231–240 of 371 posts
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According to [0], Amazon owns $40B in real estate. Which isn't a lot compared to a $1.4T market cap. OTOH, if the cost of pushing people to RTO is less than $40B it's still worth it. [0] https://azbigmedia.com/real-estate/how-much-land-does-amazon...
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.
> people take a 20% haircut on converting the buildings to condos and/or just selling for the value of the land? Leverage and derivatives completely turn this assumption on its head.
The "article" rehashes the well repeated meme about propping up commercial real estate, with the only callout to productivity being the authors own self admitted "bullshit job". My counter would be as someone who is loving WFH as a new dad, it is obvious to me that as a group, teams are less productive when not face to face even though individuals may think they are crushing it. This is obvious to many people I talk…
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> As someone who likes being in an office, I personally feel that everyone becoming permanent WFH basement gremlins is a bad thing overall Good thing that there are these things called friends , which usually aren’t forced on people like work colleagues are.
People make friends at work all the time, and usually that helps productivity and career success
Maybe workplaces would be more meritocratic if people didn't base promotions on who they like to go out for a beer with.
This isn't particularly well-argued. Just a lot of handwavy grievance about "elites" as though there's some kind of coordinated conspiracy.
The article is not well argued, yes. But there is direct evidence that politicians are influencing corporations to alter return to office policies: - Mayor of SF asking businesses to pledge to implement RTO policies: https://sfist.com/2022/03/03/mayor-breed-would-like-you-back... - Mayor of NYC basically doing the same: https://archive.is/si6xd
Remote work also makes managers/executives jobs a bit harder even if it makes the firm as a whole more productive. They have the incentive and ability to push for return to office, so they do so.
A university friend of mine is head of a European non-IT company with a an upper five digit number of employees. A few weeks ago we had breakfast and among other things talked about remote working. He points why he wants his people back in office were pretty clear: - he sees productivity slowly but steadily deteriorating - especially weaker and new employees are falling behind - restructuring has become very hard - e…
Now, of course, you could argue that it’s pension funds and things exerting control via ownership, but again, this is a bit of a stretch; it’d require a lot of coordination, and there’s no evidence it’s happening. And this would only be a real possibility, at most, for active funds; index funds can’t really threaten to sell a company’s stock if it doesn’t do what they want. And, if this was a thing, you’d expect that the Shadowy Fund Conspiracy would have made more of an effort to save _retail_, whose bleeding out over the last few decades has been a constant problem for commercial real estate.
(Also, in most cases, it’s mostly _different funds_; even within a single fund provider, the fund that owns lots of commercial real estate and the fund that owns lots of tech company are generally different funds, with different fund managers, designed for people with different risk profiles. This would make the sort of coordination imagined here even more fraught.)
I get why people like this idea; it’s a just-so story. But it’s very hard to see how it would work.
I suspect companies are pushing for this because their leaderships genuinely believe it is good for productivity, though as far as I can see there’s an absence of hard evidence. (I personally strongly dislike working from home, and got back to an office as soon as it was allowed, but the idea that it hurts productivity doesn’t gel with what I’ve seen, at all.)
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According to [0], Amazon owns $40B in real estate. Which isn't a lot compared to a $1.4T market cap. OTOH, if the cost of pushing people to RTO is less than $40B it's still worth it. [0] https://azbigmedia.com/real-estate/how-much-land-does-amazon...
The "article" rehashes the well repeated meme about propping up commercial real estate, with the only callout to productivity being the authors own self admitted "bullshit job". My counter would be as someone who is loving WFH as a new dad, it is obvious to me that as a group, teams are less productive when not face to face even though individuals may think they are crushing it. This is obvious to many people I talk…
Most of our interactions are messaging (Slack, IM, etc.), with occasional Zoom calls.
I T . I S . V E R Y , V E R Y , S L O W . I have never worked this slowly in my life. I literally cannot rush ahead, at my usual pace, because I make assumptions that are often wrong.
A few days ago, we had an in-person meeting, at a local diner, and talked about the app for a couple of hours.
I came out of that meeting with a very complete kanban list. I think it may have been our most productive meeting, ever.
I need to work on my own, at home, but I also need to have real (non-Zoom) facetime with my team.
But that's just me.