The war on remote work has nothing to do with productivity
the-sentinel-intelligence.com
the-sentinel-intelligence.com
If it were just about real estate, then Amazon would not be calling for 5 days a week return-to-office. I don’t think real estate interests are powerful enough to push Amazon around and I don’t think they’re entrenched enough in Amazon leadership to make it happen. As an alternative contributing factor, I suggest that Amazon wants employee attrition, and five day return-to-office is a convenient tool for that. One of the things that makes return-to-office such a convenient tool for employee attrition is that it’s a deniable tool.
In cities like New York, it’s pretty clear that commercial real estate interests are in bed with the city government. I just don’t think that real estate has enough power to push through a return-to-office agenda at the scale that we’re seeing. Don’t get me wrong, I think commercial real estate interests have a ton of influence. I just don’t think it’s enough influence to explain RTO at this scale (but it can explain RTO policies in some specific cases).
So about 10-20% of the total wealth in the US is in the form of commercial real estate, a significant amount of which is offices or office-adjacent-services that lose value if offices are not occupied.
I wonder how many underwater office buildings there are in the US right now, and who owns their commercial paper?
Edit: looks like about half of all office mortgages are underwater. Welp, there it is.
And, bringing people back in, especially in the context of e.g. Amazon with thousand of workers, also has lots of knock on effects on other businesses, and there are plenty of copycats who follow the big seven tech companies.
0. Readably summarized at https://www.barrons.com/amp/articles/net-wealth-is-over-135-... .
Start circulating studies showing people working multiple remote jobs at once, steer thinking around company culture, normalize it through repetition, send out talking points. Eventually dominos will start failing.
not if you're getting a large benefit from WFH. And the loss from commercial real estate devaluation won't hit everyone equally.
I also suspect (but have nothing to prove this, just a gut feeling) that the effect of pension funds is minuscule compared to the amount of money the elite make. It's a very convenient excuse to not do anything disruptive ever, of course, because "Think of the pensions!!"
So at the very least it's not miniscule, but it depends on how you want to calculate the other side of the equation.
I'm barely being facetious. "That polite chuckle" is really a stand in for all the soft power they wield in person that evaporates with WFH. They have lost a degree of control and power, it is basic human nature to look for a way to claw that back.
I bet Amazon's exercise is a hidden layoff process. Other companies probably want to get their money's worth from the office buildings. The management of others wants to see the army of smiling minions that report to them. Others want to see people in the office for control (make sure they're not enjoying too long breaks, or working from the beach, or working double jobs in parallel, etc.). And some believe that people will interact better, easier if they're in physical proximity. Or a mix of this even between managers from the same company.
And sometimes I think some cities push employers to get people back in office because they have no better idea how to keep those centers of activity vibrant, alive, and contributing financially. I remember reading some city authorities complaining that RTO means the death of the city center and the businesses tied to it.
I don't see why there would be one reason to rule them all.
From https://www.thehrobserver.com/indepth/laughing-at-the-bosss-...
>You mentioned that humour and power is intertwined – what is the social impact of this?
>If a boss is trying to be funny, they are automatically trying to get a response, so the use of humour is never neutral or irrelevant. People have a split second to decide whether or not to fake a laugh, or even how much to laugh – trying to figure out if the boss thinks a particular joke is a little funny or a lot funny. At the same time, they are trying to decide what the consequences of not laughing might be.
original paper https://journals.aom.org/doi/abs/10.5465/amj.2022.0195
People are going to stay or leave based on random criteria. Your company is going to be left with various deficits and it will take a long while to sort out the hiring mess.
This feels more like it's about power. Those with the power leave, likely to competitors.
Immediate supervisors usually know who is good and should be empowered to decide who can WFH. And who they don't want to lose.
Diktats from god are a sign of a disfunctional org.
So if a leader wants, requires, needs, is addicted to that feeling that people are submitting to them, then things will eventually go downhill as in the end the only people who will work for them will be "yes men".
"That polite chuckle" is really a stand in for all
the soft power they wield in person that evaporates
with WFH. They have lost a degree of control and power,
it is basic human nature to look for a way to claw
that back.
My hunch is that the corporate executive's thirst for power generally works a little differently than that, in ways I find it difficult to express.
Why do people want those executive jobs? Quite honestly I don't feel the primary appeal for them lies in the minutia of those in-person interactions -- the polite chuckles and such.
I do not think they typically care about Cubicle Slave #58332 enough to be gratified when they (either individually, or in aggregate) give up that polite chuckle for an unfunny joke. For them, that would be like caring about whether or not an insect laughed at their jokes -- and caring about your token genuflections, about your small personal humiliations, is still caring.
So what is the appeal for them? Well, money and status, occasionally with some loyalty and/or core belief in the company added to the mix.
It's definitely about power and control.
I'd add that it is also a question of geography. The work place is the place where power exists. And so having you inside the company's walls means you are under control.
we need to adjust our recipe/theory for coherent/functional constellations of humans unless heightened denial of humanity is in our collective interest
He said most of the time was wasted. It was spent on things like preparing slide decks for executives who then didn't read them, but who insisted the work be done in massively compressed time windows and then delivered by taxi at 6am on a Sunday. He viewed it as very inefficient and mostly a matter of bad culture. The senior managers did it when they were young, so they weren't about to let the next generation get ahead without the same sacrifices.
Here is an example. Ms. Follett [1] made a good case a century ago that value is not created by people but between people. So you need interaction to add value -- something companies are imminently interested in, even if some employees are not. Some interactions, actually anything with more than 3-4 participants, break down over Teams and require face-to-face contact to be effective. Cutting everything down to 4 participants is to put the tool above the people and, to add insult to injury, will create a new pyramid of management levels, which we chucked for good reasons in the last century. So just get together in the office, which you have anyway to set up your football table. Does this mandate a 5-day RTO policy? No, but it shows that there is at least one good reason to get into the office once or twice a week.
Even with mandatory, 5-day-per-week RTO, you may have 2 team members in the US, 2 in Europe and one in Bangalore, all in their respective offices in their respective timezones. The meetings are still happening over Zoom.
True. People need to be at least in the general vicinity, yes.
> you may have 2 team members in the US, 2 in Europe and one in Bangalore, all in their respective offices in their respective timezones
Also true, but even before COVID and 24/7 home office we knew that this kind of team setup sucks and we complained -- loudly -- whenever we had to work this way. And while technology improved the main reasons why we complained haven't changed. In short, that's not an argument for or against RTO, it is one against bad work organization.
I think that this is the heart of the issue. Everything else is relatively meaningless.
There's a reason people do LAN parties even when you have to lug your rig around, and it's not just food and drink.
In addition, a lot of people facing functions (Sales, Management etc) were done in person. There might be a world where those are possible on Zoom, but the workforce has to be trained for that. Why should a company train their 35+ management stack about online people management, when they can just force the RTO?
But, I also know non-leader individual contributors who firmly believe that in person is better for collaboration, design, and problem solving. Yes, they prefer to be at home, but they believe they need to be in person to do their best work. So, I wouldn't be surprised if many managers believe this too. I disagree with this personally, but I recognize that different things work for different people.
I also believe there are some CEOs who don't own any real estate investments, but feel some responsibility to uphold certain economic values that they believe will help prevent a massive recession that may impact their business down the line.
In other words, I believe there are several factors that are influencing different people to believe in-person is right for their business.
There’s no reason it has to just be one thing
To me that makes a lot of sense and aligns well with my experience of office life. Some people depend on seeing others around them working, or they can’t get much done.
I asked him if he thought it was fair that his self-motivated employees essentially had to provide this service for free to the company, and spend time commuting to do it. Don’t think he could fully grasp the question, didn’t see a problem with that at all.
(This was in Sweden, which has a more collectivist work culture than the US.)
EDIT: But to be honest I think there might be more truth to @kitsune_’s sibling comment.
I don't need elite developers; I need competent, conscientious "75%" developers. It doesn't make sense to spend time interviewing, onboarding, and hiring, just to expose myself to another risk factor.
Your friend was probably not thinking "fair" or "unfair", rather, what is the employment market bringing him.
In a relatively free labor market (like e.g. California’s) that perspective is fine with me, because you probably have to pay more for the conscientious “75%” developers you need. But Sweden has a heavily regulated and unionized labor market where differences in pay are typically motivated by the collectively agreed “fairness”.
I can assure you that your argument would have been just as foreign for my acquaintance.
I think I simply have more information than you do in this case. :)
(Because I know the person we’re talking about, and because I’ve worked in Swedish startups for 20 years, my own and other’s.)
I wanted to reply to your comment re:Nordics but it seems it reached a limit to comment depth, your experiences are probably related to interacting with a biased sample, a quick google tells me that on average only a couple hundred Swedes immigrate to the US per year.
If I wanted to stretch my budget, I would go to LATAM. Developers marketing themselves as "go remote, stretch your budget further" will see just how far it can stretch.
I'm hiring in the USA because my business requires knowledge of the US business environment (benefits management) and require in-person because it's easier to prevent mistakes which can attract the ire of regulators when you are small and don't have formal review processes.
> I wanted to reply to your comment re:Nordics but it seems it reached a limit to comment depth, your experiences are probably related to interacting with a biased sample, a quick google tells me that on average only a couple hundred Swedes immigrate to the US per year.
Possible, and I didn't interact with only Swedes; I interacted with mostly Norwegians and a few Swedes, so I may be generalizing somewhat. But it really seemed like there was a collective sense of "I need to act as ruthless as possible to run a business here". I don't think American business customs are well understood in practical application.
Is the employment market actually giving you that?
Anecdotally, I knew a handful of FAANG engineers with 10+ years experience who had gone full remote before the pandemic, and dozens more during/since. Those are the creme-de-la-creme of the employment market, and they are all hanging out at startups who are willing to play ball on full remote, to get access to talent they otherwise couldn't remotely afford...
Yes. Not all applications benefit from FAANG experience. There is a lot of work to be done that pays in the 130-200 range that isn't necessarily cutting edge. I should add, benefits are excellent (major medical) and it's a private office.
> Anecdotally, I knew a handful of FAANG engineers with 10+ years experience who had gone full remote before the pandemic, and dozens more during/since. Those are the creme-de-la-creme of the employment market, and they are all hanging out at startups who are willing to play ball on full remote, to get access to talent they otherwise couldn't remotely afford...
I can believe it. Sometimes, you just need technical excellence to bring a product to market, otherwise you fail. But other times, you can simply apply well understood paradigms to well understood markets and have excellent financial returns.
It's the difference between an excellent business and an excellent product. When you have a choice, choose the excellent business.
Yes, because the employment market is not a free market. You can find (virtually) any employees your heart desires, because workers are highly motivated to not die. In addition, they have no bargaining power, meaning they take what they can get. They don't have visibility either - hiring is a perfect black box to them.
The scales are not only not balanced, they're almost completely tipped. This is why companies can pay below market and still get a constant supply of (shitty) employees. If you simply lower your standards, you can get infinite employees. They could hire children if they wanted, and it would be easy. They could pay 50 cents an hour if they wanted. Luckily, the laws prevent this - but it's most certainly NOT an issue of demand. There's a high demand among children to work and there's a high demand among laborers to work for poverty wages.
We're talking about highly-skilled software engineers and product specialists who are used to being able to command high 6-figure salaries with considerable additional perks (RSUs, bonuses, 3 meals a day on campus, free laundry...)
Those are the folks Meta/Amazon/Google are mandating return to 5 days a week in office. The folks stuck doing manual labour in their fulfilment/data/moderation centres... those ones mostly never were allowed to go remote in the first place.
Everyone likes to believe they're mama's special little laborer. But you're not, you're a cog like the rest of us and the only thing you command is a shitty drip coffee machine in a cramped break room.
This is a matter of class, not a matter of profession. You, and I, are being bullied by our employers because we have absolutely 0 say in how we work our jobs. That's no different than any manual laborer - minus the ones who are unionized.
In a matter of irony, mechanics and such that operate in a union have much more control over their workplace. If their job allowed it, they could trivially strike for the benefit of WFH. That's not a power you have, you're too busy bending over and then later justifying how you wanted to take it all along.
Based on what I observe in my niche, (3) have an enormous advantage when it comes to both hiring and maintaining senior talent.
Ask him if he ever considered actually asking the self-motivated conscientious employees their opinion and preferences - and watch his mind boggle.
It's also highly likely that this is a soft layoff, trying to delay the real layoffs in 2025
"No loss of productivity" is a flat out lie.
However, management bought 8 hours of your time and not 4 when they hired you.
So the times you’re off on the weekends doing no work is valuable to the company because you’re recharging your mind and possibly also thinking about problems subconsciously.
I went to check my job offer, and it doesn’t mention anything about 40 hour weeks or 8 hour days.
Nowhere in my employment contract does it say that.
Realistically, I am allowed to spend up to 8 hours to work on goals that my employer says I should work on. It is also understood that if the goals are completed earlier, I am free to fill the "free" part of 8 hours with self-learning.
There's also an implicit understanding that certain life activities may happen/overlap with that free time, e.g. eating/picking up kids.
Only in the most pedantic bad take world would your statement be correct.
That's your management's problem, not yours. Your labor contract says that you owe the company your time, how they use it is not your business.
Requiring and taking time for purposes other than creating value for the company is nothing more than punishment. I understand being angry that you're sitting in the office twiddling thumbs while others are at home cooking. The solution here is not to punish those people for your own, and everyone's, in-office woes. The solution is to demand better for yourself.
I work in an office 5 days a week. I'll say right now - close to half of my time is wasted. However, I am still here in the office. Yes that absolutely sucks to know I could work 20 hours a week and achieve the same outcome. However, I am not "better" because I have enjoyed the punishment of spending that time. I am not more loyal nor more proficient. I am not less lazy. Pain IS NOT gain - that's a lie told by people with the intention of manipulating you to argue in favor of your own exploitation.
And if there are people working 4 hours a day remotely, how productive do you think those same people are just because they're sat in an office?
Nutshell: I think this is a nonsense argument.
If you're sitting in an office twiddling your thumbs for 4 hours a day you're not defrauding your employer.
If you're at home working a second job (or mowing your lawn) for 4 hours a day then you're committing fraud and violating your contract with your employer.
Fundamentally it's a legal issue about fraud.
If you want remote work then you need a very different kind of employment contract. (One that specifies concrete deliverables, not time owed.)
So you just want to lord over the minions, even if they're not actually doing anything for half the day? You don't actually care about productivity, you just care that you can exert your power over them and have them rot in a cubicle doing nothing, even if they were doing equal amounts of work in both situations.
Complaining that they're not properly using the time they bought is like claiming you can joyride your neighbor's expensive sports car because he's not using it most of the time anyways.
We're a remote heavy company and we don't have that type of contract, and it all works really well.
So no, you don't need it.
We are now past that point where everyone plays nice working remotely.
I'd love to see actual stats on this, because I hear it a lot on HN (pretty much exclusively from the pro-office side) but I can't imagine there's that many people doing this. Even if there was, why is this a problem? Presumably they're getting work done in those 4 hours that is satisfactory to the business, so what if they do some work on the side as well? Who cares?
I do hybrid (2 times a week in the office) and don't mind it, but I know for a fact that pretty much every single person in my team does much less work on the office days than when they're remote, because we're mostly socializing, taking coffee breaks and taking full advantage of our 1-hour lunch break (rather than the 15 minutes it takes at home to just eat the meal). Most of us will even opt out of office days when we have a big deadline.
Hell, I'm much less productive at the office simply because the chairs & monitors suck. At home I've got a quad 4K monitor setup in an extremely comfortable chair, my own desk, my own food & beverages of choice, my own music blasting as loud (or quiet) as I want it. How could I be more productive in the office?
Turns out most people aren't mischievous children that have to be under constant supervision to get work done, and in fact they were better when given the freedom to approach the work in a way that suits them best.
Your manager, because your employment contract is about time spent, not works delivered.
cue the old saw about how an engineer gets hired back to fix a problem at his old company -- he bills them $2500, $50 for the hour, and $2450 for knowing how to fix the problem.
We will came back quickly in a real modern "StrongTown" economy, of many SMEs fighting with their dynamism, instead of creating slaves with taxes and rents to keep people moving. We will really implement the Green New Deal because we can't in a modern dense city without rebuild it from the ground, but we can for small buildings. We re-create the middle class society instead of the neofeudal society of giants and neoproletarian poor.
Real estate is the most immediate threat for the giants, but not the only.
If they chase them out via RTO, they can be replaced with H-1B's.
I don’t think the world is so coordinated. Some people made a bad bet on real estate. Some other people want to write click bait pieces about lazy workers. Some other corporate leaders are scared that employees are goofing off outside the office (because productivity can’t be measured for most work).
Your question as to who these people are, is still valid. So my objection is only to the extent that it being unknown doesn't mean it isn't likely.
https://www.surveymonkey.com/curiosity/surveymonkey-research...
Now, who is “Sam Gutierrez” and how is he benefitting? Did he get compensated for it? Is he doing a public service? Is he licking ass? Do we care?
I suggest you read or watch something about McKinsey.
"People who believe in conspiracy theories have never been project managers."
They absolutely have the power to move the chess pieces on both sides to guarantee an outcome.
[0] for which there is no communication between them required, or even conscious desire to "conspire" of single one of them. Consider how mobbing can go. People don't go "so, we're all racist, and this new guy is X, so I propose you are kinda sarcastic to him, and I forget to remind him of the thing tomorrow". It doesn't even happen that way in bad fiction, much less so in real life.
Or put more positively, consider how teamwork and healthy group behavior can go, too. Most of it is simply done, gets fine-tuned by doing, and only some of it is thought, spoken or written about, usually in hindsight, often as a rationalization.
Getting back to the original thesis of the article, the author is stating that people making the decision on RTO (the "elites", another nebulous scary term...) are doing so because commercial real estate is so critical to their decision making process. If anyone can provide any evidence that McKinsey could orchestrate such a thing (with actual details), I'm all ears.
The thing I hate about articles like this one, and claims like "look at the shady stuff McKinsey has done" is that they never really even attempt to provide evidence about how the incentives around propping up com. real estate values would be enough to sway decision makers. They just try to tie some loose threads together, and use scary terms like "elites" as if all of the elites acted with one mind.
There have been plenty of comments elsewhere in this thread making the argument that the connection between com. real estate values and people making the actual RTO decisions is far too tenuous to have that be a primary motivator. Also, having been a director and had lots of interactions with C-suite folks, I find it laughable to think that of all the concerns high-level execs have that "helping the stock portfolios of other rich people" is their primary driver.
Didn't we just see a giant string of mass layoffs in spite of excellent company performance for no apparent reason besides investors wanted them?
I rarely believe in conspiracies, but mindless group-think is very real.
If investors want it, I don’t see why any other reason would be necessary, ever, to explain a company’s behavior.
Not to mention that the proposition of "for no apparent reason" is total BS to begin with. There was a ton of over-hiring during the pandemic for an expected long-term change in consumer demand that never materialized. Plus, lots of people just fundamentally don't understand how rising interest rates make many projects uneconomic. If your company is chugging along making, say, 4% return on capital, that may be fine in the ZIRP era, but when treasuries are paying north of 5% it means it makes more economic sense to close down the company and put your cash into government bonds. That's a bit of an oversimplification but not by much. Rising interest rates fundamentally mean there is a higher bar for getting ROI.
Many of them are some of the companies that wax lyrical about remote work being bad and are often featured in articles. Submarine PR is absolutely rampant alongside "native advertising".
ETA: I agree that you did not say this was happening in your original comment, but it seems to me your comment implied that these companies were actually influencing major decisions (since that's the topic of the OP).
Blackrock is a major institutional investor in just about every company, so they have press and backchannel effects. I assume similar things happen with e.g. vanguard and big ibanks. I know Jamie Dimon has been railing about RTO for a while.
It’s not just that. The article talks about “landlords who buy up trophy office buildings”, but fails to draw the connecting line to the managers who demand RTO. The managers aren’t the landlords but the article seems to treat them as one single “elites” entity. How can the landlords demand RTO? Where is the financial incentive for the managers to RTO?
There’s a story here when Amazon gets tax breaks, for instance. But that doesn’t generalise to RTO mandates everywhere; it’s the exception rather than the rule.
For one, look at the expenses of some of the large tech companies that often make the front page here on HN due to their RTO plans. Real estate is a relatively teeny portion (salaries are obviously the biggest). Point being, no sane CEO would demand RTO to "prop up commercial real estate" if they thought it would be a net negative for their actual business long term, precisely because their concerns about real estate values are so far down on their list of priorities.
There's no mystery here. People with assets want those assets to remain valuable, and act directly to reinforce it. This is why we don't let athletes bet on their own games.
> Point being, no sane CEO would demand RTO to "prop up commercial real estate" if they thought it would be a net negative for their actual business long term, precisely because their concerns about real estate values are so far down on their list of priorities.
What if they thought it didn't make any difference, or was mildly net positive to the short term value of their shares? Like, say, 2% increased value through voluntary attrition over the next 2 years, followed by 10% reduced value? And it propped up their portfolios? Is that really so far fetched? We see companies making a lot more questionable decisions in pursuit of quarterly numbers.
any real evidence of this will be easily evidence for a breach in fiduciary duty of the ceo towards the shareholders. RTO can be seen as costing more money, and likely reduce productivity, force attrition (of the best employees), etc.
Or they can say "We think it will be mildly accretive for the investors and create synergies in collaboration and creativity" and if the board agrees, who will gainsay them? We're not talking about drastic shifts in policy for most of these companies, it doesn't take much more than a little bias one way or the other to tip the decision.
It doesn't even have to be deliberate and conscious, if their wealth managers say "Boy the commercial real estate market is tanking, remote work is a disaster" that's enough to mildly influence behavior.
So most decisions are taken to increase that stock value, if RTO negatively affects it, but props up other investments it is probably sub-optimal for them.
What if it doesn't? What if they believe it's neutral, or the effects are unknown?
Wouldn't Leadership's financial incentive be stronger to increase the value of the company rather than "the whole commercial real estate market" that a single company only has a small effect on?
WeWork seems like an obvious exception - but Adam Newmann was self-dealing by renting his own real estate out to his own company. It was a hugely perverse incentive, and I suspect most boards aren't so captured by things like that.
Yes, but those are not necessarily conflicting values. As you say, I wouldn't expect them to crash their companies, but... If it's approximately neutral or RTO has only a mild negative effect they may do it anyway, or they may be boneheads and do it despite a negative effect on the company itself because they do not believe in the negative effect.
Also it's very clear that our oligarchs are not always thinking clearly, based on Twitter's spectacular implosion. People do make mistakes, especially in domains that are hard to evaluate.
The "think tanks" that are pre staffed and fully capable of churning out and placing 3x major long form articles per week that are pro or con {Subject X} (and an additional few that fence sit and are "just asking questions") already exist and have been about since at least Nine out of Ten Doctors Recommend Smoking.
You know, 5+ decades ago.
The "elites" that are losing money in {Domain X} simply have to question their circle, get a line on a half decent agency or three and hire them to pitch for the thought changes that will move money back towards {X}.
Job done.
an AEI interview https://www.aei.org/workforce-development/the-future-of-remo... which seems pretty balanced overall (and doesn't take a prescriptive position)
an AEI piece https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/the-trade-offs-... which seems pretty balanced too
a Heritage piece (from early in Covid) https://www.heritage.org/jobs-and-labor/report/labor-policy-... that seems mostly bullish on remote work (but mostly focuses on other issues, like labor rights)
a McKinsey report (also from fairly early in Covid) https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/future-of-work/wh... which is mostly descriptive and also seems pretty balanced
a Cato piece https://www.cato.org/commentary/remote-work-here-stay-mostly... which argues in favor of remote work
That's not the argument I made in my comment. I simply noted that if anyone wanted to hire a group to argue for (or against) remote work then such groups already exist and have done for decades.
If there's a coordinated press placing of "back to work" articles then the starting point would be all the articles that make that case (or talk about that subject) and look for authors, their bio's, whether these are staff writer pieces (and if so whether they heavily quote "research shows" vague sources), opinion pieces, etc.
The hardest to spot and most common is staff writers who cover all manner of things (no obvious bias) who are 90% copy pasta'ing unacknowledged "press releases" "media statements" handed to them on a plate by the Institute for Lazy Reporting.
US work from home isn't an area of any interest to me and I have no particular awareness of any of the US writing on the subject.
I'm an Australian that's largely worked remote (but not always from home) since the mid 1980s, largely for transnational resource companies.
Part of my professional career did involve tracing and sourcing released information intended to sway opinion, but that was all related to mineral and energy resources.
was not readily apparent to yourself.
> does not seem to happen, at least for the topic being discussed,
to the best of your ability to discern such activity, if it exists.
> suggesting that the world is indeed not so coordinated (at least in this instance).
suggesting that you were unable to find such coordination in this instance; not in any way negating the point that such agencies do exist and do take on contracts to shape a public narrative to the degree possible with the resources given.
I have no knowledge of your skill levels at picking out such media shenanigans, while they absolutely do happen in general I have no basis with which to weight your inability to find any specific evidence in this instance.
More to the dynamic of the exchange, you asked if I had any personal knowledge of US remote articles being dropped in the US public sphere to order and I responded that I have no interest in such articles in the US public sphere and thus have no such knowledge. That ancedatal singular fact has no bearing on whether such a thing is or isn't happening.
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/from-digital-nomad-to-...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/julianhayesii/2024/09/22/is-ama...
https://bmmagazine.co.uk/in-business/rachel-reeves-urges-end...
https://www.finews.com/news/english-news/64448-zurueck-ins-b...
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/09/09/deloitte-mon...
https://www.bizjournals.com/bizjournals/news/2024/09/18/amaz...
https://www.newsday.com/news/region-state/new-york-state-pop...
https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/survey-reveals-us-remote-workers-s...
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/news/are-remote-workers-real...
https://www.onrec.com/news/news-archive/is-remote-work-losin...
I've been a remote worker for many years prior to covid and it's been interesting to watch. There's a constant drip of negative articles about remote work which increases to a flood around headlines like the Amazon one.
"Think Tanks" "agencies" etc place articles in media outlets by a variety of means (if in fact this is what is taking place).
Media outlets in general are starved for income compared to yester years and are increasingly easy to place material with.
The first link is Euro-centric, the second is Forbes with a contributed piece by an outside writer ( Julian Hayes II ) who has written a number of articles across a number of media outlets that are pro return to the office.
Is this a truly independant free opinion he is spruiking?
Is this an opinion he gets addition income from a third party for supporting?
I personally have no idea, but this is a hint of how to backtrace content sourcing.
It's not unlike working back through subsidiary shell corporations, etc.
a. Source
(1) True source ("Where does it really come from?")
(a) Release channel ("How did it come out?") if different from true source without concealing true source
(b) Person or institution in whose name material originates
(c) Transmitting channel ("Who got it to us?"), person or institution effecting known transmission—omitting, of course, analyst's own procurement facilities
(2) Ostensible source ("Where does it pretend to come from?")
(a) Release channel ("Who is supposed to be passing it along?")
(3) First-use and second-use source (first use, "Who is said to have used this first?"; second use, "Who pretends to be quoting someone else?")
(a) Connection between second-use source and first-use source, usually in the form of attributed or unacknowledged quotation; more rarely, plagiarism
(b) Modification between use by first-use and second-use sources, when both are known
(i) Deletions
(ii) Changes in text
(iii) Enclosure within editorial matter of transmitter
(iv) Falsification which appears deliberate
(v) Effects of translation from one language to another
Of course, not all wealthy people invested in commercial real estate. But they still have an interest in preserving the existing economic system. They certainly don't want a domino effect.
Mechanism 1: Those S&P 500 shares that you own through Vanguard and BlackRock index funds, you don't actually control the voting rights to them. Vanguard and BlackRock do. They have coordinated voting power and a big voice in the C-suite of many large corporations. I do think that execs will listen when they make a suggestion, and it's in their interests that the value of assets under management stays high, because that's what determines their pay.
Mechanism 2: C-suite comp is tied to stock price, often through options. Well, as it happens, asset markets are tightly interrelated, and high valuations are a result of leverage. Strangely enough, a dollar invested in real estate can also be a dollar invested in Amazon (even if it's not Amazon's real estate). When asset valuations are high, their owners can borrow against those assets and use that money to bid for other assets, raising the price of everything together. In this process new money is essentially created ex nihilo and increases the price of assets. Conversely, when asset prices start deflating, that can trigger a sell-off of other assets, and this money doesn't simply change hands, it disappears along with the leverage that created it. A pop in commercial real estate valuations can mean that many investment funds which own Amazon will have to sell them off at fire-sale prices to cover a margin call. If you're an exec, this wouldn't be a good thing to happen before your equity compensation package vests.
He's well know to have made most of his money in commercial property and has said he wants to protect that.
If a billionaire, lord of the realm, TV celebrity doesn't count as "elite" I don't know who does. I can't really think of a bigger hypocrite that that.
https://fortune.com/europe/2024/02/05/british-billionaire-lo...
A community where they go looking for contacts when they need something, like a public affairs firm for pushing political buttons, or a real estate investment to put a big payout into, or whatever. If you are in this environment and fuck around you'll make enemies. People won't recommend you as a public affairs customer, won't tip you off on good investment opportunities, might start to talk shit about you behind your back.
Undermining the value of real estate can make these networks and communities a serious hazard to your business. And undermining the value of office estate means you undermine the really tasty cash cow in real estate, residential properties within commuting distance. Enforcing commutes to offices means that people will pay a premium to shorten the commute.
Right, I think there's pretty clearly a combination of factors at play and it's difficult to untangle them (adding one factor you didn't mention, soft layoffs).
I'm incredibly skeptical of any attempt to quantify "productivity" with this granularity, and this is especially true as technological advances over the last couple of years like LLMs are providing some substantial time savings for many tasks people do.
Whether that lends credence to the authors theory or not is an open question, but it's another financial motivator.
The truth is that after the initial movement toward remote work, we are starting to see the secondary effects.
For instance, starting as a junior in a remote job can be really daunting, and you're sure to never make any personal connection with anyone. Being stonewalled by a non-cooperative senior coworker in a slack chat while you start your job is a very stressful experience, I can tell you.
Remote also allows some slack if you don't enforce a very tight and intrusive management. See the countless stories about people holding two jobs at the same time.
Anyone with good people skills will break any barriers to connect and build a network of influence regardless of their expertise level. Anyone with communication issues or extremely introverted will have more difficulties to connect however, not that they would be doing great in person.
If non-cooperative senior coworkers are stonewalling, then it is a cultural or personal issues that needs to be managed, not the mode of work.
Starting a new job is always stressful, as any major change is difficult for human to adapt and needs time.
> See the countless stories about people holding two jobs at the same time.
This needs to stop, there were few reports, not countless. A few bad apples does not generalize the orchard. Also, if the pay is decent and living costs are affordable, no one needs to hold two jobs. If someone is holding two jobs remotely, it mostly means they are in "bulls!!t" job where they are not utilized to adequate levels and the symptoms of low output is not correctly noticed.
The truth is that other employees may have personal issues, too much work, lack of will to let go some moat, and so on. Management usually doesn't care, especially if a junior is complaining. Especially in IT where workers aren't selected for their social skills.
Remote lacks the casual interactions, at lunch or at the coffee machine. We are social animals and the lack of face-to-face contact reduces a lot the bonding, especially if you know that everything personal you write is recorded and can be read by the HR department. Will you tell about your divorce on a company Slack?
I work remotely, I enjoy it most of the time, but I have seen the difficulties that emerge from it. And yes, people holding multiple jobs at the same time is common, I know several persons who do, or have done, this.
You are putting too much faith in human nature. Lot of times, people are simply greedy and abuse the cultural norms put in place to allow slacks when truly warranted. Seen those stories first hand, and then there is https://www.reddit.com/r/overemployed/
If you are actually twice as productive as your co-workers and can manage a 40-hour a week job in 20, then the companies are getting what they paid for. Good for you that you found two jobs you’re uniquely qualified for. I’m happy you’re getting paid to do both jobs instead of having to waste the other 20 hours of your week on labor you don’t get paid for.
I have seen my share of bad managers and bad companies. Believe me - there are bad employees as well who poison the well for others.
As for allowance of some slack, yeah, theres possibility for that to happen. But management doesnt need to be intrusive: what does anyone care if some employee is working a 2nd job for example? Does anyone care how their colleagues or staff spend their time away from work as it is? As long as their work is done within acceptable timeframes (or there is reasonable limiting factors preventing it) , its of sufficient quality to meet expectations, and they meet expectations of availability, what they do in their spare time is none of anyones business. In other words, so long as someone is not breaking company requirements/policy (which would include working on competing products, etc), whether they hack away on side projects, volunteer their time somewhere, work a 2nd job, do nothing... it doesn't particularly matter. Management only needs to measure performance relative to the org's expectations of performance for that position, and timeously address any concerns if need be. Theres no need for the org to reach beyond whatever is agreed to for that role.
Covid was an outlier event, and the outcomes that occurred as a result of it will revert to the mean over time.
What you’re describing is a cognitive bias.
https://centerforhealthsecurity.org/our-work/tabletop-exerci...
You can believe COVID happened however you want — but it’s documented reality that the elites practiced exactly the authoritarian response they used mere months before the virus outbreak.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Reset
Similarly, those same elites wrote a book about how they want to use the authoritarian measures they implemented during COVID as a gateway to imposing their vision on society. Again, documented reality.
Isn’t that point of training and exercises? To be ready and have a plan when the situation you trained for actually occurs?
If you read the John Hopkins’ Center for Health Security link you provided, they did similar exercises in 2018 ("Clade X"), 2005 ("Atlantic Storm"), and 2001 ("Dark Winter").
To me this doesn’t prove that there is a conspiracy of any kind.
It simply and reassuringly shows that some of those who’s responsibility it is to be prepared for and help us collectively get through these kind of situations are actually taking their jobs somewhat seriously.
I guess you could call that a conspiracy. A conspiracy to do their jobs well.
The reality is much more depressing -- nobody is in the control. Not the Illuminati, not the Jewish bankers, and not the C-level executives conspiring to force RTO to maximize their investments in the (unrelated) commercial real estate. These all are just conspiracy theories.
which implicitly means "their own" control!
No conspiracy needed for a bunch of people to act in their own perceived best interest and work backwards to a justification.
People need not work together to conspire, only vaguely in the same direction. Incentives do that like radio waves
Better yet, those leaders maybe also love exerting control over their employees and find this more enjoyable in an office environment.
Companies ARE NOT a democracy. In my mind, there's a huge overlap between being high company leadership and also being a self-serving narcissist. Are we then surprised that narcissists prefer to do things in their own self interests, and prefer to boss people around while looking at them? To me, that's not surprising at all. I think people don't understand these decisions aren't made by hundreds of people, but rather less than a handful per company.
Is that what we are calling business now? As if industry players don't buy media outlets precisely to push their narratives (look at tech outlets, crypto outlets, pharma etc). How is this a "cabal"? It's cheaper to just talk to your friend who owns business insider and also invests in the same RE funds to ask "journalists" to research on the topic.
Also, plenty midmanagement in many industries love RTO: it's harder to justify their roles (and what they got promoted for) unless they have bags of flesh to oversee. It's not a cabal of midmanagement. It's just midmanagement slow pushing for RTO internally.
Now, all of a sudden, they realize their blunder. While the workers are happy, they are not. So now they will try to convince us that we are not productive enough, or that some of us are slacking, or that we have stopped innovating, or another 50 reasons for which going to the office will help us.
More recently, they have realized that they are not fooling anyone. So now they are threatening lower pay or layoffs for those who refuse to come back.
Sure, remote work can be productive for certain work, and for certain people. But people underestimate the value of an office.
Working in a coffee shop? Sure, if you have nothing to do but read some email.
I love both. And I don’t mind a short commute, as it starts and ends your work, resulting in a better work-life balance
All other issues are easily solvable too, either with the right tools, or the right processes.
(nb. I also think working at a coffee shop isn't for most people)
By coming back to the office?
Desk, chair, lightning, monitors are easily googlable, too.
Coming back to office creates more problems than it solves.
All those things are part of the office and you don't have to pay for them.
> Coming back to office creates more problems than it solves.
Other than commute which could be a bitch in the US what other problems for the company do they create? Yes hanging out at home is nice for you/me, you can rest, nap, be with your kids, do chores, but how would this matter to the company when people abuse these situations on a regular basis?
I gladly paid for them so I don't have to commute. Since going remote I could move to the countryside too. Bigger house, nicer environment, cheaper. My home office setup follows me if I switch jobs.
> Yes hanging out at home is nice for you/me, you can rest, nap, be with your kids, do chores, but how would this matter to the company when people abuse these situations on a regular basis?
If you don't have the discipline to work when you are supposed to, that's a you problem.
Actually it's a company problem, that is precisely why this is one of the main reasons they are doing it and why it actually makes sense.
Statement based on pretty much nothing.
Do you live in the past?
1. The desk, chair, lighting and multi-screen setup I have at home is vastly superior to any I had in any company I worked for in the past, including FAANG.
2. Know what is worse than domestic distractions? Office distractions. People around you constantly talking in those noisy, nightmarish open offices. At home I can tell my wife I need to focus, shut the door to the home office room, and be productive. During the 15 years I worked from the office I had to wear fucking headphones with loud music to drown out the incessant office noise.
3. Not sure what you are going on about bad internet. Where the fuck do you live that internet connection is unreliable these days?
4. The beauty of asynchronous communication these days. I don't even like slack very much, but it is so much better than in-person communication, that even in the odd occasion when I am at the office I prefer to use it rather than speaking in person.
5. Ah, whiteboards. Funny you mention that, there are numerous excellent collaborative tools for that sort of thing nowadays. They end up being clearer since my writing and drawing skills are shit, and they are also asynchronous, which makes it so much nicer.
And because the other person is also replying async, you have to wait. So you get the same fan-out problem as microservices.
In a regular scenario I have multiple things ongoing that I have to wait beyond communication. I need to wait for code reviews. I have to wait until some changes are deployed until I can perform something. Truth is that a whole damn lot of what I do is async anyway. Instead of moaning about it, I decided to embrace it.
Maybe I am lucky that I work in a remote friendly environment, where people also work asynchronously.
I loathe remote work, but support others in pursuing what works best for them.
With that being said, Coffitivity¹ exists for a reason. Some of us work much better in environments like that, myself included.
I did the majority of my studying at Rutgers in the student center on College Ave, as my ability to focus is much better when I'm around people, but not interacting with them. While not as impressive as if I had done so at an Ivy League institution, I believe this was essential to graduating from there summa cum laude.
In contrast, at home I control my environment, have my hyper comfortable chair in which I can spend 48 hours sitting without complaints, my own monitor setup that is infinitely superior to the crap they have at the office, I can control my own AC, I can control my noise level, I don't get casually interrupted by someone wanting to contact me out of the blue with irrelevant questions, I have 8 gig symmetric fiber internet that is literally never down and it's entirely 100% dedicated to only myself and my machines rather than being shared with 100 other people, and who uses whiteboards still? You can just buy a pen and paper if you really need to scribble something down
But it’s obvious corps only like to virtue signal about such things while in reality not caring one iota about them.
The reasoning behind the work from office mandate does not concern me; nor I will attempt to rationalize it.
I will not return to office, and I will organize with colleagues to make sure our interests are protected.
See you in the strike.
(Yes, yes, I know you personally are a conscientious worker with a stellar work ethic and would never slack off on the company's dime, but let's be real here and recognize the population averages.)
Yes, some people made a bet on office real estate, and they're in a bad position right now.
But those aren't the same people who are running businesses that use those offices. Why would most businesses care if real estate is propped up or not? How would increasing utilization of their buildings actually help them?
I don’t have an answer to that question but I am curious as to why my company and multiple companies my friends work at, are having events where they direct us to command our entire team to come into the office and then tell us the next day that there aren’t enough seats and some people should be told to stay home.
It seems like a lot of companies want to eat their cake and have it too. I mean that in the sense that they want all their employees in the office but don’t want to pay for enough office space to make that possible.
Hell, even the “golden path” schedule for my team or any other in the company doesn’t have set desks. Where we sit in office changes depending on the day because we have the seating capacity for 75% of the employees mandated to be in office, and hr is doing their best at accommodating this. I don’t think as many real estate firms would be looking at their offices sitting unused if corporations actually put their money where their mouth is when it comes to the return to office push
I'm not on the spectrum (at least I've never been diagnosed, but many software developers have autistic tendencies, so who knows), but I also need a quiet place where I can focus. Funnily enough, many people who prefer working from the office also want all others to see how hard they are working, so they sit in the biggest open plan office and do calls all day long. Which is kind of at odds with other people's need to focus...
thou, most businesses need some sort of real estate and getting it from someone you already know is often preferred
You don't have the same economic development incentives. That much is obvious. I could be more rude and press the 'so you think you're part of the elite?' angle, but I don't want to belittle your success.
My Spidey senses go off whenever someone uses an undefined label to describe a sweeping societal change.
And, yes, it is all about real estate.
Everyone in the surrounding area finds it desperately hard to make ends meet.
The restaurants and cafes, the minimarts, the cleaners, janitors, security, various stores: clothing, bookshops, bakeries etc.
All these people lose their jobs and for the small independent Stores where the owners have poured in their savings they lose all that,
There are a lot of positives with working from home but dont forget about the wider repercussions,
[1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/making-sense/heres-what...
The issue I have with that type of argument is you're moralising on causing harm to one group of people to limit harm to another group.
Who gets to decide how do do that?
And then you could also moralise by saying the commuting causes huge amounts of pollutants which cause actual harm to people's health. And the stress of the commute. And the lack of family time. Etc.
Things would just not be as concentrated in the areas surrounding commercial buildings.
So either
a) The company that is ordering workers back to office owns the property - then they get absolutely no financial gains from it, because they need to pay for the office space in any case.
or
b) They rent the office. In this case, they get financial gains from renting less space and keeping workers at home.
This all sounded like nonsense to me. The office had dozens, if not hundreds of empty desks. He wasn’t taking anyone’s spot, the desk would otherwise sit empty. When someone first goes remote they are sent a bunch of stuff they don’t really need, but it’s a one time cost, not recurring. The laptop, the VPN, these are all things the employee has regardless of their remote status.
I don’t know if she was making stuff up just to cause trouble, or if companies like to count per-seat expense in the office and at home.
In their last earnings call, their AWS operating income increased $4billion to $9.3 billion, they said it's driven by "our continued focus on cost control, including a measured pace of hiring."
That is a dramatic jump in returns, they will squeeze that until the gains from doing so are minimal, implying that specific cost base is then efficient.
Case example: The weird YouTube parents who likely never spent time with other parents and got into child abuse scandals.
It drives a large piece of demand for the auto industry and causes literally and figuratively tons of fuel to be consumed, just to take some obvious examples, but there are many many many more when you consider the chain reactions.
Fuel is heavily taxed in most countries as well, so reducing the demand is a major hit to the core economy of many nations. This is a problem for everyone, not just the 1%. It might actually be a smaller problem for them than for most.
This is not a conspiracy so much as it is a real problem that might cause problems for all of society unless its handled well.
I think we need to elevate the discussion from the tiresome "It's all $category's fault because they're evil" to stand any chance. In this case as in so many others.
This person thinks that multibillion dollar companies would be willing to sacrifice productivity to prop up the minor real estate assets they hold at the expense of their revenue and market cap?
Also, as a self-preferred hybrid, I often go to office 3-4 days weekly and I see more goofing off and also get pulled into goofing off by peer pressure(c'mon, lets have a cup of coffee, you such work-a-holic, there is tomorrow blah blah), because people will definitely take a 30-60mt coffee break after each meeting, compounding to around ~1.5-2h (if we do not consider meetings as work) effective productivity.
Lets take lunch break at office, first grouping with peers starts 15-20mt before everyone is ready and heading out to canteen or restaurant depending on the mood and then taking a long walk afterwards because everyone is sleepy after meal. Coming back, some will still feel sleepy and spend another 30mt on coffee sipping and gossips and then walk to a meeting.
Compared to my work at home, I get decent min. 4h concentrated work. Additionally, I can focus on other stuff(debugging, reviews, experiments) in background without coming off as rude, while a meeting takes place that does not directly need my input immediately. Same meeting at office means I am either super bored and sleepy and others are mostly scrolling their FB/TikTok under the table while some random people get into nerdy arguments with another someone who suggested a bad design or a manager gets at the neck of another team's manager because they can't align on the coordination or responsibility distribution correctly.
One benefit of in-person office days is, when I have a problem, I can walk up to my peer and get a clarification immeidately, while at home, they might set their status to do-not-disturb or would cite some other meetings where they are just sitting around listening to blah blah and tell me to come back later. Other than that, I do not see any immense benefits. The bonding/cultural stuff are anyways enforced by corporate team events and parties and what not and in EU, people do not often socialize personally with colleages outside work unless they were childhood friends or live in same house.
If anything, those companies could sublet and/or negotiate the cost, lowering the downside, instead of doing something they know (according to the article) won't move the needle.
The math doesn't add up.
No. It's about total loss of the control of the one of the most effective productivity measurements those 'elites' ever had: BiC/h.
Zombie towers too, but the middle management don't (and won't ever) get any profit from the sqaure meters, so they eagerly support their top-level executives specifically because they no longer can imitate the vigorous activity of managing people and projects and with WFH it's became way too obvious. They literally don't know what they subordinates do.
PS: Butt-in-Chair, of course.
I’m a manager that prefers an in-person team. My reasons are related to productivity. Any commercial real estate that happens to be in my portfolio is separated from me by enough intermediate aggregators that I don’t spend an iota thinking about it. I actually work for an organisation whose senior leadership prefer remote work, so I’m not just a kiss-ass or anything. What does OP’s POV say about me? Do I not exist? Am I a paid shill?
Honestly, and I say this as one, developers can be so bloody petulant.
So, you can either disagree with the books/studies based on your anecdotal experiences or specific circumstances, in which case the rest of the article isn't relevant to you (and unless you consider yourself an 'elite', it probably never was). Or you can understand that you may have a flawed understanding of the relationship between remote work and productivity, leading to your current opinion on the matter. Or you could have another motive, which may or may not be one of the reasons presented in the article. Which one sounds the most likely to you?
It can still work well with a certain type of people, people who are self directed and take pride in their work, but let's not fool ourselves into believing that's the only kind.
The non self-directed types were still employed, and their productivity wasn't much better or worse, but I suspect that the self-directed team members were able to deliver even more than before.
I add a thing: giants NEED the city to keep their business, who use Uber in a spread area where parking is never an issue and we all have cars? Who use JustEat where there are few restaurants around? Who buy ready-made food if most WFH? Who buy shiny macrobugs also known as smartphones, smartwatches etc where we WFH and outside there is nature, not a big city? Who will implement the "in 2030 you'll own nothing", meaning that those who say that count to own anything and rent to anyone?
That's more then mere real estate, the neofeudal economy of few big and powerful will fail to a new dynamic economy of SMEs and a free market. And yes those who are so big do not want to loose their status.
The problem with the first point is that why would a certain elite support their commercial real estate elites. This would suggest a certain transaction that the real-estate elite are not able to uphold since all of their income is coming from the companies.
For the second point, it'll be much easier to point at the conflict of interest in corporations.
The problem with these evil capitalist conspiracy theories is evidence: there should be evidence of this motivation _somewhere_. If you're a captain of industry, your compensation is driven by equity, which is in turn driven by shareholders' forecast of future earnings. So CEOs should be shouting their evil plans from the rooftops --anything you do but don't tell shareholders about might as well not have happened! Yet it doesn't come up in earnings calls, shareholder reports or at industry analyst reports. Probably because commercial real estate has no bearing on most company's valuations, and the ones it does impact are usually lightly staffed anyways, or couldn't really work from home in the first place.
I don't think the "us" vs "elites" framing helps the analysis at all, as it's far too reductive and treats actors as monoliths. Instead it's probably better to use something like "us" versus "small businesses, politicians, tech CEOs, bankers, and real estate investors." (And maybe even split up "us": not every job can work from home!) Tech CEOs generally have no exposure to commercial real estate. But bankers do, and real estate investors definitely do. These firms tend to be local in scope, and more directly connected to local politicians.
In that network of actors, tech companies are the mark. Politicians come after them with taxes and rules while carving out small business exemptions without which they would otherwise be voted out. And unlike the 'Jeff Bezos is worried about the long term viability of REITs' theory, this one has evidence, from politicians telling us their plans[1][2]. They campaign on these in-all-but-name writ-of-attainder taxes. How any individual tech company reacts can vary.
So that's the causal path between commercial RE and tech as I see it and it doesn't look like a strong one. Maybe it's more prevalent in the east coast where the banking and legal sectors are more represented, but here on the west coast only one company is fully 5 days in office They are widely reputed to have the highest employee churn target among big tech, and WFH lowered churn across the board.
[1]: https://www.sanjoseinside.com/opinion/op-ed-cupertino-city-c... [2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/31/technology/san-francisco-...
Real.
Then the market decide.
The problem as always is power imbalance. Big corporates have a lot of mechanisms to skew the power to their side. Employees have much fewer. That is why employees eventually form unions, because then they can organise as a counter balance against the machinery of big corporates.