The main thing I don’t get is that the top talent at your company are the ones that can easily find another job instead of putting up with your BS. The people that aren’t competent enough to leave on a whim are the ones you’re going to be keeping.
Buddy of mine straight up laughed at his boss when they told him to return to office, and strangely it has never come up again.
When you know the value you bring, it’s hard to muscle you around.
I’ve seen a lot of people with that attitude still get let go. I’ve fired people with huge ego’s that were extremely valuable to operations that really thought they were untouchable. As good as you think you are, there’s someone else just as good or better that will take your place.
That being said, fuck working for someone that doesn’t respect you, or makes demands of you purely because they want to flex on you.
There are 1.5-2 jobs for every worker right now, depending on area. Top talent can laugh at most RTO processes.
I do agree on cocky dicks who think they’re totally untouchable tho. This wasn’t that.
Overall, employers hold almost all the power in their relationships over employees.
Depending on individual and conditions, some may find themselves with the privilege of slightly improved bargaining power, but no assumption is stable or reliable, and ultimately employers have the final word. A company always may find other workers more easily than, in the greater balance, individuals may find other job positions.
Workers have no inherent or intrinsic value in the relationship. Companies value workers only for their labor, and do so under systems of labor commodification captured beneath the whims of the market.
A company always may find other workers more easily than, in the greater balance, individuals may find other job positions.
This (emphasis mine, for clarity) is not accurate. There are currently more jobs than people, and people of certain positions have enormous power in job negotiations.
Companies value workers only for their labor
And workers only value companies for the pay. This isn’t really an argument about anything
A job opening being posted offers no important information about the situation inside any company.
For most of us, not having a job represents having a much higher risk of death. The conditions of workers are essentially conditions of work or die.
If you think workers have as much bargaining power as companies, then you are, frankly, deluded. You may personally not notice the depth of the disparity, due to your having certain privileges, but you are still deluded even about your own conditions.
Workers literally have more bargaining power than employers at the moment, be I’m not deluded about that. I work in retention and partner with recruiting daily.
Oh the invaluable people do get fired. The problem is that the company never replace them, because they can’t be replaced.
Their value is not in how smart or skilled they are but in how much they know of their work in the company. Most of this work is not documented and it can take a decade to build this knowledge.
These people are key elements of the functioning of the company. You lose months of productivity each year simply because they’re not there, and you might even lose years of work that’s now unmaintainable.
I don’t know, if companies are too arrogant to see that or if they’d rather have people who obey than a working company. I bet on the second though.
Have you ever had a middle manager above you who constantly has to interfere as if to prove how necessary they are?
This is similar. It’s not always about the amount/quality of your work or even about the money; sometimes it’s just about control. Those who don’t actually do much (again, managers and CEOs, etc) want desperate people they can rule over.
They don’t see workers as people, they’re a commodity like everything else.
It’s because the people making these decisions aren’t incrntivised to think about the long term effect for the company. All they need to worry about is if it makes line go up in the short-term so they can get a fat bonus then use how much line went up to get a job somewhere else before the shit hits the fan. Rinse and repeat.
Even better, the competent ones ask for more money
Seriously the actions of all these big companies shows they don’t really give a shit about retaining top talent. Unfortunately, for big name companies, they’ll always have an inflow of talented new grads who are willing to give up their dignity to get their name on their resumes, and it’s cheaper (in the short term, which is all shareholders care about) to churn and burn them then to invest in long term talent
We are all freely interchangeable widgets in their calculations. They don’t have time to consider that some people might be better than the job than others.
I put up with hellish demands and a nightmare commute because I thought working at Important Company was a privilege. And to so degree it was. But I don’t put up with bullshit anymore and that was a lesson I had to learn on my own, the hard way.
yup - early on in my career, working at a specific FAANG company was my life’s greatest ambition, now I don’t think there’s any amount of money they might feasibly offer me that would make me work there lol - Once you have enough income to be comfortable, work life balance is worth more than anything
Had a convo with my mum last month, where she was concerned that I wasn’t looking to supercharge my career as I enter my 40s. She couldn’t understand why I’d declined an interview with Meta.
I had to spell it out… I won’t miss that extra money. I don’t have an expensive lifestyle, and I don’t want one. I’d miss the time lost with my kids, and I’d sure as shit regret the stress and anxiety of additional work pressure.
But then, I also had to explain why staying in an unhappy marriage “for the kids” is infinitely worse than peaceful and happy co-parenting.
Boomers. Sigh.
Better yet if the workers unionized they could end up with a strike or no workers at all. If these were the good ol days they may even wake up without their kneecaps.
That’s part of it. Another part is middle management can’t function without seeing you. Finally, it’s not worth it to a company to maintain a lease on a building if nobody works there and it’s not easy getting out of those leases.
What doesn’t make sense is why they’re not firing the useless middle managers.
Where I work, it’s the middle managers who make a list of useless people. They obviously won’t put their own names on the list.
Even a structure that is only a house of cards still depends on the cards of the middle tiers to hold itself up.
have you led a team before?
Then middle management is either incompetent or like micro manage.
There are so many fucking managers and administrators in modern organizations.
What would you recommend to capitalists, for defending themselves from the broader population, that might be a superior alternative to using human shields?
Death.
Until it happens, it seems the shields are working in their interests.
Yes.
*and
The lease is already paid, or the money is planned to be paid. You can’t recover this money anyway. But you can still save on energy and cleaning.
Getting out of the lease is as easy as not renewing it.
I agree with most of this except the lease is a sunk cost, making people come in based on a variable that won’t change is bad decision making, the discussion should be made independently of lease. I agree some managers think this way, it’s usually the ones who could benefit from remedial business finance classes.
What if I don’t return to the office and also don’t quit?
Then they get to fire you for non-compliance. And you don’t get to collect unemployment. Basically the same as quitting for them.
That’s not what my employment contract says, last I checked. And those can’t be changed unilaterally.
You’ve got it better than most, then.
You should familiarize yourself with constructive dismissal
Nice, in theory, proving it is the real problem. Meanwhile you’re not getting paid and they have an entire fund just for lawyering you into submission.
Yeah, that’s why unions are so important… Without one in that situation you’re fucked.
Kinda baffling to me most tech-companies don’t have one. I get they’re attempring to stop unionising but they can’t easily be replace their whole workforce at once. They’d loose all their know how…
Copying my reply from another similar post -
I would lose my control over my minions… Why don’t you understand?
Whoops, I meant, my staff can’t be monitored…
Whoops, I actually meant, I will lose the one place in life where I can actually throw around my power…
/s
It isn’t, it’s all the office space they own, if people are allowed to keep working from home the retail office market will crash pretty hard.
It can be both.
Ever see how much real estate companies like Google has? If all those bay area companies said fuckit let’s be remote it would crash the market and rock the economy.
We should though, if possible.
No one cares about retail office market. A market bubble crashing is merely an opportunity to earn money for the others. Capitalism doesn’t care about losers.
America only has capitalism for the poor. For the rich, it’s socialism. You better believe retail office owners stand to be losers, and they have power to fight.
There is no money to be earned though if nobody needs office space then all those offices will need to be converted to living space which will reduce the price of domestic homes too.
Cool. Then we can convert it to housing
I’m not going to quit or return to the cubefarm. These coprophagous donkey molesters can fucking well fire me and pay unemployment.
Hey who knew that the best way to make money as a company is have very few workers and be an amazing talker that can dupe others into investing into your pile of shit. Oh wait, Holmes, Neuman and Bankman-fried already came up with that business model. The innovation on that model is just don’t get caught.
Or maybe…
CEO 1: “Our plan to force everyone back to the office isnt working. They’re just quitting”
CEO 2: “Ok new narrative, convince then it was our plan to get them to quit, and keep forcing them to return to office.”
Middle manager here: they want you to quit, and me to do your job plus the jobs of the other 3 who just left after you’re gone.
What do middle managers do in WFH jobs? Most companies I’ve worked in have as many “managers” as bottom level employees. It’s hilarious
In the best case, mentoring.
In the worst case, produce carbon dioxide, which the plants would need if they weren’t plastic and only in the central office thousands of miles away.
I’m a middle manager. I run reports to make sure my team is doing what they’re supposed to do and identify things they need to be coached on if they’re falling short. I also attend meetings with other teams to figure out solutions to things my team collaborates with them on.
Some work from home dude cheat the system to work 2 full-time job at a same time. Not anymore. Well done CEO.
Or is this op-ed 3D chess reverse psychology to get you back into the office?
Hopefully the hybrid model is here to stay. I actually prefer being in the office. The only negative of going in for me is the commute.
The only negative of going in for me is the commute
That’s a pretty HUGE negative. Calculate how much time is wasted by your commute, calculate how much your transportation costs are, and then use that info to recalculate your compensation.
For me, commuting is aprox 1 hour each way (I’m only 27 miles away, but traffic is bullshit), and it costs me about $8 per day (that’s the cost of driving to a nearby park&ride and taking public transportation the rest of the way into the city & back). That’s 44 lost hours of free time EVERY MONTH, plus $176 lost out-of-pocket each month just to commute (this is based on an average month with 22 work days). And don’t even suggest I move/live closer to work, cost of housing grows exponentially the closer you get to the city.
I don’t understand how anyone can be in favor of commuting in to a job site if it isn’t absolutely essential for the type of work being done.
I don’t mind going in once or twice because when I was pure WFH, the lack of human interaction started to drive me a little crazy. Course, I’m also single which doesn’t help.
Edit: and it’s a ~25min drive
This used to be me until I got to WFH for 4 years. I’m never go back in an office now.
If only the people who wanted to go in went in there’d be practically no commutes. There’d be a lot less reason to have an office, but people can self-select jobs for that, too.
