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.”
Didn’t some Dropbox executive demand their workers come back to the office after covid? Was it someone else at the company or maybe a different cloud company?
“Tell me you’re not invested in office real estate without telling me you’re not invested in office real estate.”
RTO is now just a tactic to force people to quit.
The jargon you’re looking for is a stealth layoff
They should rebrand the stupid “quiet quitting” as “quiet layoffs”
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/
Also, WFH is good for their sales. I don’t understand how someone like the CEO of Zoom didn’t get that simple fact.
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”.
“If every other company jumped off a cliff, would you?”
They’d be off the cliff before you finished the statement.
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.
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
Yeah, definitely.
Ed Zitron of the Better Offline podcast had a piece a few weeks ago that explains so much.
I just want to say thanks for sharing this link. That was amazing.
It is the single best explanation for what is going on. As someone raised around these types ypu grow up with so much smoke being blown up your ass about jow much “better” your schools are which isn’t always the case.
its mostly about power and control, and the 2nd issue is real estate spaces, plus govt incentives.
I’ve been yelling at that AWS cloud ever since they started becoming the standard for enterprise. Glad to see sanity prevails somewhere anyway
Sounds like somebody doesn’t own any commercial real estate.
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.
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.
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.
There’s also that period before you leave when you prepare to be away from home all day, and the period after you return home when you decompress. Most people aren’t magically relaxed after dealing with the commute home.
It used to take three hours of my waking life per day. About 18% of my weekday life. 540 hours per year. At $40/hr that’s 21k of free money to the house. FWIW I’d rather have that time to myself and family, but there’s the number.
SLLLLLLLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAMMMMMMMMMMMMSSSSSSSSS RTO
Funny he says that, because malls and movie theaters are thriving where I live.
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%.
This the one who hired Condi Rice to sit on the board?
Thank you for posting this article, OP.
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.
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
I am in a situation where the return to office was a 6k decrease in wages.
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.
Hear, hear.
