Skydance offers buyouts, orders return to office | Hacker News Reader

Skydance offers buyouts, orders return to office

variety.com

84 pointsmetabagel36 comments

There should be a hefty tax on corporations insisting on having people in the office for jobs that can be done remotely. Maybe frame it as a tax break for companies that avoid stressing public infrastructure and wasting resources for dubious reasons.

How else will we convince everyone they have to live in a tiny box in a mega city without eliminating remote work?

economic signals would be useful, not sure if that is the only route however

RTO mandates should just be treated as a constructive dismissal and make you eligible for unemployment benefits -- not to mention raising the employer's unemployment insurance rate.

It already is treated as a constructive dismissal for employees for which remote work was a defined benefit or condition of the job (this is assumed if the employee works outside of the metropolitan area of the company). This has been discussed to death outside of the tech community for almost 6 years.

Yeah. When I was hired by AWS, I was told that I would always be remote. And then RTO happened.

Fortunately, I was able to exit to a new job elsewhere before I got hit by the requirement to be co-located with my management, which would have forced me to pay for my own move from Austin, TX to the Washington, DC area. Not to mention the expense of having to also move my wife there, our whole household, etc….

AMEN!

Isn't there already a natural "tax" of the cost of office space?

This is a world that incentivizes asses in seats to prop up the value of real estate. Why kill a golden goose out of altruism? This isn't that world. The greedy rule here.

Except, it’s the government and in its interests to bring back the status quo. More people commuting means they have to live in high taxes area, from mortgages of residential and commercial properties, or rent, or goods and local businesses, all the way to not needing to build infrastructure in rural areas. Plus, banks were crying during the wfh for those reasons. Wfh brings the power back to employees or people, while the old 9-5 (which was invented by fords factories and never meant for offices) keep the status of wealthy getting wealthier and the employees getting more miserable.

The people working remotely are often still in a city, just a different city. Now they're back to commuting and simply adding to transit maintenance and congestion.

Would be a mess to enforce/decide what counts.

As much as I hate large corpos, this would be just ridiculous.

I was wondering where David Zaslav landed in all this. Can’t say I’m really surprised by the answer: https://www.cartoonbrew.com/executives/david-zaslav-606-mill...

It’s called failing upwards and is the primary skill set of many CEOs and executives

It feels almost non-sequitur for a film and television studio, of all company types, to care about something like this. Your most important employees aren't even employees and they work on-site gig to gig. You live or die on whether you can make another Mission Impossible series, get the public to give a shit about the DC universe, whether the NFL and NBA can succeed in their bids to go international. Who gives a shit if the corporate accountants come to the office or not? It's like Eisenhower on the eve of D-Day fretting over how clean the bathrooms were in the Pentagon.

They have $80 billion in debt, they are basically going to be operating like a private equity run business. They'll be converting any cash flow they can to debt payments.

Back to the office is always an excuse for fairly indiscriminate downsizing. If they find you indispensable, they'll just make an exception for you.

For others, there's the buyout. They're telling you to do something you don't want to do, and at the same time telling you they'll pay you not to do it (and quit.)

It's a merger, they promised to do this. No matter what fake antitrust settlements and judges said. They're already deeply in the hole valuation-wise, they aren't going to be able to downsize their way out of it. It's the least they can do.

I'm actually curious if the plan is to have it take out a bunch of loans, strip the thing of assets, and dump it.

> I'm actually curious if the plan is to have it take out a bunch of loans, strip the thing of assets, and dump it.

It’s the American Way!

I assume David Ellison will also be in the office 5 days a week?

Did you notice the “co-CEO” title? He does not even have to do the job he was given.

More likely Larry finally had to come to terms with the fact his son is a moron, and now a significant portion of his wealth is tied to the Skydance millstone, he wanted to see adult supervision.

Suddenly Lanai is designated a Skydance office

You would think tech workers in the deep blue states would be leading unionization efforts to kill this kind of stuff before AI finally fires all of us, but no dice.

They've somehow convinced themselves that they can do a better job negotiating for their benefits on their own than with a bargaining unit representing all labor.

I’m sure arrogance is a non-zero factor, but decades of anti-labor propaganda is likely a bigger contributor.

Ask 10 people in the street about their opinion of unions, and 8 of them will regurgitate some vague concern about union leadership corruption, protection of “lazy workers” or exorbitant dues, rather than cite one of the many hard-won historical victories against exploitation or unsafe working conditions over the years. That’s no accident.

But you see, I'm an exceptional employee and I don't want seniority to be a bigger deal in my salary than my performance.

Imagine if somebody like Lebron James, Patrick Mahomas, or Tom Cruise was in a union!!

What moat do the film/tv media companies really have anymore. Distribution is no longer locked to cinema or cable. Obviously production costs are still something that requires a lot of investment. But smaller budget films have been proven to be very successful. Most tools are free these days.

There's a lot of social network effects. That's why there's such a disparity between the average quality of a Netflix original and an Apple TV one.

People act like movies and theaters are on the block but I've never had a harder time booking movies with the demand in my life than the last couple years. And everyone there is buying concessions. Trash is as piled up at the exit as its always been. The doom and gloom you see on reddit seems to be just that, on reddit.

Exactly and on the contrary look at what reddit did to amc, they basically revamped it with their meme-stock buying and now they are thriving again from what im seeing online as im not us-based.

But also our local cinemas are insanely crowded on the weekends and you cant book early enough to see the next MCU-blockbuster.

> We’ve seen the benefits firsthand at Paramount, and we want every part of Skydance to share in them.

We won’t share the benefits, of course. But trust me, bro, they’re Hugh Mongus.

the downfall has begun ! enshittification at its finest !

Enshittification is about company-user relationship. Not company - employee.

Return to office is just punishment for employees getting ideas above their station during the covid years.

RTO is what you do when you want to make people quit.

conveniently, high level leaders seem to always have exceptions to the rule.

Also quiet layoff by encouraging workers to leave.

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