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Comment by Bjorkbat | Hacker News Reader

I would argue that at the least it's a little absurd that we're resorting to corporate housing and "work-dorms" for lack of a better term when we could just simply shift more work to small and mid-size cities. Get your short commute, live in an actual house.

I mean, it's kind of silly to imagine a small cluster of Google employees in a metro of approximately 200,000 people, but at some point it has to sound less silly than some of the proposed ways of fitting more people into a metro with 3x-5x rent prices.

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There is but one risk which USA has seen in the past. When the company owns your living space, there is even stronger pressure on you to stay there, be productive and accept lower wages. When it also owns your food source, the threat is even greater. The result would be replacement of wages with "benefits" such as living. Technical indentured servitude also known as soft slavery. Technically you could move, except you cannot ever possibly afford to.

Additional stress would be put on people not in this arrangement as they would potentially have to spend more money to get at the same level. (Albeit there could be less pressure in the housing market.)

The next step in this slippery slope would be inheritance. Since company owns everything, your kids inherit little. Either that, or they inherit a position... Welcome to actual indentured servitude again. Company branded kids straight out of a few known dystopias.

Mostly because moving is a special kind of hell, especially with kids. Communities cannot form either way.

Some people like it, they're a minority though as far as I know.

...the thing about WeWork, however, is that you don't work for them, they work for you. Corporate housing was also done a lot in the post-WW2 reindustrialization of Europe. But coupled with strong tenant protections, it's not such a destructive force at the end of the day. A corporate couldn't kick you out of corporate housing just because you no longer worked there.

All of this is fine until collusion...

With current US competition protections a cartel likely will happen a few times or more. Since there is "competition" between companies, even if all of them are doing the same thing.

>...the thing about WeWork, however, is that you don't work for them, they work for you.

Give it time. Besides, when there's as large a dependency as "I get my livelihood through the services they offer" it might as well be the other way around, as one can't just drop them that easily.

Golden Handcuffs

> I would argue that at the least it's a little absurd that we're resorting to corporate housing and "work-dorms" for lack of a better term when we could just simply shift more work to small and mid-size cities. Get your short commute, live in an actual house.

the problem is workplace choice. I can walk from my house to Broadcom, EMC, drobo, Palo Alto Networks, Dell, citrix, and hundreds of tiny tech companies. 10 minutes in an uber takes me to google, facebook, linkedin, etc, etc,...

This means that switching jobs has a much lower cost.

The problem with small towns is that each one is only going to support one big employer. You often must move next time you want a new job.

My favored solution is to simply upzone near train stops. I'd be happy to abide by a rule that I couldn't own a car in the city if you would sell me a small condo without parking near a train station. (I don't have a car as-is, for that matter, though this will likely change once uber stops dumping)

It would be handy if people could work from wherever they liked.

Maybe we could build a large system that allowed rapid communication. We could include a software layer, so that not just verbal communication could happen, but even information in all sorts of other formats.

We could call it the GlobalSys. Then commutes would stop being a problem.

I've been working from home, wherever I wanted that to be, since 2011. All of this nonsense could be avoided by simply optimizing for asynchronous cooperation via the internet.

We could also avoid some of the approximately 12% of total energy usage devoted to maintaining office space, and some of the 10%+ of urban land usage taken up by offices and parking. That's all leaving aside the approximately 50%+ of all driving miles done for commuting purposes, the maintenance and manufacturing of automobiles for commuting, etc.

Personally, I am a lot less effective when I work from home. I need the social pressure of being in the office around other people that are working to stay focused.

But I've hired some incredible people that I totally wouldn't be able to afford in person who were able to be pretty effective working remote. I have worked with people who are absolute monsters when you leave them alone at home with a problem. Certainly, some people are far more effective working remote than working in the office. I'm just not one of them. In my experience... I am in the majority here.

(interestingly, I think I'm a better manager when managing remote than managing in person, the opposite of my effectiveness as an individual contributor. though I think that might also have had something to do with the sort of people I've managed.)

Right now, the market values people willing to go into an office who are able to communicate well face to face and get work done in that context a lot more than the market values people who are able to make themselves effective while working remote, though, and I think that's in part due to the preponderance of people who are more effective workers when they are physically near other workers? But... certainly part of that is that management is behind the times.

I don't think that management is behind the times. I think that the fundamental problem is that management has no real way to value individual contribution, and thus no way to pay people according to their value, rather than tradition, random guessing, or whatever their peers make. It's easy with salespeople, which is why so many work independently. It's much, much harder with an engineer or product designer.

Remote work requires better ability to follow the money through the process and that kind of close accounting is very threatening to a lot of people.

I also think that if we invested similar sums of money to what we spend on office space instead on collaboration technology, you'd see the effectiveness differential between remote and onsite work go down substantially.

The commutes would stop being a problem for what is still a minority of workers. If you are in manufacturing, retail, construction, food service, etc. telecommuting is just not an option.

> Broadcom, EMC, drobo, Palo Alto Networks, Dell, citrix, and hundreds of tiny tech companies.

> google, facebook, linkedin, etc

Any of those qualify? That's what the parent post was talking about, and that's about a million people in the bay area alone that could skip a commute.

I did say some. The whole point is, for anyone who can telecommute, they should. As a matter of not just personal freedom but social responsibility.

I think the assumption is that these people can afford to live closer to where they work because of the reduced housing demand.

We just need better city planning. It used to be that the core of the city was stores, then came a ring of expensive apartments then industry then suburbs.

That division doesn’t really make sense now that industry isn’t really polluting and people are buying much of their things online.

This is an interesting insight.

Yes, as industry has changed and retail has changed, city layouts should change too. It’s not just suburban malls that are affect by changing retail.

>some point it has to sound less silly than some of the proposed ways of fitting more people into a metro with 3x-5x rent prices.

This ignores the reality that a lot of people want to live in urban areas

I agree that the way forward has to lie in companies being more willing to locate job opportunities where people are, rather than expecting people to relocate to where companies are willing to provide job opportunities to. It's completely silly that such a big part of the value being created by clusters of economic activity, such as large corporates, startup clusters etc, should end up in the pockets of landlords who happen to own real estate there, plus generating inefficiencies like traffic congestion etc.

Interesting use of the phrase “just simply“.

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