Why WeWork? Why wouldn't they buy a building or lease from a traditional outfit?
plun9 · 4m ago
Frugality
unwind · 22m ago
For the more metric-fluent among us, that's about 13,100 square meters. Didn't immediately see how many employees are affected, though.
nopelynopington · 2h ago
Why though. Are all these companies doing RTO because they believe it's more productive?
qq66 · 35m ago
Yes, for the company’s definition of productivity.
fred_is_fred · 2h ago
Because people quitting is cheaper than a layoff. It's a tried and true method.
pqtyw · 58m ago
Except you can pick who to fire and the people leaving because they have better options might be slightly more valuable. Then again trusting or upper or middle management to get that right (outside of small/medium companies) is impossible.
op00to · 17m ago
Amazon doesn’t need the best. They need the desperate, the good enough with no better options. Those you can abuse and squeeze.
add-sub-mul-div · 2h ago
They wouldn't be rushing to take back facilities and electricity costs that had been offloaded to employees if they didn't think it was a net benefit.
Local commercial real estate markets aren't holding the reins of the tech industry.
skyyler · 2h ago
It seems like RTO isn't specific to the tech industry.
It also seems like most publicly traded companies have instituted some form of RTO by now.
I'm fairly certain that many entities that hold large amounts of commercial real estate also own large amounts of stock in companies that are doing RTO.
It's not the most far-fetched conspiracy theory.
sokoloff · 1h ago
If Amazon (or some other company) thought they were going to be more profitable and more successful working remotely, I don't think the threat is credible of some commercial property owning shareholders deciding to further underperform the market by dumping shares unless that company made the decision to underperform by forcing RTO.
"If you want to threaten me that you'll underperform unless I do, be my guest..."
I suspect that different companies could have different motivations (including potentially forcing resignations), but it strains credibility for me that it's to answer to shareholders in conflict with what they think will make them successful.
pqtyw · 1h ago
> If Amazon (or some other company) thought they were going
This presumes that the company is fully capable of measuring and comparing the utility between RTO and working from home. That might be the case or it might be mainly due to management culture and other indirect factors but neither is self evident.
Major corporations are almost by definition have massive amounts of bloat and inefficiency to one degree or another and are carried (especially tech companies) by certain products/teams/departments the rest are often there only for the ride (short to medium term at least and who has time for any "long-term" development these days?). To be clear, I don't think this has that much to do with people who are "lazy" or hard workers (you can put in extreme amounts of effort into something that leads nowhere).
Anyway, not particularly pro or anti-RTO but I just find it bizarre that we usually assume that decisions making in large companies are always logical, rational and quantifiable and are not made to benefit specific subgroups or individuals in one way or another.
skyyler · 1h ago
>it strains credibility for me that it's to answer to shareholders in conflict with what they think will make them successful
I'm not so sure. I don't think that it's exactly the most probably scenario, but I can absolutely see it being a factor. I don't think there's some commercial real estate mogul on every F500 board demanding RTO, reality is way more complicated than that.
pqtyw · 56m ago
Maybe not, but if you have signed a massively expensive long-term lease and end up keeping the offices empty your investor will start looking cross at you. Of course that's more of a Covid era thing.
x0x0 · 55m ago
Oh man. Wework is the worst office I've ever worked in.
Those glass walls and hardwood floors are great to tour. Working in them though, w/o a single bit of sound-deadening anything gives you a new appreciation for cubicles and ugly carpet that actually absorbs sound.
Just wait until a woman wears heels and you can hear "clack clack clack" echoing up the straight hallways for 500 feet.
cyberpunk · 13m ago
nah, it’s great! we all get to sit at the same desk with noise cancelling headphones on in the same meeting, and for added bonus - if someone forgets to turn voice isolation mode on you get to hear yourself with a one second delay which makes it really hard to talk..
and a nice commute either side of the workday because who really wants to spend time with their kids during the week anyway?
Local commercial real estate markets aren't holding the reins of the tech industry.
It also seems like most publicly traded companies have instituted some form of RTO by now.
I'm fairly certain that many entities that hold large amounts of commercial real estate also own large amounts of stock in companies that are doing RTO.
It's not the most far-fetched conspiracy theory.
"If you want to threaten me that you'll underperform unless I do, be my guest..."
I suspect that different companies could have different motivations (including potentially forcing resignations), but it strains credibility for me that it's to answer to shareholders in conflict with what they think will make them successful.
This presumes that the company is fully capable of measuring and comparing the utility between RTO and working from home. That might be the case or it might be mainly due to management culture and other indirect factors but neither is self evident.
Major corporations are almost by definition have massive amounts of bloat and inefficiency to one degree or another and are carried (especially tech companies) by certain products/teams/departments the rest are often there only for the ride (short to medium term at least and who has time for any "long-term" development these days?). To be clear, I don't think this has that much to do with people who are "lazy" or hard workers (you can put in extreme amounts of effort into something that leads nowhere).
Anyway, not particularly pro or anti-RTO but I just find it bizarre that we usually assume that decisions making in large companies are always logical, rational and quantifiable and are not made to benefit specific subgroups or individuals in one way or another.
I'm not so sure. I don't think that it's exactly the most probably scenario, but I can absolutely see it being a factor. I don't think there's some commercial real estate mogul on every F500 board demanding RTO, reality is way more complicated than that.
Those glass walls and hardwood floors are great to tour. Working in them though, w/o a single bit of sound-deadening anything gives you a new appreciation for cubicles and ugly carpet that actually absorbs sound.
Just wait until a woman wears heels and you can hear "clack clack clack" echoing up the straight hallways for 500 feet.
and a nice commute either side of the workday because who really wants to spend time with their kids during the week anyway?
right? right?