> Globally much of the pro-office camp's public position is driven by personal leanings of CEOs who genuinely seem to have made the decisions without evidence
In some cases, the pressure is also coming from external to the company, from cities and VCs and similar who care about the commercial real-estate value of now-abandoned offices.
I really don't think this is the case... I believe more than anything it's about the kind of personalities that make up people who are in charge of these decisions... Think about the types of people who are c-suite executives. They are likely people who prefer to be in an office setting.. at least most of the time. I don't think they like it very much coming into an office and seeing it mostly empty... Partly because it diminishes their perceived value as a leader and everything they've worked for but also because they truly believe people work better in person because that's what they've always done and continue to want to do.
I think that's actually plausible, because yeah, if I was to put myself in their shoes. If someone is looking for status, and people looking up to them, etc, it would make sense that they would get much less that sort of attention if everyone is working remotely. Getting that through the Zoom is not exactly what it would be in real life.
While we’re debating whether it’s a conspiracy from the elites or not, that eludes debates on the real important questions for a team lead/founder like me:
Does the office provide a better environment for building things together? How much do people cheat in WFH situations? Do people ask for help at the right time in WFH? What are the right ratios: A few days per week, or a few weeks per year, or everyone at home because we don’t like each other? By the way, do people develop the same sense of workmateness when only meeting colleagues remotely?
It seems all that union-talk “Boss is evil. Boss wants office. Office evil. Bad managers.” is kidnapping a real debate that is extremely important.
Unless I’m proven otherwise:
- People who WFH 2 days per week seem to spend 1hr less per day working,
- 100%-Remote people never seem to belong to the company, and in fact the team of 4 that I’ve recruited still seems to be in the underproductive ramp-up after 8 months, and it only lasts 2-3 months with local people.
Unless we stop debating whether real estate companies form a coup against the workers, I’ll never hear better arguments.
> Does the office provide a better environment for building things together?
Not for me personally, because at home I can create the perfect environment. Tons of monitors, high noise satisfying mechanical keyboard, that I'm sure would bother others in the office, music that puts me in the flow, very large desk, really comfy clothes, the exact lighting, temperature, water and coffee and everything that is perfect for me.
> Do people ask for help at the right time in WFH?
I think that's a culture thing, but if not it should be talked about and Slack should be used for that, people should have good culture around when they respond or how responses are expected.
> What are the right ratios: A few days per week, or a few weeks per year, or everyone at home because we don’t like each other?
I think it should be optional however frequently everyone wants to come. Also not wanting to come to office doesn't mean to me that I don't like someone. I just don't want to have the obligation of socialising. I want to focus on what I want to focus at the time.
> By the way, do people develop the same sense of workmateness when only meeting colleagues remotely?
It's something I don't particularly care for. I enjoy building things, but I don't particularly care for team building or similar things. The thing is then this means that if I come to office or team building events, it's something that I have to actively spend energy on to pretend that I care and that this is fun. I get much less work done if there's pressure of socialisation, especially unrelated to the actual work since it's mentally draining and takes focus away from actual work.
> - People who WFH 2 days per week seem to spend 1hr less per day working,
In a healthy environment we shouldn't actually measure hours spent on working, but the value/output produced. I don't track how many hours I work. For all you know, maybe all I do is work when I'm sleeping so add another 8h there to my hours measured since my subconscious is deep at work. All I'm making sure is that my deliveries are hitting what is expected and more in terms of quality and quantity. It's another great aspect for me. If I have a low inspiration day, I will maybe do a hour of work just to make sure there's no fires, I'm not blocking anyone else and do whatever I want for the rest of the day. However if I have high inspiration day I will do a continuous 13h spurt without eating or going anywhere. No need to try myself fit neatly in a 8h schedule that just doesn't align with how my energy naturally operates. I don't need to justify how I operate and spend my hours to some arbitrary standards. All they see is that I deliver and if they are not control freaks, that should be enough for them. I've been in an environment where people don't doubt my deliveries, but maybe that's because I'm lucky to be in such an environment.
> - 100%-Remote people never seem to belong to the company, and in fact the team of 4 that I’ve recruited still seems to be in the underproductive ramp-up after 8 months, and it only lasts 2-3 months with local people.
Firstly - I don't belong to anyone to be clear. I'm not a slave. I belong to myself. Even if I went to the office I wouldn't "belong" to anyone. I wouldn't work for a company that would own me in the first place. In fact anyone can quit at any time. I'm here to build things, not to belong to anyone. The company has a product to build and the product provides value at scale, I'm here for building it to the best of my abilities.
> I’ve recruited still seems to be in the underproductive ramp-up after 8 months
I think that's a hiring problem (skill issue tbh). I'm being a bit snarky since you seemed to imply that people should belong to companies or at least you worded it that way. I've done a lot of hiring as well, and we are all remote and we managed to hire a great, motivated team. I have no doubt they are doing their things diligently and it's clearly visible even through Zoom since they talk about their technical challenges and it's clear what kind of effort they've put in. If they didn't put in the effort they wouldn't be able to talk about those challenges at such detail. And I do constantly think how great job we did hiring.
I'm going to need some data to prove this. I keep seeing this claim, but have not seen anything more than conjecture. There are just too many factors for this, and you would have to believe that a company is willing to throw away money for this to happen.
There are tons of articles out there about mayors/council members/ etc pressuring execs to get butts in office seats for the past few years. I don’t know if that counts as data to you or not, but they are relatively easy to find in a google search.
They already threw away the money by purchasing real estate and falling for the sunk cost fallacy.
Or they’re on the hook for a lease for the next five years and it will cost more to break the lease.
Companies waste money all the time. I don’t think it’s a stretch to think they did or would waste oodles of money on purchasing or leasing their offices.
That’s not evidence. It’s as baseless as the other side’s arguments. You’ve just heard it on HN enough times and are parroting it. I assure you that there’s not a person on this website that hasn’t read essentially your exact comment 100 times. OP is saying that one nerd’s reckoning doesn’t constitute evidence.
Exactly. The home office debate is a great example of motivated reasoning - many people really like the personal benefits of home office which makes them look for things which confirm their view (with the bar for "evidence" being very low).
The more passion you have, the more ridiculous form it takes. In normal debates, intelligent people usually admit that there are various trade-offs, and there are different POVs which might favor one trade-off over another. But in the home office debate, pro-HO seems to take a position that RTO cannot have any true, valid benefit, there's no real trade-off to be made, and therefore it can be explained only by ulterior motives or some conspiracy - usually hyper-controlling managers or this real estate conspiracy.
It does feel like a debate that is mostly qualitative, and from two different sides (employee and employer).
My anecdotal experience has been that most employees I speak to are pretty clear about certain elements at the individual level but vary along many key axes: home office allows them to focus OR is too distracting; they miss the office culture OR hate the inefficiency of office smalltalk; they thrive on in-person connections OR thrive in focused isolation. There is also the topic of commuting, which most people don't love doing.
Employers should largely be motivated by more quantitative thinking, although in practice this varies and the metrics themselves are notoriously difficult to quantify.
Don’t forget the biggest interruption of all … the commute, sometimes 1-2 hours or more per day, just to get to the office and take advantage of the “benefits”.
I don't start working on something hard just before leaving home, like I don't start before a meeting. It's the surprises that really tear up the workday.
"Interruption" is only one side of the coin, there's usually a reason why somebody is interrupting you and not being able to interrupt you (=not get an important information) will often cost a lot for their productivity.
I think it heavily depends on the person and type of work. I'm SWE and for most daily work I don't mind getting interrupted - I'm able to get back to work without a problem. It's only if I work on an extra difficult problem which requires very deep focus, I go somewhere quiet, but that's less than once a week.
I think having deep work to do is the biggest sign that a team has found a good use for me. It's how tech companies build competitive products. Commodity work should be automated; Moore's Law already paid for doing that.
2/3 of corporate real estate are empty and the commercial real estate market is due for a major crash. a lot of assets on companies balance sheets are for the offices that they own. or leave empty while leased
Separately but simultaneously, there are often local tax-benefits which depend on the company "creating jobs", and that's often defined in a way that means butts-in-offices downtown.
The hidden layoff round is also high on that list if you ask me.
They call everyone back to the office, the people that dont want/cant will not adhere, and thus be fired without the companies having to pay severance.
As an amazonian, this has come up during the five day RTO discussion. As a manager, I can't imagine a more obvious way to destroy the service that I help run and then really risk losing customer trust.
I we are all cogs at some point but I really have trouble being this cynical.
not really. there used to be a system where the SF government of course provided tax benefits for Twitter (now X) and Square (now Block) to open offices to enliven Market Street. Jack Dorsey fell into this trap and actually did establish his office there, until the SF government decided to cash their Golden goose and take these tax breaks away.
and so right after, Square has gone fully remote as well as X has mostly left the Bay area
"RTO is definitely the play: the CEO says all his friends are doing it; activist-investors want RTO for their own porfolios, PR says breaking the lease on our newish HQ is embarrassing while Legal says it makes more work for them; Accounting says we'll pay more in tax unless we can prove X jobs created locally; our middle-managers need it in order to tell if work is happening, and HR notes that we can slim our workforce by prompting a lot of 'voluntary' departures! Seven key stakeholder groups."
"But will the employees be happy, and will good ones stay?"
"Seven to one, my friend. They're just grumbling like always."
While all of that is true, I wonder how much of it is re-affirmation of a social hierarchy.
From the bosses point of view RTO is a costly signal that demonstrates how much people want to work for them - signals must be costly in order to be effective. Promoting WFO as more productive and less costly destroys the signaling aspect. Perhaps workers could offer other costly signals - maybe regular arduous in person team building exercises that management can show their friends photos. I really can't think of many alternative socially acceptable costly signals that can be required from employees which is probably why RTO continues to remain so popular.
Local tax benefits is the exception, not the norm. Just because 1% of the companies get that for 1% of the location, it doesn't prove 90% of the companies have WFH policy.
And there are countries/states where the respective corportate tax is 0. Shouldn't shifting your virtual company to that be better than say opening office in California, even if assuming you get local tax benefits.
“Send us a count of employees whose home addresses is in state S (or city C). We reserve the right to audit that count.”
If a politician wants jobs in their state in exchange for state tax breaks (or same for a city or county), they can easily condition it on creating/showing X jobs for people who will there. Remote work can break that.
>In some cases, the pressure is also coming from external to the company, from cities and VCs and similar who care about the commercial real-estate value of now-abandoned offices.
That logic seems... questionable. Even if CRE firms are in VCs/investors' portfolios, it doesn't make sense to divert money from your SaaS companies to prop up your CRE firms. In the best case (ie. both sides are owned by you), such transfers are zero to slightly negative sum (from opportunity costs and costs associated with operating an office). In the typical case where you're renting from another CRE company, such transfers are definitely negative. It doesn't make sense to go spend your money to prop up the broader CRE market as a CRE investor, just like it doesn't make sense for you to go out to buy iPhones to prop up Apple shares as an Apple investor.
I keep seeing this being brought up, I haven't researched it too much, but it's a bit hard for me to believe that this could truly be the case, that there's such huge influence from commercial real estate owners on CEOs of much larger companies? What causes them to have such power over large companies?
The pressure is not from smaller RE companies, is from the biggest banks who control the comercial debt and see the writing on the wall. The banking industry can exert indirect pressure on lots of tech investors. Similarly for politicians in large cities and states who can control the tax side of the equation.
I'm not from the US, so I don't have direct sight into all of that. Luckily, I think there's many start ups and other companies who are valuing and all in on the remote work. I haven't felt the risk at my company to have a strong urge of getting people return to the office.
>Go watch any daytime cable news investment shows and you'll see it.
As in "we need to RTO to prop up commercial real estate" specifically, or something more general like "we need to RTO to increase collaboration" or whatever?
Is this actually happening? I have seen this idea thrown out a lot online but it always feels like a conspiracy theory to me (akin to "fine art is a tax write-off")
This is the case for the city of Boston. The city derives the vast majority of its budget from commercial property taxes, it's why residential property taxes are so low in the city.
Use to work for a company that was literally told by the city that if they don't have X amount of people in the building they will lose their tax incentives they got for having the company there. The company slowly mandated hybrid then RTO everyday in about 6 months. Got out 2 weeks before it was implemented. My coworkers were extremely jealous that I got a WFH job.
I think part of the equation is that less people are going into the office so values of buildings are going down, less people in downtown the less money that goes to all the restaurants/shops/stores during the week.
I can't speak for other cities since I don't live in them but Boston has never really recovered from the pandemic in terms of office workers.
Because that’s what feeds local businesses especially shops and service oriented jobs. I’m not saying I care that happens because remote workers can do that closer to their home so it’s a net zero game, but not in the eyes of business owners downtown or the mayors of said downtowns.
People being downtown are people more likely to spend money downtown then someone who lives in the suburbs and doesn't come to downtown. Therefore more sales taxes collected, more businesses in downtown, etc...
For Boston in particular, governmental borders are close to downtown. The city is composed of several unconsolidated abutting Towns and Cities. The City of Boston[1] mostly extends from downtown to the south-west. So MIT/Harvard are Town of Cambridge, not City of Boston. Downtown-vs-suburb revenue tensions extend into the city.
For analogy, imagine the historical City of New York (Manhattan and Bronx) never consolidated with the City of Brooklyn and the city and towns of Queens County, to form a City of Greater New York. WFH Queens would be as bad for Manhattan as WFH New Jersey. Not only loss of going-to-work-associated revenue, but little home-associated. As it is, the mayor vocally pushed for back-to-office (real-estate interests are powerful in NYC, transit budget income, CRE better-vacant-than-cheaper dysfunction, etc).
Because then transit, services, restaurants, stores, dry-cleaners, gyms fail, and the taxbase collapses (every city has a different mix of commercial vs residential property tax vs sales-tax).
DowntownRecovery.com project mapped this (using cellphone user data, at least)
It's not just downtown that matters, it is the total population living in the city. People working from home will live away from Boston or other major cities. If they need to work in a downtown office the same people will be forced to live in Boston or close by.
Yes, Amazon needs people to fill their expensive offices in Seattle, or otherwise explain to investors that they wasted billions of dollars building new offices that were used less than 5 years.
>> otherwise explain to investors that they wasted billions of dollars building new offices that were used less than 5 years.
So what? I mean companies write down things all the time. "We've revalued our $billion office and adjusted our balance sheet to match. Cause was a global pandemic which we considered as a risk factor in 2019, but it was negligible."
Stock will drop a % or two for a week, then recover and move on (especially as the Amazon machine continues to print cash.)
Microsoft wrote off the Nokia purchase with a shrug and the world just moved on.
Explaining a change of work environment to investors seems like a pretty minor bump, not a major factor in decision making.
I agree in that I don't think explaining a write off is a problem, per se. But I do see Amazon taking a long term view of their real estate investment and saying "OK we have it in our power to make this payoff" which dynamic is not in play with most writedowns.
I bet there are some incentives in there but it's not the whole picture. It's probably the combination of many things but mostly management that don't know how to manage people remotely, or they started to realise that most middle manager positions are obsolete/unnecessary.
“You don't need a formal conspiracy when interests converge. These people went to the same universities, they're on the same boards of directors, they're in the same country clubs, they have like interests, they don't need to call a meeting, they know what's good for them and they're getting it.”
This argument has never made sense. Commercial real estate exists to optimize the real cost (labor). There is no temptation to put it above the needs of labor.
In some cases, the pressure is also coming from external to the company, from cities and VCs and similar who care about the commercial real-estate value of now-abandoned offices.