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submitted 2 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Here's a rare sight: a CEO of a large company has spoken out in support of remote work for employees, slamming those firms that drag staff back into the office against their will. Dropbox boss Drew Houston compared RTO mandates to trying to force people back into malls and movie theaters.

Speaking on an episode of Fortune's "Leadership Next" podcast, Houston said what most people have long thought: that returning to the office is a waste of time and money when employees can do exactly the same tasks at home.

"We can be a lot less dumb than forcing people back into a car three days a week or whatever, to literally be back on the same Zoom meeting they would have been at home," he said. "There's a better way to do this."

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[-] [email protected] 3 points 11 hours ago

I am in a situation where the return to office was a 6k decrease in wages.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago)

Personally I wouldn't want to work in an office where (almost) everybody is remote. I believe that the best option is to do a hybrid.

Edit: I prefer working with others in person instead of doing it remotely over the phone or teams. Not sure if I am more productive at work or at home due to the distractions at home. But I am in the minority it seems, but then again my commute is about my rewind time so I am refreshed when I am at home. Traffic isn't an issue either and I can bike if I wish (and didn't sweat as much)

[-] [email protected] 1 points 11 hours ago

Not sure if I am more productive at work or at home due to the distractions at home

Everyone I know is more productive at home, office is all the time coffee breaks, deciding where to go for lunch, then going to lunch, then another coffee break, smoke break, etc

[-] [email protected] 2 points 11 hours ago

There are specific things that are more efficient in person, mostly meetings with multiple people.

It’s easier to interject and the conversation flows better in person.

With zoom and the like you get to to the “no you go ahead” loops when people talk over each other.

Everything else is just fine remote.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 10 hours ago

"Where to go for lunch, you go out lunching everyday? We just bring our own lunch.

But yes I am generally less productive at home because I am inclined to do other shit while at work and considering I have to write hours on customers I cannot get away with working 5 hours and writting 8 hours (that's also illegal, but okay)

[-] [email protected] 6 points 19 hours ago

Dropbox were really smart and went for it early, they closed offices completely and sent plenty of workers to full remote. Savong money for the company on office rent, and money and time for the workers.

[-] [email protected] 5 points 18 hours ago

they saw the profit in it. most of the other companies wernt doing it because: ceo, managment love to have power over the lowly worker, + govt tax benefits, business from commuters

[-] [email protected] 9 points 21 hours ago

I would still go to a mall if they didn't have overstock on slim fit clothing. I would also go to the theater more if they had reasonable pricing and actually showed movies I want to watch. There's nothing wrong with either of these things, it's just that capitalism has yet again, ruined them to appease the 1%.

[-] [email protected] 67 points 2 days ago

RTO is either companies looking for a way to cut jobs or a way to utilize their commercial real estate.

[-] [email protected] 14 points 1 day ago

I also want to think it's a little bit the management/CEOs who think their employees are their friends who get lonely realizing the stripper doesn't actually love them. Meanwhile they refuse to develop a personality or real friendships.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 18 hours ago

I didn't think that managers like Michael Scott actually existed.

[-] [email protected] 36 points 2 days ago

Step 1: Create one of the greatest tools in human history, one of the benefits being that it can allow a ton of people to work from home, increasing their quality of life, reducing traffic, and improving air pollution.

Step 2: Get forced to experience a worldwide pandemic in which we are made to utilize this tool for such a function so we can see that it actually works as intended.

Step 3: Ignore all that for the profit of the few, to the detriment of the many.

Humans = Trash

[-] [email protected] 91 points 2 days ago

Dropbox seems to be different than other companies. It is known to have migrated back from AWS to their own infrastructure at a time when ever other CEO was propagating to migrate into the cloud. Article is from 2019, though: https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/21/three-years-after-moving-off-aws-dropbox-infrastructure-continues-to-evolve/

[-] [email protected] 93 points 2 days ago

Also, WFH is good for their sales. I don't understand how someone like the CEO of Zoom didn't get that simple fact.

[-] [email protected] 56 points 2 days ago

As the election has shown us, these tech bros are not necessarily smart or thoughtful about their choices, and the real motivations tend to be related to personal financial gain. The level of push and coordination behind RTO and every company copying each other's policy probably come down from "on high", and i suspect that's investors with business real estate interests putting their thumbs on the scale to avoid a collapse in their markets

[-] [email protected] 21 points 2 days ago

Ed Zitron of the Better Offline podcast had a piece a few weeks ago that explains so much.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-era-of-the-business-idiot/

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[-] [email protected] 37 points 2 days ago

Would you be surprised to learn that business is actually a network of cargo cults, where the thing they're trying to superficially mimic is other businesses that don't know why they're doing what they're doing?

I work for an online edtech company that saw massive organic growth during lockdowns, and has been chasing that dragon since lockdowns were lifted. They spent millions expanding their workforce at the time, while they severely pared down their school outreach team. They made multiple moves that only made sense if you assume lockdowns would last forever.

I raised this with management a couple of times, and their only response was "everyone else was doing it, too".

[-] [email protected] 24 points 2 days ago

Yeah, anyone that's had a job for any significant amount of time realises that the people at the top aren't there because they're somehow smarter. Quite the contrary.

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[-] [email protected] 41 points 2 days ago

RTO is just posturing to share holders.

"Look, look, we're treating our staff badly, so you know we're a good investment!"

[-] [email protected] 14 points 2 days ago

Hm, I don't think that's likely. I have some other tinfoil hat theories:

  1. it's so that they can watch their workers to make sure they're working;
  2. it's to ensure the workers don't have other commitments outside work (like looking after a kid);
  3. people who are board members of both real estate businesses and RTO companies.
[-] [email protected] 3 points 18 hours ago

I would qualify your first point. Parkinson's Law tells us that we have pointless bosses in huge numbers, and they need to justify their own existence. The people who actually produce things, everyone can see if they're working or not by looking at the output. But their supervisors, and especially their supervisors' supervisors, those people are desperate to make themselves relevant, to justify their pointlessly-large salaries despite a complete lack of utility.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 18 hours ago
  1. that is true, but they love to do it to stroke thier own ego.
[-] [email protected] 13 points 2 days ago

It's actually:

  1. To ensure the corporate real estate market doesn't collapse like the the consumer real estate market did in 2008 despite the same problem with massive loan fraud inflating the value of business real-estate for toxic bank loans that are rated AAA, but are actually worth shit as no one needs corporate real estate post - Covid.

It's the 2008 housing crisis, but with corporate real estate. COVID forced work from home, which caught banks with their pants down, having no way to actually drive the demand back up for these buildings that will continually house less and less people from less and less businesses (Work from home + businesses not surviving Covid, now Tariffs.)

Our entire banking system is backed up by debt packaged with corporate real estate that's rated as AAA, but is just more toxic cat shit no one wants wrapped in dogshit that banks need. It's a bomb that's been growing as giant corporate buildings become ghost towns, and city centers become more horizontal than verticle.

Big companies with big loans from banks know they're fucked if the corporate real estate market collapses. So they force work from home as a band aid that gives their corporate property some value, or at least justifies it on paper. In reality, the cost to force workers into the office always offsets the billions in losses if their corporate office real estate ever followed real market forces and depreciated in value.

[-] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago

I still don't understand how this talking point makes sense. So businesses are purposefully incurring costs to prop up an industry that they're not involved in? A business will stop leasing a building and save money if they can, hell mine did.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago)

Lots of Fortune 500 companies own buildings and both they and their executives have big investments in commercial real estate. They don't want the market to collapse because it'll hurt them all personally.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 20 hours ago

See my other comment in this thread.

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[-] [email protected] 64 points 2 days ago

Lemme fix that verb:

"Dropbox ceo decries defunct despots denying workers their work from home rights"

Seriously can we stop with "slam" though

[-] [email protected] 15 points 2 days ago

Please don't replace it with alliteration.

[-] [email protected] 22 points 2 days ago

I love alliteration. And puns, especially the multilingual kind 👹

[-] [email protected] 45 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Commercial.

Real Estate.

I am not 100% sure of the physical footprint of office space per employee of DropBox in comparison to other highly computerized companies, but...

...in addition to the just subborn nature of a useless management class at many companies realizing they are basically useless and don't deserve to be paid a wage, because their workers can work just as well, or better, with far, far less 'oversight' from them...

Fucking real estate.

The C Suite knows that if they allow remote work to become normalized, then all their fancy office buildings are worth far less than they otherwise would be, and that then they'd go tits up, underwater, on all their various kinds of financing they've got on them.

Instead of managing a transition to a new paradigm in a sensible and controlled manner, that would allow them to gradually unwind from the RE, from the offices themselves... which could be done over time via the cost savings and increased efficiency from remote work, and laying off (restructuring, whatever) most of their managers... nope, they've almost all decided that that cannot be allowed.

[-] [email protected] 20 points 2 days ago

It's exactly this, 1000%. I work for a small company that had a return-to-office mandate a few years ago when Covid began initially winding down as access to vaccines became widespread. I was working fully remote and had leased an apartment over an hour away from the closest branch office in an affordable part of town. We had our most profitable year ever in the nearly 50 year history of the company in 2020 when literally every employee was working remote. Morale was up, I was saving money that wasn't going to gas or car maintenance, and I was feeling positive about the future of work-life balance.

Then, one day, I get called in for performance review, and it was all smiles and sunshine and then they said "You're doing a great job Furbag, but we'd like to see you back in the office for a minimum of three days per week." That was the first and only negative comment I had ever received on a performance review since starting for the company. When I escalated the results of my performance review to management, wanting a more clear explanation for why I am being asked to commute 1+ hours in to work almost every day from the outskirts of the bay area, they told me exactly what you said "We're paying for this building, so we want people physically in the office to justify it. Also, every other industry is doing return to work mandates so this shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone."

Naturally, this is still a sore spot for me. The company didn't learn it's lesson and still follows industry trends like little lemmings (and not the good kind that post here) while looking into buying up more real estate in other parts of the state to expand operations. They could be selling the building I'm working in now, and use the profits from the sale to fund everybody with equipment to work from home (desk, chair, monitors, hardware, etc) and work would continue as usual with a lot more employee satisfaction and work-life balance, but I've learned that owning real estate as a business is in itself a prestige that the C-Suite loves to show off to it's competitors. "Look at this historic building we own, isn't it grand?", "Oh, you think that's grand? We rent 12 floors of a 40 story skyscraper in San Francisco, beat that!".

Managers need the physical locations to continue to exist so that they can justify their own existence, and they've fully convinced gullible CEOs that productivity will wane if people are allowed to do work from home "unsupervised", even though there's plenty of data that suggests the opposite is true.

/endrant

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[-] [email protected] 11 points 2 days ago

they don't want to unwind from RE if they are board members on RE companies as well as the RTO-mandate company. We should never have allowed people to be board members in two busineses.

[-] [email protected] 10 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

We should never have allowed people to be board members in two busineses.

Ding ding ding!

Correct!

But then we couldn't capitalism as hard, so... I'm sorry but that issue is a political non-starter.

... Where I grew up, literally every single city council board member just also ran a real estate holding company at the same time.

I figured out as a literal child that this was why our local government only made nonsensical spending and taxing decisions, its the definition of corrupt, but everyone acted like I was insane.

Oh well, we're all renters now, good job to all the people who kept voting for actual landlords to run the government.

[-] [email protected] 37 points 2 days ago

RTO is now just a tactic to force people to quit.

[-] [email protected] 25 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

The jargon you're looking for is a stealth layoff

[-] [email protected] 10 points 2 days ago

They should rebrand the stupid “quiet quitting” as “quiet layoffs”

[-] [email protected] 40 points 2 days ago

Capital beat Labour to death 40 years ago but can't get enough of the taste of victory and they keep digging up the rotten corpse of the Workers to screw it some more.

[-] [email protected] 15 points 2 days ago

say it with me: GET OVER IT CORPOS, MEATSPACE IS DEPRECATED.

[-] [email protected] 18 points 2 days ago

This reasoning plays in my mind on repeat whenever I'm stuck in traffic, wondering how much I'd be getting done if i didn't have to stop working so i could drive to work.

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[-] [email protected] 12 points 2 days ago

Rare to see a CEO saying something sensible I agree with.

I'd love to see labor organize so when management is like "come into the office" they can be like "no". Let management try to do anything by themselves. They can't. Labor has untapped power.

[-] [email protected] 9 points 2 days ago

Sounds like somebody doesn't own any commercial real estate.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 18 hours ago

or tax benefits for hiring x amount employees, plus govts also dont want WFH, because then they wouldnt get tax revenue from cars, roads, businesses.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago

People generally don't give up their car or stop buying things when they work from home. Those taxes just shift away from commercial districts and toward residential ones.

[-] [email protected] 14 points 2 days ago

"Tell me you're not invested in office real estate without telling me you're not invested in office real estate."

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this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2025
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