Nothing is requiring employees to be in the office five days a week

Ngl, that's a genius headline

“this is a company for grown ups.”

That's too bad. I was thinking of getting their phone when I needed a new one, I guess I'll just add them to my mental list of companies to avoid.

"Remote work is not compatible with a high ambition level plus high speed,” Pei said in the email, telling employees who are worried about flexibility that “this is a company for grown ups.”

Sounds like he actually means it's a company for exploitable young people and socopathic assholes. Grown-ups have other responsibilities and don't want work to commandeer their whole lives.

This just means they're a struggling company who needs to cut headcount and want to do it without paying severance

The way this usually works out is you loose all the good employees and you’re left with the dregs who were unable to find another remote position in time.

uhhhh...

anyone else totally misinterpret the lede to mean "there's no reason to go to work at an office" lol?

And Nothing is going to fire you if you don’t find a creative way to meet their bullshit attendance metrics.

I love being treated like a gradeschooler. Really boosts my morale, especially with nearly two fucking decades of experience and being on the wrong side of 35.

Stop bothering me and let me do my fucking job, for christ’s sake.

Edit: all that said, the company name does make for an amusing headline

nice, yet another company to avoid as either employee or customer

I wanna see them pay for office hours AND commute hours. In a big city you easily have 1+ hour a day irrevocably lost to commuting.

Open plan offices fucken suck.

Noise, constant distractions, and that one arsehole who never covers their mouth when they sneeze, sending a wave of infectious germs rolling out across the office floor.

"this is a company for adults" says the CEO of a company who slaps "Glyph" lights on knockoff iPhones and calls it innovative. I hate when I see Carl Pei's smug face pop up every few months. Hey Carl - put a fucking charger in the box. OnePlus is thriving without you.

This headline is true in multiple ways.

Every other company:

"Hey, we're hiring..."

I have a hypothesis that anyone who is required to be on site without having to do a hands-on thing (e.g. physical maintenance or repair) is actually a garden hermit, that is, hired to perform as an extra for the pleasure of viewing upper management.

I also have a hypothesis that a lot of company budget and material goes towards handling and pacifying upper management (e.g. the way a binky pacifies an infant) since they are accustomed to being coddled and not accustomed to actually managing.

To be fair, I've only been able to observe the relationships between clerical class and management class in a handful of companies, including a small one-store CD-Rom reseller and Bechtel Corporation circa 1990, but my observations have been consistent between them.

Excuse for layoff. What I hear from the article is a CEO, who himself is not a grown up, crying me, me, me, my company, my profit, selfish behavior without any concern for his employees who have largely contributed to his startup success.

If they are a company for grown ups why is he acting all controlling like an insecure little child instead of trusting in his employees like a brave adult?

We had a tremendous office culture in the 1950s. Since then, we have had numerous -- very numerous -- improvements and innovations in the telecom space, in the office assistant space (think personal digital assistant, or rather all the ubiquitous tools that do what those used to do), and other general improvements which empower significantly enhanced productivity.

To say people still need to be in the office is to say there have been no improvements. The fact is, we can be at home and be more productive than in an office. Anyone who tells you otherwise has ulterior motives.

Company is too invested in real estate? Sounds like an issue that the C-suite caused and that they alone should fix. Middle management needs to feel useful? Maybe they should find a career that actually has a need for their micromanagement instead of forcing other people into an obsolete box to appear useful. Show me a company against remote work, and I'll show you a company with outdated goals, more outdated methods, and leadership which should be replaced en masse with people from 2024.

So this is a company whose foundation was work from home and thus has that as it's background culture? Yeah this is just an excuse for layoffs without paying.

So Carl Pei sounds like a real douchebag

r/titlegore the fault of the original article

The grown ups comment makes the CEO sound like a condescending prick. Yeah I’d be looking for another job after that.

Just corporate real estate.

That's literally it. The whole reason.

This is called a silent layoff

That headline could use some clarification.

At first I thought it was gonna be an opinion piece supporting fully remote work.

Turns out it's abouy a company named "Nothing".

“This is a company for grown-ups”.

Says man who makes phones that sparkle and a fidget spinner earbud case.

Then I'm not buying anything from them again.

There's nothing requiring people to work 5 days a week, or 40 hours, or 52 weeks a year. If we worked together we could have way better conditions.

I'm sure Carl Pei will always be in office. /s

Sounds like a great reason to unionize.

Remind me to check in 6 months, we'll see headlines that "Nothing's" valuation is going to be doing honours to its name

First devouring all of Fantasia, now this.

I read the title to mean that nobody NEEDS to come into the office lol

I have no intention of buying anything but a fairphone, at least until right-to-repair comes to GrapheneOS pixels

This is a litmus test for who actually reads the article

Ok, good luck with that! Can't wait for this guy to start whining that he can't find employees.

Guess I won't be buying the CMF Phone after all.

Except for manager-level peeps who crave the power and control that comes from dictating how people live their lives under them

Except bosses?

This is disappointing to see - especially since I like a few of their products.

I'm not sure how it is in London, but there's a strong government push to get people to go back to office (the city). Since politics is every politicians side hustle, and a lot of them own commercial real estate that's been tanking post pandemic, I feel like they are forcing companies to bring people back to re-inflate the real estate value.

Since companies can't outright say it's the government, they have to come up with excuses.

The worst part is I don't know what's worse: if I'm wrong or if I'm right :(

It's shame they already turn into the dark side

Nothing is requiring employees to be in the office five ANY days a week

FTFY

...but why? They outsource all of the phone's development!

“Remote work is not compatible with a high ambition level plus high speed,” Pei said in the email, telling employees who are worried about flexibility that “this is a company for grown ups.”

“I know this is a controversial decision that may not be a fit for everyone, and there are definitely companies out there that thrive in remote or hybrid setups,” he added. “But that’s not right for our type of business, and won’t help us fully realize our potential as a company.”

Very reminiscent of Musk's message to Twitter employees a couple of years ago.

"Going forward, to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely hardcore. This will mean working long hours at high intensity. Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade."

And his own attitudes towards work-from-home:

Musk imposed a strict return-to-the-office policy for Tesla in June 2022, warning them they would lose their jobs if they refused to do so. Employees would need to spend a minimum of 40 hours at the office a week; anything less would be “phoning it in.”

“Get off the goddamn moral high horse with the work-from-home bullshit,” Musk said, “because they’re asking everyone else to not work from home while they do.”

“If you want to work at Tesla, you want to work at SpaceX, you want to work at Twitter — you got to come into the office every day,” he said.

I already hate their name so much and now this makes me hate them even more. Fuck them.

I say this all the time. Back in the 80s companies figured out that the same amount of work could be done because of computers. Do you know what they did? HR told them to fire one in four employees and redistribute the work. Same amount of work and fewer people to pay.

Look, I can do everything that I do at work from home, except prevent my boss from realizing that some Indian could do my job from his home at a tenth of the price!

They make phones. I had to look this up since I had never heard of this company.

I would find it weird to be referred to as Nothing staff, or a Nothing employee.

Is there a Lemmy community that focuses on technology, and not things tangentially related to technology companies?

"Carl" is not compatible with the human race.

We need a human recycling center.

Unnecessary RTO mandates need to be outlawed

Such a dick move

"tHiS iS a ComPaNy fOr GrOwN uPs"

This looks like the face of someone who's used to getting yelled at

Ever since TV remote was invented, people don't even lift their asses off the couch and walk over to the TV to change the channel. Unless a company adapts to changing tech landscape, they can be many things, but not a company for grown-ups.

He just wants to fire people by making them quit.

Well, nothing should require employees to be in the office five days a week

Goddamn. It took out my boy Rock Biter's whole crew, it made the Child-like Empress cry, now this? Disgusting behavior.

Which is funny because I own a Nothing phone and they literally outsourced all of the making of it to other companies.

Chaff

He is not wrong tho... it's the company interest vs employee interest. And I must say, as someone who works 100% remotely, sometimes I do wish we are all again at the office. It was so easier to know whats happening around you on the fly, instead of spending half a day in your calendar making or taking meetings.