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Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

Not just worldview... there's a lot of money at stake. Providing office space is effectively an entire industry, so an entire industry is at stake here. And then that industry has financial derivatives on top of it, so the financial industry has a lot of incentive to get people back in offices so supply goes down and prices can go back up. There's a lot of money available to PR-submarine articles about the virtues of back-to-office. I'm surprised we don't see much, much more.

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> Providing office space is effectively an entire industry, so a

But using office space costs companies money, and they're not the ones leasing it. It is totally against their own interests to pay extra facilities costs, when they could just shirk that burden onto their employees who have to pay for a home office themselves. We're not seeing big real estate companies push this while big tech companies try to distance themselves from it and disavow it.

And as for the theory that mutual funds and whatnot are pushing it... it just seems like an opportunity for them to short this crap and make money sabotaging real estate.

The more I think about this, the more it seems like something really bizarre is going on.

> The more I think about this, the more it seems like something really bizarre is going on.

That's only because people refuse to accept the obvious. Executives, whether correctly or wrongly, genuinely believe having employees colocated in the same geographical space is beneficial for their companies.

It's not even such a stretch to imagine this because we absolutely know they believed this before the pandemic. In fact, most SV companies were willing to pay employees located elsewhere huge sums of money to move to the Bay Area.

Or executives believe it is beneficial for themselves. I've seen plenty of managers over the year manage by "perceived busy-ness", and managers who liked walking the floor and to get a feel for whether people are busy have to actually do real work to check when people work from home. Or execs are more likely to be extroverts who like their job because it provides an opportunity for them to be at the centre of a group of people. Or enough board members are also on the boards of companies that make a living from commercial real estate.

There are many options, and many of them can be true to various degrees at the same time.

When you fundamentally change a balance of anything you're likely to run into all kinds of odd entrenched interests you may never have thought about, in part because many of them may never have needed to assert themselves before.

>Or executives believe it is beneficial for themselves.

It doesn't matter, the end-result is the same, and it's completely up to you to either recognise it, or be delusional about it. We all make that choice, it's just the majority of commentators choose to engage in semantics.

Motivations matter for those who want to understand how to address it.

> Or executives believe it is beneficial for themselves.

I don't disagree with this. I do get that feeling that this is part of it...

But executives are often the ones trying to squeeze an extra dollar out of every line on the ledger. Are they really willing to spend so much extra for this perceived personal benefit? Are their bosses willing to indulge them like that?

These aren't insignificant costs. For gigantic companies, the big skyscraper headquarters in some world class city must comprise just as much of the budget as a more modest building for a more modest company in Oklahoma. They're spending millions for it.

But it's a cost they don't bear, it typically ends up in a different section of the balance sheet. And as soon as somebody else pays for it, personal benefit (perceived or real) takes the front seat. See business class pricing in travel, for example.

If their bosses do the same it won't be seen as indulgent. And indeed cargo cutting what their boss does might well be another aspect of it.

Please don’t skip the other thing that we all know to be true.

There is a lot of work from home abuse.

Of course, work from home advocates would never do that!

Everyone knows the quiet part. Just have a few people talk about it, tells me that it isn’t insignificant.

There is a lot of in the office abuse too. Time shooting the shit with colleagues, popping out for a coffee or just goofing off in front of a desk. Probably half the comments on this very website were probably written by someone who was being paid to work.

Now when I'm working from home and not feeling productive I have options. Go for a lie down if I'm tired. Get ready and go for a run if I'm frustrated. Go downstairs and have a cuddle with my 1 year old etc.

Ok, agreed.

Now, if you're telling me there is in office abuse, why would I assume it's not worse when no one is looking?

It's not even an assumption. We KNOW people are working two jobs, or they take off when they feel like it, there are plenty of annecdotes of people saying "I only work 20 hours a week now, and get the same amount done".

Look, I don't care. My employees are remote or have the option, but we have daily standups and its a small team. It works as a small team and falls apart at scale.

The fact that WFH advocates get emotional, nonsensical, and flat out refuse to discuss or admit abuse is all I need to know that it is more rampant that people are admitting to.

> The fact that WFH advocates get emotional, nonsensical

Interestingly, the person you are responding to is very reasonable in their point.

You, on the other hand, sound pretty emotional and nonsensical about "WFH abuse".

If you can't measure productivity of your remote team, that is really a "you" problem.

Managers tend to be older than workers. The higher level of management, the older.

Older people are more comfortable having a face-to-face meeting rather than an online chat or video call. They're more comfortable managing people they can see in their seats, rather than having to judge only by the amount of output.

This is true even for many larger software companies.

Is this all of what's going on? Maybe not. But I suspect it's at least part of it.

this is just meaningless ageism. you could just as easily argue that older people benefit more from WFH, since they're more likely to have nicer places to live that are further from the city centers.

"it just seems like an opportunity for them to short this crap and make money sabotaging real estate."

Shorts have the other side. You can't just ambiently short against nothing and nobody on the other side. Even naked shorting involves taking a bet against those who are long, you just skip the step where the shares you are selling actually exist. There can't be a market that consists only of short sellers, so there are going to be people interested in keeping values up.

You seem to be having a lot of difficulty separating out various separate interests in the real world. Of course companies are trying to cut office space spends. If office space were free those of us against RTO would already have lost. Office space costs are our biggest ally. But those are nearly completely separate people from the people vending the office space. (They're completely separate if the office space vendors ironically have gone to WFH themselves...) If you try to lump the vendors and consumers together you're going to have a very hard time understanding things, which may be why you're getting confused.

Don’t forget the local economies that provide services for workers in those offices. My local city has given big tax breaks to companies to get people back to work because the business around those companies are having a hard time with everyone sitting at home.

Entire economies were built on top of office spaces and that upends a lot of things when they go away.

I say let it upend. Shifts aren't easy, but they are needed. It would do the world long term good to let this play out on its own rather than having government intervention (or corporate intervention, for that matter, let employees win for once)

Let it upend and then build housing atop the rubble. People who live there will be spending money too.

The world needs less gas stations, fast food, and sprawl in general. Lots of businesses are doing fine where I live and there are a ton of empty office parks.

This take is so common and so bizarre to me. Executives at companies do not give a fuck about the landlords of their buildings. It's an annoying expense that they complain about. They idea that they are working together to make sure the real estate firm has a tenant is so hilariously detached.

It's akin to saying that apartment renters care immensely about their landlords to the point of going out of their way to keep paying them rent. Its a total and complete fiction.

No, it's akin to saying landlords care about the occupancy of their buildings and their tenants paying rent. Of course they do, and of course they're prepared to use media influence to try and make that happen.

Of course they care. But no tenant really cares that they care.

Execs will look at the numbers. Renting is very expensive and eats up a large chunk revenue. So if you are going to keep paying rent and maintaining an office, you better have a good explanation for investors other than "Our landlord will be upset".

I'm sure plenty of CEOs are falling over themselves to mislead the board on rental costs so that they can protect their 2% portfolio stake in some random commercial REIT. Totally logical here.... /s

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We are just increasing to detachment to think that executives carry large (if any at all) stakes in their landlord's company (or even commercial reit in general.) So much so that spending $100,000/mo from their own company (which they likely have a lot of equity) makes more sense than not renewing the lease.

Guys. Please. There are many reasons why a company would want to RTO. Being in cahoots with the real estate industry is not it.

Some companies own the buildings they operate out of rather than lease them, but I think that's less common. So your point largely stands.

No, but they care about their company and their stock price. And the collapse of commercial real estate, especially in large cities, is an economic tsunami so big that it's terrifying. Go to downtown SF and walk around. It's a ghost town. When is it coming back? What if the answer is not for a very long time. And it's not just the big cities, even in smaller towns, law offices, etc. are still sitting empty since the pandemic. It's a huge, huge problem.

And when that impact hits, it will affect every business.

Those executives and many others know that. They're standing on the beach with the water out, knowing what's coming but helpless to stop it. But they're trying. Of course they're trying.

If execs cared about the macro economy they would simply pay their workers more. But they don't, they care about their company. They are hired, paid, and legally obligated to act in the best interest of the company. Not the country.

Executives at companies do not give a fuck about the landlords of their buildings. It's an annoying expense that they complain about.

you spend $2B on a brand new office campus. you work directly with the architects and talk about how this new campus will create a great place for your employees to work. and then you have the humility and wisdom to throw all that away? even though everybody at the company knows that this is the big project you spent billions of dollars on?

the money that companies spend on their offices is a commitment that an executive makes. keeping their commitments and persuading other people to buy in to those commitments is one of the biggest parts of the job if you're an executive.

another very big piece is making sure that the assets on your balance sheet don't turn into liabilities.

This take is so common and so bizarre to me.

so take the time to think it through and understand it. commercial leases are 10-year leases. when an executive makes a 10-year commitment, they have spent energy to convince others to make the same commitment, and they are committed to spending more energy on it as well.

That is not your typical company though. The typical company is leasing pretty cookie cutter office space in an office park or downtown. And many of those companies are not renewing many of their leases as they come up.

I think you missed the point. It isn't the CEO who cares about the specific building they're in. It's people like the Blackrock CEO on who massive amounts of investors (and by extension your retirement portfolio) depend on. Or the people who own the newspapers depending on a healthy economy, of which a huge percentage is commercial real estate. Or, as GP said, these basically-oligarchs that sit on a few boards and can steer CEOs to make nonsensical return-to-office plans to advance their investment strategies and view of how the world should work. It's a lot bigger than a single tenant in a single office.

> This take is so common and so bizarre to me. Executives at companies do not give a fuck about the landlords of their buildings.

I don't think you have the right framing. Investors diversify, and so the set of investors and board members in your company that are invested in commercial real estate is non-zero, and arguably non-negligible.

The set of investors and board members that have some stake in work from home is considerably smaller, possibly zero. This is a clear bias that acts as a non-negligible incentive on CEOs to push a return to office. Everyone in this scenario is working in their own self-interest.

Well, if you run on the assumption that consumers are the ones with lots of ad spend for things, you would be confused, yes. Why would consumers run ads for things indeed?

Obviously it is the producers of the good who have the ad spend money for submarine PR, just as it is everywhere else.

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