KEY POINTS
- Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, whom President-elect Donald Trump appointed to lead a new government efficiency team, said they intend to call federal employees back to the office five days a week.
- Companies such as Amazon and The Washington Post are adopting a similar policy in 2025.
- But many companies will keep remote or hybrid work arrangements, largely because they boost profits, economists said.
- Some view return-to-office mandates as a stealthy way to reduce employee head count.
Like most stupid things in our world, it’s about emotions.
This topic is funny to me because I worked for a place that was all about data. Data driven decisions. They had tshirts made that said like “Data > Feelings”.
And yet when people brought up to the CEO stuff like studies showing WFH or 4-day-workweeks were effective, he just said “Nah, we’re not doing that.”. No discussion. No looking at the data. Just no.
To his credit, that CEO did run a profitable startup with barely any funding, so he wasn’t a total fool. But on that kind of stuff he was a total gutfeel asshole.
People who run startups, even the successful ones, tend to be awful to their employees. I should say, especially the successful ones.