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jmyeettoday at 3:12 PM1 replyview on HN

It's absolutely true that team cohesion impacts results but so do other factors, such as psychological safety [1], work-life balance and flexibility.

And you know what? Employers don't care about any of this, like at all. RTO mandates are nothing more than soft layoffs aimed to suppressing labor costs. Why? Because some people will quit, which is cheaper than severance, and those that remains will have to do their work for no extra compensation and also won't be asking for raises because they fear losing their own jobs. Win win (for the employer).

Profits have a tendency to decrease over time [2]. Investors demand it. To a point you can expand to counteract this. Ultimately though, every company either goes bust or reaches the end-state of having to raise prices and lower costs to maintain profit growth.

Employers are not on your side. We collectively saved companies from going bust in the pandemic by WFH. For tech companies in particular who had had a decade of market-driven increases in labor costs, this turned into a massive opportunity to institute what I call permanent layoff culture. These companies will layoff 5% of their staff every year forever for no other reason to suppress labor costs.

[1]: https://psychsafety.com/googles-project-aristotle/

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit...


Replies

stuffntoday at 3:53 PM

If remote work didn’t actually result in higher productivity the entire industry wouldn’t be trying to ship the labor base to India. Everything is going overseas. Even some doctors offices are employing video check in services.

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