The one thing I’ve seen are where companies have tax incentives tied to butts in seats. Usually like 0 property tax, with the government assumption that they’ll make it up in sales tax (lunch, gas, etc.) and taxes from employees that move to the town.

But honestly, I think a lot of companies are just doing this instead of layoffs or in addition to small “don’t raise eyebrows” layoffs. Raise the pain to get attrition.

Companies like Amazon literally own billions in office space. Making that space valuable again with RTO policies, especially if you create an RTO trend, a way of enabling them to sell at their previous values.

Do they actually "own" it? I work for a large company who spent millions building a new office and then immediately sold it to a different company so they could lease it instead of owning it (apparently this looks better on the books!)

Amazon used to lease several buildings from Paul Allen for years but ended up buying them outright, and then going on a construction binge beyond that.

>apparently this looks better on the books!

Or, as we have seen hundreds of times, it's sold at market price to a "third party" company that is actually owned by one of the board members or executives, which then rent it back to the company for a slight premium.

We do see this occasionally. You'll have some private equity group buy a restaurant chain like Red Lobster. They make RL lease the real estate from them after having RL sell the real estate to them. Sometimes it's not restaurants, I think this is what murdered Toys'R'Us (correct me on that if I'm wrong).

But this isn't the norm, and it's not happening to well-managed businesses. It's something a vulture does after the company has been struggling for years. If that happened with a Microsoft or an Amazon, or any of the companies we work for. It's silly to suggest that is the cause of widespread RTO mandates.

It is not bullshit, though it does not apply universally either. In many cases it may just be managers who need to justify having spent all that money on their office spaces.

That being said:

Deflating a real estate bubble is painful, just ask China. By artificially keeping up demand for office spaces through unnecessary RTO, banks and governments avoid having to go through that, at least for the time being.

And yes, with (partially government-guaranteed) mortgage-backed securities and all that, large-scale devaluation of commercial real estate is going to be a huge pain.

In NYC where the vacancy situation is particularly dire, politicians have been banging the RTO drum for a while.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-30/wall-stre...

> In many cases it may just be managers who need to justify having spent all that money on their office spaces.

I find this argument uncompelling as everyone can obviously see that things changed since February 2020, and sunk costs do not justify throwing more good money after bad. It could easily have been the correct decision to acquire more office space years back and it could just as easily now be the correct decision to divest that office space if more workers are remote, and it's not anyone's fault for not having seen into the future that there'd be a global pandemic.

> things changed since February 2020

Certainly nobody will blame managers for real estate decisions which were made prior to 2020. But a large number of companies revised expectations that workers would return to office as late as Q1 2023 and some even later.

https://www.vox.com/technology/2023/5/15/23721410/return-to-...

> sunk costs do not justify throwing more good money after bad

Sure. In a rational world, the office space costs are sunk and everybody just moves on. But seeing that RTO just decreases competitiveness for hiring without hard benefits to show for, this indicates that the decisions are not rational. The sunk cost fallacy is easy to fall for, and that is even before considering how business leadership roles attract narcissists who have a hard time taking blame for anything.

If I have to choose between "the owning class colludes" and "the owning class is acting irrationally, and just coincidentally happen to act in accordance with the interests of other members of the owning class", Occam's razor points me toward the first.

The first is a complex solution that would require many elements to work. The second requires nothing at all; it couldn't be simpler. Why would Occam's Razor point you to the first?

The simplicity of "it's all just a coincidence" is about the same as "it's all just magic". And you would be right about the collusion explanation's need for some elements to work, were it not for the fact that we see those elements working together in broad daylight. They attend the same universities, join the same clubs, they even have a town in Switzerland that's become synonymous with the owning class meeting up (Davos).

They're not saying it's coincidence, they're saying it's herd behavior and groupthink.

The people we're talking to don't really understand those concepts. Or possibly they just reject them implicitly (which would be an even stranger explanation).

Yeah and I hear they're stinky, too.

I wasn't going to say anything, but there is a bit of overlap between them and the "deodorant is late-stage capitalist oppression" crowd.

Not coincidentally, it is because of their bias, not some hidden conspiracy.

Occams razor requires you to drop assumptions that aren't required to explain a thing. A conspiracy involves a lot of extra stuff, furthermore it is often hard to find evidence for - usually because they just don't exist. There are so many problems with them, it should really be a matter of last resort.

Conspiracies do exist of course, but I feel you should only use time to explain the world if you have sound evidence, and still be open to falsification.

Yes, evil rich people hiding in the woodpile, snickering while silently watching through their Monopoly Guy monocles... that's the only sane explanation.

The "owning class" consists of a bunch of companies managed by a revolving door of middle management and an even faster revolving door of upper management. And they don't own a damned thing.

Totally. A lot of corps are ruled by management and sales people. Those often really enjoy talking and connecting, and it is a form of control for them. Of lot of these people think they can't do their job well if the quiet people (IT, devs) disappear into their homes. And they often genuinely think the workforce needs to have meetings and show up to be accountable. They don't really think about what IT people actually need, or they do sometimes but it won't be a decisive factor in the end.

I've worked in places where sales people were seated next to programmers, and the sales people were shouting through their phones continuously. The programmers complained endlessly about all the noise - without effect. First lockdown we had showed an increase of at least 300% productivity - hard and reliable numbers because all output was tracked voluntarily by the team (management never asked for this). Number of builds, commits, releases...everything was way up. It was quite shocking.

As soon as lockdowns were lifted managers began talking about being in the office fulltime, because it was so good to talk to each other and align your work. I remember working in a team that did 1 day a week at the office, that day we couldn't get anything done because everybody was just chit chatting all the time. Even if you wanted to - it was just impossible to focus.

Our security officer (CISO) remarked how the lockdown enabled him to think seriously about a security issue for the first time in almost two years. Isn't that tragic?

Companies are as rational as consumer behavior. You can't make this stuff up. Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

I'd be very interested to hear the perspective of your sales and management teams. Your view is obviously very biased and only tracks "productivity" from the programmers. "Number of builds, commits, releases" off-handedly does not sound like straight progress, typically fast direction changing (adapting to the business environment) from management and sales is what drives profit. Code is not an asset, it is a liability.

The loss of programmer productivity can easily be overshadowed by gains from other parts of the business. I know it's not always the case, and nobody wants to hear that their suffering is better for the company as a whole since it devalues your work, but I would be super curious to hear why the decision was made.

I'm not claiming what sales & management do is worthless, it's just lopsided (in this case). If you force programmers to sit in an open floor plan with people who are loud on the telephone, not once but every day, and not only expect them to perform but also ignore their complaints - it is incompetence and/or lack of empathy. In the end 80% of senior devs walked out and got another job btw, maybe that is telling you I'm not just making stuff up from my own tunnel vision.

Productivity is not progress, for sure. You can be very productive building the wrong thing. I've been there, wasting a year on some crap that was canned. But you need to be able to deliver and not actively frustrate your devs that want to get shit done. Otherwise the 'adapted to the market' is just a scam at best.

btw, not every dev is the same. Some actually do like being in the office, even putting on music and have lots of small talk. That's also fine, if it works for them. And I also see benefit of going to the office myself (once a week or so).

I'm pointing out the pattern of sales & management incompetently projecting their own needs and biases onto the whole company and treating devs as grunt workers, forcing them to comply with their rules and fulfill their needs regardless of how it impacts their ability to concentrate and deliver. Software development is not grunt work.

I see fulltime RTO orders as a reflection of this. Smarter management will understand what devs actually need and take that seriously. Usually this kind of management has a technical background. Office can be a part of that, sure, but wfh invariably is too, I'm convinced.

I've worked for dozens and dozens of managers in my career. Some will go out of their way to buy you the best laptop, even make you coffee and give up the best seat in the office just so that you can work in peace. Because they know that such investments in their staff will pay off. Then, others will loudly interrupt you, deny any small request out of petty resentment, and blame any and all problems on your laziness - that is if they actually show up to notice there is a problem.

‘Be careful what you wish for’ - if remote work is the norm, there is all the sudden massive downward competitive pressure on salaries, as now people can work from much lower cost of living areas. Or even lower cost of living countries.

Either officially, or unofficially.

What globalization did to manufacturing, remote work is going to do to knowledge work.

And in most cases, if the bosses give up on RTO, they’re going to be explicit about this. Because why not?

I don't think that is an issue. Yes, companies which insist on RTO have to pay more, but as extra compensation in order to make up for the difference in time and money spent commuting.

But I'd argue what could be outsourced profitably has been outsourced already. And countries which welcome digital nomads who "work from home" while visiting on tourist visas are getting fewer also. In fact the Thai Government launched DTV which can be seen as precursor to measure and later capture (read: tax) some of the benefits of that for themselves.

Remote work means ‘outsourcing’ for a FAANG includes Ohio (prev. Sunnyvale), not just India.

And if you think this isn’t having an effect on offered labor rates, available positions in certain countries, etc. then you’re not paying attention to the current market.

There are massive shifts to offshore work at most FAANGs actively going on right now. But it takes time.

Are there attempts to crack down/extract extra taxes? Yeah. But most are ineffective and/or don’t meaningfully change the economics. There is a lot of fat that can be trimmed/extracted from the super high peak of Silicon Valley comp (for one example).

A lot of folks in the US are just waiting to see what happens before they move, or are stuck with high mortgages.