Pretty much exactly this happened at my company. They started touting these new offices they got for a steal, but in the all-hands said "our company has never required anyone to come in to the office and we never will". Three months later, they start encouraging everyone to come in once a week. Three months later, they changed it to 'we expect you to be in 4 days a week', and in the all-hands one of the founders went "We never said we wouldn't have you come back into the office. I love seeing people in person, that would be silly of me to say!"

Technically it's not a requirement, just an "expectation", so I still haven't gone in more than necessary. But I'm not expecting a great performance review next year because of it, and I'm not sure how much longer I'll stick around either (it does look like most other places are being even worse about it right now, though). I was so angry to hear that.

Not the only time they gaslit either. They also had a round of layoffs about six months ago while trying not to call them layoffs ("we let a bunch of people go today, it's not a layoff though, they just weren't performant enough to work here"), that really rubbed me the wrong way too.

Because sometimes that will be required.

You are quite correct that continuing on with the company (or in that corner of the industry) may - well, likely will be - impossible afterwards. Few things say 'burnt bridges' like a lawsuit. That said, being fired because of a promise they broke is them starting the bridge on fire anyway.

Either way, the CYA handbook is - document, document, document. And keep it where no one but you has control over it. You have no power if you can't prove anything. And documents 'go missing' or get 'automatically removed' from company equipment all the time in situations like this.

knowing if you even have a case or complaint is also important - which is only going to be possible if you can see what was actually said (not what you remember being said) or written. Sometimes we hear what we want to hear, not what was said. Knowing that BEFORE you show up in court is rather important.

I would keep it anyway for your records, due to it helping your claim for unemployment benefits by establishing constructive dismissal as opposed to termination for cause. But it might not work even then.

When changing direction results in actionable torts against employees, then employees are also entitled to be made whole (to some extent).

And I meant prosecution in the sense of ‘driving to an actual successful resolution including getting paid what you’re owed’ - which can be for breach of contract, illegal dismissal, constructive dismissal, etc.

There are a million ways for a company to fire someone without ‘firing’ them, which they’ll often use if they don’t want to pay out unemployment/owed vacation or the like. Many companies will target expensive employees first (age/seniority, expensive physical health issues, mental health problems, or they just think they ‘aren’t a team player’, or are harder to manager. etc.).

I see changes to these documents as similar to the change in T's & C's for any service I use; your continued use of the service denotes acceptance of the new terms. You're welcome to leave at any time.

Not sure what you can litigate against.

0: anecdotal from the past 15 years

If course, they rarely actually say that. But some folks have definitely been dumb enough to do so.

The issue with contract law is that most folks never put things in writing, so it’s a pain to litigate many claims, which makes it uneconomic to recover damages.

But if it’s in writing? Sounds like an easy to show breach of contract to me!

If it's a general policy that "we are remote", but your contract wasn't updated to reflect that, then don't be surprised if it changes.

If it gets changed in a way that causes you injury, guess what - you can be and should be compensated. If you can prove these things, then it should even be relatively easy to do so.

Contract law is not just things that say ‘contract’ on them. It is about agreements between parties.

Usually what I’ve done is brute force. Every State has a State bar that usually has listings. Google Maps searches for ‘employment attorney near me’ or ‘civil law attorney near me’ also usually gives a lot of matches.

I dump it all into a spreadsheet, and then go down the list taking notes and calling each one. Attorneys should give a free consult (anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour).

Try to learn as much as you can about the applicable law and the situation; and ask questions. Not just what is legal/not-legal, but their history in getting actual results for clients and what the courts will actually take seriously or not.

Don’t pick anyone right away. Call at least 3, preferably 10 in each speciality.

If you like them and they like you, they’ll either take you on contingency or ask you to give them a retainer (funds to be put into a trust they can bill against). Either way there will be some paperwork they’ll have you sign before they’re ’your attorney’.

Additionally, some things to look out for -

1) anyone that makes you pay up front for a consultation is bad news. Run away.

2) anyone that promises a result is bad news. Run away.

3) Anyone who takes a case without asking specific questions and arguing with you sometimes is bad news. Run away.

4) anyone who tells you something that seems wrong (and you can’t verify independently, even after you ask for a reference) is probably bad news. Run away if you even suspect it.

Employment law is its own speciality.

Contract law is generally a subset of civil law. Civil law is a huge umbrella, from ‘my neighbors tree dropped a branch on my house’ to ‘the mega corp. in my county has been poisoning the water for decades and I got cancer’. You’ll run across attorneys who handle many different areas, ask them what they do and what their style is.

I hope this helps!

P.S. most states and countries put their laws online. There is still usually case laws which modify it, and gotchas, etc. but you can figure out 95% of it if you find them and do your own research. Leginfo.ca.gov is the California One. When you’re talking to attorneys, feel free to ask them for applicable cases and/or codes to start looking at.

Flexibility (both in being able to say yes, and no) is important. Not being abusive is important too.

A lot of folks have lost their minds over the last few years (more than most), and it’s going to be interesting for sure how this all plays out.

Anything non-monetary that they take away from you should be offered in compensation and/or renegotiation. You should not be allowing changes to your employment contract without approval, especially ones where they are removing amenities.

The company has already had to revise down their earnings estimates a couple times this year, and hasn't bothered to replace about 20-30 other employees that have quit in the months since then (despite several of them being star employees).

That's why it felt like gaslighting to me, claiming these people weren't good employees and that's why "it wasn't a layoff" (even if that were true, it's still a layoff).

1. Real estate holding investment increases.

2. Control.

3. Silent layoffs.

There's no reason for RTO. None. They're doing it to save money and regain control of their workforce.

The result in my experience is you have either fullish remote or you need just as many desks so very little saving from a company point of view.

Sounds like motivated reasoning.

There are valid reasons for RTO like better communication or even better control over employees. It's a question of trade-offs.

[three reasons for RTO] "There's no reason for RTO. None." [perhaps another]

It’s all about pros/cons and either sides approach.

One big one you didn’t list - it’s really hard to a manager to see what is actually happening when remote, which can let some serious problems fester.

Some (but not most!) employees may be burning out, or violating security or labor rules, or not following company policies, or whatever, and these would be trivial to detect in person, but nearly impossible to do so remotely. And almost definitely impossible to do anything about effectively while remote.

Incompetent leaders cannot manage people remotely and they generally do a poor job when in person, but it's masked by their ability to micromanage and type-A the problem away.

Yup, our commercial real was essentially fully vacant. So they rolled out these silly blended schedules (literally just electronically sign in to the office by physically being there once a week, no time req). Now they can say, hey our office space is 90% utilized on a weekly basis! I think commercial real estate investors are going to see right through this charade, but maybe I'm overestimating them.

You have several from major cities (NYC, SF, etc.) saying on the record that they are going to speak to CEO's and push for RTO so that downtowns, local businesses, and neighborhoods can go back to "normal."

Not everybody works or can work in an office. Not everybody can work in tech. Cities are symbiotic, they offer employment to both knowledge workers and non-knowledge workers.

Sorry but you can't just write off the needs of that 50% of the population that aren't techcels. Yes, you will come back to cities, yes, you will re-create thriving downtowns, yes, you will do your bit.

Service sector workers will not tolerate being turned into gigbots and stuffed into ghost kitchens so the PMC elite can pretend they don't exist.

Perhaps this will make things go to how they should be, which means that you work locally because that's where the demand for your services is.

Not just income or payroll taxes, but also regular traffic simulating the local bars, cafes, gas stations & oil changers, dry cleaning, late night pizza, you name it. If these folks can't make their nut then they can't pay rent, and end up moving away or going out of business. Then the problem snowballs.

And then there are the other sources of cash, i.e. speeding tickets, parking fines, and jaywalking citations.

Arguably this is the 'invisible hand of the market' doing its thing, but it's hard to run a municipality if your year-by-year tax base could change dramatically.

It doesn't need to fix things. It just needs to appear they're "doing something."

I've even heard of companies reversing the RTO mandate after the desired number of employees have left. Or just not actually enforcing it and soft-pedaling the whole thing.

It is working out.

I looked at a few financial statements for a few companies pushing RTO (Amazon and a couple of Wall Street firms). Granted, it wasn't comprehensive or scientific, but: They all made more money in 2022 than in 2019 (the last year before COVID).

So I really do not see what the problem is.

Social bonding is much harder, but important for reliable collaboration, especially when there are disagreements. I also believe that conversations are more likely to derail when they aren't in person. I've also been part of so many lunch conversations in the office that resulted in someone being able to help out someone on a different team with an issue they had solved themselves previously, learn about activities on another team that were relevant to them etc. There are ways to achieve similar things in a remote setup, but it's hard, especially to deploy across large companies with thousands of people. For the record, I've worked fully in person, hybrid and remote and think hybrid is by far the hardest to make work.

Communicating effectively on camera is a learnable skill, it's not one most people in tech have. But making sure people are trained to do a good job is a management challenge and it's incumbent upon management to make sure people are doing it. If, after two years, your team still has trouble having real conversations over a teleconferencing solution? That's a management failure.

"Lunchroom conversations" are arguably the hardest thing to foment in a remote environment for sure, but between things like cross-teams with breakouts and the like, you can do it. And some people are going to do it naturally; I know what most of my director's peers' teams are up to and I have contacts in all of them, while also touching base with them on a regular basis. If your teams don't have people who do this naturally, assign it. If you don't, that too is a management failure.

"It's hard" is true, for sure. But "we decided we don't want to and never wanted to try, so we're going to inflict misery on our employees" is an abrogation of the employer's part of the social contract.

I would stress the video capability, though, because that's the thing that impacts how people feel in pretty substantial ways. I have a weekly 90-minute meeting every Friday where my product teams bring questions to both ask me and to kick around with a group, and so far the feedback has been excellent--and a direct reason cited is that I'm not just letting the meeting wander but I am leading it, I'm standing up while on camera and projecting excitement and a reason to be engaged. When compared with the interminable-drone meetings the rest of the week, it really drives the point home that you have to talk to people like you want them to listen to you, and that is much harder on a camera but it is a totally learnable skill.

Ones thing about meeting in physical space that I miss is directionality and locality of sound. If we are sitting with 4 people at a table at lunch, we can organically switch between having a single shared conversion or two different ones.

> "It's hard" is true, for sure. But "we decided we don't want to and never wanted to try, so we're going to inflict misery on our employees" is an abrogation of the employer's part of the social contract.

Agreed. Different from a power trip though. IMO it's just ineptitudes.

This would simulate the thrill and "buzz" of managing a busy office for these executives to cosplay without having to drag unwilling employees back.

WFH gave those damn individual contributors some agency and prevented dead weight middle management from Lumberghing. Pretty soon they start thinking they're people and having some work/life balance.

Private equity that owns companies also owns stakes in commercial real estate. If companies start breaking leases or renting less office space those private equity firms will lose money. The worst thing in the world is your economic betters losing money. How else will that money trickle down in warm little showers of gold?

A better acronym for RTO would be KYP: Know Your Place.

It's not about making money. They need to make more of it, by pushing margin growth.

It's an absolute value extraction play from investment groups that hurts every company it touches.

Ironically, during peak covid lockdowns, "this is only temporary" may have actually been seen as reckless and irresponsible. "There's a pandemic! We need to be remote for the foreseeable future, not just temporarily!1!1" (etc...)

During peak covid, a lot of people made decisions that they reneged or reversed later. I'll get downvoted if I empathize with the executives making these decisions, but all I'll say is that no one had a crystal ball in 2020/2021. I give a lot of people the benefit of the doubt that they believed what they were saying at the time they said it (even if they have since reversed their opinion).

I don't think anyone was expecting the tech bubble to burst until it did. I don't think anyone was expecting the degree of inflation which led to interest rates which led to big tech downsizing, etc. A lot of people made a lot of mistakes. One of the top mistakes a lot of companies made was hiring people outside of their HQ cities and they're trying to correct that now.

Edit: To be clear I'm a proponent of remote work. Our company has been remote since before covid. Pro tip for anyone in the job market: look for companies that were remote pre-Covid and be skeptical about WFH promises if the company was forced to go remote after 2020.

I bought a house as soon as I could once the interest rate drops happened. Prices were going up by more than my net income each month.

"Yes, we see all of these price changes, but don't worry it will go back to normal after the pandemic" ... which people went along with for a while, until it was clear that prices weren't dropping back to normal.

While no one has a crystal ball it was known pre pandemic that bubbles were there and unsustainable and not far from being at bursting levels.

I know many in my circle were talking about when the dominoes would fall and which ones would topple which others in 2020-2022 as the pandemic raged on. The inevitable outcome of the social supports on top of the economic bubbles happening and then both likely ending at similar times was predictable in anyone thinking in longer terms than the next quarter and next fiscal year.

Meanwhile CEOs took advantage of conditions to go on insane M&A deals, hiring sprees and personal project schemes with little framework for any of that succeeding long term, and burning tons of cash with stock buybacks to keep up with the expected growth targets.

Once the 'Bubble' everyone saw about to burst met the realities of the pandemic and costs rippled through supply chains no one should have been surprised. Unfortunately the tech segment is way too much follow the leader/money right now and once the few big names start moving it happens regardless of it being good or bad.

I've come to view this as a personality type, the eager salesman (or less charitably, the habitual bullshitter). They will say whatever serves their needs at the moment, and never carries any long-term weight. When they say "we never said that", they actually mean it -- because what they remember were their unspoken motivations, not the words they spoke to achieve it. You can probably find them in the hierarchy of most organizations, as they're good with words and ready to commit to new strategies. They must be, because they need to have a new strategy ready for when the old one inevitably fails. Admitting to mistakes is not part of their personality, the most you will get (if anything) is that their idea was sound but the problem was in the execution or in unforeseen (by them) circumstances.

Learn to recognize the type. If their goals align with yours, they can be useful idiots, but always have a counter-strategy for when the winds inevitably turn.