My company gave us 3 months notice and said 100% RTO in January 2026. I warned them this was a dealbreaker for me. They said sorry, no exceptions. In January I submitted my two weeks notice, citing RTO. They accepted my resignation letter and then called me a few hours later saying they could make an exception. Now I'm back to 100% remote.

I wouldn't consider myself to be an irreplaceable superstar employee, but they folded almost immediately. Not sure what the point of this dance was.

Most orders are issued assuming compliance, or they'd be more considered (and less of them) or costly to enforce. To say there's "no exception" it's to say "we've done NO analysis whatsoever to understand if there should be any exception so, we'll cross that bridge later".

You did well, because someone with actual some skin in the game considered you irreplaceable at that moment.

My extremely paranoid take is they might intend to replace you with someone who will RTO but need to keep you around for a while until they find that replacement.

This is exactly it. I hope for the sake of OP that s/he's the exception but so far examples of this from my personal circles is that it is just "you are here for the continuity until suitable replacement is found."

> Not sure what the point of this dance was.

It's to reduce dance partners. Most people won't push back against "no exceptions", so they greatly reduce the number of exceptions they have to consider just by saying it.

Id be curious to know how this goes for you in 6-18 months

Best case scenario you get marginalized, middle case, is next time there are layoff, worst case they are already looking for your replacement

Regardless, unless you actively desire to get laid off I’d be searching for a job that actually wants remote people.

Yes, but we have to think of the shareholders

Because Apple

It's a small club and you ain't in it

Let me guess. Jeff/Andy make a donation to a certain someone. Tariffs on Italy are threatened. Case is dropped.

I think that normally that may be the approach (and I'm not singling out Italy for this, it probably applies to most countries).

On this occasion, however:

> In all previous cases involving other international groups, once a settlement was reached and payment made, prosecutors closed related criminal investigations, either through plea deals or by dropping the cases.

> This time, however, Milan prosecutors did not share the tax authority's approach and decided to press ahead with their probe, leading to a request that the suspects be sent to trial.

Damn, is anyone an expert that can speak to the criminal law involved here?

It’s crazy that executives can jump around the law and not face any criminal charges, then the company picks up the bill (although I’m not ignorant thinking this isn’t usual)

I’m just curious to learn more about how often this is the case and you usually what happens with people afterward

I don't know about Italian law, but in the US tax evasion is pretty difficult in many cases to prove. It is illegal in the US to deliberately defraud the IRS to evade paying taxes, it is not illegal to make a mistake, or claim a deduction you think you can claim when the IRS decides you can't, etc. So prosecutors must prove you had an intent to evade taxes you knew you owed. Because they can rarely meet that bar, criminal charges are rarely brought.

In Italy, if you are charged of tax evasion, you need to demonstrate that you are not evading. It's called "inversion proof"

that seems terrible

it's for the civil part. (so you need to show the tax office some paper trail that you based your filings on. invoices, bills, contracts, emails, receipts. and if they are formally okay, then the tax agency has to show that they are just fake papers.)

as far as I understand the criminal part still considers intent and so on (and has a higher standard for burden of proof), but if you file for VAT return and then you have zero invoices (and so the numbers simply don't add up) the court can easily find that there was intent to defraud the state. (and then sentencing is based on the amount of damages.)

Doesn't seem to be universal but applied narrowly for example for financial crimes.

While I share your sentiment, perhaps its better that it remain murky to give prosecutors a chance to succeed.

It usually works more like:

  - we want 1.4B, but it will take 10 years in courts
  - best I can do is 800M (or even lower)
  - ok, we'll take it

source: I'm italian and many tech giants did this already. Apple opened an academy in Naples too.

Not only tech giants, everybody from celebrities to random Joes can get away with it.

My mother's husband owed 70k+ EUR in taxes and at some point the judge proposed and he agreed to 2800 euros.

The trick is to not have a bank account in your name only, you have it joint with a child/spouse and they can't take your money. Nor they can take your house, if you only have one.

Eventually under those situations the judges try to take anything rather than nothing.

I'm not defending this situation, just saying it's widespread and the fact that every two governments come one that does a "condono", which is essentially "let's agree with tax evaders for some 50% of the tax they owe so they are happy and we see something" doesn't help.

Harsher punishment should be warranted, but you can't go to prison for tax evasion.

> The trick is to not have a bank account in your name only, you have it joint with a child/spouse and they can't take your money.

Yes they can take 100% of your part of that bank account which amounts at total / # of owners.

The trick is in the mud between what's yours and what's theirs. The induced doubt is lucrative.

It's pretty clear. If you have your bank account with 2 owners, and with X on it, X/2 are yours and X/2 belong to the other owner, at any point in time. Case in point, if one of the owners deceases, you can withdraw X/2 at most. The other half is blocked until the inheritance paperwork is completed and that half has a new legal owner(s).

You 100% should be able to go to prison from tax evasion. Not to fill prisons just to line prison owners' pockets like in the US, but definitely have the possibility for egregious offences.

> You 100% should be able to go to prison from tax evasion.

I said can't, not shouldn't.

In any case I'd still say it's arguable if the punishment matches the crime, I'm not saying I'm against it but I don't fully buy it either.

In Italy we have two law codes: criminal and civil. You can't go to prison for civil offenses like tax evasion in our system.

you can… it’s just not really clear that anyone does. that said, i think if you polled the average joe on the street, they would overwhelmingly say that you can, which is probably a net gain for society.

"Tariffs on Italy are threatened. Case is dropped."

Justice is independent in most EU countries.

But I think tariffs cannot be imposed on individual countries in the EU. At least that was how I understood the situation with Spain.

that is also true. Doesn't really stop Trump from threatening to do it all the tim tho.

Nothing stops that man from saying anything, he himself the least.

There's quite a few asterisks that need to be appended to "independent".

It is quite independent in Italy actually. The government is pushing for a constitutional amendment to help "fix" this feature. There is going to be a referendum on the change very soon.

I have ancestral Italian Citizenship but have never lived in Italy.

I am occasionally called upon by the local consulate to perform my civic duty and vote.

Just this week I sent them back my ballot, now marked, for this referendum in a sealed envelope.

This referendum required me to dig more deeply than usual into Italian politics before I could decide which way I wanted to vote.

> It is quite independent in Italy actually.

Ask any Romanian and they'll tell you they're not. Ask them about the Mario Iorgulescu case [1], with the Italian justice system refusing to extradite him here to Romania only because his (wealthy) dad paid the right people off. And Iorgulescu is not the only such case.

[1] https://www.romaniajournal.ro/society-people/law-crime/mario...

I am familiar with this but thought it was for separating prosecutors from judges?

Is this some indirect effect of that?

the current reform is complicated, and reasonable people can disagree on how to vote, but it goes a bit further than separating prosecutors from judges.

Namely, it also changes the self-regulating body (the CSM, Consiglio Superiore della Magistratura) of the judiciary so that the government and parliament have a bit more authority and the judiciary have a bit less: the organ is split in two, its judiciary members are no longer elected but picked randomly while a part is decided by the political side, and there's an even higher special tribunal.

Proponents say this is necessary, opponents say this is leading towards stronger power of the political majority over the judiciary.

> while a part is decided by the political side

Now, roughly one third of CSM members is nominated by the Parliament and the other one is elected by judges, according to the "correnti" (a sort of parties)

For reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Italian_constitutional_re...

> The government is pushing for a constitutional amendment to help "fix" this feature. There is going to be a referendum on the change very soon.

Italian here. It's not like that: the referendum is about definitely enforcing the career separation about public persecutor and judges. Actually they are under the same authority and the member of this authority are elected according to a sort of political parties (unique case in the whole EU) and this creates some distortions in career growths and nominations. The new schema will create two different authorities and the members will be selected according to a ballot.

A similar proposal was made by the left wing parties few years ago, when they were at the government

The only thing that matters is stonk++

too bad stonk is down 23% this year. i think they are doing it wrong

I never thought I would see the day, but my stodgy, lumbering company just banned new Oracle databases. Everyone hates Oracle, and only does business out of necessity. I think more and more companies are trying to extricate themselves from Oracle legal, so Oracle needs a new way to leech onto corporations for the coming decades. AI is the best play in sight.

Did you guys go out to celebrate? It's not too late for Ding Dong, the Bitch is Dead.

If you're Oracle it's not necessary a bad thing if you build an antiquated data center. Isn't much of their customer base legacy customers they are rent-seeking from in perpetuity? Those people are never going to be doing cutting edge AI. They will do what they have always done: adopt new technologies right at the nadir of the Trough of Disillusionment.

"The North Korea of the computer industry" indeed

It’s a huge gamble but they have no choice but to take it. Most their software will be rendered obsolete by AI (I’ve vibecoded replacements saving millions already, companies everywhere are doing this right now).

So they have to hope they’re a part of the future in the AI capacity because their SaaS business is going to take a big hit.

YTD performance didn’t fully bake this reality in. It was seen as them having 2 huge revenue streams, the market is realizing that AI is a threat to SaaS and baking that into stonks

The actions of oracle lately seem extremely misaligned to maximize stonks - it's extremely political, more than is necessary to merely keep in the good graces of the current administration.

Who could have guessed that a few billionaires and corporations shifting the same money back and forth between themselves wouldn't benefit the overall economy?

It's 100% legal if you're in the inside circle

Just because it’s not enforced doesn’t make it legal.

Non-binding and voluntary = a bunch of lip service