The reality of the situation, globally, is that the commercial real estate market was showing signs of rolling over prior to the pandemic (as well as many other markets), and the bailoutistan operations since sept 2019 repo market intervention continue to enable a lot of the paper of CRE that has/is used as collateral (and rehypothicated many times over) to put alot of entities exposed to it on life support…
However it does nothing for cashflows in the CRE that no longer exist, which is why the situation will continue to get worse with out continuously increasing the interventions in markets, and the forces that influence behavior in those markets (i.e NYT posts shilling someones cornered book to try and get peoples behaviors/preferences to change).
Arguably, there has been a long shift to remote work going on since the 90's. Anecdote: My dad has been working from home not too long after P&G sold his division to HP and then to BT, and I have been for 5 years prior to march 2020 (and continue to do so today).
Of course in every company there will be a subset of people who cannot do their job from home. Nobody is saying that every job can be done remotely. So it doesn't help to roll out the exceptions and say that nobody can work from home.
there are huge numbers of hourly employees across the stores, though i don't know where they break down numbers of employees by type.
I know for a fact that Google Maps alone has over 1k SWE's. Chrome and android have several thousands, same with YouTube. Uber and snapchat and airbnb have thousands of SWEs.
Apple has dozens of products that are comparable to the ones listed. So either each of their SWE's is worth 100x other companies or my estimate is correct.
WFH for folks in engineering labs with millions of dollars of shared instruments doesn't make sense.
That was the fundamental reality inside Apple engineering that I lived, anyway: the millions of dollars of instruments for digital design and test can't be repurchased per engineer.