Comment on Tech CEOs are backtracking on RTO mandates—now, just 3% want workers in the office full-time
neidu2@feddit.nl 3 months agoCan confirm, experienced this shift myself.
It’s worth noting that my job was kind of special in the sense that it was usually field work. I visited the office once or twice a year. The ones with “normal” positions were mostly in the office because it was objectively a healthy work place with nice people, and under such circumstances the “collaboration argument” is actually valid to a certain degree. However, nobody (except from the ones who actually needed to be on site to do their job, such as manufacturing and repair) were under no obligation to physically be in the office. Once in a whole us riffraff from the field service department would coordinate and visit the head office together, and that’s when it was pretty much packed, as it was one of the rare opportunities for everyone to meet. (This usually resulted in everyone getting an invite to a “technical meeting” at a pub nearby, with some department heads card in the bar)
However, then we were bought by a huge competitor, and the allowed none of this. I kept ignoring most requests that said I had to be in the office a certain amount of time. And when they began contacting me directly and insist, I made sure to select days that incurred the highest airline fees. That’s when they started to back off and modtly make demands that made sense.
However, gone were the days when people actually enjoyed meeting each other, be it in or outside of the office. Nobody truly cared anymore, especially since the new corporate overlords wanted to micromanage everything. I left that job a few months ago, and I hear from a lot of my former coworker that there’s a really big exodus.
My hope is that the new company ended up paying for pretty much nothing. The profit was in the people and their experience, and the people are taking their experience elsewhere for higher pay and less corporate bullshit.
Track_Shovel@slrpnk.net 3 months ago
I loved reading every bit of that. Esp the company waltzing in and then getting kicked in the dick
neidu2@feddit.nl 3 months ago
Another weird obsession with the new company was their brand and logo. When they bought our company, of course employees of said company wore and used a lot of merch with the company name. Mostly T-Shirts, but also some other stuff (us field crew got some nice travel stuff with the company logo on it, such as a water proof duffel bag, a pelicase, etc).
Some executive asshat in the new company threw a hissyfit about people wearing the logo of their former competitor, and to a certain degree I can understand this, except the new company NEVER handed out stuff like that. So whenever I was in the field I always had work wear on with the wrong (in their eyes) logo. Hell, sometimes out of spite I even wore a t-shirt from a long defunct competitor that I worked for back in 2011.
Track_Shovel@slrpnk.net 3 months ago
I love the cut of your jib