Sunday 16th February 2025

Recently I have interviewed a lot of engineers, most of which are quitting their current jobs rather than returning to the office. Let me explain why.

Topics:

• Presently in my team we are doing a lot of hiring, and as the senior guy I always do the first round interviews with our candidates.
• I do this for two reasons:
  1. I want to determine if the candidate will be a good cultural fit for my team. I protect the good moral in my team carefully.
  2. I want to understand the motivation of the candidate, namely why are they leaving their current role and applying to us?
• In the past few weeks, I have conducted dozens of such interviews and noticed a common answer for their motivation: a mandatory return to the office order from their current employer.
• During the pandemic, many software engineers bought cheaper houses outside of cities, as it gave them a better quality of live during remote work and especially during lock-downs.
• A couple of years ago, we were all told this was the "new normal" and many young engineers took this advice to heart.
• They believed remote work was forever.
• Now these engineers are being ordered back to the office Monday to Friday, resulting in huge commutes.
• It is an absolute rug pull.
• In my home city Dublin for example, the traffic is terrible down town while our city council does it's best to make it worse via traffic restrictions, less parking spaces, higher parking fees etc., they really hate cars.
• If you live 100-200 kilometers away, and need to commute in every day, you can easily spend 4 hours per day in your car or on sub-par public transport (if available).
• So, as all of the top tech firms in Dublin are demanding the end of remote work, and a return to the old normal, many individuals are left with little choice but to quit and look for another company that permits remote work.
• Their loss is our gain: we have never had such a flood of high-quality senior engineers, some with decades of experience.
• In my team, we are officially hybrid but in reality we are remote-first.
• As a manager, I only care about the frequency and quality of the work committed, NOT where it is committed from.
• So why the sudden change of policy by all of these tech firms at the same time?
• In my opinion, they are probably using this as an excuse to down-size their team sizes, and it is much cheaper for a firm if people leave of their own accord rather than having to offer them severance payments.
• It's cynical I know, but that would be my best guess.
• Or perhaps they were inspired by the actions of Elon Musk when he took over Twitter?
• Clearly they know they will lose people, but are fine with that outcome.
• Look after yourself guys, it is getting rough out there.

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techleaderpro-2025-week-7.mp3

File details: 8.7 MB MP3, 6 mins 2 secs duration.

Title music is "Apparent Solution" by Brendon Moeller, licensed via www.epidemicsound.com

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