211–220 of 301 posts
I run my own business. I have zero motivation or incentive to help out people who own office blocks.
You don't have the same economic development incentives. That much is obvious. I could be more rude and press the 'so you think you're part of the elite?' angle, but I don't want to belittle your success.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you know this "most" stat? And if there are people working 4 hours a day remotely, how productive do you think those same people are just because they're sat in an office? Nutshell: I think this is a nonsense argument.
It's not a nonsense argument. If you're sitting in an office twiddling your thumbs for 4 hours a day you're not defrauding your employer. If you're at home working a second job (or mowing your lawn) for 4 hours a day then you're committing fraud and violating your contract with your employer. Fundamentally it's a legal issue about fraud. If you want remote work then you need a very different kind of employment contra…
We're a remote heavy company and we don't have that type of contract, and it all works really well.
So no, you don't need it.
Nobody is forcing people to return to the office. If your employer mandates or requests people to work at the office and you find it unacceptable just quit. Then the market decide.
The problem as always is power imbalance. Big corporates have a lot of mechanisms to skew the power to their side. Employees have much fewer. That is why employees eventually form unions, because then they can organise as a counter balance against the machinery of big corporates.
The idea that there's a global cabal of ultra-wealthy real-estate owners who have globally conspired to control people to go back to the office holds about as much weight in my mind as the idea that there's a global cabal of ultra-wealthy who have globally conspired to create a virus to control the population. Covid was an outlier event, and the outcomes that occurred as a result of it will revert to the mean over ti…
It’s more there’s a bunch of people who put their life savings into cheap structures on expensive land in SF and Seattle. If the next generation of high income professionals doesn’t have to buy their shitty 100 year old money pit, they’ve now taken a loss on the single biggest purchase they’ve ever made while the schools they bought for get worse. Many of these folks work at places like Amazon. No conspiracy needed f…
People need not work together to conspire, only vaguely in the same direction. Incentives do that like radio waves
Yes, commercial real estate is hurting but that is only one component of the bigger picture. Everyone in the surrounding area finds it desperately hard to make ends meet. The restaurants and cafes, the minimarts, the cleaners, janitors, security, various stores: clothing, bookshops, bakeries etc. All these people lose their jobs and for the small independent Stores where the owners have poured in their savings they l…
The issue I have with that type of argument is you're moralising on causing harm to one group of people to limit harm to another group.
Who gets to decide how do do that?
And then you could also moralise by saying the commuting causes huge amounts of pollutants which cause actual harm to people's health. And the stress of the commute. And the lack of family time. Etc.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> All other issues are easily solvable too, either with the right tools, or the right processes. By coming back to the office?
https://www.google.com/search?q=collaborative+whiteboard Desk, chair, lightning, monitors are easily googlable, too. Coming back to office creates more problems than it solves.
All those things are part of the office and you don't have to pay for them.
> Coming back to office creates more problems than it solves.
Other than commute which could be a bitch in the US what other problems for the company do they create? Yes hanging out at home is nice for you/me, you can rest, nap, be with your kids, do chores, but how would this matter to the company when people abuse these situations on a regular basis?
Ok, so which “elites” are holding real estate portfolios and creating these stories in the media bashing remote work? Who are they? I don’t think the world is so coordinated. Some people made a bad bet on real estate. Some other people want to write click bait pieces about lazy workers. Some other corporate leaders are scared that employees are goofing off outside the office (because productivity can’t be measured fo…
A community where they go looking for contacts when they need something, like a public affairs firm for pushing political buttons, or a real estate investment to put a big payout into, or whatever. If you are in this environment and fuck around you'll make enemies. People won't recommend you as a public affairs customer, won't tip you off on good investment opportunities, might start to talk shit about you behind your back.
Undermining the value of real estate can make these networks and communities a serious hazard to your business. And undermining the value of office estate means you undermine the really tasty cash cow in real estate, residential properties within commuting distance. Enforcing commutes to offices means that people will pay a premium to shorten the commute.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My theory, which is kind of informed by what I saw it play out in my company: The reason is a psychological one. Most leaders derive their power from in-person interactions. Remote and video calls severely impact that. Those leaders also love having an audience that needs to listen to them whenever they are in the room and the lack of that kind of feedback and adulation shellshocked a lot of them.
Exactly this. When I was a junior investment banker we worked brutal hours, often 80-90 hours a week with most days ending at 1-2am. Yet the head of investment banking insisted we always make it to his Monday 8am meeting since he wanted a bigger crowd when he talked. Going from a Sunday all-nighter into this was quite painful.
Here's the thing: The reasoning behind the work from office mandate does not concern me; nor I will attempt to rationalize it. I will not return to office, and I will organize with colleagues to make sure our interests are protected. See you in the strike.
Won't work, because those who work remotely are already striking every day, by slacking off. From management's perspective your strike changes nothing. (Yes, yes, I know you personally are a conscientious worker with a stellar work ethic and would never slack off on the company's dime, but let's be real here and recognize the population averages.)
I’ve heard this argument before and I don’t buy it. By that, I mean it may be true (that people want to prop up real estate prices), but I don’t think that this is enough of an explanation. If it were just about real estate, then Amazon would not be calling for 5 days a week return-to-office. I don’t think real estate interests are powerful enough to push Amazon around and I don’t think they’re entrenched enough in A…
If we oversimplify everything, yes... it's all about prop up real estate prices. But if we want to talk about this, we need to have in mind the capital amortization. The value of every business goes up or down if their fixed capital gets old or unused. For example, if you have 100 computers and every computer costs 1000, your company has that value as capital. But if they lose value in the next years and those same c…