This applies everywhere: just because a job or business has existed does not mean it has a right to exist forever. This is not being harsh on people; it's just a reality.
The blacksmiths in the horse and buggy days saw demand for their services fall when time and technologies changed. The coal miners began losing their jobs when we realized that coal as fuel was more harmful than it was beneficial. History is full of valid jobs which later became unneeded or "invalid".
Remote work can increase efficiency by eliminating artificial inefficiencies. Not having to drive to work reduces fuel consumption and lengthens the time between car repairs or replacement. This obviously is a financial loss for the economy because it shifts the balance back from money to time. The same goes for office space: less office space need reduces demand which reduces rents (and amount of space leased). However, that cost can be offset some as home working can increase demand for larger homes. Even so, a slightly larger home is still probably less cost than a commercial space which goes unused for 12+ hours per day.
It smells like much of this anti-remote-work conversation (not TFA, but the topic in general) is because the people accustomed to being in charge have a fear of losing control. The manager who rules by force or threat has much to fear of subordinates who are out of sight. However, the manager (leader) who works together with a group of people toward a common goal has little to fear. Some companies operate very successfully even when management cannot observe the workers. The alarms and complaints we hear are almost certainly from the bad group. Eventually that group will be like the dinosaurs.
Exactly, the local suburban businesses are loving the extra foot traffic, at the expense of less foot traffic in downtown areas. I'm sure home delivery services are benefiting too.
The suggestion that the general economy is suffering because of people WFH doesn't make much sense, spending is just reallocated.
.. Now if people were saving any money previously spent on commuting and eating out, then that would reduce GDP expenditure. The high levels of inflation suggest this isn't the case.
> Right, and in my experience urban retail is often high cost, low quality. Some of the dirtiest stores/restaurants you see are in urban centers.
This may depend on your area but this hasn’t been my experience. I used to commute into downtown Portland for work and we had a great selection of options for lunch and happy hours, a plethora of food cart options which were great and affordable, and a number of decent bars where you could meet a friend for drinks afterwards.
Now I work from home in the suburbs and, while I wouldn’t trade being remote for anything, the food options here mostly consist of bland fast food and chain restaurants. One of the things I miss the most is grabbing a decent lunch with a coworker and breaking up the monotony a bit.
Not exactly sure how representative I should feel, but before, working in the city center, a lot of shops/restaurants got my foot traffic, and since I've been WFH it's mostly my local grocery store that gets all the money.
This argument of expense rerouting is a bit flawed. Suppose working from home saves one some money that they spend elsewhere. Working from the office they spend that money on fuel, indirectly spend on road maintenance, directly spend on vehicle maintenance where the shop in turn spends on parts and tools and so on. The money one spends circulates in the economy much longer and reaches more actors until it eventually falls back into original pocket. Working from home then they buy more items that have been manufactured in China, spend eating out where restaurants pay mostly wages and farmers, making the chain much shorter.
There are different economic health considerations for different spending habits. While not exactly a loss it's not entirely equal too.
This is close to the broken window fallacy. We tend to forget the flow of money is an indirect proxy for work performed. If 20% of construction workers are freed up from fixing roads because of lower traffic, they don't just sit around crying, they find other work to do. Same with tech workers, same with everyone. That's a net good because the work they'll move to will by definition be worth paying someone to do.
Wasting time fixing stuff that didn't need to be broken is intrinsically bad for the economy, but it's disruptive to suddenly have your now-pointless job taken away.
Yeah, people fixate on the money flow so much that they forget that there is another flow, in the opposite direction, the flow of the goods and labour, which is what the economy is actually all about... money is just so much easier to track, and account for, and aggregate (it's all just dollars!) so that the second flow is heavily de-emphasized.
Of course, when you look at just the flow of the goods and labour, the organization of a national economy in general seems highly, uh, round-about — the money serves as the main controlling/directing mechanism so without it in the picture things look pretty funky.
> are freed up from fixing roads because of lower traffic, they don't just sit around crying, they find other work to do.
yes, this holds up when there is something else to do, which is not always the case. I remember during the great recession, building contractors in Florida were praying for a hurricane to put them back to work. There was absolutely no other work to be found.
There is always work to do. However there is often a mismatch of skills and unwillingness to learn the right skills. Sometimes there is an unwillingness to work for the price people are willing to pay.
Traffic in general is also much more efficient with a small reduction in traffic.
If we have 10% fewer people commuting during work hours, then traffic might move twice as efficiently. Of course, that uses less fuel, which is bad for the economy /s
> The money one spends circulates in the economy much longer and reaches more actors until it eventually falls back into original pocket.
that's a total assumption being made. Who knows how the money from an office worker's commute gets dispersed. It's likely too difficult to track exactly. And it's irrelevant to the person how this dispersion happens or why.
All they need to care about is that they've eliminated a source of inefficiency, and thus have extra money for either investment or different consumption.
> All they need to care about is that they've eliminated a source of inefficiency, and thus have extra money for either investment or different consumption.
The purpose of the economy is to fulfill human desires. The only question we have to ask to understand which situation resulted in higher economic output is: which situation resulted in satisfying more human desires.
It's clear that the pointless burning of fossil fuels didn't satisfy any human need. Then the question becomes: is the distribution of currency caused by the buying and burning of the fuels preferable to the alternative distribution if the currency had been spent elsewhere? If it is preferable, does that offset the waste of fuel for no purpose except redistributing currency?
Any time I hear these kinds of reasonings the question comes to mind: if some distributions of currency are preferable to others, and we know what such distributions look like, why not let the government do the distribution directly?
He or she didn't mean that burning of these fuels is pointless, it was a response to a poster suggesting to pointlessly burn these fuels in order to stimulate the economy.
> Any time I hear these kinds of reasonings the question comes to mind: if some distributions of currency are preferable to others, and we know what such distributions look like, why not let the government do the distribution directly?
Because this presumes that the people in government will do what is preferable to the masses. My conception of government is that of a tool or weapon that various powers vie for control over. Why should I expect benevolence from such?
I don't agree. It's totally fair to disqualify some desires as less important than others. I think we all agree that a tyrants desire to be a tyrant isn't worth taking into consideration.
Someone selling wares don't usually desire selling wares. They desire income. Everybody wants income. Buying something we don't want/need is waste + redistribution of currency.
Redistribution of currency is a zero sum game unless we have some reason to particularly value the desires of the ones receiving. I don't see why we should particularly value the desires of landlords.
> I just don't think it's a good exercise to justify anything based on what people desire.
> Working from the office they spend that money on fuel, indirectly spend on road maintenance, directly spend on vehicle maintenance where the shop in turn spends on parts and tools and so on.
It's arguable whether all of this is needed everywhere in the world, to such a degree as is presently done.
In the cities, the transportation needs of most folks can be covered by public transportation (depending on the country, admittedly) - it is more efficient, more green and also results in fewer traffic jams.
Furthermore it scales up and down better: whether at 50% or 80% of capacity it will do its scheduled route, as opposed to all of those people otherwise needing cars and parking spaces for those and so on, which isn't always entirely feasible in densely populated cities.
I guess it's just a different take on things, but if there's commute, we might as well make it more efficient, as opposed to spending 1-2 hours per day in traffic, which is essentially wasted time. Or not have the commute altogether.
In more rural areas or many places in the US as opposed to EU it's a slightly different story.
I live in Cambridge, MA (a city for sure) and used to work in an office near the Waltham/Lexington line. Not some out in the rural woods places at all.
I looked up and wrote up my “what if I tried to commute on public transit to make a 9AM meeting?”
It probably depends a lot on your circumstances, location and other factors!
In my case, in Rīga (the capital of my country, Latvia), it was approximately:
- leave apartment at 7:45
- walk to stop in around 5 minutes
- wait 5 - 10 minutes for a trolley bus
- ride in it for 20 - 30 minutes
- walk from stop to work for 10 minutes
With a car, the same trip would be around 20-40 minutes.
For comparison's sake, walking would mean upwards of 100 minutes for that trip.
Regardless of whether in a car, or using public transportation, coming home in the evening often included waiting in traffic jams for close to an hour. In comparison, when coming home before 4-6 PM, the streets were relatively empty and there were no such traffic issues. Fewer cars, fewer issues of that sort.
But what holds here true doesn't hold true elsewhere and vice versa. Once you go past a certain scale of the city in question, transfers and other complications become unavoidable. Just how much of an issue it is, depends on many other factors as well (car ownership cost, possibility of accidents, the disadvantage of not being able to easily transport things when not owning a car and so on, lack of freedom without a car, especially when you want to visit less popular rural areas).
Neither beats rolling out of bed at 8:45, turning on the computer and brewing some coffee or tea, doing a morning shower and "being at work" 10 minutes later, though.
Random route service is difficult to efficiently serve with mass transit. Public transit doesn't have to be specifically mass transit, but the collective need of "I need to go from random place A to random place B and later return" is almost never going to line up with a mass transit solution.
Having high frequency mass transit service and decent transfers is better than the current situation, but it's really, really hard to compete with "sub-minute latency, personalized perfectly random route".
True, but I still firmly maintain that with good transfers you can get transit close enough to car levels of service so that it doesn't matter. Of course such service is a lot more expensive to run than current service - but it is still cheaper than the costs of owning a car.
Having your own vehicle is an enormous benefit in quality of life, why would anybody want to take that away? Why should we then eat nice food when we can survive on dull rations? There is so much more to the use of personal vehicles than just "transportation needs", but yes - some places build their infrastructure too much catering to cars.
The best way to beat traffic right now without having to wait for anybody else to change is to get a motorcycle - if the climate where you live permits.
But that vast majority of the time, in the US, anyway, the car is used just to get to work and back, not people exercising "freedom of movement".
It seems to me it would be preferable to have mass transit for regular commuting, combined with perhaps some sort of rental system for those times when you need greater flexibility, or need to haul lots of stuff, etc.
That is false. In areas with heavy traffic you can give more freedom of movement. In the typical city without congestion (including US suburbs!), while the car is better, it still doesn't have to be enough better to matter. That you think the car is always better is a reflection on the bad service you have had on public transit.
Public transport runs on a schedule and you have to adapt to that schedule. I live in a place where public transport is good, cheap and safe. You can never achieve public transport that could even compare to the freedom of movement a personal vehicle gives you, and that's not the purpose of public transport.
> That you think the car is always better
Make your arguments without inventing what other people say and you will make better arguments.
I'd say roads that need less maintenance are a win long term, otherwise we go back to original argument about breaking all the windows.
The rest... pure speculation from poster's own limited view, the world is more complex than 'I stay home so just order more stuff from China', definitely not true for me. I can chip in mine - ie during travel restrictions forced to buy in more expensive smaller local shops for whole family. One heck of help for local economy. Spending vacations much closer, meaning tons of money flow back to local economy. Having time to plan and do some home repairs with local workforce.
And so on, random tiny examples have little significance in hyper complex situation that is called reality.
In your example you're actually valuing the local community more than the global community. Ordering something from China probably contributes to more people's wages than commutting. There are the workers in China, land and sea transport, it's a huge infrastructure.
The argument I hear mostly from the ‘remote work is bad’ crowd is that there is highly valuable intangible benefit to collaboration in real life than collaboration remotely.
I can get behind the idea that remote work is not as effective especially when forming a new team or assimilating new team members. However the thing that the ‘remote work is bad’ crowd get wrong is the distribution of collaborative work and deep individual work.
My experience is that in person collaborative synchronization is needed far less than even once a week. In person touch points with a white board and plenty of getting to know each other as humans time is super valuable… and in my opinion 2-4 times a year in needed, not 3-5 days per week.
It heavily depends on what kind of work you do and your relation to others though - if most of your work is deep work done by yourself of course less time interesting with others makes sense but if you're a team lead for example...
I’d agree that someone in a lead role must have more collaborative time but I think IRL collaborative time needed is still significantly less than imagined by the ‘remote work is bad’ crowd.
In my opinion IRL is more needed for negotiation, handling uncertainty, new team formation, business development, etc.
Waste? Depends who you ask. All of the counties around Washington DC are the richest in the US. Like, literally, search for "richest counties in the US" and notice how many DC 'burbs are in the top 10 (and top 20).
But as mentioned that's the taxpayer getting fleeced, not the broken window fallacy.
It is said that in many cities in China the governments actually did something similar. They broke parts of the roads repeatedly so that they could rebuild them later.
That's how local corruption works in Eastern European cities. New mayor gets elected, so good streets get torn up and re-paved, so that his friend who runs a local construction company gets a lucrative government contract above market rates.
Rinse and repeat every time we get a new mayor. It's a tried and tested way of legally shoveling public taxpayer money into well connected private pockets.
I've seen similar corruption scandals in Western Europe as well, since the owners of construction companies and city leaders tend to not be strangers to one another, so I don't expect China to be any different here.
Yes, and it's also funny that they will re-pave the street, and then few months later it turns out that some water pipes need to be replaced, so the freshly re-paved street is torn up again. Then, few months later, new fiber cables needs to be put in the ground, so guess what?. Re-paving becomes one of the best businesses in such town :)
A few cities have someone who's job it is to coordinate between all the groups that have/want something under the streets so when the streets are torn up (which needs to happen every 20-60 years depending on how long the chosen pavement type lasts) everyone with something under the road goes out and does whatever they need.
The city I'm in now puts everything in the area between the streets and the sidewalks. I don't have a sidewalk yet because there are some thing that will be going in next summer.
that's good - they're able to recover some of their time. Just because this "own time" doesn't count towards official GDP, doesn't mean it isn't an improvement.
Having less costs is not clear to me. Might be assuming commute with a car (very US-centric). Paying for all the coffee, snacks, lunch, proper office setup might not always be expensed by the employer and incur extra costs. But let's say, on average, it is true that now employees have less costs because of working remotely.
Lower costs could have other consequences, other than people working less: general inflation; inflating rents/property prices; lower salaries for the same job; longer working hours (officially or not)
I think what you mention is one possible effect, but there are many and it is not clear which one dominates.
That's easy. We work to get stuff. The better the economy, the more stuff we get for less work input. The ideal that we're slowly getting asymptotically closer to is a world where we get everything for no work at all.
This is a backwards view. The economy and financial systems actively and VERY STRONGLY encourage us to spend as much time as possible making money.
This can be shown in absolute clarity: we are paid to work and not paid to not work.
You are forced to work, because you have expenses that you must pay: food, shelter, healthcare. If you do not work, you die.
You buy stuff to try to maximise your enjoyment in each unit of time, or to maximise your time: dishwashers to do the dishes, air fryers to cook food quicker. An apartment closer to work. A nanny, a cleaner, an accountant.
Some people use that extra time to... do more work. And because they do, the economy rewards them; inflation and expenses rise, and now everyone else needs to spend more time working too.
The exception to this is that it's possible to hit a threshold where your projected wealth is greater than your projected expenses for the rest of your life, and this allows you to work less. This threshold is unreachable for the vast majority of people in the world, and even the US, at least until the few last years of their lifes.
Couldn't have put it better myself. Of course with the caveat that "work" in this context means the labour we have to do to support our way of life, not the work we do for pleasure. These do and should intersect (as much as possible).
I can't remember her name but there was an economist who IIRC was Australian and made a critique of classical Keynesian economics based on an accounting model that you need a debit column to be able to balance out loss of raw materials, environmental degradation etc.
For example if an oil tanker sinks you should be able to calculate the loss of value the environmental damage represents as well as the additional value that replacing that ship represents.
This is the same fallacy that people make when they think that war is good for the economy. They somehow imagine that people are better off when we spend money bombing eachother.
Not every expense or purchase has the same multiplicative effect on GDP. The more value that is added at each stage of production, the more GDP is created by consumer spending (cooking vs. eating out). GDP also captures none of the value created and consumed within the household (cooking, herb gardens, childcare by parents, etc.).
It's not really about the money itself but the amount of work done. If people get less work done, that's less value added. Less 'stuff' is produced but the same wage is paid - regardless of what happens with inflation.
Whether that's good or bad is another question, as is the question of whether it even is happening or not.
It seems false to assume that people work less when working remotely. That is far from obvious. I personally think it is false, and have not seen any justification of it.
I understand arguments about people not eating business lunch near the office. Although it looks like home delivery and extra home office snacks, coffee, etc. would also cause spend, just in different areas as before.
Additionally, in places where the state pays for healthcare, having less stressed workers, having less traffic accidents (I assume, since less commutes) might overall decrease the amount of money spent on health and save some money for the state too.
I recently listened to a casual conversation between two women talking about their husbands WFH behaviour. The general undertone was: "Yes, he can now do this or that time-consuming hobby because he can claim WFH while actually driving from A to B". Just an anecdote, I know, but this is not the first time I overheard people cheering over the personal advantages of WFH.
Those gentlemen would probably also waste time in an office environment. You're just substituting wasting time at work with wasting time at work (from home).
In the office I work in, walking past anybody's desk you see procrastination
window and tabs quickly disappear. Either that, or people don't even bother hiding it (except from management).
If people working from home didn't manage the same workload at home, it would hopefully be noticed in a competently run company. If those gents can fit in a few more hobbies in that time as well, power to them. If the company is run so incompetently that they don't notice you're not meeting goals/project deadlines, or providing low quality work, then that's the managements fault.
Remote or in-person work isn't the main argument I think. There's more to it, which makes remote/in-person a good start for improving things. Working 9-5 (if you're lucky to work that) 5 days a week is insane, even for something you're passionate about (which most aren't). Our views on employment, notably:-
- The amount of time it takes out of our days and lives (70%+ of your adult life)
- The mundanity and pointlessness of (let's face it) most jobs
- The additional time lost to commuting to an office to sit amongst a 50/50 cast of people you like/dislike.
- The damage many jobs do to your health, both physical (back, eyes) and mentally from lack of stimulation or burnout.
When you take a step back to analyse it all, to accept this is like a form of mental illness. If I took my favourite hobby and treated it the same way that a job is treated, after a couple of years it wouldn't even be a hobby anymore.
>Those gentlemen would probably also waste time in an office environment. You're just substituting wasting time at work with wasting time at work (from home).
There's way more distractions at home and not everyone can handle it. It's just wild what people find appropriate to do during meetings that they're supposed to be paying attention to. In office yeah maybe someone would read emails but you wouldn't be fully immersed in doing something else like cooking a full meal.
It's hard to say how much my coworkers actually work. But I strongly suspect that it's much less than in office. Yeah people would pop over to Reddit or whatever. But that's far less engaging then going anywhere you want or doing anything you want. Feel like for most people if you're stuck in the office you might as well do some work.
> Feel like for most people if you're stuck in the office you might as well do some work.
The biggest distractions in the office are the coworkers. Random hallway conversations, loud talkers in neighboring cubes/offices, people walking up to your desk with a question that should've been an email/chat (but really they are too lazy to check the ticket system/wiki/doc store for the answer). The level of distraction varies with each type of job, but for many quiet focus time is important. Working from home provides that quiet focus time.
The whole point of the office is the random hallway conversations, the conversations you should be in on that you know about only because you overhear it from the cube next to you, people walking up to your desk to ask a question.
20 years ago my boss ordered me to work from home one day when I had an urgent task to get done. Most of the time though I was better off in the office - while I couldn't get as much high concentration work done, I was doing more useful work because I was in sync with the office.
The above assumes that a significant number of people are in the office everyday. A pure work from home environment works because people figure out how to use other means to communicate important things. However communication is much harder, and thus takes more effort. As a shy person I would be much better off in the office all the time as I don't put enough effort into communication.
But that quiet focus time is all for naught if people use it to pursue their time consuming hobby instead of working. Which is the point that kicked off this thread.
Wasting time at home, or finding excuses for doing so, is still easier to do, and it is harder to evaluate how much time you really spent working. And then there is the children effect. It seems magically OK if a WFH worker is not available for a few hours because "something with the child", an excuse they simply can not pull while in the office.
Also, I find it pretty aggressive that you call 9-5 5days a week "insane" and go to extra length to emphasis that you think people who do that have a mental illness. Its fine to have different viewpoint on a matter, but to call someone insane and unable to assertain their own situation just because you like a different way of spending your time, is pretty condescending.
For the record, I work 9-5 5days a week for 22 years now, and I still like it.
I hope you found a modus that makes you happy, so happy that you dont have to look down at other people and lecture them about what is best and what is insane.
People in the office constantly use the child effect. Leaving early, arriving late, popping out in the middle of the day because both parents work and the kid needs to go to the doctor/be picked up from school etc. I witness it all the time, and will probably also use the same opportunity when needed.
I'm not calling people insane who work those hours. I'm saying it's insane that this behaviour is considered normal.
You like your job, and that's good. And hopefully you will feel the same way in another 10/20/30/40 years.
Many, many people don't, yet because of the way our world works they have to keep plugging away at something they don't like, losing a phenomenal amount of their life, with a couple of gaps (holidays, weekends) thrown in as a treat. Not many of those gaps are really sufficient for pursuing anything of significant value. And the biggest gap, being at the end of life, when the bodys and minds best years are behind it.
People who work in under-stimulating jobs, and people who work with something they're interested in/passionate about or something they trained all of their life for, all feel this way at some point. Such a working schedule (which as I said is lucky, as many people work more than that) takes away so many other opportunities in life. It also has a severe effect on health. The lack of exercise and poor nutrition (you know when you finish work sometimes and you can't be bothered cooking, so you order takeout) we see in the Western world today has led to soaring obesity and overweight levels which has huge implications for society at large.
If you gave most people the choice to cut their working hours down, or to cease working entirely, I think they would take it (unless they needed money). I think most people would want to work to some degree (3/4 days a week), but if we started from scratch, nobody would choose to work 5 of 7 days a week, half of the daily waking hours (plus travel and the other bits, as well as the hours lost to rest and recuperate for the next day).
I can't see many people dropping work entirely, as it's a good way to have a sense of purpose. But it's hard to find a purpose in many jobs, increasingly so as everything gets automated. Remember, for every person that is lucky enough to work with something interesting, many more people are sat bored out of their mind waiting for the end of the day. There really isn't enough stimulating work to go round everybody.
You might be a good hard working person, but many people procrastinate simply because they don't enjoy their job. They'll procrastinate working from home, and they'll procrastinate at the office. The average office isn't a high surveillance environment. Many of your colleagues are probably browsing Reddit, Hacker News, Facebook, news websites etc. right now.
And to add to that, the physical and mental health implications and other points I mentioned, as well as points others have made about environmental damage from car commuting / congestion.
None of this should be normal. If we started from a point in time of people working less, as opposed to almost all the time (in the Industrial Revolution), it would be considered crazy if somebody suddenly came up with the idea to get everybody in an office 5 days a week. But it's considered normal and acceptable because it's a step down from the insane working practices of the times that came before (Industrial Revolution, 6 days a week, kids working in factories).
Even if less work gets done (citation needed, I think there are reasons why remote can increase productivity), you also don't have at least one major negative externality: pollution from commuting. There are also likely economic benefits: remote workers can move to areas that would otherwise suffer an economic drain from mass migration to large cities. Imagine how many other cities would benefit if most of us didn't have to live in the same six cities (in America).
Save money, too. Yeah there is a productivity hit, but in exchange you don't have to pay for offices, tables, chairs, monitors, HVAC, window washing, etc.
Plus I can offer a High COL rate, Mid COL rate, and Low COL rate, and recruit talent from all over. Yeah my boy doing node.js in Des Moines or Nashville might not be as good as the shit-hot MIT grade in NYC, but I can pay him 60% less, and he's 80% as good as that MIT kid.
Problem is you gotta re-tool and be equipped for that kind of management, and the Boomer / old Gen-X crowd running the show isn't.
The pro remote work viewpoints on HN seem like experienced developers, probably with families, often with terrible commutes externalizing the costs of what’s apparently good for them personally to their colleagues and peers:
* removing an outlet for socializing for people that are new to the area / country and don’t have friends.
* lack of face to face team bonding for new employees.
* lack of personal social contact for an activity we typically spend 1/3 of our day on.
* reduced ability to learn by absorbing what happens around oneself.
* higher competition for junior and mid-career positions from other countries.
New employees, particularly at the beginning of their careers are disproportionately negatively affected by remote work. And while many of the disadvantages I’ve mentioned above can be mitigated, remote work nudges all these aspects towards the negative. These nudges when applied at large scale add up.
Like anything, remote work has downsides which are often downplayed by those with an interest to gain an advantage for themselves.
Saying that in-person work is more productive is all very well, but this discussion is about remote work being bad for the economy because people aren't buying lunch, companies aren't leasing offices, etc., which is just another instance of the broken window fallacy.
Remote work also means less competition for urban real estate, meaning people who want outlets for socializing, who want to network and go out for drinks, can do so easier!
If remote-first workers are able to stay at home, demand decreases. Prices drop. More early-career folk can actually afford to live in the city, including artists and not-developers, meaning more friendships and business relationships can bloom.
This means needing to substitute using a co-working space or local professional organizations for social time instead of the experience being automatically built into a job. Nonetheless, this is a useful sorting function so young professionals can select into the type of mentoring they want, instead of being forced into mentors-of-convenience.
I can imagine a different solution that would allow work from home and still solve many of the problems you mentioned.
The idea is to decouple "the company you work for" from "the place you work at" for everyone, including those who want to work in an office. Basically, coworking places everywhere. You sign a contract with the company. You either work from home, or find a coworking place where you rent a desk, or coordinate with some of your colleagues to rent a desk at the same place. You could make a different choice on different days.
> removing an outlet for socializing for people that are new to the area / country and don’t have friends
The coworking places would have quiet desks, and also rooms to chat, with sound isolation. Whenever you want to get social, you walk to the room, and socialize. You can meet people who work at the same company, or people who work at different companies. When you feel like working again, walk back to your desk.
> lack of face to face team bonding for new employees
People working at the same company could agree to spend one day in a week at the same coworking place. This could be flexible, like if the company has 1000 employees, but your team has 10, only those 10 people need to coordinate together.
> reduced ability to learn by absorbing what happens around oneself
Either coordinate with your colleagues, or share the screen remotely. I learned a few things by watching my colleagues do things on their computers in a different country.
> higher competition for junior and mid-career positions from other countries
Well, yes. More opportunities for someone means more competition for someone else. That said, many companies found out that hiring people from other countries has its own challenges, so you will always have an advantage of being local.
Most of these can largely be mitigated if teams/organizations intentionally support socializing and interaction. For example - the team I'm currently on hold all meetings with cameras turned on (it's the social norm, not an official policy); twice a week we hold a "social programming" session which is more for idle chitchat than being productive; and we encourage pairing and group work - not because we think it's more productive (it may or may not be) but because it's sometimes more enjoyable or less frustrating.
On the flip side, a former shop basically treated remote workers as if we were robots. Everything was about 'productivity'. One of the most inhumane places I've been.
Thanks for this comment - I think the economic point is spot on. I think the fear of losing control is a fair summary - unfortunately there is some evidence of a selection effect that might mean employers do have something to fear. https://www.fractional.work/p/showing-face-is-more-important...
This is probably true to an extent, but I do think this analysis fails to capture the very real upheaval that happened in the life of a hypothetical blacksmith or wainwright that ended up at a car factory.
A job isn't just a financial transaction. It's part of a person's identity and a social outlet. There is a career progression that they had planned on, they made choices about where to live and all kinds of other things based on this career they thought they were going to have.
So even if they are making the same money, they might be very unhappy and this unhappiness may end up being expressed in antisocial ways that end up costing society money. In the transition from wagons to cars, the increased productivity of cars papered over all these losses. Eventually everyone had to admit it was for the best.
I'm not sure remote work will do the same thing. We'll see, but in any planning it's important that we look at externalities and factors that are difficult to quantify because otherwise we risk running roughshod over what really matters to people.
What really matters to me is spending time with my family. Fuck executives and management that would force me to go to an office to do the exact same things I do at home now. Upheaval be damned.
I get where you’re coming from but just because some of the criticism of working from home is in bad faith doesn’t mean it all is. Many American cities were hollowed out by white flight in the 1950s and 60s as people moved to suburbs, taking a great deal of economic activity with them. The balance which kept that from being an immediate disaster was business-related spending but that came at a steep cost as infrastructure was built for car commuting at the expense of neighborhoods, quality of life, and hefty maintenance costs.
This was arguably a major long-term mistake but I understand why mayors all over are panicking at the thought of that system crumbling, leaving them with all of the costs and half the downtown economy. I don’t think the entire country is turning into Detroit but it’s going to be bad anywhere that they can’t take a different path. Setting up some kind of larger tax zone to pay for at least the broader infrastructure costs could help but many suburbs were specifically designed to prevent that and few have enough slack in their budgets to help in any case.
> A job isn't just a financial transaction. It's part of a person's identity and a social outlet.
It doesn’t have to be. For hundreds of years in a large part of the world, a job for most people was whatever the local lord told you to do. Before and during that, it was whatever you were born into. History does noy dictate the present or the future.
They don't have to be, but they are. And we ignore that our peril.
I'm not arguing against working from home, I think working from home is great. I'm arguing that to make progress we need to consider things like "now that so many people are working from home, what do we do to help the people who have been affected negatively by this change?" People like baristas, gas station attendants, auto mechanics, people whose livelihoods depended on everyone commuting.
In prior changes, a wave of economic growth took care of their needs. I'm not sure that's going to happen here, so I think we will need to be more intentional about it.
Thank God a massive amount of workers left the hospitality industry during the pandemic, never to return to that line of work. And they are much better off for it, because they would never have any good return for their work and effort in that industry. They got the shake up they needed to move sectors, and realized that any other sector will reward them better.
Thanks, I wasn't aware of this, but in hindsight it neems obvious.
I think it's very unfortunate though that we have an economy where redundant pieces attempt not to disappear even if society is worse off. If people replaced by X technology could be assured that their QoL would not drop noticeably after being made redundant, we could likely forgo much unnecessary conflict between the worker class and upper class. Maybe it's impossible to do it while making sure the dislocated workers can be productive elsewhere, as I imagine many might not want nor be able to go through education again.
Bad for which economy? Countless programmers over the years have packed up their bags and moved away from their small towns to live in big expensive tech hubs. This has certainly been beneficial for the economy of large metros--they didn't pay to educate these workers and in many cases these workers (including myself) were raised and educated in completely different countries. So these metros have a huge pool of high-skilled young working age adults bringing billions into the economy just in taxes. But what about the towns these people are from? They essentially get nothing out of the bargain, unless one day one of those workers decides to plop down a retirement home there, which by then their economic contributions have already peaked. The way I see it remote work reverses this trend and offers a far more equitable way of doing things. It takes the strain off the big metros and allows wealth to be spread more equally across the country.
The big metros are more efficient (dollar-wise) and have a lower environmental impact than small towns. Small towns, in the US, are already subsidized by big towns, at least economically.
Depends for who. When a studio apartment in a big metro costs as much as a house in a small town, you need to shell out much more for a comparable level of comfort.
I know a couple who paid literally half per unit area just because they chose live a few kilometres from the city, not in it. They both work partially remotely, so ultimately the savings will be greater than the cost of transport, especially now that interest rates have gone up so much in this region of the world.
I think that's because of what we're talking about right now -- all of these workers heading to the big cities instead of living out in the suburbs. When the workers return to the suburbs, business will follow them, and they won't be insolvent anymore.
The suburbs around Boston are definitely not economically insolvent, and the ones in metro-west are fairly flush financially (continually building and upgrading schools and other town amenities).
You've also called out Watertown, Arlington, etc as modern American suburbs before but their density ranks well above major cities. But that's because they're not modern American suburbs. They're classical Streetcar Suburbs that predate the car and that's a very different thing.
IMO, there's zero doubt that Arlington and Watertown are suburbs of Boston by the most reasonable definitions of the word ("a. an outlying part of a city or town
b. a smaller community adjacent to or within commuting distance of a city")
However, if you continue to object to calling them suburbs of Boston, then look at Carlisle, Dover, Lexington, Lincoln, Sherborn, Sudbury, Wellesley, Weston, Winchester, and on and on. None of those Boston suburbs are even hurting for money, let alone "insolvent".
Source for that claim? I hear it all the time, but never a source that actually stands up to scrutiny. (strongtowns is the most common - they are not a source)
This is not subsidisation. This is a small town participating in economy and offering better price for housing or better walkabikity or better socialization options or something.
A cursory glance shows that the densest urban centers have the lowest carbon footprint. The suburbs are much higher, with affluent suburbs often being more than twice as high. Only some very rural areas approach levels as low as the cities.
Big cities are dependent on agriculture and raw materials from rural regions for their survival. The small town can exist without the big city, the reversal is not true.
As always through history, politicians and bankers plunder the country with taxes and interest. This wealth is then distributed by them, from the big cities, but that doesn't mean that the wealth originated there.
And agricultural areas are dependent on transport hubs to deliver them goods resources from far-flung regions, as well as manufactured goods where the factories want to be near those transport hubs to minimize the cost of inputs. Farming villages are not all producing their own fertilizer from scratch, nor are they all manufacturing combine harvesters from locally-sourced iron. Likewise, facilities for essential high-skill services (e.g. advanced medical care) cannot sustainably be housed in every hamlet in the world.
Concentration will always happen, and it will always happen to the benefit of rural areas, who will pay a premium in order to access the goods and services that are most efficiently produced in urban areas, in the same way that the high-density areas will pay a premium for the agricultural outputs of the rural areas.
Therefore, as far as this goes:
> The small town can exist without the big city, the reversal is not true.
This is only true for values of "exist" where small towns are reduced to primitive subsistence farming. If you live in a rural area in the US and enjoy modern comforts like an iPhone, you have the cities of Shenzhen, Los Angeles, and whatever your regional rail hub is to thank for getting it into your hands.
> Concentration will always happen, and it will always happen to the benefit of rural areas
Agreed! Both cities and rural areas benefit from each other, but I'm not confused as to what structure is dependent on the other. Cities don't produce their basic necessities and cannot exist without the rural areas. My response was to the poster claiming that rural areas are dependent on cities, when it is clearly not so.
> Farming villages are not all producing their own fertilizer from scratch, nor are they all manufacturing combine harvesters from locally-sourced iron
This iron and fertilizer is certainly not coming from the cities, but I know each region will have their niche. That's why I separated agriculture and raw materials production in the post.
> And agricultural areas are dependent on transport hubs
These hubs can and do exist without the cities. More and more of these are constructed outside of the cities because they are an inconvenience to the city populace. I think we will see the world moving even more in that direction. Especially modern delivery shopping has completely revolutionized how goods are acquired in rural areas. People who had to go to town to get things they needed now order online and wait for the truck to come around. If they order fertilizer or a combine harvester, those goods have probably not been in any city on their way from producer to customer.
> Likewise, facilities for essential high-skill services (e.g. advanced medical care) cannot sustainably be housed in every hamlet in the world.
Yes, I know of whole cities that are centered around hospitals and health care. It's one of those high skilled services that just have to be very centralized to be effective.
> This is only true for values of "exist" where small towns are reduced to primitive subsistence farming.
Who said the small town has to be cut off from the world?
Most small towns where remote workers might settle are not driven by agriculture. Agriculture matters, but we don't live in an economy where everything outside of metro areas is just farms as far as the eye can see.
I'm not saying it's only agriculture, but rural areas give much more to urban areas than they receive back, evident by the massive waste and corruption within the cities and the throngs of people being sustained in the cities without producing anything of value or anything at all.
In the past you could certainly say that urban areas give back just as much or even more, when factories where concentrated in cities. Today the factories are not only in the cities.
In poor 'African' farming communities this is true. In any even slightly developed country the farms are not self sufficient: they focus on a cash crop and go to town to buy things that they don't grow. Sure any rural farm could be self sufficient, but division of labor makes them far more efficient - at the expensive of needing the city to provide all the logistics that make it possible for them to get things they don't or can't grow (can't meaning something that doesn't grow in their climate, while don't means they could grow it but they do not).
Materially it is a fact that urban areas need rural areas to survive, while rural areas needs don't need the urban areas.
The country side can be self sufficient, the city can never be. Thousands of trucks deliver excess goods from the country side to the city every day. Saying that it is the city that supports the country side is fancy accounting.
> evident by the massive waste and corruption within the cities and the throngs of people being sustained in the cities without producing anything of value or anything at all.
Where on earth did you get this impression? I have lived in both small rural towns and large cities, and this is hogwash.
This is some weird rural populist hogwash with no basis in reality. The economy is a highly interdependent system. Cities need farms and farms need cities.
There are 2.5 million developers in the US. Most of them don’t live in tech hubs. Most of them work for hospitals, insurance companies, state and local government, etc.
Even outside of tech hubs, the distribution of where those workers end up is pretty different from the the distribution of where they were raised. Not many of my classmates from rural Wisconsin ended up in the Bay Area or New York, but many moved to Chicago or Minneapolis, and of those still in Wisconsin, almost all of those with white-collar jobs are in Milwaukee or Madison. Lots of cities and even many college towns in "flyover country" are doing just fine, but the brain drain from towns with less to offer is very real.
I imagine my hometown would be a very different place if people didn't have to leave to get decent jobs. Though of course there are plenty of other good reasons to leave.
What the small town gets out of it is property values going up because families want to live there because they have good schools that set children on a path to go to a good college, learn a lot, and then move to a city and make a bunch of money.
I don't think that's how that works. It's evident by the fact that there are no school towns like there are college towns. Once the people earning the money move out, there is no taxes left to fund education. Unless we nationalize education, which is not going to happen (at least in America).
Maybe within a city, but people are not moving to another town/city to get access to a good school. The primary factor for people moving somewhere is still jobs. If that wasn't the case why will these people move out of the place which made them this capable?
Are you in the US? People here absolutely move to get access to what they perceive as good schools for their kids' needs. That can include leaving a major city for a suburb or choosing between multiple suburbs/small towns based on schools.
Work-from-home ads more flexibility, but even with a traditional commute there are typically multiple towns/school districts within an easy range of any given workplace assuming you can afford good transportation.
I think the point was that they would move somewhere for work and then look for school in a given radius from work. That may fall into a different city/town than they work or not. But they are not moving to a new city or town because of the school and then looking for work within a radius of that school.
In the US schools are hyperlocal. So a job might bring someone to the general area, but the school system makes them buy in given locality in the area.
That is what I was trying to say. Schools are the second priority. This leads to more taxes for places with better jobs. Sure you will maybe choose a given area for the schools, but that area is limited to drivable distance from work. Work comes first, schools second.
The only reason we DIDN'T move during Covid was because of the school, otherwise we'd be living in the sticks in a huge house that's 50% cheaper and 200% bigger.
Yes, but we all accept covid times were exceptions right? But it can become the norm if remote work becomes the norm. The reason you moved to wherever you were during covid was probably because you had a good job there.
It is probably stupid, but I don't think that can ever change. The US political system is not set up to encourage nationalization, or even state based control, of anything.
edit: It also rewards the wrong people. The schools which made someone capable of getting a high paying job does not get anything in return. In fact with people moving out they get less and less money to improve themselves. Even in the most individualistic view of the system, the wrong individual is being rewarded.
> The schools which made someone capable of getting a high paying job does not get anything in return.
as it should be - the school should not be able to capture the output of its students, while at the same time, getting "free" funding. If the school would capture some of the output of the students in the future (aka, the successful ones), then the school would need to invest in the students via equity (aka, pay the students while they're being taught!).
The school _could_ get reputational reward for producing great students. That's about as far as a return a school can get.
California moved to statewide funding parity for schools and voters simply decided they don't want to pay taxes that aren't local. This lead directly to capping property taxes in the state.
> California moved to statewide funding parity for schools and voters simply decided they don't want to pay taxes that aren't local.
Was there a reason given by these people for this? Or was it just "I don't want to pay for someone else". Because that is the core issue with US politics. Everything will improve if that goes away.
That was the reason. Nobody wants to pay a high tax to support schools when only a small fraction of that goes to their children's local school.
Better to minimize the tax, have shitty public schools, and pay for private schools.
It makes sense from a certain perspective.
It was essentially the no child left behind policy for schools. No public schools are allowed to be better funded than the worst schools, so people look for alternatives to the system.
Is that common in practice? The only example I can think of of a smallish town with excellent public schools is West Lafayette, IN. (It looks like Jackson, WY, and Aspen, CO, also have good schools, but I don't think those are very good examples given that they're so far out of reach for typical families.) Other than that, all of the great school districts I know of are in suburbs of big cities, and the small towns I'm familiar with have decent schools at best.
Maybe it will be more common in the future as a result of remote work. But today it seems hard to create the conditions that result in great school districts - i.e., a relatively high concentration of relatively high-income parents who value education - in a small town that's not within commuting distance of a city with good jobs.
Heh. Well, methinks your idea and mine as to what constitutes a small town are somewhat different. The small town (pop.~1500 at the time) canceled pre-calc my senior year; the district contacted, individually, the 3 of us that had enrolled. Something about being the only person who had enrolled, so they couldn't justify a regularly scheduled class. I guess they might have thought that nerds didn't talk to each other. While I don't doubt there are many non-mega-urban environments that fit your descriptions, the number of small (wee?) towns that might lay claim to such a tax would kill such a program in its crib.
Did I miss something in the comment you're replying to or do I need to read the article?
1500 is a small town for sure. I'd consider 12k to be a small town as well. 1500 is way bigger than the town my dad is from. There's about 100 people there now. Your small town is huge compared to that. He sometimes talks about being on the highschool football team at the school shared by a collection of towns in the county. He says they did pretty damn good in the first half, but by the second they were all so worn out that they'd just get steamrolled. They only had enough players to cover the field you see. The guys all played both offense and defense.
I imagine even a couple folks moving back there and working remotely would be a huge boon for the town. Heck, it'd make a big difference in the county, what with the biggest town only being around 3k people. It's very pretty there, but it's over an hour to the nearest city that has any kind of employment opportunities. If you can't make finances work on the pay from the gas station, your options are move out of town or move out of town. The internet is decent there and being able to work remotely would be the difference between being able to survive in that town or having to move away to find decent-paying work.
Comment on comment regarding idea of some sort of remuneration going to the home town of those who grew up there.
The difference between a town of 1500 and 12000 is very significant the further you get from a (real) city. Kids from nw Kansas drove to Hays to party, not Denver or KC because they were 3+ and 7+ hours away by car.
They were talking about the tax dollars of remote workers going to the smaller towns. It's not exactly a program that needs to be set up.
It didn't seem relevant to me in terms of the discussion, so I countered with an even smaller town. I grew up in a decent-sized metro area, but I've definitely lived the 3-hour drive to the nearest Target. I'd do it again in a heartbeat.
Apparently, 5000 is a common lower bound for what constitutes a "town". But then again, I have friends who live in smaller towns than that, and they might feel a bit insulted if I said they live in a "village".
The economy is for the people, the people aren't for the economy, ideally. If you run a business that relies on particular behaviour, like people commuting the office, then I'm sorry things are hard but we do not owe you our business.
Something that seems similar that comes up often around here is when there are proposals to improve the road system to move traffic out of towns. Currently the main highways run through a bunch of small towns, so they get lots of non-local traffic. Frustrating for drivers due to the extra time, and its a safety issue. But whenever changes are happening businesses in those towns are up in arms omg we'll lose our passing trade, don't build the road. They've capitalised on some inconvenience, we don't owe them to keep it around.
> The economy is for the people, the people aren't for the economy, ideally. If you run a business that relies on particular behaviour, like people commuting the office, then I'm sorry things are hard but we do not owe you our business.
There's a pattern of restaurant closures. People want food from restaurants, but the demand shifted to different locations and restaurants were forced to close for some time. When a restaurant re-opens, it now owes tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in back rent. The restaurant goes bankrupt and the landlords get paid from the liquidated assets.
That's nothing short of wealth transfer from restaurant owners to landlords. We can say "the economy is for the people" all we want, but in situations like this, the economy favors some over others. Increasingly, the economy favors capital + rent seeking, and does not favor labor.
> The restaurant goes bankrupt and the landlords get paid from the liquidated assets.
what assets? If the restaurant is renting, their assets are just the equipment they own. The landlord will only get what they by selling those equipment for rent owed. I don't see how a transfer of wealth is happening in this scenario.
If the restaurant's location is owned by the proprietor, then they're their own landord. Their creditor would have a claim on the property, if they borrowed money to run the restaurant. But calling this a transfer of wealth is misleading - the owners of the restaurant signed up for the debt. Businesses and investments are not guaranteed to succeed, and using leverage increases the risks of losing more. How is this a transfer of wealth, except for the lenders recovering what they could, as is their right to do for lending out the capital in the first place?
"When a restaurant re-opens, it now owes tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in back rent. The restaurant goes bankrupt and the landlords get paid from the liquidated assets."
Is that what actually happens?
"That's nothing short of wealth transfer from restaurant owners to landlords."
You're arguing that the owners of commercial real estate are winners here?
There was another article in the Sydney Morning Herald [0] behooving everybody to get back to the CBD because...mental health...cafes will close...
What if you work in a tech park that has few or no amenities, or your work office is in a cruddy bit of town you really dislike? When the house is tidy and the washing done in the 10 minutes an hour I can wander away from the work laptop, I feel a lot happier than worrying about trying to get it done on the weekends or the evenings.
I'd rather quit and find some other job. I'm tired of articles telling me that something I hated to do was somehow a sacrifice I have to make for made up reasons that really don't add up to a hill of beans.
I started working remotely in late 2015 and when I first stepped into the office after some months of this it struck me as insane that we expend all these resources just to have people in particular places, at particular times, producing massive traffic in the process.
It bothers me that it took a pandemic for companies to embrace remote work.
...and yet the people in charge of those companies are starting to revert back to 'the good old days' of making everybody commute sometimes hours to sit at a (generally worse) workspace to do the work. It's maddening to me.
It’s like they want to enforce letter writing after the invention of email, or horse-drawn carriages instead of cars, or in-person work instead of videoconferencing from anywhere.
All because of some romantic notion about some essential element being lost.
The beauty of capitalism is that competition will either replace those people, or eventually the companies entirely.
Luckily this stance makes it very easy to identify and isolate the old guard. I should add that some kinds of engineering has to be on site due to it revolving around rockets or factories or mines or construction sites. But for IT, huge red flag. I’ve had so many offers to work on site and now I don’t even have to bother researching those clients.
It may be a lot of money in total but the amount of money you spend per capita tells a different story. Big cities have traffic problems, but good cities have public transit and you don't need a car. Small towns have low traffic but the amount of money you spend, per capita, on infrastructure like roads, water, electricity is higher.
I find it odd that for decades, people were shamed for wasting money at cafes ...but then as soon as people stopped going to cafes, it's suddenly an economic disaster?
I think there is some truth to that. My parents went to eat out like once a year for quite a while. They saved as much as they could and succeeded at that.
but the multipliers were also different. with saving a house was realistically affordable for a single income household. today? in many regions not at all unless you save 20 years or have a windfall event like an inheritance
Let's say you and your partner go out to each weekly and spend $100 per dinner. That's $5,000 a year. Cutting this entirely lets you have a loan a little less than $100,000 larger at a 6% rate.
This is a case of eating out a lot, cutting it entirely and the effect doesn't even cover the amount a typical home has appreciated by in the past five years.
Generation of our parents lived much more frugal lives from current perspective. Less traveling, adventures, exciting matters and more grind of work & kids care. I utterly respect them for that, but its not a life I would call ideal and strive to have.
Financials now for buying real estate became ridiculous for many places globally. It can be counted from ie how many salaries of similar jobs you need to buy a house in same place before and now. Not exact, but this shows how things skyrocketed due to cheap debt and speculation.
Is that actually true? Yes people now have less kids, but are they really having adventures more in some large numbers?
I mean, there are regular outrages here over people living frugal - not buying cars, living with parents, generally having less, having massively larger college debt to pay. It is combined with outrage over them not buying this or that subscription someone is pushing. Bycicle transport is cheaper then car and is money saving move for people living at right place too. People watch Netflix rather them going ro movie theater and pay for tickets + popcorn.
They do tons of money saving choices, get blamed for them. And then they get blame for buying anything that did not existed 30 years ago.
There is no epidemic of expensive avocado toasts being bought out in large numbers.
Anecdotally among my peers, we make more money than our parents, yet mostly need two incomes instead of one to have kids and not all of us can buy a house. I'm 40 and can't buy my house but my parents could just get a mortgage in their 20s. I doubt they even considered renting, it was just normal to buy a house if you had a job.
The number of big vacations is similar to our parents (about once in five years). We probably eat in/order from restaurants more than our parents but the high cost of groceries and fact that both parents work means it's not as simple as claiming we are simply not being frugal. We have Netflix and smartphones but these are hardly the reason we can't afford houses.
In terms of adventures, many of my friends' parents had a cabin and boat, and as kids most of our families went on weekend trips skiing, to a lake beach/cabin, camping etc multiple times per year. As middle aged adults now, none of us have cabins and weekend trips might be done 1-2 times per year instead of 5-6 times per year because it's so expensive.
Anyway, it's easy to check inflation and cost of housing vs salaries to verify that the problem is cost of living and wages, not excessive vacationing and avocado eating.
Also note that this website is heavily skewed towards American software developers, so things are generally worse than indicated by the comments here. Even the discussion about remote work is a fairly privileged one, as most workers need to do work at a workplace (factory, warehouse, retail, service, etc).
It's kind of interesting, house prices have exponentially gone up while wages remain stagnant and there's more commodities to spend your money on. I don't necessarily think our parents' generation would've been off much better if we adjusted them for our current conditions now honestly. They had less credit compared to our buying power parity, so I think ultimately down the line we probably represent the same economic spending potential despite having access to a lot more things.
More importantly though, I don't think they were necessarily much happier than us either. "Settling down" essentially meant giving up your life. Nowadays you can go to a geeky renaissance fair and find it packed with all sorts of people with kids of all ages. Same thing with like, anime conventions and whatnot.
> Remote working brings potential risks and consequences. It could see many jobs moving offshore if this becomes entrenched as a viable way of doing business.
This is an interesting (and probably the only interesting) point. Normalisation of remote working likely does lead to offshoring. Hard to put that genie back in the bottle.
It heavily depends on which army you are joining and what cause they fight for. Joining army can be step towards supporting atrocities and it can be step towards preventing them.
Just like with joining police - in some places it is good thing to do. In others, you are joining another criminal organization.
Yeah, there was no difference between joining SS and resistance or American army. Or, between fighting against invading army (like Russia) and being invader.
Soldiers from both sides in every conflict will commit war crimes, including horrible war crimes. That's the grim reality and you can either accept it or put on propaganda blinders. Modern war is hell.
And yet, sone armies commit way more of them then others.
Some armies habe those attrocities as mandates, it is their job to commit genocide. Others don't. In some armies you have to participate in others don't.
It is just not true that it would all be the same. Complete pacifism is just enabling the biggest genocides that go on while congratulating yourself.
"We're invading to defend the people against a brutal oppressor" is the argument always used. By Americans in WWII, by Russia today. Some of the worst war crimes and genocides in history have been committed systematically by the armies you've so far mentioned: Germany, America and Russia. These atrocities have been ordered from the highest leadership in these nations. Modern war is hell and there are no good guys left when it's over. If you believe that, they are recruiting volunteers.
Americans did not happened to be the invading brutal oppressor commiting genocide in WWII. Their standard behavior during that time was was remarkably better then behavior of Soviet army which was better then behavior of German army.
Your position is that joining Jewish resistance is as bad as joining SS and both are totally the same as being member of an American army.
Remote work is great for:
- People who want more quality time with family
- Environment. Less pollution.
- Businesses who can save money by not needing an office.
If “the economy” doesn’t like it, it needs to adapt.
The economy should support people, not the other way around.
> Remote work is great for: - People who want more quality time with family
I'd argue it's great for people. In general.
I don't have family, I can spend more time with my dog, I can make morning or afternoon walk longer, I can get better at cooking cause I have more time, I have more time for hobbies, to deal with personal stuff, I can go to public institution or a doctor if I have to, without taking a day off since I can start 30min early, go after work and still get there before closing.
The only downside to remote work IMO is lack of human contact and that it requires much more effort to actually be included.
I'll argue it's not and that the better alternative would be to have your own chosen days off.
I've just started a new job for an enterprise company. It is proving insanely hard getting in contact with folk. Myself having to introduce myself every-time. Trying to find someone to give me basic mentoring, even trying to understand the hierarchy.
Not only does communications break down over email, messenger, people get the wrong intention of the email, if I wish to add input I have to encounter where it doesn't feel like I'm the bulldozer. Many skills are lost WFH.
Code reviews suck over webcam, sharing knowledge is insanely hard and I'm not lucky to have a house with a spare room where I can dedicate to work. My own personal space is not an office nor I do I want it to be.
The trip to and from work allows me to break work mode and have my own freedom without having a work laptop stashed underneath the desk. It may cost me £ to get in the office each day but heck do I prefer it. I'm 33. WFH is not for me, I find it hell.
> I've just started a new job for an enterprise company. It is proving insanely hard getting in contact with folk. Myself having to introduce myself every-time. Trying to find someone to give me basic mentoring, even trying to understand the hierarchy.
It's interesting. I started a new job in a cube farm a few years ago after a decade of WFH and that describes my exact experience with that transition. I suspect it's all about corporate and workplace culture, not physical working arrangements.
> better alternative would be to have your own chosen days off.
Sure, I'll just let my dog sit for 10 hours straight on those other days. It might be a better alternative for YOU, but I doubt it's true for most peole who want fully remote work.
> It is proving insanely hard getting in contact with folk. (...) Trying to find someone to give me basic mentoring, even trying to understand the hierarchy.
Sounds like a company issue, not a problem with WFH in particular. I work remotely while my whole team is hybrid in another country, we're doing perfectly fine, hell they even praise me for actually getting in touch all the time. You need a certain type of personality to be able to thrive in remote work. You need to be able to get people to talk and point you in the right direction, get the information you need yourself. Most people are not like that, most people need someone standing over their head to show them the way.
> Not only does communications break down over email, messenger, people get the wrong intention of the email, if I wish to add input I have to encounter where it doesn't feel like I'm the bulldozer. Many skills are lost WFH.
Sounds like a YOU issue. Emails are meant to be purely async. Messaging like Teams/Slack are meant to be more of an actual conversation. If people get wrong intentions from your emails or messages then you should work on your writing, not sure what does this have to do with WFH. They'll have the same bad impression from your emails even if you write them while sitting at the office.
> Code reviews suck over webcam
Who on earth does code review while calling with webcams? The whole idea of code review is for it to be asynchronous so you don't bother other people with context switching. If you meant pair coding, then yes, it's a bit more of a hassle. Still never an issue for me, we either whip out vscode/Rider, or simply share screen. Worked ok so far, but sure, sitting next to each other is always going to be better.
> sharing knowledge is insanely hard
Again, organizational issue, remote work encourages actually documenting stuff, not just saying openly in a meeting room "I will X because of Y" and proceeding to write meaningless code because "well... everyone noded in the room". I almost forced people at my new company to write comments both in code and Jira tasks, describe what was talked through during meetings or one on one calls. Everyone loves it after a while, refining tasks is much easier, finding a reason for why certain decisions were made is also suddenly much easier.
> The trip to and from work allows me to break work mode and have my own freedom without having a work laptop stashed underneath the desk.
Great for you, but I don't have to stash anything. If you work fully remotely you learn to divide business and pleasure. I do work and play from the same desk, my work laptop is gone after the day. Organizing your workplace is another issue that is more of a 'you' rather than WFH-bad.
Again, remote work is not suited for everyone, but your arguments don't really explain why WFH would be bad. They just explain why you or your org is not suited for remote work. I started full remote fairly recently, I get paid much more because I can pick from many more offers(central EU), I have much more time for myself, my SO and my dog, I do many more things during the day that I otherwise wouldn't. It's amazing and at this point I will rather switch careers than go back to the office, especially since at current rate I will be mortgage free by the time I'm 35.
And there the typical 35 year aggressive attitude I have to deal with daily. Your joking right in thinking that no communication is loss via email? Team, zoom meetings take away facial expressions and as someone with social blindness it makes my job harder to engage. Why so hostile?
As from what I see the culture here, the prosperity that they give has been one of the I best fitted environments I've worked in. Very surprised especially for the industry. So no its not companies issue, its not a "ME" problem. Its a person issue, professional behaviour slips, people get sloppy.
I don't want to divide work with pleasure. Why should I, so you can stay home with your dog? I want to come home and know for certain there is no essence of work present. Sometimes I need that complete downtime just to recover. Let my guard down without having to create some divide.
At this point its moot. You have your view and I have mine. You won't consider from my perspective and I understand yours and the WFH perspective.
Its always "WFH is amazing" when no one takes in to account that it doesn't work for others. Its a change that needs to happen, it does give benefits and it sounds like it does for you. Good.
But my benefits are working in the office. Why is that hard to comprehend. I'm a SysAdmin and like being on premises of the hardware then a software developer like yourself (according to your profile).
> And there the typical 35 year aggressive attitude I have to deal with daily.
I'm actually 29 but sure.
> Your joking right in thinking that no communication is loss via email?
I would argue that more details are actually _preserved_ when communicating via email rather than face to face. If you cannot properly communicate via written text then yeah, of course any kind of written channel will be worse. I actually like to have everything written down, I can refer to it at any point in the future and if I need someone's immediate attention I simply call. Also f*k emails, that needs to die. There's a reason we have multitudes of different kinds of software for project management, using email to discuss important details is counter productive and obscures information from people who aren't invloved at the time.
> Team, zoom meetings take away facial expressions and as someone with social blindness it makes my job harder to engage. Why so hostile?
But that is again, a YOU issue. I might come off as hostile because stating something that is true to you as a universal truth - that hybrid work environment is better, annoys me a lot and I'm arguing that it's not. It might be better for YOU, but not for everyone, especially not for people who actually want to be full remote.
> I want to come home and know for certain there is no essence of work present.
I work from my bedroom and my work does not interweave with my personal life whatsoever. Your point of view reeks of opinions of someone who needs the office to be productive and was forced to work from home and can't handle it. It's perfectly fine, I know people like that too, but stating that wfh bad, we need the office is... really one sided.
> Its always "WFH is amazing" when no one takes in to account that it doesn't work for others.
But everyone does take it into account. I don't think I've seen a single comment here that said 'everyone should work from home just because I say so'. Let people be fully remote, let people go to the office if they want to. I can guarantee you that majority of people won't though.
> I'm a SysAdmin and like being on premises of the hardware
Again, that's great, go to the office then? Did I ever write anywhere that you shouldn't be able to? I work with people who meet regularly in the office 8 hour drive away from me and yet I don't feel excluded at all.
I'm not saying WFH is bad. It should be allowed, but I disagree that it should not be a full working week. To those who prefer to work in the office, who communicate better in the office. Should be taken in to consideration. Sorry that my brain operates differently to yours.
When you start to throw personal insults, "ITS A YOU" problem those make your points very weak and blind sided. If I have a problem, I fix it but the problem isn't me.
We both have different jobs, it works for you and going in to the office for me. Which is what I do. Hobbies outside work? I have plenty.
Your angry, and I don't know why, you sure your not an disgruntled 35 year old? I'm disgruntled at 33.
I don't want to pile on you much, but I think both you and your team aren't equipped for remote work and could benefit from a better management and leadership. I changed job very recently, to a full remote team, it was the best onboarding of my life.
My team is fantastically equipped. The company provides, and after expressing my concerns in a team meeting today after I had posted my grunt, they acknowledge and couple of the seniors are going to come in a few times a day week to get me though the learning gap.
I am a contractor and have a large responsibility riding on this job. I am counting on being successful to get me to the next level in life, and the company. This is my major lifeline but I can't do it alone nor is WFH appropriate for the situation.
I'm under NDA so I can't say what. WFH is nice I understand. For those with kids, animals, distances. I fully get it. You should earn the privilege rather then have it handed to you on a plate. WFH is lazy.
It frustrates me, its new, its nice, its popular. Its just been thrown that everyone enjoys wfh. My feelings are that feel the 15years of working with older adults, in many jobs, learning the office ropes of each; that it will become a great shame that interpersonal social skills are going to end up lost to distant remote, communication.
Yes the office place could be better, WFH has it advantages but its not the holy grail. Its a silver bullet that bridges the gap for the time being.
Forgive my confusion, but why do you specify needing space away from work now when the vast majority of your concerns prior was struggling with textual mediums? I could suggest if you want to be on prem, you can be. But none of that will address that not only do you want to be on prem you have frustration that other people are not. Couldn’t difficulty with communication be resolved via personal occupational therapy or coaching?
But how do you identify if the issue is with you or them?
If its you, sure you could.
But if it's them, how so you convince that they have a problem? Why would it be my problem, when I get on with other folk?
I find that talking in person, allows me to express what I'm wanting to express clearly. Its hard, but easier.
Why can't a compromise be made where you have three days off and then the two you come in? Why does it have to be All X, none Y or vice versa. WFH shouldn't be having weeks off from the office.
Wel I mean, there are definitely jobs like that. Why not just take those? Let the people who want to be 100% remote just work at the jobs that are 100% remote, instead of working at a 100% remote job and wanting the workplace to change. I’m sympathetic that you mentioned having a disability (if social blindness is what you meant by this) but I’m unsure if making everyone you talk to commute into the office a reasonable accommodation.
Sure, when they're not in some meeting, or marked online and not actually there. To ask questions is a pain having to ring them constantly after ending the previous call.
Sure. one could argue that this would happen in the office too but at least you can grab their attention easier.
One thing that works well is to keep the call going while the issue is being handled. So for example you ask for a solution and they tell you what to do, then you two can bullshit about other stuff while you're implementing the solution live and get back to the questions when you need help, in the same call.
We, the (tax paying) people are the economy. If people have found that remote work is beneficial for them, anyone crying against it is someone that's left behind by a new economy. They're the ones that should adapt.
It's not so straightforward. Remote work encourages sprawl, which drives sprawl on infrastructure (sewage, water, electric grid, etc.), which can be considerably more costly and environmentally impactful than concentrated living in urban centres.
I would suggest that the current economic crises are a massive ocean swell on which WFH is a tiny ripple.
Are some city cafes likely to go under because people aren't coming into the office? Probably.
Are people being forced to eliminate every single discretionary expense so they can pay their bills and eat in the same month? Yes, absolutely. Are some households only surviving because WFH is letting them avoid transport expenses, and reduce food costs? Also yes.
Our mortgage + insurances + rates + mobile/internet + utilities + basic food = almost what we're bringing in this month. And the last payment on the bathroom reno we started five interest rate rises ago will probably be due this month too.
So, define "economy". This bit of the economy would probably run out of money to put fuel in the car if I couldn't work from home.
I'm much more interested in other points about how remote work has an impact on the economy.
* How do cities and states attract well paid remote workers? Who are the winners and losers of this transition.
* How does remote work impact wages? A programmer in Nashville was probably paid less than one in San Fransisco. How is remote work impacting that discrepancy?
* How is remote work impacting residential real estate? Are home owner rates climbing as people flee the expensive cities? How is it impacting which homes are more desirable?
* How is remote work impacting energy usage?
* How is remote work impacting in office jobs for the same type of work? Are in office jobs paying a premium for labor over remote? Do employers see the increased investment as paying off? Do investors?
> How do cities and states attract well paid remote workers.
To me WFH aligns the incentives exactly right in this case. You attract workers by being a good place to live. Have stuff human people care about -- parks, playgrounds, schools, restaurants, nightlife, recreation, arts, theater, music, food, yada yada. Instead of right now where the strat is to get a critical mass of well-ish-paying businesses and then everything else is extra. Communities will form based on what people do outside work which sounds like actual heaven.
There is an "infinite" amount of people that need a job and can't do something remotely (because they are not too "techyy" for that). Right now, they have to 1.5H commute from Jersey to Manhattan because that's where the job is. They are not originally from NJ but that's where they found the cheapest rent.
I'm pretty sure they'd be happy to serve the Digital Nomads or the Remote worker that picked small town, out of no where.
Out of curiosity, why are you sure of that? Because me, personally, I have my doubts that the kind of person who wants to be a NYC bartender also wants to be an Iowa City Bartender.
I know a few friends who lives/lived in Jersey and took long commute to Manhattan. They are not "living in the city" by any shot; their relationship ends at 7-8PM when their shift ends and they have to take their long commute back.
Manhattan is attractive because it's much easier (at least pre-2019) to get a job there when you have little skills (a bartender can actually be a skilled job and requires certain connections) and need cash fast. There is also a community of people in the same situation (especially if you are a new immigrant).
Perhaps, but there's also plenty of NYC bartenders who don't particularly want to be bartenders, it's just a job they managed to get and it's what they're doing to pay the bills.
>There is an "infinite" amount of people that need a job and can't do something remotely (because they are not too "techyy" for that).
There are tons of jobs you can do remotely, without being good with tech. I will wager that most people working low paid manual jobs today have the full potential to handle a remote job. They just haven't had or made that opportunity.
The restaurants and theaters don't need to be a hour's drive away from where the workers and customers live.
US zoning is shitty because it doesn't allow stores or restaurants in residential areas. But if that could be fixed, you could have a corner store and a diner/restaurant within walking distance of your home.
There's no irony there... either those businesses that require local staff exist because they place they're in is a interesting and/or good place to live, or the place they're in is an obscenely-expensive shithole and they just won't exist.
As an aside, it is quite curious that we choose to say jobs at places like restaurants and theatres cannot be done remotely. Those are the kinds of jobs that are remote (faraway, distant)!
Heard the "but what will restaurants in the city centre do?" argument while discussing with a local politician. I argued that this way maybe restaurants, grocery shops and other activities can flourish back in small towns that are now relegated as dormitory.
Three months later, the same administration sent out a package against the depopulation of small towns (we live in the Alps so that's a real issue)
This is the short-sightedness of our administrators.
Instead of giving the people the freedom to work where they want, they spend public resources to marginally attempt to reduce a problem they refuse to acknowledge in the fist place, for the gain of temporary consensus.
Lay optic fiber everywhere and let people work from where they prefer. We would still have dense cities and alive satellite towns.
I’ve increasingly been thinking of this similarly to technical debt where city planners made decisions for a long time which weren’t inherently bad but made things less robust against a shock. Having your downtown focused on, say, financial companies is great (tons of taxes, minimal pollution, etc.) until the office workers can stay home and there’s nobody else filling in their shopping or dining.
Cities have many innate advantages so long-term I’m not expecting disaster but it’s happening almost everywhere at the same time, and we have a bigger problem looming in climate change. That’s going to be more permanently disruptive but it’ll work in favor of cities’ lower environmental footprint if the leaders don’t screw up the transition.
It seems that the same people who are trying to politicize what economy would benefit from restricting remote work are the same population benefitting from keeping the federal minimum wage at $7.25 for the last 15 years.
It’s sure to only benefit a select few. We should let the free market decide what we collectively value in cities. With remote work in particular, it feels like there is more value placed on the standards of humanity than being close to a “hub” to make larger sums of money. For me, I love great weather and not spending a tenth of my day in traffic.
It's bad for hcol cities that rely on the tax revenue to fund their public services and bad for the politicians that draw power from such. Also bad for corporations that won large tax abatements for fancy, new HQs in exchange for bringing in hundreds or thousands of high paying jobs to an area.
But good for the workers and good for the US economy as a whole as it redistributes higher paying jobs to increasingly rural areas as internet connectivity allows.
It’s been great for my economy. I used to schlep an hour each way on MUNI, 5 days a week, to an open-plan office where the sound of ping-pong games in the background drives me nuts with distraction. Now I’m taking a year to do a work-remote tour of the food capitals of Latin America. I’m currently in La Paz, Bolivia, where a 10-course tasting menu at one of the region’s 50 best restaurants[1] runs $70 USD, with wine pairings.
Anyone who thinks they can put the toothpaste back in this tube is kidding themselves.
The issue is that middle managers are being proven as ineffective and useless. The guy who wanders around the office synergizing everyone now has a spotlight on them, because its been proven over the last few years that people can be efficient and productive without Lundberg stopping by and asking for a progress report. The only part of the industry that has now been proven unnecessary are the ones clawing and fighting to get everyone back into the office.
There are ineffective managers but there are also ineffective ICs. With WFH, there are definitely people trying to do as little as possible. Objectively measuring people's effectiveness at work is hardly a solved problem.
I agree with this a lot, and I've started defining this phenomenon with 'B.S. Jobs': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs Not to say that the people currently doing the middle-management synergizing should be banished from society, but that the job function itself shouldn't exist at all.
Remote work is bad for the 'people are there to serve business' economy.
It is good for the 'business is there to serve the people' economy.
The latter distributes people across the country rather than concentrating them in megacities and forces business to go where the people want to live. It favours social capital over financial capital.
We need to decide politically which of these economies we want.
i’ve been working remotely for a decade and i’ve never been happier. i also suspect that the population being happier is no doubt bad for corporate profits.
No, but hungry people who don’t want to get dressed and leave the house will order a quick meal on Uber Eats at twice the cost of getting it in-person.
That's too lazy. No need to get dressed. You can drive to the closest point. You can collect both Lunch and Dinner. People who order Uber Eats at twice the cost are privileged (or maybe in a particular situation but these don't make the economy).
Both are true, it definitely depends on how many spoons I have when lunchtime rolls around and what the leftover situation looks like. For <$20 I can get some real food to my door async and that wins very often compared to canned/frozen.
There is also that pesky problem, particularly in North America, of the shopping district being far away from the housing. At the office, shopping may be no more than a block away. At home, you're in for a big hike (or more likely a car ride) to get to places to buy things. That extra hurdle means you won't take the time as frequently.
This is somewhat situational. I live downtown, but my employer (fortunately I am remote) built their office complex miles outside of town, surrounded by approximately nothing.
I think you should consider more than your own happiness, we're talking about the economy, this includes local markets, hairdressers, restaurants, municipal areas, parks, etc.
There is a pull that cities have, that includes being in close proximity to people who earn a bit more, greater foot traffic, activities, and shops, among millions of other things
I guess if you want to sum up everyone else who was a part of the economic impact you used to have on them as corporations, then we have nothing to talk about
There's an assumption you're making, which is the current model of cities, ie. a dense downtown area, is the right model.
This wouldn't be the case if we optimized for the right set of constraints - all of the places you mentioned being in walking distance. If there were more restaurants in the neighborhood, I'd eat out thrice a week at the very least.
When I went remote, the markets, hairdressers, restaurants close to my office lost a customer, and the markets, hairdressers, restaurants close to my home gained a customer. So no net impact to the overall economy.
Perhaps but I didn’t see any discussion of policy, just what you should be considering as a person. The article wasn’t about policy either, just whether this personal choice is good for the economy or not. I’m not sure there’s a policy decision that can be made to reverse what’s inevitable. Companies that eliminate or reduce their real estate footprint will improve EPS and given data thus far improve productivity, making them structurally more competitive than “collocate bags of carbon water for fun.” Work from home is the lowest energy state for a company and worker, and nature prefers low energy states. So, in the absence of any policy context I’m just left with the admonition, that read more generously, is: “you should think about more than just yourself, there’s others that depend on you.” But as written it’s an absurdism - you should never make individual choices that exchange your bliss for GDP. Even rewritten to be generous, while perhaps you should think about it, you definitely shouldn’t spend less time with your family so Subway branches near your office don’t have to relocate to near your home.
It could've been all you wanted and more, but you decided to twist my words and quote something that literally was not there.
I don't really enjoy having my words twisted like you did, but since you are appearing to be more reasonable after the fact, I'll leave this comment for you
No, me saying "You should consider more than your own happiness" is not saying "The economy matters more than your own happiness", that is you completing the thought inside YOUR head, the thought that says 'YOUR HAPPINESS DOES NOT MATTER, GDP DOES'. Thinking even just a bit beyond your own 'happiness' and considering the impacts of your choices is far from saying 'reconsider your entire life'.
But none of that matters now. This thread is 2 days old, and I don't really care for your opinion since I fear that you will just discount mine even more, and argue with some strawman you built in your head instead.
Not only that, who goes to a barber during work hours? That's something that one would assume would happen closer to home regardless, such as on a weekend.
Right?! Are people not actually using the perks of WFH? I can just tell my team, "hey I'm gonna step out for an hour, I have a hair appointment" and it's no big deal at all. When I hit a block, I can clean the apartment, start dinner, play videogames. And let me tell you, things you actually wanna do are infinitely more refreshing than "work Reddit." My productivity and energy levels have never been so well managed.
People go to lunch at work. I went to the barber. I am salaried and not paid by the hour and am measured by my performance. I see no problem with getting your hair cut at work. In fact at Goldman Sachs they have a barber in the building the CEO goes to.
To me, it’s a must to shower after a haircut. Getting a haircut before work would leave me with hairs on my neck or in my clothes: Always after work or on weekends
I stopped going to the barber, not because of WFH, but for the same reasons that caused widespread WFH. After barbers were closed for months during lockdown I couldn’t take it and started cutting my own hair. I’ve never gone back to the barber since that point.
To be fair I did. I got a flobee (or the modern equivalent, a battery powered clipper with a vacuum) and do my own hair since I started w@h about 10 years ago. I did that because I had more time at home to do it. Before I was so rarely home I had to go to a barber next to the office. I also did it because I hate having to have uncomfortable conversations with someone I don’t know merely because my head excretes too much keratin.
With remote work I find myself with a little more time to go to lunch, or out to dinner, or other things that involve spending money in the community around me I didn't have time for when I was commuting.
My co-workers and I don't live near each other so we don't meet up for lunch when we work remote. And it seems like other people skip their lunch so they can sign off early.
When I go into the office, I just eat a bowl of instant spicy noodles (there are few people there these days), and at home I just eat something from the fridge.
why should I care if city restaurants and hair dressers get my money? There are local restaurants and hair dressers in my small town "satellite" city that need the work as well.
I don't know if it's bad for the economy. It's certainly made my world smaller in a way probably not experienced by my parents for example.
On a weekly basis, ranked by frequency I see - my wife, my dog, my mailman, and the attendant at the gas station. Past that I can't quote a regular person I interact with on weekly basis.
You could make a conscious effort to visit friends, or even coworkers. I also count my video conference interactions as interactions with people, because they are. Frankly I consider interacting with you interacting with a person because you are. But I also grew up with BBS’s and Irc friends the world over and some of the most enduring friendships are irc friends that we’ve moved into a private signal group together. We’ve been close friends for 32 years. I can’t point to a high school or other “regular person” friend that I’m that close to. I don’t feel like I’m socially impoverished. But if god wanted me to have “regular person” friends he wouldn’t have made me a programmer.
That's a choice you are making. You could go to the gym, take a class, wework, meet friends, visit family, grab coffee at a cafe, or a dozen other social activities.
The thing about remote work is like Entropy (or some religions): you can't go back , it's a self-reinforcing thing. So it really isnt very useful to ponder whether it's 'bad for the economy', but what economy will result when people adapt to an increasingly popular reality.
Great writeup. It seems like a strange variant of the broken windows fallacy to imply that workers need to be shuttling to and from work and spending money on brick and mortar restaurants and stores. Of course remote workers will have extra spending money that's still going into the economy, whether that's delivery services mentioned in the article, local restaurants in their personal time, etc.
I'm not reading another article about remote work because they all make my mind bleed but when anyone is reading remember this:
Remote work as existed for a long long time.
The pandemic made more people and companies go remote but it's been there like forever.
In context of ycombinator almost all start-up companies that have ever existed will have extensively used remote workers are the start phase of their companies.
To summarize the article: Some people benefit, and some don't.
To editorialize: This is how all economic exchange works, and any talk of "the economy" being "good" or "bad" is mystification. The powers that be are cranking up rates hoping but not really expecting to avoid a recession. In their view, a recession (i.e. more pain for working people) is acceptable collateral damage when weighed against the risk of continued labor inflation (i.e. more pain for asset owners).
Not everything is some technocratic spreadsheet puzzle to be balanced. There are winners and losers.
The author's answer to the title question seems to be: No.
Which I agree with.
If the answer was "Yes" however, I would question if that's even a bad thing to begin with. If our economy is reliant on people driving to an office and spending their money at a restaurant, then our economy is pretty terrible to begin with.
I reached the same conclusion but from a different angle: if remote work is bad for the economy, but good for the people who enjoy it, how many other aspects of serving “the economy” are in conflict with serving the people who participate in it? Maybe it’s the economy itself that’s bad. Maybe looking for ways to balance changes like remote work with a bad economic system isn’t nearly ambitious enough.
Maybe labor that needs induced demand shouldn’t shape society at all. Maybe it’s arbitrary makework—maybe the laborers, and the society making arbitrary work, would both benefit more by supporting those humans who’d otherwise do makework.
Free market economies also offer a solution to this problem. Restaurants close due to lack of demand, and the workers find jobs doing something else that is in demand (e.g. food delivery).
That’s really just a reconfiguration of the same underlying problem. The workers have to get a job, because they arbitrarily have to make some profits to benefit someone else who is just taking advantage of the market shift and their leverage to do so. That’s an economy which is good for a few people with access to capital, but bad for everyone else.
An economy which prioritized taking care of the people who are out of work would be beneficial for basically everyone except the people who benefit from every outcome anyway.
> That’s really just a reconfiguration of the same underlying problem.
so your problem is the human condition? Where for someone to exist, they have to work and produce something from which others in society would pay for?
My problem is this being framed as the human condition, as if some people doing labor for others to survive is some immutable fact from on high.
It’s a relatively new phenomenon, part of an economic system created by people who reap outsized benefits compared to their own labor. It’s also a system which has promised efficiencies which would reduce work, which it’s delivered but very unevenly and mostly inversely proportional to the people actually doing the work.
We already live in a post scarcity society for some, but the people who get to enjoy that are generally not the people who make it possible. My problem is that the people who make that possible don’t get to enjoy the fruits of their labor, and people who are actually disabled are totally at their mercy. All because we’ve collectively decided capitalism is some kind of unquestionable, perpetual compromise which never has had to make good on promises to anyone who wasn’t already wealthy.
> there's no "some" in post-scarcity - it's either for all, or we aren't in a post scarcity society.
No kidding, that’s why I want it to benefit more people who actually need to benefit from it.
> it's not unquestionable, but so far, no better system has been proposed that produces as much goods/services as capitalism has.
And it also produced artificial demand for labor and a claim that people working from home is bad if it doesn’t buttress this artificial demand or supplement it with some other demand. I don’t need to be a 19th century philosopher to know when something has run its course.
Spending money at restaurants is great, way better than everybody sitting at home eating their own lunches. I suspect massive adoption of restaurants would be more efficient too, if we cared about that primarily.
Inner city areas full of people chatting in restaurants and cafes at lunchtime and after work are the best.
> Then you get these articles about how unhealthy life is in the city. You know; mobile phone tumours - far more likely in the city. Well you know what, so is everything else! Including sex, coffee and conversation. - Dylan Moran
> Inner city areas full of people chatting in restaurants and cafes at lunchtime and after work are the best.
It's fun, but spending time with my kids is the best.
> I suspect massive adoption of restaurants would be more efficient too, if we cared about that primarily.
Not sure I agree - I can whip up an inexpensive, healthy, and satisfying meal with food from the supermarket in less time than it takes to walk a couple blocks to a restaurant.
Whose economy are we talking about though? I mean I understand what you're saying but most people I know still prefer eating at home most of the time and going to restaurants occasionally, mainly because meals out cost 3-10x as much as eating at home, unless you start every meal from scratch. this is really important for families.
The economy of scale. A kitchen with professional staff and equipment making hundreds of plates do that far more efficiently than each person or family making their own food. The reason then why it is still more expensive to eat out is because of business burdens, such as parasitic rent and interest, parasitic taxes, and sometimes exaggerated profit demands from owners. And of course there are costs that are just nice to have, such as table service.
If you look how little healthy school lunches or lunches on ships cost, you see how efficient the economy of scale is in a kitchen environment. And truly, in many places in the world it is common for even the poorest labourers to eat out, because there is a balance without excess burdens taking away the advantage of the economy of scale.
> mainly because meals out cost 3-10x as much as eating at home
If you are at a place that sells an experience that happens to come with food that may be true, but one in the business of selling food is going to beat your home kitchen every time.
The big difference is that the home kitchen costs are largely front-loaded. This does mean you generally need less free cashflow when you are hungry, which is an appealing attribute to someone who budgets by looking at their bank account balance. However, it also means you sacrifice a fair amount of opportunity. That does not come cheap.
$15 USD for a meal at a business in the business of selling food? Your local cost of living must be insane! I think you'd be hard-pressed to spend much more than $5 USD for a meal at a food business around here.
In these parts, I can go to a restaurant in the business of selling an experience, with nice ambiance, a server who will wait on you hand and foot like you are some kind of king, etc. and can have nearly anything on the menu for $15 USD. At that price you're paying to get to act like a king for an hour or two, not for food.
If your local cost of living is that high, what's the housing market like? High CoL and high rent often to go hand in hand. If you sold your appliances and offered your kitchen space as a bedroom rental, what kind of income are we talking here?
Some fast food restaurants are in the experience business, so not strictly so, although I am sure that some food produced in the food business would be considered fast food, so I suppose it doesn't preclude it either. I'm not sure the question really overlaps with the discussion, although perhaps I don't fully understand what you are asking.
yeah, i would like an example of a meal for $5 from a restaurant of any kind. A meal for < $10 is quite rare even for fast food, a slice of pizza and a coke from 7/11 is pushing $10.
> yeah, i would like an example of a meal for $5 from a restaurant of any kind.
Eating out doesn't necessarily mean restaurant, unless you use the term loosely. Restaurants typically sell an experience, not food, and indeed you expect to pay for that experience. It is something not duplicatable at home, at least not for the price a restaurant can offer it to you. Even a high priced restaurant is cheap compared to hiring servants to come to your home.
What's fast food? I consider McDonalds fast food, but they aren't in the food business and thus wouldn't be expected to provide for $5. The term fast food is quite loaded, in my experience.
Which market are you in? We know for certain that there isn't price uniformity in all locations. I'm not at all surprised that you could be paying $10+ for the same meal I pay $5 for. Which brings us back to asking what is rent? Again, that kitchen is occupying space that must be accounted for. You're being completely disingenuous if you ignore the bulk of your costs of operating a kitchen.
You can choose to accept those costs. I like to cook and would hate life if I had to eat out every day even if were at the best restaurants around, so I do too, but I'm not going to pretend they don't exist. The cost of eating at home isn't just the raw ingredients. That would be unfair to not only the discussion, but also yourself and your finances if you aren't being honest with yourself.
Almost nothing around here is less that $10 and most $12-15 a head unless it's taco bell or the dollar menu at some fast food menu for sure. I think someone lives in a much smaller town than we do or something ?
Sure, it is fun. But the point of the article and discussion is not to be city-phobic like your quote suggests -- rather why do we need our economy to focus around people commuting? It is not only inner-city folks. A lot of these restaurants in cities rely on all of the people coming in for work.
There's an economic flipside to the 'death of the city' aspects too though, which is that the ability for companies to hire from outside of big cities, and the ability of people to take jobs with companies based anywhere, opens up a ton of economic opportunity. There's clearly an opportunity for a much more efficient system if where you live and where you work don't need to be geographically coupled.
It is actually not easy to decide this question. We can at least try to formulate a framework to think about it rationally. Remote work is not a new economic category but just a reconfiguration of what we call the knowledge economy (The total economy (TE) being the sum of the real economy (RE) and the knowledge economy (KE))
RE is 1) material stuff being extracted, processesed and moved around by people and 2) physical services provided by people. The size of RE is constrained on the supply side i) by material scarcity, environmental considerations etc, and on the demand side by ii) saturation of material consumption needs by the average human
In contrast, the knowledge economy is essentially information: collated, processed, transmitted etc by people's brains and digital artifacts [0]. Given the zero marginal cost of reproduction, the size of KE is constrained by i) intellectual property enforceability and ii) saturation of information consuption needs by the average human
Back to the original question, remote work is making KE more efficient and is entirely natural. In fact the work-from-office pattern is mostly a historical relic of how RE was organized. Remote work can be judged as positive or negative contribution towards TE in the context of a point-in-time analysis (i.e. here and now) or the overall balance of RE/KE in a sustainable economy. Moving millions of brains around in massive 2 ton exoskeletons that consume enormous resources in order for them to type into inane powerpoints and spreadsheets is not exactly "a good economy".
In any case, it could be that a sustainable economy (where KE is mostly WFH could be "smaller" in monetary units, especially if it has a major collaborative and open source component) but it is by no means clear it would "worse".
[0] KE obviously requires some RE, which is for example why the pandemic induced bloated hardware inventories
Some value is latent in listed property trusts. If that value ceases to exist, at scale, if we have a massive revaluation of commercial property of all kinds, depending how that happens then yes, it would be enormously destructive of wealth at large. It's part of billions of workers future pension income, as well as an asset class backing other forms of investment which in turn makes economic value.
That aside, there are so many upsides. Not the least of which are the reduction in time and energy waste, and pollution. Or less reductive sexist models of childcare and home duties. Work life balance, employment and unemployment and underemployment and mental/physical health could all improve at scale. Sure, some people suffer. Were talking aggregate here. Many sad special cases exist.
Work needs redefining but radical redefinition without planning is not sensible unless revolution is a goal.
Rate of profit, investment in people is complicated.
I blame open offices. I used to love coming into work and having my own space to work. Then open offices came around and I nope'd the heck out of there. I no longer had my own desk. The pleasant quiet cubical became a loud PITA. There was no longer even the little privacy I had when I first started working.
I miss being able to hang out with work friends at the office, but not enough to go back to the open floor plan horror show. Not to mention living downtown near 3 freeways and having to dodge traffic just to get some groceries...
No, the opposite. Look how much tech stocks boomed after Covid. WFM unlocked considerable productivity that was wasted at the office. People were wasting money and time on commuting, which resulted in fatigue and less productivity.
Maybe those restaurants can simply move to residential areas. People still eat lunch. Regardless we don’t manufacture buggy whips to keep the buggy whip businesses afloat either.
Yeah, I live in the suburbs, and I count almost 60 restaurants within a six minute drive of me, most of them centered on two commercial strips surrounded by residential areas. Only a few restaurants around here died since Covid (we lost a Steak n' Shake, a brunch place, and recently a chinese place and a Boston Market), most are still here, and we've gotten several new ones besides that, so I think people are still clearly supporting restaurants around here.
>Maybe those restaurants can simply move to residential areas.
In the US and other places with Euclidean zoning, that's illegal. Restaurants have to be kept far apart from residences. It's better in such places for all the restaurants to go out of business, and people can just stay at home and cook microwave meals.
See the parallel comment to yours. I didn’t mean literally buy a house and open a restaurant. But most zoning has commercial zones near residential zones. Come on, it’s all just sim city.
I wonder why we never see slippery slope arguments about unaffordable housing.
Even if remote work is bad for the economy - its good to have the option and to not enforce it on people who don't need to do it.
It relieves pressure on roads.
It gives people time back they lost in commutes.
If people insulate their homes properly - it will lower carbon emissions.
It relieves rent pressures in the city.
I read it, I'm just peeved that after two centuries, enough people are still convinced by broken window fallacies that articles like this are even necessary.
The way in which remote work could be bad for the economy would be reduced creativity (or “work output” in business speak) which would make us produce less, invent less, generally make less awesome happen.
That’s the root of what the economy is … how much useful stuff gets done.
Whether remote work has that effect remains to be seen. Certainly in the short term there’s a lot of evidence it has. That would make it very unlike other examples of change we have, such as switching from horse and buggy to cars.
All the other considerations are merely moving money from one area to another. This is irrelevant to a “good economy.”
In the end, the total wealth available to all participants in the economy is a function of the resources available and the meaningful work done.
Do cars reduce the need for horses? Yes. Does remote work reduce the need for restaurants? Yes. Does this mean there will be fewer jobs for carriage drivers / waiters? Yes. Is this good for the economy / the planet / humanity? YMMV.
We need to get rid of "what's good for the economy" (aka corporate revenue/profits and high employment) as the sole yardstick for making policy decisions. It is very, very clearly not working.
The economy should exist for (benefit) as many as possible. This doesn't mean tearing down the entirety of the existing system, but some changes are clearly needed.
Even if remote work does end up being less than optimal for the economy, the benefits to many/most remote employees in work/life balance, health, and family life is easily worth it.
The only way it'd be worse for the economy would be if remote working somehow caused people to hoard money in cash in their house. So long as people are still spending, or saving/investing their money in institutions that reinvest, then all that happens is a shift in where people's economic work is done. Restaurants in cities might suffer from losing the lunch time crowd, but people will spend that money somewhere else in the economy instead.
Remote work is obviously not bad for the economy because the economy is basically a closed system.
Solutions to nonexistent problems don't generate any GDP. Not fighting off aliens is bad for the economy.
IMO way too much attention goes to beating around the bush when we need to take a step back and ask some more abstract questions about exactly what our goal as a society should be. There are some hard questions out there that are not getting enough attention.
How about we start caring less about what is good for the economy and start caring more about what is good for the workers. I'm tired of society's sole focus being on maximum efficiency and profit extraction.
starlink and covid were gamechangers for WfH. People can now move outside of big cities and enjoy better lives while still being able to make good money. less traffic, less pollution(if you are into that), less garbage, less waste in general. billions of hours saved on commuting. more time to spend with your family, to relax...
I don't care what it does to the economy. The only people against remote work are middle managers fearing for their future and building owners afraid of losing out on rent money. I have been working remotely for 5 years and I will retire and live in a cardboard box before I commute and work in an office again.
This just isn't true. I've been working from home close to a decade and it has been fantastic for me. There are clearly workers who do better, and prefer an office environment. We are social creatures after all. There are plenty of people who are miserable at home - they don't have the space for a proper office, they can't "turn off" at the end of the day, they are lonely, face to face interactions boost their creativity, etc.
> middle managers fearing for their future and building owners afraid of losing out on rent money
You forget the business owners who fear they'll lose direction of the work.
It's not so much whether you put in the hours at home, but whether your work is directed towards a common goal.
Remote work requires a higher degree of communication, and some business owners don't possess the skill or interest to maintain out-of-office communication.
I'm glad you included that last line. I agree with you that managing a remote team or running a remote business has challenges that an in-person one doesn't. (I've been running AutoTempest with an all-remote team for almost 14 years now.) Managers who rely on the 'butts in seats' heuristic will struggle a lot with managing remote employees.
However, the opportunities are also massive. For one thing, the owners/managers get to work from home too, which I certainly wouldn't give up! You can also hire from anywhere, which is huge in terms of finding talented people. Most importantly though, I think, all the things you need to do to manage a remote team effectively are things you really should be doing anyway. Yes, maybe some of the communication would be face to face instead of Slack or whatever, but for the most part if you're managing well, it's not going to be too hard to translate that to a remote environment. It's about actually knowing what people are working on, not just making sure they're putting in the hours. Knowing the goals of the team, and the individual goals of the team members. Fostering communication and collaboration (whatever the medium). And then continuously reviewing and refining the processes by which you do all those things.
>You can also hire from anywhere, which is huge in terms of finding talented people.
This is a negative for many businesses: their employees can get poached by competitors far away that offer better pay or benefits or working conditions.
True, but it's still a net benefit for good companies. And it's not like it means you're competing with FAANG on every hire. There are far more developers out there (including very good ones) than those companies can employ. Especially now when most are looking to downsize instead!
>True, but it's still a net benefit for good companies.
Yes, but what about the crappy companies? It's a big net negative for them, so they're going to oppose it. They don't want to compete with companies around the nation; they want to be the only employer in town so their employees feel locked in and unable to change jobs without selling their home and moving.
You're spot on. One big ones you missed is the cost savings of not needing an office.
Years before covid, I pushed my company out of an office to full remote for many of the reasons you listed. It allowed us to keep a few great employees who wanted to live elsewhere, and save substantial money on office space (which matters a lot for a small company). At the time Slack had just become big and we embraced the async, transparent communication style fully.
Early on one of the other owners asked me, 'if no one is in the office how do we know they are working?', and I responded 'how do we know they are working now?' That's when he 'got' it. We had never relied butts in seats, but it can still be a little scary going into an unknown.
Remote/in-person both have unique challenges, they are just different. After years of remote, I think the advantages outweigh the challenges vs in-person.
Good point. We've always been all remote, so I forget about that one, but I'm sure it's significant! When I started it was just me, and then just me and a friend of mine, so obviously didn't make sense to get an office just for us. Then we hired a third person, but again it was easy enough to make it work. For a long time I assumed that at some point I'd eventually have to get serious and get a real office. But then one day I realized... no one was going to make me do that.
It's certainly been a continuous process learning how to effectively manage a remote team (and manage in general), but agreed that at least for us the advantages definitely outweigh the drawbacks. It's actually been nice as remote work has caught on elsewhere, because though it means more competition, it also means much better tools as well as a broader knowledge base to draw on.
If you can retire as a rash reaction to being asked to be physically present for work, cardboard box threat notwithstanding, then you are way overpaid (assuming you are under 60).
This is absolutely true. Their job is harder too. It’s senior managers who take pleasure in people being around them having making back room discussions that can’t imagine a different way of working that are driving this. They are about to become structurally unemployable.
'We are suffering from the intolerable competition of a foreign rival, placed, it would seem, in a condition so far superior to ours for the production of light that he absolutely inundates our national market with it at a price fabulously reduced. The moment he shows himself, our trade leaves us — all consumers apply to him; and a branch of native industry, having countless ramifications, is all at once rendered completely stagnant. This rival, who is none other than the sun, wages war mercilessly against us, and we suspect that he has been raised up by perfidious Albion (good policy nowadays), inasmuch as he displays toward that haughty island a circumspection with which he dispenses in our case.
What we pray for is that it may please you to pass a law ordering the shutting up of all windows, skylights, dormer-windows, outside and inside shutters, curtains, blinds, bull's-eyes; in a word, of all openings, holes, chinks, clefts, and fissures, by or through which the light of the sun has been in use to enter houses, to the prejudice of the meritorious manufactures with which we flatter ourselves that we have accommodated our country — a country that, in gratitude, ought not to abandon us now to a strife so unequal.'
Such a straw man article. He ignores the main argument against WFH which is that people are walking their dogs or doing yoga instead of actually working. I take long naps. I know I'm less productive but I can't help it.
That's an argument against you working from home. My experience was that I worked just as effectively at home and had two hours a day extra that I could use for exercise, relaxing, and in fact a bit of extra work.
Also an argument against work in general: the vast majority of people were not doing work the entirety of their 8 hour work days.
Coffee breaks, social media, reading HN, which in WfH means walking the dog, spending a few minutes with your family, doing some yoga stands after a meeting.
And that is perfectly fine. Unless you're very focused and enjoying a particular task, no unassisted human being is capable of being 100% productive 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week. I might be an outlier, but in my experience, max focus can be held for up to 4 hours a day, the rest is low focus work and faffing about.
How do you measure your productivity? Personally my working hour after a walk or a nap is much more productive than anything I could ever achieve in the office.
I've been doing full remote for six years now and it's wonderful, especially when you have good asynchronous workflows in your team to rid of "working hours" concept entirely. (Though possibility of that heavily depends on the role and team composition).
The blacksmiths in the horse and buggy days saw demand for their services fall when time and technologies changed. The coal miners began losing their jobs when we realized that coal as fuel was more harmful than it was beneficial. History is full of valid jobs which later became unneeded or "invalid".
Remote work can increase efficiency by eliminating artificial inefficiencies. Not having to drive to work reduces fuel consumption and lengthens the time between car repairs or replacement. This obviously is a financial loss for the economy because it shifts the balance back from money to time. The same goes for office space: less office space need reduces demand which reduces rents (and amount of space leased). However, that cost can be offset some as home working can increase demand for larger homes. Even so, a slightly larger home is still probably less cost than a commercial space which goes unused for 12+ hours per day.
It smells like much of this anti-remote-work conversation (not TFA, but the topic in general) is because the people accustomed to being in charge have a fear of losing control. The manager who rules by force or threat has much to fear of subordinates who are out of sight. However, the manager (leader) who works together with a group of people toward a common goal has little to fear. Some companies operate very successfully even when management cannot observe the workers. The alarms and complaints we hear are almost certainly from the bad group. Eventually that group will be like the dinosaurs.