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Comment by WirelessGigabit | Hacker News Reader

I refuse to be miserable in an office just for someone else's building value.

My former employer (in London) has just instructed everyone, finally after COVID, to be in the office for 50% of the time. Many of my former colleagues starting looking for other jobs last week.

It seems employers have two concerns: cost and presenteeism.

The first is easily solved, downsize your office. The second, is an organisational problem.

Why commute for 90 minutes each way to sit in a office with headphones on trying to avoid other distracting people to get some work done and then spend hours in Zoom meetings with those that don't come in on the same day?

> It seems employers have two concerns: cost and presenteeism.

There's real value in people talking to their coworkers in person and knowing them. There's an obvious cost as well, but let's not pretend there's no value there.

Is the value quantifiable?

This mistakes quantifiability with ease of measurement.

Yes, I remember Google studying remote versus in office work well before the pandemic.

This isn't the study but it talks on the issue:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07370024.2014.92...

> There's real value in people talking to their coworkers in person and knowing them.

I don't think this is true. A certain type of person who enjoys socializing at the office may like this, but a lot of people feel like they have a stronger voice when remote vs being talked over in real life. When you WFH you democratize communication (if you do it right), when you're with people IRL the most domineering people control the conversation and in my experience, productivity greatly suffers vs WFH.

> There's real value in people talking to their coworkers in person and knowing them.

There can also be real toxicity. From intimidation to harassment in-person interactions can be enabling.

In addition, in person interaction favors the person who speaks confidently and quickly over those who may be of the type that ponders more. Often in inperson interactions those feedbacks can be drowned out whereas a more collaborative document oriented interaction may bring that kind of feedback out.

There is some small value but you can rectify that by working closer together over phone calls and such. It's not nearly worth what middle management says it's work to cover for their need to have everyone in the office to lord over, which is the 99% reason for it.

Does that require 50% of my week to be in an office? My current employer has several 'company days' in a year, and we're in an always on (camera optional) Zoom channel. I know my current set of colleagues far better than my previous group which was actually a smaller company where we were in the office 4 days a week.

Just ignore such instruction and wait to see what happens. That's what I did and I am still employed. But I don't really care.

Humans are infinitely adaptable, I believe that most of the wailing and gnashing of teeth is purely psychological need for middle managers to lord over people in their office fiefdoms. My productivity has never been better not having to commute and listen to infinite office gossip and random phone calls while in my cube. It could be a personal failing that I'm easily distracted but it is what it is. I work better from home and will continue to seek out those opportunities over driving an hour to and from work. Consider it my contribution to the lower CO2 effort.

Most of my experience of employment has been enduring misery in order to create value for someone else. It's pretty hard to escape.

Creating order out of chaos. That is all a job really does.

The argument, as always, will be that the real estate market is using all of society as human shields and thus must be bailed out or otherwise protected from financial loss.

But actually these are two markets: commercial real estate and the residential one. While you could have some (weak IMO) arguments in favor of the latter, it is the former that is undergoing changes and I see no reasons for taxpayers to bail anybody involved.

This is the weirdest conspiracy theory that HN has gotten obsessed with of late.

I don't know if it's wise to place such a challenge in front of all of us.

HN seems to have avoided "microchips in vaccines" and "UFOs are alien aircraft" for the most part. But "return to office is a secret plot to prop up commercial real estate" gets almost zero pushback.

What's the 'conspiracy'? It's out in the open.

>New Jersey and Texas are states that stand out for spelling out exactly how often employees must work from the office to qualify for tax breaks. Before the pandemic, several New Jersey tax programs required workers to show up at least 80% of the time, and one Texas program set the threshold at 50%.

>Miami, which has seen an influx of new businesses throughout the pandemic, created a program in 2021 that requires companies to sign a minimum five-year lease for office space. The city of Sugar Land, Texas, outside of Houston, launched a new incentive in November that requires businesses to renew their existing leases for five to 10 years and invest a minimum of $1 million in office improvements.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-02-21/another-t...

https://archive.is/eOeIv

Tax breaks for businesses are not a secret plot by the illuminati to prop up their side-investments in commercial real estate. Please read what you're actually linking to and replying to.

No one is asking you to come into an office just to boost their landlord's property values. That would be a money losing proposition for the company.

Indeed they're not asking ...

If a company wants someone to come back to the office, it isn't for their landlord's property value.

If they have lots of free space they can sublease it out, it doesn't make any sense to force people in to an office just to burn money and miss out on revenue.

What if the leaders of the company, or company itself, is invested in similar properties?

Do you have any data to show how prevalent this is? I suspect worker retirement plans have more exposure than leaders of companies, and it seems only the largest, most stable and slower growing companies own their own real estate.

No, I was just positing a motivation.

My former employer's CEO (a small business) owned the floor of the building we were in and leased it back to the company.

I've known other smaller companies that owned their own building, but it would be interesting to see how prevalent it is. I suspect it's more common than we think.

In North America at least, having condo or strata units by floor of office buildings is relatively rare. I’m not saying it is ever a motivation but I just don’t think it is as big a motivation among tenants/employers as I see people on HN claim it is.

I realized that owning an office floor, condo style is unusual. My point is that I've known of several small businesses that owned their own buildings outright.

What do you think are the reasons then?

It's quite embarrassing to be paying the lease on an empty office though.

But I suspect this groupthink is not originating from individual companies.

Even for businesses that own buildings but are losing money, they can't sell their building in this market. So, they expect you to use it even though they would rather sell the building for the cash flow.

> It's quite embarrassing to be paying the lease on an empty office though.

While I agree, and I can imagine CEOs/CFOs in a hard spot over a 10-year lease with an empty office, what is better: to just pay what you had promised if downsizing is not possible, or pay and have disgruntled employees, with most of them immediately starting to look for another job and leaving as soon as they manage to find it?

That’s not true.

Companies get tax breaks when opening offices and warehouses / factories from local authorities and landlords have quite the sway with the latter.

sublease to who? the other companies whose workers don't want to work in an office?

No employer can force you to do anything. Saying No or just ignoring the demand is always an option.

This is a public discussion forum, not your living room.

I don't know what this is supposed to mean. Do you think a company is asking someone to come in to the office because they're worried about their landlord's property values?

They're definitely being asked to come in (in many cases) because the cities in which the buildings exist are granting the companies tax breaks (and/or other monetary incentives) to "encourage" workers to work from the office in order to prop up local property values. (see the story here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36835843>)

And also, yeah, I expect there are some companies that are seriously concerned about propping up the value of the building in which their office is located.

You changed your comment from this short text:

> No one is asking you.

Quite dishonest to act confused.

My comment never said that, so either you misread or you are being dishonest. It said "No one is asking you to" (come into the office to boost property values).

That's a lot different than "No one is asking you". I think you owe me an apology.

In some cases the companies are the landlords.

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