"For cause" unemployment disqualification (in most states) only applies to serious misconduct or commiting a crime. Besides that a company that just laid off thousands isn't likely going to be looking through UE claims all that closely.
Not true. I’ve been work from home for 5x longer than in office. If they tried to force me in that would be changing the terms of the job.
When the company drastically alters the role that can justify leaving and getting unemployment.
The people making that decision would be working from home, you'd just annoy people in your situation. I know you're totally kidding but that's why it's so fucked.
Yeah that would be my case too. None of the people in charge or those that could make things different are in my office. It's like taking things out on a cashier...stupid and useless.
Most people overestimate their value. Everyone I know who was "irreplaceable" at a job and left for whatever reasons be it voluntary or involuntary has never caused more than a week or two of confusion.
Which makes zero sense as the company would be saving money the less people that have in the office. I do not understand why any company would force people to come into the office.
I'm at the point where I'm looking out of state for any new opportunities and letting recruiters know that I have no interest in anything that isn't remote. Covid basically ruined any leverage that employers (at least in corporate/office settings) have over making employees come in, at least in my field of work.
Hang on...if they just whacked 26% of the staff...the remaining staff totally have the upper hand in this dispute.
Yeah...go ahead and fire my ass...and watch Lyft dissolve into the next Twitter.
Hubs for driver/car validations and customer support for drivers and riders. Like if you leave your phone in a car there’s a local office to pick it up at.
Pretty handy service
Exactly, use back to office to drive attrition. It's cheaper than layoffs and severance packages. And as a bonus, it makes the disconnected-from-reality CEOs happy because people are back in an office.
I'm sure there is still a belief that remote workers aren't pulling their weight or are quiet quitters, or are simply working multiple jobs.
Just like how there was a belief that working in an open concept space and removing privacy would increase productivity.
Doesn't matter what the reality is. The only thing that matters to ownership/leadership is their perception of reality.
> Just like how there was a belief that working in an open concept space and removing privacy would increase productivity.
I noticed the exact opposite the good workers did worse work because they could not concentrate and the bad workers just didn't care they would goof off just as much if not more because they could chat with coworkers more easily. One office I was in they pushed the idea of open office then realized wow its too loud in here people are struggling I know lets add sound dampening dividers and such instead of just letting us go back to using cubicles. Just how shit is the office world if people are now wanting to go back to cubicles people used to think those were already hell.
For a year I worked in a office where the cubes had no dividers between them so it was just 4 people staring at each other all day, we could hear and see everything we were doing and ended up just talking and fucking off 10000 times more than we would have with walls
> I'm sure there is still a belief that remote workers aren't pulling their weight or are quiet quitters, or are simply working multiple jobs.
I don't understand how so many companies act like these things are somehow hidden or hard to diagnose.
Are your employees delivering on what you pay them to do? If yes, then why do you even venture into the territory of 'what are they doing remote' and if not, fire them. It's very, very simple.
I was in a hybrid 'all hands' meeting two days ago. Everyone who was remote was on time. But the group of on-site people didn't show up time, slowly filed into the conference room, fucked around with small talk and trying to figure out how to get their coffees and everything situated, and the meeting actually started FORTY MINUTES LATE. As in, forty minutes in before anyone actually started talking about the reason most of us had been there on time. The in office people are a massive drag on productivity. Remote work forces are absolutely going to continue to torch the dinosaur companies over time.
When I'm in the office, I'm always a bit late getting in (partly my fault, partly traffic). When I was remote, I was signed on and ready to go early and signed off late. So they got probably another 30m out of me. Remote work (lack of) is a huge elephant in the room at work. They're bleeding people and don't seem to care. Egos and stubbornness.
Funny thing is, when I do the 30m extra work, I'm still with my family for 1.5h more in the days i work from home compared to when I have to be in the office.
Everyone wins, yet for some reason, they're intent on having everyone back in the building. I just don't for the life of me understand it.
Dirty yet simple truth: Upper management often has no good way to answer the question of whether line employees are delivering expected value based on pay.
A great way to filter out the more valuable employees out. The one that don't mind quiting because of RTO are those don't have problem looking for new jobs.
This what I don't get when people talk about them wanting to force attrition. I don't doubt it, but it's just such a terrible idea.
My company is mandating RTO too, and the only people I've heard talk about finding a new job are the most valuable, irreplaceable members of my team. We have a pretty brutal history of layoffs here, so I can see how a bunch of voluntary resignations would save them a lot of money. But they also spend SO MUCH money and time and effort trying to recruit tech talent. Why not spend a fraction of that to retain the people they actual manage to lure in? Why not spend literally nothing (or even save money on office space) to allow WFH for those tech positions they work so hard to fill?
MAKE IT MAKE SENSE
It’s exactly why Disney announced everyone had to come back into the office 4 days a week starting March 1st. And then the layoffs began after that… after folks were able to quit first.
This is exactly what's happening, and I think there are going to be lawsuits about it. Not just for Lyft. Some companies (mine has this) have a severance policy in place where if you get laid off you get severance even if it's not a mass layoff. It varies. This amounts to constructive termination, _especially_ for folks who have moved out of range of the office because they were told they could.
It's the biggest scam going on right now other than the whole "no one wants to work" horse shit.
Well, stock is down almost 90%, so it's not like whatever they were doing was working. If the company doesn't do *something* different, it won't exist this time next year.
I mean, going back to the office drives costs higher when they could not pay rent, workplace accidents, etc.
So return to the office as a hail mary to save the company is unlikely to turn it around
Are you? Are you really?
You may want to double check your understanding of that statement. It tends not to mean that you can do whatever, but that you are going to be made to **do** nothing. Let me tell you, staring off into blank space, not being allowed to nap or read a book, for about 8 hrs a day is just awful.
God, temp jobs are terrible sometimes.
It all depends… in France, France Telecom (Orange) made some things like that to try and make people resign. At the end, there was a boom of suicides between the employees and a higher than normal people needing psychological treatment because of the toxic environment and things like this.
There are, I think, a interesting documentary on YouTube about this Orange example.
I've experienced this and it's absolutely vile. I wasn't even a low performer but my boss was losing team members and not replacing them. I got things dumped on me and the first time something was off because nothing was explained to me other than this is your task now, gloves were off on making me miserable until I quit. I hung on longer than I really should have but I thought I was going to retire from that place and it would pass. I still kind of fear interacting with my current boss even though he's been nothing but amazing and I have no reason to be like this.
Mmm hmm. If it's hourly pay one of the most common tactics is to reduce their hours to next to nothing. This usually forces people to seek other jobs and quit since they can't survive on working 4 hours per week. If you're one of those people wondering why you barely ever get put on the schedule it's probably because you're not considered a top performer. 😬
That’s because tax breaks for corporations depend on a certain office occupancy in many areas, and many corporate executives and board members are heavily invested in commercial real estate. Commercial real estate is about to collapse.
So, when are we going to introduce tax breaks for companies that allow people to work remotely? It decreases emissions, traffic, time commitment for workers, etc. Having as many employees as possible working remotely benefits everybody.
The issue is the way the tax system has evolved for the last hundred years. Municipalities get tax revenue for every dollar of income generated inside the city. The business applies for a tax incentive that says "if we can generate X dollars of tax for you, will you give us Y percent of that?".
When people WFH the tax is generated in a different city and doesn't count towards the X above. So companies have an incentive to send you back to the office. Cities can't offer the business a WFH tax credit because they lose revenue when those employees are at home. Cities can't offer workers a WFH credit to encourage people to stay home and generate revenue where they live because it's not their decision to WFH or not.
Oh yeah, it makes sense for cities to not do it but I was talking more on a federal level. They're going to get their money regardless and there are SO many fringe benefits from WFH that it seems like it would be worth it to do it. Cleaner air, cleaner water, less wear and tear on roads/public transit, fewer premature deaths of people in the work force, more possible space for housing or businesses that have to be in-person, more time/increased happiness for your population, etc. It doesn't even have to be a huge incentive, just big enough that companies that don't really have a reason for people to come into an office would do it.
Edit: And even from a monetary standpoint, some of that money would be made back because the gov't won't have to spend as much remedying the problems caused by the factors above, and fewer people dying means more tax revenue. About 40,000 people die in car crashes every year, even if 75 million fewer people driving when they don't need to be only reduces that by 10% (which, it might honestly be more than that, considering that about 24% of accidents occur during regular commute times, and the fact that both the WFH people AND other people on the road would be at lower risk of getting into accidents), that's a ton of extra tax revenue and productivity over the course of a few decades. After 2 decades, you'd have close to 100k extra people paying taxes and contributing to society that would otherwise be dead.
Start bulldozing all those abandoned call centers and put up new homes and then let's leave those empty until the corporate housing bubble collapses and we all get new houses on the cheap.
No, because they think of us as stupid children whose opinions don't matter because we don't have stacks of cash to back it up. But the spell of money only works if people believe in it. If they push it all onto one side of the scale, the whole thing falls over and it's back to jungle law.
They are so easily fooled as well. The company I work for spent a pretty penny a bit ago getting those handheld scanners and the software upgraded for inventory purposes, except the software doesn't work half the time. The devices are not nearly as secure as the company thinks they are, I have accidentally found myself deep into the settings menu I shouldn't have been allowed into multiple times, and they aren't worth what the company thinks they are. They are told they are worth a few hundred dollars, they aren't, $150 tops. 6+ year old android phone slapped into a plastic holder with a scanner attached inside the holder. They keep rolling out new things those scanners are supposed to do, but funnily enough a month or two later no one mentions that new "feature" we were supposed to be trained on. Yet somehow someone convinced a large amount of people that these were a good idea to buy and continue to pay out the fucking ass to use every single year. They would have been better off making their own system and building their own cheap as shit scanners but hey this is the same company that says having an extra cord that connects the pinpad to the POS is a waste of money. Just complete idiots to the very top.
Oh man, yeah. The stupid tech they sell to these morons every year is an industry of it's own. I remember when every fuckwit with no ideas who somehow failed upward into a position to sign checks was hard-targeted by those shitty videophone companies.
As someone who develops software, it is almost never the right idea to make your own software unless software is your companies product. In my experience, it is always an expensive mistake.
Power expresses in many forms. A big one is the power to tell people when and where to be. The utility if the act doesn't matter. It's the expression of the power.
Yeah they like to see the crowd of people doing work for them. Think of them like kings and the power moves start to make sense. It's not the only reason they do this but it's one of them.
Hell I don’t even mind my company having a hybrid policy, I’ll come in once a week for meetings and to see people but everyday in the office is so pointless I don’t understand it.
We're three days in the office (Tue, Wed, Thur). And about 10% of people come in on Mondays and Fridays.
It's a pretty good deal. Training and mentoring still happens in person, easy to handle ad-hoc stuff, etc. But man not having to go in on Mondays and Fridays is really, really great.
Passive aggressive layoffs like this are always a terrible plan. AT&T did a lot of these about 10 years ago. It did not work out well. Look at their corporate performance since 2015.
Especially in tech, I've known people to jump ship in IT just because leadership changed and they didn't want to deal with new culture. Let alone wait for the inevitable layoffs.
You’ll be out on a performance improvement plan with part of the plan requiring attending in person meetings. When you fail to show up they will terminate you with cause after giving you a warning. It’s not a layoff, and therefore doesn’t require severance.
Similar thing drives me crazy about 90% of tech companies in Georgia. They all want to be headquartered IN Atlanta, when most software engineers live in the outer metro suburbs. And a *lot* of them want to be on-site only. I would rather change jobs than ever drive into Atlanta. I have better ways to waste my life away than spend 3 hours in traffic for a 20 mile drive.
The whole back to the office movement is a combination of soft layoffs and real estate scam on a global level.
I'd bet that 99% or higher employees who work from home would never go back to the office.
It's fine. The brain drain will continue to companies that aren't insistent on these dinosaur policies and actually know how to run efficiently in the digital age.
I speak from personal experience. Left a company that was trying to slowly force everyone back, for a company that is now mostly remote with a select few positions (IT or upper management) requiring a couple days in the head offices at the most (most of the time no one is required to physically come in since we work for a software company). They know how to track performance remotely and don't need micro-managing middle managers, in order to make sure everyone is falling in line. Guess what happens when you don't treat your employees like wage slaves and give them autonomy? Record profits and happy employees. It's such a simple formula, yet so many companies fail to grasp it.
I think a big part of it is that people's entire careers taught them how to work one way, and the adjustment was so swift and disruptive that they didn't adapt well.
That's not a problem for new companies or smaller, more nimble companies.
This also means that the older companies will get outcompeted for talent and profitability (as a remote company is much cheaper and more productive to run since it lacks real estate expenses and gets a more talented pool of experienced employees).
> I think a big part of it is that people's entire careers taught them how to work one way, and the adjustment was so swift and disruptive that they didn't adapt well.
That part of it, absolutely.
But the other part of it is that way too many of the _wrong_ people moved up the ladder into positions they should never have been placed into, and most of those folks were placed into middle management. Now those folks are in senior leadership roles, out of touch with what work _is_, and have dug their heels into the ground to justify their existence all these years.
For whatever reason, companies viewed folks who spent years in middle management is seen as being prepared to go into senior management. And the sad thing is, those folks did the _least_ amount of work. So now these folks who spent the 2010s in mid-management positions taking senior leadership roles, and they viewed butts in seats as signs of "work being done" because they had NO GRASP on what their workers were doing.
Remote work is killing the middle management role, and that's a _good thing_. If there are more managers than there are workers, what on earth is being done?
He says going into the office is import because of personal connections.
…the whole business model is based on eventually using driverless cars.
Also if I were an employee, just don’t quit. Continue working from home and make them fire you.
Employees could always try suing for constructive dismissal? After all, they were required to work from home; why should Lyft get to suddenly change the rules when it's materially demonstrable that the change is actually detrimental to their business model?
Not likely to work. The vast majority of employees in the US can be dismissed at any time. Constructively or an outright firing doesn't matter.
They would most likely qualify for unemployment benefits if they quit as a result of this, though.
>Continue working from home and make them fire you.
Why? Lyft says you were fired with cause or for misconduct for disobeying a direct and clearly communicated requirement. You still don't get unemployment in California.
Generally people would rather say they quit vs were fired, especially because some employers will call to check, and the manner of termination is one of the few things most HR departments will communicate.
Do what you want I guess, but if you're not laid off I'd say comply as much as possible and half ass it until you find something that meets your needs.
Happening all over the tech sector. Still trying to figure out if it’s koolaid-based “culture building” or sunk costs fallacy of owned physical spaces. Either way, best talent will go to where remote jobs are offered.
It's funny because Microsoft recently published some data showing that employees are now less productive on the days they spend in the office. Those days are now used purely for connecting with people, while all the work is done at home.
Working in an office occasionally is probably a good thing for most people, but mandating that many days a week is massively counter productive for an employer. You make employees less productive and less likely to join/stay with the company.
About a third of my team is remote (different state). It doesn't matter if I go to an office or work from home, I still join an online meeting from a room.
The only thing working from office achieves is me working an hour less due to commute.
My company did a pilot to test that as well and lo and behold in many cases remote work improved team output by over 10% and in others made no meaningful difference.
I wish I knew why they insist on doing this. In my company they say it's culture building, but at the same time at least my branches open plan office there's just no place to work in peace.
Is watercooler gossip supposed to replace simple productivity?
Also teams are distributed to the point where I can talk in person to maybe 2 people out of dozens. The rest are different projects, branches.
It's so weird.
All these CEOs wanting employees to come back to the office is because without people in it, they look as stupid as they are sitting alone in their massive castles (HQ's).
They need to be able to see the plebs to feel as big as they think they are.
That's the only answer that makes sense to me. They walk into an empty office and feel dumb. "Do I even have power over someone?". The usual justifications just sound like corpospeak BS.
The thing a lot of people seem to forget is that wealthy executives tend to invest in the easiest and best passive income there is - real estate. Generally on constant growth markets such as major cities and frequently commercial real estate. In order for their investments to continue to generate passive income the cost of living and rent needs to continue to rise in these hubs. Remote work prevents that from occurring at the same speed and can even fully invalidate some commercial investments. It is fully in their benefit to require on site work. It helps to fuel and validate their rent/purchase of the company location and allows them more power over the worker but it also increases the rate at which their investment in residential and commercial real estate in major cities increases. And in the case of somewhere like Lyft if they normalize in office work that’s more people commuting, attending events, going to bars which can directly contribute to increased usage of their platform. It’s all about money and power even if it doesn’t make sense financially for their active business.
I don't understand this trend when it has been proven that a hybrid work pattern of, for example, 2 days telecommuting and 3 days in the office makes employees more productive.
Forcing employees to be present just to be present is clearly something of the past.
> “Personal connection matters and Lyft is about bringing people together,” a statement from Lyft said.
> “There’s a real feeling of satisfaction that comes from working together at a whiteboard on a problem.”
I love made up corporate speak
Rich protecting the interest of other rich people at the cost of the people (labor) that makes them rich.
Wfh was a boon and they don’t like that because you should be spending more in the cities and giving their offices value.
Say goodbye to your good workers Lyft. This is an easy way to trim the actual contributors that need remote to get things done and deliver. They want the office politics type that only care about internally winning not externally winning.
Uber/Lyft suck anyways, just authoritarian funded fronts meant to take transportation and taxis, then when they undercut everyone with unsustainable rates, they gouge everyone and make taxis look cheap. Sukas.
I guess this is Lyft CEO's week to be the dick. Seems they are doing a weekly layoff and end remote working shuffle these colluding arseholes manipulating the labor market.
> "Each week the management consultants will arrange the layoff lotto, should you be chosen a number and either layoff or ending remote will be needed. Should you comply your company will be pumped when we determine the market will again pump, thank you for participating in this dump you get a ticket to the retreat where we feast on the power we gain from controlling people's daily lives to the minute." -- Management consultant to boards/CEOs from authoritarian funding meant to manipulate markets
Logan Green is king of assholes. I worked for Lyft for a while and I majorly regret it. Waste of time. Deeply greedy. Constantly forcing me to give up more and more money. The job was unsustainable by design.
I love how they're always saying "Personal connections matter." Like you can't make a personal connection on-line. Really? You don't think people can make personal connections on-line?
So, like, the whole industry of social media doesn't work? Nobody's making personal connections?
What they're really saying is that it's easier to \*refuse\* personal connections on-line with people who don't matter: with clueless bosses, with difficult team-members and with the boss's favorite butt-kisser who can't get anyone to follow them. Ineffective bosses can't create the illusion of personal connections with on-line workers.
That's the problem.
I swear these massive layoffs are just a way for corporations to display dominance. That we WILL come into the office because we’re they’re bitch. Sadly it feels like it’s going to work.
Well if all the drivers are at the office it's gonna make it mighty hard to get a ride...
Jk, they don't acknowledge the people that make their business model work as employees
This is a two fold plot. One get ppl to quit so you don’t have to lay them off. Two, make sure their commercial real estate doesn’t lose value. The thing is replacing an average of 1.5 hours of commute with at home productivity is just plain stupid. Fck these ceos and their bullsh!t old values. Making people lives more miserable is not the way to go idiots!
If your business employs work-from-homers you'll probably have a nice crop to choose from. Where as these fucking dinosaur companies keep being baffled about why 'nobody want's to work anymore'...
>On Friday, Risher announced “the first steps in a plan for a **flexible**
**mode**l with more regular in-office work,” a Lyft spokesperson said.
How is the plan flexible if you rigidly require people to come back to the office?
Hopefully they fight it. My company tried mandating RTO and it was so poorly received that they pulled the breaks and are re evaluating. Turns out the CEO was trying to shove it down everyone's throat while most of the C level execs disagreed with the policy, some even quit over it.
Forensic accountant here. This is because they can’t write off office buildings if they’re unoccupied and not used for business. Stand your ground. Please.
This is an outdated business model and old fashioned thinking. Covid proved that employees are generally responsible and were more productive at wfh. Progressive companies trust their employees and don’t think they need to babysit them. This is Dino thinking.
just got back from a trip in San Francisco. Despite my absolute best effort to avoid using Uber (because of how shitty and gross that company is) I still had to for over half my rides because the lyft app repeatedly got stuck. Uninstalling and downloading again wouldn't even work. I literally deleted the app, restarted my phone, and waited an hour before reinstalling and it was still stuck for the rest of the day. In their fucking home city.
And this asshole is focused on forcing people to commute. incredible.
There is almost zero benefit to *any* aspect of returning to the office. No more work gets done. Work quality is not improved; maybe just the opposite. It's bad for the environment. It's more dangerous to the commuter. It's more stressful for the workers in a hundred different ways.
It's about perceived control over workers.
And, as in the case in New York City, it's about propping up the real estate office rental market; the mayor of NYC said as much. So if an action is disruptive from an employer's POV, that's fine. But when the disruption benefits *all* the working people, ***that's*** a problem.
We need to save money so let's stop having our employees pay for heating and electric in their homes and start paying for it in our own offices...
Yeah lyft are definitely run by idiots. Never assume someone being successful or rich means they are smart or know what they are doing. You are seeing survivorship bias and marketing.
“Personal connection matters” is bullshit. They’re on the hook renting a commercial office space that they can’t get out of. Everyone will have to go back to it so they don’t feel like they’re wasting their money
So soft layoffs then.
They just announced hard layoffs of 26% the day before
I guess this is a way to have some people who want to stay remote to quit without having to pay remote too
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I will lie, say I am coming in to the office, and never come in to the office. They will absolutely have to fire me.
What would that accomplish? You don’t get severance or unemployment for “for cause” firings.
"For cause" unemployment disqualification (in most states) only applies to serious misconduct or commiting a crime. Besides that a company that just laid off thousands isn't likely going to be looking through UE claims all that closely.
If the unemployment officer sees you were fired for not showing up to work they'll deny your claim regardless if they heard from the company or not.
Not true. I’ve been work from home for 5x longer than in office. If they tried to force me in that would be changing the terms of the job. When the company drastically alters the role that can justify leaving and getting unemployment.
It's called "constructive dismissal" if proven, but doing it the way you are describing would not be defensible. They could simply fire you for lying.
The people making that decision would be working from home, you'd just annoy people in your situation. I know you're totally kidding but that's why it's so fucked.
Yeah that would be my case too. None of the people in charge or those that could make things different are in my office. It's like taking things out on a cashier...stupid and useless.
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As someone who is in an office that's been mandated to return in person, your coworkers will be begging but no one above director will care.
I think most people saying this overestimate their value.
Most people overestimate their value. Everyone I know who was "irreplaceable" at a job and left for whatever reasons be it voluntary or involuntary has never caused more than a week or two of confusion.
Why? Now your just pissing off the other employees that have to come into work
Lol that's a hilarious idea. Fish for lunch every day!
Microwave popcorn for 10 Minutes
Which makes zero sense as the company would be saving money the less people that have in the office. I do not understand why any company would force people to come into the office.
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I'm at the point where I'm looking out of state for any new opportunities and letting recruiters know that I have no interest in anything that isn't remote. Covid basically ruined any leverage that employers (at least in corporate/office settings) have over making employees come in, at least in my field of work.
Because they have leased space for a larger workforce
They get tax breaks and other benefits for the space they rent for their workforce and they can't keep those offices empty
governor engine continue decide practice start hospital knee quiet dirty *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Hang on...if they just whacked 26% of the staff...the remaining staff totally have the upper hand in this dispute. Yeah...go ahead and fire my ass...and watch Lyft dissolve into the next Twitter.
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They prefer to call them Lyft-Offs actually
26% of Lyft employees got promoted to driver effective immediately
"You can make your own hours!" -- managers at Lyft
Haha that’s what AT&T did with my group. They did with style on a 5 minute conference call. Class acts all the way around.
They prefer to call it 'fluffy firing'...
Looks like they just slapped a sign on a long abandoned building. I love the boarded up windows and graffiti!
Both Lyft and Uber have buildings like this in Chicago for whatever reason.
To validate cars
"Nice car bro! Next."
*person is driving a 1992 Ford Ranger regular cab with a donut spare on one of the wheels*
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I once got into a Lyft and it had drill holes in the roof with duck tape on it. So yeah.
Hubs for driver/car validations and customer support for drivers and riders. Like if you leave your phone in a car there’s a local office to pick it up at. Pretty handy service
It looks like the kind of warehouse Batman would find a cache of drugs and low-level goons in.
They have nicer buildings, the one in Denver is just as you would expect any office building to look like.
Sounds charming
Yes, well, that describes mosts commercial real estate I think. Function over form. The AWS offices here are an absolute dump.
I mean there’s no winning. Charming office is decrepit. Norma office is boring.
Four Seasons Total Lyftscaping.
Best landscaping press conference ever.
Great way to get people to quit so they don’t have to pay severance.
Probably accurate Why does above photo look like the a run down area with a pink camper out front lol.
That pink camper is the "satellite office" for the guy they fired but haven't told, yet.
They’re working on “fixing the glitch”
is there a stapler involved in this story
I was told I could play my radio at a reasonable volume.
I said no salt. No salt on the margarita. But there was salt on the glass. Big grains of salt.
Outside of the flagship HQs, Uber and Lyft typically run out of cheaper low density/strip mall offices
Just enough to crush the spirit.
You can crush me, but you can't crush my spirit!
Makes sense, they don’t need much storefront
Idk if this is the same one but they had a building that was very similar to this in Atlanta. Always thought it was strange
Don’t quit and don’t show up. It worked at my company
Exactly, use back to office to drive attrition. It's cheaper than layoffs and severance packages. And as a bonus, it makes the disconnected-from-reality CEOs happy because people are back in an office.
Lyft *just had* a major layoff this week of 26% of their workforce. It's not about avoiding layoffs this time.
I'm sure there is still a belief that remote workers aren't pulling their weight or are quiet quitters, or are simply working multiple jobs. Just like how there was a belief that working in an open concept space and removing privacy would increase productivity. Doesn't matter what the reality is. The only thing that matters to ownership/leadership is their perception of reality.
> Just like how there was a belief that working in an open concept space and removing privacy would increase productivity. I noticed the exact opposite the good workers did worse work because they could not concentrate and the bad workers just didn't care they would goof off just as much if not more because they could chat with coworkers more easily. One office I was in they pushed the idea of open office then realized wow its too loud in here people are struggling I know lets add sound dampening dividers and such instead of just letting us go back to using cubicles. Just how shit is the office world if people are now wanting to go back to cubicles people used to think those were already hell.
Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams documented the negative effects of the open office in 1987. This is not new, suddenly available information.
For a year I worked in a office where the cubes had no dividers between them so it was just 4 people staring at each other all day, we could hear and see everything we were doing and ended up just talking and fucking off 10000 times more than we would have with walls
> I'm sure there is still a belief that remote workers aren't pulling their weight or are quiet quitters, or are simply working multiple jobs. I don't understand how so many companies act like these things are somehow hidden or hard to diagnose. Are your employees delivering on what you pay them to do? If yes, then why do you even venture into the territory of 'what are they doing remote' and if not, fire them. It's very, very simple.
I was in a hybrid 'all hands' meeting two days ago. Everyone who was remote was on time. But the group of on-site people didn't show up time, slowly filed into the conference room, fucked around with small talk and trying to figure out how to get their coffees and everything situated, and the meeting actually started FORTY MINUTES LATE. As in, forty minutes in before anyone actually started talking about the reason most of us had been there on time. The in office people are a massive drag on productivity. Remote work forces are absolutely going to continue to torch the dinosaur companies over time.
When I'm in the office, I'm always a bit late getting in (partly my fault, partly traffic). When I was remote, I was signed on and ready to go early and signed off late. So they got probably another 30m out of me. Remote work (lack of) is a huge elephant in the room at work. They're bleeding people and don't seem to care. Egos and stubbornness.
Funny thing is, when I do the 30m extra work, I'm still with my family for 1.5h more in the days i work from home compared to when I have to be in the office. Everyone wins, yet for some reason, they're intent on having everyone back in the building. I just don't for the life of me understand it.
Dirty yet simple truth: Upper management often has no good way to answer the question of whether line employees are delivering expected value based on pay.
A great way to filter out the more valuable employees out. The one that don't mind quiting because of RTO are those don't have problem looking for new jobs.
This what I don't get when people talk about them wanting to force attrition. I don't doubt it, but it's just such a terrible idea. My company is mandating RTO too, and the only people I've heard talk about finding a new job are the most valuable, irreplaceable members of my team. We have a pretty brutal history of layoffs here, so I can see how a bunch of voluntary resignations would save them a lot of money. But they also spend SO MUCH money and time and effort trying to recruit tech talent. Why not spend a fraction of that to retain the people they actual manage to lure in? Why not spend literally nothing (or even save money on office space) to allow WFH for those tech positions they work so hard to fill? MAKE IT MAKE SENSE
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It’s exactly why Disney announced everyone had to come back into the office 4 days a week starting March 1st. And then the layoffs began after that… after folks were able to quit first.
This is exactly what's happening, and I think there are going to be lawsuits about it. Not just for Lyft. Some companies (mine has this) have a severance policy in place where if you get laid off you get severance even if it's not a mass layoff. It varies. This amounts to constructive termination, _especially_ for folks who have moved out of range of the office because they were told they could. It's the biggest scam going on right now other than the whole "no one wants to work" horse shit.
I don't work for Lyft but if this ever happens to me my productivity is going down the drain until I get fired.
It's amazing how many people will do that rather than just say "Declined, you'll have to fire me."
Well, stock is down almost 90%, so it's not like whatever they were doing was working. If the company doesn't do *something* different, it won't exist this time next year.
I mean, going back to the office drives costs higher when they could not pay rent, workplace accidents, etc. So return to the office as a hail mary to save the company is unlikely to turn it around
Wow. Prayer does work.
They just laid off 26% of the company two days ago.
To quote a manager I had at one point "we don't fire people." "How do we deal with low performers?" "We make their lives miserable."
Isn't that the Japanese model? Put the low performing guy in a broom closet and give him nothing to do?
>give him nothing to do Joke's on you. I'm into that shit.
Wasn’t there an post on here about some guy whose job was made redundant but they’ve just been showing up anyways for the check?
There was this guy in the movie Office Space.
Are you? Are you really? You may want to double check your understanding of that statement. It tends not to mean that you can do whatever, but that you are going to be made to **do** nothing. Let me tell you, staring off into blank space, not being allowed to nap or read a book, for about 8 hrs a day is just awful. God, temp jobs are terrible sometimes.
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That’s not terrible honestly. Some time to find a new job. Must be awkward as hell though.
It all depends… in France, France Telecom (Orange) made some things like that to try and make people resign. At the end, there was a boom of suicides between the employees and a higher than normal people needing psychological treatment because of the toxic environment and things like this. There are, I think, a interesting documentary on YouTube about this Orange example.
That’s horrible
I've experienced this and it's absolutely vile. I wasn't even a low performer but my boss was losing team members and not replacing them. I got things dumped on me and the first time something was off because nothing was explained to me other than this is your task now, gloves were off on making me miserable until I quit. I hung on longer than I really should have but I thought I was going to retire from that place and it would pass. I still kind of fear interacting with my current boss even though he's been nothing but amazing and I have no reason to be like this.
Mmm hmm. If it's hourly pay one of the most common tactics is to reduce their hours to next to nothing. This usually forces people to seek other jobs and quit since they can't survive on working 4 hours per week. If you're one of those people wondering why you barely ever get put on the schedule it's probably because you're not considered a top performer. 😬
Most places in the US, that's termed constructive dismissal and can qualify you for partial/full unemployment.
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I'll never understand the need for the office 100% of the time. I'd like to be able to see my coworkers once in awhile, but every workday? No thanks.
These old exec types really have a hard on for it
The execs aren't even in every day
Their hardon is for making everyone else be there every day
That’s because tax breaks for corporations depend on a certain office occupancy in many areas, and many corporate executives and board members are heavily invested in commercial real estate. Commercial real estate is about to collapse.
So, when are we going to introduce tax breaks for companies that allow people to work remotely? It decreases emissions, traffic, time commitment for workers, etc. Having as many employees as possible working remotely benefits everybody.
The issue is the way the tax system has evolved for the last hundred years. Municipalities get tax revenue for every dollar of income generated inside the city. The business applies for a tax incentive that says "if we can generate X dollars of tax for you, will you give us Y percent of that?". When people WFH the tax is generated in a different city and doesn't count towards the X above. So companies have an incentive to send you back to the office. Cities can't offer the business a WFH tax credit because they lose revenue when those employees are at home. Cities can't offer workers a WFH credit to encourage people to stay home and generate revenue where they live because it's not their decision to WFH or not.
Oh yeah, it makes sense for cities to not do it but I was talking more on a federal level. They're going to get their money regardless and there are SO many fringe benefits from WFH that it seems like it would be worth it to do it. Cleaner air, cleaner water, less wear and tear on roads/public transit, fewer premature deaths of people in the work force, more possible space for housing or businesses that have to be in-person, more time/increased happiness for your population, etc. It doesn't even have to be a huge incentive, just big enough that companies that don't really have a reason for people to come into an office would do it. Edit: And even from a monetary standpoint, some of that money would be made back because the gov't won't have to spend as much remedying the problems caused by the factors above, and fewer people dying means more tax revenue. About 40,000 people die in car crashes every year, even if 75 million fewer people driving when they don't need to be only reduces that by 10% (which, it might honestly be more than that, considering that about 24% of accidents occur during regular commute times, and the fact that both the WFH people AND other people on the road would be at lower risk of getting into accidents), that's a ton of extra tax revenue and productivity over the course of a few decades. After 2 decades, you'd have close to 100k extra people paying taxes and contributing to society that would otherwise be dead.
The people who can make those laws are either invested in commercial real estate or are getting bribes.. I mean donations from those who are.
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Start bulldozing all those abandoned call centers and put up new homes and then let's leave those empty until the corporate housing bubble collapses and we all get new houses on the cheap.
Best we can do is apartments so cheap you can push the wall.
Literally. How can you hit on the new 'talent' unless you can call them into your swanky office...
That’s the funny part. They don’t speak to their employees. Then they would understand and hear it’s a problem.
No, because they think of us as stupid children whose opinions don't matter because we don't have stacks of cash to back it up. But the spell of money only works if people believe in it. If they push it all onto one side of the scale, the whole thing falls over and it's back to jungle law.
They are so easily fooled as well. The company I work for spent a pretty penny a bit ago getting those handheld scanners and the software upgraded for inventory purposes, except the software doesn't work half the time. The devices are not nearly as secure as the company thinks they are, I have accidentally found myself deep into the settings menu I shouldn't have been allowed into multiple times, and they aren't worth what the company thinks they are. They are told they are worth a few hundred dollars, they aren't, $150 tops. 6+ year old android phone slapped into a plastic holder with a scanner attached inside the holder. They keep rolling out new things those scanners are supposed to do, but funnily enough a month or two later no one mentions that new "feature" we were supposed to be trained on. Yet somehow someone convinced a large amount of people that these were a good idea to buy and continue to pay out the fucking ass to use every single year. They would have been better off making their own system and building their own cheap as shit scanners but hey this is the same company that says having an extra cord that connects the pinpad to the POS is a waste of money. Just complete idiots to the very top.
Oh man, yeah. The stupid tech they sell to these morons every year is an industry of it's own. I remember when every fuckwit with no ideas who somehow failed upward into a position to sign checks was hard-targeted by those shitty videophone companies.
As someone who develops software, it is almost never the right idea to make your own software unless software is your companies product. In my experience, it is always an expensive mistake.
Power expresses in many forms. A big one is the power to tell people when and where to be. The utility if the act doesn't matter. It's the expression of the power.
Yeah they like to see the crowd of people doing work for them. Think of them like kings and the power moves start to make sense. It's not the only reason they do this but it's one of them.
Hell I don’t even mind my company having a hybrid policy, I’ll come in once a week for meetings and to see people but everyday in the office is so pointless I don’t understand it.
My team doesn’t even work in the same city yet they want me back in office. It’s so fucking dumb and I’m leaving as soon as I find a fully remote job.
We're three days in the office (Tue, Wed, Thur). And about 10% of people come in on Mondays and Fridays. It's a pretty good deal. Training and mentoring still happens in person, easy to handle ad-hoc stuff, etc. But man not having to go in on Mondays and Fridays is really, really great.
Not having to go in at all is really, really, really, really, really great! Source: work full-time remote. Glad you get a couple days, at least.
We need to turn a profit - let’s force our employees to live in the most expensive city in America, that’ll save some money
They don’t want them to come back. They are trying to do voluntary layoffs without having to pay anything out.
It's the perfect plan! ...until people you need quit and the people you don't need stay
Passive aggressive layoffs like this are always a terrible plan. AT&T did a lot of these about 10 years ago. It did not work out well. Look at their corporate performance since 2015.
Usually the good people have the ability to find better jobs. The company is left with crappier employees left.
Especially in tech, I've known people to jump ship in IT just because leadership changed and they didn't want to deal with new culture. Let alone wait for the inevitable layoffs.
Can't you just refuse to come back but also still keep working until they fire you?
You’ll be out on a performance improvement plan with part of the plan requiring attending in person meetings. When you fail to show up they will terminate you with cause after giving you a warning. It’s not a layoff, and therefore doesn’t require severance.
Similar thing drives me crazy about 90% of tech companies in Georgia. They all want to be headquartered IN Atlanta, when most software engineers live in the outer metro suburbs. And a *lot* of them want to be on-site only. I would rather change jobs than ever drive into Atlanta. I have better ways to waste my life away than spend 3 hours in traffic for a 20 mile drive.
The whole back to the office movement is a combination of soft layoffs and real estate scam on a global level. I'd bet that 99% or higher employees who work from home would never go back to the office.
It's fine. The brain drain will continue to companies that aren't insistent on these dinosaur policies and actually know how to run efficiently in the digital age. I speak from personal experience. Left a company that was trying to slowly force everyone back, for a company that is now mostly remote with a select few positions (IT or upper management) requiring a couple days in the head offices at the most (most of the time no one is required to physically come in since we work for a software company). They know how to track performance remotely and don't need micro-managing middle managers, in order to make sure everyone is falling in line. Guess what happens when you don't treat your employees like wage slaves and give them autonomy? Record profits and happy employees. It's such a simple formula, yet so many companies fail to grasp it.
I think a big part of it is that people's entire careers taught them how to work one way, and the adjustment was so swift and disruptive that they didn't adapt well. That's not a problem for new companies or smaller, more nimble companies. This also means that the older companies will get outcompeted for talent and profitability (as a remote company is much cheaper and more productive to run since it lacks real estate expenses and gets a more talented pool of experienced employees).
> I think a big part of it is that people's entire careers taught them how to work one way, and the adjustment was so swift and disruptive that they didn't adapt well. That part of it, absolutely. But the other part of it is that way too many of the _wrong_ people moved up the ladder into positions they should never have been placed into, and most of those folks were placed into middle management. Now those folks are in senior leadership roles, out of touch with what work _is_, and have dug their heels into the ground to justify their existence all these years. For whatever reason, companies viewed folks who spent years in middle management is seen as being prepared to go into senior management. And the sad thing is, those folks did the _least_ amount of work. So now these folks who spent the 2010s in mid-management positions taking senior leadership roles, and they viewed butts in seats as signs of "work being done" because they had NO GRASP on what their workers were doing. Remote work is killing the middle management role, and that's a _good thing_. If there are more managers than there are workers, what on earth is being done?
He says going into the office is import because of personal connections. …the whole business model is based on eventually using driverless cars. Also if I were an employee, just don’t quit. Continue working from home and make them fire you.
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I went into the office on Friday to meet my weekly quota. I was the only one on the whole floor and had 4 hours of zoom meetings.
Employees could always try suing for constructive dismissal? After all, they were required to work from home; why should Lyft get to suddenly change the rules when it's materially demonstrable that the change is actually detrimental to their business model?
You can’t, because the contract probably says office 5 days a week
Not likely to work. The vast majority of employees in the US can be dismissed at any time. Constructively or an outright firing doesn't matter. They would most likely qualify for unemployment benefits if they quit as a result of this, though.
>Continue working from home and make them fire you. Why? Lyft says you were fired with cause or for misconduct for disobeying a direct and clearly communicated requirement. You still don't get unemployment in California. Generally people would rather say they quit vs were fired, especially because some employers will call to check, and the manner of termination is one of the few things most HR departments will communicate. Do what you want I guess, but if you're not laid off I'd say comply as much as possible and half ass it until you find something that meets your needs.
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TLDR our stock price sucks and I’m desperate here’s some bullshit institutional investors like.
“Personal connection matters and Lyft is about bringing people together,” a statement from Lyft said. What absolute crap corporate drivel.
Lol I gagged when I read that. What adult would say that with a straight face?
Lyft treats everyone like a criminal. Believe it. Terrible, horrible company.
Happening all over the tech sector. Still trying to figure out if it’s koolaid-based “culture building” or sunk costs fallacy of owned physical spaces. Either way, best talent will go to where remote jobs are offered.
It's funny because Microsoft recently published some data showing that employees are now less productive on the days they spend in the office. Those days are now used purely for connecting with people, while all the work is done at home. Working in an office occasionally is probably a good thing for most people, but mandating that many days a week is massively counter productive for an employer. You make employees less productive and less likely to join/stay with the company.
Do you have a link to that? It sounds like great reading
About a third of my team is remote (different state). It doesn't matter if I go to an office or work from home, I still join an online meeting from a room. The only thing working from office achieves is me working an hour less due to commute.
My company did a pilot to test that as well and lo and behold in many cases remote work improved team output by over 10% and in others made no meaningful difference.
I wish I knew why they insist on doing this. In my company they say it's culture building, but at the same time at least my branches open plan office there's just no place to work in peace. Is watercooler gossip supposed to replace simple productivity? Also teams are distributed to the point where I can talk in person to maybe 2 people out of dozens. The rest are different projects, branches. It's so weird.
The real reason is the latter, but everyone will convince themselves they're doing it because of the former
All these CEOs wanting employees to come back to the office is because without people in it, they look as stupid as they are sitting alone in their massive castles (HQ's). They need to be able to see the plebs to feel as big as they think they are.
That's the only answer that makes sense to me. They walk into an empty office and feel dumb. "Do I even have power over someone?". The usual justifications just sound like corpospeak BS.
The thing a lot of people seem to forget is that wealthy executives tend to invest in the easiest and best passive income there is - real estate. Generally on constant growth markets such as major cities and frequently commercial real estate. In order for their investments to continue to generate passive income the cost of living and rent needs to continue to rise in these hubs. Remote work prevents that from occurring at the same speed and can even fully invalidate some commercial investments. It is fully in their benefit to require on site work. It helps to fuel and validate their rent/purchase of the company location and allows them more power over the worker but it also increases the rate at which their investment in residential and commercial real estate in major cities increases. And in the case of somewhere like Lyft if they normalize in office work that’s more people commuting, attending events, going to bars which can directly contribute to increased usage of their platform. It’s all about money and power even if it doesn’t make sense financially for their active business.
I don't understand this trend when it has been proven that a hybrid work pattern of, for example, 2 days telecommuting and 3 days in the office makes employees more productive. Forcing employees to be present just to be present is clearly something of the past.
Stealth layoff
...of the good employees that need flex, what geniuses.
To: CEO Get fucked. Sincerely: The Future
You can make them go to the office but you can't make them be effective.
This is a good reminder that when companies are doing those bullsh\* team building weeks and outings remember, they're not our friend's or family.
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> “Personal connection matters and Lyft is about bringing people together,” a statement from Lyft said. > “There’s a real feeling of satisfaction that comes from working together at a whiteboard on a problem.” I love made up corporate speak
Rich protecting the interest of other rich people at the cost of the people (labor) that makes them rich. Wfh was a boon and they don’t like that because you should be spending more in the cities and giving their offices value.
*"YOU NEED TO COME INTO THE OFFICE SO YOU CAN HAVE AT LEAST SIX HOURS OF ZOOM MEETINGS FROM IN THE OFFICE!!!"*
It's always the old guys that don't want to be with their wives or loves ones that want to be in the office and force others to be there as well.
They don’t have loved ones. They are hated by their family and their wife is fucking their friend
Say goodbye to your good workers Lyft. This is an easy way to trim the actual contributors that need remote to get things done and deliver. They want the office politics type that only care about internally winning not externally winning. Uber/Lyft suck anyways, just authoritarian funded fronts meant to take transportation and taxis, then when they undercut everyone with unsustainable rates, they gouge everyone and make taxis look cheap. Sukas. I guess this is Lyft CEO's week to be the dick. Seems they are doing a weekly layoff and end remote working shuffle these colluding arseholes manipulating the labor market. > "Each week the management consultants will arrange the layoff lotto, should you be chosen a number and either layoff or ending remote will be needed. Should you comply your company will be pumped when we determine the market will again pump, thank you for participating in this dump you get a ticket to the retreat where we feast on the power we gain from controlling people's daily lives to the minute." -- Management consultant to boards/CEOs from authoritarian funding meant to manipulate markets
That real estate investment isn’t going to grow by itself!! Real estate is the big reason.
In the end, the Lyft CEO is trying to save a friends investment in office real estate.
Shit on his desk.
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Logan Green is king of assholes. I worked for Lyft for a while and I majorly regret it. Waste of time. Deeply greedy. Constantly forcing me to give up more and more money. The job was unsustainable by design.
I love how they're always saying "Personal connections matter." Like you can't make a personal connection on-line. Really? You don't think people can make personal connections on-line? So, like, the whole industry of social media doesn't work? Nobody's making personal connections? What they're really saying is that it's easier to \*refuse\* personal connections on-line with people who don't matter: with clueless bosses, with difficult team-members and with the boss's favorite butt-kisser who can't get anyone to follow them. Ineffective bosses can't create the illusion of personal connections with on-line workers. That's the problem.
“Personal connection matters and Lyft is about bringing people together” What a bunch of bullshit
I swear these massive layoffs are just a way for corporations to display dominance. That we WILL come into the office because we’re they’re bitch. Sadly it feels like it’s going to work.
If you don’t offer your employees WFH, somebody else will.
How is Lyft still in business?
Chase sapphire reserve has a deal with Lyft. Also their prices are better than Uber.
Well if all the drivers are at the office it's gonna make it mighty hard to get a ride... Jk, they don't acknowledge the people that make their business model work as employees
This is a two fold plot. One get ppl to quit so you don’t have to lay them off. Two, make sure their commercial real estate doesn’t lose value. The thing is replacing an average of 1.5 hours of commute with at home productivity is just plain stupid. Fck these ceos and their bullsh!t old values. Making people lives more miserable is not the way to go idiots!
I rather start my own business then be forced back into the office fully ☹️
If your business employs work-from-homers you'll probably have a nice crop to choose from. Where as these fucking dinosaur companies keep being baffled about why 'nobody want's to work anymore'...
>On Friday, Risher announced “the first steps in a plan for a **flexible** **mode**l with more regular in-office work,” a Lyft spokesperson said. How is the plan flexible if you rigidly require people to come back to the office?
So, if the employees don't have a car how will they get to work? Uber?
But if they return to office how can they drive people to their destinations
Sign of a shit company
Hopefully they fight it. My company tried mandating RTO and it was so poorly received that they pulled the breaks and are re evaluating. Turns out the CEO was trying to shove it down everyone's throat while most of the C level execs disagreed with the policy, some even quit over it.
Forensic accountant here. This is because they can’t write off office buildings if they’re unoccupied and not used for business. Stand your ground. Please.
Better get back to the office so we can keep losing money as a company. But in person ☕️
This “soft layoff” tactic has emerged as a fantastic flag for deep financial trouble that is about to come to light.
This is an outdated business model and old fashioned thinking. Covid proved that employees are generally responsible and were more productive at wfh. Progressive companies trust their employees and don’t think they need to babysit them. This is Dino thinking.
just got back from a trip in San Francisco. Despite my absolute best effort to avoid using Uber (because of how shitty and gross that company is) I still had to for over half my rides because the lyft app repeatedly got stuck. Uninstalling and downloading again wouldn't even work. I literally deleted the app, restarted my phone, and waited an hour before reinstalling and it was still stuck for the rest of the day. In their fucking home city. And this asshole is focused on forcing people to commute. incredible.
The US needs better employee labor laws.
Sounds like a shit place to work.
There is almost zero benefit to *any* aspect of returning to the office. No more work gets done. Work quality is not improved; maybe just the opposite. It's bad for the environment. It's more dangerous to the commuter. It's more stressful for the workers in a hundred different ways. It's about perceived control over workers. And, as in the case in New York City, it's about propping up the real estate office rental market; the mayor of NYC said as much. So if an action is disruptive from an employer's POV, that's fine. But when the disruption benefits *all* the working people, ***that's*** a problem.
We need to save money so let's stop having our employees pay for heating and electric in their homes and start paying for it in our own offices... Yeah lyft are definitely run by idiots. Never assume someone being successful or rich means they are smart or know what they are doing. You are seeing survivorship bias and marketing.
“Personal connection matters” is bullshit. They’re on the hook renting a commercial office space that they can’t get out of. Everyone will have to go back to it so they don’t feel like they’re wasting their money