this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2024
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Why the fuck would any office worker whose job is 100% on a computer need to be in an office? I don't understand why companies want to pay for all of that electricity and real estate just to make people sit in cubicles.
To prevent a crash in the commercial office real estate market.
Meh fuck the commercial real estate market. Turn all the buildings into micro apartments or tear them down and install fields of solar panels.
I've been screaming its just wage theft. My city provides tax breaks for occupancy (employees prop up the local economy buying lunch). They are making me pay for gas, time, and car maintenance (and lunch but fuck them, I'll just not eat) for this tax break which goes to C-level bonuses/shareholders. Its just another way of skimming off the top of employee wages.
We worked fully remote for nearly 2 years and the hybrid policy just keeps getting worse and worse. Coupled with quarterly riffs, I also suspect this is to avoid severance pay/unemployment while accelerating the down sizing. Yet our CEO bonus keeps going up and up despite our stock plummeting since the end of COVID lock downs.
Tear them down and build houses. Flood the market of every major city with houses so it becomes unprofitable to buy thousands of houses just to rent.
Then home sales go up, and millenials can ACTUALLY buy houses in their lifetime!
That would piss off the voting base that actually votes though
Condos! Best of both worlds. Especially in a dense city, a standalone house isn't really feasible when you can fit 8+ families into the same lot.
Missing the point. The office executives are in bed with the real estate execs.
They are the real estate owners themselves
Sometimes, sure. Somewhat different disciplines but, some folks high up enough certainly play both investments.
Why should they care though? It's not like commercial real estate sells more computers. Staff still needs desktops, infrastructure still needs datacenters.
Because all these companies have a shit load of money in the market including real state...
So sell it
That's the crux of the issue.
Who's going to buy it for a high price, if there is no demand for office space, because workers are all remote?
So burn it!
Property damage is an extremely effective way to fight against money. We should be doing it a lot more.
This is what is so fascinating to me about most people, they don't understand that companies hord their assets in my different kinds of investments when they are this large. Having real estate gives them an asset they can can store large sums of money in that generally appreciate in value over time. If a company is under finacial duress, they can fire a bunch of employees, then sale the land where those employees worked and and save themselves from much larger losses on revenue for a given time period.
Both major companies I've worked for sold their commercial real estate and leased it back as one of their very first measures when cost cuts were needed. What we have here is essentially the reverse where tech companies scare off their workforce and industry knowledge and drive up employee costs so they can impart some secondary effect on the commercial real estate market... so yes i remain confused about the priorities in play here.
Cloud infrastructure is great for this. You don't need your own data center when you can just rent space on a farm. As a bonus, it's less work for the IT team who no longer have to deal with server hardware upkeep.
So for the past 4 years it didn't matter, but now it suddenly does? I smell bs on that real estate reason
During the pandemic they had to choose between go remote or close up shop. They didn’t have much choice.
Seems that once Covid stabilized they’ve been trying to force everyone back.
But that still doesn't matter if they posted profits during that time.
That's because you don't know about how CRE funding works.
Large chunk of CRE runs on short term fixed rate debt, which requires refis. Next big cycle is starting about now and will go through 2026.
So feds lowered interest rate sum, and corpos are pushing us into the office to soften the blow from CRE operators and their creditors.
With that being said, low quality class C office space is in default, no way around it.
Shiti suburban trash offices also will die along with the shiti malls.
However, the return to office policy is specifically to bail out class A and B office towers in the major cities, ie the VIP CRE owned by the real owners and not bagholders
Whether we're in the office or not, they're still paying for the same space.
So how does us going back justify anything?
office valued if it is used. if it is used ,it has value.
Who do you think owns the real estate?
Why would Dell care about the commercial office real estate market?
they bought instead of rented? iunno
You do understand that large corporations invest in many kinds of assets in order to diversify them right? Real estate is one of the oldest investments any entity can make, and is often considered a pretty strong investment. Everyone needs land right?
Sociopathy, mostly.
Some people are bad at working remote, and want to drag the rest of us down with them, too.
Yes, it's a slightly different skill set to work remote. You have to be better at the written word. You can't just roll up to someone's desk and be like "have a minute?" (which is fucking awful anyway). You also need to be responsive and set your status appropriately. A lot of coworkers just wander off and leave their slack status as active. To my mind if you're running an errand longer than taking a dump, you should update your status.
I just have slack running on my phone. If I'm at IKEA instead of my computer and someone wants something, I'll just tell them I'll take a look at it after lunch. If I'm out biking in the afternoon, I just tell them I'll take a look at it tomorrow morning.
If someone wants something really urgently, I'll tell them to give me thirty minutes. Thirty minutes later I'll tell them that the results are inconclusive and this will need more time, for which I have scheduled a block for tomorrow.
A response (or status!) on slack that's like "I'm at the grocery, back in 20" is fine with me. It's more annoying when someone wanders away with no status and is unresponsive for hours.
I'm obviously exaggerating. I got some stupid "top slacker" award at the last company function. My wife told me that actually does not shine a good light on me.
So managers and other poor personality types have someone to torment. This is said flippantly but I'm quite serious.
probably because their cost is sunk in the real estate already and no one wants to buy it.
I'll go out on a little limb, it might be sales specific. My company is 100% work from home. All the engineers and product and design work remote, maybe come into the office once a week just because.
The sales team however is strongly encouraged to come in as much as possible. I think it's a morale thing. Sales teams become these weird cults, maybe necessarily. It's really hard to pick up the phone and make a call when you've been rejected 5 times in a row. The teams little ceremonies are designed to help push through that.
Their sales team aregoing about this all wrong. Just buy the consumer lists from major dispenseries, and then call the stoners.
Boom. Easy sale.
You need to set your sights on enterprise sales.
Doing lines in the bathroom is also more fun at the office with your fellow salesmen compared to alone in your home.
Like I said, their little ceremonies.
Especially in sales and finance: every call is potentially on the record, and that's a problem.
A lot of internal communication in these departments is, to put it mildly, legally not without interest. A quick chat after a meeting is completely off the record, an email is not.
Quick answer to that......you forget everything said off the record.
I know I'll be downvoted, but I'll answer your question.
"Need" is a strong word. Sure, it's not needed. But that's not what the business tends to care about. They care about productivity.
I work in software. In my previous job I was a one man show. For my day to day development, I didn't need to interact with other people much. When I shifted to remote working it was a huge boost because I got protected time to work where I wasn't distracted by other people in the office, either socially or incidentally. This case it worked very well.
After the pandemic I switched jobs into one with a hybrid schedule. Luckily for me my job is a 15 minute bike commute.
However, the suite of tools I'm now developing and working on require me to constantly interact with other people in the office. I also spend a lot of time mentoring jr devs.
This is, quite frankly, just better when we're all in the office. The jr devs know, explicitly, that they can bother me whenever they need it. In the office this happens probably an average of 8 times a day. When either of us is remote, it's probably once a day.
Now with the other senior devs, we hate meetings. However, all the time, spontaneously, we'll end up chatting in our little section about the development of the system, someone will overhear (maybe even from an adjacent group) and chime in with useful knowledge. Next thing you know we have 4 or 5 devs whiteboarding and discussing things. Most of the fine tuning of our systems get hashed out in these impromptu meetings. This never happens when we're remote.
Also the barrier to just turning around and asking someone something is so much lower. Often 30 seconds. Because at home I have to send them a message, maybe message back and forth a bit before determining that it would be easier on zoom, then we have to jump on zoom which takes a small amount of time. Now this is not some huge thing, but it is a barrier that makes it just hard enough that he happens way less frequently.
Working in the office is just better for productivity in this type of situation, which i imagine is true for most jobs that involve lots of collaboration. Almost all of my coworkers agree. We also all agree that remote is better because commuting sucks. It honestly even boggles my mind to hear other software devs argue that they are more productive at home. Believable if we are talking about my original situation, or if you're just mindlessly closing tickets. But for collaborative development of large systems? No way.
So essentially you're saying that communication falls apart and you don't have the correct tools for remote work.
That's fine, it's a new issue to solve, no one has it perfectly done yet.
I completely sympathise with this, I have experienced it when I was a stonemason for 10 years (I say stonemason, I am a qualified banker mason but I have been programming machines to do the work for me). And I overhear and interject my experience with the new lads often. But now I'm at university 3 days a week and everything has fallen apart.
So we use discord, where we can all talk and ask advice about how to do X but not need to be in person. And in my experience it works exactly the same, I can read everyone's input and offer my own.
The problem is that I don't know of any tool or set of tools that fixes this. We have an extensive chat system that is open all the time with rooms for each group, we have zoom, we use all kinds of collaboration software. Everyone knows these are available, and uses them, but the hurdle inherent to it seems to be just enough to really put a damper on seeking help.
I think the best solution would be to have a zoom room where everyone is in it all the time. Which sounds even more miserable.
I don't think it's a system issue, it's more of a people issue, a lot of people are still using things like teams and slack as if they're email which bottlenecks everyone, but with the correct training and mindset switch it can be very efficient.
Switch to what exactly?
Mindset switch to not thinking of that communication as email. At least at my work place it took a while for people to not be overly formal and just go straight to the point, which slows things down. It's meant to be an instant communication channel after all
I saw some tips about this, they said to have a group chat and never use DMs so people can see and chime in.