klodolph
3 hours ago
I’ve heard this argument before and I don’t buy it. By that, I mean it may be true (that people want to prop up real estate prices), but I don’t think that this is enough of an explanation.
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).
kitsune_
2 hours ago
My theory, which is kind of informed by what I saw it play out in my company: The reason is a psychological one. Most leaders derive their power from in-person interactions. Remote and video calls severely impact that. Those leaders also love having an audience that needs to listen to them whenever they are in the room and the lack of that kind of feedback and adulation shellshocked a lot of them.
slg
2 hours ago
It feels a lot worse to deliver a lame joke at the start of an all hands meeting to a bunch of muted zoom windows with their cameras off. How much of the return to office is leaders wanting that polite chuckle from that captured audience back?
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.
tankenmate
10 minutes ago
To follow on from your premise; I suspect it comes from a misunderstanding of authority. In my experience most leaders have a visceral understanding of authority, but not an actual understanding. Authority comes from submission; anything you submit to has authority over you. The corollary of course is that the submissive person has the power in the relationship; at any time they can say I don't want this any more. Obviously in a work context this means quitting.
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".
csomar
35 minutes ago
I am not sure why not more people are not considering that to be the reason. In my last job, it actually made sense to have an in-office audience and yet management was opposed to it due to costs. When we had a round meeting, it kinda transpired to me that upper-management didn't really like to interact with the tech team much. They had a liaison person and that was as much as they wanted to interact with tech people.
slippy
37 minutes ago
Alas, it's a nuclear option.
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.
close04
an hour ago
I think we're looking for the unified theory of RTO. Soft power is definitely one of them. But every company and group of people have their own mix of reasons.
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.
sulandor
an hour ago
new rituals for video-calls and remote interactions are being evaluated by gamers and nerds for decades now, but the application to diversely motivated workers is difficult
clumsysmurf
an hour ago
The soft power aspect of jokes, who laughs at what, and when is fascinating. There is even some research on it:
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
agumonkey
2 hours ago
I really wonder if there's a tribal / psychological effect of this kind and if not having to play the submissive / adoration dance made people more interested in practical information passing. Saying this because a few articles mentioned that some full remote teams were much much more effective at actual work, spreading data so that everybody could find solutions or continue work right away.
kwar13
an hour ago
Exactly this. When I was a junior investment banker we worked brutal hours, often 80-90 hours a week with most days ending at 1-2am. Yet the head of investment banking insisted we always make it to his Monday 8am meeting since he wanted a bigger crowd when he talked. Going from a Sunday all-nighter into this was quite painful.
wiz21c
2 hours ago
And that goes up to every levels of the hierarchy.
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.
bjornsing
10 minutes ago
Yeah I think this is a huge part of the primitive gratification many people get from workplace “power”. You can often get a glimpse of it in-between the lines in more charged situations: some people essentially have a mental model where they are the sovereign of the office space, or speaks directly for the sovereign. It can get very interesting when that model meets reality (where they are in fact not the sovereign, but just another loyal subject under the law of the land).
Propelloni
an hour ago
Obviously this is a multi-causal issue. RTO policies spring up for a variety of reasons, often a mix. All those negative narratives sure have some founding in reality, but maybe you can think of benevolent reasons why companies call for RTO?
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.
miki123211
a few seconds ago
All these "face-to-face meetings are better" arguments are predicated on the fact that all your teammates are on the same campus. That is just no longer true in a lot of companies these days.
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.
EoinB
2 hours ago
This is the conclusion I have come to as well. So much of what happens in society can be best explained (imo) by human psychology and our relationship with ego, desire, perceived success etc.
steve1977
2 hours ago
Totally agree. Add to that the fact that in many cases, businesses ran fine without the in-person interactions of these managers… which could mean that we actually don’t need them, the managers I mean. And they are very scared of that.
sulandor
an hour ago
thou, leaders are more dependent on it, imho it impacts all human interaction and mostly for the worse.
we need to adjust our recipe/theory for coherent/functional constellations of humans unless heightened denial of humanity is in our collective interest
bjornsing
2 hours ago
I talked to an acquaintance who ran a startup that went remote during the pandemic. His view was that the self-motivated conscientious employees were just as productive remote as they were in the office, if not more. The problem was that when they left the office the people in the office became less productive.
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.
mgh95
2 hours ago
I think a lot of this comes down to perception of ROI for management. If the employment market is giving you qualified candidates at the price you seek in-office, why would you expose yourself to risk? I'm in this situation now where I'm hiring early employees and looking to grow, and about 90% of the decisions is how well can I derisk this hire.
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.
swiftcoder
an hour ago
> If the employment market is giving you qualified candidates at the price you seek in-office
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...
mgh95
an hour ago
> Is the employment market actually giving you that?
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.
-mlv
an hour ago
If getting the best developers for your budget isn't a priority, hiring remotely allows you to stretch your runway further.
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.
mgh95
an hour ago
> If getting the best developers for your budget isn't a priority, hiring remotely allows you to stretch your runway further.
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.
bjornsing
2 hours ago
> 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.
mgh95
2 hours ago
If I'm being totally honest, I am not sure it would be totally foreign. Entrepreneurship in Sweden (at least according to a quick google search) is relatively rare. Most of the entrepreneurs coming from the nordics I have interacted with have been decidedly less social contract oriented than even I am to the point where they seem almost like Gordon Gekko caricatures as though they are attempting to behave in a manner they think someone attempting to operate in a market-driven context would act. I am not sure that this argument would be totally foreign to your acquaintance, at least based upon the entrepreneurs coming from that region of the world in the USA.
bjornsing
an hour ago
> If I'm being totally honest, I am not sure it would be totally foreign.
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.)
benterix
an hour ago
That's kind of normal so I only pick up companies that offer remote only positions with no strings attached.
mgh95
an hour ago
That's fine? It's a market. Work for whoever is offering mutually agreeable terms for as long as that remains the case.
benterix
an hour ago
> Don’t think he could fully grasp the question, didn’t see a problem with that at all.
Ask him if he ever considered actually asking the self-motivated conscientious employees their opinion and preferences - and watch his mind boggle.
-mlv
an hour ago
That's a problem that can be encountered by companies that don't think through how remote work is supposed to work at their workplace. It's easier to craft processes when everyone is remote (i.e. if the company is remote-first).
jaggederest
3 hours ago
A significant majority of the total wealth in the US is in real estate (~$90T of ~$150T). Most of that is residential, but about a third of it is commercial.
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.
pash
2 hours ago
The Fed’s estimates thru 2022 say real estate makes up 46.8% of net US wealth ($83.5 trillion of $178.4 trillion) [0].
0. Readably summarized at https://www.barrons.com/amp/articles/net-wealth-is-over-135-... .
jaggederest
2 hours ago
Appreciate the more accurate figures, I didn't want to have to break out a spreadsheet to read an inflammatory blog article.
euroderf
2 hours ago
Is there a metric like PPP for real estate ? It might be a reality check for wealth vis-à-vis other nations.
jaggederest
2 hours ago
I think cap rates are a decent proxy for that kind of thing, and they're not too bad recently in commercial office space, as far as I can tell. It seems that office buildings are selling at a discount to what they were a few years ago. But I suspect that many buildings have not yet changed hands, and thus have debt based on their old values.
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.
HeatrayEnjoyer
2 hours ago
But the mortgage is fixed. Bringing people back in won't change the contract.
jaggederest
an hour ago
The value of the building is as a multiplier of the net operating income, that's what a cap rate is. If people come back in and companies expand and renew their leases, that increases the value of the building and reduces the capital needed to recapitalize the mortgage.
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.
rblatz
3 hours ago
I’ve long suspected it’s a PR campaign/propaganda and talking points aimed directly at the c suite class. A lot of people with a lot of money stand to lose a lot. Banks, investors, retirement funds…
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.
_zoltan_
2 hours ago
If it would be bad for people's pension funds and such, shouldn't it be everyone's interest to actually keep showing up to prop up those real estate values?
chii
2 hours ago
> shouldn't it be everyone's interest to actually keep showing up to prop up those real estate values?
not if you're getting a large benefit from WFH. And the loss from commercial real estate devaluation won't hit everyone equally.
InDubioProRubio
2 hours ago
Productivity would grow the amount of value in real-estate + some i guess. Should be a little spike starting at covid where new value is generated, but old losses are not priced in.
bilekas
2 hours ago
Pension indexes wouldn't be in a volotile industry as real estate.
theturtle32
2 hours ago
No.
esalman
2 hours ago
That's too obvious of an explanation and probably the likeliest one. It is common knowledge that almost every big corp is trying to downsize now, and RTO announcement does force a lot of employees to reevaluate their situation.
ronjakoi
3 hours ago
Can you please explain what you mean by employee attrition to a non-native English speaker?
vertalexgraph
3 hours ago
They're hoping a bunch of people quit (instead of complying with the mandate) to reduce headcount/the negative PR of layoffs.
shwouchk
3 hours ago
I think he means that some companies would like employees to voluntarily quit
fragmede
3 hours ago
Employees quit for all sorts of reasons. When a company gets big enough, it's just resource management, like a board game. Employee attrition is getting employees to quit without firing them, which is usually cheaper for the company.
Malcolmlisk
2 hours ago
If we oversimplify everything, yes... it's all about prop up real estate prices. But if we want to talk about this, we need to have in mind the capital amortization. The value of every business goes up or down if their fixed capital gets old or unused. For example, if you have 100 computers and every computer costs 1000, your company has that value as capital. But if they lose value in the next years and those same computers have a value of 50 in the market, then your company's value is halved (oversimplifiying it). The same happens with buildings and offices, if they lose values the company loses value too. Forcing workers to move to the office gives value to the area and the building, and the buildings around, and that's one of the main reasons why they are forcing the back to office thing.
acchow
29 minutes ago
Aren’t most companies leasing their office space?
Malcolmlisk
24 minutes ago
Not all, and even that, leasing is a cost in their accounts, which is good. Those companies that have huge ammounts of benefits need huge costs to maintain a propper balance.
otabdeveloper4
an hour ago
There is no conspiracy theory here. Most people will work 4 hour work days when working remotely. (And if they're working an 8 hour work day it's because they're working two remote jobs at the same time.)
"No loss of productivity" is a flat out lie.
yurishimo
an hour ago
How much of your 8 hours at the office is productive work? In my experience, half the day is spent on coffee breaks and lunch anyway.
Malcolmlisk
17 minutes ago
In my company we decided to go to the office 1 day every week. It´s completely optional and most of the people come. For us, that day is almost 100% lost. You spend the morning in some calls, dailies and things like that, and ofcourse taking some coffees and talking to people that you didnt see in 1 week. I even send myself notes for the next days when i work from home where im more productive.
amjnsx
an hour ago
Maybe most people can get all their work done in 4 hours so sitting in an office for 8 is pointless
otabdeveloper4
an hour ago
Maybe, maybe not.
However, management bought 8 hours of your time and not 4 when they hired you.
acchow
22 minutes ago
Tech jobs, especially in California, usually hire you for all your time. If your work requires overtime, you work overtime without getting paid overtime. This is called an “exempt” job.
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.
snailb
23 minutes ago
So it's up to management to fill my time with work. If I finish my work in 4 hours, then it's not my problem.
chaostheory
2 hours ago
There are also tax incentives. Cities like big company offices because in theory their workers would become customers of local businesses, which would not be possible with remote work. Maybe cities have been threatening to take away the tax breaks unless leadership did a RTO?
It's also highly likely that this is a soft layoff, trying to delay the real layoffs in 2025
Log_out_
3 hours ago
Its about socio pathic no life loners with power wanting company,the company be damned.
neuroelectron
3 hours ago
Amazon wants retention? That seems very strange and counter-intuitive. When did this happen?
klodolph
2 hours ago
I wrote that Amazon wants “attrition”, which means the opposite.