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I work closely with some people who make these kinds of decisions and ime it's not commercial real estate (though I'm sure there might be isolated cases of this

I work closely with some people who make these kinds of decisions and ime it's not commercial real estate (though I'm sure there might be isolated cases of this happening - Washington DC's city government is a notable example of this) Based on my network, their reasoning is a mix of: - communication breakdowns due to the difficulty of building an async communication model (remember that most people are not as text/writing and async driven as Internet commenters on a tech forum), and operational work like quarterly planning, QBRs, product line prioritizations, etc can be done much faster in person instead of over 10-15 Zoom calls over 3-5 weeks. - situations where remote workers are domiciled in a different location from where they were hired AND they didn't tell HR (this leaves companies legally liable for various tax, business incorporation, and safety regulations) - the occasional case where a major security incident occurs due to lack of in-person verification (eg. The recent North Korea remote worker scandal, the ongoing Snowflake break) - Justify US headcount. One of the portfolio companies I was an observer for went public a couple years ago. When they switched to remote during the pandemic, they realized they could cut down their entire US engineering presence and overhire in Eastern Europe, Israel, and India and drastically reduce margins. Most larger institutional investors are clamoring for this now, and they have a point to a certain extent. IBM, Google, Crowdstrike, and Amazon have unofficially started this, and I'm not surprised if other companies are doing the same There are ways to change an organization to resolve these issues, but they are hard, expensive, and not scalable for large organizations.

salawat 2y ago
>- situations where remote workers are domiciled in a different location from where they were hired AND they didn't tell HR (this leaves companies legally liable for various tax, business incorporation, and safety regulations) This right here is entirely a result of government leveraging employers as a social control mechanism, that hitherto hasn't been so much of an issue; but with things like the Internet and computers, has now become highly disruptive to comply with. The answer to "who gets the tax revenue?" has previously been "the jurisdiction of record for the employee". Anything more fine grained than that starts to become indistinguishable from serfdom, and reels of government overreach.
- alephnerd 2y ago
  > This right here is entirely a result of government leveraging employers as a social control mechanism Not everything is a conspiracy. I like using roads, my local library, my public schools, and my local park. The issue is if my employer thinks I'm domiciled in Texas but I am actually working from Portugal, then my employer is paying taxes to Texas but not Portugal. This pisses off Portugal as there is basically an additional person who's using public services but not paying for them (income and corporate taxes make the majority of tax revenue).

salawat 2y ago

>- situations where remote workers are domiciled in a different location from where they were hired AND they didn't tell HR (this leaves companies legally liable for various tax, business incorporation, and safety regulations) This right here is entirely a result of government leveraging employers as a social control mechanism, that hitherto hasn't been so much of an issue; but with things like the Internet and computers, has now become highly disruptive to comply with. The answer to "who gets the tax revenue?" has previously been "the jurisdiction of record for the employee". Anything more fine grained than that starts to become indistinguishable from serfdom, and reels of government overreach.

alephnerd 2y ago
> This right here is entirely a result of government leveraging employers as a social control mechanism Not everything is a conspiracy. I like using roads, my local library, my public schools, and my local park. The issue is if my employer thinks I'm domiciled in Texas but I am actually working from Portugal, then my employer is paying taxes to Texas but not Portugal. This pisses off Portugal as there is basically an additional person who's using public services but not paying for them (income and corporate taxes make the majority of tax revenue).