Comment by add-sub-mul-div 2 days ago
They wouldn't be rushing to take back facilities and electricity costs that had been offloaded to employees if they didn't think it was a net benefit.
Local commercial real estate markets aren't holding the reins of the tech industry.
If Amazon (or some other company) thought they were going to be more profitable and more successful working remotely, I don't think the threat is credible of some commercial property owning shareholders deciding to further underperform the market by dumping shares unless that company made the decision to underperform by forcing RTO.
"If you want to threaten me that you'll underperform unless I do, be my guest..."
I suspect that different companies could have different motivations (including potentially forcing resignations), but it strains credibility for me that it's to answer to shareholders in conflict with what they think will make them successful.
> If Amazon (or some other company) thought they were going
This presumes that the company is fully capable of measuring and comparing the utility between RTO and working from home. That might be the case or it might be mainly due to management culture and other indirect factors but neither is self evident.
Major corporations are almost by definition have massive amounts of bloat and inefficiency to one degree or another and are carried (especially tech companies) by certain products/teams/departments the rest are often there only for the ride (short to medium term at least and who has time for any "long-term" development these days?). To be clear, I don't think this has that much to do with people who are "lazy" or hard workers (you can put in extreme amounts of effort into something that leads nowhere).
Anyway, not particularly pro or anti-RTO but I just find it bizarre that we usually assume that decisions making in large companies are always logical, rational and quantifiable and are not made to benefit specific subgroups or individuals in one way or another.
> Major corporations are almost by definition have massive amounts of bloat and inefficiency to one degree or another and are carried (especially tech companies) by certain products/teams/departments the rest are often there only for the ride (short to medium term at least and who has time for any "long-term" development these days?). To be clear, I don't think this has that much to do with people who are "lazy" or hard workers (you can put in extreme amounts of effort into something that leads nowhere).
This is a really good summary, IME.
Yes there's loads of people that do "actual work" (technical work) on projects that are "pet/promo projects" that are doomed from the start to go nowhere and have no path to profitability.
There's also loads of managers managing managers overseeing project managers etc etc
I don't presume that they are fully capable of measuring and comparing the utility between RTO and WFH.
I think they're making the decision based on 5-15% data/measurement and 85-95% beliefs and judgment. I don't know how you'd possibly carefully and precisely measure something as multi-faceted as the difference between the two modes of working, especially when the one pre/post test you have data on was heavily influenced by COVID, ZIRP, massive stimulus, massive disruptions to economic consumption patterns and working patterns, but you still have to decide where to position yourself between "working the way we did in Dec 2019" and "working the way we did in April 2020 or June 2021".
They wouldn't threaten to dump shares (and they may not even be allowed to dump shares, eg. they may be an index fund). Instead, they'd threaten to exercise their votes, and potentially fire the CEO.
But most likely they wouldn't have to. The CEO knows that a deleveraging event would kill their stock options even if their company outperforms the market on the way down.
>it strains credibility for me that it's to answer to shareholders in conflict with what they think will make them successful
I'm not so sure. I don't think that it's exactly the most probably scenario, but I can absolutely see it being a factor. I don't think there's some commercial real estate mogul on every F500 board demanding RTO, reality is way more complicated than that.
> It also seems like most publicly traded companies have instituted some form of RTO by now
So have plenty of private companies.
> It's not the most far-fetched conspiracy theory
It really is. (With unusual prevalence in the San Francisco Bay Area.) You're talking about some of the most powerful and notoriously-independent companies on the planet kowtowing to invisible shareholder pressure.
It seems like RTO isn't specific to the tech industry.
It also seems like most publicly traded companies have instituted some form of RTO by now.
I'm fairly certain that many entities that hold large amounts of commercial real estate also own large amounts of stock in companies that are doing RTO.
It's not the most far-fetched conspiracy theory.