I know what is expected from me at work: anything and everything. This is especially true shortly after our seemingly annual round of layoffs (right before the holiday season!). This increase in responsibilities has not come along with an increase pay, but our CEO got to double his total compensation package compared last year.
I'd look for something else, but seeing this report, talking to friends and reading some comments in various threads on HN, it's clear the grass isn't greener anywhere else.
As a staff engineer at my company, my stupid manager expects me to do his work all the time. I'm hardly building things but just managing jira, talking to other teams, managing shit, writing docs, dealing with politics etc. I never signed up for this crap. But sadly this is where many companies are going
“Staff engineer” varies by employer but this is generally exactly what I expect it to be.
There are times I do technical work and times my entire job is putting out fires and making sure the wheels stay on the bus as we barrel full speed to a release. Making sure people have work. Making sure they know what it is, and the customer is on board. Tracking deadlines. Managing expectations. Making critical decisions about the architecture and the like.
Any developer can write code. This stuff requires a different set of executive functions, and engineers that can do both are generally promoted.
Have yet to be convinced that staff eng is worth it. Seems like it is [project] management by another name and placed at the top of the IC ladder so as to suggest that maybe, just maybe, you'll get time to actually write code.
I’m not sure the C Suite realizes that their efficiency drives — getting rid of managers — often means their engineers now aren’t as free to focus on engineering things.
I've been having to do stuff "as soon as possible" for over a year now. I'm at a mid sized company and in many ways the nagging to deliver ASAP is beyond even when I founded my own company.
And if something is gonna take a few days or a week, all the managers do is ask me five times if I can instead divide the work and farm it out to other engineers. If it isn't taking on the order of hours, they want to throw people at it to go faster. Parallelism is clearly a manager KPI.
The thing is: you've already got the means of production. You have a computer, your brain (the real core of software production), and the whole universe of open source / Free software out there.
What people actually want is VC money salaries without having to pay the VC piper's price, which is more of a problem.
(AI has changed this somewhat, because it's so energy-intensive that it's become a capital asset. And of course we have to consider the monopolistic nature of software markets.)
A refrain I’ve heard from real life friends and people on the internet alike is that employees are being asked to come back to the office where they wind up just sitting on video calls much of the day. This seems like an absolute worst case for job satisfaction to me.
I’m lucky enough to work wherever I want and accept Zoom meetings as a prerequisite to that, but find them tiring and a poor simulacrum of real in-person conversation. If I were asked to come to an office every day and deal with the commute and the stupidity of most modern office designs and still had the majority of meetings happen over video, I’d be pretty dissatisfied with my job.
> but find them [zoom] tiring and a poor simulacrum of real in-person conversation
After working remotely for 8 years, I find video conferencing to be preferable.
* I am more physically comfortable. I can control the thermostat, the humidity, the lighting level. My preference on these three things are very different than standard office. In addition I have better control over items such as the food I am digesting, the office chair I am sitting in, the smells in the room, etc. One concrete example, I am often cold in offices. If I am cold my muscles tend to be tense, and my mind reads that signal and makes me more anxious/alert. I can concentrate better and think more clearly if my body/mind is relaxed.
* Reduction of information to only the most relevant. Do you know how much data you receive when sitting next to another human. Significantly more than the 1000mb/s my home internet connection provides. During a critical negotiation or an intimate moment you might want that extra volume. During engineering it's a distraction. I don't want to smell my co-workers lunch while paired programming. All of the conversations are more focused.
* Consent. I choose to connect. I can choose to disconnect at anytime. I'm never stuck in a conversation while waiting in line for coffee, and if someone virtually decides to drop by my desk, I have more flexibility in dealing with the urgent need.
I think those are all fair and reasonable—ultimately I've chosen not to work in an office since late 2019, so I'm not exactly an in-person absolutist.
Personally, though, I do think that the higher-bandwidth effect is valuable to me. I think part of what makes me feel like video calls are tiring is that my brain is working overtime trying to extract some of that extra signal from the participants, while in-person I'm able to better gauge others' reactions intuitively and adjust my tone or approach without much conscious effort. People have told me for years that I have a "calming presence" in the workplace/meetings, which is not a way I'd describe myself unprompted, so I think I've silently benefited from nonverbal cues in that way.
Being in a comfortable environment is a huge one though for sure. So many modern offices are comically badly arranged, with people trying to do thinking work space shared with people having meetings who are overflowing from the insufficient number of conference rooms. It's kind of a joke.
In the last few decades workers got the impression that there is some sort of a utilitarian reason or rationale behind the workplace practices or management approaches. After all there is research! Business schools!
This facade has started to crack in many places, and RTO is just a very obvious example, it's almost absurd how the companies prizing themselves for being "data-driven" descended into "we're doing this because bossman says so". But it follows the spirit of times anyway, people will quickly adjust.
We're learning that our companies are not data-driven, they're data-chauffeured: Bossman decides what he wants to do, and then (maybe) they cherry-pick data that support that pre-determined decision and ignore any data that contradict it.
On the other hand, some people are stuck at home all day, no in-person interaction, management is possibly out of touch and ignoring remote people, less tasks, less achievements, less recognition...
Honestly, in-person communication is vastly overrated. If a decision is made in a meeting, you better hope someone thought to document it. If we are planning something that requires engineer feedback, hopefully you’re quick enough (and confident enough) to come up with your questions in realtime.
I’d rather move most of this stuff into slack or confluence. It’s more egalitarian, and it has the added benefit that I can search and find the past conversations to reference them later.
I think for discussion/negotiation with decisions being made, my hierarchy of preference would be (from most preferred to least):
- Message board style like Github issues
- Slack thread
- Email thread
- Video call
- In person meeting
I do really like in-person meetings for brainstorming or collaborative design type stuff. Having a real whiteboard is hard to beat, and I think the discussion can flow a little more naturally without any latency.
I have found that AI notetakers can bridge this gap fairly well—whether in a virtual meeting or in person. If the calendar event has a virtual meeting with a notetaker that joins by default, someone can join the meeting and throw a phone down on the conference table and everyone gets a full transcript, summary, and list of next steps afterwards. One of my favorite real world applications of LLMs so far.
My buddy works at Salesforce and they are started to enforce RTO for a few days a week in Seattle.
There are two kickers to this. First the employees have to hot-desk, which means they do not have an assigned desk and have to find a spot each day. Funnily enough, they all had desks before the pandemic...
Secondly, there is a second office essentially just for executives that is elsewhere and not connected to the main one. If Salesforce wants to complain about the cost of owning buildings and getting people to RTO maybe close the superfluous executive office first...
Hot-desking would drive me nuts. When I worked in an office I found it disruptive having to move or rearrange desks even once a year or less. One would think we would have learned from TBWA trying it 30 years ago https://www.wired.com/1999/02/chiat-3/
I think you're romanticising in person meetings, so much wasted time, you don't have other information on hand. These days you have videocalls you didn't have that back then (less ubiquitous).
Yikes. I am very, very lucky to do fulfilling and meaningful work at a place that values me, with people who are a pleasure to work with. But from what I hear this is the exception and not the rule. Knowing this is possible, however, I'm not as scared by the job search as I once was, since I know that when I someday decide to look for my next job, I'll know more of the qualities of the places I want to work at.
For me the key seems to be getting out of the corporate world, away from companies with a singular focus on profit-making and competition and the endless feature churn, corporate ladder climbing, disruptive managerial edicts to change horses midstream, ridiculous metrics to meet, and the inevitable burnout that environment seems to create. Has anyone else had similar (or contradictory) experiences?
I spent a decade in FAANG, then burned out and left. I’m at an early-stage startup now and couldn’t be happier.
The pressures are very different. My most stressful episodes at this startup have been related to technical problems, where I ultimately feel that I’m in control. My most stressful episodes in FAANG were ones in which I fundamentally had little to no control, but had “accountability” (i.e. blame) for the outcome.
For example, I vividly remember being on a flight to visit my ailing grandmother, and having chest pains from stress due to a parallel team throwing up a red flag weeks before the launch of a years-long project. They were a team of specialists whose work I could not personally do, and I had gotten their sign off on the project months prior. Team members changed, and a new person took issue with a fundamental aspect of the project.
I still believe there was nothing I could have reasonably done differently, as I didn’t have the domain knowledge to get sign-off in this area, and had done my due diligence of engaging the team and getting their sign off. Both my manager and their manager agreed, saying that there was nothing more I could have done, and even going so far as to say that I had been set up to fail.
However, this was of course treated as a significant failure on my part, and was held against me as the reason for lack of promotion. Way up my management chain, people were congratulated for the eventual launch of this project which was bringing in tens of millions in revenue.
> Knowing this is possible, however, I'm not as scared by the job search as I once was, since I know that when I someday decide to look for my next job, I'll know more of the qualities of the places I want to work at.
Knowing what qualities to look for, them still existing, and being able to find them... are 3 different things. :)
I also consider myself extremely lucky in that regard.
> the key seems to be getting out of the corporate world, away from companies with a singular focus on profit-making and competition
In my experience there are still healthy corporations out there. The signals I now look for are: profitable, privately held, not pursuing IPOs or buyers, grow headcount slowly (if at all), have never needed layoffs, promote engineers into positions of authority, and have high average employee tenure.
It's refreshing to work in an organization where people feel secure enough to make long-term investments in infrastructure, people, and projects that may not pay dividends for many years. (And to be the beneficiary of decades of prior long-term investments.)
Where do you find these places though? That's tricky. They're the real 'unicorns' from my point of view as an employee. I don't care if I earn quite as much if I enjoy my job.
Idk if it’s better. I’ve been trying to get into the university.
I taught a class recently. It’s pretty much yours to reign over. It made me never want to go back to corporate drudgery. It’s definitely not for everyone. Even into high schools teachers talk about being bullied by students. I don’t know what it’s like there, but some of it’s probably the schools not supporting the teachers with managing a classroom. Classroom management is really hard ime.
University IT, here. It doesn't pay anything close to what the private sector pays, but I've seen firsthand the good in the community and to society that my university does, and I feel like I'm actually making a difference and an impact. Feels so much less soulless than working enriching a faceless corporation.
The best place I ever worked was a small company, but not so tiny that there was no specialization of roles. We were making a complex hardware/software product that was selling pretty well. There were investors, but it was a long-term kind of thing and there wasn't pressure to double in size every few weeks or whatever Silicon Valley nonsense. I moved away from where the company was, unfortunately or I think I might still be there. They're still there doing what they do and building on it with a lot of the same people as when I worked there, rather than the turmoil du jour in "faster paced" environments.
Everyone is trapped and has nowhere to go. Without hope, this is what you would expect. Engagement is sentiment of hope of future development, comp, responsibility, etc.
Edit: This appears to be covered thoroughly in the thread ChrisArchitect links to.
>Everyone is trapped and has nowhere to go. Without hope, this is what you would expect. Engagement is sentiment of hope of future development, comp, responsibility, etc.
Quits rate (ie. the opposite of "trapped and has nowhere to go") saw a spike in 2022-2023, but that associated with lower job satisfaction rating compared to 2020. There was also a huge dip in the quits rate after 2008, but engagement barely moved.
My mental model around these indicators: High quits rate + low engagement = workers leaving for greener pastures. Low quits rate + low engagement = no greener pastures to go to. Low quit rates + high engagement = "professional/career/work potential" sentiment high, happy workers staying put and grinding because they choose to.
(imho, n=1, scholar of the macro and the human, I am an internet rando trying to read the room and could be wrong)
It certainly doesn't help that we're being told every day that AI is coming for our jobs and, by-and-large, it appears that is true. Even if AI isn't technically capable of completely replacing us, CEOs are making it true by refusing to hire[^1] and reducing workforces as much as possible. Despite that the companies we are working for are recording record profits.
UBI is a nonstarter and the entire country is unprepared for this new future we're creating. What exactly is there to be excited about?
You don't have to look far. I am NOT saying that AI is actually 100% capable of replacing us, but I am saying that many CEOs are already treating it that way.
Is it the actual task they dislike or the fact there is no care or consideration for workers as human beings? I imagine many would enjoy their jobs a lot more if you had less focus on what is seemingly productive behaviour, aka coming into an office for no reason, working more hours than paid for, doing exactly what your boss says, not taking holiday and so on, and actually started being allowed to take care of themselves to allow themselves the opportunity to be more fulfilled across their whole life. Get rid of those staff who believe doing everything you can for the company is all that matters, and you will see more enthusiastic workers with better output.
If they're too far up to fire, maybe round up everybody who matters and explain to the shareholders that you're all going to quit and form a competing company unless they choose new leadership.
Of course, high enough up that is true, however there are always those middle management evangelists who have believed the word from the CEO and chosen that their workers should follow their lead.
The return to office mandate at my company has definitely made most people at my company unhappy. Especially because it's obviously being done as a way to encourage people to quit. As a senior developer I've stopped caring about the company plan. If upper management doesn't care about employees, I don't care about deliverables. As the person that does most the technical interviewing anyways I know they won't be able to find any replacements in a reasonable time.
My buddy senior engineer left recently. And you know what happened? Nothing! His salary was a nice saving for a company. And his work was divided on the shoulders of those who didn’t quit. Management showed the priorities.
> Emily's thought bubble: It seems more than coincidental that workplaces became more focused on good management and culture when interest rates were very low and they could afford such luxuries as making sure employees feel valued.
Maybe it’s me who is out of touch, but how is that the author’s honest take away? That low interest rates make people better managers?
I’m not buying it. It doesn’t cost anything to make sure employees feel valued, unless you’re doing things to hold back their careers. At which point, you’re probably not concerned about employee satisfaction to begin with.
With low rates, there was a lot of hiring, and the supply demand curve for SWE jobs was in favor of employees. So companies had to compete more for employees, leading to perks like remote work. In an era of hiring freezes and layoffs (including stealth layoffs via RTO), not so much.
Does that make line managers better or worse at being line managers? Probably not. But it may affect the experience of being managed if your manager is more or less stressed about fighting for headcount, figuring out who to lay off, fitting performance review ratings to a curve, etc.
Making sure employees feel valued does have a cost though. Managers spend a lot of time on this, and they have a high salary. Career growth, 1:1's, conflict resolution, comp adjustments, etc.
When managers' own heads are also on the chopping block in a tough job market, they're going to prioritize looking out for their own ass. If "leadership" is saying "boil the frogs or you're gone", they're probably going to do it. Even if they don't want to.
> It doesn’t cost anything to make sure employees feel valued, unless you’re doing things to hold back their careers
But it does. Even something as simple as writing a thank you email has an opportunity cost. In that time a sales person could initiate a new call, or an engineer could write another paragraph on a design doc.
It's why engineers having free coffee, or even BYO coffee, is such a bellweather. When the free coffee goes, the good times go with it. It costs the company nothing to let engineers BYO coffee, yet my friends and I have been with many a company that eventually set up a small coffee shop or a pay-per-cup coffee machine and go around confiscating employee-brought coffee machines. Historically they cite a "fire hazard" or some similar safety issue.
> That low interest rates make people better managers?
It's not entirely wrong. Higher interest rates reduce investment frequency and amount because it increases the risk and opportunity cost. When interest rates are low it's easier to justify to investors/board members that diverting some capital to employee value and satisfaction. When interest rates are high, things like the aforementioned thank you email becomes an inefficiency, reducing your attractiveness to investors. An extra 2% on a 10MM loan is 200k, and someone's gotta provide that additional revenue. Suddenly free coffee, unsupervised/unmonitored work (like remote), and thank you letters don't provide direct increased revenue while a sales call or design doc could.
Readit News
I'd look for something else, but seeing this report, talking to friends and reading some comments in various threads on HN, it's clear the grass isn't greener anywhere else.
There are times I do technical work and times my entire job is putting out fires and making sure the wheels stay on the bus as we barrel full speed to a release. Making sure people have work. Making sure they know what it is, and the customer is on board. Tracking deadlines. Managing expectations. Making critical decisions about the architecture and the like.
Any developer can write code. This stuff requires a different set of executive functions, and engineers that can do both are generally promoted.
Deleted Comment
That may be true, but even the act of looking can provide some measure of hope, which can make everything more bearable.
And if something is gonna take a few days or a week, all the managers do is ask me five times if I can instead divide the work and farm it out to other engineers. If it isn't taking on the order of hours, they want to throw people at it to go faster. Parallelism is clearly a manager KPI.
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The ball is squarely in the employer's court and they are maximizing their position accordingly.
Woah, woah, they're not overseas, they're "Virtual Employees" now. You're not supposed to look behind the curtain.
Lucky you. :P
What people actually want is VC money salaries without having to pay the VC piper's price, which is more of a problem.
(AI has changed this somewhat, because it's so energy-intensive that it's become a capital asset. And of course we have to consider the monopolistic nature of software markets.)
Dead Comment
I’m lucky enough to work wherever I want and accept Zoom meetings as a prerequisite to that, but find them tiring and a poor simulacrum of real in-person conversation. If I were asked to come to an office every day and deal with the commute and the stupidity of most modern office designs and still had the majority of meetings happen over video, I’d be pretty dissatisfied with my job.
After working remotely for 8 years, I find video conferencing to be preferable.
* I am more physically comfortable. I can control the thermostat, the humidity, the lighting level. My preference on these three things are very different than standard office. In addition I have better control over items such as the food I am digesting, the office chair I am sitting in, the smells in the room, etc. One concrete example, I am often cold in offices. If I am cold my muscles tend to be tense, and my mind reads that signal and makes me more anxious/alert. I can concentrate better and think more clearly if my body/mind is relaxed.
* Reduction of information to only the most relevant. Do you know how much data you receive when sitting next to another human. Significantly more than the 1000mb/s my home internet connection provides. During a critical negotiation or an intimate moment you might want that extra volume. During engineering it's a distraction. I don't want to smell my co-workers lunch while paired programming. All of the conversations are more focused.
* Consent. I choose to connect. I can choose to disconnect at anytime. I'm never stuck in a conversation while waiting in line for coffee, and if someone virtually decides to drop by my desk, I have more flexibility in dealing with the urgent need.
Personally, though, I do think that the higher-bandwidth effect is valuable to me. I think part of what makes me feel like video calls are tiring is that my brain is working overtime trying to extract some of that extra signal from the participants, while in-person I'm able to better gauge others' reactions intuitively and adjust my tone or approach without much conscious effort. People have told me for years that I have a "calming presence" in the workplace/meetings, which is not a way I'd describe myself unprompted, so I think I've silently benefited from nonverbal cues in that way.
Being in a comfortable environment is a huge one though for sure. So many modern offices are comically badly arranged, with people trying to do thinking work space shared with people having meetings who are overflowing from the insufficient number of conference rooms. It's kind of a joke.
This facade has started to crack in many places, and RTO is just a very obvious example, it's almost absurd how the companies prizing themselves for being "data-driven" descended into "we're doing this because bossman says so". But it follows the spirit of times anyway, people will quickly adjust.
When parts are remote (or if teams are split in 2 locations) you run the risk of excluding people who are remote.
In fully remote situations even water-cooler chats are deliberate.
I’d rather move most of this stuff into slack or confluence. It’s more egalitarian, and it has the added benefit that I can search and find the past conversations to reference them later.
- Message board style like Github issues - Slack thread - Email thread - Video call - In person meeting
I do really like in-person meetings for brainstorming or collaborative design type stuff. Having a real whiteboard is hard to beat, and I think the discussion can flow a little more naturally without any latency.
I have found that AI notetakers can bridge this gap fairly well—whether in a virtual meeting or in person. If the calendar event has a virtual meeting with a notetaker that joins by default, someone can join the meeting and throw a phone down on the conference table and everyone gets a full transcript, summary, and list of next steps afterwards. One of my favorite real world applications of LLMs so far.
There are two kickers to this. First the employees have to hot-desk, which means they do not have an assigned desk and have to find a spot each day. Funnily enough, they all had desks before the pandemic...
Secondly, there is a second office essentially just for executives that is elsewhere and not connected to the main one. If Salesforce wants to complain about the cost of owning buildings and getting people to RTO maybe close the superfluous executive office first...
For me the key seems to be getting out of the corporate world, away from companies with a singular focus on profit-making and competition and the endless feature churn, corporate ladder climbing, disruptive managerial edicts to change horses midstream, ridiculous metrics to meet, and the inevitable burnout that environment seems to create. Has anyone else had similar (or contradictory) experiences?
I spent a decade in FAANG, then burned out and left. I’m at an early-stage startup now and couldn’t be happier.
The pressures are very different. My most stressful episodes at this startup have been related to technical problems, where I ultimately feel that I’m in control. My most stressful episodes in FAANG were ones in which I fundamentally had little to no control, but had “accountability” (i.e. blame) for the outcome.
For example, I vividly remember being on a flight to visit my ailing grandmother, and having chest pains from stress due to a parallel team throwing up a red flag weeks before the launch of a years-long project. They were a team of specialists whose work I could not personally do, and I had gotten their sign off on the project months prior. Team members changed, and a new person took issue with a fundamental aspect of the project.
I still believe there was nothing I could have reasonably done differently, as I didn’t have the domain knowledge to get sign-off in this area, and had done my due diligence of engaging the team and getting their sign off. Both my manager and their manager agreed, saying that there was nothing more I could have done, and even going so far as to say that I had been set up to fail.
However, this was of course treated as a significant failure on my part, and was held against me as the reason for lack of promotion. Way up my management chain, people were congratulated for the eventual launch of this project which was bringing in tens of millions in revenue.
That’s about the time I left.
Knowing what qualities to look for, them still existing, and being able to find them... are 3 different things. :)
Checking back in with my friends who I left behind I made the right decision.
> the key seems to be getting out of the corporate world, away from companies with a singular focus on profit-making and competition
In my experience there are still healthy corporations out there. The signals I now look for are: profitable, privately held, not pursuing IPOs or buyers, grow headcount slowly (if at all), have never needed layoffs, promote engineers into positions of authority, and have high average employee tenure.
It's refreshing to work in an organization where people feel secure enough to make long-term investments in infrastructure, people, and projects that may not pay dividends for many years. (And to be the beneficiary of decades of prior long-term investments.)
I taught a class recently. It’s pretty much yours to reign over. It made me never want to go back to corporate drudgery. It’s definitely not for everyone. Even into high schools teachers talk about being bullied by students. I don’t know what it’s like there, but some of it’s probably the schools not supporting the teachers with managing a classroom. Classroom management is really hard ime.
Benefits are nice too.
Deleted Comment
Edit: This appears to be covered thoroughly in the thread ChrisArchitect links to.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42697779
Quits rate (ie. the opposite of "trapped and has nowhere to go") saw a spike in 2022-2023, but that associated with lower job satisfaction rating compared to 2020. There was also a huge dip in the quits rate after 2008, but engagement barely moved.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTSQUR
(imho, n=1, scholar of the macro and the human, I am an internet rando trying to read the room and could be wrong)
UBI is a nonstarter and the entire country is unprepared for this new future we're creating. What exactly is there to be excited about?
[^1]: https://www.salesforceben.com/salesforce-will-hire-no-more-s...
[citation needed] and not from an AI company's marketing materials.
- https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/08/business/ai-job-losses-by-203...
- https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-12-12/klarna-st...
- https://www.salesforceben.com/salesforce-will-hire-no-more-s...
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicholasreimann/2023/05/01/ibm-...
In the age of AI, no human job is a profit center any more. EVERY job is a cost center and it's the duty of CEOs to reduce those expenses.
Deleted Comment
Typically this is impossible, because those staff are the top management. (I'd say "leadership" if they were actually that.)
If they don't comply, make good on your threat.
Maybe it’s me who is out of touch, but how is that the author’s honest take away? That low interest rates make people better managers?
I’m not buying it. It doesn’t cost anything to make sure employees feel valued, unless you’re doing things to hold back their careers. At which point, you’re probably not concerned about employee satisfaction to begin with.
Does that make line managers better or worse at being line managers? Probably not. But it may affect the experience of being managed if your manager is more or less stressed about fighting for headcount, figuring out who to lay off, fitting performance review ratings to a curve, etc.
When managers' own heads are also on the chopping block in a tough job market, they're going to prioritize looking out for their own ass. If "leadership" is saying "boil the frogs or you're gone", they're probably going to do it. Even if they don't want to.
But it does. Even something as simple as writing a thank you email has an opportunity cost. In that time a sales person could initiate a new call, or an engineer could write another paragraph on a design doc.
It's why engineers having free coffee, or even BYO coffee, is such a bellweather. When the free coffee goes, the good times go with it. It costs the company nothing to let engineers BYO coffee, yet my friends and I have been with many a company that eventually set up a small coffee shop or a pay-per-cup coffee machine and go around confiscating employee-brought coffee machines. Historically they cite a "fire hazard" or some similar safety issue.
> That low interest rates make people better managers?
It's not entirely wrong. Higher interest rates reduce investment frequency and amount because it increases the risk and opportunity cost. When interest rates are low it's easier to justify to investors/board members that diverting some capital to employee value and satisfaction. When interest rates are high, things like the aforementioned thank you email becomes an inefficiency, reducing your attractiveness to investors. An extra 2% on a 10MM loan is 200k, and someone's gotta provide that additional revenue. Suddenly free coffee, unsupervised/unmonitored work (like remote), and thank you letters don't provide direct increased revenue while a sales call or design doc could.