Because loads of commercial real estate is empty that is all financed by mortgages which won't pay by themselves.
If a mission critical kernel can be developed remotely with people from basement of the world Australia to Seattle then these shopping carts, comparison websites, classified portals, review aggregators etc etc. should perfectly be possible remotely and if not, that's totally on your incompetence to communicate and organise things properly.
Corporate managers outing themselves as less competent at organizing work than a bunch of smelly[1] computer nerds and 16 year old MMO players in their parents’ basement. It’s pretty funny that they haven’t realized they’re dissing themselves hard.
Meanwhile, C-suite still managing from airports and golf courses and their vacation home. One wonders if it’s got more to do with class than effectiveness.
[1] sorry; stereotype for rhetorical effect
> C-suite still managing from airports and golf courses and their vacation home. One wonders if it’s got more to do with class than effectiveness.
This. The term is class consciousness. I suspect most execs think they deserve it, too. You know, from working so hard.
One empty C-suite office wastes less square feet of commercial real estate than an empty cubicle farm (unless the organisation is even more broken). Plus the C-suite isn't just stealing time (back) from the company to care for a sick kid. Oh noooo! They're doing the important the things they're entitled to like golf, tennis, and hookers.
The idea that RTO is being driven by the desire to prop up commercial real estate makes zero sense and needs to die. The vast majority of companies are renting their office space, and have no interest at all in the mortgage price of the building.
There may even be a counter incentive, where if the real estate values go down, so does the rental rate which would save the company money.
Trends among my mostly-not-even-tech circle of friends and acquaintances do not support this opinion.
Also, their answer is aspirational. They’re saying what they want to be true, to sway opinion. Whether they believe it has nothing to do with their answer, in most cases.
It seems like all they’re doing is pissing people off. They’re acting overly confident once again and acting like the feudal lords they see themselves as in the higher interest rate era, just like they were overconfident in hoarding talent in the lower interest rate era. They just can’t help themselves it seems.
As usual, the headline is more provocative than the actual article (not submitter's fault): "...U.S. corporate CEOs predicted that corporate roles that were performed in the office before the pandemic will be back in office full time within the next three years."
Basically if the job wasn't remote pre-pandemic, it likely won't be in the next few years either. Could say more about the corporate policy than the job function though.
As someone who's worked mostly remote for going on 15 years now, there will evolve a hybrid approach.
There's too much value to the individual in remote work for it to go away and there's too much value to the team to have a space to meet periodically. Some people thrive in remote, some people thrive in-office. I've had moments of both - there's definitely benefit to getting up earlier, dressed, commuting, being around other people but it doesn't have to be every day.
The office space comment is often made derisively, and I think it's definitely true. Huge, expensive offices need to be justified at some point, and when long-term leases expire a lot of larger companies will opt for new options. I just don't know what that is. Less space? Shared spaces? Hard to say. Another reason for offices is for appearances and recruitment. A great, beautiful office can be inspiring sometimes, and it's really nice to have that option.
But ultimately I think the wastefulness of full-time RTO will hit these companies and their CEOs and we'll have a lot more hybrid with mostly WFH at least in our industry.
The headline contradicts their own claims in the article. They say that corporate roles returning to in-office will give an opportunity to entrepreneurs to poach talent by offering remote work... which would mean that remote work is not dead.
No problem.
Just get me a decent home for fair price close to the office or the commuting and preparation for office will be deducted from working hours. Oh yes, decent desk and chairs, individual climate control, healthy and available food provided for fair price in a good variety to choose from. Flexibility to rearrange around essential personal matters. Otherwise fuck your office, sit in there alone dear CEO!
We have learned a lot about what can be done remote. However it isn't clear anyone has actually taken the time to put together a study of all that and come to real conclusions. Instead everyone wants to assume their bias is correct and do whatever their bias is.
Yeah but if you did 20 studies they'd still do that.
Which is why we need unions to push back, bylaws to protect workers right, and sensible environmental policies that promote remote work to reduce gas emission.
You need to have your employees in the office? Alright, pay for their commute and add a tax to finance public transportation systems for each employees at the office.
They spent the last couple of years trying to get everyone back in the office, but found limited success, so they are giving themselves another three years.
New headline: CEOs say things that help CEOs keep their jobs in front of boards.
"Man won't fly for a million years" says the New York Times, 9 days before Wright brothers' first flight
Sigh. It's the usual multi-millionaire CEO that can buy a multi-million apartment 15 minutes from the office telling staff that would have a 90 minute commute in hellish traffic or public transport and the physical and mental toll that ensues, to come into a noisy open-plan office to try and concentrate on a job, whilst moaning about productivity and costs.
Want me in your office? Give me an *office* with a door that shuts. And don't stop me from working from home if I need to sort out "life".
Stop being cheap.
"Come and work* for our multinational company and collaborate with smart colleagues around the world"
*must physically be in office to work with team 2000 miles and three timezones away over Zoom/Slack
> Want me in your office? Give me an office with a door that shuts. And don't stop me from working from home if I need to sort out "life".
Stop being cheap.
The finance and MBA folks have been busy for years trying to kick everyone else (doctors, lawyers, professors) out of the upper-middle class. It’s bad enough programmers make enough money to fit in that group, they’re not gonna let us have the perks and autonomy that come with it if they can avoid it.
The mental gymnastics with RTO and the global workforce reality is what pisses me off the most. American corporations have shipped so many jobs overseas and teams are distributed so widely it’s ludicrous to talk about the supposed RTO benefits for many people. I have coworkers forced to go to an office just because HR demands it but work with people overseas and in other states a majority of their day. We get up extra early to have meetings with engineers in low cost countries that replaced local engineers. And the trend continues.
Open plan offices remind me of factories, they want to return back to the good ol days.
They look like early 20th century accounting offices, when a lot of that was rote copy work (no copy machines, after all!). Like the office from The Crowd (1928):
https://c8.alamy.com/comp/HBKHYR/the-crowd-1928-HBKHYR.jpg
Sorry for the crappy watermarked image, best I saw. Movie’s pretty good if you can tolerate silent films.
It’s time for governments to levy extra taxes on companies that require employees to commute into the office.
The taxes should pay not only for the transportation infrastructure but also for the childcare costs that are incurred by employees forced to be in the office.
It’s reversed. Governments are holding back tax benefits due to companies not forcing their employees to work in their respective cities. Fat chance they’ll have a change of heart.
It shouldn't be expected of parents to work while providing active childcare. Both the parents and children deserve better than "Shush! Mommy is on a call." (at the kitchen table).
Here's the KPMG report on which the Inc piece is based...
https://kpmg.com/us/en/articles/2024/kpmg-2024-us-ceo-outloo...
Note: The survey was of CEOs of large companies world-wide, not a general survey of all CEOs across corporate sizes in any specific country.
It also states that flexibility is important. So take that however you want. Based on what I'm seeing in the workplace today, I'm reading that as "the BoD is invested in real estate, so we're saying we'll RTO but employees will really just be hybrid."
It would be nice if companies would at least make a decision one way or another. Instead companies continue to be wishy washy, changing policies, not enforcing policies, then enforcing the policy, so they use it as an excuse later to reduce the workforce.
Sure. The slaves must row and can’t leave the galleys. Guys living in the PowerPoint world can’t imagine that their subordinates are people and not abstract headcount number. And most of the people hate long commutes, full parking lots, cheap open offices and disgusting canteen food. I never had a mythical water cooler conversation with creativity burst. Because a water cooler was too expensive for a greedy CEO.
By mandate.
RTO is something CEOs want anyway. Gotta justify that office space, can't or won't downsize to a smaller space. And currently harsh RTO mandates function as stealth layoffs. It's win-win!
Someone's living under a rock :) Far from the truth.
But they have this expensive commercial real estate on their books...
If a sad day comes where they put me back in an office I’ll spend a lot of time planning my escape
One way of reading this claim is that, within 3 years, all work that only requires "pressing buttons to make the pattern of lights change" will be taken over by AI, and the only jobs that remain will be those where you have to do some dextrous in-person activities, like cleaning or plumbing.
I think remote work might have different acceptance in different stages of companies for most roles and maybe that’s okay.
Startups will benefit from big companies getting rid of talent.
Will be interesting to see how the market evolves.
The boards should fire CEOs who are willing to so openly rule out some of the best engineers from working for them.
The math is simple. Clearly some engineers hate offices. Clearly some engineers are good. Clearly those sets intersect. As long as your competition openly states they offer WFH while your company is run by an idiot who openly says “offices or bust”, you have just denied yourself some of the best talent. Not a clever move. Boards, take note.
That's why they published "79 Percent of CEOs", to provide cover. If we knew WHO they were specifically, well that might a great list of stocks to short.
Remote Work Says 79 Percent of CEO Roles Will Be Dead in 3 Years or Less
79% of CEOs either have significant holdings of commercial real estate, or have friends / family who do. None of this "RTO" nonsense has literally anything to do with productivity, creativity or whatever other nonsense CEOs are prattling on about, it has 100% to do with propping up the value of the commercial RE holdings of these CEOs and their cronies. The venn diagram of the people who own commercial real estate and the people opposed to remote work is a circle. These greedy, feckless bastards want you to sit in traffic and suffer not because it's going to make anything actually better, but because it's the only way to protect the value of their investments, and it make me sick.
Surveyed every CEO did they?
Why do they need to survey every CEO? As long as you have a large enough sample size that represents the larger group, you can get a really good idea of the general consensus. Looking at the KPMG report: "Our latest edition of the KPMG CEO Outlook analyzed insights from more than 1,300 CEOs at large companies globally, including 400 in the United States, to evaluate how they are continuing to navigate the challenge of compound volatility.", which is pretty good if we are considering large companies.
That's not how polling and statistics work.
