I will die on this hill: tech firms that mandated 5 days in the office was about soft layoffs, rather than a principled stance on individual performance under WFH.
My "evidence" is that trading firms that kept raking in the money, and that benefit from maximum productivity of their employees, still generally have a hybrid work culture.
> I will die on this hill: tech firms that mandated 5 days in the office was about soft layoffs, rather than a principled stance on individual performance under WFH
“True work only happens in person with human collaboration! Everyone must come back”
2 years pass
“Oh wow we can replace everyone with a chatbot this is amazing”
narrator: It was the interest rates all along. Many of these tech businesses are fundamentally bad, the ROI is smoke and mirrors, energy shocks and bad macro-economics are coming, and investors are starting to ask hard questions.
Tech has never been perfect, but there was a time when it felt more hopeful and optimistic and about building cool stuff. There's always been give and take with the money side of things that's necessary to keep fueling the building, but it feels like it all kind of went off the rails somewhere.
I'd be fine with earning less (we're pretty frugal) to work in that kind of environment with good people.
I don't think it was interest rates. Tech just saw that workers were able to extract higher and higher pay and more and more benefits and the industry saw an opportunity to reverse this trend. And it has succeeded. The semi-coordinated action since 2023 has caused pay to stagnate, enabled businesses to remove benefits, and frightened workers away from changing employers.
There's a second layer of abstraction here where it's way harder to measure a big tech exec's worth.
Trading firm managers are like sales managers, you've got one number, nothing else matters, the truth will set you free.
Big Tech is a bunch of people competing for influence over the big shared number coming in from ads or whatever, it's important to have good UX etc so you get more ad money, but how do you tell who's meaningfully contributing, or who's just really good at playing internal politics? This will bias towards different sorts of decisions.
My guess is that it was a reaction to the pandemic-era trend of "over employment" where a small number of remote workers bragged about clocking in simultaneously to multiple jobs. Employers may have decided that their employees' physical body was the only unique identifier that couldn't be duplicated.
Well... Yes. The middle class haven't been rendered sufficiently replaceable yet. Make no mistake, once you're deskilled, you'll be treated exactly like the poor. Have you not been keeping up? What do you think the whole AI craze is about? Perfecting transmute money->code for the wealthy without requiring the burden of hiring.
When I worked at BlackBerry, it pissed me off when CEO John Chen sent out an email telling employees that they need to be fully focused on their BlackBerry job. Meanwhile, he was on the board of directors of Disney and Wells Fargo while BlackBerry was failing badly.
> My guess is that it was a reaction to the pandemic-era trend of "over employment"
I'm guessing the opposite: that these firms wanted to push back-to-the-office policies, and so either invented, or publicized, engineers doing "over employment", and that it wasn't a real problem that any of them actually faced.
Not working from home is easier than from office. But in general why keep employees you can’t trust? At least on the scope of startups it shouldn’t be a problem. When you know each person face to face, everyone in the team knows if someone is slacking. Doesn’t matter if it’s wfh or from office.
Thing is, who decides how many tasks someone can do in a day? What if they get paid for 8 but only work for one, but the manager doesn't know they do, and they never communicate their workload is too low?
Why would you expect Homo Economicus to ask for more work? The companies they work for chase infinite profit at zero cost as a matter of principle, why shouldn’t employees?
This holds whether their butt is in a seat in some office or at home.
Same can be said for people using LLM agents to complete jobs faster than humans ever possibly can. It's not like they just fluked it. They've learned how to harness the capabilities of the tech. Now companies are introducing this stuff as a normal workflow but they are clueless as to how it actually works and expecting 10x output from people.
It will all crash when they will see that people can't do 10x, even with AI. It requires too much expertise and knowledge in the field to actually make it work as a hired professional. Look at the AWS outages... and they are professionals, right? RIGHT?
Nail guns are tools, just like hammers. However, you have to know how to use it and to know how to adjust the pressure for the depth you need. It also costs money, much more than a hammer. And you can't use normal nails, you have to have a specific cartridge of nails, and you must know how to adjust it, and ultimately to not die.
Nailguns are not as complicated as you think, anybody with IQ over 80 can be trained to the top proficiency in 30 mins. Same goes for other power tools, they are generally much easier to use and more productive than their human-powered equivalent. The effect of the construction industry adoption of those is in smaller crew sizes, which is also being observed in SW industry.
I think it's a fair comparison; experienced carpenters who've learned to work fast with a hammer, now asked to be 10x more productive while using a new tool they don't have experience with. It probably got more than a few a bit bothered.
get your carpenter a circular saw, a drill, a router, a hand planner and an orbital. on many jobs you ll get your 10x.
you don't need much experience. the tools make you insanely faster with much much less physical strain and maintenance time. they're simple, predictable, reliable, and obscenely powerful.
an experimented carpenter would take a few minutes to be decent at using then.
- stable and "slow" is best
- don't ever let the blade get pinched (by wood)
- be mindful of the cords
- keep the flesh out of the way
- goggles up and don't breathe the dust
There are very few contractors still swinging a hammer. They're going to be slower and more expensive than the competition, which is a major factor in getting the job.
This is a management issue. They should be keeping an eye on the progress and see if the pace is enough for the deadline. Estimates are a thing too, I know. But you can see if someone is slacking and falls behind. If the workload is low, why would it matter as long as the things are done?
Companies should stop penalizing people for being work efficient, and increase their salary if the workload increases.
How is this any different from loafers who don't do anything? If you can do two jobs at the same time, you weren't really doing anything at first job to begin with.
Realistically I think very little employees were doing this. And, of the ones that were, is it even a problem?
I mean, the idea is that they're such amazing developers that they can be 2 developers at once. So you still end up with 1 developer. So, break even, right? No harm no foul?
My company went back to 5 days in office in May 2025. Since then 8 people out of 100 in my office have retired. They were in the 55-65 age range and 3 of them directly told me that they would have stayed working if we stayed hybrid 3 days a week. So now we are hiring people and having to retrain them. Many of them are over 50 and were laughing at our 5 days in office. But our stock is high so I think they will stay for a few years and retire.
There has always been a "retire, come back as a consultant" flow, but it's a bit stronger now. Perhaps the healthcare savings are worth it for the company.
Doubtful it's healthcare, as unlike other benefits like stock options, consulting firms will have substantially similar healthcare costs that will be reflected in their fees.
Look at the last 3 years of the job market: No company has any issue with doing actual lay offs. The layoffs have been about reducing capital spend, and one wants to get rid of dead wood and redundant hires, not let fate decide who stays or goes.
> My "evidence" is that trading firms that kept raking in the money
If you're talking about "trading" as in financial, then this makes sense from a culture perspective. Its a group of people who, are about the job and not about any ones feelings.
It's harder for teams to be this way without the social lubricant of bonding over lunch and coffee and small "how are you" or "the boss sucks" social interactions. Things that are easy in person but more difficult when all your communication channels are owned by the company or result in "documentation" that can be used against you. It's much easier to be "professional brusk" (I need this asap) with someone you just ate lunch and talked about life with than it is for someone you DONT have those interactions with.
I have been a consultant (read: mercenary) for over a decade now. I have seen just about every team layout there is, and there are lots of distributed teams whos effectiveness is much lower than it could be. Its going to depend more on your product and ALL your teams willingness to be candid and blunt than anything else.
I think some of it was just a belief that work you can see being done by a floor of people talking with their mouths and looking at screens in the same room is more real than the slightly less visible conversations in slack while looking at screens in their own rooms.
Open plan offices continue to be designed more for seeing the work happen than for doing the work. I spend a lot of mental energy on ignoring the distractions around me. No job has ever offered me a private office with a door that closes in exchange for being in the office 5 days a week.
My employer very successfully shipped a lot of brand new stuff during COVID when everyone was full-time remote. We made a lot of money off of those products. Then they sort of bragged about it. Then they instituted RTO. Now (I'm told, I'm at a megacorp so I'm far removed from these discussions) the executive team is bitching that we're not in office 5 days per week.
I think that's the question - did RTO increase productivity? I haven't seen any audited economic evidence that actually happened. Same as AI - I've seen a lot of PR and hype, but no audited company financials indicators.
Historically though, the data suggests that mass layoffs have a huge impact (negatively) on productivity after a short term "boost" by the survivors.
I know that this is Hacker News and so all rich and important people must be geniuses making only rational moves, but consider the slim possibility that most aren't very good leaders and make poor decisions.
Maybe there's some 19D "soft layoff" motivation, but I suspect a large part is just about control and appearance. You spent all that money on offices so workers better be there. And what's the point of having your own nice big office if you can't look out on the peons toiling for you? And more fundamentally, some people just have this deep belief that work = something you do in an office and can't compute working at home as "real" work, no matter what the results show.
There’s some of that for sure, but also knowledge sharing is easier in person. The question is whether or not it’s that much easier to justify the trade off of in person work. I don’t think so, but even most remote workers I know would agree that in person has a certain collaborative nature that remote lacks.
Sure, WFH has some downsides as does anything, but it's always funny to me that we have 150+ years of basically everyone who's ever worked in an office despising it as a place where productivity goes to die mired in pointless meetings, office politics, etc., but when WFH becomes a realistic option all of a sudden the office is now Plato's Academy reborn.
This was a trend among boards and executives, people like GE's CEO would not shut up about it, and that started the trend of boards requiring even recalcitrant CEOs to do it too.
Then the executives come up with justifications, one of which is surely the ability to trim some hires in a tight financial environment.
I know that this is Hacker News and so all rich and important people must be geniuses making only rational moves, but consider the slim possibility that most aren't very good leaders and make poor decisions.
Every single frontpage thread on WFH / RTO for years now on HN has dozens to hundreds of comments bitching about the obvious stupidity and narcissism of upper management to force RTO, which is obviously inferior in every way, at least according to HN.
Maybe I'm just lucky but the worst micromanagement has always been from my direct supervisors, never VP-level. In my experience most at that level (especially when it's several layers removed from the ICs) do as little work as possible, and spend most of their time hanging out with other VPs and trying to move on to the next step.
Are the tech firms the ones spending billions on office buildings? It's certainly not the VPs.
What pressure are cities applying to companies to get them to move back into the offices, exactly?
When a company looks for a new office, cities give them subsidies to open office there. Those subsidies come with strings attached beyond, "please lease this office space". They expect additional foot traffic that the other businesses near the office would benefit from.
I don't think this is true, do you have a cite for this other than stories that make national news like Amazon's HQ? Even if it happens for more than outlier examples like that, this would only happen for huge companies that can meaningfully move the economy of large urban centers. So maybe top-5 level huge companies in mid-market cities, but 99.9999% of companies wouldn't qualify for that.
Alright, let's agree that it only happens for the top 5% of companies.
Then the leadership of those companies come out and make big announcements on how WFH is dead.
Just to be clear, I'm not saying nobody implements RTO just because Amazon implemented RTO and they're a bunch of lemmings. I'm 100% that happens for more than a couple companies.
I don't think any companies move into cities with agreements they will meaningfully increase foot traffic in large urban centers, certainly not with any sort of true repercussions if they don't. That just simply does not happen.
If they had a shred of evidence that RTO was the eminently more productive, they would smugly rub our collective noses in it.
They don't have evidence. They have vibes and a profound hatred for the labor class. It irks them that suddenly common people had access to a benefit exclusive to them.
If you're looking for a cheap way to lay people off, you probably dont want to have to make large investments in real estate to do so.
I think it was mostly about lack of trust and desire to regain a feeling of control over employees. The soft layoffs were just a bonus.
When my company WFH during covid the first thing they did was force-install invasive tracking software. You could practically taste the executive paranoia.
I for one am renting a desk at an office. I have all the usual office amenities and an environment in which I can focus properly, but I don't have to involve myself geographically with the company I work for.
Data from consultancies tends to show that WFH and hybrid work patterns are correlated with a significant increase in billable hours compared to 100% in-office. My understanding that a similar pattern can be seen in law firms.
The "RTO is more productive" thesis tends to come from industry sectors where quantitative measures like billable hours aren't so readily available. At best, it seems vibes-based - but, like you, I suspect that it's actually disingenuous posturing.
I don't think it was a soft layoff, I'm sure that might have been part of it, but I think the majority of it was about telling the working class that the owning class is back in power and they want you to know it.
After all, not a single CEO cited published metrics for the productivity reasons for ending WFH, and almost all went about other power grab type moves later to show the working class the power they were able to wield during COVID was over and we were returning back to the old ways.
> I don't think it was a soft layoff, I'm sure that might have been part of it, but I think the majority of it was about telling the working class that the owning class is back in power and they want you to know it.
If they demand 5-in-office then they should stfu about climate and affordable housing. The commute offices tend to inflict on the staff makes such arguments bs.
I think it says we need more time in the evolutionary oven. With how fast tech and education have accelerated we're running Ubuntu 24 on the Enigma machine.
Yeah, that seems to be a better conclusion - that we're not built with enough sophistication to deal with everything we're currently dealing with. But I think that's also due to the fact that the things we're dealing with are intentionally built to take advantage of our weaknesses. You can't out evolve technology.
If such being does exist, then how could it possibly not matter? If there's an architect and we are the architect's creation, then how could our belief alone be the important thing?
That's immaterial to the discussion. The comment I replied to simply stated: "Displacing God as the center of life." They aren't arguing that god matters, it's our displacement of them.
So, on the existence of god, we have two possiblities: God does exist, god doesn't exist.
1. If god doesn't exist, then we're unhappy because we're displacing a false god as the center of life.
2. If god does exist, then we're unhappy because we're displacing a real god as the center of life.
In that discussion, god's existence in fact doesn't matter, it leads to the same outcome.
If God does exist and is our creator, then we're designed to recognize him (at least to strive to, or have some innate need to); failing to do so or radically abdicating from this need would lead to disaster.
In other words, in the God-exists scenario, we are not merely observers of a phenomenon who can be detached from it.
But that framing only really works if we assume a Abrahamic world view.
Other cultures don't and didn't relate to their deities in the same way. Do we then have to assume they all suffered lower life satisfaction than a 11th century German peasant because of their detachment from a singular god the creator? Why didn't they strive for the relationship you're describing?
Trying to put God with a capital G at the center of our lives as some innate need doesn't make sense from a historical context.
I don’t know about religions in the general sense, and you’re right to point out that I very much have the “Abrahamic world view”, though my case is much much more specific than that but that’s not relevant here.
What we might more safely assume is that the Creator is revealed through history and a group to whom it he’s not revealed might pursue him more ignorantly (I appreciate the language might sound offensive or condescending but that’s not the intention) but in that pursuit they’re still better off than someone who willfully rejects him.
This I believe is relevant to the post, as these societies have not gone from one god to another, but to none.
That's a lot of assumptions, and really only make sense if you're trying to put your own beliefs as the "correct" choice. Somehow, all these other cultures got it wrong, but the ones who believe one single god, they got it right.
> This I believe is relevant to the post, as these societies have not gone from one god to another, but to none.
I don't know what you mean by this. Particular God's importance rose and fell out of fashion in ancient societies.
This is the first release of any Haskell debugger, as far as I know. It coincides with the release of v9.14 of the de-facto standard Haskell compiler, GHC
Well, there has always been some very bare-bones debugging support in ghci (you can set breakpoints, step and inspect variables), but only for interpreted code, and zero debug adapter protocol integration or such things https://downloads.haskell.org/ghc/latest/docs/users_guide/gh...
I've never managed to get any use out of it.
This new `hdb` however looks like the real thing. I like that they added a `DebugView` class for debug-specific pretty-printing. Even has a nice web page :) https://well-typed.github.io/haskell-debugger/
The semiconductor manufacturing process is so ridiculously cool that they have to make the working conditions terrible to keep the plant from being flooded with junior engineers. I worked in ion implant, which means I was responsible for honest-to-god particle accelerators working right. But you pay for the cool factor in sweat. Pager duty isn’t a thing you take turns with. It’s your duty to carry a pager, always, from the day you sign on until the day you leave. And you will get paged. A lot. At all hours. Some of those pages will require you to go in, but you work so many hours at the plant that you’re probably already there. Did you know that “exempt” means “exempt from the 40 hour work week?” You probably have to attend at least one passdown meeting a day. Those are at 6, and whether that’s a.m. or p.m., it means you’re working a long day. The fab needs weekend coverage too, so every fifth or sixth week, you go in and work straight through, 12 days.
And then there’s the software. Part of my job was entering numbers into a system that had been designed to make it hard to enter numbers in it. This was so that you wouldn’t change them too often. But we did. A big part of the job was data analysis, but instead of actual access, certain data was only available as server rendered PNGs. Small ones.
> designed to make it hard to enter numbers in it. This was so that you wouldn’t change them too often
That's some big brain management idea right there. I suppose there was probably a reason for it but it sounds like when you do make a change it would be likely to cause an error because of poor ergonomics.
I've had the same experience while building EMRs and pharmacy inventory systems. Clients actually requested for bad UX, so that the people doing the data entry will double check that they've entered the correct values because fixing them is more painful.
Reminds of me being a hospital resident, but instead of saving patients lives and increasing the profit of the hospital's shareholders, you're just increasing the profit of the fab's shareholders.
I don’t think it’s unsustainable, it’s just an unpleasant result of supply and demand in the labor market. In Taiwan, TSMC hires PhDs to do this. Maybe there’s a smarter way to run a fab, but labor costs are a tiny fraction of capital costs, and “grind through recent college grads” has worked so far, so why change?
I left the industry because it is soul crushing for anyone who wants to try new ideas.
I also had a pager strapped to me 24/7/365. Finding a US backup for a UI developed in an obscure language owned by a Japanese IT company proved to be quite challenging. I bet they're still using it to this day and just managing it from Korea now. The risk of rewriting or refactoring some of this stuff is measured in 10-11 figures.
As others have pointed out, the monthly Who Is Hiring and Who Wants to be Hired threads are a good place to start.
Since you probably don't have industry experience, I strongly suggest you build a good Github profile. Build your own software in public, contribute to projects. That's an excellent hiring signal
My "evidence" is that trading firms that kept raking in the money, and that benefit from maximum productivity of their employees, still generally have a hybrid work culture.