My company has an interesting strategy. We're mainly hiring people local to our office (closed the others), but no one is required to go in. Hell, I've been told a few times, "You ordered $thing and no one was there to receive it. Can you check from now on?"

This way, if we want to pull a team together for a minute, we can. Most folks know each other, if even from a brief visit, and that works out better. Lemmy bags on in-person relationships, psychology be damned. 🤷🏻‍♂️

But if we ever mandated a return to the office? LOL no. Our top talent would walk and we'd be left with the dregs who can't find a better job.

I just started a gig at a company that doesn't really know how to do remote work well, but that basically told me that they were having trouble finding candidates so they had to start looking for remote.

I recently left a gig that sold their offices off so even employees in the area don't have an office to go to anymore and everyone is remote. They've lost some Product/Manager people over the decision, but have otherwise seen an uptick in productivity and morale.

Only if enough companies offer fair remote work. If 90% of them stick to work from office culture war, what are you going to do? Not work? I can quit my job and have a new one by the end of the day. I would still struggle to find remote work in a reasonable time frame. I'm not willing to blow my savings on it so I stick with job O enjoy that offers hybrid.

Not like that /$

No, we need a rescue fund right now! It can't be true that the elite has to suffer under the tyranny of the working class!

Fuck the realestate industry period. It shouldn't be commodified to the point where there are more empty houses up for rent, airbnb, or sitting empty as "investments" than there are homeless. Foreign companies are allowed to buy up realestate and literally extract wealth from the country for something that's supposed to ultimately be owned by the country (hence no escaping property taxes or eminate domain)... It's such a limitedly regulated mess that any such "free market" cannot responsibly control.

This is great! Only the rich suffer!

They surely won't find other ways to make up this loss of wealth. And they surely won't take it out of our hides.

Trickledown economics only flows up.

Can part of it be skatepark laser tag?

It's be more useful to turn it into an apartment complex, but way more fun to turn it into a giant laser tag arena

Or maybe housing or both

The hard part will be water lines for so much active water use. A sink and a few toilets is one thing but rigging an irrigation system that also has drainage for leaks or overflows requires space and lots of upfront renovation costs that will be paid back over a very long time. It's a difficult financial proposition.

Unfortunately, these days, that usually means, "we're willing to risk as many of our employees as we can."

Almost like the idea of downtowns as "work zones" fed by commuter residential suburbs was a stupid idea, and making them unliveable by all but the chronic homeless is a problem.