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Comment by Devasta | Hacker News Reader

I work in Cork, Ireland. My boss is in Dublin, his boss Singapore, my staff in Nova Scotia, Devs in Manila, clients in London and New York. I'm always working remotely, no matter where I am, as is anyone who works in any multi office company.

The RTO is being entirely driven from the top by institutional investors wanting to avoid losses on property investments and from the bottom by those who have yet to grapple with the fact they dont have friends or hobbies and need you in the office so that they dont feel like such embarrassing losers.

The return to office has nothing to do with productivity, trying to look at things through that lens reflects a total lack of understanding of whats going on.

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> The RTO is being entirely driven from the top by institutional investors wanting to avoid losses on property investments and from the bottom by those who have yet to grapple with the fact they dont have friends or hobbies and need you in the office so that they dont feel like such embarrassing losers.

I know i'm supposed to "contribute to the conversation" but it's important to recognize that the above point is exactly right.

also important to read the nuance of them "feeling" like losers. Obviously if you're working in tech there's little chance of you actually being a loser in your career (which is probably the most difficult place to find success) so really they'd just need to put some effort into being social and these people would be doing well for themselves, however, in-office can be a huge crutch for people to pretend like they have a social life.

Is it though? Most companies prioritise their own self interest over nebulous “institutional investment” bogeymen.

Do they? Odd how coordinated so many companies reach the same conclusions, policies, and follow the same trends.

Could it be that the board members of these companies are in that nebulous investor class?

It's not odd at all that people in a similar situation tend to act the same way, particularly when they can see how the others act and realise that following the crowd is the best way to not get fired.

Many companies would benefit financially by reducing their office footprint and thereby paying less rent. The idea that boards everywhere would sabotage their own companies to appease commercial real estate investors is tinfoil hat level stuff.

If you buck the trend that everyone else is following, maybe you really are the genius in the room. But that's probably not the way to bet unless your situation is unique for some reason.

Yes, they do. The board member croneyism keeping the working man down is a bit of a simple minded reddit fantasy - in the real world, public companies have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders. They don’t serve the interests of some hidden cabal.

If you notice that companies make similar decisions as a result of changing market trends (a global pandemic, for instance) it’s probably because those decisions were deemed the most financially sound. They weren’t colluding to screw over employees.

In the real world, public companies rely on financing for a heft of their operations. Financing is controlled by the investor class only a simple reddit mind could possibly believe exists

In theory, if there is such a thing as a "self" to have an interest in. The idea breaks down when the same 30 people sit on the board of directors of every publicly-traded company in a particular sector and also own all the property.

More amusingly, not that long ago my direct boss was denying it was the case, but it was not until recent RTO call that he ( and his boss ) finally admitted something along the lines of 'yeah, we got commercial real estate on our books so like you know, we should do our part'.

So yeah, I am told to subsidize failing real estate without getting anything in return. Won't I think of the poor, poor investment managers and their real estate? Why would I? Do they think about me?

When it comes to gains and profits, the shareholders are supposed to benefit. When it comes to losses and difficulties, the employees are supposed to 'do their part' and shoulder them.

OP forgets ‘institutional investors’ is code for the pooled retirement funds of the vast majority of residents, as well as the institutions who hold much of the sovereign debt, which is generated to pay for social services, war, etc. It all comes down to those who are presently working supporting those who presently don’t.

Ok but insofar this is true, this is also a misguided, terrible state of affairs that needs to be addressed!

Like saying "you better support your employer's aims or maybe grandma wont get her cancer medicine," is not the gotcha you maybe think it is.

IDK, I don’t think real estate part is entirely true. It’s often quoted but most companies have very little RE as a percentage of revenue or whatever metric you think makes most sense. Many more are just leasing RE and could easily have exited that position by now. Even a one time write off could be spun as a positive thing. These properties can be repurposed and have continued value without their corporate tenants.

There’s no grand conspiracy where executives are helping boost the holdings of REITs and institutional investors. Executives as a “class” and a “job” just like the traditional butts in chairs approach to work. They have to think about the entire company and it’s easier to have a singular approach. Instead of bespoke approaches by team/department/title where some people are RTO and some WFH as that quickly reverts to everyone is on zoom/teams for every meeting because of the remote people.

WFH has also provided a whole host of new and unusual problems for HR. I’m sure most executives are just tired of hearing about it. In my own experience/approximation only about 1 in 3 people are can actually self manage in a way that’s needed for remote work to be effective. I think software development is a very specific job that is very well suited to WFH but most other jobs within a company are not.

One of the larger companies I'm most familiar with is definitely not renewing leases on a fairly widespread basis. I'm sure some companies feel they're locked in for some reason but it's just not universal.

Not necessary the company directly, but could be parent company, stockholders. What value would office buildings retain if there were no one leasing office spaces? They would be burning money by maintaining the buildings.

Where I live there’s a big movement of office->residential. It’s not free. Should it be? Was it a risk free investment? I’d argue no and no, and mention they’ll likely be better off financially as we have a shortage of housing and an excess of commercial in my market

Sure, let's say it is shareholders. So these shareholders (diverse, distributed groups) get together and collude to pressure their investment companies to sacrifice performance (WFH) for the benefit of the shareholders' other investments?

I don't buy it.

The alternative to REIT consipiracy is that execs have run the numbers and loss from remote work is greater than the loss from office work. Painful.

Headlines don't support this, articles only get clicks when celebrating remote work. But there is a very clear disconnect where headlines are saying "remote work is more productive" and executive surverys are saying "we are moving back to offices".

Execs (on the whole, not anecdotes) don't hate money and productivity. If remote work was so much better, they would be rushing to it at breakneck speed. Instead the opposite is happening.

HN Note: Only a small fraction of workers are developers or work in IT. The white collar workforce is huge an varied. The remote vs. RTO debate is about workers on the whole, not just the small sliver that are devs.

I have to disagree. History has shown over and over again that MBAs don't need to be intelligent or understand the business to get to highly paid and powerful roles. Similarly, you can be an idiot and still succeed in becoming the president of US.

RTO is dictated by those people because without the headcount in the office it's plain and obvious that most of their "work" is illusory and provides no value beyond giving them means to build their kingdoms. RTO is mostly about self important and self-preservation of this whole class.

Execs have signed long leases on office space and need to be seen to be using it.

I disagree. When you calculate the total spend of a company on Google on real estate then multiply it by their PE ratio and now that spend now has 0 return instead of 30x or so you get a pretty large double digit percentage of their market cap in delta value.

I think you are trivializing a pretty huge risk on the global markets.

Google is chump change to the global commercial RE market.

I’ve worked with/on dozen or so executive teams, public and private, bought sold RE and leased/renewed RE at most of them. Nobody cares about the landlords or the shareholders of those companies. It’s actually an adversarial relationship just like most tenant/landlord relationships. Each party is looking out for themself.

The math makes no difference when all you care about is yourself. The executives are wanting RTO because they feel like that’s what’s in their company’s best interest. I’m not buying into the grand conspiracy theory that’s floating around.

You seem to misunderstand what im saying...

You can maybe make the argument that regional banks want people back in the office because they have self interest in commercial real estate as a whole but outside that the argument is brain dead stupid IMO.

To me, it is all so simple. Does the micro manager to a fault know they are a micro manager? Of course they do but they can't help it. It is strategic and a trade off. It is the same exact thought process but just applied at the company level.

Another factor is that large employers in city centers are getting some political pressure to bring people back into town. Commuting is a major prop to city economies and tax bases.

What does this pressure look like, in practice? Sternly written letters? Phone calls? What power does a city have over a private employer when it comes to employment decisions like this? If remote is everything people say it is, the cities should have no power to overcome improved performance and lower (in the long run) costs (due to lower or nonexistent rent)

Lots of companies get tax breaks, and a city can threaten to take them away if they don't bring employees back to the office.

"Of the billions in tax incentives granted to US companies every year by cities and states, many agreements require workers to come into the office some of the time, or at least live in the region. For companies receiving these incentives, relaxing in-office attendance could be costly."

"New Jersey paused its on-site requirement when Covid hit. Last summer, though, the state announced that companies receiving those benefits must bring employees back to the office about three days a week — a lower bar than before, but still challenging for firms struggling to hang onto workers in a red-hot labor market."

"The state [of Texas] said it will revoke benefits granted under the multibillion-dollar Enterprise Zone Program to companies whose employees no longer work on site at least half the time."

The article does go into pushback the states are getting from companies for imposing these, to be fair, but it's clear they have some levers to pull in order to coerce companies to bring employees back to the office.

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

I am not sure why you, and others in this thread, keep stating a performance boost. Workers claim a performance boost while actual performance suffers pretty greatly

https://fortune.com/2023/07/06/remote-workers-less-productiv...

I don’t personally believe there is an actual performance boost. I think I is the opposite, and even where it might exist at the individual level I think it is certainly (to my eye) incorrect at the team and company level.

But I won’t make that argument because it is the third rail of HN comments. So I make all my arguments assuming WFH improves productivity.

You can also stipulate that short-term productivity didn't take a major hit for the most part while having concerns about onboarding junior people, reduced level of engagement on teams, weakened company culture, etc. It's hard to separate out other factors but it sure feels like that to me.

I agree with you on this as well, but this is HN and WFH is a shibboleth that you’ll get downvoted for questioning.

Think about it as if it was a private golfing club, where these guys (corporate executives, real estate developers, bigshot investors, local politicians and officials, chief of police, county and city judges) all hang out in the same bar and play golf together, and shoot the shit with each other, and go to each others' kids' soccer games and so on. I'm sure there's a lot of peer pressure for them all to kind of get along and scratch each other's backs so that everyone can profit at the expense of the rest of us schmucks who are not in the club. A phone call is probably the most formal that it would get!

I think this is mostly it. But a little more generously, a lot of business leaders do have civic pride and if remote work is going to collapse the city's tax base, that isn't about personal profit. There are practical and emotional reasons why politicians, business leaders, educational and healthcare institutions, non-profits etc. would not want this. And this all trickles down to voters - people don't want to live in a crappy place!

This is argument keeps getting parroted without evidence or skepticism. Where's the evidence? Just because many people don't like RTO doesn't mean that RTO is driven by evil forces up to no good. There's nuance - on both sides of the debate! - and it does no one a service to reduce the arguments to bumper stickers.

No, employees wanting to work from home don't universally want to loaf off. No, employees that want to work from an office aren't universally middle managers trying to justify their existence. Some people work better at home, others work better at the office. Some companies have found WFH to improve productivity overall and are flexible, and other companies have found RTO to improve productivity overall. If you work better from home, go work for the former. If you work better from the office, go work for the latter. Let the market decide. If WFH is overall more productive, eventually the RTO companies' performance will suffer, and vice versa. No need to blame things on the boogeyman behind the curtain!

I think the problem is, if you want to work remote you don’t care if other people work in the office or not. However, if you want to work in the office you really want others in the office as that is the purported main point of being there so one side is forcing the other into their desired working situation. This is exactly what the OP is describing, people above/below/around compelling RTO.

So go to a company that doesn’t have RTO requirements. The market should sift employees and employers to an equilibrium where people work in the environment that suits them.

We already have this. People that can’t stand sitting at a screen all day and need to be outdoors to feel good find jobs that suit that. People who need to interact and not do paperwork find jobs that suit this. And vice versa. RTO and WFH will just be the next phase of that.

I look forward to the market showing us, objectively, which is most effective on the whole when enough companies with radically different policies compete with each other.

I have a strong suspicion which will prevail but I want to see objective real world results.

WFH is existentially painful for those that have coupled their identity too strongly to their jobs. They're confronted daily with the fact that their coworkers just aren't that into them (e.g. the job, and by extension, them) as they'd like. The likelihood this has happened goes up significantly as you move up the ladder, because the volcano gods demand sacrifice for that.

There's also a segment of the population that somewhat overlaps with the previous paragraph that uses work as their primary social outlet.

I think this and the slightly less gracious way that OP explained it is the most significant driver of RTO from the employee side.

It is also why I am shamelessly pro-WFH. The banality of this mindset as the possibly main major contributing cause from labor for RTO and all the many, many issues that office work causes is too much for me to handle.

Get some non-work friends and hobbies. Understand career mobility and productivity, if that’s what you really want to prioritize, is equally there via WFH. Leave the rest of us out of it.

> The RTO is being entirely driven from the top by institutional investors > The return to office has nothing to do with productivity

I agree for many big tech firms, but I'll present the other (or my personal) side.

I'm a developer. And I am looking for a job in an office, actually about to take one very soon and get out of my remote-only gig.

A lot of engineering cultures don't function well without face-to-face, high bandwidth conversation and whiteboard time.

1. Our design process has suffered greatly, specifically the process of collaborating on high-level design and consecutively lowering the conversation into a low-level design. Instead it becomes: one person writes something up, and we all read a doc with bunch of text and diagrams, add comments, owner iterates. Collaboration is serialized. When we try to get into a room and brainstorm, the limits of voice/video chat take over and we can't effectively communicate 3-4 people at a time like you can in the same room. And unfortunately my company hasn't given everyone iPads to whiteboard together, so I think you cut out an appreciable chunk of the engineering population who are primarily visual thinkers (a la 'Visual Thinking' by Temple Grandin).

2. Junior folks flounder, unable to ramp up quickly drinking through such a thin pipe of information (a lot of which is tribal and needs to be received from the mouth of others). The talented folks were going to succeed anyway and have adapted, but the average kid is isolated and out of sight of management. The senior folks love that isolation and never want to return to office. The junior folks may think it's cool, but in 5 years many more will still be junior engineers.

3. Work is more than productivity. I don't need to drink the kool-aid and take the slide down to the ball-pit, but I need daily face-to-face contact else I start to feel alienated. I wish my social life was nested in a loving community of best friends but it's not. I live in NYC, my friends are a 40 min train ride or too busy to meet up on a nightly basis (as am I). I might feel different about this if I had a partner and kids, but then I'd say anti-RTO is driven from competing priorities for a worker's time. Which is fair, but not the argument here.

Ireland is crazy for jumping on the real estate ship again. This almost bankrupted the country in 2007 because the economy had become so one-sided. I remember the dreary half-finished shopping malls and whole neighborhoods of concrete slabs falling to pieces.

And yes I know some of those bottom feeders in our place too. They're the ones constantly distracting you at work with chitchat. I have several people I try to avoid but unfortunately our pisspoor desk booking system (Planon, never buy that!) doesn't even allow to look up where other people are.

I don't think we are on it as much this time. prices are sky high again, rents are sky high too.

This time though it's more because enough isn't being built to meet demand. A good chunk of property is be gobbled up by AirBNB.

> from the bottom by those who have yet to grapple with the fact they dont have friends or hobbies and need you in the office so that they dont feel like such embarrassing losers.

Two anecdotes supporting this.

Back in my early career I worked with this dev in their 40s. He always brought his gaming laptop to office and would stay late in the office. He had family and kids, this was the only time he could play games without being bothered.

At another job, we had a director who was workaholic and would schedule meetings at insane hours like 7PM. You were not forced to take meetings in person, could dial in but still it was insane. Rumors were that she was going through divorce and work was escape from personal life. Escape from your life is fine but do it without making everyone else's personal life miserable.

I can see such people wanting RTO.

> the fact they dont have friends or hobbies and need you in the office so that they dont feel like such embarrassing losers

You must be a great person to work with if this is whats going on with your internal monologue about the people you interact closely with.

Why would this be the internal monologue about people I interact closely with? They aren't the ones forcing everyone in.

If you look at RTO mandates coming out of places like IBM and Yahoo during the Before Times, there was clearly an "increase unforced attrition" aspect to them. Layoffs without the pesky WARN notices, severance, etc.

Id be more specific. RTO is pushing commute costs to workers, which is why RTO is miss priced in the market.

If your commute time was paid for by the firm, all the firms calculations would shift dramatically.

A worker rise up moment, if we ever needed more.

The commonly stated goal is to “work together” - something you can do if you have years of experience being in online communities, and alien if you have not.

This post is a perfect example of why RTO is bad for everyone, including office-likers like myself. I don't want to have to be anywhere near this guy, lol.

How does that work? Are institucional investors writing "plz return to office or we are going bust" emails to every company?

They don't need to explain themselves. Big enough shareholders just can express their needs to the board, a vote can be held and, if the decision is not implemented, courts can get involved.

Courts getting involved over something like that isn't realistic. A more likely outcome is board members getting fired.

No they just have board meetings where they stress the importance of being in the office for "spontaneous exchange of ideas" and "culture" while also floating think pieces in business magazines about how important having people in the office is to success.

"Hey Exec team, my other portfolio investments have real estate exposure so I need you to sacrifice the performance you clearly witness from WFH employees and your own personal bonuses that are tied to that performance for the benefit of my other investments."

I don't buy it.

I would imagine it's more nuanced cues like expressing skepticism at key moments that encourage alternate choices

Companies have investors / shareholders who are also invested in commercial property. They use their power as shareholders to mandate RTO so that their investments won't lose value. It's going from the top.

Investors have invested in companies that just happen to pay rent to the....investor (now landlord)?

If you're someone like BlackStone or Vanguard you absolutely manage investments in companies that are paying each other.

I don't know how it works exactly but I can show you how it works in practice. The CEO somehow managed the middle management that RTO is a good thing. Their reasoning was that the lease was signed for several years ahead, so it's a waste of resources for this space to rest unused. "Can't they "renegotiate?" "No, it's already been signed and the owners won't budge" "Can't we just wait until the lease is over and then downsize?" "Well, you need to understand what happens to us if we downsize the office, use your imagination!"

These people somehow managed to internally identify the company with the office, and reducing the (open plan) office space with downsizing the company. And they were dead serious. No arguments (we did this during the pandemic and our revenue soared, acting against the wishes of all employees means shooting oneself in the foot) would be accepted. So the best engineers left, end of story.

I worked under a C-level person who was otherwise a pretty sensible guy, but he had participated in a workshop about this, in a 1000 person company. After the workshop he instituted a RTO policy. The policy was more lenient than the company policy, but still needlessly strict. In personal discussions he stated that in the workshop they discussed that all people would slack away from work given the opportunity. He seemed agitated about it. I guess this was how the C-level was "motivated".

Interesting. Though, to be fair, C-levels are C-levels because they are the best at doing what they're told to do. So I feel like a CEO just has to say, "obviously WFH is bad" and then the sycophants will parrot that as if it was their own idea.

Well, yes. I cannot get into details, but I am pretty confident that the CEO was pressured in a similar fashion as well.

> the bottom by those who have yet to grapple with the fact they dont have friends or hobbies and need you in the office so that they dont feel like such embarrassing losers.

Projecting much?

Absolutely not... I have loads of hobbies!

> and from the bottom by those who have yet to grapple with the fact they dont have friends or hobbies and need you in the office so that they dont feel like such embarrassing losers.

I can see why office culture doesn't appeal to you, you sound like a grump who doesn't enjoy the comraderie you can form with people that you spend 40 hours a week with. If you can enjoy the cognitive dissonance of socializing with black squares in a zoom, that's great, but I'd rather enjoy the time I spend working, not merely tolerate it. I don't think that makes me a loser.

This is exactly why folks should be free to choose remote or to “band together” in a shared workspace - people aren’t the same and it’s so much better when we can tailor our workspace to fit our personalities and way of working.

> who doesn't enjoy the comraderie you can form with people that you spend 40 hours a week with.

I'd much rather spend that time with people I chose. Some you of you borderline sound like you're suffering from Stockholm syndrome

What I don’t get is why you would want to spend half of your waking hours, even remotely, working with people on a team whose company you don’t enjoy? The conclusion I would draw is that I’m on the wrong team or at the wrong company, and then switch as quickly as possible.

I enjoy my friends, yet I don't want to spend 8 hours a day, 5 days a week in sitting 1 meter away from them.

It's a job, it's IT, it's easy, it's well paid, as long I don't have a literal archnemesis annoying me every day I literally don't care who I work with. Not everyone has the luxury to quit a job and find a new one right away, especially in the current climate

Some of us just don't enjoy socializing with whoever happens to be around more than we would enjoy just not socializing. I have had some good relationships with some of my co workers but I haven't made any real friends at my current job of ten years. And the people that talk the most tend to be the ones I find the most difficult to relate to, whether it's because they only want to talk about one thing (football or hunting generally) or all of their jokes assume everyone else is racist too. The specifics here have to do with my location but it seems like a wide enough issue that most of my real friends experience similar issues at their jobs as well.

The big secret is 1-2 people of 10 actually enjoy that camaraderie vs being home with their families and dogs, all else equal. You sound like the 1.

Doesn’t make you a loser, but it does make you very lacking in empathy for the real life consequences of the missed band recitals, lunches with a spouse and many many opportunities to build the life-long links of family via wfh for in exchange for a 2-3 year relationship with colleagues

Those colleagues won’t remember your name in another 2-3 years. But as this version of the argument goes, your short term social needs get prioritized?

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