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.”
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.
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
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/
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.
Yeah, definitely.
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”.
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.
“If every other company jumped off a cliff, would you?”
They’d be off the cliff before you finished the statement.
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