this post was submitted on 13 May 2024
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But the reality is managers want to pick who gets laid off. It's not that they want to just cut heads and reduce costs... upper management. may want that... but the actual managers want to keep their best and brightest. They know who the people are who get shit done, and they want to keep those people. Rto tends to have the opposite effect.
The reality is it is often the best employees, the most experienced employees, and some very high level employees who have the most confidence and are most willing to say " screw you, I know I can find a job somewhere else" And give the middle finger to the employer who's trying to do an RTO plan.
Don't be fooled by the headlines. Real businesses want to control who they let go. They want to have all the power in the relationship. They want to cut their lower performers and keep their superstars. RTO is about the worst head cutting program you could dream up.
Sure, fair points. We should distinguish good and bad managers here before we get too specific. The bad managers will do whatever they're told to do by upper management. Upper management just says "cut down to this number" and they do it because they only care about their own incentives and don't care about the consequences. The good managers will probably realize the downsides of these decisions and will try their best to blunt the impact of these decisions. But in the end, they still have to report to higher levels of management, so there's little that they can ultimately do. So they're probably going to end up doing the same thing anyway.
This is why management is such a hard position, especially in the lower levels. You're basically at the end of the chain and usually have little power to get what you want. At the same time, you still have to make lots of different groups happy - upper management, your workers and whoever you're delivering your product for. All the things that you listed are things that I'm sure they would like to have, but probably end up having to get sacrificed anyway. If there's only one group of people that you're going to please, chances are that it's going to be the people you report to.
A good example would be Musk firing his charging org. He apparently did this in reprisal for the manager not firing enough people.