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Comment by manishsharan | Hacker News Reader

The fear of an collapse in commercial real estate is driving these decisions. What 4 hours of your life each day compared to the well being of the real estate moguls ?

I am staying at my job (100% wfh )and foregoing other opportunities in the job market as an extra hour of playtime with my kid is worth that much to me. The minute my employer changes their mind, I will be out hunting similar WFH job

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That $1T giants care more about a $10b real estate portfolio than 2% productivity of their workforce is the biggest QAnon level conspiracy that HN supports which makes no sense.

Even places on the cutting edge of tech, like OpenAI, have no real estate portfolio and require full time in person. Don't even start that it's because they're worried about their $2m house becoming $1m... Or you fundamentally don't understand how much the productivity of these businesses are actually worth.

Considering that a nobody like myself has "real estate" in his portfolio, I have no doubt that people at Jassy's level have stakes in all kinds of businesses that will benefit from RTO.

Commercial RE is just one of them. They could have Airbnb/rental properties, restaurants, franchise fast food, private car services.

Jassy has ~$100 million / year compensation for doing his job. He is outvoted by >99% of the companies shareholders. Jassy doing anything not in the best interest of shareholders will get him fired. He does not care about random properties that are peanuts compared to his compensation and status as CEO of Amazon.

Jassy's reported ~$200M CEO compensation package is spread over a decade (not annual), and Jassy has significant Seattle investments, including a stake in Seattle's new NHL team and a ~$7M house

Sorry .. I am unable to understand what you meant. Could you elaborate ?

Many people on HN claim that big co's like Amazon, Apple, and Google only want RTO (return to office) because they stand to lose so much money in real estate. However, these are companies worth >$1,000 billion. When you dig into the value of their corporate real estate holdings, it's almost always only $5-20 billion, a paltry percentage of their overall worth. Their financial incentives mean they do not care about losing even 50% of a $5-$20B real estate portfolio, if it in anyway impacts the ability of their workforce to be productive in making the $50 billion/year profits required to maintain >$1,000 billion equity value. Losing 50% on $10B real estate means a 0.5% loss. Losing just 1% productivity on your workforce is a 1% loss, double.

These companies care about their software productivity and profits, period. That's what drives their decisions. Their worth isn't comprised of real estate.

> These companies care about their software productivity and profits, period. That's what drives their decisions.

Then there ought to be enough data on the productivity of RTO to shut up all the naysayers on HN. It's not there. It doesn't exist. Jassy admitted his decision was based on groupthink.

Data already exists[0][1], the big co’s have more, and they are figuring out how to release it tactfully without upsetting their employees and getting bogged down in debates. Like how China builds high speed rail while California can’t get around everyone’s conflicting opinion. HN is just a bit of an echo chamber of antisocial pro-wfh opinion, from majority employees that care about their personal interest rather than total company productivity, that you’ve never heard of the data.

[0] https://www.nber.org/papers/w31515 [1] https://wfhresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/SIEPR1.pd...

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