses to your inquiry are accurate.

What does this mean in concrete terms? What useful power do they gain based on physical presence, and what rights are currently absent but coming (back?) soon?

If remote labor is the norm, then every tech company has to compete with every other, across all geographies. If local labor is required, the employers can manage or restrict their competitive environment. There are fewer options for the employee.

The bulk layoffs of the past couple of years have a similar effect - gaining power. It makes every employee a little more conscious that their employment is provisional and conditional.

But I think RTO goes beyond just market power gains. There are many workers who are conscientious, attentive, and dedicated. For each one of those there are plenty who are just punching their time card. I’m no expert but it seems to me that RTO gives the employer and mid-level managers better visibility into all of that dynamic.

But RTO fights against the reality that employers have constructed distributed teams, with people working from all over the globe on the same project. If that’s the case, what is the difference whether I work from my home office, or a hotel desk space in a big building alongside people I don’t know.?

Doesn’t that seem backwards? A company that supports remote work has a worldwide talent pool.l, including lower cost geographies. A company that insists on RTO can only hire locally, so has less talent available and can’t arbitrage labor costs.

I think RTO makes no sense, but I don’t see how it gives employers more power.

* Remote workers aren't actually a worldwide labor force because of time zones, so the competition on the labor side is less than in theory.

* Remote work diminished the difference in liquidity between labor and capital markets. Capital is by nature more liquid than labor, and being more liquid gives you an advantage. As you say, the competitive pressures exist in both markets, and maybe this is a wash in terms of power.

* Remote workers can pay off mortgages faster, leading to more early retirements.

I still think the primary reason is a desire to manage according to the old style, which is a different argument than the GP.

Humans are not just replaceable cogs. When you hire someone, there are several things built into the assumption of that work that we take for granted. For example, federal holidays or work culture. The US is notorious for accepting overwork as the norm (people even brag about working 60-hour weeks) where that's just not acceptable in other parts of the world. That's obviously not true everywhere (e.g. 9-9-6 in China), but is true in enough places that it's not trivial to just swap in person A from country X with person B in country Y. That's not even touching on labor laws, language barriers (e.g. understanding office lingo like "circle back"), or value structure. The latter is huge where Americans care a lot about their jobs and careers and most parts of the world don't have the concept of a career.

Of course. And the workers want more money.

It's how markets work.

As for workers having fewer protections rn, gestures in the general direction of DC.

This doesn't make any sense. Remote jobs are... remote. Moving to mountain view or whatever doesn't make you "limited to other companies in their metro". You can still find remote jobs, but now you have the additional option of in-person jobs in the bay area.

If you live in Omaha and work remotely, far more remote jobs are available.

Since that’s always an option.. yeah clearly keeping talent in high col places is a part of the cudgel that employers want to use against employees. It’s similar to healthcare being connected to employment really. If the labor market was actually free from ultimately coercive tactics like this then the world would look very different.

Remote jobs on average pay less because you are competing with people who live in the MiddleOfNowhere Nebraska.

Even formerly “field by design” roles that were permanently remote at AWS (where I use to work) paid less than in office jobs. Now those jobs are also in office jobs at both Amazon and Google (GCP).

My prediction is that as soon as interest rates fall, employers will be reintroducing “flexibility” to lure workers and attract talent. And at that point it might become more established.

Definitely power there if you know your staff have just uprooted their lives and now depend on you for their immediate term existence…

Do this, or else.

Fortunately I didn't have to uproot my life or move cities, but it was a wakeup call as to the true nature of at will employment. You can't take anything for granted.

A plan B is always a good thing to have. I knew a middle class engineer a few years ago who spent every dime of his salary on installment payments for this and that. The company then had to cut back, and he went into a furious panic. It was a trap he set for himself, although he blamed the company.

Even if the government guarantees you lifetime employment, it isn't a guarantee.

Some states even have laws that employers don't have to pay accrued vacation time. For example Nevada says employers with under 50 employees don't have to pay accrued vacation.

However, there are exceptions. In particular if the company is small enough, or the layoff is below a certain percentage of employees, it doesn't take effect.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retrai...

(And big tech execs still make orders of magnitude more in compensation than you do. You two were never alike!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ve-mANenpC4

It took me about seven years in industry, starting from my first internship, to hit my first million. Non-FAANG and nothing magical happening with appreciating options or stock, just ordinary W-2 work.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43235932

"Millionaire" was added in a 2004 misquote by Robert Wright, and $1 million in 2004 dollars is about $1.7 million in 2025 dollars.