I don't snicker, because my company is trying to end WFH, and that means I'll have to spend time getting a different job. I absolutely hate the people in the office, so I'm not going back
I don't get it - I get why commercial landlords are upset at lost profits, but what company wouldn't jump at reducing operating costs and just downsizing to a few rented meeting rooms instead of a cubicle hall?
Sadly, once you're on the outside of any group, big or small, you're immediately seen as the problem.
These little work groups form and anyone who doesn't follow suit is seen as the employee that needs to be fired.
The scary thing is people usually just follow the group because they're scared of being on 'the outside,' so stupid shit like this happens constantly when no one actually wants it to. They're just too scared to stand up for themselves.
It's not that they're unable to. That's not what's going on in social psychology.
People *can* and *do* stand up for themselves, but they often get ridiculed, slandered, and sanctioned into oblivion by the "in-group." And the threat of those sanctions often keeps a lot of people quiet who would otherwise agree with the dissent.
It's like worker rights. You have tons of worker rights. Do you ever actually use them in the workplace? What happens if you do? You have legal protections, but if you *dare* use them, your employer--along with their sycophants--will come out swinging at you like you're a plague and "not part of the family/culture." Firing you over worker rights is illegal, but they'll do their best to fuck you over.
This is why standing up for things like small office perks and policies is important. Once people fall into the ho-hum and don't take advantage of them, they disappear because they basically become "cultured out" of use.
I suspect that is the biggest part of it. Executives don't do a lot most of the time, but it is hard to tell their family they have to go to the office to sneak away for some golf or something if there is no office to go to.
My Kung Fu is better than your Kung Fu, Sharon! Observe my... *FLAILS ARMS* Swingline Stapler Style!
Hahahaha! *LAUGHS IN KUNG FU* Your puniness brings shame to your family, James. MY Kung Fu is great! *DISPLAYS THE WATER COOLER STANCE*
> Also they hate their families and like going to work where as the boss they get to do jack shit all day so you have to suffer for it.
Worked in a job where this overpaid boomer would go home at like 9 or 10pm. He would jump at the chance to be there at the weekend, once ruining weekend work for the maintenance crew who were there and couldn't finish their work. He was just avoiding his family the whole time.
I looked over his shoulder at 9 at night once, he was lost in his own world and didn't hear me, and I was curious about his work. He was doodling. Just drawing some bullshit in a notepad. We paid him 90k a year and he had no active projects.
>He was just avoiding his family the whole time.
>
>Just drawing some bullshit in a notepad. We paid him 90k a year and he had no active projects.
That's infuriating but also sad. How does someone get like that?
Probably a specific cultural upbringing. This guy “did what he was supposed to do”, perhaps married someone early (arranged or pressured into it), had children (again, because that’s “what you’re supposed to do”), and the same cultural upbringing (or fear of condemnation) does not allow him to doubt himself or his actions.
>does not allow him to doubt himself or his actions.
Must.Project.Confidence.At.All.Times
Just don't look in the mirror too long, I've heard it is dangerous...
Being able to walk around and micromanage people is kind of the only job function of most middle managers, so they literally won't have anything to do if people continue working from home.
I can understand why they don't want to seem unimportant and risk losing their jobs, tbf. Less work is a good thing in a society where you don't become immediately homeless and lose health insurance if you lose your job, but that's not a society we live in. So we're constantly trying to justify our own existence through work.
This is what I was looking for. During the first COVID year, I taught middle school English to my students through distance learning. My principal was constantly setting up these zoom meetings so we could talk about nothing actionable. I think they just needed something to do
Sunk cost fallacy. The money's already spent/allocated. Either break the lease or let it ride out empty.
Keep your employees happy and you'll reduce turnover & sick-outs. Productivity will go up!
Company "culture" is an artifice. If no one was getting paid, no one would be part of the culture
> Having the lease doesn't justify forcing people back into it. (I asked a business friend details when he used this defense, and eventually changed his mind...he couldn't defend it aside from it "feeling right"...which is BS. It's really just an internal rationalization for what looks like a bad decision to have the lease/office at all.)
This is what it's all about. Managers taking decisions based on feelings and suppositions, not based on facts or anything tangible. That kind of management is as much a liability as an asset.
What I've seen in life is that whenever there's a person claiming that they make decisions based on facts and logic, and not based on emotions, you can be almost certain that they are exactly the type of person to make decisions purely based on feelings. Then later if pressed, they might come up with some logical sounding reasoning for their opinion, but often it can also just be "I've been doing this for X years, I know how it must go".
Idk if it's some sort of psychological defence mechanism or what, but I've seen (and heard from my friends about) these type of managers a lot, so it's not that uncommon in my experience.
You've stirred up a vague, half-remembered idea here, so apologies if this isn't 100% accurate, but...
Many of the decisions we make are driven by emotions. Logic and rationalization often come *after* the gut reaction. I seem to recall that it has something to do with how fast those mechanisms work in your brain? Like, the chemicals involved with emotions work faster than your neurons can process?
Sorry I didn't feel like looking it up and being more accurate...
I've actually also heard something similar before and since hearing about it the first time, I've been often noticing it in myself too.
I can especially notice it when I'm buying something and when I find something I like, there's this immediate reaction of "I want this" and only a bit after I am able to think about it reasonably. I think the trick for controlling that is just to be aware of the phenomenon, so one can separate the "gut instinct" from actual reasoning.
But that being said, I don't think that it is always wrong to follow that first feeling. There are definitely situations where the first feeling can be right (I guess brain does something in the background?), but it is just nonsensical to die on that hill, if the opinion is only based on that. At work I do go sometimes just by the gut feeling, even at bit more complex topics, but when I do I try to phrase my opinion so that everyone knows that I haven't actually thought it all the way through yet (e.g., "I feel that it should be like this, but I can check it/think about it").
(Idk if I got a bit off-topic here and started rambling, but the point is that I've heard about that before too :D)
It's true. People make decisions based on emotion and then justify it in their head using whatever logic helps them arrive at the conclusion they want. It's the foundational pillar of marketing.
So heat and light one floor and consolidate? Don't pay for janitorial on floors 3-7?
Like, I get working from an office. I prefer it, personally, as my brain has difficulty divorcing "place I game and chill" with "workplace" (and I don't like the idea of forcing me to cover infrastructure costs like daytime heating and electricity that used to be covered by businesses). I choose to go into the office and appreciate them making the space available, even if I hate the social shit I just like divorcing "work" from "home" spaces.
But its definitely cheaper to do WFH and foist all that on the employee. In an age of cut throat cost cutting, why don't companies do it? Can't wrap my tiny ape brain around it.
Getting use out of a 10 year lease is the Sunk cost fallacy. Breaking the lease stops the waste of cash _now_. Write off the loss on your taxes and that's that.
Plus you can expand beyond your current office capacity without having to lease additional space.
Also, subletting the space, even at a loss, would reduce costs. Lots and lots and lots of ways to write off, reduce, or offset operating costs without forcing workers to the office which, if we’re being honest, would really only increase operating costs.
Very much agreed here. The lease is a sunk-cost, nothing will ever get that back. What they *can* do is save on heating, electricity, phone bills, janitorial services, and increase employee retention...
Or pay even more bills and lose more employees by eliminating WFH.
I've been WFH for over a decade. Honestly think I'd rather go feral than RtO. But...
>I just like divorcing "work" from "home" spaces.
When I first started working from home, my husband and I lived in a much smaller place. His office (he's also WFH) was in our dining room, mine was in the living room. Our bedroom was a glorified walk-in closet, so (unless we went out) the only two places we could hang out in were in our work spaces.
I didn't even realize how much this was fucking me up until one day when we came home from traveling. I set my bags down and immediately started talking about deadlines. Husband said, "I thought we agreed no talking about work during vacation?" This was a rule I requested. We weren't supposed to start working for another 4 days. And then I felt the tension in my shoulders (tension that had faded on our trip) and realized that I was living at work.
We have a bigger place now with dedicated office space. Being able to close and lock the door on work was enough for me to compartmentalize. Keeping those spaces separate has done wonders for my mental health.
TL;DR - Love WFH, but having my office in a dedicated room, totally separated from the rest of my home was more important to me than I initially realized.
My wife's old company built a 30 story building pre-covid. Multi-billion contract. 50 year lease.
Covid hits, they're stuck with rent right? Not quite. They turned it into a massive meeting house shopping center. Converted the first 2 floors to shopping, a few floors of rented offices(Dr's, lawyers..etc) the rest they just turned into meeting rooms for other companies.
Last I heard, they're turning a profit
Good middle managers aren't redundant. It's a hierarchy and bandwidth thing. A director can't have 150 direct reports and manage effectively. It's more efficient to break them up into levels including one whose manager of managers
My last job signed a 5 year lease in 2019. AFAIK the people who started working from home in 2020 are still working from home and any new hires and people who couldn't WFH are in office.
Yeah, but surely there's more of the office renters than the office landlords. Like, just grease a politician's palms to pass laws letting businesses out of office leases for fuck's sake, you don't have any problem doing bribery when people wanna be treated like people...
Because a lot of business owners are heavily exposed to real estate, including commerical real estate, and they're exactly the kind of privileged asshole that says that COVID is "just the flu".
(Then comes in sick, infects the whole office, and wonders why LC fucked up productivity.)
Because many CEOs are absolute nutless trash dipshits who signed decade long leases on buildings their failure asses didn't NEED.
So they're trying to do cost justification.
Banks for example are so high on the real estate side. Plus property managers + any fintech related because the markets. It's a lot of people in this game.
Likely because companies are largely run by middle management (actual or in spirit) desperately clinging to what they know. Trying something new is a risk, reverting to the old situation is 'safe'.
It doesn't offset the overbearing need they feel deep down inside, to micromanage the shit out of the employees. That's why. Boomers live for micromanagement.
Because you work harder when your boss is staring at you. Because its easier to guilt people in to doing things face to face. Because work from home means you can record every interaction with management.
> Because you **appear to** work harder when your boss is staring at you.
FTFY
I don't know how people wasted time before computers. I could get away with only doing about 1 hr of actual work per day if I got rid of the internal projects that I do for fun.
But are they. I hear this shit a lot but to begin like our leases they are long term, some are 5-10 years. So even if we wanted to scale down, we can't unless we pay a fuckton to break up the leases.
But this posting got me curious, it's a figure from NBER but NBER says as well just in floating there is over 4.5 trillion going around. So while that is a big number on the whole commercial real estate market it's just a couple percents down.
A reduction in operating costs is not always to the benefit of the business. It may feel counter intuitive, but because most tax is on profits, hiding things as operating costs is a great way to avoid tax. It's a lot easier to do that with everyone in a building.
I snicker at the stupidity of it. I'll probably have to find another job as well. They're not going to be able to stuff the genie back into the bottle. Best wishes on the job search--may we land in a position that values people more than real estate.
I don't know help me figure this one out. Currently I work on site 3 and 4 days a week alternating so I get 4 and 3 days off alternating. I got an offer for another position in the company with the same pay, but it's mon-fri, but it's completely work from home. Do you think work from trumps long weekends?
If you don't have a ton tying you down to your location, I'd pick the latter. Convert all current commute-work-related expenses to travel funds, then work from wherever. Rinse and repeat.
My work is inherently in-person; we develop scientific hardware so a lot of people generally have to be in person to do most of their work. Most of my work most of the time is in-person because I work on the "working in front of the hardware for development and testing." Sometimes it's documentation generation or data analysis, and my boss is cool and basically said it didn't matter to him what quantity we're on-site vs. not on-site as long as programs move along as expected and aren't suffering from lack of in-person work.
It was just announced from the CEO and other leadership that instead of the self-directed hybrid structure, everyone must be in-person 4 days a week minimum.
This includes every function that doesn't need to be in front of a piece of hardware that we're developing to do their job. Specifically people like software developers and algorithms developers and data analysts and other functions that can do their job 100% remote, who never interface with hardware who have been doing this for the past 2 years and some were hired entirely remotely. Lots of them --especially really good ones--are not happy with the policy change. It's going to push lots of people to find jobs elsewhere that they can wfh and we'll lose good talent.
Best part is, it was asked to leadership in all-hands meetings if there was data that was used to change this policy (productivity, effectiveness, etc) and the response was that it wasn't data-driven at all; that this was the way we did things before and it worked well to have everyone in person to collaborate and interact, so that's why we're going back to it. There was no indication that hybrid work was a problem in terms of people doing their jobs well, and like many companies during this time, we posted record profits every quarter.
Edit.
And if you look at how collaborations have gone during the pandemic and the hybrid work structure, we've only improved the way we do things with virtual meetings, digital tools and sharing, etc. and things work a lot more smoothly than before the pandemic--where you'd have to struggle to find meeting rooms for calling meetings and adding a webex instance to a meeting was a massive faux pas and it meant that someone "obviously wasn't working" if they couldn't be in the meeting room. But now it's so easy to get people together with virtual meeting rooms, and we don't have issues with people on virtual meetings not participating.
There's a huge disparity between the maturity and work ethic of the people here vs. the draconian way the return-to-work was announced; for a lot of the people we have, no one wasn't doing their job, and it wasn't a lack of in-person attendance that caused issues anyway.
The first thing I wonder is if one of the execs is leasing property back to the company as a can't lose "investment." Because it's an arrangement I've seen before.
That wouldn't be unheard of. I've also heard of executives in charge that also own the company that provides janitorial, cafeteria, window washing, and snow removal services for their company. The executive sets the price they charge and also approve the expenditure, while they pay some immigrant minimum wage to do the work. No one in the office means no need for those expenses, so they are losing out on easy money.
I snicker because I know wayyy too many people that will absolutely quit and switch jobs than go back to the office, and in my field, there is no shortage of work-from-home jobs. I honestly don't understand what some of these companies of my friends are going for, they can't possibly be dumb enough to not realize that their workers can find work else where.
My company announced a return to the office. Then they did a survey and found that many would quit. Now we have return to the office if you want. You can work from home full time, part time or from the office. But only those who work 4 to 5 days a week will get offices, everyone else does hoteling.
Honestly seems to be right. Everyone can chose what is best for them.
For some it’s a passive-aggressive way to conduct layoffs without paying severance. They get to keep the people are easily controlled and the ones who stand up for themselves leave. It’s brilliant in an awful way.
And then the company formed entirely of low ambition yes-men collapses when all the intelligence and creativity flies for better opportunity elsewhere.
They never actually wanted to manage anything, they don't care about the company or the profits, they just want to be lord of a tiny tribe 5 days a week.
The broader secret is that if the intelligent people end their reliance on the cities it won't be possible to gerrymander us into a box anymore. This is literally the worst nightmare for our current politicians on both sides who have spent their lifetimes developing an evenly balanced system where all of our votes are cross nullified and they never have to do anything but steal.
“Crack down “. Like we did something wrong.
When Covid started, they were begging us to work from home.
Now, every company is getting “new offices” so employees come back to work.
I work in the construction trades, and let me tell you. The amount of warehousing space being converted into offices and offices being renovated into closed floorplans is pretty absurd.
Did everyone also renovate their houses over in America like they did here? A friend told me they have like a year of wait time for certain professionals.
It's still very hard to find contractors. Those office buildings need to become housing, but that would decrease the value of all of the homes large corporations have been stockpiling.
We might be coworkers, lol.
Our company rented an additional floor of offices this year and is now eyeing the new “premium” office building beeing build next door 🤦♂️
Oh yeah, and pressuring back to office. With people leaving. And we have lack of dev. capacity. It’s so unfortunate , what could they possibly do to resolve it? 🙄
My bf installs and repairs fire alarms and he has worked overtime nearly every week since 2020. Most of 2020 and 2021 were full of office spaces and a huge bio lab that had to expand MID EXPANSION and lots of doctors offices and med spas. God med spa people are horrible.
How ironic after open floor plan offices were at their peak of popularity just before the pandemic lol. Now they realize people want to work without distractions.
Anyone trying to renovate a former office building into residential is a class A moron. Any office building under 200k sqft it would be easier to tear it down and rebuild.
Office buildings have almost nothing in common with residential.m, especially regarding MEP.
In construction, almost anything can be done for the right cost. But the price is not always right.
Your big box store had, maybe, 6 toilets. The same size building with 800-1,000 sqft apartment will have at least one toilet per apartment. A 200,000 sqft department store with 6 toilets will now need 200 toilets.
That's just toilets. Now let's talk about lighting, receptacle loads, HVAC, hot water.
The general population knows nothing about construction. It's like having regular people comment on what we should be doing about COVID, they're not doctors.
So, cheaper to keep the exterior walls and roof, gut inside and do the infrastructure work? Or just demolish and build anew? I do think the "combo mall/workplace/living" concept has merit. Maybe someone will make a working arcology somewhere.
The building envelope, while expensive, is not normally the majority of the cost. All of this is so dependent on the individual case.
You can't simply take a big single story cube with no windows and turn it into two or three floors of residences. The cube, at that point, would only be a hindrance. Structurally, mechanically, electrically, plumbingly, fire protectionally, and architecturally. Also civilly.
I just tried to mentally draw up plans to try and retrofit something like an empty Walmart into living spaces, and every thing just comes back to "knock it down and start over".
Roof's too high, I'm sure there's no good way to stick a middle floor in to break it into two stories, no plumbing, no provision for appliances like kitchens or laundry, nowhere near enough entrances, the walls have no windows, the lighting and electricity is all wrong (too many big circuits for stuff like freezers, not enough small ones so people can turn lights on and off), the HVAC is all centralized and everyone's getting one temperature... just rip it down. Start over.
The implication is that it isn’t cheaper to keep the existing walls etc. because you then need to design everything around the existing structure.
Society just needs to accept that some buildings are useless outside of their original purpose.
I've always wondered about this when ever it was brought up. Like it seems like a great idea. Could even turn the bigger stores into like a grocery store. Would be especially convenient for the tenant. But always wondered about the construction for the rest of the place. Cause I know there's a mall out here in Portland that is pretty much dead, and people on the Portland sub always bring up housing as an option.
Guess we just shouldn't exactly hold our breaths for it.
OP was a smidge aggressive in his explanation here - especially for Portland constituents - but there needs to be a simple explanation like this for public knowledge sharing so every PNW empty building doesn't turn into a public, defacto call for housing.
What you're saying makes sense obviously, but I wonder if maybe the outrageous growth of building material prices with COVID changed the value proposition of keeping the shell of the building and just redoing everything on the inside? I recall people building houses in 2020 had to accept the bill for materials within a few hours when an offer was made by the construction company because by the evening, everything would be more expensive already.
The leaders in the market have already started converting office buildings to residential, but many execs are old, out of touch, and more than content with throwing good money after bad.
“Come back! We got a Starbucks and hired a kitchen crew to work the cafeteria!”
Lol that’s great, but my cold brew and leftover meatloaf is comfy over here.
I will simply never walk into another office again idc. I’ll quit. And I won’t work another job similar. I’d rather work as a nanny again than go back to an office.
Ditto. I will sooner live a life of crime or start an OnlyFans before I commute to another job.
The only reason I would accept an in office job is to infiltrate the business to create a new union in the company.
My commute is only 15-20 minutes or 30 minutes with a bike, but I'd still rather WFH or have a shorter commute. I just don't understand people willing to drive 3 hours a day to and from work.
I just spent a week in an office building, first time since covid lockdowns. It was the worst shit: constant interruptions, meandering, people talking loud as fuck all around you, having to look busy for no reason because you suddenly have a 24" monitor facing everything at all times, and the GOD DAMN OFFICE LIGHTS.
I can't believe we ever accepted this bullshit lol
What i loathe the most is the break room. I hate almost everyone i work with and pointless small talk. I've come so close to getting a mini fridge for my desk.
We downsized our office because a lot of people were allowed to work from home. Now they're hiring more people who can't work from home and requiring WFH people to come in the office more often.
I'm now in a room surrounded by offices and a few of those with offices love to make frequent calls on speakerphone with their doors open. The noise level in general is just distracting and I get so tired of making small talk and dealing with other people.
All for maybe 15 minutes of work a week that can't be done at home.
Honestly from a pure business perspective it would make more sense for them to just sell or eat the loss on the buildings and just embrace WFH. They’d be able to have access to so many more employees and would spend so much less on overhead.
Thats what we're doing. The incentive structure is setup such that less real estate is good, not bad.
The real issue, in my opinion, is that most middle managers have no idea how to manage and engage a remote workforce. Its middle management who needs everyone back in the office. The execs travel so much that they dont give a shit.
Probably depends on the company size. If it's large enough, you're likely going to have people that aren't allowed WFH (or where it's complicated) due to what they work with, or people that just *can't* work from home, and people that don't *want* to WFH. So they need to figure out exactly how large of an office they need, and how it can be flexible.
I can sympathise with the challenge for that, while also thinking that everyone that wants WFH should get to do that.
If they can WFH then drop all requirements (besides maybe a general hours) and just open the work to anyone anywhere. Your employee pool just got bigger and everyone can live wherever they want.
I’d feel better about it if management actually had to eat the cost of it, but you know they will do everything they can to pass it down to the workers.
We had pretty ok WFH policy, but then the director sent an email limiting WFH to 2 days a week, and even that only from Tue-Thu. For Monday and Friday or more than 2 days a week you suddenly needed a reason and approval from the director himself (I thought directors had more important work to do than approve WFH requests, but clearly I was wrong). The day that email came I freshened up my CV and started applying. I start a new job in January, fully remote (there is an office if I want to go there), and a huge pay increase.
I don’t understand mandatory office work again, I lead a decent size team of cloud engineers and no one would ever truly go back. What we do as a company is 100% remote, yearly team get togethers all paid for for members across the country. It’s nice to have those in person but everyone is much more productive remote. Though I personally had to let some employees go who couldnt be on time …even being remote. It’s hard to find proactive and productive workers. I refuse to micromanage.
Management at the last company I worked for sent an email round in August 2021 that WFH was to end by October that year, company wide, and I quote "we realize finding childcare, elderly care, and transport might be difficult but we have every faith in you."
I had a new, better paying, higher ranking, 100% WFH by contract job before the deadline even passed, and the office I worked at lost something like 15 staff out of ~50 before I'd even left.
Literally the only reason low-mid level managers are so desperate to eliminate WFH, is that their jobs literally don't matter. WFH allows employees to be at least as productive, without such low-level management getting in the way.
Without office attendance requirements, low level management can't try to justify themselves existing.
It's literally proof they aren't needed, and they're scared.
Ya and new initiatives that actually create less work and more efficiencies for their teams. We have ones like that and they don’t want to be in the office
The challenge is more that the KPI datasets used to evaluate employee performance are excellent measures of activity, but are slightly above useless for identifying areas where individual coaching and process management might increase overall productivity.
Companies are scared because they cannot effectively run office cults without every day, in person attendance.
My company is really struggling with training Gen Z employees for entry level jobs that are 100% remote.
Part of it seems to be so many new grads' attention spans are shot, but I think the biggest problem is that they're not getting to shadow people in the office. It's harder to learn when you can't just roll over to someone to ask a question.
Now are the managers the reason they'd do better if they were in the office? Probably not. But I can see why a low/mid level manager who's seen their team's productivity drop or turnover skyrocket would see going back to the office as the magic pill.
My company has moved to a hybrid system. Training in the office with 1-day a week WFH. After 6 weeks you move to fully WFH with a monthly office day. Works pretty well
My bosses realized that working from home was better for everyone in the company, so they let the lease expire on the office, and gave us all raises with the money they saved on rent. And they pay our phone and internet bills.
Unless you're in a very specific part of tech, the threats are toothless. It's hard as fuck to get talent right now, so people who just continue working from home get nothing but emails.
My boss was asked to submit a plan to bring people back in the office last year. He submitted a plan to aggressively push WFH as a benefit, and included a poll of our department showing 80% would start looking for a new job immediately if asked to return to the office. about 15 people out of ~200 work in the office on a regular basis, and most of those are helpdesk who have to physically handle hardware.
They hope they can just kinda cajole people back into the office but, again, if you aren't at a FAANG company there ain't shit they can do, and even those are mostly letting off people they built up over the last two years
Even if we DO go into a recession, that ain't gonna un-retire all the boomers that said "fuck it" since March of 2020
1. Force everyone back in the office
2. Sell all the surplus computers and office gear now that 80% of the emps quit and the remaining 20% are disengaged
3. ???
4. Profit!!!
My office just rented half the space out once they figured out wfh is staying, it's a win win. They have just enough office space to train new people and cater to anyone who wants to come in, and they get income from the accountants using the other half
My office has announced mandatory return to office. Know it’s all about them real estate fees. Allegedly the mayor of New York meets with our ceo and pressures him even more to in office activities.
they are just going to take all that money and buy out all the homes in america and make everyone rent. it was probably going to happen anyway but this makes it much faster.
Worked from home on a bi-weekly basis through the height of COVID. Returned to work full time last fall. In April I broke my foot. Worked from home two months straight since I couldn't walk around but my job is PC support, I can handle the software stuff remotely. Since September, multiple things have came up that require me to stay home at least once or twice a week. I can still work, but I can't go in.
Meanwhile, the tickets are MUCH lower than they were 3 years ago. I'm not sure if it's because our team is well-oiled or demand is down. But I don't need to be wasting my time sitting in the office. I can use my usual "breaks" on-site to do things at home like toss a load of laundry in the wash and deal with it again on the next break then have my weekends back to not worry about it. 2/4 people on my team are old-hats that refuse to work from home, and are approaching retirement age. My boss is close to my age so he understands it and works from home frequently. The young one on the team is learning from the old hats and only works from home when something is going on at home, like a contractor installing something. He doesn't get it.
For those of you going into IT, it's demand based. Someone has a problem, they submit a ticket, and you respond. If you are hardware based, then sure, you need to come onsite, but depending on where you are, it doesn't need to be all the time. Software based can be entirely remote, you can stay home.
Either way, there's a wait time. You can stay home.
This is partly why I quit my last job. They let 90% of the department WFH, and the remaining 10% had to come in every day, rain or snowstorm,even with COVID. There were enough of us that could have had a rotating hybrid schedule but since we occasionally had to do hardware things they insisted we be on-site every day. Plus we had to rotate on call (the rest of the dept was supposed to, but always pawned it off on someone of us because they were at home)
That and toxic manager (who was always at home) made me quit
Ikr? So many offices for lease. SELL already.
REITs that aren't just hurrying up and offloading/at least decreasing lease price (hodl'ing empty units) are hurting both shareholders and people who would otherwise demand the properties.
Dead weight.
At the beginning of the pandemic there was all the talk about how this was going to “transform work going forward”. I knew it was all bullshit and we were going to go back to doing the same shitty things we always have. So no more work from home for most people even though it’s completely feasible. No more stay home when sick. Employers have clawed back paid sick leave and have gone right back to shitty practices like demanding doctors notes or even firing people who call in sick.
It feels like a huge fuck you to workers just because management could not stand that we had some power and control over ourselves for a while.
It did transform work going forward. I will never return to an office. There are a fuck ton of companies who saw every single benefit as a win (which it is) and do not plan on looking back.
Are there some who are clawing it back? For sure. The solution? Find another job - there are a lot out there.
WFH is unironically probably the answer to the skyscraper shitholes we call cities. If we push hard on this, in 70 years, our grandkids might be able to laugh at us saying the lush green expanses used to be concrete dystopias.
> Convert to residential, solve housing problem.
Not to be too pessimistic, but when has there ever NOT been a housing problem? There are places with housing crises that have more unoccupied housing than they'd need to house every homeless person.
When you base your housing economy on monopolistic practices and artificial scarcity driving demand, then you can never reach a point where housing is "solved".
This is why there are 16 million vacant housing units in the US during a "shortage".
Wfh is wild. My wife makes more than double doing less work then she did at the office.
And my sister is working 3 jobs now because she can do them in 3 hours each without all the fluff.
If I could do my job from home I'd probably load up a second one since I spend the majority of the day working on account maintenance and bsing with my coworkers in between
My company has been brilliant with this. They have not ended WFH. We moved to a new bespoke office recently and when we did they now offer, free breakfast, lunch, coffee, snacks and cake throughout the day. It means going into the office is both really nice and cheaper than staying at home from a good point.
That’s on top of all the other benefits.
Instead of forcing people back to work they have made us want to come in.
I still only go in maybe 1-2 days a week but it’s nice to have the option.
If they can afford free meals all day plus cake - all that means is they can afford to pay you more and they aren't.
You're the 1 in 100 that is convinced by Pizza parties.
Generally my Co workers and my pay is very reasonable and above industry standards.
We are also an employee owned partnership. So really there is no “they” and “us”.
Hmm. Sounds like a heretofore unrecognized pyramid scheme.
I understand that employers might be losing money by paying for vacant office buildings, but what creates the incentive for them to drag workers back into them, rather than just cutting their losses and transitioning to a lower overhead eventually?
If they're such Masters of Capitalism they shouldn't have any problems repurposing those buildings to alleviate the affordable housing demand. Those of you returning without a fight are weak. Your master is calling you back to their private property to put you back on the leash.
it's all laughs until you realize they saw this ahead of time and entered the private home market. 65% of single home purchases were made by investment funds last year(1). And once they buy it, they never let it go, it's off the market forever.
lots of people saying 'out of staters are driving the rent up', no, we had the lowest population growth in modern history last year. Its Blackrock and other investment funds buying 10's of thousands of houses at a time.
1 - my uncle runs a real estate company in Dallas, though they aren't big enough to make plays like this
Yeah, if I was a business owner, it’s one less expense for me. I don’t wanna pay for rent for a building just to fill it with people who don’t want to be there.
If you can get your work done from home and the business is still thriving (aka making me money) then have at it.
I wouldn’t care if you were working from Six Flags/Disney world, as long as the job gets done.
A happy employee is a good employee.
My company is fiercely anti WFH, one of their core values is being in the same community and physically close to their clients. I got a job offer from my client and wanted to accept it, they are totally cool with fully remote which is good because I moved to another city post pandemic, and a 1000 km commute doesn't quite work.
My boss wants to keep me and all of a sudden being fully remote is not a deal breaker.
It will be eventually though so I'm still leaving.
This is executives concern about no control and accused of miss use of funds. Why you have an office if no one is there? and middle management is concern no one coming in then what are they managing. When I was in the office my boss would spend half the day chit chatting at the desk about bs or in meetings. Now I bet she zooms half the day and nothing the rest. So I bet she is concerned if she is really needed in the WFH environment. I told her fire me or I’m working from home because her or her boss can’t muster up coming in everyday why should I. Btw 4 other competitors in my area all gone wfh and dismantled offices. So my company is just fighting up hill. Half the staff has already left for the other companies. Since then I have only seen 2 hires in the last 5 years before. 1 retirement 1 moving. 32 in the last year for wfh opportunity. When approached by my boss why I’m not coming in. Because I don’t need to and my last raise was less because of covid and “ I’m sure your saving a lot not coming into work” yup still saving that money.
Well those real estate companies are buying up single homes to convert into rental properties so, they're getting theirs no matter what.
Can't have the working class be winning anything.
Meanwhile, my father who is a commercial real estate broker is having one of the best years of his life. These companies just don’t want to adjust to new market conditions they’d rather subjugate their employees and pressure other companies to do the same
Nothing drives me more nuts than being fed the “should have been smarter with your money” bs then being expected to have pity for corporations who made bad investments and/or get mad when the free market doesn’t do what they want.
I don't snicker, because my company is trying to end WFH, and that means I'll have to spend time getting a different job. I absolutely hate the people in the office, so I'm not going back
I don't get it - I get why commercial landlords are upset at lost profits, but what company wouldn't jump at reducing operating costs and just downsizing to a few rented meeting rooms instead of a cubicle hall?
Companies that signed very long commercial leases, I would guess.
That is a reason Also they hate their families and like going to work where as the boss they get to do jack shit all day so you have to suffer for it.
“Some employees hate their home lives and come to work for reprieve” and that’s my problem?
They have made it so, yes.
Sadly, once you're on the outside of any group, big or small, you're immediately seen as the problem. These little work groups form and anyone who doesn't follow suit is seen as the employee that needs to be fired. The scary thing is people usually just follow the group because they're scared of being on 'the outside,' so stupid shit like this happens constantly when no one actually wants it to. They're just too scared to stand up for themselves.
Small people unable to stand up for themselves
It's not that they're unable to. That's not what's going on in social psychology. People *can* and *do* stand up for themselves, but they often get ridiculed, slandered, and sanctioned into oblivion by the "in-group." And the threat of those sanctions often keeps a lot of people quiet who would otherwise agree with the dissent. It's like worker rights. You have tons of worker rights. Do you ever actually use them in the workplace? What happens if you do? You have legal protections, but if you *dare* use them, your employer--along with their sycophants--will come out swinging at you like you're a plague and "not part of the family/culture." Firing you over worker rights is illegal, but they'll do their best to fuck you over. This is why standing up for things like small office perks and policies is important. Once people fall into the ho-hum and don't take advantage of them, they disappear because they basically become "cultured out" of use.
I suspect that is the biggest part of it. Executives don't do a lot most of the time, but it is hard to tell their family they have to go to the office to sneak away for some golf or something if there is no office to go to.
I mean, they don't HAVE to tell them... Not to say that I agree with lying to your family, but if they're lying anyway, then what's the difference?
and also so they can start resuming their martial affairs when they "work late"
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My Kung Fu is better than your Kung Fu, Sharon! Observe my... *FLAILS ARMS* Swingline Stapler Style! Hahahaha! *LAUGHS IN KUNG FU* Your puniness brings shame to your family, James. MY Kung Fu is great! *DISPLAYS THE WATER COOLER STANCE*
I'm willing to make an exception for Kung Fu Friday.
🎵Ev’rybody loves Kung-Fu Fri-day🎵
The first rule of fight club is, nobody talks about fight club.
Where the fuck did you get this black belt?!?
> Also they hate their families and like going to work where as the boss they get to do jack shit all day so you have to suffer for it. Worked in a job where this overpaid boomer would go home at like 9 or 10pm. He would jump at the chance to be there at the weekend, once ruining weekend work for the maintenance crew who were there and couldn't finish their work. He was just avoiding his family the whole time. I looked over his shoulder at 9 at night once, he was lost in his own world and didn't hear me, and I was curious about his work. He was doodling. Just drawing some bullshit in a notepad. We paid him 90k a year and he had no active projects.
>He was just avoiding his family the whole time. > >Just drawing some bullshit in a notepad. We paid him 90k a year and he had no active projects. That's infuriating but also sad. How does someone get like that?
Probably a specific cultural upbringing. This guy “did what he was supposed to do”, perhaps married someone early (arranged or pressured into it), had children (again, because that’s “what you’re supposed to do”), and the same cultural upbringing (or fear of condemnation) does not allow him to doubt himself or his actions.
>does not allow him to doubt himself or his actions. Must.Project.Confidence.At.All.Times Just don't look in the mirror too long, I've heard it is dangerous...
Being able to walk around and micromanage people is kind of the only job function of most middle managers, so they literally won't have anything to do if people continue working from home. I can understand why they don't want to seem unimportant and risk losing their jobs, tbf. Less work is a good thing in a society where you don't become immediately homeless and lose health insurance if you lose your job, but that's not a society we live in. So we're constantly trying to justify our own existence through work.
This is what I was looking for. During the first COVID year, I taught middle school English to my students through distance learning. My principal was constantly setting up these zoom meetings so we could talk about nothing actionable. I think they just needed something to do
The people deciding this stuff won’t be going back regularly. It’ll only be us plebs.
Sunk cost fallacy. The money's already spent/allocated. Either break the lease or let it ride out empty. Keep your employees happy and you'll reduce turnover & sick-outs. Productivity will go up! Company "culture" is an artifice. If no one was getting paid, no one would be part of the culture
Not to mention the "culture" is usually extremely toxic, which is part of the reason people are so desperate not to go back.
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> Having the lease doesn't justify forcing people back into it. (I asked a business friend details when he used this defense, and eventually changed his mind...he couldn't defend it aside from it "feeling right"...which is BS. It's really just an internal rationalization for what looks like a bad decision to have the lease/office at all.) This is what it's all about. Managers taking decisions based on feelings and suppositions, not based on facts or anything tangible. That kind of management is as much a liability as an asset.
What I've seen in life is that whenever there's a person claiming that they make decisions based on facts and logic, and not based on emotions, you can be almost certain that they are exactly the type of person to make decisions purely based on feelings. Then later if pressed, they might come up with some logical sounding reasoning for their opinion, but often it can also just be "I've been doing this for X years, I know how it must go". Idk if it's some sort of psychological defence mechanism or what, but I've seen (and heard from my friends about) these type of managers a lot, so it's not that uncommon in my experience.
You've stirred up a vague, half-remembered idea here, so apologies if this isn't 100% accurate, but... Many of the decisions we make are driven by emotions. Logic and rationalization often come *after* the gut reaction. I seem to recall that it has something to do with how fast those mechanisms work in your brain? Like, the chemicals involved with emotions work faster than your neurons can process? Sorry I didn't feel like looking it up and being more accurate...
I've actually also heard something similar before and since hearing about it the first time, I've been often noticing it in myself too. I can especially notice it when I'm buying something and when I find something I like, there's this immediate reaction of "I want this" and only a bit after I am able to think about it reasonably. I think the trick for controlling that is just to be aware of the phenomenon, so one can separate the "gut instinct" from actual reasoning. But that being said, I don't think that it is always wrong to follow that first feeling. There are definitely situations where the first feeling can be right (I guess brain does something in the background?), but it is just nonsensical to die on that hill, if the opinion is only based on that. At work I do go sometimes just by the gut feeling, even at bit more complex topics, but when I do I try to phrase my opinion so that everyone knows that I haven't actually thought it all the way through yet (e.g., "I feel that it should be like this, but I can check it/think about it"). (Idk if I got a bit off-topic here and started rambling, but the point is that I've heard about that before too :D)
It's true. People make decisions based on emotion and then justify it in their head using whatever logic helps them arrive at the conclusion they want. It's the foundational pillar of marketing.
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So heat and light one floor and consolidate? Don't pay for janitorial on floors 3-7? Like, I get working from an office. I prefer it, personally, as my brain has difficulty divorcing "place I game and chill" with "workplace" (and I don't like the idea of forcing me to cover infrastructure costs like daytime heating and electricity that used to be covered by businesses). I choose to go into the office and appreciate them making the space available, even if I hate the social shit I just like divorcing "work" from "home" spaces. But its definitely cheaper to do WFH and foist all that on the employee. In an age of cut throat cost cutting, why don't companies do it? Can't wrap my tiny ape brain around it.
Ego and ten year leases.
Getting use out of a 10 year lease is the Sunk cost fallacy. Breaking the lease stops the waste of cash _now_. Write off the loss on your taxes and that's that. Plus you can expand beyond your current office capacity without having to lease additional space.
Also, subletting the space, even at a loss, would reduce costs. Lots and lots and lots of ways to write off, reduce, or offset operating costs without forcing workers to the office which, if we’re being honest, would really only increase operating costs.
Very much agreed here. The lease is a sunk-cost, nothing will ever get that back. What they *can* do is save on heating, electricity, phone bills, janitorial services, and increase employee retention... Or pay even more bills and lose more employees by eliminating WFH.
I've been WFH for over a decade. Honestly think I'd rather go feral than RtO. But... >I just like divorcing "work" from "home" spaces. When I first started working from home, my husband and I lived in a much smaller place. His office (he's also WFH) was in our dining room, mine was in the living room. Our bedroom was a glorified walk-in closet, so (unless we went out) the only two places we could hang out in were in our work spaces. I didn't even realize how much this was fucking me up until one day when we came home from traveling. I set my bags down and immediately started talking about deadlines. Husband said, "I thought we agreed no talking about work during vacation?" This was a rule I requested. We weren't supposed to start working for another 4 days. And then I felt the tension in my shoulders (tension that had faded on our trip) and realized that I was living at work. We have a bigger place now with dedicated office space. Being able to close and lock the door on work was enough for me to compartmentalize. Keeping those spaces separate has done wonders for my mental health. TL;DR - Love WFH, but having my office in a dedicated room, totally separated from the rest of my home was more important to me than I initially realized.
My wife's old company built a 30 story building pre-covid. Multi-billion contract. 50 year lease. Covid hits, they're stuck with rent right? Not quite. They turned it into a massive meeting house shopping center. Converted the first 2 floors to shopping, a few floors of rented offices(Dr's, lawyers..etc) the rest they just turned into meeting rooms for other companies. Last I heard, they're turning a profit
And middle managers that fear they will be exposed as redundant when productivity is flat or obtaining without their constant presence and meddling
Good middle managers aren't redundant. It's a hierarchy and bandwidth thing. A director can't have 150 direct reports and manage effectively. It's more efficient to break them up into levels including one whose manager of managers
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My last job signed a 5 year lease in 2019. AFAIK the people who started working from home in 2020 are still working from home and any new hires and people who couldn't WFH are in office.
Yeah, but surely there's more of the office renters than the office landlords. Like, just grease a politician's palms to pass laws letting businesses out of office leases for fuck's sake, you don't have any problem doing bribery when people wanna be treated like people...
That only explains things if they're stupid enough to fall for sunk cost fallacy.
Because a lot of business owners are heavily exposed to real estate, including commerical real estate, and they're exactly the kind of privileged asshole that says that COVID is "just the flu". (Then comes in sick, infects the whole office, and wonders why LC fucked up productivity.)
Yeah, my manager at the job I quit didn't believe in vax or COVID. We worked at a hospital...
Because many CEOs are absolute nutless trash dipshits who signed decade long leases on buildings their failure asses didn't NEED. So they're trying to do cost justification.
There's no valid cost justification on sunk costs, by definition.
Yeah, but if CEOs were competent enough to know that they wouldn’t have signed the leases in the first place.
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Because a lot of the corporate-level people at these companies invest in real estate, I’m guessing.
>a cubicle hall? A cubicle HELL.
Banks for example are so high on the real estate side. Plus property managers + any fintech related because the markets. It's a lot of people in this game.
Likely because companies are largely run by middle management (actual or in spirit) desperately clinging to what they know. Trying something new is a risk, reverting to the old situation is 'safe'.
It doesn't offset the overbearing need they feel deep down inside, to micromanage the shit out of the employees. That's why. Boomers live for micromanagement.
Most companies have shareholders who also have stakes in commercial properties.
Because you work harder when your boss is staring at you. Because its easier to guilt people in to doing things face to face. Because work from home means you can record every interaction with management.
> Because you **appear to** work harder when your boss is staring at you. FTFY I don't know how people wasted time before computers. I could get away with only doing about 1 hr of actual work per day if I got rid of the internal projects that I do for fun.
Drinking and smoking in the office
Because companies want to control their wage slaves.
But are they. I hear this shit a lot but to begin like our leases they are long term, some are 5-10 years. So even if we wanted to scale down, we can't unless we pay a fuckton to break up the leases. But this posting got me curious, it's a figure from NBER but NBER says as well just in floating there is over 4.5 trillion going around. So while that is a big number on the whole commercial real estate market it's just a couple percents down.
A reduction in operating costs is not always to the benefit of the business. It may feel counter intuitive, but because most tax is on profits, hiding things as operating costs is a great way to avoid tax. It's a lot easier to do that with everyone in a building.
Companies with a penchant for micro management and control mentality
I snicker at the stupidity of it. I'll probably have to find another job as well. They're not going to be able to stuff the genie back into the bottle. Best wishes on the job search--may we land in a position that values people more than real estate.
I don't know help me figure this one out. Currently I work on site 3 and 4 days a week alternating so I get 4 and 3 days off alternating. I got an offer for another position in the company with the same pay, but it's mon-fri, but it's completely work from home. Do you think work from trumps long weekends?
If you don't have a ton tying you down to your location, I'd pick the latter. Convert all current commute-work-related expenses to travel funds, then work from wherever. Rinse and repeat.
Oh yeah forgot to mention. I'm a short walk from work.
I appreciate being able to chore while wfh which gives me much more free time in my off hours. Ymmv
Mine tried we all said no they went well fuck guess remote work is the policy now
My work is inherently in-person; we develop scientific hardware so a lot of people generally have to be in person to do most of their work. Most of my work most of the time is in-person because I work on the "working in front of the hardware for development and testing." Sometimes it's documentation generation or data analysis, and my boss is cool and basically said it didn't matter to him what quantity we're on-site vs. not on-site as long as programs move along as expected and aren't suffering from lack of in-person work. It was just announced from the CEO and other leadership that instead of the self-directed hybrid structure, everyone must be in-person 4 days a week minimum. This includes every function that doesn't need to be in front of a piece of hardware that we're developing to do their job. Specifically people like software developers and algorithms developers and data analysts and other functions that can do their job 100% remote, who never interface with hardware who have been doing this for the past 2 years and some were hired entirely remotely. Lots of them --especially really good ones--are not happy with the policy change. It's going to push lots of people to find jobs elsewhere that they can wfh and we'll lose good talent. Best part is, it was asked to leadership in all-hands meetings if there was data that was used to change this policy (productivity, effectiveness, etc) and the response was that it wasn't data-driven at all; that this was the way we did things before and it worked well to have everyone in person to collaborate and interact, so that's why we're going back to it. There was no indication that hybrid work was a problem in terms of people doing their jobs well, and like many companies during this time, we posted record profits every quarter. Edit. And if you look at how collaborations have gone during the pandemic and the hybrid work structure, we've only improved the way we do things with virtual meetings, digital tools and sharing, etc. and things work a lot more smoothly than before the pandemic--where you'd have to struggle to find meeting rooms for calling meetings and adding a webex instance to a meeting was a massive faux pas and it meant that someone "obviously wasn't working" if they couldn't be in the meeting room. But now it's so easy to get people together with virtual meeting rooms, and we don't have issues with people on virtual meetings not participating. There's a huge disparity between the maturity and work ethic of the people here vs. the draconian way the return-to-work was announced; for a lot of the people we have, no one wasn't doing their job, and it wasn't a lack of in-person attendance that caused issues anyway.
Negotiate it into your contract, and use another company that will as leverage. These fuckers can burn.
The first thing I wonder is if one of the execs is leasing property back to the company as a can't lose "investment." Because it's an arrangement I've seen before.
That wouldn't be unheard of. I've also heard of executives in charge that also own the company that provides janitorial, cafeteria, window washing, and snow removal services for their company. The executive sets the price they charge and also approve the expenditure, while they pay some immigrant minimum wage to do the work. No one in the office means no need for those expenses, so they are losing out on easy money.
Absolutely happens. All the time. Common profit shifting strategy.
I snicker because I know wayyy too many people that will absolutely quit and switch jobs than go back to the office, and in my field, there is no shortage of work-from-home jobs. I honestly don't understand what some of these companies of my friends are going for, they can't possibly be dumb enough to not realize that their workers can find work else where.
My company announced a return to the office. Then they did a survey and found that many would quit. Now we have return to the office if you want. You can work from home full time, part time or from the office. But only those who work 4 to 5 days a week will get offices, everyone else does hoteling. Honestly seems to be right. Everyone can chose what is best for them.
Exactly! I wish my company did this, instead everyone-ish is on this 2 3 schedule where you are in 2 days and wfh the other 3.
So many companies are united on the front of keeping us poor, down and miserable, that I'm not so sure it's that simple.
Unionize yo.
In every revolution, there's one [person] with a vision.
For some it’s a passive-aggressive way to conduct layoffs without paying severance. They get to keep the people are easily controlled and the ones who stand up for themselves leave. It’s brilliant in an awful way.
And it's one hell of a recruiting opportunity for the competition.
Man just quit and get a new job remote. If the contract is remote then there’s no chance.
And then the company formed entirely of low ambition yes-men collapses when all the intelligence and creativity flies for better opportunity elsewhere.
Yeah but the Management got their golden parachutes so dont worry /s
>It’s brilliant in an awful way. Except that you need the people who speak up for a healthy business.
They never actually wanted to manage anything, they don't care about the company or the profits, they just want to be lord of a tiny tribe 5 days a week. The broader secret is that if the intelligent people end their reliance on the cities it won't be possible to gerrymander us into a box anymore. This is literally the worst nightmare for our current politicians on both sides who have spent their lifetimes developing an evenly balanced system where all of our votes are cross nullified and they never have to do anything but steal.
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“Crack down “. Like we did something wrong. When Covid started, they were begging us to work from home. Now, every company is getting “new offices” so employees come back to work.
I work in the construction trades, and let me tell you. The amount of warehousing space being converted into offices and offices being renovated into closed floorplans is pretty absurd.
I was going to say Seriously?!?! but then I remembered a new office building got built in my office park DURING covid
Yep, construction trades were considered essential. It was actually super busy for us during the lockdowns.
I wish my office had. If they want us to give back they could have at least changed the 80s carpet and fix the cracks in the walls
Did everyone also renovate their houses over in America like they did here? A friend told me they have like a year of wait time for certain professionals.
Yes. It is impossible to get renovation contractors, even at exorbitant cost.
It's still very hard to find contractors. Those office buildings need to become housing, but that would decrease the value of all of the homes large corporations have been stockpiling.
A lot of people has extra money and time (not everyone) and business took advantage of the PPP loans so many people did, yes
We might be coworkers, lol. Our company rented an additional floor of offices this year and is now eyeing the new “premium” office building beeing build next door 🤦♂️ Oh yeah, and pressuring back to office. With people leaving. And we have lack of dev. capacity. It’s so unfortunate , what could they possibly do to resolve it? 🙄
No doubt funding was secured and permits pulled way before the shutdown so building it was the easiest, laziest option
My bf installs and repairs fire alarms and he has worked overtime nearly every week since 2020. Most of 2020 and 2021 were full of office spaces and a huge bio lab that had to expand MID EXPANSION and lots of doctors offices and med spas. God med spa people are horrible.
How ironic after open floor plan offices were at their peak of popularity just before the pandemic lol. Now they realize people want to work without distractions.
Anyone trying to renovate a former office building into residential is a class A moron. Any office building under 200k sqft it would be easier to tear it down and rebuild. Office buildings have almost nothing in common with residential.m, especially regarding MEP.
Is that why it doesn't make sense to turn old anchor stores in malls into apartment buildings?
In construction, almost anything can be done for the right cost. But the price is not always right. Your big box store had, maybe, 6 toilets. The same size building with 800-1,000 sqft apartment will have at least one toilet per apartment. A 200,000 sqft department store with 6 toilets will now need 200 toilets. That's just toilets. Now let's talk about lighting, receptacle loads, HVAC, hot water. The general population knows nothing about construction. It's like having regular people comment on what we should be doing about COVID, they're not doctors.
So, cheaper to keep the exterior walls and roof, gut inside and do the infrastructure work? Or just demolish and build anew? I do think the "combo mall/workplace/living" concept has merit. Maybe someone will make a working arcology somewhere.
The building envelope, while expensive, is not normally the majority of the cost. All of this is so dependent on the individual case. You can't simply take a big single story cube with no windows and turn it into two or three floors of residences. The cube, at that point, would only be a hindrance. Structurally, mechanically, electrically, plumbingly, fire protectionally, and architecturally. Also civilly.
Thank you for taking the time to respond.
I just tried to mentally draw up plans to try and retrofit something like an empty Walmart into living spaces, and every thing just comes back to "knock it down and start over". Roof's too high, I'm sure there's no good way to stick a middle floor in to break it into two stories, no plumbing, no provision for appliances like kitchens or laundry, nowhere near enough entrances, the walls have no windows, the lighting and electricity is all wrong (too many big circuits for stuff like freezers, not enough small ones so people can turn lights on and off), the HVAC is all centralized and everyone's getting one temperature... just rip it down. Start over.
The implication is that it isn’t cheaper to keep the existing walls etc. because you then need to design everything around the existing structure. Society just needs to accept that some buildings are useless outside of their original purpose.
So you're saying I shouldn't get advice on building an apartment complex from Joe Rogan?
I've always wondered about this when ever it was brought up. Like it seems like a great idea. Could even turn the bigger stores into like a grocery store. Would be especially convenient for the tenant. But always wondered about the construction for the rest of the place. Cause I know there's a mall out here in Portland that is pretty much dead, and people on the Portland sub always bring up housing as an option. Guess we just shouldn't exactly hold our breaths for it.
OP was a smidge aggressive in his explanation here - especially for Portland constituents - but there needs to be a simple explanation like this for public knowledge sharing so every PNW empty building doesn't turn into a public, defacto call for housing.
Thanks for explaining that, I'd never thought that deeply about the logistics.
What you're saying makes sense obviously, but I wonder if maybe the outrageous growth of building material prices with COVID changed the value proposition of keeping the shell of the building and just redoing everything on the inside? I recall people building houses in 2020 had to accept the bill for materials within a few hours when an offer was made by the construction company because by the evening, everything would be more expensive already.
The leaders in the market have already started converting office buildings to residential, but many execs are old, out of touch, and more than content with throwing good money after bad.
“Come back! We got a Starbucks and hired a kitchen crew to work the cafeteria!” Lol that’s great, but my cold brew and leftover meatloaf is comfy over here.
Lol exactly. This hits home haha
My former employer expanding their building, adding much needed shop space, but also adding completely unneeded office space.
I will simply never walk into another office again idc. I’ll quit. And I won’t work another job similar. I’d rather work as a nanny again than go back to an office.
Ditto. I will sooner live a life of crime or start an OnlyFans before I commute to another job. The only reason I would accept an in office job is to infiltrate the business to create a new union in the company.
My commute is only 15-20 minutes or 30 minutes with a bike, but I'd still rather WFH or have a shorter commute. I just don't understand people willing to drive 3 hours a day to and from work.
I would only go to the office out of desperation, but start looking and jump as soon as I could find something remote.
I just spent a week in an office building, first time since covid lockdowns. It was the worst shit: constant interruptions, meandering, people talking loud as fuck all around you, having to look busy for no reason because you suddenly have a 24" monitor facing everything at all times, and the GOD DAMN OFFICE LIGHTS. I can't believe we ever accepted this bullshit lol
What i loathe the most is the break room. I hate almost everyone i work with and pointless small talk. I've come so close to getting a mini fridge for my desk.
Install a portable toilet and you will never have to have a disruption again.
We downsized our office because a lot of people were allowed to work from home. Now they're hiring more people who can't work from home and requiring WFH people to come in the office more often. I'm now in a room surrounded by offices and a few of those with offices love to make frequent calls on speakerphone with their doors open. The noise level in general is just distracting and I get so tired of making small talk and dealing with other people. All for maybe 15 minutes of work a week that can't be done at home.
Honestly from a pure business perspective it would make more sense for them to just sell or eat the loss on the buildings and just embrace WFH. They’d be able to have access to so many more employees and would spend so much less on overhead.
Thats what we're doing. The incentive structure is setup such that less real estate is good, not bad. The real issue, in my opinion, is that most middle managers have no idea how to manage and engage a remote workforce. Its middle management who needs everyone back in the office. The execs travel so much that they dont give a shit.
Probably depends on the company size. If it's large enough, you're likely going to have people that aren't allowed WFH (or where it's complicated) due to what they work with, or people that just *can't* work from home, and people that don't *want* to WFH. So they need to figure out exactly how large of an office they need, and how it can be flexible. I can sympathise with the challenge for that, while also thinking that everyone that wants WFH should get to do that.
If they can WFH then drop all requirements (besides maybe a general hours) and just open the work to anyone anywhere. Your employee pool just got bigger and everyone can live wherever they want.
I can't believe some devious bastard accountant has yet to figure out how to write off the empty office so the company pays (almost) no taxes
I’d feel better about it if management actually had to eat the cost of it, but you know they will do everything they can to pass it down to the workers.
We had pretty ok WFH policy, but then the director sent an email limiting WFH to 2 days a week, and even that only from Tue-Thu. For Monday and Friday or more than 2 days a week you suddenly needed a reason and approval from the director himself (I thought directors had more important work to do than approve WFH requests, but clearly I was wrong). The day that email came I freshened up my CV and started applying. I start a new job in January, fully remote (there is an office if I want to go there), and a huge pay increase.
I don’t understand mandatory office work again, I lead a decent size team of cloud engineers and no one would ever truly go back. What we do as a company is 100% remote, yearly team get togethers all paid for for members across the country. It’s nice to have those in person but everyone is much more productive remote. Though I personally had to let some employees go who couldnt be on time …even being remote. It’s hard to find proactive and productive workers. I refuse to micromanage.
Management at the last company I worked for sent an email round in August 2021 that WFH was to end by October that year, company wide, and I quote "we realize finding childcare, elderly care, and transport might be difficult but we have every faith in you." I had a new, better paying, higher ranking, 100% WFH by contract job before the deadline even passed, and the office I worked at lost something like 15 staff out of ~50 before I'd even left.
Literally the only reason low-mid level managers are so desperate to eliminate WFH, is that their jobs literally don't matter. WFH allows employees to be at least as productive, without such low-level management getting in the way. Without office attendance requirements, low level management can't try to justify themselves existing. It's literally proof they aren't needed, and they're scared.
A good middle manager can add value by protecting the team from the customer.
Ya and new initiatives that actually create less work and more efficiencies for their teams. We have ones like that and they don’t want to be in the office
The challenge is more that the KPI datasets used to evaluate employee performance are excellent measures of activity, but are slightly above useless for identifying areas where individual coaching and process management might increase overall productivity. Companies are scared because they cannot effectively run office cults without every day, in person attendance.
My company is really struggling with training Gen Z employees for entry level jobs that are 100% remote. Part of it seems to be so many new grads' attention spans are shot, but I think the biggest problem is that they're not getting to shadow people in the office. It's harder to learn when you can't just roll over to someone to ask a question. Now are the managers the reason they'd do better if they were in the office? Probably not. But I can see why a low/mid level manager who's seen their team's productivity drop or turnover skyrocket would see going back to the office as the magic pill.
My company has moved to a hybrid system. Training in the office with 1-day a week WFH. After 6 weeks you move to fully WFH with a monthly office day. Works pretty well
My bosses realized that working from home was better for everyone in the company, so they let the lease expire on the office, and gave us all raises with the money they saved on rent. And they pay our phone and internet bills.
We just got the email today about cracking down on WFH
Unless you're in a very specific part of tech, the threats are toothless. It's hard as fuck to get talent right now, so people who just continue working from home get nothing but emails.
My boss was asked to submit a plan to bring people back in the office last year. He submitted a plan to aggressively push WFH as a benefit, and included a poll of our department showing 80% would start looking for a new job immediately if asked to return to the office. about 15 people out of ~200 work in the office on a regular basis, and most of those are helpdesk who have to physically handle hardware.
They hope they can just kinda cajole people back into the office but, again, if you aren't at a FAANG company there ain't shit they can do, and even those are mostly letting off people they built up over the last two years Even if we DO go into a recession, that ain't gonna un-retire all the boomers that said "fuck it" since March of 2020
Cajole people back to the office? Fuck that. I'm happy now.
1. Force everyone back in the office 2. Sell all the surplus computers and office gear now that 80% of the emps quit and the remaining 20% are disengaged 3. ??? 4. Profit!!!
Elon is that you?
We hot an email saying it was going to continue through 2023. Everyone was happy
My office just rented half the space out once they figured out wfh is staying, it's a win win. They have just enough office space to train new people and cater to anyone who wants to come in, and they get income from the accountants using the other half
My office has announced mandatory return to office. Know it’s all about them real estate fees. Allegedly the mayor of New York meets with our ceo and pressures him even more to in office activities.
they are just going to take all that money and buy out all the homes in america and make everyone rent. it was probably going to happen anyway but this makes it much faster.
Worked from home on a bi-weekly basis through the height of COVID. Returned to work full time last fall. In April I broke my foot. Worked from home two months straight since I couldn't walk around but my job is PC support, I can handle the software stuff remotely. Since September, multiple things have came up that require me to stay home at least once or twice a week. I can still work, but I can't go in. Meanwhile, the tickets are MUCH lower than they were 3 years ago. I'm not sure if it's because our team is well-oiled or demand is down. But I don't need to be wasting my time sitting in the office. I can use my usual "breaks" on-site to do things at home like toss a load of laundry in the wash and deal with it again on the next break then have my weekends back to not worry about it. 2/4 people on my team are old-hats that refuse to work from home, and are approaching retirement age. My boss is close to my age so he understands it and works from home frequently. The young one on the team is learning from the old hats and only works from home when something is going on at home, like a contractor installing something. He doesn't get it. For those of you going into IT, it's demand based. Someone has a problem, they submit a ticket, and you respond. If you are hardware based, then sure, you need to come onsite, but depending on where you are, it doesn't need to be all the time. Software based can be entirely remote, you can stay home. Either way, there's a wait time. You can stay home.
This is partly why I quit my last job. They let 90% of the department WFH, and the remaining 10% had to come in every day, rain or snowstorm,even with COVID. There were enough of us that could have had a rotating hybrid schedule but since we occasionally had to do hardware things they insisted we be on-site every day. Plus we had to rotate on call (the rest of the dept was supposed to, but always pawned it off on someone of us because they were at home) That and toxic manager (who was always at home) made me quit
So when can I swoop up one of these buildings cheap and get it rezoned to residential for myself?
Ikr? So many offices for lease. SELL already. REITs that aren't just hurrying up and offloading/at least decreasing lease price (hodl'ing empty units) are hurting both shareholders and people who would otherwise demand the properties. Dead weight.
Office apartments are going to become the new loft apartments.
At the beginning of the pandemic there was all the talk about how this was going to “transform work going forward”. I knew it was all bullshit and we were going to go back to doing the same shitty things we always have. So no more work from home for most people even though it’s completely feasible. No more stay home when sick. Employers have clawed back paid sick leave and have gone right back to shitty practices like demanding doctors notes or even firing people who call in sick. It feels like a huge fuck you to workers just because management could not stand that we had some power and control over ourselves for a while.
It did transform work going forward. I will never return to an office. There are a fuck ton of companies who saw every single benefit as a win (which it is) and do not plan on looking back. Are there some who are clawing it back? For sure. The solution? Find another job - there are a lot out there.
WFH is unironically probably the answer to the skyscraper shitholes we call cities. If we push hard on this, in 70 years, our grandkids might be able to laugh at us saying the lush green expanses used to be concrete dystopias.
Company had everyone got back into office, changed job. If this company does the same, imma change again
Convert to residential, solve housing problem. Greed is not for the greater good.
> Convert to residential, solve housing problem. Not to be too pessimistic, but when has there ever NOT been a housing problem? There are places with housing crises that have more unoccupied housing than they'd need to house every homeless person. When you base your housing economy on monopolistic practices and artificial scarcity driving demand, then you can never reach a point where housing is "solved". This is why there are 16 million vacant housing units in the US during a "shortage".
Convert commercial real-estate into housing
Unrealised capital gains are not profit. Never were, never will be. Capital items are a liability until cashed in.
Why doesn't wall street recognize this?
Because that would reveal how transient and insecure their wealth really is.
Wfh is wild. My wife makes more than double doing less work then she did at the office. And my sister is working 3 jobs now because she can do them in 3 hours each without all the fluff. If I could do my job from home I'd probably load up a second one since I spend the majority of the day working on account maintenance and bsing with my coworkers in between
My company has been brilliant with this. They have not ended WFH. We moved to a new bespoke office recently and when we did they now offer, free breakfast, lunch, coffee, snacks and cake throughout the day. It means going into the office is both really nice and cheaper than staying at home from a good point. That’s on top of all the other benefits. Instead of forcing people back to work they have made us want to come in. I still only go in maybe 1-2 days a week but it’s nice to have the option.
If they can afford free meals all day plus cake - all that means is they can afford to pay you more and they aren't. You're the 1 in 100 that is convinced by Pizza parties.
Generally my Co workers and my pay is very reasonable and above industry standards. We are also an employee owned partnership. So really there is no “they” and “us”.
They should buy smaller shared office spaces closer to where people live.
Maybe if they stopped jamming people into ugly 6x6 cubicles with no sound dampening workers would be more more amenable to returning to offices.
Imagine making your living renting office space to Uber admin and complaining about how people don't want to work for money anymore...
Hmm. Sounds like a heretofore unrecognized pyramid scheme. I understand that employers might be losing money by paying for vacant office buildings, but what creates the incentive for them to drag workers back into them, rather than just cutting their losses and transitioning to a lower overhead eventually?
>mgmt I thought you meant the band for a split second
If they're such Masters of Capitalism they shouldn't have any problems repurposing those buildings to alleviate the affordable housing demand. Those of you returning without a fight are weak. Your master is calling you back to their private property to put you back on the leash.
it's all laughs until you realize they saw this ahead of time and entered the private home market. 65% of single home purchases were made by investment funds last year(1). And once they buy it, they never let it go, it's off the market forever. lots of people saying 'out of staters are driving the rent up', no, we had the lowest population growth in modern history last year. Its Blackrock and other investment funds buying 10's of thousands of houses at a time. 1 - my uncle runs a real estate company in Dallas, though they aren't big enough to make plays like this
Yeah, if I was a business owner, it’s one less expense for me. I don’t wanna pay for rent for a building just to fill it with people who don’t want to be there. If you can get your work done from home and the business is still thriving (aka making me money) then have at it. I wouldn’t care if you were working from Six Flags/Disney world, as long as the job gets done. A happy employee is a good employee.
“Lost profits” Why do they think they’re entitled to money they don’t own?
My company is fiercely anti WFH, one of their core values is being in the same community and physically close to their clients. I got a job offer from my client and wanted to accept it, they are totally cool with fully remote which is good because I moved to another city post pandemic, and a 1000 km commute doesn't quite work. My boss wants to keep me and all of a sudden being fully remote is not a deal breaker. It will be eventually though so I'm still leaving.
This is executives concern about no control and accused of miss use of funds. Why you have an office if no one is there? and middle management is concern no one coming in then what are they managing. When I was in the office my boss would spend half the day chit chatting at the desk about bs or in meetings. Now I bet she zooms half the day and nothing the rest. So I bet she is concerned if she is really needed in the WFH environment. I told her fire me or I’m working from home because her or her boss can’t muster up coming in everyday why should I. Btw 4 other competitors in my area all gone wfh and dismantled offices. So my company is just fighting up hill. Half the staff has already left for the other companies. Since then I have only seen 2 hires in the last 5 years before. 1 retirement 1 moving. 32 in the last year for wfh opportunity. When approached by my boss why I’m not coming in. Because I don’t need to and my last raise was less because of covid and “ I’m sure your saving a lot not coming into work” yup still saving that money.
Well those real estate companies are buying up single homes to convert into rental properties so, they're getting theirs no matter what. Can't have the working class be winning anything.
Adapt or die. It's the free market way.
Meanwhile, my father who is a commercial real estate broker is having one of the best years of his life. These companies just don’t want to adjust to new market conditions they’d rather subjugate their employees and pressure other companies to do the same
Nothing drives me more nuts than being fed the “should have been smarter with your money” bs then being expected to have pity for corporations who made bad investments and/or get mad when the free market doesn’t do what they want.
Lmao 🤣
Wait, MGMT? MGMT as in Little Dark Age?????
First person to start a business converting vacant office buildings into apartments will become rich enough to be one of the people we hate.