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Comment by reaperman | Hacker News Reader

$100M just isn't that much money though. That's maybe the compensation for 200-300 truly good-to-excellent engineers? RTO mandate seems likely to lose that many good to great engineers. $100M is 0.017% of amazon's revenue. At my income level that's equivalent to me telling the woman who cleans my house that she's done here because I found someone else who charges $1/month less.

I could see that potentially being one part of the overall calculus, but certainly have difficulty seeing it be a rational "driving reason" of all this RTO.

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Agreed. Plenty of similar companies are making the same type of mandate despite having no tax incentives.

Quite clearly, execs at these companies believe they get stronger productivity from people working at the office, and this would outweigh any attrition from people leaving from RTO mandates. I don't care how many people scream about how that's false -- what matters is that the people making these decisions _do_ believe it.

Maybe the tax incentives are a nice bonus, but there's no way it's the entire picture.

The CEOs also have investments and buddies with investments in CRE, not to mention the companies themselves with the actual offices. Probably it’s more about the real estate than anything else.

That won’t explain the prevalence of RTO. Most CEOs are not involved in CRE and being involved with renting out your office space to your own company is a conflict of interest.

The simplest and most likely explanation is that they think it’s better.

What about institutional investors in these companies who are involved with CRE? What if the CEO is just doing the bidding of the board in this case?

What if what if what if. Give some hard evidence. Until then the obvious answer is the right one.

I just don't buy this. It might be why the media is pushing an "end work from home" narrative but I don't believe the majority of execs are making the decision due to this reason. I think WFH just exposes that without the ability to physically harass and micro-manage people they don't provide much day to day value.

It’s probably a bit of everything we said here, plus cargo culting. WFH is probably more effective for some individuals and orgs and offices for others. I personally need it, because where I live has no real software dev jobs.

That is interesting.

If I had my way each engineering-level employee would be the ongoing key to about $1M/year of income.

So regardless of any tax incentives, if I lost 100 top producers I fail to break even because there is no upside to paying the tax compared to paying employees.

Unless of course the executives are not very good at making money from employees having mad technical skills, compared to how easy it is for gov't money to roll in.

Yeah, I’ve never got the “it’s stealth layoffs” or “because we need to use the offices we pay for” or “for the tax breaks” arguments. The math just doesn’t work out.

Staff are such a huge part of costs, and the difference between your good staff and bad staff can break a company. Adopting any policy that would encourage the staff who can go elsewhere (the best ones) to leave and be left with the ones who can’t (the less good ones) is such a huge risk, you wouldn’t take that position for a few million dollars, but only if you believed it’s the best strategy long term.

It is interesting to me though that with so many companies taking this stance lately, many of them heavily data driven (like Amazon), that I’ve not yet seen any actual data or research that says “Here are some quantitive numbers on what we think having folks back in the office is worth”. Anyone got any data on this?

That’s the cool thing. At the top, there are humans making decisions, but based on their gut rather than data.

I doubt they would share their data, but do consider that the average tenure at Amazon is around 2 years and that they disproportionately hire a lot of recent graduates. We do know that junior staff are mostly negatively impacted by wfh, so it’s a small step to seeing they need to bring the seniors back to mentor the juniors.

From a comment of mine two weeks ago... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41562625

> There's also the question of even if remote work was more productive on the whole (and I believe this to be true) and that these productivity gains come from the more senior workers who are able to identify tasks that they need to complete and effectively shut the door on the office and focus ... while also being able to handle other things at home (being more productive because you can put a load of laundry in at noon or being able to get something to eat without having to go all the way to the break room)...

> So, grant that on the whole productivity is higher with WFH for mid level and senior level individual contributors ... junior ICs may be suffering quietly without more direct mentorship, the listening in on ad-hoc hallway meetings, managers being able to pick up on work stress more easily.

> It would be very easy to imagine a conversation at some director level (where I'm making up the numbers)... "From 2020 to 2024, we've seen the number of junior ICs advance to mid level drop from 20% to 16% compared to 2016 to 2020. This is a declining trend and when looked at year over year 2020 to 2021 had 8% advancement while 2023 to 2024 only showed 4% advancement. Furthermore, the senior ICs are comfortable in their role and the number of them moving up to management has dropped from 5% to 3% in the 2020 to 2024 time frame. If this continues, we may be looking at a lot of unsatisfied junior developers who are not progressing and a lot of satisfied senior developers and leads who would traditionally shift to the management track... well, not take that step in their career progression."

> Yes, that's a just-so story. I find it to be a believable one.

> So even if everything is great with remote work currently for productivity, some trends may be showing a problem years down the road where people are not improving and the company as a whole is stagnating (even more).

Right: so many of the decisions to treat employees poorly, going way back before the pandemic and the rise of remote work, are not about money (though they are usually justified by talking about money in a superficial way); they're about power, and classism.

If our Just And True Overlords (ie, the bosses) can't walk around and see the people they command doing everything they tell them with their own two eyes, then what's even the point of being one of the Just And True Overlords?

Don't look at the revenue, look at the margins. If the margins are in the single digits, 100 million looks much more attractive.

$100M isn't even a rounding error to Amazon.

> $100M just isn't that much money though.

But at the end of the fiscal year, there's going to be a net loss for 100M, and somebody is going to ask who's responsible and why.

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