Nearly half Dell's US workforce has rejected RTO. Rather WFH than get promoted (2024)

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/nearly-half-of-dell-s-full-time-workforce-in-the-u-s-has-rejected-returning-to-the-office-they-d-rather-work-from-home-than-get-promoted/ar-BB1oBygb

by this_weekend • 2 years ago

196 178 2 years ago

msn.com

vsskanth• 2 years ago

Smart move. One typically needs to move jobs to get promoted anyways.

throwawaysleep3• 2 years ago

I’ve yet to work for a company where promotion isn’t a scam anyway compared to job hopping.

You put in way more work than preparing for interviews for a raise that is often less than job hopping.

You want me to grind for two years for a raise when I can just be a C player and get it from someone else with stories about being an A player?

refulgentis2• 2 years ago

100%. I worked at a particularly late age FAANG, at this point advancement was few, far between, and was very, very, easy to predict. And the predictive factors were a toxic stew.

TL;DR: got here first | overworks | never ever does anything that could possibly be construed as challenging authority, such as having original ideas in front of someone ranked higher than you, or trying to help create some semblance of process.

Being absurdly incompetent at writing maintainable code that had serious, consequential, misunderstandings of the material needed to implement it? That's fine.

it's a feature, not a bug, to do just good enough a job to rush exec misunderstandings into prod, as long as anything wrong with it can be dissembled verbally, unless someone else wants to dig into the code.

This would have sounded horribly cynical and bitter and loser-speak when I was younger. Now that I saw it first hand, it clarified for me why people do startups and turnover is high, given it was a $300K/year job if you just show up 20 hours a week, and 40 hours a week for a month or two a year.

Younger me: lesson here is either care, and do a startup, or don't care and do the family and skiing or whatever.

Your plan of "I should go bank money for a few years so I can leave and do my own place safely" panned out great.

Your plan of "wow...standards are this low? People will see it and care, certainly if you're doing extremely impactful work" was completely wrong.

yownie2• 2 years ago

I find what you wrote difficult to understand.

_heimdall21• 2 years ago

One of the many lessons I've learned (so far) in my career is to do a job you don't mind, maybe even enjoy, on a team you like and ignore the whole ladder climbing game.

Promotions are overrated and if you are in software you should be making a comfortable living from the beginning.

More money can be helpful, but it isn't worth the stress of chasing promotions and playing the political games required at higher levels.

bdangubic11• 2 years ago

* you, interviewing for a new position

Interviewer: “mr. so-and-so, I see that you worked as XXXXX at YYYY for ZZZZ number of years, can you tell us about the core reason your career stagnated and you were not promoted in all that time there?”

* assumes you somehow got the interview…

pavel_lishin2• 2 years ago

on a team you like

I cannot over-stress how important this is.

Being on a bad team will drain you fast, no matter how interesting the work is.

Meanwhile, churning out widgets is something you can do if you enjoy the people you're doing it next to.

ninkendo• 2 years ago

Is job hopping to get a bump in salary still a thing nowadays? Serious question.

I haven’t needed to look for employment in the past year or so, but I’ve heard some terrible things about the job market, enough that I’d be surprised if it was still possible given how slow hiring seems to be.

recursivecaveat• 2 years ago

A long time to get hired is a disaster when you're currently unemployed. As a background thing while you're currently employed it's no big deal. If you are someone who intends to change jobs every 2 years or something you just start the process earlier. I think the job market is usually kinder to those looking for a change in jobs too unfortunately, since your current employer is an implicit vouch for you.

rednafi3• 2 years ago

Learned it the hard way. Multiple times. Being an A player isn’t worth the effort in most places.

Taniwha• 2 years ago

Where would one get a list of these WFH Dell employees? Asking for an HR friend ....

gruez• 2 years ago

I'm sure your HR friend has a linkedin recuriter subscription that allows them to blast any dell employee with a cold linkedin message.

eightysixfour4• 2 years ago

Interesting framing - why is this a bad thing for Dell or the employees? It isn’t like a BS hybrid environment where everyone knows, but it isn’t written anywhere, that being in-office is an important part of career growth.

There are benefits for employees working at home, there are benefits to companies for employees coming to work. Letting people self-select seems like a great way to have a culture that acknowledges the benefits and weaknesses of both modalities.

foota2• 2 years ago

I suspect this is bad for dell because employees called their bluff, Dell would probably be negatively affected by only promoting from half of their talent pool. It's unclear how this is bad for workers, since they didn't "defect" (in a game theorhetic sense)

eightysixfour4• 2 years ago

I’m not sure it is bad to filter out people from the potential leadership pool that aren’t invested in the culture and style Dell wants. They get the best of both worlds - strong ICs who weren’t bought in and are going to job hop anyways, and self-selected people who want to rise in the company.

I’d prefer this as a filter to the old school “first in, last to leave” bullshit.

throwawaysleep3• 2 years ago

It depends on what it means for the workers. I can see Dell being the place that wants everyone grinding hard (whether they actually do is another matter).

So Dell may view these employees as those disengaged and just there for a paycheck.

warkdarrior• 2 years ago

WFH employees are interchangeable with employees in other countries (India, Poland come to mind). As a manager, I don't care where you work if you are not in the office, so I'll find the best employee at the lowest possible price.

datavirtue3• 2 years ago

Unless you notice that all your WFH are actually the good employees, and the in-office end up being lack luster sycophants that you do not want to promote. From the POV of executive this is a nightmare.

I have WFH a lot and never really had any issues with it and generally preferred it over commuting. But I did miss the in-office connection. Having taken a 100% remote leadership role, it hit me why all these executives are freaking out and mandating RTO. If your job is to communicate in the course of creating and changing processes to drive the company forward, then your job is easily twice as hard when everyone is remote. Sprinkle in a handful of offshore teams and...

No one ever gets on camera. I and other leaders set an example and get on camera for every meeting, but most employees and contractors do not follow suit. So, I lose any body language communication from them, and if they can see mine, I don't get the feedback from that since I can't see them. Very subtle loss of information but it adds up to be huge. You end up having to pull everything out of ICs to get them to engage. It is fucking exhausting. Not only that, when you multiply this across the organization it obviously compounds and can spiral into a lot of uncertainty.

Additionally, you are in meetings constantly where you are fixed in position in front of your station. For those of us on camera it seems to take a lot more energy than being in person, like you have to stage yourself since you can always see your image and you are subconsciously paying attention to it and adjusting. Contrasted with being in a meeting where you are in the room with nearly everyone at once where a matrix of (again) body language is constantly feeding information to everyone. All of that is lost. Even if we are all on camera I cannot focus on every tile and we certainly not making adhoc one-on-one body language connections as the meeting progresses.

To the average employee, they don't care about losing all that if they can skip the commute and spend more time with their family. I totally get it, but for leadership it is soul crushing.

this_weekend• 2 years ago

I don't think anyone believes leadership have souls anymore.

nradov2• 2 years ago

Do any of the office employees get promoted? Dell hasn't grown much in years, so I assume promotion opportunities are close to zero. Wait around 20 years until your boss retires?

_heimdall21• 2 years ago

It'd be interesting to see their attrition numbers for that. If Dell is losing employees at higher levels you would see promotions opportunities whether the company grows or not.

pavel_lishin2• 2 years ago

For a lot of software engineers - especially those of us who are actually senior engineers, not folks who've been working for 2 years since graduation - I don't think a promotion makes sense, anyway. From here, it's Staff or Principal (or management, which is fine for some folks, and anathema to others), and the raise does not justify the amount of effort the next level would require.

A lot of us are happy where we are, level-wise, and if we do want a significant raise, others have pointed out - we're more likely to get it by interviewing, not by getting promoted.

Now, granted, if you're gung-ho and really want the responsibility and the more interesting work that Staff/Principal will give you, fuckin' go nuts - I'm happy there are ambitious folks out there. I just want to do my job and then go play with my kid.

nine_zeros• 2 years ago

The next level is also a pyramid level - aka - competition and stack rank and often political. A lot of people cannot be bothered with petty politics.

c0n5pir4cy2• 2 years ago

As a Principal engineer, I would refuse to RTO and would look for another position or do the same and continue WFH if it's rewarding enough.

Most of the Staff/Principal engineers around you are not there because they don't have other (sometimes much better on the face of it) opportunities - we're here because of inertia and realm expertise.

paxys• 2 years ago

Being financially secure and not caring about a promotion is the biggest superpower you can have at a tech company. Work on whatever projects you want. Skip whichever meetings you want. Don't want to waste multiple days writing a pointless report? Fine. Don't want to participate in org politics? All good. As long as you are doing decent work and have a good reputation among your peers the threat of firing will always be an empty one. And soon you'll start to realize how much of the work people do at any company, especially at higher levels, is just performative ass kissing.

Every single terrible job experience is the result of a shitty power tripping manager. Take away the manager's power over you and suddenly your job will be fun and fulfilling again.

scarface_7429• 2 years ago

Being financially secure and not caring about a promotion is the biggest superpower you can have at a tech company.

And not being in the country on an H1B…

This is not a rant against H1B Visa holders. It’s a condemnation of the system that makes their ability to stay in the country contingent on their job.

I saw it first hand at AWS. When Amazon started Amazoning when I was working there, I knew what was up and wasn’t stressed, didn’t jump through the hoops to stay off PIP and when they gave me the choice of getting 4 months severance and “leave immediately”. I took the money and ran and got another job in 3 weeks.

My coworkers who were there on H1B, were definitely afraid, even if they did have more than enough money to hypothetically tide them over.

I knew I could get a job, a contract, start independent consulting or do something before my money ran out. That wasn’t an option for them.

For those who don’t know how the PIP process works at Amazon…

- if you choose to “leave immediately” instead of working through the PIP, you got one month of base pay for every year and partial year you worked there.

- if you failed the PIP (and you will), you got 1/3 of the original amount.

- of course you can appeal. But if you fail (and you will). You get 1/2 of the 1/3.

WalterBright2• 2 years ago

Every single terrible job experience is the result of a shitty power tripping manager.

Having been both employee and manager, it's hardly that one-sided. For example, having an employee coming in high is not the manager's fault.

dreamcompiler• 2 years ago

I once got a new boss who was one of these power trippers. He and I didn't get along. But I was making my customers happy and I was making his boss happy; my job was completely secure.

At review time he told me in a very condescending tone "I just don't think I can recommend you for a raise this year."

My response was "Oh good. That means I can do whatever I want."

Nobody had ever said that to him before. Shortly afterward he took a leave of absence for mental health reasons.

TMWNN3• 2 years ago

Being financially secure and not caring about a promotion is the biggest superpower you can have at a tech company.

Highly relevant:

TIL what "FYIFV" means at Microsoft. "Fuck You, I'm Fully Vested" means that a person is so rich from Microsoft stock that he can be completely honest to coworkers and can leave anytime. <https://np.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1ax59rb/til_w...>

mrayycombi3• 2 years ago

I welcome our new AI middle management overlords.

May the PHBs R.I.P.

spamizbad• 2 years ago

Speaking as someone who tracked up the management chain….

Senior Software Engineer was the best job I ever had. The perfect balance of autonomy and responsibility.

Spooky23• 2 years ago

150%.

I loved, loved, loved being a technical SME and engineer.

It was incredibly satisfying and fun. I got greedy and also enjoyed systems, so I moved into an architect role, then director/exec.

I have a great job and enjoy the company and mission… but the politics is exhausting.

cflewis• 2 years ago

I just had my annual “career check-in” or whatever they are calling it now at work. I’m at the crossroads level: stick as being a software engineer and accept I’m not smart enough to ever be promoted again on software engeering track, or head for management track.

My guess is I would be either an excellent manager or an appalling one. Either way, I have absolutely no wish to do it. My wife is saying I should go for it in order to continue climbing the ladder.

I can’t pretend I’m not glad to see someone who would have been happy sticking as well. Hopefully you get the chance to demote yourself soon :)

neilv• 2 years ago

When you liked the role of Senior Software Engineer, was the situation that you could trust that others in the company were doing a good job of covering the responsibilities outside your scope?

Or was it because the scope was nice, and you didn't much care what happened outside the scope?

(Both are valid ways that people look at jobs, at different times, and in different situations. Just interested in anecdata and insights into how I should think about hiring.)

moron4hire• 2 years ago

I'm enjoying being a manager. My team is pretty small, though, only 3, sometimes 4 other people. I still do a lot of programming, but I'm also mentoring--which I find very rewarding--and I have a meaningful voice in some decision making. Also, my boss trusts me, and encourages me to use his authority on occasion, too (a plan I've come to calling "weaponizing the org chart"). I don't think I could do that if I was "just" a senior developer.

imoreno4• 2 years ago

If it was so great, why did you not go back to it? Do you mean that it was great, if you disregard the pay? Or are you now overqualified and unable to downshift into it?

harrall• 2 years ago

Me too. The reason my current and previous companies can handle their high throughput is 100% from my architecture but I have no actual responsibility and stress in my position.

I’m sure I could make a gnarly salary somewhere but I’m extremely happy with the free time that I have. Beats any other job that I’ve had by a mile.

brightball• 2 years ago

Yea, I’ve worked with folks in management who are just laser focused on the idea that offering leadership or management positions as a carrot to good developers is appealing. For some it is, but most of the time I find people just want to work on interesting problems and be appreciated for it.

darth_avocado3• 2 years ago

The more important question is: how much is the pay raise from Senior -> Staff. For even the companies that pay generously, like Facebook, the median pay increases by about $150k in the US. If you look at companies like Dell, levels.fyi reports that the increase is barely $15k (https://www.levels.fyi/companies/dell-technologies/salaries/...)

Now if I were to choose, getting paid 15k less and stay remote in a LCOL area vs get that pay raise to live in a presumably more expensive city to RTO, it’s a no brainer. Even if I live in a HCOL area and I don’t go to the office, it is still a win. I live in the Bay Area, relatively close to the office and just commuting to the office, if I use public transportation, is about $300/month ($3600/year). If I drive, pay for parking, bridge tolls, and pay for lunch, I suddenly start spending $2000/month to RTO ($8 toll, $16 lunch and $25 parking 5 days a week). I’d need almost $40-50k pre tax raise to break even, which most companies refuse to give. And that is on top of time I waste commuting and the added work responsibilities I now have to take on.

The incentives to RTO are really not there.

imoreno4• 2 years ago

The problem with the raise is that you often end up getting hired into a role at the high end of the comp range for that level, since during the application you have leverage. When getting promoted, you have less bargaining power - what are you going to do, refuse the raise because it's too small? So you get promoted out of highly paid senior into underpaid staff.

If you really want to be staff, you can try interviewing elsewhere for that position, and negotiate to get the high end of that.

When companies promote internally, they have a huge advantage against random employers on the market: There is vastly less uncertainty about the employee's value. The promotion you get has every reason to be competitive with open positions on the market. But they often seem to promote into underwhelming positions, perhaps they figure the employee would value staying at the same company.

gedy• 2 years ago

I can't comment on Dell specifically, but as someone who WFH and remote friendly companies, the vast majority of people not working from the office are people who moved for more affordable housing (mostly purchasing, not for renting).

I'd have loved to stay and live near our nice offices and biked or short drive to work, but it literally wasn't affordable and just got worse over the 10 years I was in-office.

You reach an age where you have make a decision on these life choices and so WFH/remote it was. It wasn't really a choice when no company would pay enough to afford a home near their offices (married with children) - so sorry/not sorry?

ChrisArchitect• 2 years ago

Old story from 6 months ago:

Some discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40729588

breput3• 2 years ago

The truly essential people who want to WFH will just ignore the directive and their managers will cover for them. I assume they don't show up in this 50%.

The rest are literally calling Dell's bluff that any potential promotion would be less valuable (monetary or well-being). Good on them!

XorNot• 2 years ago

I mean that's the thing. At the end of the day not WFH is at least another 2 hours of your day dedicated to work things.

That's an absolutely massive chunk of time.

breput3• 2 years ago

I wouldn't give all 2 hours to work, but you're not wrong.

tomjakubowski• 2 years ago

Hardly "at least" two hours a day. The average one-way commute in the United States is under a half hour; the state with the longest average commute (New York) is at 33 minutes.

https://www.census.gov/topics/employment/commuting/guidance/...

brandall102• 2 years ago

That’s more personal time, not work time. It’s not like they’re subtracting your commute from the time you have your butt in the seat, and most savvy employees aren’t going to spend an extra 2 hours working at home.

Xelbair3• 2 years ago

also who even gets promoted internally and in what way? usually it is meager salary gain for a lot of new responsibilities

99% of time if you want to get promoted or get a pay rise you apply somewhere else if you want your pay to match your responsibilities.

p_l2• 2 years ago

In a certain big database company attempts at such moves for anyone whose position didn't involve huge political sway (let's say the kind of positions directly making decisions on direction of company at global scale) was met with HQ announcing that they are going to remotely track badge reader data and apply "firing with cause" for consistently skirting RTO to both employee and managers...

breput3• 2 years ago

I am not an oracle, but I know people who work at similar companies, with similar decrees, and the Important People just ignore this and I assume the SVP's administrative assistant (who holds the REAL day-to-day power at most companies) just makes the problem go away.

LAC-Tech2• 2 years ago

COVID was such a waste of a catastrophe. We all briefly figured out that maybe people who work at a computer all day don't actually need to travel every day to a special computer in a special building. And that we don't need mass tourism and mass migration.

But everyone was determined to learn absolutely nothing from it, and just go back to normal but even worse.

cloudking• 2 years ago

WFH was the best thing to come out of COVID.

PessimalDecimal• 2 years ago

"was" might be unfortunately too accurate.

celdon25• 2 years ago

back to normal but even worse.

Yep, I had no problem finding remote jobs before Covid. Now I get no interviews, every application rejected due to competing with literally thousands of remote "applicants" per job.

toomuchtodo• 2 years ago

We learned that corporate leadership folks are willing to make workers suffer out of ideology and ignore data. Valuable signal.

DrillShopper3• 2 years ago

Suffer and die

_heimdall21• 2 years ago

If you're looking for Covid response lessons to learn, WFH is pretty low on the list in my opinion.

We saw how fragile our entire system is from infrastructure to food. We saw how quickly a bit of fear turned an entire political party (at least in the US) from vilifying big pharma to putting it on a pedestal, handing over mountains of money, and creating legal cover for any and all liability. We saw how strong of a grip the news media has over society, turning public opinion on a dime as new recommendations/talking points came down. We saw how intertwined social media and the government really is.

WFH feels like a quaint novelty to me in the context of what all went wrong and what lessons were missed during the pandemic response.

scarface_7429• 2 years ago

The party you are thinking about isn’t the party that was against the science of vaccines

andrewmcwatters• 2 years ago

No one forgot. The lasting effects are here and real.

cwbriscoe• 2 years ago

special computer

I would work on the same laptop at an office that I do at home. I doubt they would even provide me an ultrawide 2nd monitor that I also use at home.

wahnfrieden• 2 years ago

Wage suppression tactics aren't the same as productivity-enhancing tactics

booleandilemma• 2 years ago

I think this will just encourage the further replacement of American citizens with H-1B's from India who will do whatever upper management demands, because they have no choice.

I look around my workplace and see Indians building simple CRUD APIs because allegedly Americans can't? lol.

23B1• 2 years ago

Good.

Managers pull your heads out of your ass and lean into the change in working habits.

There's a lot you can do to maintain the benefits of office work, just realize you aren't peoples #1 priority and you never were.

danjl2• 2 years ago

The concept that you would rather promote a mediocre employee who works in the office over a star who decides to work at home is just absurd, and horrible for business. I cannot imagine it actually being implemented.

Muromec• 2 years ago

It's consistent with both theories about rto -- one that remote work harms productivity (and someone working remotely cant be more productive than their office peers) and the other postulating its just a power move

timothevs• 2 years ago

Sadly, I was at the receiving end of this. FWIW I don’t work at a tech company, but rather at the IT department of a University in Florida.

jimt1234• 2 years ago

This is basically how the federal government works. Employee-A is a "rock star", she is extremely productive, does great work, inspires others to do great work - the rest of the team basically depends on her, but she has to drive her kids to school in the morning and is sometimes 5 or 10 minutes late to the office. Employee-B is basically useless, does as little as possible, helps no one, but is always on time to the office. Now, take a guess who's gonna be promoted. ... I used to do civilian contracting; I saw this situation many times. Totally demoralizing.

imoreno4• 2 years ago

Perhaps they believe their own management abilities are strong enough that mediocre enhanced by close management is better than good but out of management's reach.

There's a lot of assumption I don't agree with in that, but I would assume their logic is something like that.

benreesman• 2 years ago

Open plan offices are a waking nightmare. If you want people to return to office maybe make offices reasonable places to work.

rednafi3• 2 years ago

After only seven years in the industry, a promotion doesn’t make much sense to me right now.

I want to write good code and build great products. But in the corporate world, visible work is more important than good work. So, there are two options for me: either be a staff engineer or a manager. While staff seems like the obvious choice, in most companies, staff engineers are just managers who code. The number of meetings and admin work goes through the roof. Not to mention the nasty politics and mind games you have to play just to survive.

So, if I have to choose between staying at home or getting promoted, WFH is the obvious choice. Oh, and I learned late that hopping jobs is far better than chasing promotions for my financial and mental health.

leeoniya• 2 years ago

in most companies, staff engineers are just managers who code

managers, by definition, have direct reports while ICs do not. for L5/L6 roles you're a mix of tech lead/architect/product mgr, with broader scope. you do have more meetings, but they're typically ones where your input is needed, not just ceremonial bs.

rednafi3• 2 years ago

I’d love to expand the scope of my work and do better stuff. But meetings without concrete agendas are the bane of my existence, and even as an IC, I’ve had to sit through far too many.

Post-senior paths are kind of hazy, and I’d rather job-hop than climb these ladders. The number of times I’ve gone “above and beyond” only to hear, “Sorry, we don’t have the budget for a raise,” is exhausting.

scrapcode• 2 years ago

Good. If I have to go back into the office it may as well be with a fat pay raise and a new mission, the likes of which are more likely with a new company.

daviddever23box• 2 years ago

An exclusively WFH remote team is dangerous to those team members subject to mandatory RTO directives - especially at Dell - and especially dangerous to middle managers incapable of justifying their existence. I have the receipts.

imoreno4• 2 years ago

We're on, what, year 2 of the WFH-RTO wars? It's a roller-coaster for sure.

I don't get why some companies are so obsessed with RTO for jobs like software engineers, who have no reason to be in the office anyway and tend to have enough technical savvy to figure out slack and zoom (which people use in the office too btw). I mean, if I set aside my cynicism. What do they get out of it?

All these tech companies are in very high COL urban areas. In fact, they always put their office in some downtown area as well, so even going to the cheaper suburbs of the area is not always feasible due to commute. It seems like they would save so much money by letting engineers WFH:

* Less money spent on office lease, existing office space can be leased to someone else

* Less money spent on utilities, kitchen snacks, custodial...

* You get more chances to "suck people in" to do just one more thing after hours, since they basically live in their office now (I thought that was the management dream?)

* Since the WFH can work in a low COL area, they might accept lower pay

* The paycheck becomes more efficient, as both sides pay less tax. Also, often RTO means moving to a state which has much higher state income tax as well.

* Child care costs can be massively reduced for the employee, reducing salary expectations

* You have a bigger pool of people to hire, not just people in your area

* I suspect employees subconsciously count commute towards "hour worked" and adjust their hourly pay accordingly - with WFH the commute is 10 seconds so their subjective pay increases further

* A common WFH play is to relocate to a low tax, small govt state which also has fewer regulations for the employer, which saves even more money

* People might be more likely to eat at their desk, rather than: Walk to restaurant, order, eat, walk back...

* No physical contact probably means fewer HR incidents, less work for HR, so you can reduce HR headcount

The savings and efficiencies seem crazy, an I'm baffled how they figure that RTO is a good idea. I get that they have this fear that WFHers will watch Netflix all day instead of working... But honestly, when's the last time you had a software job where, when you miss your targets (KPIs, Jira tickets, whatever) you could get away with "but boss, I've been in the office all day this week! It's not my fault I couldn't get it finished". All these roles are already heavily biased towards deliverables rather than how many hours you spent delivering.

Being in the office isn't even the worst part. But the office is always in a location that's extremely hostile to employees. Why can't they open a second office in some cheap place like rural Arkansas, where the workers can get cheap quality housing with a short commute, and send some managers over there? There's something to be said for working in your pyjamas, of course, but this seems like a pretty good compromise.

As for trying to get someone who is already WFH to RTO... Sheesh. Suppose they do relocate back within commuting distance. They got into a lease or mortgage, that would otherwise be a bad deal, just so they could come to your office. Who's to say you don't lay them off anyway in a few months? And then they'll be stuck with a house they don't need or want. This creates a risk for the employee, that must be mitigated by having an even higher salary expectation.

RTO seems like swimming against the current in so many ways. Maybe I'm missing something really big here.

fire_lake• 2 years ago

Another possible reason: managers making RTO decisions are trying to protect their own salary from cheaper international competition by forcing RTO on their reports.

daft_pink• 2 years ago

does anyone really believe they are going to just promote people who don’t work from home instead of by merit?

Nearly half Dell's US workforce has rejected RTO. Rather WFH than get promoted (2024)

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