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Comment by theandrewbailey | Hacker News Reader

A lot of business executives fall into the demographic that heavily invests into commercial real estate, which is facing some substantial depreciation. Telling everyone they need to get back to the office would help to keep those prices up. To everyone else, they have no incentive to keep fighting traffic every day (and paying for it) to go to an uncomfortable place full of maybe awful people.

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The simplest reason is lack of effective communication, team bonding, and morale.

People behave differently behind a screen even if incentivised by money. This becomes a problem at the scale of big companies.

Eg - without body language, tone and context - everyone needs to be extra charitable to avoid miscommunication or distrust. This might cause people to be overly defensive in their approach to communicate.

I've said this in other places, but as a _manager_ it's much nicer to work in the office, in person. That gets more true the higher up the management chain you go. Managers spend most of their time in meetings. Meetings suck over video chat. This is the entire reason CEOs (and pretty much everyone between them and line employees) would rather everyone come back to work. It makes their workday more pleasant.

Managers and execs ought to already know that not everyone else is an exec, and don’t have the same face-to-face requirements, and do actually need time to do the “productivity” that nets execs their fat pay checks.

Meetings tend to be some the least productive activities, especially when everything "discussed" could have been sent out as an email (which can be read remotely).

Depends on the type of meeting. Where I work, we have a short 15-minute meeting every morning that's done over video call, just to see who's working that day and make sure everyone is on the same page. The CEO constantly does screen-share meetings with clients so they can show him what they're trying to do with the product, and he can watch the recording later and break it into tasks to give to us. I'd say it works pretty well. Without this the product would lose out on a lot of valuable feedback.

Meetings can only be replaced with E-mail if people actually read (and respond to) their E-mail, and I've found fellow employees' E-mail hygiene to be pretty spotty.

The idea of in-person meetings only works if there is one office where everyone is at.

I was forced to move to another state (pre-pandemic). The people on my team were in offices, but 5 different offices. So I moved to another state to be in an office, so I could sit on the phone all day, every day. There is no sense to that. It’s no exaggeration that the forced move cost me tens of thousands of dollars… and for what?

I recently had a FAANG recruiter reach out to me and when I brought up this concern when I was told I’d need to relocate to an office location, I was told the recruiter was in a similar portion on her team, spending all day on the phone because her team is spread across multiple offices.

In person meetings are great, but if the reality of the office strategy isn’t going to make them possible, then there is no point. I think the occasional in-person meetup can do a lot to build rapport with members of the team without being in an office all the time, or on a weekly hybrid schedule.

I’d go a step further to say that a meeting where 3 people are in a conference room and others are remote, is worse than everyone joining remote or from their desk. Meetings should either be 100% in-person, or 0% in person. Anything in between is a bad experience. I think it’s a safe bet that any company making news about return to office strategies has multiple offices with teams spread across multiple cities, states, and even countries. This makes meetings a poor justification for workers being in the office.

>Meetings should either be 100% in-person, or 0% in person. Anything in between is a bad experience.

Agreed, even one person joining remotely completely changes the meeting. The remote person is slightly out of sync with everyone, can't participate in any whiteboarding sessions, and you lose the connection because they are a face (or icon) on the screen and they are looking at a wide angle feed of the entire room.

More people use these things as coercive tactics than effective communication.

How those cross-geo projects manage to do it then?

or OSS like Linux?

Lots of email, chat, and video calls. Also conferences in the case of major projects like Linux.

They behave differently behind screens, yes, but I would not say the negatives outweigh the positives. I have worked, and worked with, tons of people in both scenarios. Some of the best colleagues I never/rarely saw in person. Some of the worst were around all the time.

That doesn’t make sense unless the CEO owns the building the company rents. If you have money in REIT then your company’s little decision wont affect it. Anymore than buying a single share of Apple will affect the price.

I've never understood the "because CEOs invest in commercial real estate" angle. Like really? Why would senior executives be more likely than the general investing public to invest in that one very specific asset class? It seems like a small tail wagging a big dog.

Yeah, it feels like conspiracy thinking to me.

It's called class solidarity, which the wealthy are smart enough to have and everyone else gets grind culture and crab bucket mentality instead.

Still I’d rather SPX500 it than commercial real estate. In general.

The funny thing is that if they invested more and made offices into, you know, offices people would want to work there.

Instead we have these open floor plan monstrosities for the hoi polloi and private offices for the masters of the universe.

I have no idea what brain damage causes this but if you can't work efficiently in the space you give to your workers to work in how do you expect them to work?

A more or less verbatim conversation between the CEO and myself as CTO shortly before I quite:

>The new office is so stuffy. I'm going to work from home.

>>We need to get a new office.

>No we paid too much to break the lease.

>>But you can't work there.

>I can work from home most of the time. I'll only come in for the big company meetings.

> if you can't work efficiently in the space you give to your workers to work in how do you expect them to work?

I'm gonna go out on a limb and suggest that most CEOs and COOs use private offices as private, perpetual conference room space. I know my own executive manager has office space he barely uses because he's in conference rooms all day.

Privacy for me but none for thee?

Code monkeys need conference rooms twice a month

Even fairly mid-level execs are probably in meetings--whether in their offices, at home, or in conference rooms--maybe 6+ hours a day.

I often have to hide from folks who want to interrupt me doing my work so I can do their work for them. If I turn them down I get a bad peer review and get labelled a "Jerk" (no jerks allowed!). If I help them, I don't get to begin doing my own work till 5PM.

Surely there's a ticketing system you can abuse to defend your time?

Curious what you have in mind, how so?

"That sounds important! As you can see, I have three tickets in flight already. Can you open another one up, and $MANAGER and I can prioritize the work that you need done?"

They're already working on the ticket? (assigned to them) This is about people stopping by for help on their assigned work, and at the end of the day I get no credit for the contributions to their work or leeway on my own.

Code monkey here and I average 3 meetings/day

Okay, meeting monkey

Money is what causes Brian damage

In my experience CEOs had a modicum of a private office, but it didn't really matter. They were in hybrid mode from the start, came to the office only for meetings and signing papers and went away the rest of the time, including working from home.

Two decades ago we had an hilarious all hands meeting where we scrambled to get to the office at 9AM while the big big boss would appear on screen from the corner of his kitchen table.

They just didn't want everyone to do the same.

The only way that many people can justify their exceptional success is to assume they themselves are exceptional. It's a nice ego stroking way to look at the world and allows them the rights to create double standards at will.

No one called them out?

The worst of the open office trend was ripe for a backlash. CEOs should have known better in the medium term. Short term, of course it looks attractive. And no one could have predicted Covid and remote work would be a big driver of the backlash.

I would love it if this is the end of the barn (aka open) office. It's such a awful place to work. Companies say they do it to foster collaboration but the truth is its very cheap, and easy to deal with a lot of turnover, which every company I every barn company I ever saw had a lot of.

The funny thing always was "everyone has the same space" and the SVP/ CEO reserved this conference room all day, the one with suspiciously nice furniture that is never available.

You can make an office as palatial as you like. If it's a 1+ hour commute I still don't really want to come in.

Any source for this at all? I've seen it before and it's a top-rated comment here, but it doesn't sound plausible and it's exactly the opposite of what game theory would predict.

Do you have a source for the view that executives invest in commercial real estate, or is the view based on anecdotes? I have not observed any such trend/relationship, and am under the impression that most MBA-types are generally averse to CRE and similar markets, but this is anecdotal, and I have no data to support it.

I have heard rumors (yes, completely lacking proof) that some major banks with huge commercial loan portfolios are using those loans as leverage to coerce companies into loudly demanding return to office. That's actually pretty easy to believe, because they'd really be hurting if commercial real estate values were to plummet.

How are they using those loans as leverage? The terms are set, your student loan company couldn't make you, I don't know, tweet something you didn't want to.

It could be a line of credit, which might be modified. There could also be an ongoing relationship, related to the issuance of a series of loans used for financing inventory or something like that.

Student loans are different from commercial loans. Student loans are long term, with all the details fixed for the life of the loan. Commercial loans are more fluid, and generally have short terms, adjustable rates, and other fun things.

Two possible approaches to leverage quickly come to mind:

- The carrot: "You've got a loan with us for $xM at y%. If you show you are committed to this office by maximizing occupancy, that lowers our risk and we can give you a 0.1% discount."

- The stick: "Your loan term is expiring soon. I know it'd hurt to need to make that big balloon payment. Let's discuss our conditions for rolling you over into a new loan."

Commercial leases are typically five years.

It is 2024. COVID was 2020.

If you don’t own your building you should be thinking hard about your new negotiating position with your landlord.

To quote ishowspeed: "simple as that bro".

Who benefits from keeping everybody in these offices? People who have a financial interest in maintaining those real estate prices high.

The drive to get people back into the office isn't due to any sunk cost on commercial real estate — it's a strategy to prevent workers from working multiple jobs simultaneously.

When did all the CEOs meet to decide this? I missed that one.

There's a large whatsapp group containing hundreds of Silicone Valley CEOs. I imagine they keep up with gossip and coordinate policies in that group.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38583253

Is there any evidence that this is actually happening and going undetected in large enough numbers for it to be rational to allow the possibility to dictate the official remote/not-remote policy of large companies? This feels more like a meme that circulates among management/executive types than it does an actual problem in the real world.

The thing about executives is... they don't need evidence, they can operate on feelings. And there's certanly enough of overemployed people around to have managers convinced its a problem.

It has a pretty active subreddit.

https://www.reddit.com/r/overemployed/

While this is happening, I don't think it's happening at a large enough scale to matter or long enough timespan. Most people burn out after a year or so of working multiple jobs. It's posted all the time in /overemployed.

That's all well and good until you're the second job people are working.

And then you notice that they don't produce any work and fire them. What's so hard about that?

If you didn't notice before, you won't notice now. If they were producing enough work, why would you want them to leave?

It's amazing how many people in this thread are saying "it's not X, it's this one single issue Y."

This is a complex, multifaceted issue that doesn't have one root cause or solution. Claiming otherwise shows extreme inexperience or lack of imagination.

Where I live the act of being "over employed" is considered fraud, and can land serious penalties. Because it is fraud, when your employment agreement stipulates that you will not divide your time in some manner.

https://mcmillan.ca/insights/employment-and-privacy-implicat...

That was just getting fired for cause homie. If they catch you, you are definitely getting fired.

Yup, the biggest class of assets in SV are boring single family homes owned by multimillionaires. Once you take the proximity to offices out of the picture the SV property bubble pops. Make the drones come in a few days a week and the assets value keeps going up due to artificial scarcity.

I think it’s more that the big asset holders spent marketing money in CEO monthly magazine and it was effective.

Is that true everywhere or just the USA? As far as I know remote work really only stuck around in the USA.

TBH this sounds like a massive conspiracy theory that somehow gets continiously propagated.

Your average small software company CEO doesn't give a crap while still forcing people to RTO.

all the small companies my friends work for in my neck of the woods stopped leasing office space

Indeed, which is why this real-estate conspiracy is downright bizarre.

And even a larger company I'm familiar with has been looking very hard at lease renewals and has been walking away from a bunch of them. There's a certain lip service to the energy associated with having people back in the office but, in practice, people are being switched to fully remote if they don't come in and offices are being eliminated or swapped out for smaller spaces.

I've never been in USA and I wfh.

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