[lWaterboardCats]

Tin foil hat says commercial real estate overlords need warm bodies in their empty buildings to provide foot traffic for lease signs go down.

The weird thing is, I’m sure many people here would likely take a pay cut over RTO.

If only we used this monumental opportunity to rethink how we need to collaborate and design cities to support or even embrace remote work models.

Instead, back to concrete jungles and mind numbingly sitting in traffic or being herded from one stop to the next.

[rtpg]

Less tin foil hat reasoning that I've found: managers are lonely. CEOs are lonely. Especially when you have the space that is empty it's kinda depressing.

The tricky thing is if you have the office you gotta have space for a lot of people, even if the "ideal" amount might be a smaller space that would just feel fuller in hybrid environments.

In a recent Kojima Productions video, Kojima said something like "yeah we have the new office... please come in everyone!" It's an uphill battle, accentuated by people putting offices in places where you are doing close to office XOR low rent.

[dangus]

I definitely think there’s merit to the conspiracy theory that people who own shares in companies are the same general groups of people as those who own commercial real estate interests.

Or there’s the tried and true explanation that it’s just micromanagers who want play power games with their employees.

The senior leadership team member can’t really conceptualize a world where an individual doesn’t sacrifice their entire personal life for work, so hearing that an employee has time to do laundry makes them think that it’s anti-productivity to be home.

[brevhtff]

> Or there’s the tried and true explanation that it’s just micromanagers who want play power games with their employees.

Everyone thinks they are the good employee that doesn’t need to be managed thank you very much. Yet every manager has seen employees that produce very little if they aren’t constantly managed.

And every manager thinks they’re a good manager, too!

[dangus]

And every employee has seen companies that have no idea how to measure or foster high performance.

How many developers work in a companies where achieving a S.M.A.R.T. goal related to their output will result in a defined positive outcome (bonus, promotion, salary increase, title/level increase, stock grant)?

I’ve never seen a software development team be given an incentive like “deliver XYZ feature with less than N defects by datetime to receive a performance bonus of $10,000/1,000 shares.”

I have worked at a grand total of zero companies where anything close to this was the case. For me, every company has made equity into a joke, performance reviews into “you will always be a 3 unless you turn water into wine,” and significant raises regarding high performance merely match inflation.

I thought that we were beyond the illusion that micromanaging works. All it does is produce employees who create illusions of productivity beyond a minimum standard. These illusions will exist whether they’re in an office or not.

It’s as simple as making sure your boss likes you. There’s really no output difference between the mouse jiggler working at home and the salaryman staying late but pretending to work, taking care to leave after the boss leaves.

Meanwhile, the sales team has a grand total of zero people who are slacking off because their salary is on a commission. Every ounce of extra work is potential to earn more money. But for the engineering team the company has a perpetual surprised pikachu face when they find out that employees are just doing the bare minimum to stay off the firing radar despite having no tangible incentive to do otherwise.

[dkasper]

Real estate companies are generally not wielding any power over tech companies… tech companies have all the leverage in any office leasing deals right now. I’m sure there are exceptions though.

[CamperBob2]

It may not be that simple. A lot of city and state tax revenue comes from commercial real estate...