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Comment by IAmGraydon | Hacker News Reader

I’m a believer in reversion to the mean, and I think that’s what we will see with the office market and work from home. The technology to work from home existed before the pandemic. Why didn’t it take off before the pandemic if it works so well? We didn’t suddenly discover a new technology here. The use of that technology was precipitated by a transient force, and when that force is removed completely, things will return to the previous equilibrium. It will take years for the mentality to revert, however.

That’s my take. Smart investors will acquire office properties during this time.

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> Why didn’t it take off before the pandemic if it works so well? We didn’t suddenly discover a new technology here. The use of that technology was precipitated by a transient force, and when that force is removed completely, things will return to the previous equilibrium.

Not necessarily. It's entirely possible that working from home has always been better but that there was enough friction preventing a move in that direction that it didn't happen until covid forced it to. If that's the case, then we don't expect a reversion because the friction preventing the initial adoption is gone.

Well some of that is also regional, as the "forced" was a region by region, and job by job type of impact.

For me, my employer only had about 3 mo's collectively from 2019 to 2022 where full time work from home was even an option, and zero months where it was required and the offices where shut down.

I think there is a perception that all employers, everywhere were required to go full time work from home, that simply is not the reality

A lot of companies/managers couldn't conceive of how to run a business remotely before the pandemic. There were a few that were doing it, but lots of people had beliefs that caused them to not be able to see how it was possible. Due to the pandemic everyone had to experience how to do it, so the business world got a management crash-course in it. That dropped a whole lot of mental barriers.

I am not entirely convinced WFH will stay the norm either. Certainly more normal, but I think the HN crowd might be uniquely positioned to exploit the situation. Your average office worker doesn't usually have the agency to push back on office policies at the best of times, and you already see plenty of pull back into the office.

The other part of the equation is the more common hybrid arrangement. If you still have to come into the office twice a week you get a similar dynamic to traditional in-office work.

I think we are currently underestimating the desire to get back to the status quo and overestimating our leverage long term. Right now is a very unique time, sure to have lasting impacts, but I don't think it will stay like this.

Covid is basically over and it is still like this. It will probably stay more like this than it will revert. Global paradigm shifts don't usually revert.

The less number of days workers go into the office, the less companies can justify renting the space and paying for the supplies. I think companies will begin to either go 100% remote except for on location workers that have to be there such as data center people, and others will try to go 100% back to office, and the latter will lose because the economic incentives are stacked against them. Increased cost, including a premium on talent willing to commute, make companies that do this less competitive. Unless you believe the water cooler has some property that boosts productivity significantly, in which case you're right. But I doubt it.

I wonder sometimes if the future of office work is something like a Star Trek Holodeck. Most people won't have one at home and will commute to a local remote work office used by people working for various employers.

I don't know where you live but covid is not over here.

Not here, either: Folks are still getting it and folks are still dying from it. We simply don't have as many restrictions right now - though we are getting those again. Yesterday, some places in California are mandating masks again and I still have to prove I'm Covid-free to visit family in the US, and it doesn't matter than I'm a citizen.

>Not here, either: Folks are still getting it and folks are still dying from it.

If that's how you measure it, then covid will NEVER be over (People are still dying from flu every year)

Pandemic is over. COVID19 is never leaving us.

It will never be over. We just have to live with it and move on with our lives.

And I shall, but it turns out my reality isn't the only reality.

So the disease isn't over. And I hate to break it to you, in case it isn't obvious by now, it never will be.

But the panic and response are over, the public has accepted it as a part of the world now, the world is just the world and life is just life again.

I am well aware of the long term outlook of it all. I am fully vaxed, living life as I always used to, and I am all for returning to normal now that we have done all we can with vaccinations. But society globally is still changing and being impacted very seriously by the pandemic and will be for years yet.

Keep in mind that both places, people and policies change state to state, country to country. You are talking like your experience is the only possible one. Where I live is seeing the most deaths it had the entire pandemic, we have still removed all restrictions but that doesn't stop people changing their behavior. Some places are still having lockdowns. Some borders remain shut. You get the idea.

I actually worked for a company pre-pandemic that had this epiphany and almost went fully remote just based on cost. The reason they didn't was because there were people who couldn't work from home for family reasons and some who didn't want to.

We may find that being able to work remotely becomes a commodity the employee can offer the employer. As it's certainly still true that working from home doesn't fit everyone and we still haven't solved that I don't think. Renters can't build on an office they don't have for one example, and I don't think it's reasonable to expect an employee to work from their living room. But maybe co-working spaces will become more popular for the edge cases.

I think co working spaces are going to become popular, but they'll likely get rolled into the hospitality industry. I doubt you'll see pay by the month office spaces, what's probably more likely is bring your own laptop cyber cafe style settings that provide food or drinks.

When the "can you work from home" question gets a high enough incidence of "yes" answers, you'll see diminishing returns on renting office spaces. People that can't answer "yes" to that question will be priced out of the market.

One factor I don't see brought up often: many organisations can't go back now. They've hired too many people to fit.

The issue isn't so much work from home, which is not the ideal working arrangement for all, it's the commute to a central location. What has happened is people have realised the essential stupidity of it.

The future will be much more mixed and more sensible. Some people will work from home and some people will work in offices, but those offices will be much closer to where people live and people who need to work together will tend to live close by, or at least have the opportunity to. Essentially we'll see a lot more smaller offices in the suburbs.

You couldn't design a worse system of everyone having to commute to a central location, with infrastructure that is always overloaded at rush hour and underused the rest of the time.

The key to that arrangement surviving has been that the impact is all on workers and the convenience payoff has been for employers. The pandemic opened people's eyes and they're not going back.

I hope you are right, but I think America has hamstrung itself already with it's historically terrible zoning bylaws. Rather than end up with office parks again, to enable this type of arrangemen you need better public transit and zoning that allows a bit of commercial intergration into suburbs, so that never going into the city is an attractive lifestyle choice and as workable as it can be.

I live in a suburban desert, and if I had to work at a sattelite near here, I wouldn't be unable to do a lot of things I currently do during the week because it just isn't here.

Wearing my Tinfoil Hat: I see a looming, hypnotically-self-induced recession, manufactured precisely so that workers (incl. those who tend to hang on HN) feel more insecure and thus feel less empowered to say "No" to back-to-the-office mandates, thereby rescuing the rent-seeking classes from a Covid hangover. The timing is just too convenient...

(Only half joking...)

A potential recession is brewing in the news and likely to take some of the wind out of employees feeling of agency and security. Maybe employers use that to pull people back into the office or maybe it turns out to be the perfect opportunity to ditch their rentals.

IMO the hybrid arrangement is because office leases tend to be long term commitments. Since it is already a sunk cost in a sense the hybrid model has value right now.

I just can't see that the hybrid model is the long term equilibrium. The office either has a competitive advantage or it is a liability that can be trimmed in cost cutting measures. Long term, firms will either push the edge of the competitive advantage of the office back to everyone going to the office full time or cut the cost completely. Maybe it even depends on the department within the firm or across firms but the hybrid model is just nonsense to me. A cascade of punting a decision down the road so leadership doesn't have to really decide right now while we are all stuck in these pre-2020 commercial leases anyway.

That's not what "reversion to the mean" means.

It is specifically a concept tied to repeated observations from a -random- process. That is, a process in which the values fluctuation over time (due to inherent randomness), but the -fundamentals- of the process (and its probability distribution) remain fixed -- along with its mean value.

What they're saying here is that WFH has caused a seismic shift -- and hence, a drastic change in the fundamentals of the process. Their whole point is that we're seeing different valuations in 2022 than in early 2020, it's not due random fluctuation -- its because the fundamentals of the process have changed -- along with its mean.

By definition, "reversion to the mean" only applies if ... the mean is fixed.

respectfully disagree. knowledge, just like innovation cannot be reverted. it hadn't taken off before the pandemic since we were living under a purposefully driven illusion of the necessity of office work.

just like food delivery, employers, just like workers now have the knowledge that wfh works. thus workers will always have the leverage of having competitive companies that know it does offering it.

That's one take, it's not an unreasonable one.

The internet was always going to enable people to perform information work remotely. It was all a matter of the process and how long it was going to take. Covid accelerated it, but it was already happening. There was no equilibrium before, just a lot of resistance and legacy social structure keeping the inertia going. With covid, that resistance was shown to be mostly substanceless, and now the inertia is preventing going back. In the end, there will be a premium paid on any work that requires someone to be at a specific location, and jobs that don't require it to be able to do the job itself won't pay that premium.

That's my take. It's basically the opposite of yours. I would not invest in office properties.

I think the opposite. Currently there is very little remote work ecosystem, but there is a huge office ecosystem. With remote being now a very real option for so many people, businesses that facilitate remote work will spring up (helping people relocate, coworking, help with foreign workers, payments etc). Traveling hasn't even resumed, and as the pandemic is removed and the war ends, people will have more options to reconsinder where they want to live.

Remote is also naturally self-reinforcing because partial-remote degrades the value of offices.

Totally agree. It will be a few years until things really shake out and we know the actual long term trends.

Nothing fundamental changed between 2019 and today.

> Why didn’t it take off before the pandemic if it works so well?

Because hopeless middle managers (toxin or cancer? [1]) like their empire to be outside their office doors in cubicles. Hopefully the past few years has started to root out these sociopaths and make their incapability clearer both up and down the management chain.

[1]: https://www.slideshare.net/bcantrill/surge2013/2-Software_En...

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