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Comment by reaperman | Hacker News Reader

I’m just a shareholder, not employee or customer. For me it doesn’t inspire confidence in future performance. Seems like one of those stupid bean-counter moves that leads to organizational decline.

I wouldn’t call this “a good thing”, except in the very narrow perspective that you analyzed (I agree that honesty between management and employees generally leads to better outcomes). But I think the benefits of the honesty are far outweighed by the idiocy of the policy.

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As an investor, I have a question for you. Kindly answer if you have the time. I have always wondered why aren’t the shareholders encouraging WFH more? Clearly it’s cost savings for the company that would help the bottom line. Or is it because investors usually hold a bag of stuff and in them are REITs and companies that own the buildings and people don’t want their portfolio to suffer?

Biggest investors are Vanguard/Fidelity/etc (anyone who can vote with clients’ 401k shares). $10,000-100,000 doesn’t buy you any influence or control. Some companies like Meta are still 51% controlled by the founder.

The people directly managing the investment are unlikely to also be holding REITs, so your assumption is valid. I think it's basically that: - The people who care about company profit are the asset managers, who will tend to implement their ideas by selling/buying shares, rather than trying to encourage a given company's management towards better practice - Corporate governance itself is therefore usually outsourced to proxy voting companies, who are quite conservatively-minded (and spread quite thin) and so won't tend to micro-manage, they'll assume that profit maximization is the job of management - The only thing the proxy voting companies will tend to have a say on is ESG-related, and WFH doesn't really fit into that

Few investors want RTO. I am a shareholder (vested) in a large tech company that communicates about the WFH/RTO matter with investors less than they do with their employees.

I can only imagine that executives want to please REITs and RE hedges so they don't dump the stock, even they own relatively little, as many executives are constantly cashing out at a slow rate. It's not for the good of the business because the days of equity financing and attracting investment is far in the rear view mirror for most large tech, and because we know this harms companies in the long-term. It might just be personal greed.

By my rough estimate, Sundar Pichai sold an average of $1.8M of Alphabet stock every month since 2015. A 3% dip on the stock would have made him make perhaps $50k less pcm. Wallmine says he's now selling at a rate of $16-40M a month. 3% is $0.5-1.2M loss every month. At that scale, the downsides of RTO to these executives pale in comparison to their personal losses if they don't please REITs.

All the other employees with peanuts in vested equity probably see it differently. I know I do. I'll take a $1k hit to not make all my colleagues go through RTO when they've moved away during the pandemic, have them pull their kids out of school, move out of their dream house, abandon their parents who need care, etc.

SG&A is a cost on the income statement. This can only improve their quarterly earnings. Unfortunate it's the case, but stocks don't appreciate on goodwill (real goodwill not the line item).

The good thing is that you can sell your stock if you don’t agree with management and invest in their competitors who are encouraging remote work.

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