WSJ, Fortune, FT, all fall along the same line with opinions about all the cons of remote work, or all the virtues of RTO.
Whilst most online only newspapers fall along the opposite end of the spectrum.
Seems like a topic where everyone has made up their mind and will only accept data if it aligns with their world view.
But using office space costs companies money, and they're not the ones leasing it. It is totally against their own interests to pay extra facilities costs, when they could just shirk that burden onto their employees who have to pay for a home office themselves. We're not seeing big real estate companies push this while big tech companies try to distance themselves from it and disavow it.
And as for the theory that mutual funds and whatnot are pushing it... it just seems like an opportunity for them to short this crap and make money sabotaging real estate.
The more I think about this, the more it seems like something really bizarre is going on.
That's only because people refuse to accept the obvious. Executives, whether correctly or wrongly, genuinely believe having employees colocated in the same geographical space is beneficial for their companies.
It's not even such a stretch to imagine this because we absolutely know they believed this before the pandemic. In fact, most SV companies were willing to pay employees located elsewhere huge sums of money to move to the Bay Area.
There are many options, and many of them can be true to various degrees at the same time.
When you fundamentally change a balance of anything you're likely to run into all kinds of odd entrenched interests you may never have thought about, in part because many of them may never have needed to assert themselves before.
I don't disagree with this. I do get that feeling that this is part of it...
But executives are often the ones trying to squeeze an extra dollar out of every line on the ledger. Are they really willing to spend so much extra for this perceived personal benefit? Are their bosses willing to indulge them like that?
These aren't insignificant costs. For gigantic companies, the big skyscraper headquarters in some world class city must comprise just as much of the budget as a more modest building for a more modest company in Oklahoma. They're spending millions for it.
It doesn't matter, the end-result is the same, and it's completely up to you to either recognise it, or be delusional about it. We all make that choice, it's just the majority of commentators choose to engage in semantics.
There is a lot of work from home abuse.
Of course, work from home advocates would never do that!
Everyone knows the quiet part. Just have a few people talk about it, tells me that it isn’t insignificant.
Now when I'm working from home and not feeling productive I have options. Go for a lie down if I'm tired. Get ready and go for a run if I'm frustrated. Go downstairs and have a cuddle with my 1 year old etc.
Now, if you're telling me there is in office abuse, why would I assume it's not worse when no one is looking?
It's not even an assumption. We KNOW people are working two jobs, or they take off when they feel like it, there are plenty of annecdotes of people saying "I only work 20 hours a week now, and get the same amount done".
Look, I don't care. My employees are remote or have the option, but we have daily standups and its a small team. It works as a small team and falls apart at scale.
The fact that WFH advocates get emotional, nonsensical, and flat out refuse to discuss or admit abuse is all I need to know that it is more rampant that people are admitting to.
Interestingly, the person you are responding to is very reasonable in their point.
You, on the other hand, sound pretty emotional and nonsensical about "WFH abuse".
If you can't measure productivity of your remote team, that is really a "you" problem.
Shorts have the other side. You can't just ambiently short against nothing and nobody on the other side. Even naked shorting involves taking a bet against those who are long, you just skip the step where the shares you are selling actually exist. There can't be a market that consists only of short sellers, so there are going to be people interested in keeping values up.
You seem to be having a lot of difficulty separating out various separate interests in the real world. Of course companies are trying to cut office space spends. If office space were free those of us against RTO would already have lost. Office space costs are our biggest ally. But those are nearly completely separate people from the people vending the office space. (They're completely separate if the office space vendors ironically have gone to WFH themselves...) If you try to lump the vendors and consumers together you're going to have a very hard time understanding things, which may be why you're getting confused.
Older people are more comfortable having a face-to-face meeting rather than an online chat or video call. They're more comfortable managing people they can see in their seats, rather than having to judge only by the amount of output.
This is true even for many larger software companies.
Is this all of what's going on? Maybe not. But I suspect it's at least part of it.
Entire economies were built on top of office spaces and that upends a lot of things when they go away.
It's akin to saying that apartment renters care immensely about their landlords to the point of going out of their way to keep paying them rent. Its a total and complete fiction.
Execs will look at the numbers. Renting is very expensive and eats up a large chunk revenue. So if you are going to keep paying rent and maintaining an office, you better have a good explanation for investors other than "Our landlord will be upset".
I'm sure plenty of CEOs are falling over themselves to mislead the board on rental costs so that they can protect their 2% portfolio stake in some random commercial REIT. Totally logical here.... /s
I don't think you have the right framing. Investors diversify, and so the set of investors and board members in your company that are invested in commercial real estate is non-zero, and arguably non-negligible.
The set of investors and board members that have some stake in work from home is considerably smaller, possibly zero. This is a clear bias that acts as a non-negligible incentive on CEOs to push a return to office. Everyone in this scenario is working in their own self-interest.
Obviously it is the producers of the good who have the ad spend money for submarine PR, just as it is everywhere else.
you spend $2B on a brand new office campus. you work directly with the architects and talk about how this new campus will create a great place for your employees to work. and then you have the humility and wisdom to throw all that away? even though everybody at the company knows that this is the big project you spent billions of dollars on?
the money that companies spend on their offices is a commitment that an executive makes. keeping their commitments and persuading other people to buy in to those commitments is one of the biggest parts of the job if you're an executive.
another very big piece is making sure that the assets on your balance sheet don't turn into liabilities.
This take is so common and so bizarre to me.
so take the time to think it through and understand it. commercial leases are 10-year leases. when an executive makes a 10-year commitment, they have spent energy to convince others to make the same commitment, and they are committed to spending more energy on it as well.
Guys. Please. There are many reasons why a company would want to RTO. Being in cahoots with the real estate industry is not it.
And when that impact hits, it will affect every business.
Those executives and many others know that. They're standing on the beach with the water out, knowing what's coming but helpless to stop it. But they're trying. Of course they're trying.
They often can't, though. Companies change policies after being hired (mine did), the job market is hard (my son has had his start date pushed back 2x now for a total of over a year), and a lot of time this "choice" of job is not in a context you can deal with. I want to go into the office, but I'd have to move to do it. I want to WFH, but I can't find anyone to hire me for the $ I need to live where I do.
Moving isn't an option for many.
> Those are all reasons why things will take time.
These 2 things are at odds, which is why I posted. I agree with you, but we're not "at a point"... yet. GP might be, and to some degree I am too, but this is hardly universal nor even as widespread as GP posits.
However, that world will also have companies that are much friendlier to full-time remote where practical and companies that mandate coming in a few days a week at least. And people who prefer one or the other will naturally gravitate to different work over time if they haven't already done so.
Right now we're going through a phase where things are changing and people feel that they're not getting what they bargained for whether staying remote or getting back to a before-times office.
Because chances are this world is not our world. In our world the former companies have an advantage, but there are a lot of financial interests put on not going down that route.
"Thing is, we need ones that want to be here and ones that don't want to be here."
Context kinda matters, but the gist remains valid. WFH might not need to force RTO on others, but RTO absolutely does.
The FT articles on remote work can be found listed at: https://www.ft.com/search?sort=relevance&q=remote+work
Long-time columnist Simon Kuper's column [1] published on September 21 was in favour of working from home, with the position: "Homeworking is not just a corporate issue, it’s a chance to create a better society." Another article from columnist Sarah O'Connor published in May 2023 [2] argues that "More flexibility has improved work-life balance for many since the pandemic began."
Though the FT has also featured opinions in favour of more in-person office time (such as a podcast [3] featuring an interview of a professor who speaks about the benefits of in-person work), there is no clear bias for or against remote work from the search results.
To sum up the search results: there are opinion articles in favour of remote work, news articles about major companies ending work-from-home with quotes from executives who favour in-person work, and articles that report on the benefits of hybrid working arrangements.
For the FT, I've seen a diversity of opinion, without any clear effort to sway the readership one way or another about the issue.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/74b43b83-1af1-4045-9bd1-15fc85569...
[2] https://www.ft.com/content/44e81232-9b25-4f4a-91ab-4462978dc...
[3] https://www.ft.com/content/b35e3643-de04-4a0e-ae4a-c0f2db6b5...
[0] https://commercial.ft.com/our-products/financial-times/ [1] https://abcnews.go.com/Business/IndustryInfo/story?id=342198... [2] https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2023/demo/p60-27...
It is sort of like how you see all sorts of segments about "the hydrogen economy" on Fox News as if they live in some bizzaro world there are more than two hydrogen cars out there.
It's because the natural gas folks want hydrogen vs. electric and are paying to advertise it.
I manage people and anecdotally I see engineers having collectively more output if they are in the office, and they do grow in seniority on average.
The remote folks produce sum-of-its-parts impact and do well, but grow slower and not as much.
More senior folks really benefit from WFH, they have similar performance, but I as the manager of the team miss out on a senior person training the junior folks.
We don't offer remote positions for junior candidates.
To be fair, they may be better now. It's been years since I've read a Fortune article.
I'm kind of between both camps. I actually like in-office work, but the combination of 1) facilities pursuing bad office plans (open-offices, hot desking) and 2) the rise of remote work and distributed teams makes RTO pretty unappealing.
Co-located in-office work also makes me feel a lot more secure. It's much harder to form social bonds remotely, which makes you much more isolated and replaceable. Remote work pretty ruthlessly cuts away all relationships except direct working relationships, and even makes those much flatter and less warm. It's easier for a higher up to fire someone they don't know, and fewer of your peers will care or even notice if you leave.
Also, here's your daily reminder that an offshore job is a remote job, so once you're no longer in an office you've removed a big speed bump for replacing you.
If my entire immediate team was in a single location I don't think I could get away with not going in despite the tradeoffs.
I think there is an unspoken belief amongst most here that they are the indispensable contributors to their organization (and there are many genuinely talented people here no doubt), and that they can never be replaced. Of course many of our mentors have told us an undeniable truth; that the world's cemeteries are full of indispensable people.
You'll often see an argument that timezones are important, which is fair, but I'll note that there are many countries south of the US with cheaper labor and some quite smart people (my experience from working with them).
Language/culture is another argument and another fair point, but I think at some point cost differences make up for it. And the US seems uniquely good at exporting language and culture anyway.
At the end of the day, I like working with a small team of smart and dedicated people. We work in a quite hybrid fashion that seems to work for us. I don't believe we've ever all met at once in the time I've worked here, but while I and a few others come in almost every day, some come in to work a bit more closely as needed. I think this sort of individuation of working circumstances is something that a large company is just going to struggle with; it's not really something that can be articulated in a policy that all parties will consider fair, but it's just sort of the way things have organically fallen here even before the pandemic, but especially after it.
While this is undoubtably true being in office won’t save you if you are in office in the US. I am full remote and for what my company pays me they could easily get 10 Indian engineers. If time zones are an issue then they could easily get 2-4 top tier Mexican developers instead. Go to Colombia and we are back to being able to afford 8-10 again.
The cost difference is large enough that if a company can effectively off shore then they will.
My point was embracing/demanding remote work removes one more barrier to offshoring (or more offshoring), not that working in-office will somehow totally protect you from layoffs or offshoring. Basically, being remote puts you in weaker position in many respects, and people should be clear-eyed about that.
It's a fairy tale to think of companies and ruthlessly rational and efficient. A lot of decisions are really driven by some descision-maker's personal preferences and personal convenience.
To the degree that an office is very hybrid, remote people will often be somewhat marginalized while the environment for in-person will naturally use things like hot desking and a lot of people won't just be there. Some of this can probably be mitigated (and large companies always had people in a lot of different locations).
They always have, but I think the key mistake is smearing a single team across different locations. Once you do that, or start doing that habitually, you've completely undermined whatever benefits you think your organization will get from RTO.
IMHO, if you really want to RTO, you need to co-locate all team members (and reorganize teams to make that happen), and ideally co-locate closely collaborating teams.