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Comment by kevinventullo | Hacker News Reader

It’s not middle management pushing for this. It’s clueless upper management.

I've spoken to a few folks in middle management there, and some senior engineers, and it's exactly this story. So far as they can figure there aren't many middle managers actually pushing for this.

It's all senior leadership trying valiantly to recapture the "Day 1" mentality that process and procedures have beaten out of the company.

The clueless upper management are serving their wealthy owners who have a commercial real estate portfolio that is losing them huge amounts of money unless they can get the little people back in the offices.

They are more worried about employee fraud. Commercial real estate is boned anyway.

Great many folks are completely ineffective in remote setting. Some are not but many are. Simple as that. No real estate mogul conspiracy theories necessary

Are there studies to this effect? Any empirical evidence companies can give plotting productivity decline and subsequent increase after RTO? Or is it all just vibes?

How would you even do a study like that? Besides, looking at scientific studies is not how businesses make decisions. They sometimes use studies as justification but there's a difference.

What real estate does Amazon own in this case?

Well, presumably they own the offices that their staff are returning to.

But I'm more talking about wealth funds that own commercial real estate that are also shareholders in Amazon, quietly having a word with execs about how to get the workers back in the offices.

You know, the old "you should come for a weekend to the country and meet a few people", the people turn out to be incredibly rich and connected, and all they want from you is this little favour where you get all your people back in the office. Just for a while so they have the chance to unload their commercial real estate portfolio without taking a huge loss.

Doesn’t sound very plausible to me unless you have an actual connection for either speculation. We’re talking about tens of thousands of employees here.

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