Backdoor layoffs. It's always backdoor layoffs. If they really appreciated and needed you at the company, they would cater for your needs when you're delivering your work.
So you're doing backdoor layoffs, but you're laying off the people you'd most likely want to keep, leaving the company with the less experienced/talented people.
The corporate structure is not created around talented people, but around mediocrity. In Dilbert land you have no use for brainiacs.
In my current environment one line bugfix takes 3-4 workdays to release. Does it matter one bit if you will do the fix in 10 or 100 minutes if it will be overshadowed by the time THE PROCESS consumes.
a.k.a Dead Sea effect
There is no way for somebody like Nadella to have an understanding of most employees' performance, and the chain of management is so long that he doesn't trust anyone else's ability to ascertain individual performance. This leads to the introduction of "objective measurements" of performance, which further undermines trust, as everyone now starts trying to manipulate the numbers.
I think at some point, it's just inevitable that C-level management takes decisions based on the assumption that people are replaceable and that the difference between a great performer and a poor performer is essentially irrelevant.
Maybe, but I find it hard to believe that someone who has spent their entire career in the tech industry actually believes this.
The "backdoor layoffs" theory seems suspect to me more generally. It's not like they're particularly averse to doing layoffs the normal way. Especially now where the signal from big tech company doing layoffs is "we're really good at AI".
https://fortune.com/2025/09/05/paramount-skydance-ceo-david-...
A 10 day notice requiring agreement to full 5 day RTO or take a voluntary package. This from a CEO talking bout 'efficiency' and cost cutting, where I know people who have been 100% remote for 5 years.
What are the odds those voluntary packages are worse than whatever contract & law specific in the case of layoffs. And I am sure the (very X/Musk/extreme hardcore coded) agreement employees sign agreeing to RTO means if they are fired later for office attendance its for-cause.
Roughly zero, if the scale as a layoff would be sub-WARN Act level, because it is unlikely that the impacted employees had any contractual severance guarantee or any legal entitlement to any notice of termination of employment or pay in lieu (they might be less than the firm’s historical practice for similar roles, and having an excuse to characterize it as voluntary provides a bit of PR cover for that, but that's not a legal or contractual guarantee.) At-will employment is the rule, rather than the exception, for private, non-uniom employment in the US.
Would imply they are probably planning WARN-act-level layoffs, and trying to get under that with "volunteers"?
company will probably write exceptions for those people into their contracts; my neighbor, a talented senior dev lead at BigTechCo, has it in his contract that he can WFH regardless of RTO calls
There's no reason to covertly plot convoluted "backdoor layoff" schemes when they're openly doing layoffs on a regular basis. "Backdoor layoffs" is a silly meme loved only by the sort of people prone to falling for conspiracy theories.