Google forcing some remote workers to come back 3 days a week | Hacker News Reader

Google forcing some remote workers to come back 3 days a week

cnbc.com

7 pointss3r3nity6 comments

I cannot understand. Has the country collectively lost its mind? Yes, there are certain professions that must occasionally come into an office building like say a surgeon. Accountants, computer programmers, clerical staff, and a ton of other professions are more productive working from home. Not to mention all of the tons of gasoline, air pollution, road rage and other issues that are largely solved by simply enabling remote work.

What is driving this insanity? The gas companies?

Banks and real estate. Commercial real estate, not just the offices but the also the surrounding businesses, is a large portion of investment funds like pensions and mutual funds. Something like 15% of the overall investible market is commercial real estate. Online shopping has already done damage to this portfolio with places like Malls massively devaluing.

Also if you are going into the office less then things like air travel and hotels also suffer. If you don't go into to your own office, why travel to another company's office?

Adults spent a lot of time at work. A surprising portion of the economy exists just to support this second space, often in high cost areas.

As a result, municipalities are offering tax incentives for RTO, even if it's only 3 days per week. That's what forced the company I work for to do a 3 days per week RTO earlier this month.

As an added bonus, the company may benefit from a quiet layoff. If you do an RTO with no exceptions, then some of the staff will be forced to resign. All the company has to do is look through the employee database and get a reasonable estimate of the impacts. In the case of the company I work for, they exempted people who lived over X miles from an office facility - so they weren't looking for a quiet layoff. They just wanted those sweet tax incentives.

It actually isn't a conspiracy. There is a lot of group think, but genuine challenges around remote work. Primarily relating to managing accountability, but also communication and training.

Lot of people I know treat WFH as unofficial vacation days.

This is a management problem, but that doesn't mean it isnt real.

Many of the people who RTO will just end up spending most of their day in a phone booth on a videocalls with people in other offices anyway.

Pretty rich coming from a company that's not-so-slowly outsourcing it's workforce to India.

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