[pydanny]

Return to office so you can join zoom meetings!

[mandevil]

I feel like one of the under-appreciated problems with modern society (1) is the sheer quantity of lies we are surrounded with. RTO is just the current most blatant example (2) in the American economy of people saying lies knowing that they will never be held to account for those lies. All of these lies together are corrupting and destroying civil society, destroying the sense of trust necessary for people to work together, to respect and trust institutions, and to build a better world.

As the excellent series Chernobyl put it (in the words crafted by a writer, not an actual scientist) "Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth" and at some point someone is going to have to pay all of those debts.

1: Here I'm focusing on Anglosphere/largely US and UK societies, as a monolingual American that's all I can effectively comment on.

2: 'this will make you more productive/more efficient/more creative' whatever

[lmm]

You hear a lot about how toxic the hierarchical Japanese workplace is, but the fact that people are willing to openly admit things like "product B is better than product A, but we're going with product A because our CEO is friends with their CEO" ends up being surprisingly refreshing.

[anitil]

I find this difficult to navigate sometimes because I find myself looking around the room and wondering "we don't really believe this, right?" but I can never quite be sure

[electriclove]

It is a complete lie unless of course it is backed by firing people who aren’t good enough. But 99% of the execs who force RTO are really just trying to get people to quit - unfortunately this gets good people to quit and crappy people stay

[kazinator]

The other day I came to the office to join a Google Meet meeting. Another person near me was also in it, with their laptop speaker on. I'm hearing my headphones and their speaker, plus also them acoustically when it's their turn to speak. So I picked up my laptop and buggered off to a small meeting room where I closed the door and sat alone.

[LtWorf]

Ah well at least you got a laptop. At the office I have a desktop so I can't do that.

[giancarlostoro]

My favorite part about working hybrid is that no matter what, nobody meets in person, except the managers once a week, everything else is a Teams meeting at your desk.

[konfusinomicon]

it's called collaboration, and thanks to those sets of complementary off brand noise canceling headphones that welcomed you back to a desk, it's clearly increasing!

[Insanity]

If one would be skeptical about leadership, one might assume that this is a forcing function for people to quit ahead of the layoffs.. :)

[IshKebab]

Yeah make the best people who can easily get a job elsewhere quit. Great strategy Intel.

[hibikir]

I know a place doing RTO where most teams are at least 50% contractors from Central and South America. You can imagine how productive the office might be for those people, given that everyone is on zoom all day, and there's a whole 4 meeting rooms in a floor with 50 people.

[wtf2025]

I’ve not ever had to experience that particular management style, but I think it’s the one where they don’t give a rat’s ass about their employees or unique thought.

I’d also hoped that some major semiconductor company would NOT embrace AI, just so they could differentiate themselves: “Our shit may be too slow for the Terminator to use, but it was designed by and for humans to use as air-gapped spreadsheet running machines with USB-key sneakernet email.”

Given that there is a growing backlash towards LLMs by the general public (not just one writers’ guild), that might sell some stock.

[stevenAthompson]

Has anyone backtested a stock bot that just shorts every company doing RTO? It's clearly a leading indicator for company collapse.

[generic92034]

> It's clearly a leading indicator for company collapse.

So, Amazon, Apple, ... are close to collapse?

[markus_zhang]

TBF it can also be Google Meet and MS Team ones…