All the anonymous posts on HN, Blind and Reddit about how SWEs only perform 10 hours of real work a week with a full salary must have made their way up the chain of command.

The executives have known about this for a while; rather, the delay is because they only perform 1 hour of real work a week.

Depends on the team. This is true in all companies

Anonymous posts are one thing, but the popular "day in the life of a [Facebook/Google] program manager" short videos were something else entirely. That entire genre was incredibly damning.

I'll try to look up the link later, but I'd swear that one of them goes something like this, and some of you guys probably know what I'm talking about: Lady shows up with her dog. Grabs a bunch of free snacks. Grabs a free smoothie. Hits the "funfetti room" with her laptop for a zoom meeting. Grabs an enormous seafood lunch at the (free) company canteen. Goes for a walk with her dog. Grabs another free snack and/or a smoothie. Goes home.

Just another generic "day in the life."

Many of those posts were made by recruiters! They were ads for the company.

For many of us slogging away in retail or made unemployable by "5 years of experience"-ism, those were a barrage of "let them eat cake" moments. The delta between that quality of life and the average Zoomlennial's (the real average, not what any given coastal publication might have you believe) is unconscionable and in no way justified by apparent differences in capability. I watch luxury mansion tours for fun, and not one has made me nearly as furious as one of those DITL videos. They make the tech industry look like an upscale daycare for the adult children of the right class of global citizens, and no one else.

lmao, way to set expectations. Also, what type of person were they trying to recruit with that sort of thing? The Lotus Eater tribe?

I don’t get the extreme focus on eating and drinking. Nearly every shot involves food and drink. These companies have so many perks to brag about, but all these young “influencers” talk about is eating and drinking all day long. Are Gen-Z people starving or something?

I (and many other engineers I work with) often get so engrossed with work I forget lunch. Who are these people stuffing their faces all day?

These people are “eating out”, and eating out is a luxury; hence, the videos promote the idea of a luxurious job (without, apparently, and real work to be done).

What makes those videos infuriating is that they miss out… any of the parts where she does actual work? And that’s a video choice not an indictment of the industry. Surely nobody thinks everyone at linkedin just wonders round the office sipping mojitos for 10 hours a day.

Between the sheer number of people getting axed in layoffs and the amount of, "Yeah I actually only do like 2 hours of work a day," boasts, it doesn't sound so farfetched. They're surely not doing something so technical and important that they deserve that versus, say, the person dealing with screaming, irate customers in a pharmacy for 8 hours (also, you can't sit, no sitting allowed, it looks lazy).

10 hours of real work would be quite an accomplishment at a big company, but it’s not all laziness. At least at Google, there is almost a complete lack of workable process and at the same time insane red tape around most everything. The environment is inefficient and blaming ICs for getting little done in this situation is unfair.

It’s usually rather about if you proved yourself or not. Who’s your manager, etc. It’s always been the case in all FAANGs since the last decade. Some people can do remote, some people can’t.

I can second that this is often about power, even if it's not deliberate on the execs part it can be perceived that way, in the early days of the pandemic at a previous job I saw this play out in a huge way, everyone in any management role at the company basically bailed from the office immediately, but made it very clear that everyone else had to stay in the office (until it was essentially government enforced).

It created this really toxic dynamic of managers lording over the staff remotely from their homes, while making overt claims on "oh its so important for everyone else to really pull together and come into the office" and how "difficult it was for them to be out of the office", many many people left including myself when we found remote work elsewhere.

Hypocrisy never is a good impression to give.

Shows how out of touch these people are.

Most companies have a huge and wide class division. It’s just that the differences used to be subtle and mostly hidden, but lately they are now more overt and in your face.

The traditional class divisions were mostly hidden: Companies strongly try to hide salaries. Chauffeurs and company limos for the execs operate from private back doors reserved for the execs. Lavish outings are usually kept secret. Huge perks like company-provided vacation houses and yachts are kept way on the down low.

WFH is harder to hide. When only the exec class gets to do it, and all the cogs need to be crammed into the office, this is overt and gets noticed. When your WFH office is bigger than most people’s apartments, it gets noticed (the execs in my company have caught on to this one and now all blur/tone-down their videoconf backgrounds). In retail, when management makes all the worker bees wear masks yet exempts themselves, it’s noticed.