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The elite's war on remote work has nothing to do with productivity

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Re: The elite's war on remote work has nothing to do with productivity

#211

Post by lost_tourist »

metalspot wrote: post #61
VirusNewbie wrote: post #9

I don’t really buy the argument. If commercial RE crashes, that means what, people take a 20% haircut on converting the buildings to condos and/or just selling for the value of the land? We are still seeing unprecedented housing shortages, which puts a pretty high floor on how much l “downtown” land values will crash.

SF office buildings are selling at 60-70% off in some cases. I don't think anywhere else is as bad, but still probably worse than 20%. https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/downtown-sf-office-bu... https://www.globest.com/2023/06/07/wells-fargo-sells-san-fra...

Why are all the capitalists crying, "it's just the market, supply and demand, dude!" . I'm sure less urban areas are getting that capital so it all balances out in the end. I'm not going to cry for someone who is rich enough to own a skyscraper in downtown San Francisco.

Re: The elite's war on remote work has nothing to do with productivity

#212

Post by FrustratedMonky »

jackmott42 wrote: post #40
stanleydrew wrote: post #23

This isn't particularly well-argued. Just a lot of handwavy grievance about "elites" as though there's some kind of coordinated conspiracy.

A the top end there is a lot of coordination, big money conservatives get together at CPAC and other venues to make plans, each political party is a powerful coordinated force of elites, they are all on each other's boards, etc. However this article did not present any evidence of any given group of elites doing this, for this reason, so...

Maybe these points were assumed?

Doesn't everyone know that corporations Boards, and C-suit, and Republican donors, etc, etc, etc.. All vacation together, meet together, perhaps even chug beers with Supreme Court Justices together.

Does the author really need to 'prove' this in order to reference it???

This whole post is people arguing about what level of 'coordination' does it take before we can call it a 'conspiracy'. There isn't any 'conspiracy', it's just friendly chatting and innuendo, but of course there is a common 'problem with a solution we should perhaps generally steer towards (wink)'.

Re: The elite's war on remote work has nothing to do with productivity

#213

Post by kolbe »

endemic wrote: post #201
kolbe wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do realize companies function better when employees are friends, right? I'm not saying forced daily association is the way to make them friends, but you can see the logic behind trying to encourage it.

I’ve gone out of my way to engage socially with co-workers, and I’m not sure any of those relationships ever progressed to the “friend” stage.

80% of my friends are ex-coworkers. Some i even made from WFH. So, I think making friends at work is important, but I'm not sure how much being in-person is necessary.

Granted, I've seen how our developers rarely make friends with each other, so it may be more of a sales/HR/product thing than engineering.

Re: The elite's war on remote work has nothing to do with productivity

#214

Post by DonsDiscountGas »

wredue wrote: post #90
kristjansson wrote: post #58

This seems needlessly class-war-monegring. People slack off at home, people slack off in the office. Everyone’s situation is not your situation. Everyone’s work does not look like your work. Some people like/want/need office space to work, some people don’t. Some people find themselves in different camps on different days. In any case, companies driving RTO are acting in their own perceived best interests, not their…

The elites are actively engaging in class war with you. I don’t understand why so many people are so quick to be little foot soldiers for the people that despise their existence.

I don't understand why so many people don't understand the "the elites" consist of multiple people, who don't all have the same incentives. Many elites own commercial real estate and would love rents up. Many elites rent commercial real estate and would love to keep rents down, or close the office entirely to save money on rent.

Re: The elite's war on remote work has nothing to do with productivity

#215

Post by intended »

kolbe wrote: post #187
supertofu wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do realize that people who WFH have friends and communities outside of work, right?

You do realize companies function better when employees are friends, right? I'm not saying forced daily association is the way to make them friends, but you can see the logic behind trying to encourage it.

For the firm. What does that do for employee salary?

It’s a firms way to gain productivity. Especially after preventing you from socializing near your home.

Wow, uh, maybe we should be against team building in principle.

Re: The elite's war on remote work has nothing to do with productivity

#216

Post by sangnoir »

kolbe wrote: post #187
supertofu wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do realize that people who WFH have friends and communities outside of work, right?

You do realize companies function better when employees are friends, right? I'm not saying forced daily association is the way to make them friends, but you can see the logic behind trying to encourage it.

> You do realize companies function better when employees are friends, right?

Professionalism and trust result in more productivity - not necessarily friendship

Re: The elite's war on remote work has nothing to do with productivity

#217

Post by ip26 »

weego wrote: post #71
brentm wrote: post #32

Bad take. There are plenty of dumb reasons people are wanted back at the office but the most predominant one is probably that it just "feels like" it will make your company better. I'd think people would be happy that at least some remote work will never go away at this point. To argue that you should never ever even have to consider going back into an office for any amount of time is just silly. But to also argue yo…

It is a bad take. Most managers were people doing stuff who got promoted into 'managing' stuff with no obvious output or direct value. It's not really surprising that a chain of these people would knee-jerk react weirdly in a situation they felt exposed as not being that useful / have their limited people a management skills tested in a situation they themselves likely didn't experience.

To reframe your argument more charitably, it seems like most people agree that managing a remote team well is probably a lot harder than in person, and we already know that many managers have not even received the training to do well with an in person team. So we should not be surprised if they are not taking this well.

Re: The elite's war on remote work has nothing to do with productivity

#218

Post by flappyeagle »

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #192
flappyeagle wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

>"Stop repeating this meme." LOL. It's literally the subject of the article. Empty Corporate Real-estate, offices, is driving a Return to Work effort by those corporations. So many people here are saying it is a 'conspiracy theory' hence not true. Many financial news outlets have reported on this, the properties are public knowledge. Even Amazon does check its bottom line from time to time. It is possible they do car…

40B out of 1.4T is 2.8%

Their market cap has swung by 20x that this year. It’s fun to theorize about creepy ulterior motives but doing some basic arithmetic blows the whole thing up.

Re: The elite's war on remote work has nothing to do with productivity

#219

Post by notacoward »

skwirl wrote: post #24

How are "the elite" forcing companies that do not own real estate and who rent their office space to mandate RTO? How are they forcing these companies to renew their leases when they expire?

> How are "the elite" forcing companies that do not own real estate and who rent their office space to mandate RTO?

Well, for one thing, the people who own real estate and the people who run Fortune 500 companies are the same people. What do you think the CxOs and board members do with their money after they cash out their outsized stock grants? Hide it under the mattress? No, they invest it, and often they invest it in whatever's "cool" that year - in this case commercial real estate. Even if the exact same person doesn't have feet in both camps, there are likely to be favors going back and forth between them. So, renting isn't the smartest move for chairperson X's company? That's OK, says building-owner Y. We'll make it up with deals from the other companies I own, or you can get a special bonus when you jump ship to join our other friend Z's company because they owe me a favor.

It's not a conspiracy theory when the possibilities are legion. No coordination is required; it's more of an emergent network-effect kind of thing. I've seen people I know[1] make these kinds of deals. In general they fall below the "breach of fiduciary duty" line, but even when they're clearly crooked they're unlikely to be prosecuted. Even the DAs and such who aren't hoping to walk through the same revolving door lack the resources to prosecute such complex and uncertain cases. They have more career-enhancing things to do. We could argue about how much it happens, or how much it's driving the push for RTO, but the ultra-dismissive tone of some commenters here smells just as fishy as anything coming from the other side of the discussion.

[1] No, not friends. I like my friends moral. But I'm not 100% in control of who moves into my neighborhood, who joins the clubs or engages in the activities I do, etc. Sometimes they mention these things directly, because I can pass as a business-savvy person and they don't even realize these things are wrong. Sometimes I overhear them, because braggarts tend to be loud. If you've never moved beyond the semi-rich techie circle and met people in the really-rich business circle, you might not appreciate just how bad these people tend to be.

Re: The elite's war on remote work has nothing to do with productivity

#220

Post by lostdog »

asdff wrote: post #154
8b16380d wrote: post #2

What recourse do we as workers have? We can soft boycott and quit/stop applying to onsite positions, but there are hundreds of thousands willing and able to take these positions.

Maybe even more powerful than unionmaking would be coop making. Realistically, everyone could take their team of the 10 closest workers they know, form a coop, and contract their work back to the employer akin to a freelancer. This would help take the real leverage from large organizations, their magnitude and its ability to shape markets due to inertia alone, if that magnitude was more of a temporal nature on a per…

Have you made a coop? Why or why not?
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