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>. The cost savings of work from home must have been enormous for these companies First I agree overall, however I think you overestimate how much any companie

>. The cost savings of work from home must have been enormous for these companies First I agree overall, however I think you overestimate how much any companies saved on the WFH shift. 1. They still own the buildings or leases/mortgages. I doubt many were able to get out of leases which in commercial are usually 3-5year min. Mortgage only goes away if they sold the building. 2. They still have to pay the cost of maintaining the building and facilities while unused in the above cases. 3. Pretty much all companies are using their commercial locations to bloat their balance sheets and secure debt. This is actually a HUGE factor as to why so many companies what WFH to end. They simply cannot get rid of their offices or they would be insolvent based on their finances. You can't throw out 2bil in real estate that is securing 20bil in debt or it would be called in. 4. Many companies were unprepared so they had to pay out the nose the get things setup rapidly for remote workers because they resisted it for so long. Why do you think Zoom blew up so fast?

skrbjc 4y ago
I think the big savings in real estate came from not having to keep getting more and more space to house all of your new employees. When I worked at a large tech company in SF, they were running up against their limits and just didn't have enough space to house the people they were hiring, so they had to slow hiring. The smaller startup I worked at also had to get a second office a couple blocks away from the original office. In the current remote-forward world, while these companies have to keep their existing real estate, they get the benefit of not having grow their real estate portfolio relative to their employee size. I was also told it cost that large tech company 20-30k a year per physical seat in the office. So I'm pretty sure the savings have been decent, even if they didn't dump their office spaces.

skrbjc 4y ago

I think the big savings in real estate came from not having to keep getting more and more space to house all of your new employees. When I worked at a large tech company in SF, they were running up against their limits and just didn't have enough space to house the people they were hiring, so they had to slow hiring. The smaller startup I worked at also had to get a second office a couple blocks away from the original office. In the current remote-forward world, while these companies have to keep their existing real estate, they get the benefit of not having grow their real estate portfolio relative to their employee size. I was also told it cost that large tech company 20-30k a year per physical seat in the office. So I'm pretty sure the savings have been decent, even if they didn't dump their office spaces.