Comment by bhaney | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bhaney | Hacker News Reader

Everyone already knew this was the case and having hard data around it was never going to change anything. RTO has always been about protecting real estate values and massaging egos, regardless of the hollow rhetoric about performance that was clearly bullshit from the start.

Except at a certain point this doesn’t matter to shareholders or boards. As leases and tax agreements expire, BYOO (bring your own office) will look to save hundreds of millions to billions a year in real estate and related expenses significantly boosting EPS. Then we can tear down the human warehouse hamster wheels and rebuild them with housing and services for human life.

Yep, that's why there are so many Bloomberg articles jacking off RTO. It's a better investment to shout about how everyone else should RTO than to do it yourself.

Shareholders and board members don't want their company to RTO, they want the entire industry to RTO. If their own company RTOs and CBD real estate crashes anyway, they're the ones that are left holding the bag, whether it's because of big fixed term leases, real estate investment or whatever other skin they have in the game.

Can someone explain how a tenant company suffers when commercial real estate value collapses? It's another thing entirely if the company owns its own offices, of course

Commercial leases for large offices are pretty long. I think 8-10 years or longer is fairly normal?

If you're stuck with 5 more years of 2019 rates and all your competitors have downsized, your cost per employee is going to be much higher.

Some percentage of the larger companies are going to own their office space too.

I'd guess as we get further from the start of covid (bit over 4 years now?) the pressure to RTO will dwindle as more companies downsize.

Yeah it’s mostly sunk cost fallacy driving the regret. Elderly leadership who harken for the way they developed their career are the ones pushing the narrative. “Think of the children,” “how can we organize in any other way than the emergent reality my career was shaped by,” etc are the real drivers and the sunk cost is used to buttress. Eventually cold hard cash will win out over fallacious thinking.

> Everyone already knew this was the case and having hard data around it was never going to change anything.

See also: open offices.

It's a con. Everyone knows it's a con. But it's one of those cons that get so big, everyone just pretends like they're not rotten liars.

WFH is essentially "what if everyone at work had their own office?" I'm not at all shocked people who don't even need the flexibility enjoy it as a perk.

> RTO has always been about protecting real estate values

Most businesses don't own their office space afaik, so why would a business care about protecting real estate values? If anything, wouldn't the majority of businesses prefer to see a decline in real estate values as that would lead to a decrease in rent?

Because the decision isn't made for the benefit of the business. It's made for the benefit of individuals; either management, their friends/families, or investors. At the expense of shareholders and employees.

So you are saying that executives at businesses are violating their fiduciary duties and putting their own personal profit goals related to commercial real estate above their obligations to the company? Surely with making such a claim you can provide a list of a number of companies doing so.

This real estate narrative never made sense. offices exist to optimize (and monitor) employees.

> The reason offices exist is to optimize (and monitor) employees.

This rationale makes no sense to me. Forcing the totality of all employee interactions to a device owned and controlled by the company seems to provide a more complete monitoring solution than any in-person monitoring could provide.

The office existed before those.

The point is that work from home doesn’t ruin some real estate investment scheme. It reduces their expenditures, in the same way that they don’t have to buy cubicles.

But that cost is miniscule, they would prefer to pay it to get the (perceived) productivity and monitoring benefits.

First you say that offices are to monitor employees, then you say that working from home is to reduce expenses. I don't understand the point you're making.

They're saying companies pay the costs of RTO in order to have more control over their employees.

That’s an insane expense for monitoring alone.

The average cost is $37.64 per square foot and ~250 sq per employee (you don’t just pay for cubicles) it adds to ~9.5k / employee per year which is far from insignificant.

Worse it’s dangerous as layoffs don’t instantly end leases and downturns are terrible times to try and sublease office space.

Average cost where?

10k on an employee whose total cost is at least 120k is not insane at all. Computer equipment is ~5k (also for the same reason). Not to mention support staff like IT (guess why).

That’s across the US, by comparison the average office Worker base salary in the United States is $42,181 before benefits so you’re not talking 120k total.

Some places have higher salaries but also higher rent. Manhattan for example averages 81$/square foot.

I don’t know it’s the case and this is hardly “hard data”.

But but.... What about all those watercooler conversation? The spontaneous ideas riffing? The surges in team energy? /s

Millions of gamers all over the world are still absolutely puzzled how they ever built any rapport with each other playing games over the internet without routinely bumping into each other in the hallway twice a week. A total mystery.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com