I feel this, as I get to make decisions on my own at home. In the office I need to discuss and explain all the options, only to have my manager make the same decision I would come to.

Decision-making processes shouldn't really be affected - if someone's manager has a psychological need to rubber-stamp their decisions, then that is just as necessary with them working from home as in the office, and failure to do so will ultimately lead to conflict and probably looking for a new job in the end.

i don't understand why it's not needed?

>can't have f2f meetings all day

i have zoom 1:1 meetings all day with managers. going remote doesn't obviate the need for team planning and management. bottom line is commercial real estate (CRE) is screwed and the sole driver of all of this. if a behemoth like dell, amazon, etc can go fully remote and still be profitable, then what does that say for any smaller company? and then what does that do to all of the CRE holdings of said behemoths?

tough situation and it may not resolve in our favor

> bottom line is commercial real estate (CRE) is screwed and the sole driver of all of this

I suspect that alongside the obvious reasons (inflexible management styles, micromanagement, etc.) always discussed, this is a major driver: ongoing spend on office buildings needs to be justified, and is probably very difficult to get out of - e.g. long-term building projects, or ownership of buildings which would be difficult (or a big loss) to resell, or long-term leases signed when obviously the offices would be needed for decades, or senior leaders feeling personally invested in particular building projects, etc.

I'm not sold on this one, although I see it pretty regularly. Its got the whiff of conspiracy theory to me in that it provides a simple answer to a complex question by having two faceless entities colluding with each other for unknown reasons. Dell has no incentive to support the real estate industry, and while I'm sure facilities departments are feeling pretty unsettled by the move to offices being unneeded I know of very few companies who don't consider facilities to be a liability they'd like to reduce the need for.

About the only bit of this I buy to some extent is very senior managers who've been closely involved in building out new office space only to find it's empty.

I think it's not a drive to support CRE per se. There are some state-level subsidies that companies get if they bring a certain amount of jobs into an area. Employment and showing up at the office can be a part of the deal there; if your employees don't show up at the office, your company would have to pay back the subsidies.

Think of it this way- a company has a CRE portfolio originally worth a hundred million dollars on their balance sheet.

If they sell it and take a massive loss, they'll take a big hit on the balance sheet. So, they want to hang on to it until times are better. But, people will criticize the company for hanging onto unused real estate if nobody shows up. So now the company wants to show people in the office.

I'm not sure that this is true, but it's the only realistic way I can see CRE holdings driving returns to the office

> whiff of conspiracy theory to me

Literally news from yesterday: Three compies conpired to impersonate millions of voters to influence federal policy

How many times do companies have to conspire to commit fraud before people stop claiming conspiracy and corporate fraud never happens??

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35934504

> Its got the whiff of conspiracy theory to me in that it provides a simple answer to a complex question by having two faceless entities colluding with each other for unknown reasons.

There's no need for a "conspiracy theory" to explain it. The better way to look at it is:

Some VP at Dell leased X million sqft of office space on a long term lease that does not expire until the year 2030 (thereby getting a good deal and locking in a lower rent until that time) sometime before the pandemic flipped things to "WFH".

Now, post pandemic, with most employees in WFH status, Dell, the company, is paying $Y million/month for X million sqft of office space, which is going unused -- and they can't get out of their 2030 leases early without taking an even bigger loss. So from Dell executive's viewpoint's, this is office rent going to waste, so if it is going to be paid for anyway, we might as well force employees back to the office so we don't have to report the rental costs as pure losses on our quarterly reports to the SEC.

Yup, I think what's happened is we have a lot of upper level people are going to have bad numbers from WFH becoming the norm and thus they are fighting it. No need for a conspiracy, they're just a bunch of people responding to the same forces.

I'd hope business leaders wouldn't fall for the sunk cost fallacy.

Hah. Have you met many business leaders? They could be poster models for the Dunning-Kruger effect.

At the end of the day I think office space is a dead weight around most companies. Any drive to return to the office on the basis of propping up real estates is ultimately going to be undermined by newer players with no skin in that game, for whom not having to pay massive real estate costs is going to be a real competitive advantage.

While we seem to be on a backswing a bit from it, eventually supporting WFH will be a matter of competitive survival. Office mandates will be the next hallmark of legacy firms who have become inefficient and wasteful in their spending.

Next hallmark? I would argue that a need to mandate it is a sign we are there already. I mean there is no reason to mandate in a Shannon Information Theoretic sense to mandate a general practitioner's office (even though it is arguably an office in a different sense) because the necessity is already implicit and obvious. Going into the office when you need to take biological samples and lack proper droneage or telemedicine is a clear necessity for the job.

> Any drive to return to the office on the basis of propping up real estates is ultimately going to be undermined by newer players with no skin in that game, for whom not having to pay massive real estate costs is going to be a real competitive advantage.

The question is whether that competitive advantage will outweigh the incumbency advantage of the massive current players in various industries.

Sure, the small fry ABC IT Consultings of the world might get their lunch eaten by sharp new outfits that don't have to foot the cost of a floor full of downtown offices, but a behemoth like Dell, particularly one that has already been paying those costs as long as they've existed and has them built right into their structures, isn't going to be nearly so easy to dislodge.

This is one of the huge downsides of allowing so much consolidation across the board for decades. The incumbent players become much more resistant to disruption through changes like this—it will take a huge percentage of us, the tech workers, firmly saying "no, we will not accept on-site-only jobs anymore," to make a real difference.

>huge percentage of us

this is not limited to tech

No, indeed; it cuts across almost all industries.

Tech just happens to be a place where almost every job can, with appropriate management and support, be done fully remotely with no meaningful loss of productivity.

This is why I don't buy the commercial real estate argument. If you own the building, you're paying the upkeep and taxes with either RTO or WFH. A decline in commercial real estate just means you have to mark down an asset on your books. Unless you were planning on selling in the next 10 years, the only difference it makes is a bad quarter of earnings, but that should already be priced in, and markets are forgiving of one-time write downs like that.

This only applies to companies with large real estate portfolios that play real estate as a side hustle. If you mostly rent, just don't renew your lease. If you're an office space REIT, it's gonna be brutal.

CRE is very clearly a driver of which banks are RTO, how often, and how strictly.

No surprise JPM leading the charge on draconian RTO measures, given their CRE exposure..

I don't understand this thinking. JPM is in long-term arrangements with CRE landlords whether employees come into the office or not. If employees come in to the office, JPM actually pays MORE, because the buildings will need the lights on and the HVAC running to keep those employees comfortable. Worst case scenario is that JPM pays exactly the same amount for CRE in both the RTO and WFH scenarios. So how does CRE drive them to bring back in employees if, as WFH advocates say, people are as productive or more at home than at the office.

I suspect that JPM is telling the truth about their internal productivity numbers being better in the RTO scenario, but I also suspect that these numbers are based on "doing things the way they were always done" and don't take into account scenarios with a JPM that is structured differently for WFH scenarios (e.g. reducing middle management and its proclivity for in-person meetings).

JPM is not simply a company that leases CRE space. That describes a lot of hedge funds, which is why they haven't cared about RTO to the extend the big banks have.

JPM is a huge lender in the space.

If CRE falls, JPM has a tougher time than the average big bank. They are also building a huge tower on Park Ave that was started pre-COVID and still not done.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/deutsche-bank-goldman-and-...

> bottom line is commercial real estate (CRE) is screwed and the sole driver of all of this

as a former business owner (good exit, so no bitterness here) all i can say is good riddance, and i hope they take a massive haircut as an industry.

they're the biggest pricks i've ever dealt with in running my business. 'arrogant' doesn't even begin to describe the attitude they had in the 2015-2020 time period. and they are literally no fun at parties.

example in another industry - think of all the restaurants you've ever loved that have had to close their doors because of asshole corporate landlords, for no other reason than to avoid setting a precedent for lower rents even when it wasn't financially necessary.

> for no other reason than to avoid setting a precedent for lower rents even when it wasn't financially necessary.

I agree with your virtiol, but this isn't quite correct.

You can tack "missing" rent onto the end of your financial agreement without penalty. "Lower" rent causes a reevaluation of the financial agreement basis which will almost always require a cash outlay. This is what is causing commercial real estate to be empty for 5+ years rather than lower the damn rent.

Municipalities need to implement an (in?)occupancy tax to stomp this crap out. If real estate isn't generating rent for 12+ months, tax needs to start going up on the space.

SF has a Commercial Vacancy Tax, for properties unoccupied for 182+ days a year.

My guess is that it is not well-defined and therefore generates minimal revenue. I also can't tell if this applies to office buildings or is more for street level commercial real estate.

> bottom line is commercial real estate (CRE) is screwed and the sole driver of all of this

I've seen several people point to this narrative on HN and it just doesn't make any sense. There's three possibilities as I see it:

1) There's some secret cabal of people who run the world and they've decided that commercial real estate needs to thrive, for some reason. So these overlords go to their puppets running major companies like Microsoft, Amazon and Dell and tell them they must make their workers return to the office in the name of propping up commercial real estate. Apparently some people on HN think this is likely?

2) The managers at Dell/Amazon/etc. feel the need to prop up commercial real estate as an act of charity. Rather than focusing on their own businesses, they are worried about their friends in commercial real estate. This seems even less likely than 1.

3) Managers at major companies believe that there are benefits to working together in person.

Why are people so reluctant to accept option 3? You don't even need to accept the premise that working from the office is better. You just need to accept that premise that management believes it's better to be a proponent of this option.

Allegedly, Amazon forced RTO because there were tax incentives that required butts-in-seats. I don’t think they are a cabal of puppet masters, but that does go some ways towards point #1.

Couldn't there be an Option 4 like this?

4) Some companies have a significant amount of capital tied up in CRE. Preventing its value from going to from $X to $0 is valuable to the tune of $X. There is no apparent cost to the C-suite in enforcing RTO. So for no cost, you can save $X. It's simple, non-complex, and tied to obvious incentives.

Dell probably owns SOME real estate but their business is making computers and shit, not renting and selling property. They have no incentive to increase the value of any property they hold. Like most large businesses, they likely rent the vast majority of their offices so falling rent would actually benefit them.

I'm as much of a WFH proponent as the next guy but blaming CRE on the latest return-to-office movement is some crazy conspiracy theory stuff.

Dell doesn't own a ton.

However, who are Dell's the main shareholders? Do they have any vested interest in commercial real estate? Are they associated in other ventures with people who have a vested interest in commercial real estate?

Go lookup Dell Capital.

Frankly, I don't want to, but based on the other comments, you've proven my point :-)

>Dell probably owns SOME real estate but their business is making computers and shit, not renting and selling property.

You would think...

Dell is a subsidiary to "Dell Capital" who's portfolio also boasts at least a 10B stake in real estate. (Primarily CRE) https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/bdt--company-and-ms...

"There's some secret cabal of people who run the world and they've decided that commercial real estate needs to thrive, for some reason."

The reason is easy to figure out: "Holding a lot of Commercial Real Estate assets". There's literally trillions of dollars at stake here. I would personally propose that the alternative that the people holding this trillions of dollars of assets are just sitting back and watching their entire market collapse placidly, with it never occurring to them to call in favors, use political power, buy lobbyists, buy PR, and literally everything else possible to save that money, is the crazy idea.

It requires me to believe that the 0.001% are just so amazingly honest and fair-minded that they will calmly accept the judgment of the market that their assets are no longer required. This is not a position I see a lot of evidence for.

The only thing that surprises me is that we haven't seen a lot of call for some sort of regulation that accidentally whoopsydoopsy can only be conformed to by workers in offices whoknew what a surprise and shocking unexpected consequence. Keep an ear out for it, I wouldn't be surprised to see this tried in the next year or two. Their situation is pretty dire.

It hasn't even been all that secret either: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2022/02/17/new-york-c... I'm not citing that as proof, just evidence. There's plenty of money at stake in this matter.

Often 100 hours per week, an hour each way.

Thanks for this great explanation, I hope companies take your comment into consideration.

Cynical but true in my experience coaching multiple F250s. More competitive companies will move to a model based on managing the flow of value, while legacy companies will be stuck with a model based on managing people. The two models are very different, with the first one often eliminating whole layers of management through automation. Companies think they can save management jobs by going to a matrixed model and flattening the org, but that's just an accommodation to save managers most of the time.

In Dell's case, I can only speculate, but they need to justify office space, and managers need to manage people, and most of leadership get promoted from middle management (or sales).

Worthless levity injection attack: my client supplied Dell windows machine still hiccups on cold boots sometimes (this ticket has been open for decades), while all my personal linux machines just keep chugging away. Find a company that is automating away management layers and uses linux.

> model based on managing the flow of value

This is not something I've ever heard of. Some websearching produced this article. - is it describing the concept?

https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/strategy-and-corporate...

Simpler and more executable than that, actually. 1) Basic premise of waste: People need to be told what to do, people wait to be told what to do. 2) Eliminate the waiting by standing up a value stream where everyone is part of the value stream team. Sections of the stream can be activated in a parallel fashion through autonomy of action. 3) Managers quit telling people what to do, and instead become value stream engineers - focusing on efficient flow of value like it's the company's inventory, from creation to delivery to the customer. 4) This move has different demands on remote work, but since it promotes autonomy of action, the more ham-fisted demands of legacy management are deprecated.

I think you just described something I haven't been able to figure out for over a year. I loved being a manager and then director at the previous small-ish software company I was at, and then I hated it after being acquired and integrated into the acquirer's culture. I stopped being able to be a "value stream engineer" as you put it.

Anywhere I can read more about this? Blog post or book recommendation? I understand that you want to keep it simple and all but I feel I need more practical details.

Look at the term Theory of Constraints https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_constraints. There is a "business fiction" book called "The Goal" by Eli Goldratt that is pretty approachable. He actually wrote a number of books at different levels of detail. Initially the concepts were addressed for manufacturing ops, but there are some fundamental similarities for scaling software teams, focusing where you produce value, and where you can create waste and misfocus if you try to keep everything/everyone busy at 100%.

There is a book written in the style of the goal but for software, called Phoenix Project. Quite good.

I hadn't come across this before. I'll have to check it out. Thanks!

Agree on Goldratt, and the book his daughter wrote and recently released, called 1) "Goldratt's Rules of Flow." Theory of constraints is a rich subject with heavy roots in industrial engineering. Look for Don Reinhardt's 2) "Principles of Product Development Flow" as the gold standard. Also most all of Edwards Deming work touch on systems thinking from the industrial engineer perspective. See 3) https://deming.org/. Additionally, see books like 4) "Systems Thinking and Other Dangerous Habits," and 5) "Team Topologies" as examples of why legacy management are probably doomed if they don't learn how to scale teams via a coherent system. Finally, Senger's 6) "The Fifth Discipline" is total classic on why we need to shift our legacy management mental model to an organizational system that is continuously improving via systems.

Oh yeah I didn't pimp my own book, "Agile V2 Coach's Field Manual" on amazon. Hard copy only.

I appreciate the book lists :)

Some references I recognize and some interesting new ones. Thanks!

It's like data structure driven programming then. Language doesn't really matter as much as the storage, in work layout and transformation of data. Focus on the data management as the framework / skeletal structure and everything surrounding it becomes more clear.

Sounds like a backlog (value stream) with Kanban (pick up work asynchronously as available).

I've worked with some kanban teams who were absolute animals. Kanban is great if your board workflow doesn't get too complicated, and the team is constrained from doing scrum. Ex. locomotive software has to be fully deployed on a train before it can be checked off. That's a tough ask with scrum, but kanban can work well in this case. Whatever the case, it's back to managing flow, not people.

> It's more about lower management becoming less needed. If a dude managing a team of 5 and not contributing anything can't have f2f meetings all day he suddenly feels obsolete and fears for his future at the company.

I don't know about that. In my admittedly limited experience as an EM of 4 ICs, I'm drowning in work, mostly because they all do great work and are now double and sometimes triple booked on projects because we haven't been allowed to hire anyone. It's more than a full time job to keep a small team supported and I don't remotely feel like I'm obsolete because the company could chose to WFH.

I've personally noticed, since we've been back in office, it's been easier for those ICs to have conversations with other people in the company that they need to work with, as well as have informal brainstorming sessions with each other. This is great for me, because simply being a conduit of information between other people isn't the most efficient use of my time, so I don't really feel threatened by that. All of them have told me they've actually appreciated the hybrid schedule and the time in office for some of the week, and some of them told me that when I was a peer IC (before being their manager).

Our work is definitely more experimental/R&D/unproven though. Frequent communication, collaboration, and brainstorming is critical for success. If you're doing the kind of work where you can sit down today and create a year's worth of feature tickets then maybe it skews in favor of the office being more of a distraction.

> Of course he will sacrifice his 5 reports to feel more important so he communicates up the chain that it's absolutely vital that they return to the office. 5 guys will commute for a combined 50 hours per week so that 1 guy who doesn't do anything can keep his job.

I don't get the impression anyone at the executive level of a BigCo is collecting feedback from low level managers about whether they should RTO or not. And even in the Bay Area, 2 hours a day of commuting is on the extreme end. Everyone on my team has a total of a 1 hour commute or less, and in my case that includes a day care drop off and pick up. Personally speaking, my commute wouldn't change even if we were 100% WFH because my home and the office are equidistant from day care.

We do have a peer IC who has a long commute though and it's not great for him. I do wish there was more flexibility on a case-by-case basis to tweak the number of days he's in the office.

> I've personally noticed, since we've been back in office, it's been easier for those ICs to have conversations with other people in the company that they need to work with, as well as have informal brainstorming sessions with each other.

Most communication norms aren't tied to the physical location, it's just easier to communicate communication norms when conversations are visible to the people not involved.

I was on two projects during covid WFH. The digital collaboration styles were night and day. One's mattermost team still has less than 50 messages total across all channels. The other team's mattermost was and remains a major collaboration point now that we're back on site. One team always had cameras on during calls, the other didn't. And wasn't just chat, just calls or just emails. The communication was different on every medium.

There was a lot of the same people on both projects, too. We all adapted to different collaboration styles depending on the project. The only difference was that project management made a few gentile pushes to enable fluid communication at the beginning of one project, and the other team didin't.

And I've noticed something similar with younger people. They're much more interactive in discord chat/calls than the slack/mattermost/zoom/chime equivalents. Not that this is necessarily unique to young people, just that older people tend not to lurk discord as much. What might be unique to that age group is they've been taught corporate tools mean bifurcated groups (e.g. teacher/pupil) where they're not equal participants.