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Comment by ashtonkem | Hacker News Reader

I think you'll find that it makes sense if you begin imagining non-productivity reasons why execs want workers back. Sunk cost fallacy over an expensive office is a regular guess, personally I suspect that it's got to be quite a rush to see hundreds of people working at your direction in an office and remote work cannot replace that.

That or bad management techniques work better in person.

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It's astonishing how unified the message is, across big tech and smaller tech leaderships. It's like every CEO is reading a script from the same business magazine: "We understand how important it is for employees to return to the office and we can't wait to make this happen! We know that this is the One True Way to work, and that everyone is looking forward to it! We must get Back To Normal and the only way to do it is to get bodies in offices." How many of us have heard variations of this script in our own internal memos?

I've never seen all of Corporate America's CxO-level Leadership so aligned with each other on a topic like they are aligned on Return To Office being the only logical way...

Maybe the are used to collect all the suffering by sitting over the main office with all its cubicles.

Maybe they are afraid of a way more aggressive competition for workers and what they have to pay them. Considering they now could switch the workplace via different login credentials.

What alternative hypotheses have you considered and dismissed to explain why so many CEOs agree on this approach?

There exists an area of study emerging in economics covering the effect of companies being directed by a small number of shareholders - for example, if the key stakeholders of all US airlines are (for the sake of the argument) Black Rock, then what effect does that have on the companies? If they same shareholder selects the same sort of execs for all their airlines in their portfolio, how does that affect the strategies for each company? If Delta loses share but United gains it and you've got a similar shareholding in both, what difference does it make.

If significant investors have heavy positions in commercial and residential real estate in particular locations, and also has a significant position in companies who employ workers in those locations, how might that change the perception of how your employer does business? Will support a CEO taking a position that tanks their real estate positions?

They are reading the script. It is an narrative.

Mostly it is very hard politics.

Forcing tech people to live in zone X will increase voters and tax revenues to political party Z.

there is whole system to "milk" the middle class.

Rents, taxes, products, private schools, medical centers, etc.

Now with remote working suddenly some rents are getting lower in high rent places.

People are now really choosing where they want to be and whom they will socialize.

Imagine the audacity of serfs having freedom..

I assume most of this is simple survivorship bias. The kind of people who become executive leaders are the those who thrive in that specific office environment, so naturally they will want to preserve it.

It's like asking polar bears what temperature to set the thermostat. They're going to want it like the arctic because that's their home.

Well, as part of my MBA classes I read a metric ton of WFH articles and some interviews with CEOs. And all of them get the same advice from their HR, finance and compliance and likely get very similar responses from their respective heads. Since that is the case, it is less of a surprise that the decisions they optimize for is so prevalent.

As an anecdote, as part my class last semester I did an interview with 2nd in command at our company. It was exactly this. Covid is a temporary distortion of the market.

edit: removed between the lines part; its my interpretation so it might be an unfair read

I don't know why these companies with massive in-person offices don't just convert them into mini data centers. Maybe have 1 or 2 top level floors reserved for in-person meetings or executives but the rest of the building can be used for housing data centers.

Most businesses wouldn't even need to an entire floor.

I don't think offices make great datacenters without a lot of investment in HVAC at least, beyond the handful of racks they might already have in a few rooms. Plus most businesses don't own their offices, they lease them from a property owner that would probably prefer to keep it as office space should the business fail.

So why don't they just not renew the lease on 50-80% of that expensive office space? It's not like a majority of tech businesses own the buildings their office is in. Or if they do, rent the excess out to others. (Sure, right now if everyone does either, the office-space rental market will pretty much crash... But a lot more tech corps would profit from that than would suffer from not getting good profits from renting out their property.)

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