Something whispered about by the MBA set right now is how the recent hard RTO push at these companies is a form of "stealth layoffs". Don't have to pay severance if someone quits voluntarily.
I doubt TikTok has too many old-school types who just love being in office given they had barely a few hundred employees in the US prior to 2019, and didn't exist as a company until 2016, so it's a good control for the "outdated middle managers just want butts in seats/so they can exert power" theory (which as a prior middle manager myself I just didn't see in any of the hundreds of other tech EMs I interacted with).
TikTok did however scale from <500 US employees in Jan 2020 to >8,400(!) today. They set an aggressive hiring target of 10,000 employees by 2023 when the economy was going strong. Lots of biz dev and recruiting people amongst them who aren't required in a (predicted) recessionary cycle. So by forcing RTO and making it unpleasant, the rational conclusion (imo) is that they're hoping to thin the ranks.
I doubt TikTok has too many old-school types who just love being in office given they had barely a few hundred employees in the US prior to 2019, and didn't exist as a company until 2016, so it's a good control for the "outdated middle managers just want butts in seats/so they can exert power" theory (which as a prior middle manager myself I just didn't see in any of the hundreds of other tech EMs I interacted with).
TikTok did however scale from <500 US employees in Jan 2020 to >8,400(!) today. They set an aggressive hiring target of 10,000 employees by 2023 when the economy was going strong. Lots of biz dev and recruiting people amongst them who aren't required in a (predicted) recessionary cycle. So by forcing RTO and making it unpleasant, the rational conclusion (imo) is that they're hoping to thin the ranks.
Here's an article from CNBC about it:
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/12/why-rto-mandates-are-layoffs...