[gravescale]

It's a fun theory, and sounds rather plausible at first blush, but do so many of the upper management class really have so many commercial real estate investments that they're willing to break the effectiveness of their core business?

I know of at least one company with an RTO drive but leased the office, and the land owner doesn't have external shareholders. Also the company paid for quite a snack supply, so backsides in seats actively cost a relatively small but still not trivial amount of money.

[karmajunkie]

there’s at least some municipalities that are essentially bribing employers with tax incentives to RTO to prop up dependent businesses like restaurants.

[idontwantthis]

> break the effectiveness of their core business

It could be a non metric cost vs a metric cost. They RTO and deadlines slip but they can blame that on anything. Versus losses on the balance sheet from real estate holdings. I don’t necessarily think the real estate theory is right, but I do think calculations like that happen all the time by tech execs.

[lassoiat]

There is obviously not something conspiratorial here since crossing the conspiracy would have such value for an individual company.

I think though there is a network of decision makers that when you take into account this high dimension of decision variables, there is an emergent alignment of self interest towards the office.

I work for a very small company and of course no one comes into the office. We are small enough and lack enough of those variables that we don't have to perform this office theater like bigger firms. The bigger firms don't really have a choice when you sum all the inputs.