I don’t even understand how the logistics of that would work, nor if it would be legal, and especially politically unpopular since now small businesses are getting hit with taxes simply for being small.
Source: I was hired by a well-known hyperscalar cloud company that didn't want to send me to HQ, but wanted to place me at some random remote satellite offices. I looked into why, and it was this payroll / other tax break by the locality. (I sorta forced them to send me to HQ, as I don't deal with the heat / humidity well in the remote locations, which were in the US south).
> threatening higher taxation if they don’t return to office.
Financially, it does not make sense to want to pay extra for each employee for square footage for the desk. Even if only some employees work remotely, that opens up the possibility of selling the building and leasing/purchasing a smaller one that costs less. Basically, remote work shifts the burden of paying for the desk to the employee... something you might be tempted to think the company would want to do.
Totally believe that things like this are playing a role in RTO decisions. I also think the soft-layoff thing is a major factor, and generally that execs get uncomfortable when workers gain... anything, really, but especially perks of a higher "class" than they're "due".
It comes and goes in waves, this is just a current trend we have to surf.
We had a year (1?,2?,3? ) when different companies tried to put people back in the office and the general sentiment was anger and and incredulity. Devs were entitled to work from home 100% if a company didnt offer it thye company would tank since all the devs would quit.
Has the job market now shifted as lot that enough that people accept restrictions on working from home?
My take on remote work is that bigcos with big names can broadly do whatever they want and still get headcount because people want the name on their resume and their stock (mostly still privately held!) in their portfolios. So they can jerk people around in a million ways, one of which is RTO, and still hire. They obviously make exceptions where it would really hurt them wrt high level roles.
Meanwhile, literally everyone else has to be flexible or they're either not going to get applications, or the adverse selection of no-remote-work makes the candidates who do apply such worse quality that hiring takes forever.
My current company tried this. Our owner (no kids or spouse) wants people in office with him so he can keep pretending it's the good old days. It's somewhat well-intended in that all it means is we started posting dual job posts and/or started posting them for SF first, then opening to remote if we didn't get any SF apps of sufficient quality. That was almost a year ago now. Despite this, we've made exactly one hire in SF within commuting distance and they didn't even apply into that position and don't have any RTO in their contract. The other 10ish HC we've added have all been remote, despite these efforts.
I also know of a different tech SMB I worked for long ago and still have contacts in. They don't offer remote at all (boomer owner). The business has essentially failed, they can hardly hire and cannot retain, and they're only kept afloat because the owner is extremely rich off the efforts of the prior non-owner CEO who he ousted to come back and ruin everything.
That's my anecdata.
Uber doesn't really have any way to grow. They can't exactly start charging more. They can't pay their drivers less, who already are paid poorly. The market for expensive taxi rides isn't going to expand, either.
So now they have to be in a cost-cutting mode. The app already exists, so they don't need a large staff of highly-paid technologists.
[0] https://waymo.com/blog/2024/09/waymo-and-uber-expand-partner...
They will be happy to lease a vehicle to you as the driver (with a predatory, abusive contract), but even this is almost entirely operated by third parties.
Also because people hate using multiple apps, you need an “aggregator” (see Stratechery). If I go to a city and I need a ride from the airport, my default is going to be to open Uber - not to say “oh yeah, Waymo is available when I fly into ATL but not when I fly into JFK”. Uber was even available when I flew into QXP from San Jose Costa Rica (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quepos_La_Managua_Airport).
Also many businesses have “Uber for Business” where business travelers can automatically get their Uber rides charged to the company instead of having to do reimbursements. How many companies are going to establish relations with Waymo to and tell their sales people/consultants - “use the Waymo app in cities where it is available otherwise use Uber”?
Just like I’m not going to open some taxi app when I fly into DCA. But I will open the Uber app and choose a taxi (with the standard taxi regulations) if it is more convenient.
Business travellers is a lot more lucrative for companies than consumers.
But getting back to Waymo and utilization, if you know you need both enough capicity to handle peak utilization and want to have capacity to handle steady state, you are going to have Waymo as a baseline and people that will come out when they think it is worth it based on current surge pricing.
Having enough Waymo cars available to handle peak capacity would be about as dumb as Intuit having enough server capacity in a Colo to handle tax season instead of using AWS and autoscaling.
Uber is also managing maintenance for Waymo in the cities it is available.
So anyone who actually knew what they were doing would just install the Gett taxi app, which was cheaper and better than Uber. If such an app existed in DCA, I would certainly install it. But I wouldn't bother with an app at all in DCA, since they already have an excellent and affordable taxi system. (Taxis in DC are cheaper than Ubers, particularly during surge pricing; if you want an app, install Curb.)
"Uber for Business" is an even more giant scam, where it costs more than Uber does personally. At the last place I worked, employees were advised to go ahead and set it up but switch to Personal and just request reimbursement because of how large the price difference was.
But you're right, Uber will always have a niche of people who are unable to install or use anything other than the Uber app and want to be blissfully unaware that better alternatives exist.
Even if I had been aware of getting a taxi directly when we went to DC last month or had been aware of the DiDi app in Costa Rica or the local app in Israel, as a tourist, I am still going to use Uber because everything is one central place, I am on vacation so I’m not that price sensitive and especially in Costa Rica, I know my Spanish is still rough and the Uber app automatically translates to English.
I would personally be very annoyed if my company asked me to reconcile Uber rides to save a few bucks when I know how much money I directly and indirectly make the company when I’m on/over a project.
When I've worked for a large company, I had to spend more time on expense reports, not less. However much I was being paid seemed to have on relevance to how much time I had to spend on keying things into Concur (and no, we didn't have admin staff who would do it for us).
If you're not "price sensitive" on vacation, good for you. If I'm on vacation in Israel (or DC), I would prefer rides that show up faster and are cheaper. If you prefer to use the Uber app for everything, that's fine, but I doubt there is much of a use case for "people who don't want to install an extra app and are OK with paying 15% more for everything".
And why would I look to them for robotaxis? Waymo seems way ahead of them.
If you charge people $100 to deliver a loaf of bread and you have 0 customers it doesn't mean anything about your potential market size or equilibrium price to deliver a loaf of bread, because you have 0 data points.
Reading about the different RTO rebellions is interesting. I know multiple people who have ended up in a half day schedule that they really like. All meetings scheduled before noon-ish, then head home to focus on work. These are all kind of against company policy but there’s a shield of willingly ignorant managers between the executives and workers. As long as the managers can say “as far as any metrics I have access to tell me my people are in the office the required days per week” they’re ok with it.
That's demonstrably not true.
Their latest earnings (Q4 2024) showed a 20% growth in revenue, an 18% increase in trips, and a 14% increase in the number of monthly active users (all numbers YoY).
From my perspective, wages have increased faster elsewhere, and there are far more remote jobs than local ones. The whole reason I moved to Ann Arbor for work was because UMich had created a little startup scene that I could aspire to. I expected the scene to grow, not fade. It really seemed like the beers on tap, foosball table tech job fantasy for a few years there.
Of course, in my own operation it would be very hard to justify to building out some "cool office". Our workers simply seem to prefer other things. They sure aren't interested in forced socialisation.
When you want to hit remote working, you can make anything into a stick
That is very expensive in most big cities, so if your workplace doesn't have dedicated parking and they don't comp your parking spot, you wind up spending thousands per year on parking
On top of the other car stuff, it becomes prohibitive
Relocating without even having a fixed contract from day 1, just to be able to go to the office, is a bet many (talented) people won't be willing to take these days.
Yes, you can try to work around these and other challenges, but working around long-evolved brain firmware that, for many cases of interaction, favors in-person communication, is tough. Of course many people prefer to stay at home, as do I, but there is a huge increase in the level of connection I feel when I go back to the HQ and hang out with everyone (a handful of times each year).
Proponents of both in-office and remote work are just spouting feelings and vibes rather than actual evidence that it really makes a difference.
Gallup [1] found that far fewer workers felt respected while remote during the pandemic. I thought it was wild to see the huge uptick (31%) year-over-year in SEC whistle-blowers. [2]
Research of this type is challenging, especially because it's difficult to source the volume and quality of data needed from businesses. I'm sure we could find weaknesses in any study for or against.
Hybrid might be the best of both worlds per HBR, see [3]
Honestly I'd love to see a solid refutation of the benefits of in-person work, so that I could use it for leverage the next time my remote job is at risk of being converted back to in-person.
[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01196-4 [1] https://www.gallup.com/workplace/657629/post-pandemic-workpl... [2] https://www.proskauer.com/blog/bloomberg-sec-receives-record... [3] https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/22-063_639195cc-...
We as tech workers need to fight this. We need to finally unionize so we can strike and shut down production if necessary. The tactics of the industrial revolution still work in the digital age - labor is still the source of all revenue.
markus_zhang•4h ago
cue_the_strings•4h ago
A startup can now afford hiring better talent at lower costs, because people value remote work so much.
Remote doesn't necessarily mean working from home. There are people in situations (having babies / toddlers?) where their productivity would improve from working outside the home, so startups should offer to pay for a local coworking space or a similar arrangement.
paulluuk•4h ago
But I don't know if that's how investors think?
cue_the_strings•2h ago
Most of the RTO reasons barely make sense for investors investing in startups, but may for established companies. Things like this RTO push rarely happen without a reason.
Off the top of my head:
- tax cuts if you're operating in a certain area, maybe even historical ones, political connections like - legacy of lobbying local politicians in said area to get some benefit
- conflict of interest from the owners (private or major shareholders) also somehow owning commercial real estate or businesses that rely on its vitality
- management having reasons to prefer RTO: simple preference for in-person management, fear of loss of control or being perceived as useless, misalignment with a personal-connections-over-merit advancement; these things are mostly misaligned with the owners' interests
agos•3h ago
markus_zhang•2h ago
cynicalsecurity•4h ago
markus_zhang•3h ago
owebmaster•4h ago
bluefirebrand•3h ago
I don't want to go back to being limited by my local labour market, and I don't want to go back to commuting daily and all the other stuff
So I'm really determined to stay fully remote, and glad to hear that people have been doing it for much longer than just since COVID
Any tips for maintaining this? I have been thinking that it would be easier to stay remote if I start contracting instead of being an employee
owebmaster•1h ago
None that will make you happy. The market changed a lot, I myself not sure if I will be able to find contracts (I'm a contractor) for the next 20 years. The alternative isn't terrible tho: you gotta create your own job, contracting and then creating your own business online. The best way to prove remote works is to create jobs and hiring remote. Nobody should think they are entitled for a great remote job forever.
bluefirebrand•30m ago
I definitely do not feel entitled to it, but it is such a benefit for my life and mental health that I am willing to work to maintain it
I am willing to accept lower salaries and a lower promotion ceiling to maintain fully remote work, for instance