Neckties were an essential business requirement for ages. At some point, people had had enough of the mostly pointless ritual and began rejecting the norm. Even still, stodgy companies required it with the argument that it was necessary for being considered professional.
Startups certainly saw differently, although admittedly many startups are not remotely professional (no pun intended).
Now we have remote work vs office work. In an information age where physical items passed around from worker to worker are a thing of the past in most industries, the need to spend $$$ for a high profile location is going the way of the necktie.
Many workers have tasted the freedom of no commute, or at least a pleasant walk/bike commute to a nearby coworking space. They don't want to go back, and like myself they will reject any job which has a firm requirement for such. Companies are torn between the old-school management notion that worker will only work while being observed and the realization that they can save a ton of money by not having a big fancy office.
The day of the office is passing. There will always be offices, but they will be, like food trucks, existing where and when they are useful. The real estate world better clue into this.
And beyond the office topic there is the residential topic. As prices for city apartments increase dramatically, people lose interest in living in those cities. Better to live someplace pleasant and less expensive, and then spend the saved money on trips to many different nice places.
When it comes to the office-vs-home discussion everybody is just plugging their own personal preference. Clearly there is a mix. Personally, I love going into my office: it's close to me and has amenities and coworkers I like very much, and I'm personally much more productive there than at home. I realize there are plenty of people who prefer and are more productive working from home. But clearly it's not nearly as superficial as a necktie. Onboarding in particular is demonstrably more difficult to do remotely. Maybe a happy balance for new hires is an extended in-office orientation followed by the option to go remote, although this also requires some senior employees to be in the office to help with orientation.
Ofc the benefits of this have to be weighed against real estate costs. Let's just stop pretending anybody knows exactly what the office situation will be in the coming years.
> Onboarding in particular is demonstrably more difficult to do remotely.
How would you demonstrate this?
I’m with a funded SV startup that’s been remote-only since its founding, a few years before covid. We have staff in at least five countries, and in the US, in at least five states (just based on the people I can think of offhand.)
The company is the leader in its field, which involves significant real innovation, and has many major enterprise customers.
I’ve helped onboard many employees, and I’ve managed one of the key product teams.
When I hear people talk about all the disadvantages of remote work, I just internally roll my eyes. As you say, they’re plugging their own personal preference. But that seems to be exactly what you’re doing with the quote above.
I am just plugging my preference. Tried to emphasize "me personally". I'm sure many companies work much better without an office, though I think at a certain size it almost certainly becomes beneficial to have at least some office space. My main point was that neckties are not an apt comparison, and that we don't really know yet how valuable offices are under various circumstances.
This is similar to saying that you are just justifying your preference for board shorts and flip flops.
Although I am a huge proponent of WFH, I had found it very hard to build relationships during the beginning years of the pandemic, and it wasn't until travel has opened up and I met in-person many of the people who I've only ever met over Zoom that I was able to start building relationships, which noticeably accelerated a lot of the work that I do that relied on other people. It's just so much easier to break the ice with someone when meeting face to face. Also, people will tell you things when meeting 1-on-1 in person over a beer that they will never tell you in Zoom, and this applies to customers and vendors as well as co-workers, and is extremely useful to understanding the hidden forces which is sometimes crucial in doing your job well.
I think it's reasonable to make a distinction between
- A remote-only job, with no requirement to ever come in to "the office" to work (particularly not to do regular work, as opposed to a meeting), and
- The situation we had during the pandemic, when all jobs that could be had to be as remote as possible for safety, most socialization was severely curtailed, and travel was dangerous at best
I don't think it's at all out of the question for a "remote-only" WFH job to include travel, provided it's a) disclosed up front, and b) paid for in full by the company. This can even include occasional mandatory meetings with colleagues, either at some company-owned property or elsewhere.
Personally, I find that the best way to get those kinds of less-formal getting-to-know-you interactions with people you don't see physically face-to-face is by having an open text chat system—something like Slack, Discord, IRC, etc. I've got friends I met online a decade or more ago who I only know through such chats, but would feel very comfortable working "side by side" with digitally (if it were ever to come up) because of the rapport we've built over the years.
This is unfair. I don't have a strong position in this debate but there is clearly a difference between in-person interaction and digital interaction that is much greater than the superficial nature of the necktie (or any other piece of clothing). Which is why it generates such strong feelings compared to the necktie.
Back when neckties were required, people were just as convinced “real business” couldn’t be done without having a professional appearance.
It only seems ridiculous now because it turns out neckties weren’t really required. But we could look back with the same incredulity on spending $80k/mo for an office that the entire workforce commuted 30 mins to and from every day.
Remote work definitely works for some companies and not for others. If football player X never lifts weights and player Y lifts weights a lot, and they have similar levels of performance, it does not follow that lifting weights is unnecessary for a successful football career. It just means that it's unnecessary for player X.
I was hired into a senior role (architect level) by a company that was compelled to go remote because of the pandemic. Remotely building working relationships at that level was hard AF since most people I had to work with already knew each other from the pre-pandemic days and were happy to have sidebar conversations to keep moving.
We parted ways about 9 months into the job when we both realised this wasn’t working.
My impression is that remote work for new employees needs a lot of explicit relationship and trust building that we get for free when we interact with people in an office.
I'm in a similar situation now, but the new company has been more than happy to have company days where we fly in from around the world and get to know each other and it works pretty well. Also, having zoom/teams/slack video channels permanently open works surprisingly well too (you don't have to have your camera on).
Companies that have gone fully remote, also quickly discover how much of their company knowledge is in one person's head, or whether it's well documented, which helps with the onboarding too.
Some companies have definitely moved to remote working better than others.
I joined a remote only company 5 months ago and saw people face to face for the first time earlier this week. It takes more conscious effort, sure. But that's also all. It will be a hard adjustment for companies whose staff is not used to remote work, but it's just a skill people will acquire.
This is about being "remote first". All discussions should happen in the shared chat or at the weekly group video call except if there's some specific reason not to (eg. disclosure of non-public corporate financials, personal 1-1s, or similar). It sounds like that company transferred some bad office habits to online.
This sounds suspiciously like a “no true Scotsman” argument to me.
Remote first is a spectrum and dismissing lived experiences as “oh, you just haven’t experienced the right kind of remote first” helps no one.
What makes you think documenting everything exhaustively is a panacea? What if the quality of documentation sucks? Will your argument change to “you have to document everything to a certain level of quality otherwise you aren’t remote first enough”?
Please don’t feel I’m attacking you. I was a big remote first proponent before experiencing the difficulties of integrating with teams who didn’t know me except as a voice on a call.
After this, I’m more sympathetic to execs demanding RTO for culture reasons.
We saw immediate changes in productivity when people moved home 2 years before covid, less meetings, things got done and people where in generel more happy, but that might not be for everyone but onboarding wasnt made harder, what was harder is the comradery you get at the office, but that was also what swallowed alot of time in the first place i suspect..
> Onboarding in particular is demonstrably more difficult to do remotely.
Is it? I don't believe it is. At this point, people just plug right in - once you're used to remote work, it's a matter of learning which chat platform they use, getting access to email, and away you go. It's literally the exact same thing as in office these days, precisely due to needing to accommodate remote onboarding.
I'm now struggling to find the study I was thinking of when I said "demonstrably", but I can say anecdotally that our new hires ask fewer questions online than in person, despite my reminders that the worst thing you can do while onboarding is ask too few questions. Coworker relationships are more formal and compartmentalized online than in person and they can be more reluctant to ping people with questions out of fear of being considered annoying. This doesn't apply to everyone but it has a noticeable effect on the average new hire.
I'm sure you can come up with the perfect counterpoint to my anecdote. We'll just have to wait a few more years for more robust, large scale comparisons before we really understand how much an office is worth.
I don't have a counterpoint, I'm interested in other people's perspectives, honestly. I just thought it was a little absurd to gently move past the assumption that remote onboarding is obviously worse!
I can see ways it might be worse, obviously, and I've experienced good in-office onboarding. But I've also experienced absolutely crap in-office onboarding (a month of no working development environment!) - so I question whether that experience was because of the office/remote dynamic, or because companies that do a good job onboarding because they value it, regardless.
So it's interesting to hear stories and experiences from other people's perspective, both onboard-ee and onboard-er, since I'm just one dude with my own Unique Perspective™ and limited total experience based on that viewpoint.
Absolutely.
I personally found myself less likely to ping someone over Teams to ask them a small question versus leaning over to the next seat to ask. I was assigned a work-buddy when I was on-boarded, but I think I asked him a total of 3 questions. I believe that if I was on-boarded in-person, and had a few lunches with him, it would have been quite different.
Also, the fact that the only time I talk to my co-workers is over Zoom makes it necessary from a human relations point of view to start many meetings with a bit of chit-chat, which otherwise in face-to-face meetings can be skipped since we can chit-chat outside of meetings.
FWIW i am FAR less likely to interrupt the person sitting next to me and yank them out of their current flow into a different topic.
I'd rather send them a chat message that they can answer out of bounds when it does not interrupt their flow.
>which otherwise in face-to-face meetings can be skipped since we can chit-chat outside of meetings.
So in terms of time there is little difference?
I find myself to spend much more time chitchatting in person - which is nice but also not the job.
> I'm sure you can come up with the perfect counterpoint to my anecdote.
Even if your interlocutor can, and even if the large scale studies run counter to your argument, that doesn't mean your experience is invalid.
Life isn't a double-blind randomised placebo-controlled study. There is no control group consisting of you and your cohort to measure against.
The scientific method is, I argue, on the whole, the wrong instrument to bear in these scenarios, at least because measuring the metrics affects the study group and publishing the resulted affects the society in which the study occurred.
Absolutely agree. I just wanted to provide a counterpoint to the idea that it was just accepted and obvious that remote onboarding is worse - that doesn't mean it isn't, but I don't think we have to assume that it is.
I'm interested in hearing other people's experiences especially because I've been remote since 2011 so I have a clearly biased perspective.
Upvotes are not enough to express agreement here, don’t have much more to add other than it reflects my experience, too. Most people don’t know if they’re supposed to ask the most trivial questions so they implicitly default (wrongly) to not asking. This doesn’t happen in person because the most trivial issues are noticed without newbies asking. To replicate this fully remotely you need a
purposefully designed process.
Increased difficulty doesn't mean impossible or unsuccessful. Personally, I think it greatly matters what sort of culture and tooling you have available at your companies. If you've always done remote onboarding, you have years or training and materials. Having started remotely at a company that was not really prepared to be remote (2021), it was quite difficult as often many questions were expected to be answered by someone sitting next to you. Seeing new coworkers start while being in-person has shown it to be a better experience than what I had.
If there's some thought put into the onboarding process, I believe remote can be effective however I would argue remote onboarding requires far more effort and planning for the same result.
I think onboarding is easier at remote-only companies because you can just search for relevant conversations, you don't have to puzzle out that the way to understand the wonky CI process is to go mountain biking because it's the drive home from the trail where they actually hash out the problems.
Oh c'mon. Code is like the cosmic background. It's a picture of how the universe was back when it's author's we're only barely capable of making it work. They know better now, but it works, so they're off doing other things.
Therefore, if it's a year old and it smells bad:
- either it's still like that
- or somebody has since harvested its improvement into at least one standup update, which you can search for
At the very least, you're likely to be able to find who to ask.
>It's literally the exact same thing as in office these days
It's just not. In the office you're sitting next to a person you can lean over to and ask a question. Yeah, it interrupts their workflow, but that's ok when they're supposed to be helping you onboard. Remotely you've got to send a message, wait for somebody to reply, schedule a zoom call, whatever. It's async communication and it's slower, which is OK when you're not blocked, but when you're onboarding and blocked you need to be unblocked quickly because you don't have the experience to know where else to go while you're waiting.
The majority of offices are located in the biggest cities >1mil population. Every such city has huge size and insane traffic jams, where people are wasting a lot of their lives. Regardless of my preference to work from office (some days I do want to see my colleagues), the sad reality of commute is going to be a major factor in preferring remote work. I do not want to waste 15 full days every year at sitting in traffic jam, or standing in a bus packed with people. And neither do most of the people with such option. Having an office in <30 minutes commute or even walkable distance is a luxury really, and very few people have it.
> Onboarding in particular is demonstrably more difficult to do remotely.
I think it is only the case in companies where there is no proper onboarding process or it is an afterthought.
I was hired as a remote worker in a company in late 2021 and it was the most seamless onboarding process I ever had. I remember in a lot of companies having to chase people, trying to find them or waiting for them to get back from a meeting. Or the unpleasant experience of spending hours with a new hire and literally feeling his breath behind your neck while I would show him something and not being able to multitask at the same time on other things, especially those that had a private matter or were too confidential for that person at this stage. I am currently doing a lot of knowledge transfer for a new member of the team while I am moving to another one and I spend hours in video call with that guy. I am sharing one screen, while I can still do other tasks, reply to emails/instant messages in a separate screen. It is more walkie-talkie approach than a real videocall. But I can work on something and I don't have to tell him "look I have to do something urgent and confidential, let's discusss in a bit again" and then get dragged by millions things and not being able to get back to him.
I also preferred working in office. My company had a really nice one.
But due to covid forcing remote work I was able to go from renting a basement, to buying a home (and renting out MY basement).
House cost me the same as a city apartment, but I only qualified for the mortgage due to the added rental suite income. So if I'd stayed, I'd be unable to buy and have to continue renting.
Compared to staying in town, since I made the move in 2020, the difference in my net worth is now more than the entirety of my untaxed salary over that time.
tldr: I prefer office work, but working remotely has been the equivalent of earning 2.5X my salary the whole time.
It really just boils down people wanting a quiet place to work, or not, and employers wilfully ignoring that.
It's documented ad-nauseum that developers (or any other job that requires concentration and reasoning) are far more productive in quiet surroundings.
I've worked in my own office, with a door, for a couple of years out of a 30 year career, and those two years were by far the most productive. Apart from the last 3 where WFH has been even better.
Open plan offices are awful for most, and commuting 90 minutes each way, standing for the full 90 minutes on a rush hour train into London is also a waste of time.
I'm sure it's the same in the US, but substitute car and traffic jams for trains.
The tl;dr here is, if there's so much office space available and going cheaply now, isn't about time employers add proper offices for those that want them, and entice a large number of developers back to the office?
This industry is rich, pays $$$, pays $$$ bonuses, employs smart people, will supply you with $3k, $4k, $5k laptops, desktops, $1-2k monitors, peripherals, free lunch, standing desks, send you on 1-2k conferences and travel, and so on and so on.
On the other hand, working with a necktie can feel like working with a noose around your neck. The first (non-intern) job I had out of college required a necktie as part of the dress code, and though I got "used to" it after a while, it was never comfortable in the >5 years I worked there, and I was extremely glad that when I got to the interview for the job I'm in now, one of the first things they said was (paraphrasing, this was over a decade ago) "well, we certainly won't expect you to wear a tie if you get this job!"
It's great how you're more productive at the office. Now picture this: instead of your office with people in it who live within an hour commute, your team now consists of candidates literally anywhere in the US. You had 20 qualified people interview for your job, and you got it as the best, most productive person to get it done? Now the company picks from a pool of candidates 200x the size. You are now the 180th best qualified candidate. The guy who beat you, who lives 3000 miles away, is the best. Now do that for literally everyone you see when you do a little spin in the lunchroom. And it's not about the resource pool averaging out the same, because all companies can pick from anywhere. The guy who beat you isn't superior to you - his skills and experience and personality just more perfectly align to your job. And yours will align better to a better job. Both of you are now happier and making more, while the company makes more by saving on rent.
Also, ghmm, that nice long shit I used to take while browsing reddit... Go ahead and send me a meeting invite for timeslot.
> As prices for city apartments increase dramatically, people lose interest in living in those cities.
I would argue that the prices reflect at least an incredibly persistent demand to live in those cities.
Just for different reasons than before. For instance, since the pandemic many cities have invested heavily in bike infrastructure and pedestrianization. E-bikes have become extremely popular. And as the post-COVID reopening has progressed, people have been organizing local hobbyist meetups, many of them having acquired those hobbies during the depths of the pandemic.
There is a huge lifestyle appeal to living in cities, and it will not go away anytime soon. Cities need to recognize that both the massive increase in residential demand and the massive plunge in commercial demand are incredible opportunities to differentiate themselves by converting their dead-after-6pm business districts into thriving, walkable mixed-use hubs.
Where did you find those prices? NYC is so insanely diverse about living/office, I find it hard to quote something here. Average or median is mostly meaningless.
internet commenters are allowed to spitball, obviously a 800 sq ft 1 bdrm can go from anywhere between a quarter mil to 2 mil depending on the neighborhood and the view, OP's point is that converting to residential is a net positive for the real estate owner.
A few real estate trade websites I quickly googled. The $85 for commercial was “top tier” Manhattan commercial office space (the other tiers ranged to over half off IIRC) and the residential was a general average of inventory in 2022. Certainly for my dissertation I would have cleaner references, but I controlled a bit on the supposition by picking P90 vs avg to give the other side the statistical advantage.
I think we'll have to see what the demand for living in big/dense cities looks like in light of at least somewhat reduced demand for living there because of employment. Certainly, there's some demand--especially among younger people in the college-educated demographic.
But it's less obvious what tradeoffs people make in general to the degree that employment isn't part of the equation. I certainly never lived in a city when my company was located well outside.
But the whole reason we’re even having the discussion is because of the evidence that more people are remote working. So I’m assuming we’re talking about people who might have to go to their office at max two or three days a week in the extreme cases? Not sure how that will create enough of a market drain to make NYC, Boston, or San Fran living affordable?
I think the suggestion to reclaim business districts is the only rational way forward with any kind of chance of lowering prices. There just don’t seem to be enough people willing to live outside the city to bring down prices. If anything, everything price-wise points to market demand increasing.
2-3 days/week isn't daily but still qualifies as pretty frequent. From first-hand experience, I still don't want more than an hour commute. Of course, I don't need to live right in the city for that but, especially in the absence of a good commuter rail system (which those specific cities have to at least some degree), you can't move that far out.
Not the person you were asking, but to me, "suburban" is not defined by density, but by how walkable an area is. Even relatively low density neighborhoods can be urban under this definition as long as residential isn't zoned far away from commercial districts and everything is within a few minutes of walking or an easy bus ride. Suburban is when having a car provides an enormous QoL boost, but isn't strictly necessary. And rural is when a car is absolutely required to survive.
These are fairly car centric definitions. But considering the car enabled the suburb in the first place, I don't think it's necessarily wrong to use it as the metric.
But I think the modern suburbs (in the USA) were more of a "white flight" phenomenon, enabled by cheaper construction methods and perhaps a confluence of a few other post-war trends/policies.
White flight swelled the population of suburbs but they were already substantial. I think it would be a misleading picture if you just choose one point in a continuous process and start from there.
We don't need to create the universe to bake an apple pie from scratch. I agree that a history of the suburbs might begin before WWII, but the general concept of needing to start at the beginning is a slippery slope. I'd say nearly all histories must pick an arbitrary start, mid-stream.
I think there is still, even now, a difference between these older, inner-ring suburbs with many people commuting to work by train (and generally smaller plots and the like) and newer outer-ring suburbs or exurbs (or just rings around newer cities) which are more car-focused from the start.
Areas with lots of single family homes where you're more likely to drive to go somewhere than not. Much of sunset, much of richmond, twin peaks, bayview/hunters point, lots of the places around 280 between 101 and 1.
Sometimes I wonder, and then I look and see that people vastly underreport how dense/urban the areas they live in are and I feel that maybe many of the people claiming to feel so different are not being sincere.
Sometimes I wonder, people say they don’t like crowds but are still not living in the wilderness and I feel that maybe many of the people claiming to feel so different are not being sincere.
If you conceive of living in a city as only being in the middle of Manhattan or Shinjuku or wherever then yes I guess what you're saying makes sense, not everyone wants that.
A lot of that demand is for the house/apartment as an investment vehicle or for the idle rich for a party pad. Alternatively, it is a place for people directly or indirectly on welfare of some kind to be funneled to. Those two uses have become increasingly more prominent in US cities. You have to be addled in some way to think these cities are for middle class people, which is why many of them have seen historically massive waves of middle class outmigration in recent years.
Is an American city for you? Are you a( indigent; b( a literal aristocrat or rich enough to be one; or c( a "financial domination" enjoyer who desires to give everything they earn to some combination of landlords and governments when you are not giving all your time to your boss? If you answered yes to any of the above, an American city is for you. If you are a working stiff, the city doesn't want you anyway.
This take does not square in the slightest with my actual experience in the DC area. I make a middle class income, pay a fairly modest rent, and have an active social life and tons of hobbies that are enabled by the trappings of city living - density of educated people, easy mobility on a bike, a wealth of pleasant public spaces.
Yes, lot of people would not reject idea of having it, but at the same time actual demand (i.e. actual number of people who would think price is worth it, is quite lower compared to spagetti which is much cheaper but has many more buyers)
All in all. high price does not necessarily mean huge demand.
> Many workers have tasted the freedom of no commute, or at least a pleasant walk/bike commute to a nearby coworking space.
Yes, although I say it a different way. Working in offices has always been fairly terrible, and had been growing increasingly terrible over the last decade or two. People put up with it in part because they had no option.
But once they worked outside of those spaces and realized what hell they were, of course they resist returning.
So it's not just about discovering new "freedom", it's about discovering that a major thing that makes life suck doesn't have to be a thing at all.
> Working in offices has always been fairly terrible, and had been growing increasingly terrible over the last decade or two.
Offices don't have to be terrible. IBM, GE, Bell, etc. knew how to put together offices that didn't suck. Occasionally the architects got out of hand and produced some monstrosity, but the offices were mostly fine.
It's only the whole dumbass "open office plan" bullshit that made everything suck. Given that's the "standard", is it any wonder everybody wants to work from home?
What I really hate about open offices is the fishbowl effect. Having someone behind my back and staring at whatever's on my computer screen feels extremely uncomfortable.
I do a lot of technical drawings. It feels way different to be in an open workspace with a horizontal drafting board (which is what I would have had prior to the 1990s) than with a brightly-lit, vertical screen. You have more privacy, even in an open space.
One way to mitigate this is to get into a position where it's illegal for someone to look over your shoulder. Barring one two-year stretch a decade ago I've always had a private office.
However, pre-1980+ (or later), most workers were probably head-down looking at paper on their physical desktop. And surely more of them had actual offices compared to the cubical 80s-2000s or open offices 2000+.
Also, I would assume that pre-voip technology meant that salespeople were not yelling into their phones for the "joy" of their open-office-mates as they were 2000+.
In retrospect, cubicles were just aesthetically unfortunate and a convenient target for those who wanted to mock business culture (a la Office Space). But full size cubicles were vastly superior in visual privacy and sound dampening to the hell of “open office” seating at long benches that came after.
> most workers were probably head-down looking at paper on their physical desktop
Not really. If you go back to the 50's you will find armies of people looking down at paper, reading and writing, but not most. By the 80's all of those people had machines on their desks, while most didn't do paper work.
I believe the majority of people only started doing information (since the paper isn't there anymore) work this century on the rich countries. On many countries they didn't yet.
By the 80's all of those people had machines on their desks
What kind of machines? Computers? My father was an office worker his whole life. He didn't get a PC on his desk until the 90s. Before, he had a type writer.
> open plan offices were the norm until the 1960s.
I remember visiting the workplaces of both of my parents in the 1970's and neither were anything like open plan. I know you said "1960s" but the buildings my parents were working in were well established at the time and had been there since, at least the 1960's.
When I interviewed with Boeing in 80s, it was large rooms filled with desks an no partitions with managers around the perimeter. (The company I took a job with had private offices but there was obviously a lot of variation.) Later in the 80s I had the stereotypical cubicles.
Open plan in a nutshell: would you like to save 20% on seating costs for the low cost of a 30% reduction in productivity? Then open plan offices might be right for you.
The nutshell takeaway here is that concrete reductions in costs will always outweigh greater but less concrete increases in costs, because... well George Carlin covered that.
My theory is it's a classic cargo cult situation: "If we just do the same thing this successful startup did (we'll ignore that they were doing it in a different context for different reasons, and ignore the ones that did the same thing but weren't successful) then we too will have the same explosive success!"
One would argue that it was "dumbass" if the attempt to cut cost affected a greater loss of productivity.
But that is often the case; attempts to increase "shareholder value" come at an outsized and detrimental cost of productivity and ultimate profit. But such is life. You cannot know the outcome of two paths as you can only test one of them.
They're a good rejoinder to Musk's recent farcical argument that since most blue-collar workers cannot work remotely, it's immoral for white-collar workers to resist Return-To-Office mandates [1]. Some jobs still require neckties, but that does not mean we should all be obliged to wear them too.
I personally enjoy commuting — a 35-minute journey in a big city via public transport. It gets me to an office full of friendly faces who also enjoy the commute. The people who prefer remote stay home. It's a happy medium.
RTO mandates in US cities with poor/non-existent public transport options are bad ideas all around.
> They're a good rejoinder to Musk's recent farcical argument that since most blue-collar workers cannot work remotely, it's immoral for white-collar workers to resist Return-To-Office mandates.
One of the dumbest things he’s ever said (and that’s saying something). Most people can’t fly private either but it doesn’t seem to stop him.
The entire egalitarian fad we're living through is not longer interested in alleviating poverty, but abolishing any form of "inequality" [0]. As if inequality were a bad thing and equality a good thing.
It's hard for me to visualize why some jobs would require neckties. It's not a piece of useful equipment, like a safety helmet. What would offices lose by having workers wear whatever they like?
I don’t totally believe that remote work is going to go completely away . I think that personally for me never going into the office wasn’t really a great experience. It made me much more sedimentary (which in tech is almost a work hazard) but that was my fault . I do like being hybrid (but also the team I was a part of basically stopped existing) so while I think it could be a combination of working from home and the team imploding made me lonely.
I rather have the option to going to work and I think companies should still offer a solution for that if they are able to. I do like traveling into the city so maybe I just like neckties.
I am definitely against all of this rhetoric about how remote work is horrible and the laptop crowd isn’t doing good work when we don’t really give people enough time for childcare or elder care which I think is a much bigger problem that motivates people to work remotely. Also real estate markets are way overvalued.
> I rather have the option to going to work and I think companies should still offer a solution for that if they are able to.
I love being in the office. I hate the hour commute. And I hate doubling or tripling my housing price. I prefer showering at 745 and connecting and being productive at 8 over showering at 645 and driving into work to be productive at 8 (while being in zoom meetings all day anyway).
I like records too. They are so cool with nice artwork. And I like record stores. But I listen to music 99% of the time digitally.
The office is the same way. It’s not that it isn’t nice. It’s that the cost of using it over better alternatives is madness, especially at scale.
Imagine all the pollution saved from people driving to work.
I feel like much of the hate towards offices comes from people with long commutes. Personally, I've resolved to never be more than a 15 minute drive or 30 minute public transportation/walk away from work and it's been wonderful. Pop into the office, say hello, have lunch with good friends, talk to the people I see, leave the office around 4:45 and I'm home before 5. I recognize that's not feasible for many people due to the cost of living in their area, but there are many places where you can work at a big FAANG company and still have a house within 20 minutes for a not great but not terrible price.
> Personally, I've resolved to never be more than a 15 minute drive or 30 minute public transportation/walk away from work and it's been wonderful.
That’s nice you’ve resolved that, but it’s not useful to many people. It’s like saying “personally, I’ve resolved to wake up at 4am and run 14 miles. The health benefits are amazing. Yadda yadda yadda.”
Or even better “personally, I’ve resolved to inherit family wealth and not work.”
This advice is not very applicable to the return to work discussion.
Most people have families and community ties that limit them from living close to work and from moving every time they change jobs.
For me, the schools are very bad near my work and private schools cost $30k/year. So I’m not going to move close to work as my income doesn’t allow it.
If wishes were fishes, I would definitely like to live close to work and walk and be able to pop home for lunch and whatnot.
But even if schools were great and house was cheap near my work, I’ve changed work locations in the same metro area 7 times in the past 20 years so I’m not going to uproot my family each time I change positions.
So I, and I think many others, chose commute to give family opportunities. And now I choose remote to save that expense while still giving family opportunity.
This is very dependent on personal circumstances. Some of us live in circumstances where we're close to the office or have transit alternatives which makes the commutes fine places to get work done or nap or veg out on other things. Some of us bike to work.
As another comment said, a lot of the consternation about whether or not to go to the office is based on personal circumstances.
Yes, certainly. But most don’t. So in the discussion of whether to return to the office, there’s not much good in discussing those rare options other than noting that those people are fortunate and not representative and can certainly go into the office if they like.
My office had a funny interaction where when we were discussing remote work, one person remarked that they liked coming into the office on their bike and it was so pleasant. This was one of the highest paid people who lived in a $1.5M house 5 minutes away from the office. And they said this to a zoom of 100 people of which maybe half commuted from $200k houses and made $75k.
Yes, that’s nice, but not useful for productive decision making.
Of course the consternation is based on personal circumstances. I don’t think workers have ideological stances on remote vs office work. I think it’s based on cost and productivity and quality of life.
> I don’t totally believe that remote work is going to go completely away . I think that personally for me never going into the office wasn’t really a great experience. It made me much more sedimentary (which in tech is almost a work hazard) but that was my fault . I do like being hybrid (but also the team I was a part of basically stopped existing) so while I think it could be a combination of working from home and the team imploding made me lonely.
I think a lot of people ran into these problems, but there are solutions. Work doesn't have to be your only source of community, and in fact, it can be problematic when it is, because then your community only lasts as long as your job. On the one hand you might lose your job, and on the other hand you might not quit when you should. Having connections outside work is pretty key to having work/life balance IMO.
love when commenters are just immediately dismissive of other people's preferences.
I feel the same as OP. I have a very healthy social life outside of work but full time remote work at home feels isolating and repetitive. My mind does not like the lack of separation between home and work and I've tried every trick in the book. This is also true for most other activities in my life (e.g. I don't like exercising at home vs. a gym).
I don't want to force people to the office, but it gets tiring hearing other people assuming I haven't tried their "solutions"
> I have a very healthy social life outside of work but full time remote work at home feels isolating and repetitive. My mind does not like the lack of separation between home and work and I've tried every trick in the book.
If OP had said any of that, I wouldn't have responded in the way I did.
Don’t worry it’s not the worst one. That one was where I said I liked the Apple Keyboard on the 12 inch model and that I didn’t experience many keyboards but I have used an IBM model M, Corsair k70 and various other ones. So you can get keyboard shamed…
sure - I agree with this, but I think this goes both ways. I will give a parallel situation that I think about quite a bit: cars. Cars have quite a bit of the same benefits as remote work. You can live further from work, you have independence, and quite a bit of the concrete negatives (e.g. no more crowded public transit) generally go away. But we now know that designing society around cars was a mistake. It ends up being bad for everyone and is more isolating by default. I'm similarly concerned about doing something that will make Americans more isolated by default.
>I'm similarly concerned about doing something that will make Americans more isolated by default.
You're right to be concerned about this, but I think it stems from a combination of "false dichotomy" and "learned helplessness":
The socializing we do at work is ultimately a side effect of the work environment, not part of the primary goal. We can learn from how non-car-oriented societies structure their settlements. Returning to the previous (and terrible) iteration of the American status quo is not the only alternative.
We don't have to settle for terrible choices simply because they have mildly beneficial side effects.
I'd also like to start taking steps toward a society with less work. There will come a time when human work simply isn't needed: when robots can do the physical labor and AIs can do the mental labor--perhaps not in our lifetimes, but it will happen. And even now, we don't need to be working as much as we do.
“Economists have been predicting that...”, in a tone of “...and it ain't happened yet, so they're probably wrong”. Actually, they've been right all along, only it's been masked by the twin phenomena of hugely skewed distribution of wealth and creation of ever more bullshit jobs.
> Work doesn't have to be your only source of community, and in fact, it can be problematic when it is, because then your community only lasts as long as your job.
Literally all of my adult friends are former coworkers, with some of them not even becoming friends until after we quit jobs.
You spend majority of your waking hours at work, where else do you make friends? Please don't say the gym.
> Literally all of my adult friends are former coworkers, with some of them not even becoming friends until after we quit jobs.
Ehh, some of my friends are that way too, but a lot of my work friendships have withered when there wasn't work keeping us in contact on a regular basis.
> You spend majority of your waking hours at work, where else do you make friends? Please don't say the gym.
It doesn't have to be the gym either. I personally have met a lot of my friends out rock climbing, but that's going to vary from person to person because you have to find things you enjoy doing. Going to the gym to meet people if you don't enjoy working out at the gym doesn't make sense.
Are there other things you enjoy doing besides work?
(Incidentally, I don't spend the majority of my waking hours at work).
> Ehh, some of my friends are that way too, but a lot of my work friendships have withered when there wasn't work keeping us in contact on a regular basis.
Can you really say they were your friends tho? do you think your rock climbing buddies will be your buddies after you stop?
I think going to the gym is not a social activity and I am very tired of bro's giving me "feedback" on my deadlifts.
Let's examine your I don't spend majority of hours claim, So there are 24 hours in the day, you work for 8, 2 hours for commuting, 1 hour for showering, taking a shits, getting dressed and all that, 1 hour for various chores, like buying groceries, laundry, cooking, etc, 1 hour for exercise, 7 hours for sleep. You have about 6 hours a day left for "fun". Last time I checked 6<8
> Let's examine your I don't spend majority of hours claim, So there are 24 hours in the day, you work for 8, 2 hours for commuting, 1 hour for showering, taking a shits, getting dressed and all that, 1 hour for various chores, like buying groceries, laundry, cooking, etc, 1 hour for exercise, 7 hours for sleep. You have about 6 hours a day left for "fun". Last time I checked 6<8
Let's examine what you know about my life: last time I checked, nothing. It certainly does not look like what you describe (hint: I don't work 8 hours a day, even on most weekdays).
Given the claim was "Incidentally, I don't spend the majority of my waking hours at work", it's a bit strange that you've included "1 hour for showering, taking a shits, getting dressed and all that, 1 hour for various chores, like buying groceries, laundry, cooking, etc, 1 hour for exercise" in there. And I agree that you should include commute in calculating your hourly pay, which is why I would not take a job which required 2 hours of commuting per day.
And do you work weekends, or are you ignoring a solid (24 x 2) - (7 x 2) = 34 hours of the week here?
I'd respond to the part of your post before that, but this math is too absurd.
Are you assuming I include various things you have to do during the day that are not exactly social into hours you spend at work? No, these are just hours that you end up spending on such activities, every day, because that’s what you have to do to be able to live
And i’m not here to argue with you how many hours you work or do not work, that’s absurd. I’m arguing from a general point of what schedule is roughly true for majority of employed people. Of course you as an individual can work 3 hours a day or 17, that’s besides the point.
The 34 hours of the weekend is only true for people that have absolutely 0 other obligations, such as children, parents, chores, etc.
I’m not here to say that people absolutely must make friends at work, but implying that it’s somehow unhealthy or bad is just incredibly out of touch with how majority of adults live
> Are you assuming I include various things you have to do during the day that are not exactly social into hours you spend at work? No, these are just hours that you end up spending on such activities, every day, because that’s what you have to do to be able to live
Still irrelevant and you were rightly called out on it. It doesn't matter if you spend an hour taking a dump and a shower, climbing rocks, or doing housework (just a single hour? You're a guy, right, with a wife?). It's still not an hour spent at your job.
The week has 168 hours. Normal people spend about 40 of them at work and 56 sleeping. That leaves 72 waking hours not at work; almost twice as many as at work.
You would have looked so much better if you'd just manned up and admitted you were wrong.
Remember where I said, "(Incidentally, I don't spend the majority of my waking hours at work)." Yeah, I was talking about myself, as indicated by the word "I". So I'm not sure why you decided to "examine" my claim from the perspective of what most people do when that wasn't what I said, and then decided to include a bunch of things that aren't work as work.
> I’m not here to say that people absolutely must make friends at work, but implying that it’s somehow unhealthy or bad is just incredibly out of touch with how majority of adults live
And I'm not here to say it's somehow unhealthy or bad. That's a hallucination that you had.
> Work doesn't have to be your only source of community
Sorry if this sounds blunt, I’m moments away from sleep, but this comment of yours really frustrated me. You are assuming that someone who enjoys the social aspects of working in person does so because they lack social outlets outside the workplace. That is just your assumption, and a distortion of the discussion. I see this all the time. What gives?
It isn’t my only source of community. I participate in my local python software group and also I help out with a research software package porting algorithms to it so I do have alternate places where I have communities.
Company I work at has taken to running most large meetings in person, booking out a large meeting room for half the day, and then often structuring social events around the day as well, often with paid for drinks and food.
I feel like these in person get togethers are far more interactive and productive than a day of calls where most people go camera off and fall asleep 30 mins in. Actually doing work remote works mostly fine, but god I hate group calls, the latency, the bad audio, etc.
I get that not everyone is like me but I just cannot stand those pre/post meeting socials with food and drinks. I'm just sitting there fidgiting thinking about what a completely nonproductive imposition this is on my time.
If I want social time with food and drinks I want to be with family and friends. If I'm at the office I want to be working. Otherwise I don't want to be there.
They aren’t mandatory, if you want, you have the option to sit by yourself worrying about productivity while the rest of us go enjoy a drink and free pub meal.
Unlike neckties (which are entirely about appearance and perceived norms) -- there are very considerable intrinsic benefits to having people onsite. They just don't outweigh the very considerable negatives, many are coming to find. So it's fundamentally an argument about tangible tradeoffs -- not social norms.
I think "hollow" is a bit heavy for the judgment, but I agree they are not the same in terms of tangibility (although I'll bet if I dig enough I could find some practical use for neckties (in the office, at least)).
However, like neckties, many companies do the office thing because that's what you're supposed to do. "Everybody knows this." Some (many?) offices exist without a tangible benefit.
There's also a "status" thing for people and for companies - companies are not immune to "fake it until you make it" and many pour billions into status-buildings that are perhaps not technically necessary.
And those things can change, suddenly having a huge tower in downtown NY becomes a sign of a out-of-date "old" company; perhaps the new hotness will be something like a small company "town" in the outskirts somewhere.
> the new hotness will be something like a small company "town" in the outskirts somewhere.
So the "new hotness" will be kind of like the old days where you worked for Pullman, and with those wages you earned, you: paid rent to Pullman, bought your goods at the Pullman general store, and so on in effect giving much of your earnings back to the company.
In europe that's exactly what the state it is. There's so many levels of taxation, company-, employement-, wage-, pension-, health- and property-tax. And then there is 25% vat on everything.
> companies are not immune to "fake it until you make it" and many pour billions into status-buildings that are perhaps not technically necessary.
Cities too. My city government offices are located on some of the best real-estate in the city and in elegantly refurbished turn of the century buildings.
Government offices should be pre-fab cheap as possible in brownfields or on other low-value land. High value land should be used for at minimum something that will generate property tax revenue.
Definitely. If someone foolishly chooses to work for the government, where dealing with the proletariat is unavoidable, they should work in the crappiest of environments. I don't think we should even provide chairs, they should be standing so they work harder. Save the Fog Creek style offices for the übermensch who drive productivity and advancement towards the future.
You should realize that the real estate around the government offices in your city are high value because they were located near the government offices?
It's not so much that the days of the office (and neck ties and other nonsense) is passing but that the economies of scale that made such environments economically viable are changing.
It used to be that companies had to have lots of people around organized in hierarchical processes working to certain uniform processes to produce value at scale. These days, you can outsource a lot of these things, automate a lot away, to the point that many businesses are scaling down to human level.
Many companies exist that are only a handful of people working together. They do business with other companies or sell to consumers directly via the internet. Instead of doing things in house, they partner with other companies for things that used to be done in house. HR, accounting, marketing, manufacturing, logistics, etc.
And in so far people still need to be internal, they no longer have to be in the same place or even on the same continent. Remote work is here and still somewhat controversial. But it works and has liberated a lot of people from going to an office on a daily basis. These people are often acting more like independent companies rather than employees. Often that's exactly what they are: independent contractors, freelancers, etc. And of course, a large and growing part of the workforce is no longer permanently employed by anyone.
So, having all these people come to some huge sky scraper in New York isn't that logical or productive anymore. You could do it. But it doesn't really add that much value. And it actually costs a lot of money and time to do it.
> Many workers have tasted the freedom of no commute, or at least a pleasant walk/bike commute to a nearby coworking space. They don't want to go back, and like myself they will reject any job which has a firm requirement for such.
I assume some many continue to exist but employees will also have to get used to large pay cuts if that's a hard requirement for them.
> As prices for city apartments increase dramatically, people lose interest in living in those cities. Better to live someplace pleasant and less expensive
No one wants to live there too many people live there......
I've gone over to the darkside. I live in a suburb 20 minutes from my favorite neighborhood for entertainment, 30m from my parents, 20m from endless fields, 1 hr from the rest of my family and friends. I have a yard, access to a lake, a riding mower, and no utility lines in my backyard so I can dig and build to my heart's content.
I also have Gbps internet and a job at a startup as a principal. This literally is the best of both worlds for me. I'm not particularly wealthy and not particularly clever - I'm sure everyone is doing this and the best part is, there's _room_ out here, at least in the USA.
> I assume some many continue to exist but employees will also have to get used to large pay cuts if that's a hard requirement for them.
How does that follow from anything? I am working remotely from the start of 2011 and never once took a pay cut compared to an on-site job, as far as I am aware at least.
I mean yes in general I agree remote first companies are probably going to have lower profit margins and fail to keep up with competitors but how does that help them find a well paying remote job?
> I assume some many continue to exist but employees will also have to get used to large pay cuts if that's a hard requirement for them.
Some companies are losing their more experienced employees when they force RTO. If they want to compete for this portion of the talent pool, they'll need to offer more than the other remote first companies.
> I assume some many continue to exist but employees will also have to get used to large pay cuts if that's a hard requirement for them.
In my experience, the employees that have to go into the office are generally the ones that get paid less than the ones who can work from home. I'm not really sure how you came to that conclusion.
Narrowing down a bit, I think it's the "downtown business district" that's on the way out -- and the accompanying high office rents, long commutes, etc.
My home is a place of rest and family, not work. Work happens at a dedicated location five minutes from home, on foot.
I think we'll see more of this in the future--mixed neighborhoods with a lot of residential space next to offices. What I think we won't see as much of, are huge office blocks very far from residential areas, where the majority of the workforce commutes an hour+ every day, each way, to work.
Central business districts were created by trains which let people move to suburbs; then hung around for a while due to concentration of office effects even as many commuters moved to cars. Interesting tho think about what transit looks like in a world without them. Public transit would need to move more away from the hub/spoke model, which possibly dooms new rail construction in existing car-centric cities; busses already go much more point to point with a lot more route options, but if you have less commuters, do those fail to maintain their current timetables as well?
The car-based world was supposed to work on suburban houses and out-of-town office parks - no expensive centralised land in a hub-and-spoke model, more like a grid.
But that kind of office park and lifestyle pretty much sucks. So I don't think city centres are in any danger. Turns out they're a useful way of organising socially even if they're not where the offices are.
Then why do cities built around cars - that never had trains - still have central business districts? i.e. the entire south & west of the US, pretty much.
To get the same concentration-of-offices effects in new developments, like I mentioned. But take a look at the size of those central business districts compared to older cities; look at the population of LA vs Chicago or Boston vs the size of their downtowns. (And LA is one that did have some streetcars for a while - Phoenix would be an even more extreme example of a big metro area with a truly pretty small central business district.) There was a lot less pull outside of certain industries - new industries like tech largely avoided ever going downtown much in the first place, preferring big suburban office parks.
So if you don't even need the suburban office parks anymore, do things sprawl out even more in places like Austin or Dallas that are surrounded by empty land (vs somewhere like the Bay Area which is hitting geographical barriers)?
You end up with city/county hall, local courts, then the lawyers, general contractors, banks etc all clustering around that. There's a natural clustering of resources that happens just from local government. It's not uncommon for the largest hospitals in the region to be near city hall. From there it just snowballs.
That said, I'm not sure why the neighborhood around San Jose's City Hall is so dead, it's very odd experience to go there
I've been reading that this change (hub and spoke to decentralized) was already a big effect of COVID.
I like trains, but an alternative could be electric buses, with Uber Pool-like dynamic routing. I'm not sure how the speed would compare, but, it gets pretty wild when you consider what's possible with mobile phones, AVs, and electric vehicles.
Moving offices outside of the downtown doesn't really help. The only visible benefit is less load on the city center (often tourist and historical destination).
It simple 2D geometry - if you live 1x from the office your commute is 20 minutes, if you live 2x from the office, your commute is 50 minutes, 3x from the office - 90 minutes commute, and so on. If you move the main cluster of the offices outside of the city border, then the commute time would change for people, for some it will decrease, for some it will increase. There would be exactly the same percentage of people living 1x, 2x, 3x etc. from the office, just the people would be shuffled between the quartiles.
Reading the title, my initial thought was residential skyscrapers. Reading the article clearly indicates that it's discussing offices.
But back to residential: I understand that many wealthy people buy real estate for the prestige of having a certain address or as a way to "lock up" wealth in an asset. See Billionaires Row [0] [1]
Billionaires and vacant apartments cause issues, but they at least pay taxes. An office building with no tenants will face plummeting property values and a corresponding dive in tax bills.
* Note: residential property taxation in NYC is in dire need of reform but the point still stands
Regarding property ownership, for a number of recent years it has been a challenge to find "safe" places to park money. Real estate in NYC and other prime locations is probably seen as pretty safe.
Also, if you have true "FU" money, then owning a piece of prime NYC real estate is just another mark on your bedpost, like your superyacht.
Has this meme ever been a real thing? I know quite a few people who've made entire careers off of fixing the mistakes these outsourced "cheap" Indian make in their work, cheap being in quotes because the end result is that you have to pay someone more, for far longer to fix up the crap they leave in their wake.
Besides if it's cheap enough to hire someone overseas (who by definition would be remote), how would it not be cheaper to just pay their current workforce to work remotely?
A half answer here is, given "agile devops" software development (i.e. developing with iterative tradeoffs on both features and operational stability), then regular meeting time matters a lot to resolve conflict, and so working time zone matters a lot. The more spread, and the more you get people blaming "not good enough processes" on what is really just "not enough common time to meet to collaborate".
Now the other half of that is what remote-first, "all I need is more time to code" developers really don't want to hear, is that in resolving conflict, in-person communication is much higher bandwidth than even zoom communication, both for the whiteboard, and for the fact being in-person de-escalates emotion. This is particularly true for early career developers, where some pushback (i.e. conflict) in their naive assumptions is actually how they are going to learn better from senior developers.
So while 5 days a week in the office is dead, its way too early to say what the eventual outcome will be. But I do agree less days a week will force some amount of square-foot downsizing, so I am glad I don't own any office buildings.
1: Indian wages are going up. The difference gets smaller every year.* Note that many of the best Indian developers are paid in USD, and even for the developers that get paid in Rupees, the company they are hired by locally often does get paid in USD by the American company that buys their services, so the fact that the Rupee goes down doesn't necessarily offset their wage increase for the American company that hires them.
2: American workers can still meet in every Tuesday. It's hard from Hyderabad.
3: Time difference can be a real issue (but of course it can also be an advantage).
4: It's often easier for Americans to understand American English than Indian English.
5: American developers might understand the American market and competing products better.
If your boss can save on your wages and the cost of office space by hiring a guy in India you'd think employing you in an office would be even less appealing than employing you to work from home...
English as a first language. Implicit shared cultural values. Time zones. You are way less work to manage than someone across the world from another culture.
Some companies do outsource everything but it’s HARD.
> Neckties were an essential business requirement for ages. At some point, people had had enough of the mostly pointless ritual and began rejecting the norm. [...]
Neckties are still widely worn.
Have a look at the demise of hats throughout the 20th century for another example.
I found most of this kind of argument quite unnecessary.
Most of the people want less work and more pay, that’s a reality.
On the other hand, staying competitive is most company’s reality too.
So it is really not about you as a employee or employer’s will but rather than the market supply and demand that determines the work location flexibility. If I am employer and I have 2 candidates with similar skill level, of course I will prefer the one who can come to office everyday. And if I am an employee with two job offers with similar pay and working items of course I will choose the one with remote flexibility, because having choice is always better.
Yeah, living in these legacy markets has become clunky, and the markets can't be changed. If I found out that I no longer needed to swallow rocks to digest my food, why would I ever go back to doing so?
Unfortunately, here in the real world, people have to go to work. Hospitals, stores, schools, manufacturers, warehouses, truck drivers, and builders/maintaniers of all the infrastructure that your lifestyle depends on.. even your car salesman with necktie: these are all places that need workers and always will. The small proportion of workforce that are startup employees dont make the rules. You're crazy to think that everyone wants to work from home, I know I sure as hell dont.
I believe both in the flexibility of remote work, and in the benefits of learning and collaborating with people in person.
I think we have gained and lost things in the remote shift. I feel bad for young people starting their careers who will never know what it's like to make acquaintance with their coworkers and feel at ease with them, to work on problems together.
That's an inspirational narrative. However, offices aren't significantly vacant due to remote work. Advancing the narrative that this is the reason will in-part hide economic decline, and will help allow important people to escape the political consequences of the worst economic decline in ninety years.
Some have apparently downvoted you, but I think you make a good point.
The workers may have rejected the onsite companies such that it is difficult to fill the expensive offices. But also, it is likely that the COVID forced out-of-office situation has caused companies to re-evaluate the value of prime office locations.
Fashion is a self-reinforcing feedback loop. If the scenario is visible and hyped, others will believe they must follow it to be relevant. And then it becomes stronger, and effectively relevant. Soon every real US finance company needs a prime Manhattan office... unless it's a commodities company, in which it must have a prime Chicago location.
Aside from inflating finance company performance via tax laws, I don't think politics really has so much to do with this. Actually, the global upward wealth redistribution policies do mean that a smaller group has a more difficult time finding places to park money, so that indeed does inflate propertly values.
I've been working remote from NYC since 2008, and for a chunk of that time I had rented a cheap, no-frills loft space in Brooklyn with some friends. I had space to have a soldering setup, another area for a shared work bench, storage for tools, bookshelves for CS/math books, space for some couches, a sink, etc. I think we paid around $400/month each to split amongst the 5 of us. It was a lot of space.
Finding that now in NYC is pretty difficult without paying a ton, even with all this unused commercial space. Co-working spaces have all these amenities I don't want and charge $1200-2000/month for a closet you can kind of fit a few small desks in. A lot of these buildings are holding out to get one or two big corporate leases. I'd totally rent a small space in Manhattan if the price was right, just to have the option to head into the city when I want to get out of the house, but I don't think anyone is trying to cater to a bunch of hacker/artist types anymore. Until then I'll just work from home.
Those places still exist out in bushwick / east williamsburg. If you hang out with the right people, or go to the right facebook groups you'll find them.
The living or working arrangements are often illegal, so they aren't visible in the "above-ground" market (Zillow, Streeteasy, IRL ads, etc.), but they're still there.
Gypsy housing used to be the mecca for this kind of activity. They changed the name (reasonably so!) to Ghostlight Housing, but it looks like it was suspended by an admin in 2022.
If you generally search the web for "NYC housing facebook groups", those keywords will lead you to the right groups. Note you'll probably have an easier time searching for these groups with Google than with FB. And don't be intimidated by private groups, the barriers to entry are really low.
There are niche groups for artists, craftspeople, etc. if that appeals you – just add appropriate keywords!
A few friends of mine are also trying to do something similar here in SF. We want somewhere else to work other than our cramped apartments, but don't necessarily want to go into a real office.
My company has a couple of suites in a small one story building.
I'd say it's only about 30% full now (down from about 90% last summer or so). Even so, they were unwilling to budge on the rent for one of the suites my company leases. Now it's sitting empty too.
Ok, I will be the first to say that I hate offices: the culture, the aesthetic, the rituals and customs. But I'm not necessarily sure that--especially for young people--work from home is the best option. Someone who is married, has kids, has a whole social world in their neighborhood, that person would enjoy and promote work from home, but that person is usually in a higher power position. A young person just starting out or at least earlier on in their career doesn't really have the opportunity to make friends, meet people (romantically), or otherwise make social connections while working from home.
My job dictating my friends, romantic attachments and other social connections is incredibly disgusting and dystopian to me. Meaningful social activity has only occurred outside the workplace, to me. Being forced to commute to an office decreases the chance for that by stealing even more free time, and it pushes many people to move away from their friends/family to entirely different cities or countries!
It's also IMO a significant part of how some companies retain people.
In years past there's always been a persistent strain of criticism of perk-heavy offices because "it's a ploy to get you to work late" - I think the criticism has actually been off the mark. It's actually a little bit more sinister than that: the perks create a culture where your entire social world exists at work, and massively raises the barrier to quitting.
If you've worked at a perk-heavy FAANG like Meta or Google you've met them: the people for whom nearly all of their friends are from work, who relish going into work for the social contact. For them leaving the company isn't just leaving a job, or even colleagues they like, it's the near-total obliteration of their social world.
I don't begrudge people for making friends at work - you have to do a job, you may as well make the best of it, but I would heavily caution people against forming the bulk of their social world around their workmates.
Having a life outside of work isn't just good for you personally, it's IMO pretty critical to your career's success.
Correct, this is what companies build "culture" for. Turnover goes way down in situations like this and once their employees have a mortgage and fixed living expense they basically only need to give them cost of living adjustment for 20+ years or they quit
> My job dictating my friends, romantic attachments and other social connections is incredibly disgusting and dystopian to me. Meaningful social activity has only occurred outside the workplace, to me.
last stats I found is that 43% of marriage come from the workplace so it's most certainly not something to discount that easily
It's not just having an office. It means work-life balance is so tilted that your workplace is basically your whole life. That implies all sorts of terrible things.
Why even leave work? You'd get all sorts of nice marriage statistics if you force people to live in a prison-camp environment 24/7
There are severe social costs to pushing/forcing people to relocate away from friends/family and spend time commuting, so I disagree with that conclusion
Do you go to work to accomplish your assigned goals or do you go there to socialize? These things seem contradictory.
A salaried employee who can maintain productivity in a WFH environment has far more time and freedom to socialize, wholly on their own terms, than an employee who is forced to expend some amount of time on commuting.
For people who go to work to get work done, WFH is the obvious best choice.
> Do you go to work to accomplish your assigned goals or do you go there to socialize? These things seem contradictory.
I mean if you can get 8 hours of solid uninterrupted coding, good job, but otherwise social interactions gonna happen.
And while some also happen over remote chat, it is nicer in person. Of course that flips if you hate your coworkers or don't share any common interests.
But yes, trading for 2h commute is definitely not worth it. 15 min commute to work ? Why not. Especially if you can do some shopping along the way.
Honestly, hybrid 1 day-at-work currently work well for me. The on-site day is mostly planning, some gossip and whatever requires some bigger coordination, then rest of the week nobody bothers me.
>I mean if you can get 8 hours of solid uninterrupted coding, good job, but otherwise social interactions gonna happen.
I see these interactions as overhead related to work ("hey I need your help with $COMPLEX_PROBLEM" or chitchat waiting for a meeting to start), not a conduit for genuine friendship. They're (hopefully) cordial and pleasant, but almost completely work-related.
I don't use work time to discuss hobbies, music, or other interests at length. I do mention these things in passing, and if a coworker shares interests and wants to talk more, we sync up outside of work hours. Is this not the way most people operate?
> The on-site day is mostly planning, some gossip and whatever requires some bigger coordination, then rest of the week nobody bothers me.
That sounds like a pretty good balance if everyone is local. For more distributed teams needing 'virtual onsites', there are some interesting concept such as Gather
You're not locked in at home. There's very little stopping you from joining a coworking space, going to the coffee shop etc and working in an environment outside of your home. In fact this is far more beneficial for your career because assuming other people are doing so, you are passively networking with people outside of your company and finding better opportunities.
People have gotten so use to the corporate propaganda of work being your life that they cannot understand you can live and socialize outside of work, and that it's far healthier to do so. I've made friends at work and while working full remote but corporations use this to add friction for people to stay.
> There's very little stopping you from joining a coworking space
I know my employer wouldn't cover this cost, and I'm guessing most of them won't, so why on earth would I take money out of my paycheck to be able to work from an office instead of the one my employer provides? Further, confidential discussions with customers or coworkers in a space filled with people working for other companies sounds like a very bad idea.
Regarding cost, some employees might still find it worthwhile to use a co-working space at their own cost, if they save enough on commuting (which employers also typically don't pay for), or if they earn enough to be able to absorb the cost.
Regarding confidentiality, using co-working spaces needn't be full-time, but could be combined with WFH, just like going to the office can, which could help somewhat.
Co-working spaces have private booths and such for sensitive discussions. And ultimately because it's cheaper to go to a nearby co-working space on occasion than it is to move and live close to the office.
I'm full remote. Moving to the office would quite literally cost 1.5x in rent.
Disgusted by companies encouraging you to become entirely dependent on them for your social life, making it much more difficult to stand up for yourself, ask for a pay rise, or leave.
I've seen severely underpaid people stay far longer than they would have out of a misplaced sense of loyalty towards their peers. The only entity that benefits from that arrangement is the company.
> Your job isn’t dictating your relationships - it’s giving you an opportunity at making some.
This is abuser level rewording. Are you a manager?
Seriously though, if 'work is giving you opportunities to make relationships' to the point where it's a significant downside to get rid of it in some capacity, then we should consider that we're in a live-to-work system, which is dystopic.
It’s easy to find friends in a group of people you have things in common with and spend lots of time with. I know not every job is like this, but some of my best lifelong friendships started at workplaces. (And outlasted the companies that they started at)
Been working 12+ years remotely in a company that has been doing it even longer in some departments. It works and you can get around all the complaints no problem. I understand some people prefer to work in an office and I understand it also depends on the type of business you are it. I get that but people also need to remember times change.
The modern school system is incredibly dystopian and prison-like, yes.
Many people talk about surviving school, especially people with autism or similar divergence from the acceptable norm. Making friends at school is a small non-guaranteed consolation prize for them, and it comes at the cost of lifelong trauma.
Let people, including children, socialize on their own terms.
Agreed. I think it is even worse than the workplace. My social skills were stunted because I mainly learned how to attempt to socialise in a structured prison-like environment. I was trained to obey the authority figure saying to ignore friends if they tried to speak to me during class. Forced into classes with people I didn't get along with. Often my friends were put into a different class so I was forcibly segregated from them, damaging the relationship. I'm in 30s and still have nightmares about school often
> A young person just starting out or at least earlier on in their career doesn't really have the opportunity to make friends, meet people (romantically), or otherwise make social connections while working from home.
Sure they do - if they live in a city. I am a young person who started my first FTE job last year and am WFH. I have an incredibly bountiful friend group that comes from hobbyist meetups, social bike rides and dating apps.
I think we as a society would benefit from evolving the "third place". A place that is neither work nor home where you can socialize. Like it or not, lot of people want remote work, so the best path forward is to adapt.
Probably what we will end up with is school from home, work from home, everything from home. Socialisation will move entirely online where you meet up on VR Chat or whatever is popular at the time. Many people will almost never leave their house.
This is... demonstrably untrue? People who work from home generally aren't house-bound, they will still go to the coffee shop, the local park, local stores, meetups, pubs, bars, etc.
Sure, if you live in a very amenity-poor area WFH may in fact be quite isolating - but if anything that reinforces the main thrust of the argument: live in a city where there are things to do other than working and hanging out with coworkers!
India really struggles in this regard. We don’t have a widespread pub/bar culture so everyone meets out on the streets…just knots of people sitting on bikes and chatting with each other.
This is traffic nuisance but also makes the streets relatively safe (on average).
I just wish a “third place” culture would spontaneously arise if only to decongest the roads.
I think this is right. I'm married with kids and have little desire to go to an office. It was indeed different when I Was younger -- I didn't cook at home as much so enjoyed office lunches with coworkers, I lived in a smaller apartment which was easier to find closer to work, etc.
It occurs that shows including "Call my agent", "The Newsroom", and to some extent "Madam Secretary" depict the better version of office life (particularly for young people) pretty well.
I'm someone who entered the workforce fully, 100% remote (ignoring jobs I had as a teenager anyway) at 19 and I couldn't disagree more.
I actually have (and especially back then, had) a life outside of work believe it or not, and the thought of all of my social interactions (especially back then) being tied to the office sounds absolutely disgusting and completely dystopian.
I don't particularly care for anyone in my company or any of my past ones bar 1 or 2 people, and I much prefer keeping it that way, where my work life is a completely separate universe to anything even resembling my personal life.
I work for a big corp with a big grad intake. We are RTO 4 days a week and I think its great, lots of young people working together, going out after work. I feel kinda sad for those at home.
Cool. I WFH and so does my wife so I get to spend more time with my favorite person. My kids' school is a very short drive so I get to see them 5 minutes after I get off work. I guess I no longer get the appeal of going out after work with young people.
I think the assumptions many are making incorrectly is that the workplace is the center of one's social life. This is truly the triumph of a bizarro and dreary corporate capitalist individualism and an indictment of the state of our families and communities. Certainly, the workplace is a part of our social lives, but the argument that WFH leads to isolation should lead the arguer to reflect on what is wrong with the way he is living his life rather than condemn what I think is a welcome change. IMO, remote work can amortize the affects of market changes so that people aren't forced to uproot their lives to find work. They can work in the vicinity of their children. They can save time by avoiding commutes. All of this seems to contribute to the formation of community because it reduces social churn. Once communities form, the other aspects of community life can come into existence that open up the possibilities that are attributed to the workplace but that are not proper to it. The notion that you cannot make friends or find a spouse or whatever without the workplace or corporation being the social organizing principle is truly horrifying. This echos the WEF's ideas of how social life ought to be organized. I think that remote work will also cause a redistribution of other kinds of labor that office workers have long benefited from (like the restaurant industry). All of this seems to enable better social conditions.
Most people have a 40 hour/week contract and it would be a shame to spend that in solitary confinement.
You can go to the office, play ping-pong, rant about your boss, flirt with coworkers and then "go home" and socialize some more (if you want that.) It's not either-or.
I've found that if you spend all time together at home, at the end of the day, you have nothing to talk about with whomever you happen to live with.
It's often frowned upon to make romantic arrangements with workmates. But the rest, sure. I guess some new social construct will be needed. Like in the old days - balls, cotillions, clubs?
> A young person just starting out or at least earlier on in their career doesn't really have the opportunity to make friends, meet people (romantically), or otherwise make social connections while working from home.
Oh, we Europeans have no problem with that. The difference we have is that we have employee protection laws that put a hard cap on working hours to 48h a week on average over a year (with some rare exceptions, usually for crews of offshore rigs, boats, public health/safety, military and private security) - and that this stuff gets audited, especially on complaints. And when the government looks at a company, they audit everything, not just the person who complained...
I don’t really understand how that’s at all relevant. The point is that social connections are more difficult with remote work irrespective of how many hours you’re working.
When you have to work 60h+ weeks, you're way too exhausted in the evening to do anything social, and you'll lose the weekend to barely recovering. That forces many people to look for companionship in their coworkers.
I don’t work 60+ hour weeks, I work an entirely respectable number of hours. I don’t in any way feel “forced” to look for companionship with my coworkers, I want to, they’re nice people. And remote work makes it harder.
Human civilization existed without office culture for many millennia, and we managed to socialize and reproduce just fine. Even in modern times a very tiny percentage of people in the world are white collar office workers, and the rest somehow don't have any of the problems you mention. Heck I'm willing to wager that people who don't have these kinds of office jobs do better socially and romantically than those sitting behind a desk all day.
