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Apple, SpaceX, Microsoft return-to-office mandates drove senior talent away (arstechnica.com)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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The study (PDF), published this month by University of Chicago and University of Michigan researchers and reported by The Washington Post on Sunday, says:

In this paper, we provide causal evidence that RTO mandates at three large tech companies—Microsoft, SpaceX, and Apple—had a negative effect on the tenure and seniority of their respective workforce. In particular, we find the strongest negative effects at the top of the respective distributions, implying a more pronounced exodus of relatively senior personnel.

Dell, Amazon, Google, Meta, and JPMorgan Chase have tracked employee badge swipes to ensure employees are coming into the office as often as expected. Dell also started tracking VPN usage this week and has told workers who work remotely full time that they can't get a promotion.

Some company leaders are adamant that remote work can disrupt a company's ability to innovate. However, there's research suggesting that RTO mandates aren't beneficial to companies. A survey of 18,000 Americans released in March pointed to flexible work schedules helping mental health. And an analysis of 457 S&P 500 companies in February found RTO policies hurt employee morale and don't increase company value.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

There's an assumption that these companies actually value competency.

For many companies, once they established the brand value, competency becomes an expensive superfluous thing. From that point forward it's about high margin while churning so the customers don't immediately catch on that the good folks are gone. Especially once they've converted a critical mass of customers to renting their product, then the money keeps rolling in and the product can pretty much plateau.

In companies serving businesses, it can take a long long while before the right people at the customers catch on enough to care. When the product sucks for the users and they gripe to leadership, well a few rounds of golf with the vendor and that can is kicked down the line. The employees need to suck it up because this is the premier solution in the industry...

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

They value the job getting done efficiently with the minimum amount of confusion and risk, which is what good senior types will do and enable others to do (when doing something big or new, a team with only more junior types will fall into every pitfall and end up in every programming dead-end imaginable, but much less so if there's a senior person around, mainly because such people already went through similar things and often recognize certain kinds of potential problems before they're actual problems)

That said, plenty of managers in plenty of companies often don't know what they have until they lose it, and I expect B2C companies and larger B2B - which as you point out are mainly Brand driven - are less likely to value predictable delivery which is much closer to what's actually needed on the first release than smaller B2B, consultancies or in-house development were it's a lot harder to shove inadequate shit out and then convince the paying customers or the business side (if doing in-house development) that's what they want.

Certainly that's my own experience.

IMHO, as long as the senior types in these companies aren't fixated in staying in B2C, they'll have no problem finding new jobs and may even enjoy it more, so as I wrote in the previous post, it's easier for them to leave.