Tell HN: Salesforce is mandating RTO 3 days/wk for all employee
Applies to ALL employees within 40 miles of an office.
Announced internally in what’s known as V2MOM, which is an internal top-down KPIs. All managers will be judged based on this metric.
This applies to employees at all organisations under its umbrella, including Slack. Includes engineers.
239 comments
[ 0.27 ms ] story [ 258 ms ] threadI can't vouch for all the random Google results but for US tech voluntary attrition seemed to be somewhere around 15% per year pre pandemic. It went even higher during the 'great resignation'. Companies hiring strategies were based off 15% or 20% of people leaving by surprise. They had to hire accordingly
Now big employers are freezing or significantly slowing hiring down, some are afraid as new employees they'd be targeted in layoffs (or maybe their offers would be cancelled an hour before starting), so everyone ends up with more employees than they planned for
Source?
Not much consolation to the folks in Antioch/Brentwood. That's a brutal 2hr drive in rush hour, and nearly the same via BART.
Though it looks like the Baby Bullets aren’t stopping in Sunnyvale currently which is a damn shame
Regardless, depending on where you are in Sunnyvale it may not be too bad hard to catch the Mountain View baby bullet
There is a case to be made for certain sectors definitely being more productive while at the office, especially those that are working on future products. The issue is that from a management standpoint, you can't make certain people come in while letting others who can easily do work from home stay with WFH. So generally, there will be policies mandating everyone to return to a certain extent.
Especially companies with a similar real estate lease footprint
Results also show lower productivity of fully-remote teams, especially when more than half of your team is new, people haven't ramped up on complex codebases and haven't made good bonds with their colleagues.
Ultimately WFH is more economically efficient for worker and employer, so it is up to the employer to prove to shareholders why they should be spending tons of money on in-office aside from "because this is how we've always done it."
I strongly disagree with this. WFH will be economically disastrous for the US workers in the long run, akin to what happened to the US rust belt. See the previous discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27696235 (part 1) , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29784222 (part 2).
I do not understand this. That was the reasoning given by my previous employer as to why folks had to come back to the office as well, and it just doesn't hold up to close scrutiny.
Delineation of duties and clear expectations is sort of step 1 of managing people. Some people have jobs that can be effectively done off-site, and some do not. It's just a matter of sitting down with folks and outlining what and why.
If they disagree, you provide an avenue for evaluating the business case they have, other than 'I just prefer it'. If there is a compelling case to be made, let them make it and quantify its positive impact on the business.
I just don't get that statement, at all. I didn't three years ago, and I don't now.
Some people just can't handle working from home. A lot of people, actually. Heavy-handed management can somewhat keep them in line, but then you're tying up extra manager time just to get certain employees to do their job.
That's not to say people can't slack off in the office, too. The problem is that someone prone to getting distracted has 10X more distractions at home and feels 1/10th the peer pressure to work like everyone else in the office.
But if you start picking and choosing who has to come back and who gets to stay home, it's a disaster. The people forced to come back to the office will resent the people who get to stay home, creating more divisions in the team.
The real issue, IMO, is that companies hired way too many people who couldn't handle remote work. At this point it's not an option to apply more management pressure or lay them off because they make up large parts of the employee base. It's not exactly fair to people who can WFH, but at some point bringing everyone into the office starts to look like the only practical solution to addressing widespread problems.
It's not about the people. It's about the position (unless the person identifies that they should not do X because they are easily distractible, but then, that's where the business case comes in). If a position is deemed able to be WFH, then the position is WFH. If a position is not, then it is not. Based on duties and expectations.
Management is about setting expectations and measuring outcomes while providing appropriate support for staff. If the expectation is that you can work from home and produce at a consistently acceptable level, then that's great. And when the easily distractable person falls behind, you either develop them, or get rid of them.
That's not heavy handed management. It's just management. If it's too heavy handed to measure how productive people are in some fashion, then what even is the point of management?
The thing you said just seems like avoiding measuring someone's output and avoiding confrontation. It sounds toxic.
Even for Software engineers, I see very few positions which can be fully WFH. If you are newbie, it's better to come to office. If you are a tech-lead of a big team or above, it's better to come to office. Only the independent junior engineer role seems to be a good fit for a fully remote setup.
Onboarding can be done remote, but the best is to schedule extensive meetings / pair programming, or even just a virtual room where the newbie can work independently but ask the senior "as in the office". Or even very clear directions on when to reach out if nothing else is possible.
What happens instead that the newbie is expected to handle all the responsibility of reaching out, and when that inevitably fails the conclusion that's reached is that wfh is not for onboarding.
Seniors typically are already overloaded with keeping the product running and backfilling for the departed colleagues (who are being replaced by the new employees). So using words like "decency" is sure to piss them off even more.
I'm not sure why this would be a different experience than normal performance review. My manager can set my expectations, and if I'm unable to meet those expectations while working remote, we can work out a different arrangement or I can get fired for not meeting expectations.
I really don't see the dilemma here -- the same exact thing could apply for workers who don't know how to work in an office. The solution would be the exact same: set the expectations, and if they're not met then switch things up or let the employee go.
When I asked "well qualified candidates" what they prefer, there was a split between hybrid, remote and in-office with hybrid winning a plurality. People like hybrid because that allows them in-person brainstorming. Much easier to tackle complex design over a whiteboard than trying to do so over zoom. In-person beats video when it comes to transferring thoughts.
Hands down.
But I'd like to see approaches like "two weeks a month" rather than "three days a week". Start the month off with planning, brainstorming, collaboration, integration, then end it with heads-down focus.
I think it would also be interesting to see what ends up happening when cal hsr is finished. Now you can live in merced and could end up in sac, la, sf, san diego, anaheim, population and job centers all over the state really for a lot less hassle and cost of flying. Trains are generally more spacious and comfortable for getting some work done on the laptop as well, maybe you can bake the train commute into your working hours since you'd essentially be in an office that moves at 220mph around the state.
Now compare that to an office lease where you can get. At an avg density of 200 sqft/person[1], you'd need 10,000 sqft. You can get that for ~500K$/yr[2]. You use that for 10 times in a given year and you are breaking even.
[1] https://aquilacommercial.com/learning-center/how-much-office...
[2] https://www.loopnet.com/search/commercial-real-estate/san-fr...
People who are pro WFH will defend it to the death, those pro RTO the same and God[1] forbid you want a hybrid regime.
[1] God of offices, of course.
Just to give one specific example - if half the team is in office huddled around a conference room table and the rest half is dialing in via Zoom, the ones in the common room will have far better connection and the remote members will feel neglected.
I have not had a discussion at all with anyone, that says "people should be banned from the office". I have not met a single WFH person who has said anything other than "people should not have to go to the office if working in they are more productive at home".
I don't know where this "the only options are A, B, or C come from" when quite clearly "people who don't need to be in the office don't need to come into the office" is what every WFH person (I guess outside of nonsense "thought" pieces from random people trying to get press coverage, rather than actual employees effected by these choices) has wanted. "Hybrid" plans are entirely about trying to mitigate the unrelenting harm caused by mandatory RTO.
We even get that some times it would be useful to be in the office - but again, non-mandatory RTO folk are not banning offices, whereas RTO folk are banning WFH.
> Just to give one specific example - if half the team is in office huddled around a conference room table and the rest half is dialing in via Zoom, the ones in the common room will have far better connection and the remote members will feel neglected.
If this is how your company operates continuously that sounds like a horrific work environment. Also, people who are working from home are not feeling "neglected". Again, if someone is unable to handle online communication they can go to an office - for larger companies they clearly aren't going to be alone - but you can't project their feelings of neglect on to others. I want to be clear here, "Mandatory office work because I need X, therefore those WFH people must need X as well, and the only solution is to force them to come in to the office" is projecting your personal feelings on to other people, it is not "caring" about those people, and framing it as such is dishonest.
Here is what my "hybrid" work week looks like:
On the plus side there are some huge benefits: Seriously, I understand that for some people the opportunity to socialize in person in the office is necessary, and they can do that. But for people who don't need to do that, mandatory return to office is horrifically expensive in numerous metrics, and has literally no benefit.Just look around, most of the threads here have someone chime in saying "i'm 10x productive at home with my wife and my dogs by my side, so my RTO CEO is an idiot". In plenty of these discussions, people don't even think about anything but themselves, in the most narrow way.
It is not a person saying "offices should be banned".
Because you seem to have difficulty with this: a person saying "forcing everyone to return to the office is stupid" is not "don't allow anyone to work from an office". Your preferred alternative "force people to come into the office" is definitionally "ban wfh".
I do appreciate that all the "I need an office to do my job" people seem to try to denigrate anyone who disagrees as in your example "i'm 10x productive at home with my wife and my dogs by my side" which is clearly intended to make this sound false. Rather than more realistically:
To be clear, I have two dogs, one of which is still relatively young and an idiot, and he is less distracting than many coworkers that I have had. It goes without saying that my wife isn't a distraction because that whole mutual respect thing.I understand, there are many people who need an office environment to work, for a variety of reasons (focus, home distractions, or not having any other social environment). The problem is that this group of people - which I'm taking to include you - isn't saying "I need this, so I'm going to RTO", it's saying "I need this, therefore everyone must RTO". Oftentimes this argument is coupled with an implicit or explicit "I need RTO for this reason, therefore those other people do to and the only reason that they don't want to RTO, is that they don't want to work".
Again: No one is saying "ban offices", they are saying "offices are not necessary, and mandating them for everyone is at best equally productive, often times not, and certainly makes work much less pleasant for many of us".
A real hybrid system where people don't have to come to the office for no reason makes things better for people who do want/need to RTO as well: fewer people in offices means less doubling of offices, or less dense seating in open plan pens (noting of course that open plan and similar have only ever been shown to be worse for productivity).
As a specific example of tyranny of remote workers, I have worked at a company which had the idiotic rule of everyone dialing in from their own laptops even if many of us were in office and some of us were remote. Just to ensure that remote workers are on a level playing field. Needless to say, that policy never worked in practice.
"I will punish people who don't work in the office, because I want to be in the office and everyone else must also do what makes me happy, regardless of impact on them"
Again, I am so tired of listening to people who are incapable of working outside of office environments claiming that their own weaknesses apply to everyone else as well. Just because you can't deal handle not being in an office doesn't mean others can't, just because you can't communicate outside of a conference room doesn't mean others can't (otherwise the last 30+ years of open source development is fiction), and just because you need your work to provide you social interaction does not mean other people need it.
I get it, for you an office is better, but ffs stop then claiming that it must be better for everyone else, and that anyone claims otherwise is basically lying.
> As a specific example of tyranny of remote workers, I have worked at a company which had the idiotic rule of everyone dialing in from their own laptops even if many of us were in office and some of us were remote.
Unless the point was to keep groups of people from collecting in small poorly ventilated rooms during a pandemic I can't imagine any other possible reason for this policy.
I guess it could also be some portions of the company recognized that some of its management and employees were not able to do their jobs well enough to recognize the value of work done by their coworkers and instead rate performance based on other metrics - looks, how chatty they are, etc. Of course if we weren't having the mandatory office discussion we could also ask "are people who aren't able to rate coworker performance when they're remote using the same BS and biased measures for determining performance when every one is in person as well?".
It goes without saying, that based on everything you just said, that you are saying that it's reasonable to discriminate against people with medical reasons that actually prevent them from returning to the office. After all, if you're immunocompromised, you should know that you aren't as good a worker as that person who wanders around disrupting everyone in the office.
Not sure if I'm "well qualified" to you, but I assume I am...
When I was searching for a job, I basically told the recruiter/manager what they wanted to hear (after research them). I can work wherever, and since I'm located in a city, a commute is easy. There's a benefit to telling someone what they want to hear so you seem like a "culture fit".
Realistically, I like hybrid but not the 3/2 per week breakdown we see a lot. I want to WFH for 2 weeks doing my work in peace, then go to office for a few days of busy planning and socializing. This is especially helpful around holidays, vacations, etc where my schedule is disrupted and I don't want to be forced to commute. Being told in-office only would be the worst option, because the flexibility of being remote for package delivery, family events, travel, etc is too important. I understand the value people profess of in-person work, but its one of those things that benefits the company more than the individual.
> I want to WFH for 2 weeks doing my work in peace, then go to office for a few days of busy planning and socializing.
That's a reasonable take.
> its one of those things that benefits the company more than the individual.
I disagree on that one. In-person connections are very valuable to climb the ladder faster, particularly in the early stages of one's career. They are also helpful to forge bonds with senior leadership once you are at a higher position. That typically happens with casual hallway or watercooler conversations, occasional coffees or just while waiting in line at cafes for lunch. I have seen people liking other people more once they have spent some time in person.
I find this trend in every thread talking about mandates that people will come along telling us that REALLY employees WANT to be back at the office, but the thread is about a mandate so self-evidently that isn't true.
I say let it be optional and let the problem solve itself. If people want to be back: Go right ahead, and if people don't then so be it. Let the market decide.
I joined Google on the first "RTO" day (April 2022) when they tried to mandate it. My team only saw like 1/3 regularly go back by the end of the month, and it's still not better. I would have preferred my teammates be there to help ease onboarding. When no one went back, it reduced the value for me to return, regardless of my preferences. I stopped going in to office to reclaim my commutes, because there was no value in the office.
For better or worse, the value of in-office work is the co-workers. If the important co-workers are remote, then the office isn't valuable. Mandating it is the only way to do it company wide. Thats not to say that in-office is better, but in office can only work if everyone is there. We see this "laissez faire" suggestion all the time, and i'ts willfully missing the point.
Obviously with competing needs and perspectives, you can't please everyone, so it comes down to how to please as many people as you can and rectify the issues with the displeased people as best you can. Chances are, a company that has been around for a few years is not all new hires on boarding, so the majority of employees might be like the coworkers of yours who don't feel the need for hands on learning time or want more focus versus new hires who really do like that sort of direction and attention. That doesn't mean you leave the new hires dry, that means you reevaluate how you onboard people in this new remote world so that your new hires do feel confident about their situation and how much training they are getting. This latter approach is all too rare unfortunately; its a lot easier to throw your hands up and say you've tried nothing and are all out of ideas than to work thoughtfully on something that doesn't directly relate to your profit centers, especially when the try nothing idea is so popular in business news.
The needs of the business are not always the needs of the employees. It’s beneficial to have your employees in office, it’s beneficial to have the flexibility to be a remote employee (social and home life preference aside). I think a reasonable reality is that you need to be paid to commute and you should plan for your employees to be together at least once a quarter but not expect it daily.
Silicon Valley has a habit of taking every discussion and injecting it with religious zeal. Not everyone wants WFH. Not everyone wants in-office, or even hybrid. There are team dynamics unique to each configuration, with the relative costs and benefits depending on context. Beyond that, there's a spectrum of options, from remote-only to in-office only, to RTO on fixed days a week to RTO a couple times a year.
For me, its like the earth has went from a 24 hour day to a 26 hour day, what an invention in human efficiency these two hours have been! When is the last time we gained two hours of free time as a civilization, when we went from animal to mechanical power for transportation?
That's easy:
1. The 2 day weekend.
2. The 40 hour workweek.
I'm searching for a job now, and one of the things I'm starting to see - and place value in - are 4 day work weeks. I'm willing to take the pay cut, I don't care what day a week is the free day (but friday is the best IMO).
My mother was a very successful engineer in the 90s but went to a 32hr work week to raise me (matched school hours). During the summers she would work 8x4 instead of 6x5 and take Fridays off. She said it hurt her career for the first few years, and she had to work extra hard to re-prove herself but once she established herself, she much preferred the reduced schedule, and continued it even after I moved out.
Do very many people think that the quality of education in their area is irrelevant to them? You shouldn't need children to see the benefits of living in a community of well educated people.
RTO people are mandating RTO for everyone: "I can't work from home and/or use work as a proxy social life, therefore _everyone else_ must make me happy by wasting hours every week coming to the office for no reason - I don't care if they're functionally taking a 20% pay cut, what is important is what I want".
Fully Remote orgs (either full firms or subordinate organizations) exist, and I’d be surprised if it wasn’t more both absolutely and proportionately now than before the pandemic.
Mandating RTO is therefore very clearly a 20-25% pay cut.
Not really. My company announced return to office 100%. All the IT department complained. Executives reconsidered their decision... now it's hybrid mode for non-IT folks only. A few key engineers already set their green labels "open for work" on Linkedin and that scared upper management a lot.
Western Europe.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/04/technology/salesforce-lay...
From Marc Benioff...
"Success depends on constant communication and complete alignment. We’ve been able to achieve both with the help of a management process I developed a number of years ago called the V2MOM, which stands for: Vision, Values, Methods, Obstacles, and Measures."
https://www.salesforce.com/blog/how-to-create-alignment-with...
I might consider coming into the office a few days a week if it's within reasonable walking distance, but that usually means living downtown which is usually a cost that exceeds the regional CoL compensation adjustments that most companies make, which means it's coming out of my pocket to be possible, and I am not going to commute unless it's East Asia style train commuting during off-peak hours, where I can actually do something while in transit.
Being able to see people face time face gives a different dynamic you cannot replicate with video calls.
Having an all-remote team with people who can work well remotely is a wonderful thing. It's rare to get a department full of people who can work well remotely, though.
I personally prefer companies that remove the people who can't handle remote work, but so many companies hired large numbers of unprepared people into remote jobs under unprepared managers in the past 3 years. You really have to be careful about team selection to build a fully functional remote team, but that wasn't happening during the hiring rush.
My observation is that with some people, I can drive to the office, find parking, find the people I'm meeting with, we go find an open room which takes time... sit down, bring up the laptop on the tv in the room....
I tell them the same fucking thing I told them yesterday on the webex.
They smile and nod and now they get it. Because I had to spend a fucking hour coming in to talk to them.
And then I've wasted half my damn day so someone who couldn't pay attention to me on webex felt compelled to pay attention to me sitting in a stinky room in a filthy chair.
EDIT: damn I didnt think it was this bad 938 crimes per square mile in SF [1]
[1] https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/ca/san-francisco/crime
[1]: https://www.geekwire.com/2022/amazon-moves-employees-out-of-...
(I had similar experiences the two times Salesforce mandated that I be schlepped out there from the other side of the country)
I wonder if the timing on RFID is loose enough to proxy it over the web.
Just don't cheat and fraud, easily detectable
It is impossible to hide doing WFH like one can do “endlessly” collaborating with your colleagues at the office.
Let me make it very clear: Employees that WFH are more productive, so you don't need more of them. If you don't need more headcount, the executive has no use. If the executive has no use, they will be executed (symbolically, as a re-org).
Doesn't OP say that this only applies to employees that live within 40 miles of an office? It sounds like if you're remote, you're not affected.
That is easily a 1:30hr commute, one way. Depending where your office is, 4 hours a day of commuting..
Took remote work as soon as company offered it and will never go back to the commute.
Just to be clear, it's 3 days, not every day.
That's basically saying "because I want to feel power over my plebs I'm going to give you a 20-25% pay cut".
For now - first they change to hybrid 3 day within 40 miles, you don’t think they can change it again ?
Wild.
Much of the demand to return to office is driven by commercial real estate interests. But they're losing. Companies aren't renewing when leases run out.
The lease (reportedly) goes 15.5 years from 2017 so they certainly have incentive to use the space but I don't think they get anything from the value of the building up or down.
Take all the nice high end stores out of graffiti and litter ridden areas and put them inside SF tower.
I’d never go there but if it helps make downtown better I’m all for it.
> I’d never go there
> Manhattan-based workers are spending at least $12.4 billion less per year than they were before the COVID-19 pandemic drove a shift toward remote work, according to calculations conducted by Stanford University economist Nicholas Bloom’s WFH Research group and reported by Bloomberg on Sunday.
> New York City Comptroller Brad Lander warned that the trend represents a risk to the tax revenue needed to maintain high-quality services.
> “If less income tax is being paid in New York City, then it’s hard to figure out how to capture enough value to maintain the subways and invest in the schools and keep the city safe and clean and all the things that really matter,” Lander told Bloomberg.
> Mayor Eric Adams has repeatedly urged companies with a presence in Manhattan to require their workers to return to the office. Last April, he warned poor office attendance could hurt the city’s recovery.
> “It is a real concern,” Adams said. “We’re going to have to get to the table with all of our business leaders, our economists — and really, we can’t stumble into post-COVID.”
Lots of entrenched interests with incentives to require in office work. They see a piece of worker wages in their pocket already.
Some companies with fancy headquarters (SalesForce, Apple, etc...) will want a RTO to keep their shiny castles full. But many companies will re-consider. I'm sitting here in an empty office space that used to house Shopee. Shopee didn't decide to go full remote but instead to move to Malaysia. I'm pretty sure there are lots of vested interests in Shopee remaining here ranging from landlords to coffeeshops to the government. But the ship has sailed. The money flow is stronger than any conspiracy the "top" elites will conspire.
My previous post did not mention a conspiracy, and also, money flow, aka "the distribution of wealth" was the point of my post.
All the companies with a vested interest in workers going to the office, like landlords, shop owners, taxi companies, etc., have the same desire to continue to be profitable. That profit is predicated upon commuters re-distributing their wealth to others via the commute, in office time, restaurants, etc. Those with the vested interest can all act independently to pressure governments to coerce businesses to force RTO...so not sure where "conspiracy" came from, nor is it required.
The companies with employees coming into the office do not make additional revenue by people being in the office...it is actually cheaper for them to not have employees in the office. Reducing business space costs like electricity, maintenance, custodians, etc. Also, they do not have to supply snacks, reduction in amenities like monitors, chairs, etc. And finally, they can sub-lease until their primary lease runs out. So there isn't an excellent monetary reason to keep their shiny castles full. It is typically out of prestige or an older mindset of control.
Finally, out-sourcing and off-shoring occur independently of this RTO dynamic but for the same reasons. Companies want to maximize the distribution of wealth to the leaders and shareholders. They attempt to minimize the share of profits with employees. Layoffs, pay cuts, equity reductions, off-shoring, and more are all examples of reducing the distribution of wealth to employees.
https://www.ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/news/2023/02/15/adams--... (Adams: Some NYC agencies may consider remote work options again)
> However, many employees have resisted and just months after Adams’ infamous “pajama” comment was made, Gothamist reported that New York City agencies were struggling to fill thousands of jobs, partly because of the refusal to allow hybrid work.
so about 15%-20% pay cut. on a per hourly basis.
With people not reliably in the office it talks away most of the advantages an office can give you. I.E. Meetings with half the people calling into a conference are just bad. People talk about things in hallways and the remote folks are left out and not slacked/emailed about it.
I have to pray I won't have to go to the office on my gym days.
And yet barely anyone visits the office… I WONDER WHY.
When office attendance is optional and only 20-30% of people show up, these things feel so much more forced and not as fun.
I know the point you are trying to make is that these are dumb distractions people don’t care about compared to WFH. But I think there is a “critical mass” aspect as well. Offices, for me, are much better to work in when there’s a community, and not just a pimped-out first-party WeWork
So I would say that it’s not just people who want to go vs people who don’t. There is a third category that basically doesn’t see the point if the office is “just” a working environment and doesn’t have enough actual coworkers there, which I find myself in, and I suspect many others do too.
Also it makes no sense in a lot of scenarios. For example i am 800km away from the office.
I think the solution will come in sorting companies into remote or in-person, rather than having every company be a mix of both.
To echo the sibling comment, long term, I think it would be good for teams to be separated based on office policy. One team for pure WFH, one for hybrid (which can mean many different things), one for mainly going to the office, etc.
In my case I see it as a prisoners dilemma kind of thing. I’m officially 3/2 hybrid with unenforced 3 day attendance, along with 80% of my team. I like that I can still choose to WFH on those 3 days and my team can do the same. But we have reached an equilibrium where there’s basically no point to go to the office on those days because nobody else would be there, even though we all had the option to go officially remote (so we were all ok with going to the office). I think in that case, for example, we need at least one “actually everybody should go to the office” day for the 80% that aren’t remote
Maybe 1/5th of the office showed up. 3-4 times as many people as normal, but barely anyone.
1) stay home, dick around (or do laundry, play with children, whatever)
2) dick around at the office (ping pong, fancy beer, etc.)
3) stay home, get work done
4) get work done in the office
Under mandatory office attendance, you are only really allowed to choose between 2 and 4, so naturally more people will choose 2. Under optional attendance, all choices are available, so more people will choose 1
1) I prefer working in an office.
2) I must have good public schools—non-negotiable.
3) I'm going to hate & resent my commute unless it's also physically-active time (walking, biking) and fairly safe. The cost, the unpleasantness, the lost time. The risk, for that matter.
This combo means the happiest place I'm at all likely to end up is remote working. It's damn near impossible to satisfy requirement 2 and also preference 3 while working in an office. So preference 1 is sacrificed, making 3 moot and 2 easier to satisfy. It's not a hard call to make.
4) Affordable
Some balance is good.