 One of the consequences of the recent pandemic was an economic upheaval, the likes of which haven't really been seen since the Great Depression. Millions of people lost their jobs. In fact, the only people who really kept their jobs during the beginning of the lockdowns were people who the government deemed essential like nurses and grocery store employees and people who were able to work from home online. Now, the transition to working from home was much easier for some companies than others. During the pandemic, I was actually working for a company that developed cloud collaboration software. So it was a pretty easy transition to work from home, working there. In fact, the guy who was my direct manager when I first started working there lived in New Hampshire and the office was located in Boston. So instead of spending probably thousands of dollars a year on commuter rail tickets, he just limited his office visits to like a couple times a month. And when I was working there before the pandemic, I was already working from home a couple of days a week. So yeah, it was pretty easy to switch. You know, obviously a cloud communications company can function just fine with the vast majority of their workforce working from home. And I think the same is true for any other company where the majority of your time is spent making phone calls, sending emails and screwing around with Excel spreadsheets and other kinds of documents. And so work from home ended up being the best part of the new normal that so many of us were forced to participate in. I mean, imagine how many more salespeople were making more sales with the confidence boost of talking on the phone in their living room with their pants off. Imagine the precision gains from accountants that are balancing billion dollar budgets on one computer screen and then installing Lady Dimitresc mods for Resident Evil Village on the other. There were also some cascading benefits from people working from home. For example, there were fewer people on the roads because nobody had to commute to work. And this greatly reduced the traffic for people who actually did need to go on the roads to drive places. And there was a reduction in pollution. People were saving money because they didn't have to buy as much gas. And I also wouldn't be surprised if some people just ended up selling their cars since commuting is one of the main things that people use their cars for. There's also huge cost savings for businesses as well. When people are making decent money working from home, they typically start investing some of that money, like some of their own money into improving their home office space. They'll buy new desks, new chairs, they'll get new peripherals. Some people even buy new computers for themselves to use at work if the company allows you to bring your own device. And of course, people that are working from home are using their own internet and their own electricity. But the biggest corporate savings is not having to actually rent office space because in big cities, office space is usually so expensive that you have to contact someone just to get a price. But in a place like Boston, it can easily cost you more than $60 per square foot to rent office space. So work from home really makes sense for a lot of people and for a lot of businesses. But despite that, a lot of companies have been issuing these return to office mandates to their employees. And one of the most recent companies to join that trend, oddly enough, is Zoom, the cloud collaboration software company that went from just an obscure like Skype knockoff to becoming a household name because of people working and studying from home. I mean, obviously, Zoom wasn't the best tool. It definitely wasn't the most secure one, but Zoom still managed to carry the academic and professional world on its shoulders for like two years and it became a multi-billion-dollar company in the process. Now, the reason given by Zoom's CEO, Eric Kwan, for these return to office mandates was so that people can get to know each other better. He said over the past several years, we've hired so many new Zoomies that it's really hard to build trust. That's right. Zoom employees are unironically called Zoomies and many of these Zoomies are Zoomers, just entering the workforce after doing college classes on Zoom. And now they're being told to go back to the office. Like, I get some companies wanting employees to return to the office if they already own their office space or if they're still under a contract to rent it and so they don't want to pay all that money for it to be used and not be used. And there's also companies that think they're losing productivity from their employees with this work-from-home model. Goldman Sachs, for example, they've basically done a complete 180 on their work-from-home proposal and they told employees they would need to be in the office five days a week. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy recently told Amazon employees straight up that it's not gonna work out if you don't come into the office at least three days a week. Metta said earlier this month that employees would also need to show up to the office at least three days a week or they could lose their jobs. And this was announced after Metta did an analysis of engineers starting their careers who they found out were more effective when they come into the office at least three days a week to, I guess, be around other engineers or more senior engineers. But of course, the details of this analysis was not shared. Nobody's able to actually fact check this analysis that Metta did. But Zoom, whose only product is remote software, you know, remote working software, them advocating for people to go back to work really sounds insane. It's a horrible PR move, if anything else. It would be like Microsoft saying that they're going to start using iPhones for better security or that they were gonna switch to using Zoom or Slack instead of Microsoft Teams. And the reason that Zoom gave saying that people need to go into the office just to get to know people better sounds like complete bullshit. Like maybe it's just me, but I never felt like office environments were really a good place to actually get to know people and build meaningful relationships. It's a very artificial place with artificial lights and well, artificial people having artificial conversations. I mean, any interesting conversation that I've ever had with a coworker or a conversation where I really felt like I got to know them was always outside of the office and usually it wasn't even on lunch breaks either. It would usually be over like team speak, you know, video game calls if we find out that we played the same video game and then we would play them after hours. That's when the real conversations take place. And the only time that I would really end up interacting with people in the office would be with people that I don't really like. And if I'm going to be forced to interact with people I don't like, I would rather they only take up a few pixels of space on my screen for just one hour during the weekly stand-up instead of at all times or at any random time of the day for five days a week while I'm at the office. Plus I can't go to the office and do my work without pants on. That's the real deal breaker for me. Now one interesting theory I've seen people posting about online is that these back to office mandates are really a way for companies, especially big tech companies to get rid of employees without doing another major layoff and hurting their bottom line. Because if you think about it, the ability to work remotely is a major reason why someone would want to work for one company or another. In fact, it's probably a bigger deal for most people than the healthcare package that a company might offer. And so if all of a sudden you get cut off partially or completely from working from home, you might just voluntarily quit instead of a company having to lay you off and give you a severance package. And more often than not, layoffs have a negative impact on your company's stock price as well, especially when just a few quarters ago, so many of these companies were having hiring frenzies. Like they felt like they couldn't hire enough people. So switching gears that fast from hiring frenzy to layoff frenzy, it makes your management seem short-sighted and cruel because they're basically just disposing of employees. But one of the problems I see with this back-to-work mandate being used as a stealth layoff theory is that these companies won't get to pick who ends up quitting unless they selectively enforce the back-to-work mandates which could just end up causing more bad press and legal trouble than them laying people off in the first place. Also, the people who quit because they don't want to go into the offices are probably going to end up working for competitors in the same sector, which again is probably going to cause more harm than good in the long run. So in reality, there's probably a myriad of reasons for the mass hirings and firings that take place throughout big tech right now, but what are your theories on this clear mismanagement that is taking place? Let me know in the comments section below and be sure to like and share this video to hack the algorithm. Follow me on Odyssey and have a great rest of your day.