I don't think there is anything else more illogical in modern society than waking up in building A, hopping in a car and fighting traffic for an hour to get to building B just to sit in front of a computer for 8 hours (perhaps with a few minimally productive meetings here and there), then commute back to building A 8 hours later.
Building B sits empty for 16 hours a day while Building A sits empty for 10 with both being heated/cooled for 24 hours. The employee wastes 2 of their 16 available waking hours in the non-productive commute while incurring significant financial costs (lease/insurance/fuel/energy) in order to support this patently absurd activity. Similarly the employer wastes time and energy negotiating leases, re-arranging offices, purchasing AV equipment for meeting rooms in building B, etc.,etc., in addition to paying the likely enormously expensive lease itself.
The impacts on the environment, the number of hours of human life wasted in commute, the pointless buildings and associated costs to employers as well as the public infrastructure to support it (roads, trains, busses, etc.) are all incredibly wasteful. Surely, all of this could only be justified if physical presence had a dramatic impact on productivity. Yet, we cannot tell one way or the other if it actually improves outcomes.
I have a friend what has a company with ~20 employees. During COVID they all went WFH. After 12 months or so they announced they'd stay WFH forever and closed the office. 9 months later the president and office manager got new office. They realized they were more productive together than separated, more productive at a dedicated work space than at home with all the distractions, family, kids. They were also happier to be together, to spend time with their "work friends", etc... They have not asked the employees to come back to the office but several are of their own accord, finding their life better than being at home all the time alone or with just the people in their houses, rather than having a larger extended set of people to hang out with.
This mirrors my work experience over the years somewhat. I had a pretty unique experience as a college student when I was permitted to take one of the company’s HP 720 workstations with me two states away and work remotely. I used dial up and kermit to transfer files. It was very exciting at first. I did engineering up at campus, worked at home, consuming all of tiny toons and animaniacs while I worked on nuclear fuel design software. I missed the team though. I missed having someone to bounce ideas off of spontaneously. And to be in the know of what was going on. I was glad to “go to work” when I got done with school.
In my next job, it started out as a tight team of software in a larger company. It grew and then we bought our biggest competitor (we called it an acquisition; they called it a merger). Over time what was left of that staff shrunk and became remote. So we had a core group that was collocated, and then a group of remotes. The power dynamics were odd and competitive. The remotes wanted to be kept in the loop. The locals resented the extra process and protocol that had to be observed to keep the remotes in the loop. The locals also resented that the remotes got to just code, and didn’t have to deal with the interruptions that come with product managers that stop by with questions.
I was so excited when my next job was all remote, everyone. My kids were aged 3-11, and had a lot of school activities I wanted to support. We were in the “trench years” of four kids. At first, I loved the flexibility. It was great. After six years, I hated it (I’m not sure how much of this was remote vs feeling betrayed that the company was dysfunctional). I hated that I felt like I worked half time all the time. I could step out of work any little minute. But every little minute, work was only an “open up the laptop in the office” away. It was like being an on call dad and an on call worker simultaneously 100% of the time. And it seemed like a large portion of the team was basically freeloading on the gravy train. There were a core of us that could not help neatly figure out how 40ish hours at home work amounted to so little produced results.
When I got a job at a local company, I was so thrilled to go back in to work and work as part of a cohort. I have a lot of flexibility/autonomy here, so some days I stay at home and work because I’m in the groove and want to focus. But more times than not, I find I’m drawn back into the office/lab to work. There’s a lot gadgets I work with that it just wouldn’t make sense to duplicate for just me and warehouse at home. Our company has seen an uptick in can’t-do-without-em upper level staff who are now working remote. I find I often resent them.
> I hated that I felt like I worked half time all the time. I could step out of work any little minute. But every little minute, work was only an “open up the laptop in the office” away. It was like being an on call dad and an on call worker simultaneously 100% of the time.
This describes my current situation 100%. It feels both my duties at home and in the office are exaggerating themselves because I am seemingly available to both of them all the time. This is surely in large part my fault, but I struggle with finding solutions to this that don't create stress for my family.
> It feels both my duties at home and in the office are exaggerating themselves because I am seemingly available to both of them all the time.
Personally, I just set boundaries and stick to them. When I'm working, I'm unavailable to anyone else at home (except for emergencies) and will help them with whatever they need later. When I'm done with my work, I'm unavailable to the team, no Skype/Slack/Teams on my phone (though they have my phone number for work emergencies).
Admittedly, this works because I do not have kids currently, given that healthily establishing borders then could be a lot more challenging, at least in a positive manner.
That said, if I do make the choice to work longer on something really important, I can do so at a decreased personal expense to myself (no being stuck in commute late in the day), after letting everyone know so that I may leave faster on another day to not burn out.
And taking breaks is suddenly also more healthy due to my own enjoyable surroundings and nobody to care about how I spend said breaks - lazing around the couch, going outside to spend some time with my pets or going for a walk in fresh countryside air (of course, applicable in a limited set of circumstances, depending on where you live).
The environmental impact is also a nice thing, though something that's less of an important point to me - the more noticeable benefit is the lack of having to waste my time commuting.
It all very much depends on what your life circumstances are, though, as well as what your personality is like, which environment is better for you etc.
WFH demand a home office, to be done seriously, a thing most people do not like to accept. A home office means a room, well equipped, closed with a door, with enough noise comfort to been able to speak at normal or even just a bit above normal tones and no one else will hear nor you hear other noises except of a normal quiet background etc.
Not only: since we are social animals we need a social life, in most modern society due to the number of worked hours work life is ALSO social life, in a WFH setup we need a local social life apart of the work life.
IOW for a proper, real, scalable, effective WFH model we need to work less, like OR the morning or the afternoon, even for 6 days a week, or just 4 days a week maximum, to been able to have the work life and the local social life. We need homes with an office per human living there etc. With all that and a bit of habit well I'm pretty confident 80% of people with eligible jobs (around 30% of all jobs I imaging) would like to WFH. It's not a thing that can be done quickly simply because we can't reshape the society quickly. Here is the fault.
With enough time we can (re)build a distributed enough society with distributed enough services that cover people needs AND desire, so we can have local schools for children (as before) because for them being physically together is needed, with enough services for elders, for "middle ages" etc. few industrial districts, because certain productions can't be much distributed, and so on. Such cultural shift can probably happen in 25 years minimum, I doubt the society can be quicker than that...
I agree, but I don't think the problem is so much "the office", but rather how poorly cities are designed in the USA;
- The lack of mixed use zoning makes it just that much more likely that one live so far from their workplace. The choice is too often "a house far away from everything" or "a high-rise close to the noise, smells, and un-pretty sights of town"
- There's so little space to build offices cities end up having super-dense downtowns, with very tall, expensive and crowded buildings. This is great for office real-estate, but terrible for everyone else because it means traffic. Since cities tend to have only one mega-downtown, cause zoning in the USA is pretty adamant in grouping everything together, things get even worse, because everyone is moving in the same direction at the same time.
- This hyper-dense core, but hyper-sparse suburb outskirts in cities make it very hard to bike to work; many people in the USA wouldn't even consider it an option. It's also hard to build efficient public transit. The routes that make sense are radial, so they might be good to get to work, but inefficient for leisure. Things are so far apart in the suburbs one it's hard to put stations close to everyone where they live.
The fact so many people prefer to not leave their home for work should be considered a moderate victory for remote communication technology, but an abysmal failure in urban design.
Most American cities have their jobs distributed throughout the city, and don’t have mega skyscrapers. The more sprawling the city, the more evenly distributed the jobs are. Mixed use zoning has no effect on commute times because it doesn’t matter that an office is near your home, what matters is that your office is near your home. Most people don’t move every time they change jobs, so even if someone originally lived near work they may not in the future, and couples may have jobs in different locations. The US and Europe have nearly identical average commute times [1][2].
It is inherently impossible for most people to walk/bike to an office job, that is not due to a choice of urban design. The point of office jobs, and cities in general, is that agglomerating huge numbers of people lets you choose workers from a larger pool, which leads to more specialization and higher productivity. These huge numbers of people will need to live across a large area, so wherever you put the office, at most some of them will be in walking/biking distance. Dense downtowns at least allow you to serve everyone with an efficient rapid transit system, dispersed office jobs would not allow that. I agree though that low-density suburbs are a big drag on efficiency.
I think it's important to note that it is inherently possible for most people to walk/bike to an office in the US. Many European cities (I live in Copenhagen, for example) make this an extremely viable option. Honestly, if you take your car or the metro to work, it is usually slower, more expensive, and you don't get a nice workout! But many European cities are designed in order to pedestrians to be able to get around easily. I've also lived in Boston, and the bike accessibility there could be possible, but right now its a bit too dangerous to make it a viable option for most people.
> I've also lived in Boston, and the bike accessibility there could be possible, but right now its a bit too dangerous to make it a viable option for most people.
I live in Philadelphia and this is true there too. In general the city is dense enough that bike commuting is very viable, but the most direct routes are far too dangerous for most people.
That’s in a mindset where workers are interchangeable and change employers often, and employers make no effort to cluster together. You could also have a model where workers specialize within either a single company for life (japanese model) or a cluster of geographically near companies doing the same line of work (silicon valley model) and they choose to live near this location. New employers in the same line of work would then choose this site specifically because of the nearby workers.
I think the challenge is not with the specialized workers, but with the lower paid staff. The cleaners, the cooks, the maintenance crew, the guards. They won’t be able to afford to live near such places because they get displaced by specialized workers, and then they’re stuck in a commuting model.
Working in one place for life is very economically inefficient for any intellectual work. Eventually there will be a company that would get more value out of you, and therefore is willing to pay you more, but you won't be able to take the job.
Clusters of companies already exist. One is Manhattan where finance jobs are concentrated, another (like you say) is Silicon Valley where tech jobs are concentrated. In both, the workers choose to live across a vast area.
> I agree, but I don't think the problem is so much "the office", but rather how poorly cities are designed in the USA;
It’s the same in Stockholm, despite laxer zoning laws. Companies tend to cluster in particular places and housing around them becomes more expensive. We chose to settle down in a less expensive (as in 50%) area but on the other hand I had at least 50 minutes one way commute to the nearest job cluster.
It's not about us, it's about the guy who delivers lunch, or the girl who owns the bagel shop.
However, offices are straight up abelist , if you have mobility issues it's absurdly hard to commute.
Commuting isn't really needed here, if I was in a wheelchair I'd take this to court.
Full tin foil hat time, if remote work was the norm the entire commercial real estate sector would collapse.
Most modern cities would collapse as well. So many industries are based around commuting, or supporting office workers. Hell, normalized remote work might destroy our entire economy.
It's not about us, it's about the guy who delivers lunch, or the girl who owns the bagel shop.
Isn’t that just an instance of the broken window parable? There’s nothing to prevent the bagel shop locating adjacent to a residential area instead of an office park - then society sees the benefit of WFH and tasty round breads.
Northern Virginia has seen this with food trucks. Since late 2020, I'm starting to see food trucks posting up in the evenings in various residential neighborhoods (almost like how ice cream trucks trawl the streets in summer). This would have been unthinkable just a few years ago -- not worth it for the truck owner. But now they're moving to where people are, which is the upper-middle-class neighborhoods where everyone still WFH. Incredible to see a line for dinner at a food truck parked in the middle of a residential summer street in the suburbs.
All this to say: there are ways to keep evolving how things are usually done.
Where are these trucks? I’m in Reston, but I imagine the trucks are mostly clustering in Falls Church or Arlington? All I can think of is there’s sometimes a food-truck-event at the local park-and-ride, usually on the weekend, but it doesn’t seem very consistent.
Presumably if you had bagel shops in every residential neighbourhood, each would sell less and have largely the same fixed costs and so prices would have to be higher.
Possibly, but I imagine they could get by with less square footage, and in a less expensive space, so rent would be substantially less. But, yeah, oven and other cooking apparatus is probably the same regardless of scale (up to whatever size starts requiring duplicates).
And from a societal perspective, saving on commute time/expenses but with $15 bagels is still better than wasting 2+ hours/day, additional car expensises, and only a $7 bagel.
A huge bagel store will use humans more efficiently than a small one.
One big problem with "lots of shops" is that they require lots of retail workers, workers who spend much of their paid time not working. Prices reflect that.
It's unclear to me why urbanists think that wasting humans on retail is so important.
Stuff at small stores costs more money than stuff at big stores. As you point out, labor efficiency is one of the reasons, but there are others too. Regular people know this very well. The “urbanists” active in HN threads are typically well-off enough that they don’t care about whether their grocery bill is $50 or $60. That’s good for them, but expecting everyone else to follow suit is rather out of touch.
> Cities don't have much of a reason to exist, at least not in their current form, with WFH.
Are you assuming people would rather live in suburbs and countryside then? I would definitely still live in the city, and my first thought of offices closing was "great, more space for residential buildings".
Not everyone, but you'd have less of a reason to consolidate so many people in a relatively small space.
It's much much cheaper to live outside of major cities. As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, office buildings are a massive source of tax revenue for cities.
This is the entire reason you have this push to bring everyone back.
Ideally, people should be able to live where they want to. If that is in a city, great, otherwise they can live elsewhere and work from home. I don't see any great benefit in forcing people to live where they do not want to be.
> Full tin foil hat time, if remote work was the norm the entire commercial real estate sector would collapse.
They just need to slightly change focus. People still need a place to work even if remote.
Instead of trying to rent out that 20Ksqft building to some corporation, start renting out individual private offices within that building to people nearby who need a place to work remotely that's not their couch.
I've been renting out a small office room since the pandemic started, right near my house. Almost zero commute but still a separate work area. I lucked into finding someone who is happy to rent me one office room in their building.
But many commercial real estate owners still don't get it and don't want to deal with individuals. There are a few empty office buildings in the area which I know have nice offices, but they keep looking to rent the whole building out, so it continues to sit empty. I know there's demand since most people I talk to who are working from their living room love the idea of a local office when I mention I have one.
I pay for it out of pocket. Yes, it'd be nice if companies also moved towards standardizing paying for remote office space, hopefully that'll become normal.
But the office payment is less than what I was spending in fuel having to commute, so in that sense I'm still saving money compared to pre-pandemic commute life.
My sandwich café sells sandwiches with such a variety of fillings that me trying to replicate that would lead to a lot of wasted food. Everything from asparagus, pickled carrots and smoked cheese to avocado, broccoli and burrata.
Plus, there is something about just going to a breakfast where you can just people-watch the passersby without food preparation or cleanup.
Cities have much more to offer than office work. Restaurants, entertainment, shops, museums, sights. People that choose to live in the city often choose for those amenities, not a nearness to the office. Getting rid of offices might actually lead to a city that is denser with those attractive activities and therefore more welcoming for people to move there and enjoy those activities.
For many American cities the CBD/downtown (and sometimes older streetcar suburbs) are the only profitable areas in the sense that they pay more in tax than it costs the no city to provide municipal services. Newer suburbs and exurbs don’t pay their way and are subsidised by the centre and unsustainably financed.
What seems to be happening is that local economies in smaller cities are booming, because people no longer commute to the bigger city. So it's more a shift.
I was born socialist country and since state owned everything, they would keep a factory afloat just so it keeps people employed even if it operates on losses. That is not sustainable. Sooner or later it had to collapse. We don't have classic peasants anymore because society recognized that keeping them in business we had to compromise too much in other areas of society. At some point the mentioned delivery guy and girl with bakery will be in the same situation and this is just prolonging the inevitable.
Mobility issues are not for you to agree with or not.
And yes, work the hours you want to work. I typically don’t start until 11 or noon, and thanks to time zones and meetings tend to work until 11pm or so. It works out great since 11 is typically when the good shows start here.
Heating/cooling 100 homes vs 1 office favours the office, but the commute tips it in favour of WFH. So why not fix the commute? Let people live/work/play in dense urban environments rather than commute individually from live-zone to work-zone.
I’ve heard stories of people getting up, driving to the office, turning on their computers and sitting in zoom meetings all day from their desk. Who thinks this is a good idea?
Nowadays people will try and convince you you're weird and wrong if you say you enjoy seeing other people and not working in silence at home.
I like the office environment. The only thing I don't like is the commute. This is why I think the future is local shared working spaces within towns so that they're in walking distance. I'd much rather have a 15 minute walk to work than a 30 minute drive.
I find it ok to see and visit coworkers now and then, but work is not meant to replace one's social life. Further, some years back, I attended a couple different "Work at a Startup" and related events. Companies pushing "we are a family", "we hang out after work" typically means they have an unreasonable expectation of how much time they expect you to be around - despite productivity.
Do I have colleagues (current or former) that are friends? Yes. Do/did I feel a need to be in the office to spend time with them - no.
Work is a contract between myself and my employer to produce based on a certain set of expectations. Those expectations shall not include (nor exclude) social interactions outside those times.
> I find it ok to see and visit coworkers now and then, but work is not meant to replace one's social life.
Work has been a critical component of social life for many generations now. It is extremely strange to offhandedly dismiss its role like that.
> Do I have colleagues (current or former) that are friends? Yes. Do/did I feel a need to be in the office to spend time with them - no.
I started my previous job in mid 2019. I made multiple friends at the office in 8 months before the lockdowns started that I still keep in touch with. After we went full remote, I worked there for an extra year. During that time, my team have doubled in size. Not only I did not make friends with any of the new colleagues, I don’t even remember their names now.
I finally quit in 2021, because I absolutely loathed full time WFH. I am now commuting to the office every day, with rather arduous 50-60 minutes one way commute, and I am extremely happy, making friends again and feeling very motivated.
> It is extremely strange to offhandedly dismiss its role like that.
Chalk it up as an overreaction to how many startups and large tech companies with imposing corporate cultures alike have tried to foster workplaces designed to keep workers away from home for as long as they could with free dinners and foosball tables.
Office sucks.
Let me list a few things:
- Hot desks
- People laughing and constantly talking while you are trying to focus
- Unstable temperature making you freeze or boil
- Uncomfortable and unhealthy desks/chairs
- Often lack of proper screens/equipment
- Getting squeezed in trains to commute - spending at best an extra hour per day
- Unhealthy and expensive dietary options around work
- Contamination of diseases
- Useless meetings and team activities that usually produce zero value
Not to mention how bad this is for the environment.
And no, a ping-pong or foosball table doesn't make the office cool. It's like adding chocolate syrup on a rotten fruit to make it edible.
Totally agree. I feel like the ideal balance would be 2x/month office visits to coordinate/meet/socialize. And WFH the rest of the time. But, at the same time, I don’t want to limit my hiring to the local market (and 4/6 of my team are fully remote), so WFH/remote it is. Really, I just miss social lunches and a bit of water-cooler gossip. I should try to convince my two local employees to meet for a snack sometime and call it good enough.
Edit - I don’t remotely miss the open office at my employer. Worst idea ever. Directors and VPs hog the conference rooms, leaving me (line manager) to roam around looking for private spaces to talk to employees. Dumb dumb dumb. End rant.
It sounds like you just have a bad office though. Eg I don’t hot-desk; if I had a problem with my chair I could ask for a different one (e.g. something like an aeron or something wacky looking); I have good screens and for most equipment I could just ask for something if I needed it. It’s typically easier to get these things in the office than at home and certain necessary upgrades for working from home (eg faster Internet, dedicated office space) could be very expensive and/or impossible without moving.
See I think the issue is the design of offices have become shit. Less and less space per employee and no privacy. It’s abhorrent, and it is this design philosophy that people are primarily raging against.
Hot desking? It is laughably inhumane that anyone thought people would be happy with this.
While at Skype - open offices were a thing - someone thought it was beneficial to have people testing A/V as well as video standup areas (dispersed teams) in the same areas people were trying to get work done.
I had an office with a door for 12 years. I switched jobs 3 years ago and everyone has a cubicle even the managers.
Constant distractions with people talking loudly on conference calls. Then someone else talks even louder on their call.
Before covid our site was mostly working on the same project. There was some fun collaboration in the conference room around white boards etc.
We had a reorg to pool resources across projects across the country so now only 3 out of 10 people on my project are at my site.
Most of us bought our own 40" 4K monitors so if I go in a conference room I can't even share my remote Linux desktop session properly because I'm scrolling within the window to find my applications to share.
Because of that I just stay at my cubicle to share my screen and end up disturbing everyone else around me with my own conference call.
Everything would be fine with offices and doors but instead we get stupid surveys about whether we want an open floorplan which is even worse.
We are supposed to go in the office 3 days a week. The reality is most people at my site show up once or twice a week for half a day for the free lunch once a week and then go home by 3pm to get work done.
We have 30 job openings and we hire about 1 person every 2 months. We lose 1 person about every 4 months. Management hasn't said anything about people not showing up probably because they don't want to push people to leave.
i worked for a blue chip finance dept in mayfair a lifetime ago, squeezed maybe 25 of us in a room no bigger than say 35m^2 i could literally elbow my colleagues
We are in the early stages of a societal upheaval and I for one am not sure how it will play out.
Firstly, it's clear that we've had a massive "short term" upheaval in which we got to clearly find out who could work from home, and who could not. Or perhaps more accurately who can work _at_ home (white collar) and who can work _from_ home (sales etc).
We've learned that those who have space at home did better than those who were already cramped. We've learned that the number (and age!) of others in the house matter. It turns out not all homes, or offices, are created equal. Having small kids around can make life a lot harder.
We've discovered that commuting time and money is a thing - I might live 5 minutes from work, you might easily spend 2 hours a day on transport - clearly we have different experiences with regard to WFH changes.
Some offices are open plan, some have cubicals, some have actual offices with doors and individual climate control.
We've started to learn that once you work at home, home can be anywhere. Time zone, and language, are the only hindrances to you living anywhere, or indeed your job going some where cheaper (without you.)
What's my point? Well I guess that we are right at the beginning. Architecture of both offices, and homes, will adapt. Zoning will hopefully adapt. We'll start acknowledging that school is as much about day care as education. White collar jobs will (I suspect) end up paying less. Perhaps even a culling of "bullshit jobs".
The secondary impact on density, and thus secondary jobs that rely on that density, will be significant. And perhaps in some ways less predictable. New businesses will form - new ways to socialise will emerge - new work boundaries may emerge, or maybe boundaries will disappear.
However it shakes out these are interesting times - one thing is clear, the future doesn't look like 2019.
Remember these times, 30 years from now they'll be as foreign as the 80s, or 50s, are to us now.
One if the things that made Ultima Online an incredible MMO gaming experience when it first came out and has since never been replicated is because it was the only choice. EVERYONE had to play it, all the various types of folks. It's this that made the game special.
I wonder if the same affect is going to ruin the office experience. In that what made it special was that everyone had to go to the office. Nowadays, the only people that show up are the ones that "prefer" it or whatever. And, I don't know how to word this differently, maybe, I don't care for those folks. Just something I was thinking about. When I go into the office now, something is missing. No point even going in a day or two a week.
I've gone back to "the office" but I've realized that what I've really gone back to is the lab. And the lab is not the office. The lab has a door that closes, big Danger signs, and a flashing red light above the door.
I also have a desk in a cubicle, but there have been some chances since the pandemic. Maybe others have alluded to it as well: Work life is a bit more relaxed. Our supervisor moved to his home town, and now manages us remotely. It's working out just fine. So the thing about being in the office so we can be watched is gone, if it ever was a thing.
Folks have talked about sitting in the cubes and attending Zoom meetings (or Teams, whatever), but I think meetings have calmed down. Perhaps option of attending via Zoom has eliminated the attraction of calling everybody together into one big room. If the meeting gets too obnoxious, attendance will just evaporate, with people joining the meeting from their desk and "multitasking" to be charitable.
If somebody's not around, you don't know if they're on vacation, or sick, or just working from home. The chance of finding someone at their desk has dwindled to where it's pointless to look for them, just for a chance to interrupt them.
I spent a short time at a place where I had both an office desk and a desk in a lab room. I never figured out why I would ever work from the office desk; the lab was superior in every way.
Judging from the people milling about the lab corridors, other people except the most senior ones and/or managers thought the same.
And sure enough, if my current workplace had a lab room to offer, I'd be much more inclined to go there.
The Office won't die but flexibility where it makes sense will take over. I'm glad such possibilities are presenting themselves. One of the silver-linings of covid.
Once remote working has been around long enough we'll probably see the rise of new social constructs that fill the void the office as the "second place" is leaving behind.
I've always though those victorian clubs were pretty interesting, at least theyre portrayed in things like sherlock holmes, the old "adventure clubs" focused on exploring the world, north pole, antartica..etc
I already can imagine some versions. For example, the journeyman were one visits various "experts" to become a better craftmans - traveling from home to home.
The forming of conference-clusters, were digital nomadic workers meet up at some place by tradition to jam and work on something, like a conference without the conference hall.
I can also imagine community, who specialize in a particular field. Like a suburb, dedicated to database optimization.
Or have some programming group in the park or on a train. If you are free from social constraints and locations- all it takes is good internet.
See that is a business opportunity. Soon you will see "Office simulators" opening up in your neighborhood, where you can enjoy a crowded crammed office with endless meetings and chatty employees over your shoulder. Special events such as life coaching, terrorist attacks, christmas parties, and random drama will make it an unforgettable experience for $20/day
Some people rely on their institutions to satisfy their basic socialization needs. Without the office, remote workers need to prioritize socializing as a need. Same deal with college.
Once the institution is exposed for what it is, it is up to the participants to fulfill their own needs.
I miss offices in reasonable locations. Instead they're all in the same 6-8 cities that all have increasingly bad homeless populations.
No, I don't want to live in the Bay, New York City, Boston, Austin, or Denver. Please create small satellite offices in reasonable cities instead of mega campuses in towns that all seem to have public libraries that are now defacto homeless shelters.
Tech imports most of the talent these days anyway, so I don't buy the "talent only wants to move to the Bay!" argument.
> I miss offices in reasonable locations. Instead they're all in the same 6-8 cities...
The majority of the US population lives in the same 6-8 metro areas; so it's "reasonable" to put offices in those metro areas. I've worked at places with offices in downtown areas (short public transit ride or walk), in close suburbs (the extent to where public transit goes), and in remote suburbs (that require driving to get there), and the further away from city centers they are, the more brutal going to them is unless you already live in or relocate to the sleepy suburb the office is in (and then you still need to spend a not-insignificant amount of time driving, even for going places that are not your office, because suburbs are not, almost by definition, navigable without a car).
> Please create small satellite offices in reasonable cities instead of mega campuses
Do a lot of large companies have "mega campuses" in city centers? That doesn't make much sense, a campus requires a significant amount of land, land which is not available in city centers. Google's "mega campus" in the Bay Area is in the suburban part of the Bay Area (in as much as the Bay Area is mostly suburban sprawl anyway), and has "satellite offices" in downtown areas because that's where a lot of the employees live. I suppose Salesforce Tower could count as a "campus" if it's heavily populated with Salesforce employees, although I don't think one thinks of Salesforce Tower when the term "campus" comes up. Maybe the handful of buildings around Salesforce Tower that contained Salesforce employees could be considered a campus in aggregate (generally, a single building does not make a "campus").
Going into a small satellite office and interacting with most coworkers remotely is not really much different than working from home and interacting with coworkers remotely. You get the burden of going into an office without any advantages of in-person interaction. However, one of the reasons I miss having a dedicated office is that I have found that having a different place to work than my house does wonders for my general heads-down productivity and work-life balance, but that's independent of the many other advantages and disadvantages of having a communal, shared space where people working on the same thing can congregate.
> The majority of the US population lives in the same 6-8 metro areas;
According to [0] that isn't true. The eight most populous metro areas make up less than a quarter of the population in the U.S. You'd need the 48 most populous metro areas, not the 8 most populous. That means including all the way down to... Salt Lake City, Utah, at just over a million people.
Thank you for pointing out this lack of accuracy and clarity. Majority is hyperbolic, but even a quarter is a big enough chunk that it motivates both employees and employers to locate in and look for each other in those areas. I guess it's less about total population, a statistic that doesn't contain enough detail, and more about population density. SLC has a million people in 110m² at half the density SF at 875k in 49m².
What's "the problem" that you contributed to? That humans are social animals and that as a group they are stronger than the sum of the individuals? I supposed by not starting your own business outside of London to cater to people like you where you came from does contribute to there not being businesses outside of London. But I'm not sure why that matters. You're only beating yourself up for not doing that and for moving to London.
All else being equal, neither the workers nor the employer has the time to wait around existing in a place where they can't get work or find employees, respectively, waiting for the other to arrive. An empty night club is just as much fun as a loner hanging out at the Circle K: no one wants to go to an empty night club, and no one is going to open a night club in a location just because people loiter there. It's about momentum, there's nothing wrong with a positive feedback cycle. The self-reinforcing is the cause of the continued and sustained congregation, because it makes it easier, more flexible, and reduces risk for all parties. Being in metro areas (traditionally) creates significant buffer and reduces risk significantly for both the employee and employer in terms of availability of prospects.
That both sides of a transaction have realized it's efficient to meet at the (defacto) marketplace (metro areas) in order to successfully and easily transact business (being employed/employing people) isn't lamentable self-fulfilling; it's descriptive of the state of how people interact and that the true value of a network is the connections, not the nodes.
Horrible ? It works extremely well. It's one of the reasons America is so rich.
It's 'horrible' from the '3rd space' perspective, in that it doesn't make for quaint high street shopping ... but it works really well for teams that want to get together every day and do stuff without the fuss of complicated little villages and twisty roads, no space for parking.
Kind of like major highways, they're good at what they were designed to do. They just have externalizations. Bad one's depending on how you measure.
Urban areas don't have to have lots of petty crime and homelessness. Let's not assume they come as a package.
Certain sectors clustering together in a geographic region has nice advantages even for non-23yo non-single folk. One can hop jobs without uprooting the rest of the family.
In Seattle, it became the norm. Honestly, my commute from an island required exiting a ferry terminal. On the way from the terminal to the office, I eventually went dead on the inside after stepping over sleeping homeless and wretched smells.
I used to work in San Francisco and after buying a house on Bainbridge Island, I now work in an office around the Westlake Center.
It really isn't that bad mate. After living around the world (central Europe, SE Asia), Los Angeles, the mid west, I can say that people who complain about smells and the homeless are incredibly sheltered. I find they tell on themselves when they complain about seeing homeless people when the crime rate is down across the board from the last 20 years.
If you are so offended by seeing someone in distress, who is probably more dead on the inside trying to survive in a world whose upward mobility is strongly diminishing, then perhaps you shouldn't be going into that community to begin with.
My solution, at that time, was to stop walking beyond the terminal exit then hailing an Uber to pick me up. That tunnel under the highway was bad.
It's perfectly fair to complain whilst having empathy for people. The lack of solutions or even enforcement is a problem, and I voted with my feet to live away from it.
All the good jobs are in 6-8 cities because large cities have agglomeration effects that make them inherently more productive.
The homelessness is simply a result of high housing prices [1] which in turn are the result of restrictive zoning. Remove restrictive zoning laws and most of the homelessness will go away.
"He constructs an office in his flat and whiles away his days copying and amending letters – he even ‘commutes’ via a walk around the block every morning. He dies ‘happy’: at his desk, halfway through penning a final document."
I've worked from home for the last 5 years (startup founder). It bled into everything at home. At one point during covid, half of the upstairs of this house was filled with equipment, spare parts, workbenches and servers.
Now that it's been mothballed I found a job that was advertised as "work from home" but I've been going into the office instead. Not sure if it is just the mental break of what I was doing before or something else, but I found it both refreshing and frustrating.
It's nice to "dress up" a bit to go to work instead of just rolling out of bed and sit at a desk in whatever I grabbed. It's nice to interact with people outside the family.
The downside is that I forgot just how intrusive/noisy other people can be. I think there is are a lot of people who thrive on that distraction (or distracting others) whose jobs might not require the concentration of a programmer. I guess a set of headphones might sort that out but that also seems kind of rude in an environment that is supposed to encourage interaction.
I do like leaving it all at work when I come home. That is better in terms of mental health at least.
I do dress up for work from home and I keep my morning routine just like I would be going out from home because when I "just rolled out of the bed" I was just tired after one week and totally demotivated.
Dressing up is still casual, but I consciously pick t-shirt or polo shirt for the day.
I almost think the solution would be to have people live in apartments in the cities during the week and have them go out to a larger place in the countryside on the weekends. Maybe have a 4 day workweek and have that be the rhythm of life.
Homeownership wouldn't be about a glorified cubicle in the suburbs, but about landwonership proper. Apartments could be treated as the temporary "live near work/in the city" thing that they are, and the city could be a walkable mixed-use environment meant to support this overall rhythm of life.
> Putting myself out there for "training" helps so my issues don't build up.
That is a good point and probably a nice argument for venturing outside of one's zone of comfort occasionally.
That said, what about people whose quirks make others reflect negatively upon them? Something like ticks that make other people uncomfortable (had a person occasionally grunt loudly at the office, really distracting), yet wouldn't really make their actual work performance any worse? If those ticks are involuntary, sometimes they might prefer to partake in remote work.
Moreso, what about people who are anxious, agoraphobic or have avoidant personality disorder, or something like it? People who might socialize in a limited set of circumstances, but might have to deal with panic attacks or undue stress in larger meetings or other types of social situations? Dealing with all of that due to no alternatives might be pretty debilitating and demotivating and might not be something "solvable" (at least in the short term), yet the person still should be able to make money so they can survive.
Of course, I cannot make claims for others, but personally it's nice that we can accommodate various types of people and their preferences, as long as they actually get things done at no significant expense to anyone else.
To clarify, I do not have a general answer for everyone I described my own feelings/approach from last 2 years.
That was my question to parent poster if he considered that "always remote" might fix some issue right now so he could keep his job - but what about working to handle quirks/anxiety so in the future if he really needs to switch jobs putting himself out there with people might help.
It is less the death of the office and more the death of work. We just haven’t come to admit that. Death of work and “cold” relationships and the retreat to home, emotional connection, nurturing, caring. Once employers know it’s more about that and less about work then we will see things turn around.
Rather than calling it the death of work, you could instead think of it as a change in the nature of our relationship to work. I am all for going into the office often, as I think complex collaborative projects need face-time to have a tight feedback cycle. But I'm also ok with it not being good or necessary for everyone.
Building B sits empty for 16 hours a day while Building A sits empty for 10 with both being heated/cooled for 24 hours. The employee wastes 2 of their 16 available waking hours in the non-productive commute while incurring significant financial costs (lease/insurance/fuel/energy) in order to support this patently absurd activity. Similarly the employer wastes time and energy negotiating leases, re-arranging offices, purchasing AV equipment for meeting rooms in building B, etc.,etc., in addition to paying the likely enormously expensive lease itself.
The impacts on the environment, the number of hours of human life wasted in commute, the pointless buildings and associated costs to employers as well as the public infrastructure to support it (roads, trains, busses, etc.) are all incredibly wasteful. Surely, all of this could only be justified if physical presence had a dramatic impact on productivity. Yet, we cannot tell one way or the other if it actually improves outcomes.