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Comment by roflc0ptic | Hacker News Reader

This article really isn't about remote work writ large, it's about websites/organizations that provide platforms for individuals to sell services to consumers. The fact that you can make popular workout videos from your home is orthogonal to the behavior of consumers on the Peloton platform.

It's an interesting and important observation that good communicators win disproportionately as telecommunications get better - e.g. because recorded music is a thing, as a songwriter/guitarist I'm competing with Frank Zappa for mindshare. But this just isn't about remote work. Feel like I got clickbaited.

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The winners of remote work are those whose services are scalable, and those who excel at it. The content and conclusion was also not what I was expecting, but you can see that it's a completely valid title if you allow yourself to see it from a different perspective.

> are those whose services are scalable

Exactly! I am surprised so few people here see that.

It is a pattern that happened with other technologies before. Music recording allowed some pop stars to become millionaires while most musicians lost income. Movies allowed some actors to get rich while most actors lost public. Industrial manufacturing (e.g. woodworking, textiles, tanning) made some industries big while millions of artisans lost market. Franchised merchant stores (e.g: Tower Records, Toys'R Us, WallMart) destroyed thousands of small merchants.

The economist J. Schumpeter had a name for this: "creative destruction".

The article specifically mentions programmers as well...

Lower floor because a global workforce increases supply of programmers available to the western market.

Higher ceiling because every company is now competing for the top people, who are in limited supply and know how to get top compensation.

So yes, I do think this applies to remote work in general.

It mentions programmers without making any particular claims about it; they don’t actually demonstrate any losers. Outsourcing to India has been a thing for many years, and US companies appear to have every incentive to take advantage of it, but somehow they keep paying pleasantly high wages to Americans.

It's got to be clickbait. If there are winners, then how many workers are losing by working remotely? It seems obvious that the vast majority of people win big by not being forced to commute into a full day at an office where they would rather not be.

To use an example from the parent post, local, cyclist spin trainers are losing, since people are simply using the Pelaton trainers at home, rather than going to an "in person" spin class. The local, small time trainer can't compete with a celebrity/model trainer. Similar to how TV and movies hurt local theatres. In the end, it is more efficient, but there are "losers".

I'm not convinced a lot of these trends stick post-COVID. A lot of people like the in-person part of the spin class and probably would prefer it to the highly-paid video pro.

That said, behaviors will have changed for a lot of things over the course of a couple of years. People have developed new habits. Not all of that--including going into an office five days a week in many cases--are going to just reset.

The same principles that apply to remote work apply here.

Why would I want to drive 10-15 minutes, park, change and all that for a 30 or 60 minute spin class when I can take that same class in my garage or living room.

Because you want to get out of the house and socialize with people as well as get some exercise. Now some of the same logic does apply to people wanting to get back into office. But I doubt it's true to the same degree and most people have more than a 10-15 minute commute.

While I have no personal interest in gyms or exercise classes, they are social for many people.

There's a difference between social interaction because you want it and working. I work from home and use the gym and martial as (non-drinking) social time during the week.

because then you wouldn't need a spin bike in your garage or living room

Because some people like to have separation of concerns in their life. I don't necessarily want to have my home be where I workout and where I work. Especially given that I live in a small studio. I do classes 1x a week still, and being in a room, 15 minutes down the street, surrounded by people in the same mindset helps me focus on that task.

This doesn't fit into everyone's wants and needs...but just because you can't fathom why YOU would want to do something doesn't mean there isn't a completely valid reason for those around you.

I don't know about you but many of us were remote for many many years before Covid.

I don't see this mentioned enough but the fact remains: when you work from home you also live at work. It's a two-edged sword. Its hard to unplug when you sleep next to your desk.

Sometimes I go to the store, just to leave work/home. A gym sounds nice too, just to go somewhere else.

Post-Covid, I tend to agree. If people continue to work from home, rather than in an office, then the in-person spin class and other in-person activities could actually surge in popularity, since people will want more in-person interaction.

What reason do we have to believe that there will be a point in the future with less COVID risk than there is today? By what mechanism will that arise?

Vaccination numbers still have a lot of room to grow, the virus may mutate into something that has a lower kill rate, the vaccine efficacy will likely improve, etc...

Well, and at some point, even relatively cautious rational people go: "I'm not permanently curtailing my activities." I live in a deep blue state and, while you see masks, life has returned to normal in a lot of respects.

My (limited!) understanding is that mutations that make pathogens more contagious but less fatal are evolutionarily advantageous, so to the degree we can talk about Covid-19 having “self-interest,” becoming ever closer to Bad Case of Flu is within it.

In the long term this evolutionary pressure is present, however, it's not an iron law - as I understand, in addition to becoming more transmissible, COVID variants have become a bit more fatal over time.

I've seen this as well. I feel like maybe worst case scenario is a virus that is silent, contagious, and eventually deadly, and can stick around long enough to infect others.

Mass vaccination and exposure. The hope is that our immune systems will collectively get used to it, and its evolution will be constrained enough that, while it will continue to mutate, our immune systems will continue to have a "good enough" answer to it that we avoid the cytokine storm problem that's killing people.

At the rate things are going it would take decades to get everyone exposed, but much less time than that to lose natural immunity.

The only Americans who might be vaccinated in the future but aren’t vaccinated today are children under 12. The FDA is in no hurry on this because it doesn’t make much difference anyway (minimal vaccine risks loom larger next to minimal COVID risk).

I think this is a slightly-too-bleak-for-the-evidence take, because it's not clear how long immune defense persists. COVID antibodies tend to go away kind of quickly, but there are (so I hear) other mechanisms of defense which may persist longer.

Things could of course be much worse - it's possible that the COVID molecule is somehow unusually well situated for immune escape and length of immunity won't matter that much; those of us in countries that can afford it will get our semi-annual microchip infusion with the latest flavors.

Pelaton trainers, on average, are far superior to in-person instructors. The experience is better in-home and less time is in used travelling and changing. My equipment. My home. Die hard educated professional leading the class. The only in-person that comes close runs about $300-500 a month.

It's not all about impersonal efficiency for many people.

Just want to note that pre-COVID, not many people would even have considered not-in-person equivalents to things that they thought they preferred in-person. When I say "not even considered", in many cases I mean "were not even aware they existed".

It might be that their pre-COVID apparent preferences remain their actual preference post-COVID, but I would not take that for granted.

There's also the people using spin class trainers in Apple+ that wouldn't ordinarily use one...it's not a zero sum game. (I have it playing the the background as I ride my roadbike, it provides enthusiasm even if the effort doesn't line up with the road.)

how many workers are losing by working remotely

I think the big losers are the service workers that provided services for all of those office employees: coffee shop workers, restaurants, drycleaners, caterers that provided employee lunches, cleaning people, etc.

A Starbucks, a drycleaner and 2 or 3 restaurants that were in my former office building have shut down permanently. My company stopped stocking snacks and catering lunches 3 days a week, and presumably they or the building have cut back on cleaning as well as general building maintenance staff.

Some of those jobs will come back when (if) we return to in-office work, but since it will probably be part time in-office work, not all of those jobs will be back.

Food trucks seem to be doing pretty well - when employees dispersed, they did too. I don't go into the city much since I don't go to the office, but now I visit the same food trucks in my own town and they seem to be pretty busy.

You’re exactly correct here. Our complex isn’t in the greatest area, but it sure was nice to have a dry cleaner right across the street. But in our complex we had a cafeteria and two satellite snack places. They are closed until our building hits a % of capacity as stated in their contract. I feel like there is a big opportunity for food trucks. Maybe use those empty mall parking lots and set up some times for people to grab food, set up outdoor dining.

Yeah, there are a lot of businesses that have gone under because they were geared to serving office workers. Out here in Silicon Valley, a Panera-esque chain called Specialty’s just shut down completely within a couple months after offices closed; most of their locations were only open Monday through Friday for breakfast and lunch. Downtown San Jose hasn’t been completely decimated, but I’m pretty sure there are a lot of places that aren’t coming back.

(N.B.: There is one Specialty’s location that has re-opened, near Moffett in Mountain View; apparently the family that started the chain decades ago bought the assets, and their one original location, back.)

I think in general you'll just see a lot of those restaurants and businesses that provide services to office employees move to where they can provide services to remote employees. Service industry businesses generally follow people and if people aren't going downtown everyday and instead hanging around the suburbs, then you'll likely see more starbucks etc in the suburbs serving that crowd.

My town already had one Starbucks before the pandemic and still has one Starbucks after the pandemic -- moving people to work from home doesn't change the economics of running a service business like a coffee shop or restaurant. My office building had 25 floors, and probably over 1000 people worked there. That's a lot of foot traffic, probably more than my small downtown sees in a day.

When I work from home I just make coffee or lunch at home - I don't drive down to the strip mall for lunch. But when I go to the office, I eat lunch out with coworkers, and my bus drops me off right in front of the Starbucks so it's easy to stop in for coffee.

I doubt that the employees that the lost jobs from the businesses that served offices were all just displaced to the suburbs, but if you have a reference for that, I'd like to see it.

It will take time for businesses to follow the workers. At the very least I would imagine the distribution of such businesses won't fully adjust until after the pandemic is over.

I think it is too early to say.

And given the shortages in servering labor, we may see a shift in the jobs people have as well.

Going out of business isn't the same as losing at working from home. Going out of business is usually not working.

Otherwise this article would just be the fairly obvious statement that people who kept their jobs are "winners" over those who lost their jobs.

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