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Companies have spent the past several years making increasingly strong declarations about where employees should work. Come back to the office. Work remotely. Go hybrid. Actually, come back again. Just make sure it’s apparently the correct office.

One employee recently lost a boss he describes as one of the rare genuinely good ones. This wasn’t a manager who took credit for everyone else’s work or treated approving PTO like a personal favor. He supported his employees, valued their opinions and even advocated for raises substantial enough to make a real difference in their lives.

He also showed up to work in person at an office filled with other employees from the exact same company.

Unfortunately, after nearly a decade, the company apparently decided that particular building was no longer an acceptable place for people in his department to work. The job itself didn’t require him to be physically present, but instead of simply letting him continue working there—or, you know, remotely—the company laid him off.

And he wasn’t the only one.

Now his former employee is left trying to make sense of a policy that cost the company a great manager while providing seemingly little in return.

Boss got fired for going to his office

First off, this is not an anti-boss post; it’s an anti-company post. I know most bosses suck, but this guy was awesome.

He had my back all the time, he genuinely valued my input, and he pushed for the kind of monetary compensation for me that allowed me to make significant life decisions. So I’m not posting this particular thing to sh*t on middle management.

What’s less awesome is that he got laid off recently because it was decided that people in our department could no longer work in certain offices.

Woof.

In other words, this guy a) did not work remotely, and b) commuted to an office that employs tons of other people from the same company, and c) worked a job that does not require anyone to be in person to begin with, but because he happens to work out of this one specific building, the company decided, “F*ck this guy in particular.”

(This is the part where there’s probably going to be speculation that he got fired for a different reason I don’t know about.)

I suppose anything’s possible, but it just so happens everybody who was laid off was laid off for the same reason, except they worked in different buildings. So I don’t buy the idea that he did something specifically to get axed.

Doesn’t add up.

I’m angry. They were perfectly fine hiring him to work in the office that he’d been working in for close to a decade, but all of a sudden that same office was a problem for reasons I will never understand.

Beyond that, good bosses are hard to come by, and this guy was one of the best I’ve ever worked with.

This is just another reminder that, at the end of the day, you’re just an employee ID and companies don’t feel like they owe you anything, no matter how useful you might be.

Commenters understood why the employee was angry, although many suspected there was probably a financial or organizational explanation happening behind the scenes that workers simply weren’t being told.

Companies don’t generally wake up one morning and develop a personal vendetta against a particular office building. There could have been tax implications, lease arrangements, department consolidation, location-based compensation issues, headcount targets or any number of corporate considerations behind the decision. But knowing that some spreadsheet somewhere probably explains it doesn’t make the outcome feel any less ridiculous to the people actually affected.

That’s especially true when the employee who disappeared was a good manager. Those are notoriously difficult to replace, and their value isn’t always neatly captured by the metrics companies use when making broad restructuring decisions. A manager who advocates for employees, retains talented people and makes them feel valued can have an enormous impact on a team—right up until someone several levels above them decides geography matters more.

The fact that multiple employees in different buildings were reportedly laid off for the same reason also makes the employee’s explanation more plausible than the theory that his boss was secretly fired for poor performance. Whatever the actual corporate reasoning was, it appears the location rule affected more than one person.

And that’s really why this story struck a nerve. The boss apparently did what employees are constantly told they’re supposed to do: showed up, performed well, supported his team and remained with the company for years. None of it guaranteed that his job would survive a policy change completely outside his control.

There may have been a perfectly rational business explanation for the decision. But “rational for the business” and “sensible to the humans working there” are very often two different things.

This person agrees with OP.

This person says perspective is everything.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about an ex-Army vet who quit his security guard job after he doesn’t get a promised raise.

And this person says they will just never understand why this happens.

Turns out showing up to the office still isn’t enough when corporate decides you’re showing up to the wrong one.