“Blizzard canceled its survival game Odyssey after six years in development largely due to its struggling technology. One factor behind those struggles may have been the company’s inability to retain or attract senior engineers, in part, because of a lack of remote-work flexibility.
But the hardest impact of this policy is that both companies asked people to move to southern California — where the rents are expensive and the cost of living is high — only to then take away their jobs.
Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that productivity does take a hit when people work from home. Maybe it’s especially hard for some disciplines, as managers have argued, and maybe it’s difficult to engage in creative collaboration on Zoom and Trello. Doesn’t matter. CEOs should recognize that no productivity boost is worth the short- and long-term repercussions of forcing people to move and then laying them off”