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.

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.

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.

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.

You miss a part: it's not just real estate. If we WFH, we own homes, not in dense cities. If we own homes we start having maybe a shed with p.v. and storage, a homelab, which with modern FTTH connections could be a small machine room alike datacenter, which with modern tech could be a part of a decentralized network so the SME/startup instead of buying someone else resources in the cloud buy their employees resources in their home at similar rates and equal reliability but with much more balance of power and much less private censorship possible (like arbitrary PayPal and co blocking of payments for Wikileaks or porn-producers). In such setup who will rent a Waymo? Who wont a more shiny macrobug aka smartphone? Who want JustEat or Uber?

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.

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

Amazon RTO has a very simple explanation. If Amazon fired a bunch of people they'd lose access to bringing replacements in via H-1B, EB-1, et cetera.

If they chase them out via RTO, they can be replaced with H-1B's.

Can you please explain what you mean by employee attrition to a non-native English speaker?

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.

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.

I think there could be legit reasons for RTO, such as improved mentoring opportunities, and developing deeper productive relationships with co-workers. I'm in my 50's and have worked fully remote for 15 years, but most of my business comes from past coworkers with whom I formed close relationships via working late nights in the office, going to happy hours, grabbing a coffee at the break room, etc. So, while I agree the companies are pursuing their own agendas, I think workers (especially young workers) could benefit from RTO.

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.

Amazon wants retention? That seems very strange and counter-intuitive. When did this happen?

Its about socio pathic no life loners with power wanting company,the company be damned.

> I don’t think the world is so coordinated.

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.

It's all the people you'd expect, some purpose-built REITs, big investment firms and private equity, Blackrock, Blackstone and other wealth management, the larger investment banks and the commercial mortgage paper owners are also directly invested (double dipping just like we saw in 2008, where banks would buy mortgages and also leverage those mortgages with derivatives)

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".

> Ok, so which “elites” are holding real estate portfolios and creating these stories in the media bashing remote work? Who are they?

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.

I don't think it is far fetched tho. If you have a couple of millions to spare, you can easily set up a little think tank on how to effect certain changes. If you're willing to throw money at something, it requires minimal effort to coordinate.

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.

Lobby groups like the Property Council of Australia were extremely supportive when the public service in New South Wales (a state of Australia) started forcing RTO: https://www.realestatebusiness.com.au/commercial/28416-nsw-s... ; https://www.governmentnews.com.au/nsw-public-servants-ordere...

Or if maybe big landlord pay millions to consultants to fix this problem dollars get involved and you start seeings these PR pieces and these CEO edicts and so on.

If you have billions of dollars in real estate losses and think can offset the losses by driving some anti remote work stories in media, I don't see why rich people would not do this. Also you think planting stories needs coordinated work across media. It doesn't. Read more about it.

Wealthy people are in the same social circles, of course they keep hearing these concerns about commercial real estate. They don't have to formally coordinate because they share the same class interests. You could even argue part of this coordination happens subconsciously.

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.

It's not exactly coordinated. Powerful businesspeople usually own real estate, it's great for financing new ventures and so on, and they have habits. They go to clubs, golf courses, rather exclusive hunting trips and so on, where they meet other people with power in business. And they talk, speculate on the future and develop a community.

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.

> I don’t think the world is so coordinated.

I suggest you read or watch something about McKinsey.

> 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).

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.

Exactly, these articles always just make me face palm because the authors never manage a cogent argument about who is making the actual RTO decisions and who cares about commercial real estate values. It's much easier just to chalk it up to the nebulous and scary "elites" and then the authors don't have to do any actual research.

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.

Well here in the UK Lord Sugar has vocally complained about people working from home (whilst doing so himself).

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...

I can't answer this definitively; I doubt anyone can, but I can suggest at least two possible mechanisms that don't require a shadowy cabal of elite conspirators. These don't require anything other than people acting in accordance with incentives that they already have. I'm sure it's not hard to find more.

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.

There's two curious things happening at once that are not often talked about together: there are RTO mandates and tech companies are also dropping stock compensation without a replacement.

Whether that lends credence to the authors theory or not is an open question, but it's another financial motivator.

"You don't need formal conspiracies when interest converge" - George Carlin

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAFd4FdbJxs

The world doesn't have to be coordinated. People mistake the fact that it's easier to selfishly gain from chaos for conspiracy: what you see is a result of every man for himself thinking, combined with their being little downside to seeding a narrative and seeing if it sticks.

Sum of all people receiving pensions? aka Boom(AndBust)ers. Welcome to the Gerontonecropolis, where we work hard to be burried in similar luxury .

I would agree, but...

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.

I do not think that you need to be around to make connections. I have had colleagues who were at office once every blue moon but everyone in the office knew them and invited them everywhere. And I also know of people who sit on opposite desks for years and only have greetings and coffee chit-chats when forced to.

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.

While I can agree that starting as a new hire can be daunting, there should not (theoretically) be a case where a single colleague stonewalling a new hire is a problem. At least in an org set up correctly for remote work. Smaller teams (or those with a single decision maker) are more susceptible to failing this, but thats a management problem that needs to br highlighted and addressed. And requires management to be actual people and process managers, and not psuedo manage by following some random guides and ticking off items on a checklist and "managing" by graph/stat outputs and only attempting to make some dashboard green, lines moving in the direction etc.

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.

> global cabal

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.

The conspiracy theories are frequently based on the optimistic idea that the world is under somebody's control. Mind you, it's a bad control, but the idea is still optimistic because we can theoretically have a revolution and put it under "good" control.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias

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.

Aside from conspiracy theories, remote working was already a thing before Covid, Covid just accelerated the process and showed to everyone that it worked. IMHO what we are now seeing is a "counter-revolution", an attempt to get the genie back into the bottle, and those are mostly doomed to fail...

It’s more there’s a bunch of people who put their life savings into cheap structures on expensive land in SF and Seattle. If the next generation of high income professionals doesn’t have to buy their shitty 100 year old money pit, they’ve now taken a loss on the single biggest purchase they’ve ever made while the schools they bought for get worse. Many of these folks work at places like Amazon.

No conspiracy needed for a bunch of people to act in their own perceived best interest and work backwards to a justification.

Game theory, not conspiracy

Really? A workplace with no proper desk, chair, lighting, multi screen setup, isolation from domestic distractions, crappy phone lines due to bad internet, the hurdle of contacting someone who used to sit next to you, and the impossibility of scribbling something on a whiteboard etc?

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

Out of curiosity, which country do you live in where software engineers can strike.

Won't work, because those who work remotely are already striking every day, by slacking off. From management's perspective your strike changes nothing.

(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.)

I guess the argument is that business leaders feel that their unused office space is a waste and/or they want to exercise more control as mentioned in other comments.

Also wouldn't the most sensible strategy for these ruthless capitalist to let in entirely crash and then scoop it up at the bottom and then mandate RTO...

Did you also dangle your next headquarter location in front of them? No? Might be a connection. Or rather, no connection.

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.

granted

thou, most businesses need some sort of real estate and getting it from someone you already know is often preferred

Yes, this is undoubtedly also a factor. Cities offer incentives to these large companies to open offices because they have an impact on their surroundings (see [1]). Workers support surrounding businesses; with the workers at home, these businesses must surely struggle. I can't imagine that the cities are not putting pressure on the large companies to bring workers back to the offices.

[1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/making-sense/heres-what...

> There are a lot of positives with working from home but dont forget about the wider repercussions

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.

Wouldn't opportunities arise to where people live instead?

Things would just not be as concentrated in the areas surrounding commercial buildings.

But why is that my problem? The restaurants that are closer to me will get more of my business as will closer businesses to me. Of course some will get hurt and some will get helped, that’s just economics.

I’m not sure how the accounting works, but I witness the head of facilities get short with a guy who was coming to the office, but was listed as a remote worker. She said he was costing them a desk in the office, while also the expense of being remote.

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.

Then their jobs didn’t mean anything to start then? What well run business doesn’t have metrics for their employees to meet ? If they are able to “vacation” and get their jobs done, what is the harm in that?

I've seen multibilion dollar companies sacrifice productivity for even more retarded reasons.

[dead]

Blackrock is on the board of both these entities.

What's the "/h"?

Well, OP's POV is challenging you to reconcile your views with the information they presented. You say you prefer in-person for productivity reasons. TFA provides several sources indicating that working remote actually improves productivity.

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?

You could also adjust your world view so that your employees or potential employees aren’t automatically considered petulant and grumpy based on their job title.

What I typically saw were people in the office doing a lot of nothing, because if they were in the office it was “working” just being there. Those working from home worked extra hard to try and prove they were actually working and making sure they were getting noticed.

During quarantine, companies universally congratulated themselves and their staff on the boost in productivity that WFH enabled.

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 think it is about the idiotic old mentality of control, sense of 'ownership' and distrust.

> It’s some kind of influence effort. Maybe even Russian.

Russians are amateurs compared to proper "influence efforts" like, for example https://www.telegraph.co.uk/authors/r/rk-ro/ross-clark/ :

> Why are the BBC weather maps on fire? Is it none too subtle climate propaganda?

> Electric cars are a Trojan horse for the destruction of driving

> Net zero now threatens our national security

> The heat pump fantasy is dead – only our blinkered elites haven’t noticed

> The Brexit revolt is spreading across Europe – and the Brussels elites are terrified

Oh, yes, and:

> Lazy Britain now needs to be paid to get back to the office - Slashing Friday travel fares is the wrong way to fix our entitled, WFH, unproductive workforce

All these are real "thought pieces" in a real British broadsheet, if you can believe it...

At least don't be lazy with your research. Divisive or not, she's[1] been writing for years. The idea that her writing is Russian disinformation is ridiculous.

[1] https://x.com/JessicaLexicus

It's a substack blog, there's no trickery going on. It just means she used https://jessicawildfire.substack.com/ until now

Maybe they are traitorous Putin assets, if that would help lower standards of proof and be more palatable bogeyman for you.

Right, counter a conspiracy theory with another conspiracy theory...

“Putin has weaponized RTO” is an interesting theory, but the even more interesting one is that home-office was a plot to undermine Western society by making people lonelier and less productive.

> It’s garbage meant to sow divisiveness.

You mean like random unfounded fear-mongering about Russians?

Way to stereotype bald, overweight, and 50 year old+ people. This is an absurd post.

> 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.