CIO: Work-from-office mandate? Expect top talent turnover, culture rot

26 pointsposted 13 hours ago
by dmitrygr
(cio.com)

12 Comments

fred_is_fred

7 hours ago

These moves are always about getting people to quit and nothing else.

lovich

12 hours ago

Why would the leaders care?

It’s currently a buyers market for employees, they can flex as much as they want and desperate people will still flock to them.

The RTO mandates were not done with productivity in mind.

alephnerd

12 hours ago

It's 2026.

If you are truly exceptional, you will get a WFH allowance in most organizations - that said, most developers are not.

If you want to be remote-first you will have to become mission critical, otherwise it is hard to justify not hiring someone in India, Israel, or Poland remotely.

Rodeoclash

11 hours ago

The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.

pratchett

10 hours ago

How do you justify this assertion of yours? I would contend that the most efficient method is written down and shared widely in a doc. Otherwise, everyone is relying on their memory of what was spoken. For anything non trivial, I would want it written down.

hackable_sand

3 hours ago

Beep boop

Now initiating information transfer protocol

Beep boop

Please acknowledge receipt

aeternum

9 hours ago

Did you remember to consider commute times, context-switching costs, office overhead and facilities staff overhead in your efficiency calculation?

andOlga

9 hours ago

Reading is significantly faster than listening. Writing is significantly more precise than speaking. You're gonna have to write information down so that it's not lost anyway.

zwaps

5 hours ago

Yes however speaking allows flexibility in communication, dynamics that text does not support and, crucial if there is no alignment, nonverbal communication.

It is much much easier to build trust in person, which is important for efficient teams.

In the end, both modes have pros and cons, but there is indeed a lot of research indicating remote teamwork is much more challenging on many dimensions

andOlga

5 hours ago

To me all of this reads like gibberish but I'll admit that it's likely just me (and "my kind" of neurodivergent people). Far as dynamics go (ability to interrupt) voice chat solves the problem fully as far as I'm concerned. Non-verbal comms are lost on me to the point that I don't know what you even mean, and I simply cannot trust anyone who is close enough to me to potentially punch me...

Again, granted -- I'm an outlier, but that also means that I can just operate at my full capacity when I work with text and cannot when I work "in person".

pvab3

10 hours ago

speak for yourself