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Comment by koreth1 | Hacker News Reader

I keep hearing this explanation (executives want to keep commercial real estate values up) but it has yet to make sense to me. Can someone lay out an example scenario?

"Having investments in commercial real estate" isn't sufficient explanation on its own, IMO. It's certainly true that a lot of executives have commercial real estate investments. It would be weird if they didn't, because real estate is a pretty common thing to have in an investment portfolio. But those investments are going to be diversified across a bunch of commercial real estate, little or none of which has any relationship to the executive's company (because otherwise it wouldn't be very well diversified).

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I also don't buy that reasoning. For me, the more obvious reason is control. WFH gives workers more mobility. Everyone says it lets the company hire from anywhere, but it also lets the worker apply anywhere. A companies best people can now more easily go work for the cool new startup on either coast without disrupting their family.

never bought that line either, though its often repeated as gospel. Sure, some big employers own the buildings and care about the value, but many are just leasing their space - and a typical profit-driven corporation, if they could just dump their leases when its over, and felt they could save a ton of money by letting all their employees work from home, would all be doing it.

I suspect this 'having big investments in CRE is the reason' is just blowing smoke.

For 11 years, I worked for a successful Silicon Valley company that had a philosophy of renting rather than buying. Their rationale was to focus on their business rather than in something outside their core expertise, commercial real estate.

As a side benefit, twice in that time, we moved to newly constructed campuses, which was nice.

One don’t have to be invested in the exact building office workers pushed to. Just in the same city - lower vacancy rate (across the city) keeps office buildings valuation afloat.

but that's a bit of a stretch isn't it? Like why go through all of these hoops instead of changing up your portfolio. It's not like the CEO of UberForDogs doesn't have other things to do than plot this out.

Every executive I've seen pushing for RTO, it seems prima facie explainable by "executive is lonely and wants to see people". Legit, and I get it! And all the other WFH debates are there, but especially if you've been an exec for a long time and really don't do anything apart from talk to people all day.... RTO sounds nice compared to the alternative

It's a conspiracy theory, to be brutally frank.

Like, what seems much more likely is a combination of a bunch of things.

1. Lots of people don't work effectively remotely 2. Lots of companies aren't set up to work remotely (which is a big deal) 3. Lots of management are socialised to prefer working in offices 4. RTO is a way to do a soft layoff 5. (way down the list) Some companies have financial arrangements with cities that require them to get people back in the office.

Additionally, it's worth noting that this argument is much more prevalent in the Anglosphere (broadly constructed), as I believe that levels of office occupancy are much higher on continental Europe (Western) at least.

The worker side is presumably being driven by poorer public transportation and housing policies, which means that workers gain more from WFH.

> 3. Lots of management are socialised to prefer working in offices

I would rank this as 1 on the list.

Yeah, depends on the management.

Honestly though, lots and lots of people/companies can't work remotely.

It probably works for a higher proportion of tech people, but even I, who's been full time remote for four years, and basically remote for the majority of my career, still prefer in-person for bandwidth purposes.

My current team are all scattered across different countries, but when we had an offsite and a problem, it was so incredibly nice to be able to simply pop my head up and ask someone a quick question.

Is the main problem non-overlapping work schedules?

That's an issue, of course, but the tradeoff is that the company's potential talent pool is severely limited if all hires are forced to relocate internationally.

Nah, it's just so much quicker to speak across a desk relative to sending a slack message.

Let's be honest, I love my current team and company, and we have enough overlap (5 hours difference in the worst case) that it's relatively straightforward.

Like, in-person is substantially higher bandwidth. Remote has lots of things that make up for it, but let's not pretend there's no difference.

They themselves can't save their real estate portfolio. CEOs as a collective can. A marxist would call this acting in their class interest.

It's not about their company and the building they reside in. Wealthy people operate as a hive mind. A network. A dive in commercial real estate is a hive problem. They're all panicking for each other because they affect each other.

I like this line of reasoning. It's crazy that so many still try to explain human behaviour as if it's rigidly rational. Have we learned nothing? There are an awful lot of social and political factors at play especially when it's about power and group identification.

Something I note from interviews from RTO advocates is that the managerial class has an emotional reaction to WFH. I believe it wounds their sense of status and hierarchy - they resent the "unearned" freedom and comfort of people they have power over. They are not acting for business advantage but from a compulsion for their inferiors to know their place. It's very human sadly.

> Something I note from interviews from RTO advocates is that the managerial class has an emotional reaction to WFH. I believe it wounds their sense of status and hierarchy - they resent the "unearned" freedom and comfort of people they have power over. They are not acting for business advantage but from a compulsion for their inferiors to know their place. It's very human sadly.

I don't know if this is actually true or not, but it is exactly how I feel (about the mangerial class).

Carlin explained this eons ago. They don't have secret meetings where they try to find the next way to screw us

They have the same interests, hang out at the same places, etc. They need not conspire, it's automatic

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