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0 pointslukasschwab6mo ago0 comments

> An RTO mandate is also an excellent thing for a CEO to show investors they are doing, if they are not making money and lack better ideas.

I think of Jeffrey Pfeffer's "social contagion" arguments a lot — first with regards to layoffs[^1], but increasingly also to RTO policies and tracked AI use.

It seems very unlikely execs (esp. in small organizations) are taking the time to read and seriously evaluate research about RTO or AI and productivity. (Frankly, it seems much less likely than them doing serious modeling about layoffs.) At some point, the "contagion" becomes a matter of "best practices" — not just a way to show investors what you're doing, but part of the normal behavior shareholders expect.

Bleak if true!

[^1]: https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2022/12/explains-recent-te...

0 comments

devnullbrain6mo ago

>the normal behavior shareholders expect.

And for each CEO, those shareholders are mostly the same people.

It's easy to get sucked into thinking this is just the way the world works but really we've just enshrined a local and temporal phenomenon. Layoffs aren't a physical law. There are places and times where this would not happen.

Let me put my investor hat on: hiring at the top and firing at the bottom is a predictable inefficiency and represents a CEO failing at their responsibilities. You don't get to be a CEO and claim ignorance of market cycles.

Schnitz6mo ago

Just how software engineers are in the hacker news thought bubble you have the VC and CEO thought bubble. It roughly goes like this: Someone has some productivity or whatever problem and RTOs. That costs money, they lose people, so they can’t later admit it was a wash or a net negative. So they go on Twitter or LinkedIn and trumpet how great their hardcore 996 RTO is going. Now others see this and fomo kicks in. They start their own RTO which they are then again highly incentivized to report as successful. Rinse and repeat.

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