[Negitivefrags]

> The way this position conforms to the interests of the capital class, and conflicts with those of the labor class, is a red flag.

If being in the office conforms to the interest of the capital class, it implies that WFH is inherently less efficient.

This is one of those things that I often find strange with work from home advocates. They seem to imply that business owners just want employees to suffer as a goal in itself.

[sisyphuslife]

There are a few factors at work, including:

1) A lot of executive type work _is_ easier in person... and those executives forget that their work might not be representative of _other_ roles within their own org, and they might actually be the outlier.

2) A lot of managers don't know how to manage by looking at output. We see this not just with WFH, but also with multi-location teams, where some managers simply can't do it competently.

3) Many managers do, in fact, get some satisfaction from having that sort of power over their workers.

4) Many executives like having an office that is a bit of a tribute to the company (and therefore their) power. And this falls apart if the office is empty.

[antoinealb]

That's not necessarily true, though. For instance, real estate investors have a lot to lose from vacant office space and therefore would benefit from RTO.

I personally find that I enjoy in person collaboration but that should not mean we should universally force every team to come back to the office.

[MontyCarloHall]

I never understood this argument. Most companies do not own their office buildings, but rather lease space from corporate landlords. It is in the best interest of these companies to dramatically reduce their lease burden via WFH. Why would a company totally unrelated to real estate investment act against its own self-interest just to prop up real estate investors?

[addaon]

The argument (which may or may not be valid, just explaining it) is that companies do not lease space (or take any action), people do. And the same individuals who are able to make leasing decisions for office space are co-invested in commercial real estate; even if the company doesn’t benefit from maintaining an expensive office, the C suite might; and if so, then of course that’s the decision that will be made.

[MontyCarloHall]

>[T]he same individuals who are able to make leasing decisions for office space are co-invested in commercial real estate

But those individuals are much bigger shareholders in the company they work for. Downsizing the office footprint of a single company has a tiny marginal effect on the overall real estate market, but can incur enormous savings for the company, and enormous personal rewards to the people making the decision to downsize and save money.

Individuals are notoriously bad at considering collective externalities. If a CFO realizes that they could save tens of millions of dollars per year on real estate by switching to remote-only, they’re not going to then think “but if everyone did this, it would hurt the commercial real estate holdings I have in my portfolio.” No, the CFO is thinking “announcing that we’re saving 8 figures per annum on real estate is going to pop the share price of my company (and thus my equity holdings), and likely net me a really fat cash bonus.” By similar logic, CTOs, who likely have considerable technology investments, would want to needlessly maximize tech spend. Instead, they get lauded for cutting IT costs.

[Aurornis]

This is a weird conspiracy theory. You'd have to believe that real estate investors were pulling the strings in companies to get them to spend more money with no upside. Like they're just milking these companies for rent and the companies are doing it because they want to give money to the real estate investors?

Even in the rare case where real estate investors are also investors in the startup, my experience is that the startup gets reduced-rate rent as a bonus.

[antoinealb]

That's not what I believe. Other posters have explained it well, but to respond myself:

1. Some large tech companies are also large real estate funds. Google had >100B$ in real estate positions (although mixed between datacenters and office parks) [0]. So its not that they are milked for rent, but more that they would be loosing some money here, although not much. 2. People making decisions are also probably invested in the real estate market, and therefore have money to loose from a collapse of real estate value.

I also gave more thought to it, and I don't see it as impossible that WFH reduces employee's productivity (from the perspective of the employer). However, that is also true of other worker's rights like vacation time or sick leave. RTO mandates are an act of control of workers, from the managing class, and pushing it as "because of productivity" does not change that.

And again: I personally like working more from an office. I don't want to force others to follow my preferences.

[0] https://www.realtygroupfl.com/blog/posts/2022/02/02/google-r...

[alserio]

Not a startup, but real estate investors have a good chunk of shares of the company where I work and they can influence the decision makers just fine

[Aurornis]

I don't doubt what you're saying, but I don't these situations where real estate investors and company investors overlap and also want to micromanage the company's operations are common.

The way this is brought up as a general explanation for RTO across the industry is getting a little silly

[hunterpayne]

Office Real Estate used to be looked at as a very reliable investment. Good return for fixed income and reasonably safe when diversified across geographic locations. So lots of investment houses used REITs for some of their investments, pension funds, investment banks, even those companies that also invest in risky software startups. So you have this idea that there is a person called a "real estate investor", but really the majority of the people who invest money have some stake in office real estate. And those investments got crushed post-COVID. And they are salty about it and blame (probably correctly) remote work. Doesn't matter though, they took the risk and this time it didn't pan out for them so they don't have a real platform to complain. So they do this nonsense and trick a journalist into writing a hit piece.

[SilverElfin]

> They seem to imply that business owners just want employees to suffer as a goal in itself.

No, it’s more that they want to steal from employees by not paying for all the time lost to commuting and the impact of living near a few pricey locations. That theft is suffering.

[fmajid]

There’s some research that suggests WFH is less efficient per hour worked, but people work more hours that they would have otherwise wasted commuting so it’s a wash.

That said, the motivations of managers are seldom aligned with the interests of the business. There is such a thing as ego trips. Also, mediocre or insecure managers will rely more on the crutch of face time.

[xboxnolifes]

> If being in the office conforms to the interest of the capital class, it implies that WFH is inherently less efficient.

Not quite. It implies it affords the working class more power than the capital class is comfortable with.

[baq]

The interests of the capital class are not necessarily aligned with efficient allocation of capital. Note this is far from saying they want employees to suffer, but they install inefficient policies over them.

[prewett]

It's even worse. The capital class is disconnected from employees because they have the managerial class running the business, so it's actually the managerial class that creates the employee experience. But, it turns out that "the capital class" has a large component of 401k funds, and so "the capital class" has a very large component of small shareholders, and so they don't really even have any influence whatsoever.

[atomicnumber3]

"If being in the office conforms to the interest of the capital class, it implies that WFH is inherently less efficient"

only if the capital class is solely motivated by efficiency. I think this is trivially demonstrable to be not the case.

The capital class's primary interest is self-preservation - both of their capital, of course, but also preserving their place in the pecking order. And they'll spend a LOT of the former to maintain the latter because the latter is how they got the former.

Through that lens, GP's point is perfectly coherent.

"They seem to imply that business owners just want employees to suffer as a goal in itself."

Have you met... people? Yes there are literally many owners who do want employees to suffer. Or, perhaps worse, will tolerate tremendous amounts of suffering in the pursuit of minor other gains. (Amazon pee bottles come to mind.) It would somehow be a comforting kind of moustache-twirling comic book evil to say they just want people to suffer. Another to say they simply don't value human happiness (or lack of suffering) enough to not trade large amounts of it for small things they do care about.

I had a boss who was only willing to hire non-whites because he could inflict undesirable work on them, leaving more desirable work for the white employees.

I just want to end this by remarking that this presumption of owners being perfectly optimal, morally clean agents of free markets is absurd and honestly disgusting to bring to an argument.

[Aurornis]

> This is one of those things that I often find strange with work from home advocates. They seem to imply that business owners just want employees to suffer as a goal in itself.

I've worked remote a lot and I'm a big fan. I find it hard to discuss WFH online because it's so hard to find people willing to discuss it honestly, including the challenges. The way it's talked about here and on sites like Reddit is as if WFH is perfect, works for everyone, and the only reason we can't have more of it is because companies are hell-bent on doing things against their self interests.

I'm in another forum where we have a subforum for managers to talk, and remote work problems are a perennial topic. A lot of people really don't handle it well. There are even managers in the group who would prefer to work from home, but they've moved their teams into the office at least 2-3 days per week because their 5 day WFH experiments didn't go well.

It's a hard topic. I find myself holding back from discussing it because anything other than 100% pro-WFH anti-manager comments will get a lot of drive-by downvotes.

[BoredPositron]

Post hoc ergo propter hoc...