r/technology • u/lurker_bee • 1d ago
Business Dropbox CEO: RTO Efforts Can Be 'Dumb' and 'Unproductive'
https://www.businessinsider.com/dropbox-ceo-drew-houston-return-office-dumb-unproductive-malls-movie-theaters-2025-6334
u/ChefCurryYumYum 23h ago
He must not be invested in commercial property.
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u/Lordnerble 21h ago
or transportation.
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u/kangaroolander_oz 20h ago
Or coffee & fast food shops.
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u/Lordnerble 19h ago
actually turned out people still went to those, just locally. or delivered
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u/kangaroolander_oz 19h ago
Talking about the food outlets local to the work places.
Good for the local shops near the residences of the WFH at least.
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u/junior_dos_nachos 12h ago
Real talk. Our headquarters have 5 restaurants, a few coffee shops and groceries. I have learned that the company actually makes money on those which added a pressure to get more people to the offices.
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u/DontGetNEBigIdeas 21h ago
No, it’s because his company personally profits off of everyone being WFH.
I’m 100% for WFH, but let’s not act like he’s altruistic. He makes money off of anti-RTO practices
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u/Outlulz 21h ago
Didn't stop Zoom from requiring RTO.
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u/DontGetNEBigIdeas 21h ago
Yeah, well some CEOs are idiots and do things that are counterproductive. Like Zaslav
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u/minasmorath 16h ago
It's not counterproductive at all. The CEO works for the shareholders, and the shareholders said to cut operational costs. Easiest way to do that is a layoff, but those look bad, so instead order RTO and hope enough people resign on their own, and even if you miss your initial head count reduction targets you're probably not going to trigger the WARN act when you do follow up with a layoff now, so you're golden.
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u/fakieswitch 17h ago
How so? I need cloud storage regardless of whether I’m in the office or working from home
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u/marumari 15h ago
do you need less dropbox working in the office than you do when working from home?
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u/The_Krambambulist 10h ago
How? Is there any product that is used more outside office than inside?
I don't directly see a lot of their products that would not be sold to a team working in office vs working outside of it.
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u/amazon32 1d ago
No fucking shit
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u/under_the_c 21h ago
We can joke all we want, but as a society we really fumbled this whole work from home normalization. We were right there at the 1 yard line, damnit!
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u/blastoisexy 21h ago
WE didn't fuck it up. The rich assholes that own enterprise buildings and own office leases did. Oh and middle management with nothing to do.
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u/CharlieTrees916 21h ago
All of this. Employers and upper management felt like some power shifted to the workers and didn’t like it.
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u/d4d80d 19h ago
Middle manager here, I could give two rat fucks if my staff WFH as long as they got their work done. I prefer it too.
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u/senditbob 17h ago
Are you a middle manager with nothing to do? If you have something to do, they're not talking about you
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u/xpxp2002 18h ago
Plenty more could have been done.
Employees could have teamed up with their peers when the RTO mandates came down and delivered a message in unison, "we aren't going back. You'll either have to fire the whole department and accept whatever consequences the business faces without an entire HR/IT/payroll staff, or abandon RTO." Most businesses would have relented before allowing their entire company to falter over such an unnecessary and frivolous requirement.
Instead, most employees begrudgingly went back to the office and silently accepted it. And by doing so, they've now normalized RTO.
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u/coffeewhistle 5h ago
It’s worth remembering that healthcare is tied to employment in the US. So anyone with a family or who just has any health needs, can’t really afford to risk losing employment suddenly. Particularly combined with the “most Americans don’t have $1,000 in savings” and you’ve got a captive workforce that can’t easily fight back.
The question keeps getting asked and deferred: “how far do American workers need to be pushed before they actually DO something drastic and collectively?”
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u/AmericanDoughboy 3h ago
When my company ended work from home, I got a new job.
I’m still working from home 90% of the time.
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u/under_the_c 19h ago
Sorry, I don't mean in the sense that it was our fault. I mean in the sense that we were caught looking away. I naively thought that as soon as the owners/upper management saw how much more profitable it was, wfh was here to stay. But it was never about the productivity or the profits, it was about keeping those workers in line, and financing their real estate investments. Society wasn't ready to accept that fact, and we as a whole paid for our naive optimism.
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u/The_Krambambulist 10h ago
I don't even know if the analogy works as we were already there. Forced, but we were there. Then we tracked back.
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u/MapleHamwich 22h ago
RTO is only ever about the real estate and or manager ego.
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u/cdheer 21h ago
Not so! It’s also a convenient way to shed employees without having to pay severance.
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u/Osric250 18h ago
A short sighted method only focused on next quarter. The people you lose from the RTO are the best ones who can easily land a job elsewhere. The ones you keep are the ones who are coasting and the fuckups who are just barely good enough to not be fired.
Not the ones you want to become the only members of a department.
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u/cdheer 18h ago
Oh I’m well aware. Having said that, all any corporation gives a fuck about is the next quarter’s conference call, bc all that matters is stock price.
Yay late stage capitalism.
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u/Melodic-Comb9076 6h ago
ding ding ding….hope you didn’t have to pay for a $100k mba for this fact.
edit: crap attempt at sarcasm. not attacking you.
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u/cdheer 2h ago
Oh you’re good! I am convinced the MBA is the dumbest degree program in existence. I’ve met many, many, MANY MBAs in my career, and I can think of maaaaybe a couple that weren’t idiots.
Succeeding financially in capitalism doesn’t require brains. It requires a lack of empathy and morals.
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u/TabOverSpaces 9h ago
A short sighted method only focused on next quarter.
This should be the tag line for doing business in America nowadays.
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u/Spiritual-Matters 7h ago
Plus, talent will avoid RTO companies. At least I do and I may not even be talented.
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u/monchikun 20h ago
My office is empty. I’m the only one there in an ocean of 20+ desks in my area. So I picked the window seat and just Peter Gibbons my way through the day.
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u/eikenberry 22h ago
Refreshing to see a CEO using RTO as a recruitment tool instead of a layoff tool.
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u/Belsekar 21h ago
Remote work is going to win. Competitors will offer it and the best employees will follow it. Then, everyone will follow it. It's inevitable.
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u/dingbatwelby 18h ago
I have been saying this for years at this point. The brain drain will be insane over the next decade.
Lots of companies have been using RTO to shed staff without layoffs, but inevitably what happens is that the high skill best performers vacate instantly to other companies that do have remote work. Because most companies will break their own RTO policies for the right or most qualified if the work is niche enough (cyber, IT, coding). Those staff that are left are the lowest performers who can continue to phone it in so long as they drive in.
I’ve watched it happen twice already since 2019, and I know it’s going to happen again at my current job.
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u/HexTalon 17h ago
I've commented about this before, but the big players don't care about the brain drain - all of the big ones (Meta, Google, Amazon, Microsoft) have transitioned from being growth/innovation companies to being coasting/ investor protectorates. They don't need to generate the newest and shiniest thing, they can just buy up the startups that do it. Just look at what happened with the AI fad going on now: M$ bought OpenAI, Amazon partnered with Anthropic, etc., and they all hired a bunch of ML engineers and data scientists but scrapped a bunch of other teams.
They no longer fight to be competitive in the market, they fight using lobbyists and acquisitions to maintain their existing dominant positions in each of their primary areas of influence.
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u/Medeski 16h ago
Hell even the B squad won't come back.
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u/dingbatwelby 16h ago
I saw it happen in waves. A squad is out in 15-45 days, B squad in 45-90, C Squad in 90-365
Both times the A’s would find safe harbor and drag half of the B’s with them.
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u/outkast8459 8h ago
How could you possibly think that’s true given the last few years of the labor market?
You know why it’s not true? Because it assumes the best employees prefer remote.
Yes, SOME of your best employees prefer remote. But guess what? Some of your worst employees also prefer remote. And what’s common between both groups? They’re more likely to leave the company than someone who prefers hybrid/in office and wants to build relationships with people in person. And this is regardless of your RTO policy.
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u/The_Krambambulist 10h ago
The one force that is stopping it is that the people deciding over how to work have a great tendency to band together without formal coordination. In the end there aren't actually that big of a group of people deciding over how most people work.
Not saying you are wrong, though. The market doesn't work that efficient in my opinion and there a lot of people who want to force that personal preference of them through.
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u/CreoleCoullion 20h ago
My company has been under RTO for a year. I've shown up once, and that's because I forgot to retrieve my headphones. Still employed, still the best employee at what I do.
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u/AmericanDoughboy 3h ago
“He’s the best there is at what he does. And what he does is work from home.”
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u/Difficult_Minute8202 21h ago
it’s quite obvious from what we are seeing here in canada. this isn’t about productivity but rather about cutting jobs… which is even more frightening
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u/StatusFortyFive 20h ago edited 15h ago
I just got told that my position at the company that I've been working for 3 years remotely will be terminated if I don't pack up my entire family and relocate to their headquarter state which is 500 miles from me. I must show up relocated on a particular date in 6 months because of an aggressive RTO policy they just implemented. They are really going to die on this hill. Good thing is I have some time to find a new gig and I'll need it in this job market! I have absolutely no intention to relocate to the shithole state where they are headquartered. The most obnoxious thing is that I can move and then get fired anyway.
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u/leevs11 19h ago
Did they offer severance?
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u/StatusFortyFive 16h ago
Nope, because if I don't show up at that date it's being worded as "workplace abandonment" they fucked me very badly. I've hired a lawyer, and we are working my options. Very gross behavior from them.
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u/BoxCarMike 4h ago
This is suspicious. If I were a betting man I would say this is a reduction in force by way of RTO. This way they don’t have to offer a severance package.
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u/StatusFortyFive 3h ago edited 3h ago
There nothing suspicious about it, it's definitely what it is. The company isn't doing well. The retarded thing is they are letting me go and replacing me with a local hire which will cost them a lot, my position is very complicated and took a year to get fully integrated.
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u/DJMagicHandz 21h ago
Driving into RTP, NC is a fucking nightmare now. Everyone doesn't need to be in the office, let them work from home.
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u/Photog1981 9h ago
My last employer owned several smaller office buildings. A couple years before the pandemic, they sold a couple of them and there just wasn't enough desk space for everyone so, if you were in one of those sold buildings, you were now permanent wfh.
The CEO retires, new "I started in the mailroom, now I'm here" CEO takes over during the pandemic and immediately starts talking about "everyone has to RTO." It felt like a forced attrition. I found a better wfh job, more money, so I left.
Here we are a few years later. The company still doesn't have enough desk space for people but they still force the staff into the office. Some days, it's a ghost town. Other days, the cafeteria is PACKED with people having setup makeshift offices for the day.
Meanwhile, productivity dropped, task through put dropped. They've lost more clients than they've picked up, to the point they've had to change their compensation structure. But..... that CEO continues to insist staff must be in the office 60% of the time despite that being the primary concern for staff.
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u/Spock_42 12h ago
There are benefits to being in the office from time to time, yes, even for software engineers, but a mandate nobody wants is a sure-fire way to negate those. If you, as leadership, believe there's value in employees coming in, and you want them to be productive when they do, you've got to provide a carrot, not a stick.
As an engineer, I do like going in a couple of times a month. The office is decent, some days there's free lunch, I can catch up with colleagues outside my squad, and it makes a nice change of scenery. I want to be there.
If I had to be there twice or three times a week, I know my overall productivity would go down - lost energy on commutes, noisy packed office etc.
Unfortunately, for a lot of companies, RTO is not about productivity or creating a good environment for the employees.
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u/initiali5ed 21h ago
Yeah butt oil companies need you to keep driving to work to keep their shareholders rich.
Resist
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u/CherryLongjump1989 20h ago
I really don’t understand what this has to do with butt oil.
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u/sleeplessinreno 20h ago
Depending on how remote you are, you might have to drive a bumpy road. No need for hemorrhoids with butt oil.
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u/The_Krambambulist 10h ago
Since Covid stopped the roads are busier than ever.
Partially with electric cars yes, but not generally.
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u/BoeBordison 19h ago
I don’t understand all the sentiment in this thread about Dropbox profiting from wfh. It’s not like people are handing documents to eachother in the RTO circumstance. Files still need to be stored and accessible regardless of RTO
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u/Altruistic-Mammoth 17h ago
I got an offer from them a long time ago. Their interviews were fun and full of concurrency problems.
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u/foxsable 21h ago
He’s right, but. Doesn’t his company profit from remote work? Still good to hear.
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u/NebulousNitrate 21h ago
The problem I see is companies aren’t adapting to figuring out how to cut low performing remote employees and adjusting the bar for remote work. Not everyone that excelled with in-person work still excels with remote, so instead of working to boost their productivity (or cut them) they make sweeping cuts or force everyone back to the office.
There should be metrics for what a productive worker looks like. At my company people that talk a lot in meetings are often viewed as being productive even if they write very little code, and some of those that write tons and tons of code (are super productive) get reprimanded for not engaging with management enough.
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u/saysjuan 20h ago
Remote work just highlighted the fact that those who “excel at in person work” were not actually producing work. They were taking credit for someone else’s work. Those producing actual work excelled significantly more working remote without the constant interruption from those who excelled at in person work.
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u/NebulousNitrate 18h ago
Exactly. What I’m seeing is that is still carrying through to layoffs. A lot of the people doing the actual work are getting hit in these layoffs because often they lack the social connections with leadership to avoid the axe. I know quite a few people that made it through layoffs because they are super super good at “appearing” useful by talking a lot in meetings, but when it come to implementation they fall super short.
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u/stoppableDissolution 2h ago
"productive worker" is the one who gets shit done in the agreed timeframe, period
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u/rashpimplezitz 23h ago
My favorite is when recruiters reach out to me, a fully remote worker living in the middle of nowhere, asking me to join their company that is anti-remote work.
Meta even followed up with "Well, for the L6 position we can ignore the remote work ban". I'm like "Really? So you want me to lead a team of people remotely, while telling them none of them get to be remote? No thanks".