100% agree on this. I'm at the RR campus and more often than not it's packed from 8am to 11am. Those who are there, are out by 11am - 11:30am or noon at the latest, and go home to eat lunch.
All these chefs in the cafeterias are making so much food for people who have no interest in paying for it when we could just eat for free at home... So in a way, dell is wasting money on not only paying these chefs to be there for no REAL reason, but also wasting money on food that ends up getting thrown away.. Can't just take the premade food out of the heatlamps and put them back the next day lol... Thats a major health code violation, especially since 99% of it is chicken based.
I live an hour from the office and spend roughly $100 bi-weekly on gas (something like that.) Then I spend about $25/week at least on just on tolls. Cost aside, that's 2 hours of my work day driving and being unproductive and unavailable to do any work. EVERY DAY. So add up the tolls and gas and I'm spending damn near $500 JUST to go into an office in which none of my teammates/coworkers even go into or work at lol... Then I'm wasting a solid 8 hours at least just in the car driving to and from.
The RTO had nothing to do with anything other than execs/whomever not wanting to continually waste money on elec, water, security, maintenance, landscaping, etc... for nobody to ever be there. Which I get. But I think they took it a step too far by mandating 5 days/week AND monitoring. Even pre-covid, dell was always a hybrid company - 3 days in office, 2 at home.
The ONLY reason they mandated 5 days is because other companies were doing it. But I 1000% promise the 5 days and/or monitoring will be a thing of the past by EOY or early next year. My bet is they scale it to 3 days/week.