81–90 of 212 posts
Commercial real estate value is a bubble that's gonna pop soon. There's just way more office space than anyone needs.
Is there a way to short CRE other than investing in non-commercial RE? I'd think you can probably directly short CRE-focused REITs but I'd be worried about them rebalancing or diversifying even as CRE starts to pop.
EDIT: And copied and pasted here too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36956799
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Productivity can't really be defined, let alone measured. When people start talking about it they have left hard facts behind I'm afraid...
Maybe not for what most of us do but for a lot of jobs, especially blue collar jobs, it absolutely can be measured down to the smallest increment. If you work on an assembly line, or really anything that isn't mostly knowledge work, your productivity can be measured very accurately.
People think you can measure this as a single number. At best, for a very limited number of workers, who don't WFH anyway, you can measure it. But you cannot compare those workers with the workers next to them doing similar but slightly different jobs even.
So it's a huge mess and the idea of a graph of it for the USA is like making a graph of the average number of testicles. Except people take it seriously!?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some people do and some people don’t. It seems to me it’s largely a matter of personal preference. I worked from home before the pandemic, hated it, and vowed to never do it again. Then the pandemic happened.
I worked remote for a year before the pandemic for health reasons and didn't like it much, was looking forward to going back. The pandemic was a huge rearrangement to so many things though. It forced through a lot of the accommodations that previously I had to beg and fight for. Got everyone used to having to write more, have video option for all meetings, train judgement about what can be async etc. It also normaliz…
I reclaim 1.5 hours a day from work from home, so a mandated back to work would actually represent a 6 point pay cut on the day assuming I thought that through properly. I don’t even have an egregious commute compared to others. Never mind that all of a sudden I no longer need before and after daycare. I have a home gym and can acceptably exercise at lunch. I don’t have peer pressures to go out for lunch all the time…
Ed Zitron wrote about it a lot in his newsletter a while back and I think had some really excellent insights about it. Especially these three factors: - Executives work in a way that genuinely does probably reward or even require in person interaction. A lot of their job is "intangible" human connection-building stuff with other executives, shareholders, investors, manufacturers, etc. And because of the way executive…
I think for many executives it's so "intangible" as to be worthless bordering on detrimental ;)
"Unispace found that nearly half (42%) of companies with return-to-office mandates witnessed a higher level of employee attrition than they had anticipated" No severance payouts. No bumps to your unemployment insurance payments. Everything is working to plan.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/at-t-tells-60000-m...
Although the story says that "managers" (e.g. non union individual contributors) get to choose from the 9 locations, that's not the reality, your work stream is assigned a designated location, there may be an alternate location you can petition to go to instead but it must be approved first.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ed Zitron wrote about it a lot in his newsletter a while back and I think had some really excellent insights about it. Especially these three factors: - Executives work in a way that genuinely does probably reward or even require in person interaction. A lot of their job is "intangible" human connection-building stuff with other executives, shareholders, investors, manufacturers, etc. And because of the way executive…
> A lot of their job is "intangible" I think for many executives it's so "intangible" as to be worthless bordering on detrimental ;)
Assuming they are doing anything by doing this, they need to be in person to do it. I'm with you though I don't think very much of value is taking place up there.
My take on remote work as a manager for a company with significant name recognition: I think it's clear some people prefer working remotely (and the online hacker news crowd leans heavily that way). It's also clear that some people feel real benefits from being in the office. I think it's inevitable that the culture of a company mirrors the values of it's leaders. Companies with leaders that value in person communica…
If I could instantly teleport in the office and if the office had quiet private spaces, yes sure, but the terrible housing market, long commutes and shit offices, are bigger downer that prevent me from prioritizing going to the office even though I like working and socializing with my coworkers.
Anecdotally my org is on a hiring tear lately and we're completely remote, and the quality of candidates has steeply risen as of late. I mean really good candidates I'd rarely see before are pouring into my inbox. I've never talked to so many folks currently at Google, Meta, Amazon, but also big banks and other F500s. Many candidates are coy about their reasons for leaving, especially given all the layoffs, but, stil…
Does he actually spend any time working?
the author of this article is a PhD who is advertising their services at the end -- it is partially a self-promotion piece. However it has quantitative survey data, and speaks to the regulatory and also practical concerns that real corporate management faces in managing a mid-size work force. Unlike other recent articles, there is little reference to the real-estate value of office property. Instead this article talk…
>> "the author of this article is a PhD who is advertising their services at the end" That's an author bio. Completely ordinary for articles and has been since the print days.
> At that point, they called me to help as a hybrid work expert who The New York Times has called “the office whisperer.” We worked on adapting their return-to-office plan, . . .
> In another case, a large financial services company began noticing employee turnover despite offering competitive salaries . . . . After consulting with me, they adjusted their policies to be more competitive in offering flexibility.
He's just trying to sell books and consulting. Nothing wrong with that -- but hardly objective analysis.