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Comment by idiotsecant | Hacker News Reader

This is a good thing, they're being honest and letting employees decide if that matters to them or not. I guarantee a lot of places have this as a 'soft' unspoken policy and just don't say it out loud.

This is good for workers and good for owners. More places should put their policies out in the open.

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I’m just a shareholder, not employee or customer. For me it doesn’t inspire confidence in future performance. Seems like one of those stupid bean-counter moves that leads to organizational decline.

I wouldn’t call this “a good thing”, except in the very narrow perspective that you analyzed (I agree that honesty between management and employees generally leads to better outcomes). But I think the benefits of the honesty are far outweighed by the idiocy of the policy.

The good thing is that you can sell your stock if you don’t agree with management and invest in their competitors who are encouraging remote work.

SG&A is a cost on the income statement. This can only improve their quarterly earnings. Unfortunate it's the case, but stocks don't appreciate on goodwill (real goodwill not the line item).

As an investor, I have a question for you. Kindly answer if you have the time. I have always wondered why aren’t the shareholders encouraging WFH more? Clearly it’s cost savings for the company that would help the bottom line. Or is it because investors usually hold a bag of stuff and in them are REITs and companies that own the buildings and people don’t want their portfolio to suffer?

Biggest investors are Vanguard/Fidelity/etc (anyone who can vote with clients’ 401k shares). $10,000-100,000 doesn’t buy you any influence or control. Some companies like Meta are still 51% controlled by the founder.

The people directly managing the investment are unlikely to also be holding REITs, so your assumption is valid. I think it's basically that: - The people who care about company profit are the asset managers, who will tend to implement their ideas by selling/buying shares, rather than trying to encourage a given company's management towards better practice - Corporate governance itself is therefore usually outsourced to proxy voting companies, who are quite conservatively-minded (and spread quite thin) and so won't tend to micro-manage, they'll assume that profit maximization is the job of management - The only thing the proxy voting companies will tend to have a say on is ESG-related, and WFH doesn't really fit into that

Few investors want RTO. I am a shareholder (vested) in a large tech company that communicates about the WFH/RTO matter with investors less than they do with their employees.

I can only imagine that executives want to please REITs and RE hedges so they don't dump the stock, even they own relatively little, as many executives are constantly cashing out at a slow rate. It's not for the good of the business because the days of equity financing and attracting investment is far in the rear view mirror for most large tech, and because we know this harms companies in the long-term. It might just be personal greed.

By my rough estimate, Sundar Pichai sold an average of $1.8M of Alphabet stock every month since 2015. A 3% dip on the stock would have made him make perhaps $50k less pcm. Wallmine says he's now selling at a rate of $16-40M a month. 3% is $0.5-1.2M loss every month. At that scale, the downsides of RTO to these executives pale in comparison to their personal losses if they don't please REITs.

All the other employees with peanuts in vested equity probably see it differently. I know I do. I'll take a $1k hit to not make all my colleagues go through RTO when they've moved away during the pandemic, have them pull their kids out of school, move out of their dream house, abandon their parents who need care, etc.

They just laid off 6,000 people. Sounds more like it was an attempt to get people to quit so they don't have to pay as much severance.

https://www.firstpost.com/tech/tech-layoffs-2024-dell-fires-...

They might be optimizing for the wrong people.

I've seen this take a few times about this story. It is despicable to have a blanket policy that excludes remote workers from promotions. Or maybe you don't think so! But in both cases, whether the company engages in honest communication is a tangential issue. There is certainly nothing wrong with discussing a related tangential issue, but using the context of that issue exclusively to characterize the news story ("this is a good thing") makes it seem like there is an ulterior motive, or is at the very least confusing.

Why is it despicable? This is a pretty free situation - the company is free to value in-person interaction (which regardless of how heavily you weight it, does have nonzero value) and the worker is free to value the freedom that comes with WFH. If the two have disjoint values, either party can find a better match elsewhere in the big wide world. Its OK to have preferences, even when you might disagree with them.

Your framing is over-broad, in that it could be applied to any policy within the bounds of legality. I.e. it sounds like a purely legal opinion. Yes, I think it's despicable, subjectively. That's my opinion. Just because somebody is "free" to engage in a behavior, does not somehow make that behavior immune to a moral description like "despicable".

I also think "just switch jobs" is often (and in this case) a fallacious defense except as a purely "free market" idea, which, again, is another narrowing of context.

Employers have more power than employees. It is much easier for an employer to find a new employee than vice versa, in general. I don't mean statistically easier - I mean easier in the sense that humans use the word. The disruption to a business of finding a new employee is usually incomparable to the disruption to an employee's life of finding a new employer, on average.

Edit: I also am not particularly interested in the "is it despicable" conversation in the first place, hence why I allowed room with the "or maybe you disagree!" qualifier. "Despicable" as a moral judgment of policy is probably not something one is going to casually convince another person to switch sides on. I was primarily interested in critiquing your use of their honesty as the sole factor in arguing that "this is good", not critiquing your personal opinion on whether the policy itself is good.

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