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Comment by justaguy88 | Hacker News Reader

"I spent all this money on offices, better force the minions to sit in them"

Please don't post unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

it's true though. They are a publicly traded company with over 100B in office assets. If they can't get people back into the offices, they would not be able to justify they cost of keeping said property and would have to sell it to appease investors. Please use a brain cell next time.

Lol yes investors want to sell offices. They clearly need brain cells from you.

Yikes, please don't damage HN by responding that way, no matter how wrong another commenter is or you feel they are. This is how we get downward spirals into hell. Think of it this way: you may not owe the comment you disagree with any better, but you owe this community much better if you're participating in it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

If that was really the case Google would just sell all these. Do you understand how costly it is to maintain offices?

I worked at a place with a historic, beautiful, downtown office. It was great ... for a while. Then they expanded but the location could not. My enjoyment dropped rapidly once we were five to a desk. The question of remote work came up and upper management was heavily invested in on site ICs. And this around the time they promoted some semi-remote folks to be our managers. It was weird. Possibly some trust issues from past contractors.

EDIT: Forgot to mention they did specifically call out the expense of the location and parking privileges as a reason to disallow remote work.

The worst time I had was when I got to manage a team of 5 at a remote location. All 5 guys were sitting together. There was only one conference room equipped with videoconference gear. I tried maintaining at least one meeting a week but it had to be booked a lot in advance and I was frequently preempted by higher management because this was the only one room. Usually at the last moment (and I had once been evicted in the middle of the meeting).

There was no budget for me to visit them at the office so all in all I saw them in person twice. Not twice a month or even twice a year. Twice. Total.

It’s likely less costly to the decision maker than admitting a mistake and changing course would be.

Google has signed like 16 year leases in some offices and has invested hundreds of millions of dollars into them already. For the playa vista office alone at least.

You act as though people are rational actors.

It would make sense, they don't want to stop the appreciation of their real estate assets. How much is google's campus worth?

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