When do we just start calling out that it’s about their commercial real estate holdings? I’m an engineer at a large fortune 500, and while my part of the company has made it very clear to leadership that we are going to remain remote, they made this whole huge deal about RTO for the rest of the company. They said it was about culture, but it’s very obviously about real estate. The CEO is very ego driven and likes his big buildings. I was really hoping someone would have the balls to call him on that in one of the many comical public meetings they had about RTO.
It’s not just about liking the big buildings. It’s also very much tired to company evaluation numbers and stock price.
Real estate is a huge part of company asserts and they reflect in the stock price.
Why do you think these huge mega companies publicly traded have these trillion dollar campuses and stuff? Private companies would find that a little bit crazy, when they are more focused on having actual cash in the bank.
The real estate isn’t an ego thing, it’s protecting and growing the price of company stock
I’m not convinced the bottom dollar is as relevant as the stock price.
These companies make baffling dollar decisions, like having these trillion dollar campuses, that would make no sense at all to the bottom dollar.
It would seem wasteful. But for the stock? Well that seems like a different story. What does having trillions in real estate holdings under a company name do to the stock?
well it helps the book value as an asset but it hurts the available cash and the liquidity of assets and the return on assets although the depreciation is a big write off. its not a great use for most companies to sit on brick and mortar that aren’t generating revenue. but whats the point of having a high floor corner office if nobody is around to pretend to care?
A lot of companies with large campuses have gotten concessions from local government, since the workers will increase economic activity in the area. So part of it is also that city governments are putting pressure on companies to get people in, and they might lose millions in tax breaks they got for building in their city.
Like i said, I’m not going back to the office, and my part of the company is openly defiant about it. Most of us are independently wealthy and they know we can just walk.
My previous employer put on a handout that was supposed to make people feel good about RTO that Denver was chosen as a hub because of a $7 million tax break. So it’s about real estate but there could also be other bullshit reasons for it as well, none of which actually have to do with collaboration or culture.
“Jassey deflected questions on what data or information led him to make this decision. Jassey, seemingly losing patience, eventually warned employees that if they don’t return to the office, they may have to find employment elsewhere.”
So he doesn’t have a good reason, and when asked about it he started to “lose patience”? How dare anyone question the all mighty CEOs plans /s
we are going back to the office at least three days a week, and it’s not right for all of our teammates to be in three days a week and for people to refuse to do so.
I really wish they'd give a real reason for it. Just say "When we built our offices we negotiated with the city to have lower taxes and if you don't come back we'll lose that." Or "We don't want the value of our commercial real estate holdings to go down."
At the very least the workers could be mad at the right thing. Instead Amazon is going to lose its best folks to fully remote jobs first, then backfill with people who aren't able to get a WFH job or have to pay people a huge premium to attract remote workers back to the office.
That will hurt them worse than the taxes or real estate devaluation, but that will happen over years instead of by next quarter, so they don't care.
I work at Amazon, and for many people this is what annoys people the most.
Rightly or wrongly, a lot of people like Amazon because it pushes the narrative that data is king. If you want to do something, you need the right data and figures to justify it.
Since Jassy took over, Amazon mimicked other tech companies by becoming a belief-driven company, instead of a data-driven company. The reason he’s losing patience is because his belief is being questioned, at a time where his leadership is either being questioned or being followed right to the top.
Data at Amazon has never been king, it was lip service at best and in most case it was only ever to be used to attack someone else’s position, never to support your own.
FWIW, I fully agree, and I’ve seen countless examples of managers using LP’s as a weapon to fuel URA or to promote their own views.
The view is distorted in that the people that Jassy is pissing off are those that benefited and thrived under the reign of Bezos. IMO, he would’ve done the exact same thing, but that doesn’t stop the Amazon cult from remembering “the good old days”.
Reddit was always going to rebound eventually, it's got a massive userbase and can pull through a fair number of people leaving. I'm pretty happy with the amount of free time I've won back since I've stopped doom scrolling Reddit.
Pretty keen to see how the fediverse improves over time.
I’ll still likely get answers to questions by including “Reddit” in my search engine searches, but for general community posting consumption I’ve been really pleased with Lemmy. I haven’t missed Reddit and avoiding ads is 100% worth it for me. It feels like using Gimp instead of Photoshop.
I tend to agree with the sentiment here that we are all the winners for having discovered and are still using kbin, a platform that most wouldn't have even known about before Reddit's shenanigans. Though, I want to point out that total user activity on kbin is down 7,000 people since about 10 days ago...
It seems people are either going back, or are abandoning for Lemmy because of their abundance of mobile apps. Artemis is a decent kbin app, and is almost ready to release for public beta now that the API is complete (just waiting on integration) - though I fear it needs to happen sooner than later if we are to retain the userbase.
Yeah. that is probably true for many since we all came looking for an alternative due to the loss of our mobile app... Lemmy is a little more mature since it's been around a lot longer, so it already had an API to build on. @Rideranton has been working on an API and has several pending pull requests to implement one. I truly believe kbin is a better software so I'm hoping that the API sparks more dev interest.
Artemis is now available (Play Store link), but I completely agree that the lack of maturity in apps make Kbin a less compelling offer. It's still my usualy way to browse from my desktop though.
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