817
Dropbox CEO slams return-to-office mandates, compares them to outdated malls and theaters
(www.techspot.com)
this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2025
817 points (99.4% liked)
News
30144 readers
3995 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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
Yep, your personal anecdote illustrates broad cultural tendencies of the American managerial and owner class.
Office space and location is the same as buying a lambo.
Its peacocking, its dick waving.
They very rarely care about running a business well.
They care about being better than, wealthier than, more powerful than other people.
If anyone needs a refresher, go watch American Psycho again.
As another commenter once pointed out when I said something similar:
Same exact shit, just worse fitting suits and slightly better haircuts these days.
Sounds like you need to start a new company. Out compete the dinosaurs and drive them into bankruptcy.
I agree with most of this except for the manager piece. Most of my managing is over Teams or the phone. Doesn’t matter where I am.
But of course, I’m just a worthless manager taking up resources so take what I say with a grain of salt.
I think people tend to overly generalize to "managers" when they really mean the middle 3-4 of 6-9 layers of management or something.
E.g. the reporting chain from our company's CEO all the way down to me (an "individual contributor") has 7 people between us. The most change, and with the least noticeable effect on the work I actually do, happens around layers 4 to 6 above me
There’s typically 2 reasons for this: