Comment by burnte

Comment by burnte 4 days ago

18 replies

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> I can see this being a valid argument for return to office for a lot of corporations, if its actually true. The tax benefits are too good to pass up and in office has been the status quo forever.

Holding on to what is now an outdated view of worker utilization might help them for a couple years with these tax incentives, but they're going to get a lower quality of worker, and incur a lot of retraining costs as people quit. They're going to have to pivot to having less commercial real estate eventually.

supportengineer 4 days ago

The executives must look out and see a bottomless supply of cheap engineers. And I doubt they plan on training anybody at all. It’s just a race to the bottom at this point.

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  • burnte 4 days ago

    They'll be gone in 3 years. This will juice the stock price as investors will be happy with gaining additional tax benefits. By the time the problems bubble up from a weakened foundation it'll be the next guy's problem.

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    • snoman 4 days ago

      Amazon already had very high turnover before Covid. Many people don’t stick around (willingly or otherwise) after the year 2 hiring bonus cliff.

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  • GenerocUsername 3 days ago

    As long as shipping in whole floors of indians is a viable strategy it will continue. As soon as they cannot shio them in, they will ship the jobs to India. We need tariffs and controls to maintain quality of living standards above the global median

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Aurornis 4 days ago

> but they're going to get a lower quality of worker, and incur a lot of retraining costs as people quit.

This gets repeated a lot online but statistics don’t really support it. They will lose some number of employees but the significant majority of people just go along with RTO policies.

All of the headlines claiming employees will quit if their companies mandate RTO are based on self-reported surveys where people are asked hypothetical questions. When reality hits and people are forced to choose between their large FAANG comp or quitting, it turns out barely anyone quits.

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  • marcus_holmes 4 days ago

    The people who are there to solve interesting problems quit [0]. The people who are there for the cash stay.

    The vast majority of any large organisation are in the second category, so your statement is 100% correct.

    Whether the organisation loses something because the first category leaves, is open to debate. I think they would.

    [0] because they now have the experience (and option at other organisations) of working from home full-time, which reduces their exposure to corporate bullshit and pointless meetings.

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    • srockets 3 days ago

      It’s a job, if you’re not there for the pay, you’re also hurting every other worker by reducing the market price for similar labor.

      The people who are there to “solve interesting problems” are there to do so for pay. But, they can also get paid by other employers, who can offer more sensible employment terms.

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    • dnissley 3 days ago

      To be fair not all people who are there to solve interesting problems prefer remote, so they would only lose some subset of those folks.

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      • consteval 3 days ago

        Even if you don't "prefer" remote, the sheer cost savings of gaining an hour or two a day (or the cost savings of lower cost of living) is pretty hard to deny.

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        • dnissley 2 days ago

          My commute is ~15 mins each way fwiw. I do pay a premium to live nearby, but that is what the high compensation is for. Not even close to all of the extra compensation is eaten up by rent increase though.

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  • trickstra 3 days ago

    Statistics do support it though:

    - https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/06/nearly-half-of-dells...

    - https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20220523-the-workers-qu...

    - https://theconversation.com/bosses-are-increasingly-forcing-...

    - https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/06/company-heads-ho...

    - https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/05/rto-m...

    On the other hand, stats supporting the idea that working from office increases productivity are dubious at best, I've seen one which said 10% better productivity, but that could be offset by the lower costs of remote work. Maybe you can provide some research that convinced you otherwise?

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  • pteraspidomorph 4 days ago

    It probably depends on whether there have been hundreds of thousands of severances in the industry in recent years or not... People would probably quit if they didn't have to compete with an insane amount of people to get a job at this time.

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    • kmonsen 4 days ago

      Which is why we are seeing return to office right now.

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