It’s a feature, not a bug.
Daring people to quit is a hell of a lot cheaper than laying them off. Consider 2 trends in tech:
1. Return to Office Mandates…among people who were both hired remote and in completely different cities.
Before I start, I do want to mention that “everyone should be remote” takes are probably the most egregious pandering content out there. Office work has advantages. Remote work has advantages. And it’s all situational depending on industry, roles, experience level, etc.
Let’s admit that like adults and move on.
But there’s something different about hiring someone full remote, who doesn’t even live in the same city, then forcing an office return. Especially if that hire was made in the last year. And someone upended their life by quitting another job to make the switch.
Amazon pulled this move a couple of weeks ago. A survey by Blind (here) showed 91% of employees were pissed about it.
The part that made me laugh: “The conglomerate said that it would make exceptions to its RTO policy for family emergencies, workers with sick children, and coding assignments requiring isolation.”
So 2010 selling points are making a comeback! Awesome.
It’s pretty obvious that for Amazon, this is a feature, not a bug. They want people to quit. Because they don’t have to pay severance if they do.
2. Quotas for salespeople in some SaaS firms are absurdly off the mark. By design.
I spoke to a friend in sales management last week. Publicly traded org. He grew his account base by 140% compared to the previous year. And he’s at 40% of quota.
His entire team – all of whom have always been over 100% of quota every previous year – have grown their accounts 80%-130% and are in the 30-40% of target number as well. The response from their leadership is along the lines of “whoop, looks like we miscalculated, our bad” without any actual change.
If you peel back the layers, it’s another ‘feature not a bug’ situation: if salespeople don’t hit their quotas, they don’t get paid. The financial analysts *love* it when you grow revenue without increasing costs. And as you can imagine, that entire sales team is looking for new roles.
Asking around, I know several other people in different companies in similar situations. This is more the rule than the exception.
To be clear: this isn’t every company. Not all companies trying to bring people back to office are daring people to quit. Not all companies changing their comp plans are trying to juke their EBITDA numbers at the expense of their employees.
👉But workers are becoming increasingly jaded and distrustful.
These moves are not subtle. Everyone is becoming more skeptical of the next job they interview for, even with companies who keep everything above board.
The key to attracting talent in the next few cycles will be how adept you are at addressing corporate transparency issues that may have nothing to do with you.
Partner at Hirewell. #3 Ranked Sarcastic Commenter on LinkedIn.
