What Happened?
- A major Cloud outage on Monday, October 20th reminded everyone how fragile the internet gets when too much depends on one provider and one region.
- Leading up to this, strict five-days-a-week RTO mandates at the Cloud Computing Provider and layoffs pushed many top developers to quit, be fired, or disengage entirely.
- Despite the disruption, Wall Street barely flinched. When the market shrugs, prevention isn’t a priority.
- Our response stays the same as in our last article: we self-host. We own our reliability so you’re not living on someone else’s outage schedule.
RTO as a Blunt Instrument (Five Days, Everyone, or Else)
Return-to-office started as a culture pitch. It started slow, whispers in the dark. A chant that ‘someday we will be back to normal, someday the people who are forced to put up with me will once again need to tolerate my micromanagement’ – said the “Lion Food” at every company.
Amazon, a company which benefited and pioneered many remote working tools, became one of the worst examples of the industry– very PUBLICLY demanding full Five days per-week in office, and strict crackdown and tracking on so called ‘coffee badging’.
This is despite surveys, internal and external, showing full in office 5days a week being the preference of about 1 in 12 office workers, the remaining 11 in 12 preferring Hybrid or fully from home.
In practice, the five-day mandate for everyone became a quiet filter: if you can’t, won’t, or simply won’t tolerate the commute tax, you’ll self-select out. Moved away in the pandemic? Neener neener.
No severance headlines; just attrition.
Who leaves first?
Often the most mobile, most in-demand builders– the A-team, the rock stars. They aren’t being treated like children and are desperately sought after consultants and founding engineers.
Who stays?
The extroverted engineers who were desperately hoping for in-person collaboration on video meetings and office water cooler pointless minutia?
No. Typically, it’s the self-preserving, risk-averse, mid to low performing “job huggers” who know they can’t do better. (Or even find another job.)
The result is a workforce that’s smaller on paper but lighter on deep expertise—the exact expertise you need when complex systems wobble.
Plain speak: RTO used as a one-size-fits-all hammer doesn’t measure performance; it bleeds it.
The IBM Lesson (A Cautionary Tale About Brain Drain)
History shows that broad early-retirement and buyout waves can drain precisely the people who keep the lights on—staff with institutional memory and hands-on mastery.
When management can’t (or won’t) measure performance carefully, the wrong people exit. What’s left looks leaner, but systems get fragile.
Why This Fuels Outages—and Slower Fixes
- Fewer senior hands to prevent mistakes and triage fast.
- More centralization into a few cloud regions makes single failures hit everyone at once.
- Investor amnesia: stocks pop back even after rough incidents, so there’s little market pressure to redesign for resilience.
Put together, you get a world where outages keep happening—and the biggest players feel less urgency to change.
Plain English: What “The Cloud” Actually Is
It’s other people’s computers you rent. That’s great for speed and scale, but when millions crowd into the same few data-center regions, one hiccup can ripple everywhere. Convenience is amazing—until everyone shares the same failure.
How MTT Opts Out – We don’t Use the Cloud, we have our Own Experts IN HOUSE
In our piece on the AWS outage, we explained why we don’t run on public clouds. Here’s the short version again:
- We self-host with redundancy and fail-safes.
- We publish live results so you can see real performance, not marketing fog.
- We run our own models on our own hardware for explainability and data control.
- Compliance and transparency are built in—clear change windows, auditable releases, no black boxes.
Translation: We chose the hard way so you don’t have to live with someone else’s outage—or someone else’s HR experiment.
What This Means for You (Non-Technical)
- Fewer shared-fate failures: We’re not tied to a crowded cloud region’s bad day.
- Accountability: If something breaks, we fix it—no vendor ping-pong.
- Trust: Live strategy results, explainable models, compliance by design.
A Small Cyberpunk Reality Check
Power will keep consolidating. Mandates will try to standardize humans. Markets will shrug. Our response is simple: own the stack, protect the user, keep the tools up when the megatowers flicker.
Quick FAQ
Is five-day RTO just layoffs in disguise?
Many observers say strict RTO drives attrition without the optics of layoffs. The people with the most options often leave first.
Why do the most talented devs exit first?
They’re highly employable and allergic to blanket rules that ignore outcomes. They’ll take their skills to teams that measure results, not badge swipes.
How does this connect to outages?
Less senior talent + more centralization = more mistakes, slower recovery, and repeated “black swan” Mondays.
How does MTT avoid it?
We self-host across sites and networks, publish live results, run our own models, and build for compliance and transparency from day one.
Call to Action
Ask any vendor three things: Where do you run? How do you fail? Can you prove it?
If you want infrastructure with a backbone—not a hope—choose tools that own their destiny.
Live results posted daily, and backed up forever:
https://mastertradetools.com/public_view_dashboard2