Business

C.E.O.s, and President Trump, Want Workers Back in the Office

Published

11 months ago

January 21, 2025

C.E.O.s, and President Trump, Want Workers Back in the Office

Five years since the pandemic began, workers have grown accustomed to a script. Their bosses make return-to-office plans, which then get shelved. And then shelved again.

In recent weeks, the calls to end remote work have come back with gusto, and with authority.

On Monday, President Trump signed an executive order requiring federal department heads to “terminate remote work arrangements” and require all federal workers to return to in-person work five days a week. He previewed the move in December when he said those federal workers who refused to go into the office were “going to be dismissed.”

Some chief executives, who have long been enthusiastic about ditching remote work, have also announced full return-to-office plans. Amazon, JPMorgan and AT&T told many employees they would have to be back in the office five days a week this year. Even in popular culture, the office is making a comeback, with “Babygirl” glamorizing the blouse wearing C.E.O., “Severance” returning for a new season probing corporate psychological drama, and buzzy newsletters like “Feed Me” declaring remote work “out.”

And some workers, who have come back to in-person work of their own volition, are eager to pick up their prepandemic work routines.

Two years ago, Ellen Harwick would have said she wanted to work remotely forever. Last fall, a switch flipped.

A marketing manager for an apparel brand in Bellingham, Wash., Ms. Harwick worked remotely for two weeks in Portugal while still working on Pacific time. Suddenly, she began to crave office chatter.

“Something just shifted for me,” said Ms. Harwick, 48. “Working from home was really novel for the first bit, and then I just felt isolated.” She is now back in the office five days a week.

But many proponents of remote work, who underscore the benefits it offers to people with caregiving responsibilities, voiced concern about flexibility evaporating entirely.

“It’s very challenging to find child care that allows you to be in the office 9 to 5,” said Sara Mauskopf, the chief executive and founder of Winnie, a start-up that connects families with child care providers. Her company is fully remote.

Amazon’s return to office began on Jan. 2, when the company instructed most workers to come in five days a week, up from the three days required as of May 2023. In some locations, the deadline has been postponed as the company reconfigures office space. Andy Jassy, the company’s chief executive, told employees in a memo that returning to the office would better allow workers to “invent, collaborate and be connected” to one another and to the company culture.

“Before the pandemic, it was not a given that folks could work remotely two days a week, and that will also be true moving forward,” Mr. Jassy wrote.

JPMorgan told employees that in-person work would support better mentorship and brainstorming. The company will start rolling out its return to office in March.

“We know that some of you prefer a hybrid schedule and respectfully understand that not everyone will agree with this decision,” JPMorgan wrote in a memo to employees. “We feel that now is the right time to solidify our full-time in-office approach.”

Many work force experts point out that executives have wanted people back in the office for a while, for the purposes of building culture and relationships. What has changed, they say, is that employers feel they have more leverage now that the labor market is not quite as tight as it was at the height of the Great Resignation, when there were more open jobs for the number of unemployed people.

“It becomes like another dimension of compensation — in a really tight labor market, employees get their way more, employers might not pressure them to come back because they might want to quit,” said Harry Holzer, an economist at Georgetown University. “In a labor market where there’s more slack, employers might be less worried about that.”

Sometimes a return-to-office push has less to do with building an office culture and more to do with cost. Nick Bloom, an economist at Stanford University who studies remote work and advises executives on hybrid arrangements, said he had seen some companies press employees to return to the office as a way to reduce head count, understanding that calling all workers back would encourage some to quit.

“The waning of the D.E.I. movement has made it a bit easier,” added Mr. Bloom, referencing the backlash to corporate diversity initiatives, and explaining that women and employees of color have tended to voice more support for remote work in surveys.

In spite of these high-profile efforts to get workers back five days a week, many other employers are holding on to a hybrid approach.

Data from a Stanford project tracking work-from-home rates shows that over one-quarter of paid full days in the United States are worked remotely. And about three-quarters of Americans whose jobs can be done remotely continue to work from home some of the time, according to Pew.

One of the reasons that hybrid work has remained so sticky is that workers have made clear their preference for flexibility. Nearly half of remote workers surveyed by Pew said they would consider leaving their jobs if their employers no longer allowed them some remote flexibility. At Amazon, corporate workers staged a walkout in May 2023 protesting R.T.O. Some employers said they had no plans to change course from hybrid arrangements.

“We are committed to providing flexibility to the work force and believe the hybrid-flex approach allows teams to collaborate intentionally,” said Claire Borelli, the chief people officer at TIAA, an investment firm that called its employees back to the office three days a week in March 2022.

Some remote work stalwarts say that the policy has had no impact on productivity and that it has helped employee retention. When Yelp’s lease came up for renewal in 2021, the company decided to shift locations and sublease a smaller space from Salesforce. The company now allows employees to work fully remotely, bucking broader return-to-office trends.

“At this point, we almost drop the descriptor of remote work — it’s just the way we work,” said Carmen Amara, the company’s chief people officer.

Ms. Amara said any skepticism the company faced over its remote policy went away because of bottom-line results. The company reported record net revenue and profitability in the last quarter of 2024, as well as a 13 percent decrease in turnover since 2021.

But with big names like Amazon and JPMorgan returning to the office in full force, and with President Trump insisting that the federal work force do the same, the commercial real estate industry is tentatively optimistic, according to Ruth Colp-Haber, the chief executive of Wharton Property Advisors, a real estate brokerage.

Office occupancy is still shaky — a little over half of what it was prepandemic — according to Kastle, a workplace security firm whose “return-to-office” barometer has reflected the ups and downs of remote work since 2020. But that is up from what it was in 2022.

“These things take a while to work their way into the numbers, but there’s no question the momentum is on the positive side,” Ms. Colp-Haber said. “For a variety of reasons, one of them being the push by big companies to have five days a week back in the office, we’re seeing greater demand for office space.”

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Business

They graduated from Stanford. Due to AI, they can’t find a job

Published

4 hours ago

December 19, 2025

Press Room

They graduated from Stanford. Due to AI, they can’t find a job

A Stanford software engineering degree used to be a golden ticket. Artificial intelligence has devalued it to bronze, recent graduates say.

The elite students are shocked by the lack of job offers as they finish studies at what is often ranked as the top university in America.

When they were freshmen, ChatGPT hadn’t yet been released upon the world. Today, AI can code better than most humans.

Top tech companies just don’t need as many fresh graduates.

“Stanford computer science graduates are struggling to find entry-level jobs” with the most prominent tech brands, said Jan Liphardt, associate professor of bioengineering at Stanford University. “I think that’s crazy.”

While the rapidly advancing coding capabilities of generative AI have made experienced engineers more productive, they have also hobbled the job prospects of early-career software engineers.

Stanford students describe a suddenly skewed job market, where just a small slice of graduates — those considered “cracked engineers” who already have thick resumes building products and doing research — are getting the few good jobs, leaving everyone else to fight for scraps.

“There’s definitely a very dreary mood on campus,” said a recent computer science graduate who asked not to be named so they could speak freely. “People [who are] job hunting are very stressed out, and it’s very hard for them to actually secure jobs.”

The shake-up is being felt across California colleges, including UC Berkeley, USC and others. The job search has been even tougher for those with less prestigious degrees.

Eylul Akgul graduated last year with a degree in computer science from Loyola Marymount University. She wasn’t getting offers, so she went home to Turkey and got some experience at a startup. In May, she returned to the U.S., and still, she was “ghosted” by hundreds of employers.

“The industry for programmers is getting very oversaturated,” Akgul said.

The engineers’ most significant competitor is getting stronger by the day. When ChatGPT launched in 2022, it could only code for 30 seconds at a time. Today’s AI agents can code for hours, and do basic programming faster with fewer mistakes.

Data suggests that even though AI startups like OpenAI and Anthropic are hiring many people, it is not offsetting the decline in hiring elsewhere. Employment for specific groups, such as early-career software developers between the ages of 22 and 25 has declined by nearly 20% from its peak in late 2022, according to a Stanford study.

It wasn’t just software engineers, but also customer service and accounting jobs that were highly exposed to competition from AI. The Stanford study estimated that entry-level hiring for AI-exposed jobs declined 13% relative to less-exposed jobs such as nursing.

In the Los Angeles region, another study estimated that close to 200,000 jobs are exposed. Around 40% of tasks done by call center workers, editors and personal finance experts could be automated and done by AI, according to an AI Exposure Index curated by resume builder MyPerfectResume.

Many tech startups and titans have not been shy about broadcasting that they are cutting back on hiring plans as AI allows them to do more programming with fewer people.

Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei said that 70% to 90% of the code for some products at his company is written by his company’s AI, called Claude. In May, he predicted that AI’s capabilities will increase until close to 50% of all entry-level white-collar jobs might be wiped out in five years.

A common sentiment from hiring managers is that where they previously needed ten engineers, they now only need “two skilled engineers and one of these LLM-based agents,” which can be just as productive, said Nenad Medvidović, a computer science professor at the University of Southern California.

“We don’t need the junior developers anymore,” said Amr Awadallah, CEO of Vectara, a Palo Alto-based AI startup. “The AI now can code better than the average junior developer that comes out of the best schools out there.”

To be sure, AI is still a long way from causing the extinction of software engineers. As AI handles structured, repetitive tasks, human engineers’ jobs are shifting toward oversight.

Today’s AIs are powerful but “jagged,” meaning they can excel at certain math problems yet still fail basic logic tests and aren’t consistent. One study found that AI tools made experienced developers 19% slower at work, as they spent more time reviewing code and fixing errors.

Students should focus on learning how to manage and check the work of AI as well as getting experience working with it, said John David N. Dionisio, a computer science professor at LMU.

Stanford students say they are arriving at the job market and finding a split in the road; capable AI engineers can find jobs, but basic, old-school computer science jobs are disappearing.

As they hit this surprise speed bump, some students are lowering their standards and joining companies they wouldn’t have considered before. Some are creating their own startups. A large group of frustrated grads are deciding to continue their studies to beef up their resumes and add more skills needed to compete with AI.

“If you look at the enrollment numbers in the past two years, they’ve skyrocketed for people wanting to do a fifth-year master’s,” the Stanford graduate said. “It’s a whole other year, a whole other cycle to do recruiting. I would say, half of my friends are still on campus doing their fifth-year master’s.”

After four months of searching, LMU graduate Akgul finally landed a technical lead job at a software consultancy in Los Angeles. At her new job, she uses AI coding tools, but she feels like she has to do the work of three developers.

Universities and students will have to rethink their curricula and majors to ensure that their four years of study prepare them for a world with AI.

“That’s been a dramatic reversal from three years ago, when all of my undergraduate mentees found great jobs at the companies around us,” Stanford’s Liphardt said. “That has changed.”

Business

Disney+ to be part of a streaming bundle in Middle East

Published

16 hours ago

December 18, 2025

Press Room

Disney+ to be part of a streaming bundle in Middle East

Walt Disney Co. is expanding its presence in the Middle East, inking a deal with Saudi media conglomerate MBC Group and UAE firm Anghami to form a streaming bundle.

The bundle will allow customers in Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE to access a trio of streaming services — Disney+; MBC Group’s Shahid, which carries Arabic originals, live sports and events; and Anghami’s OSN+, which carries Arabic productions as well as Hollywood content.

The trio bundle costs AED89.99 per month, which is the price of two of the streaming services.

“This deal reflects a shared ambition between Disney+, Shahid and the MBC Group to shape the future of entertainment in the Middle East, a region that is seeing dynamic growth in the sector,” Karl Holmes, senior vice president and general manager of Disney+ EMEA, said in a statement.

Disney has already indicated it plans to grow in the Middle East.

Earlier this year, the company announced it would be building a new theme park in Abu Dhabi in partnership with local firm Miral, which would provide the capital, construction resources and operational oversight. Under the terms of the agreement, Disney would oversee the parks’ design, license its intellectual property and provide “operational expertise,” as well as collect a royalty.

Disney executives said at the time that the decision to build in the Middle East was a way to reach new audiences who were too far from the company’s current hubs in the U.S., Europe and Asia.

Business

Erewhon and others shut by fire set to reopen in Pacific Palisades mall

Published

1 day ago

December 18, 2025

Press Room

Erewhon and others shut by fire set to reopen in Pacific Palisades mall

Fancy grocer Erewhon will return to Pacific Palisades in an entirely rebuilt store, as the neighborhood’s luxury mall, owned by developer Rick Caruso, undergoes renovations for a reopening next August.

Palisades Village has been closed since the Jan. 7 wildfire destroyed much of the neighborhood. The outdoor mall survived the blaze but needed to be refurbished to eliminate contaminants that the fire could have spread, Caruso said.

The developer is spending $60 million to bring back Palisades Village, removing and replacing drywall from stores and restaurants. Dirt from the outdoor areas is also being replaced.

Demolition is complete and the tenants’ spaces are now being restored, Caruso said.

“It was not a requirement to do that from a scientific standpoint,” he said. “But it was important to me to be able to tell guests that the property is safe and clean.”

Erewhon’s store was taken down to the studs and is being reconfigured with a larger outdoor seating area for dining and events.

When it opens its doors sometime next year, it will be the only grocer in the heart of the fire-ravaged neighborhood.

The announcement of Erewhon’s comeback marks a milestone in the recovery of Pacific Palisades and signals renewed investment in restoring essential neighborhood services and supporting the community’s long-term economic health, Caruso said.

A photograph of the exterior of Erewhon in Pacific Palisades in 2024.

(Kailyn Brown/Los Angeles Times)

“They are one of the sexiest supermarkets in the world now and they are in high demand,” he said. “Their committing to reopening is a big statement on the future of the Palisades and their belief that it’s going to be back stronger than ever.”

Caruso previously attributed the mall’s survival to the hard work of private firefighters and the fire-resistant materials used in the mall’s construction. The $200-million shopping and dining center opened in 2018 with a movie theater and a roster of upmarket tenants, including Erewhon.

“We’re honored to join the incredible effort underway at Palisades Village,” Erewhon Chief Executive Tony Antoci said in a statement. “Reopening is a meaningful way for us to contribute to the healing and renewal of this neighborhood.”

Erewhon has cultivated a following of shoppers who visit daily to grab a prepared meal or one of its celebrity-backed $20 smoothies.

The privately held company doesn’t share financial figures, but has said its all-day cafes occupy roughly 30% of its floor space and serve 100,000 customers each week.

Erewhon has also branched out beyond selling groceries.

Its fast-growing private-label line now includes Erewhon-branded apparel, bags, candles, nutritional supplements and bath and body products.

Erewhon will also open new stores in West Hollywood in February, in Glendale in May and at Caruso’s The Lakes at Thousand Oaks mall in July 2026.

About 90% of the tenants are expected to return to the mall when it reopens, Caruso said, including restaurants Angelini Ristorante & Bar and Hank’s. Local chef Nancy Silverton has agreed to move in with a new Italian steakhouse called Spacca Tutto.

In May, Pacific Palisades-based fashion designer Elyse Walker said she would reopen her eponymous store in Palisades Village after losing her 25-year flagship location on Antioch Street in the inferno.

Fashion designer Elyse Walker announced the reopening of her flagship store

“People who live in the Palisades don’t want to leave,” Walker said at the time. “It’s a magical place.”

Caruso carried on annual holiday traditions at Palisades Village this year, including the lighting of a 50-foot Christmas tree for hundreds of celebrants Dec. 5. On Sunday evening, leaders from the Chabad Jewish Community Center of Pacific Palisades gathered at the mall to light a towering menorah.

A total of 6,822 structures were destroyed in the Palisades fire, including more than 5,500 residences and 100 commercial businesses, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

Caruso said he hopes the shopping center’s revival will inspire residents to return. His investment “shows my belief that the community is coming back,” he said. “Next year is going to be huge.”