Is remote work bad for the economy?
fractional.work
fractional.work
The blacksmiths in the horse and buggy days saw demand for their services fall when time and technologies changed. The coal miners began losing their jobs when we realized that coal as fuel was more harmful than it was beneficial. History is full of valid jobs which later became unneeded or "invalid".
Remote work can increase efficiency by eliminating artificial inefficiencies. Not having to drive to work reduces fuel consumption and lengthens the time between car repairs or replacement. This obviously is a financial loss for the economy because it shifts the balance back from money to time. The same goes for office space: less office space need reduces demand which reduces rents (and amount of space leased). However, that cost can be offset some as home working can increase demand for larger homes. Even so, a slightly larger home is still probably less cost than a commercial space which goes unused for 12+ hours per day.
It smells like much of this anti-remote-work conversation (not TFA, but the topic in general) is because the people accustomed to being in charge have a fear of losing control. The manager who rules by force or threat has much to fear of subordinates who are out of sight. However, the manager (leader) who works together with a group of people toward a common goal has little to fear. Some companies operate very successfully even when management cannot observe the workers. The alarms and complaints we hear are almost certainly from the bad group. Eventually that group will be like the dinosaurs.
it's not, because the money that was otherwise spent (wasted) can now be deployed else where.
Otherwise, why not increase the GDP and economy, by periodically just breaking every window? The replacement is gonna cause huge growth!
.. Now if people were saving any money previously spent on commuting and eating out, then that would reduce GDP expenditure. The high levels of inflation suggest this isn't the case.
They could get away with this because they had a captive group which was previously forced to be in that location with relatively few options.
This may depend on your area but this hasn’t been my experience. I used to commute into downtown Portland for work and we had a great selection of options for lunch and happy hours, a plethora of food cart options which were great and affordable, and a number of decent bars where you could meet a friend for drinks afterwards.
Now I work from home in the suburbs and, while I wouldn’t trade being remote for anything, the food options here mostly consist of bland fast food and chain restaurants. One of the things I miss the most is grabbing a decent lunch with a coworker and breaking up the monotony a bit.
This argument of expense rerouting is a bit flawed. Suppose working from home saves one some money that they spend elsewhere. Working from the office they spend that money on fuel, indirectly spend on road maintenance, directly spend on vehicle maintenance where the shop in turn spends on parts and tools and so on. The money one spends circulates in the economy much longer and reaches more actors until it eventually falls back into original pocket. Working from home then they buy more items that have been manufactured in China, spend eating out where restaurants pay mostly wages and farmers, making the chain much shorter.
There are different economic health considerations for different spending habits. While not exactly a loss it's not entirely equal too.
Wasting time fixing stuff that didn't need to be broken is intrinsically bad for the economy, but it's disruptive to suddenly have your now-pointless job taken away.
Of course, when you look at just the flow of the goods and labour, the organization of a national economy in general seems highly, uh, round-about — the money serves as the main controlling/directing mechanism so without it in the picture things look pretty funky.
yes, this holds up when there is something else to do, which is not always the case. I remember during the great recession, building contractors in Florida were praying for a hurricane to put them back to work. There was absolutely no other work to be found.
If we have 10% fewer people commuting during work hours, then traffic might move twice as efficiently. Of course, that uses less fuel, which is bad for the economy /s
that's a total assumption being made. Who knows how the money from an office worker's commute gets dispersed. It's likely too difficult to track exactly. And it's irrelevant to the person how this dispersion happens or why.
All they need to care about is that they've eliminated a source of inefficiency, and thus have extra money for either investment or different consumption.
...or prices rise to balance out the extra money.
It's clear that the pointless burning of fossil fuels didn't satisfy any human need. Then the question becomes: is the distribution of currency caused by the buying and burning of the fuels preferable to the alternative distribution if the currency had been spent elsewhere? If it is preferable, does that offset the waste of fuel for no purpose except redistributing currency?
Any time I hear these kinds of reasonings the question comes to mind: if some distributions of currency are preferable to others, and we know what such distributions look like, why not let the government do the distribution directly?
That sentence would have a different meaning if the conclusitory (looking for real word here) word "pointless" was not there.
Abundant reliable on-demand energy has enormously improved the human condition. I'm also glad the Dutch no longer dig up peat bogs for dirty fuel.
Because this presumes that the people in government will do what is preferable to the masses. My conception of government is that of a tool or weapon that various powers vie for control over. Why should I expect benevolence from such?
Yeah, but ... how much of it was pointless? Who decides if a use-case is pointless? You? Me? The government?
It's arguable whether all of this is needed everywhere in the world, to such a degree as is presently done.
In the cities, the transportation needs of most folks can be covered by public transportation (depending on the country, admittedly) - it is more efficient, more green and also results in fewer traffic jams.
Furthermore it scales up and down better: whether at 50% or 80% of capacity it will do its scheduled route, as opposed to all of those people otherwise needing cars and parking spaces for those and so on, which isn't always entirely feasible in densely populated cities.
I guess it's just a different take on things, but if there's commute, we might as well make it more efficient, as opposed to spending 1-2 hours per day in traffic, which is essentially wasted time. Or not have the commute altogether.
In more rural areas or many places in the US as opposed to EU it's a slightly different story.
I looked up and wrote up my “what if I tried to commute on public transit to make a 9AM meeting?”
It’s ugly to the point where no one would voluntarily choose it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31723197
The best way to beat traffic right now without having to wait for anybody else to change is to get a motorcycle - if the climate where you live permits.
The rest... pure speculation from poster's own limited view, the world is more complex than 'I stay home so just order more stuff from China', definitely not true for me. I can chip in mine - ie during travel restrictions forced to buy in more expensive smaller local shops for whole family. One heck of help for local economy. Spending vacations much closer, meaning tons of money flow back to local economy. Having time to plan and do some home repairs with local workforce.
And so on, random tiny examples have little significance in hyper complex situation that is called reality.
I can get behind the idea that remote work is not as effective especially when forming a new team or assimilating new team members. However the thing that the ‘remote work is bad’ crowd get wrong is the distribution of collaborative work and deep individual work.
My experience is that in person collaborative synchronization is needed far less than even once a week. In person touch points with a white board and plenty of getting to know each other as humans time is super valuable… and in my opinion 2-4 times a year in needed, not 3-5 days per week.
In my opinion IRL is more needed for negotiation, handling uncertainty, new team formation, business development, etc.
Starting wars to fuel arms industry worked just fine so far.
But as mentioned that's the taxpayer getting fleeced, not the broken window fallacy.
Rinse and repeat every time we get a new mayor. It's a tried and tested way of legally shoveling public taxpayer money into well connected private pockets.
I've seen similar corruption scandals in Western Europe as well, since the owners of construction companies and city leaders tend to not be strangers to one another, so I don't expect China to be any different here.
The city I'm in now puts everything in the area between the streets and the sidewalks. I don't have a sidewalk yet because there are some thing that will be going in next summer.
Not neccessarily, people have less costs now, so some people can now just choose to work less - which would shrink the economy.
that's good - they're able to recover some of their time. Just because this "own time" doesn't count towards official GDP, doesn't mean it isn't an improvement.
Lower costs could have other consequences, other than people working less: general inflation; inflating rents/property prices; lower salaries for the same job; longer working hours (officially or not)
I think what you mention is one possible effect, but there are many and it is not clear which one dominates.
I believe by classical Keynesian theory that would indeed create economic growth?
For example if an oil tanker sinks you should be able to calculate the loss of value the environmental damage represents as well as the additional value that replacing that ship represents.
Can't remember much beyond that though.
Whether that's good or bad is another question, as is the question of whether it even is happening or not.
I understand arguments about people not eating business lunch near the office. Although it looks like home delivery and extra home office snacks, coffee, etc. would also cause spend, just in different areas as before.
Additionally, in places where the state pays for healthcare, having less stressed workers, having less traffic accidents (I assume, since less commutes) might overall decrease the amount of money spent on health and save some money for the state too.
It is not an easy thing to model IMO.
Plus I can offer a High COL rate, Mid COL rate, and Low COL rate, and recruit talent from all over. Yeah my boy doing node.js in Des Moines or Nashville might not be as good as the shit-hot MIT grade in NYC, but I can pay him 60% less, and he's 80% as good as that MIT kid.
Problem is you gotta re-tool and be equipped for that kind of management, and the Boomer / old Gen-X crowd running the show isn't.
Omg this is genius! Does Jerome Powell know about this?!
* removing an outlet for socializing for people that are new to the area / country and don’t have friends.
* lack of face to face team bonding for new employees.
* lack of personal social contact for an activity we typically spend 1/3 of our day on.
* reduced ability to learn by absorbing what happens around oneself.
* higher competition for junior and mid-career positions from other countries.
New employees, particularly at the beginning of their careers are disproportionately negatively affected by remote work. And while many of the disadvantages I’ve mentioned above can be mitigated, remote work nudges all these aspects towards the negative. These nudges when applied at large scale add up.
Like anything, remote work has downsides which are often downplayed by those with an interest to gain an advantage for themselves.
If remote-first workers are able to stay at home, demand decreases. Prices drop. More early-career folk can actually afford to live in the city, including artists and not-developers, meaning more friendships and business relationships can bloom.
This means needing to substitute using a co-working space or local professional organizations for social time instead of the experience being automatically built into a job. Nonetheless, this is a useful sorting function so young professionals can select into the type of mentoring they want, instead of being forced into mentors-of-convenience.
The idea is to decouple "the company you work for" from "the place you work at" for everyone, including those who want to work in an office. Basically, coworking places everywhere. You sign a contract with the company. You either work from home, or find a coworking place where you rent a desk, or coordinate with some of your colleagues to rent a desk at the same place. You could make a different choice on different days.
> removing an outlet for socializing for people that are new to the area / country and don’t have friends
The coworking places would have quiet desks, and also rooms to chat, with sound isolation. Whenever you want to get social, you walk to the room, and socialize. You can meet people who work at the same company, or people who work at different companies. When you feel like working again, walk back to your desk.
> lack of face to face team bonding for new employees
People working at the same company could agree to spend one day in a week at the same coworking place. This could be flexible, like if the company has 1000 employees, but your team has 10, only those 10 people need to coordinate together.
> reduced ability to learn by absorbing what happens around oneself
Either coordinate with your colleagues, or share the screen remotely. I learned a few things by watching my colleagues do things on their computers in a different country.
> higher competition for junior and mid-career positions from other countries
Well, yes. More opportunities for someone means more competition for someone else. That said, many companies found out that hiring people from other countries has its own challenges, so you will always have an advantage of being local.
On the flip side, a former shop basically treated remote workers as if we were robots. Everything was about 'productivity'. One of the most inhumane places I've been.
Thanks for this comment - I think the economic point is spot on. I think the fear of losing control is a fair summary - unfortunately there is some evidence of a selection effect that might mean employers do have something to fear. https://www.fractional.work/p/showing-face-is-more-important...
A job isn't just a financial transaction. It's part of a person's identity and a social outlet. There is a career progression that they had planned on, they made choices about where to live and all kinds of other things based on this career they thought they were going to have.
So even if they are making the same money, they might be very unhappy and this unhappiness may end up being expressed in antisocial ways that end up costing society money. In the transition from wagons to cars, the increased productivity of cars papered over all these losses. Eventually everyone had to admit it was for the best.
I'm not sure remote work will do the same thing. We'll see, but in any planning it's important that we look at externalities and factors that are difficult to quantify because otherwise we risk running roughshod over what really matters to people.
This was arguably a major long-term mistake but I understand why mayors all over are panicking at the thought of that system crumbling, leaving them with all of the costs and half the downtown economy. I don’t think the entire country is turning into Detroit but it’s going to be bad anywhere that they can’t take a different path. Setting up some kind of larger tax zone to pay for at least the broader infrastructure costs could help but many suburbs were specifically designed to prevent that and few have enough slack in their budgets to help in any case.
It doesn’t have to be. For hundreds of years in a large part of the world, a job for most people was whatever the local lord told you to do. Before and during that, it was whatever you were born into. History does noy dictate the present or the future.
I'm not arguing against working from home, I think working from home is great. I'm arguing that to make progress we need to consider things like "now that so many people are working from home, what do we do to help the people who have been affected negatively by this change?" People like baristas, gas station attendants, auto mechanics, people whose livelihoods depended on everyone commuting.
In prior changes, a wave of economic growth took care of their needs. I'm not sure that's going to happen here, so I think we will need to be more intentional about it.
Thank God a massive amount of workers left the hospitality industry during the pandemic, never to return to that line of work. And they are much better off for it, because they would never have any good return for their work and effort in that industry. They got the shake up they needed to move sectors, and realized that any other sector will reward them better.
For some, sure. But certainly not for everybody.
Dinosaurs prospered for million years, you know? And only global scale mass extinction ended their reign.
So, though it appears we do are well on the road for such a huge collapse, I’m not sure your analogy was the best one here. :D
Look up the equivalent of the Department of Workforce Development for your state and find the employment and training section.
For example: https://dwd.wisconsin.gov/det/ and https://dwd.wisconsin.gov/dislocatedworker/
I think it's very unfortunate though that we have an economy where redundant pieces attempt not to disappear even if society is worse off. If people replaced by X technology could be assured that their QoL would not drop noticeably after being made redundant, we could likely forgo much unnecessary conflict between the worker class and upper class. Maybe it's impossible to do it while making sure the dislocated workers can be productive elsewhere, as I imagine many might not want nor be able to go through education again.
Depends for who. When a studio apartment in a big metro costs as much as a house in a small town, you need to shell out much more for a comparable level of comfort.
I know a couple who paid literally half per unit area just because they chose live a few kilometres from the city, not in it. They both work partially remotely, so ultimately the savings will be greater than the cost of transport, especially now that interest rates have gone up so much in this region of the world.
And that doesn't account for GP's immigrant case at all.
Can you expand on that (or link to more) ?
A cursory glance shows that the densest urban centers have the lowest carbon footprint. The suburbs are much higher, with affluent suburbs often being more than twice as high. Only some very rural areas approach levels as low as the cities.
As always through history, politicians and bankers plunder the country with taxes and interest. This wealth is then distributed by them, from the big cities, but that doesn't mean that the wealth originated there.
Concentration will always happen, and it will always happen to the benefit of rural areas, who will pay a premium in order to access the goods and services that are most efficiently produced in urban areas, in the same way that the high-density areas will pay a premium for the agricultural outputs of the rural areas.
Therefore, as far as this goes:
> The small town can exist without the big city, the reversal is not true.
This is only true for values of "exist" where small towns are reduced to primitive subsistence farming. If you live in a rural area in the US and enjoy modern comforts like an iPhone, you have the cities of Shenzhen, Los Angeles, and whatever your regional rail hub is to thank for getting it into your hands.
Agreed! Both cities and rural areas benefit from each other, but I'm not confused as to what structure is dependent on the other. Cities don't produce their basic necessities and cannot exist without the rural areas. My response was to the poster claiming that rural areas are dependent on cities, when it is clearly not so.
> Farming villages are not all producing their own fertilizer from scratch, nor are they all manufacturing combine harvesters from locally-sourced iron
This iron and fertilizer is certainly not coming from the cities, but I know each region will have their niche. That's why I separated agriculture and raw materials production in the post.
> And agricultural areas are dependent on transport hubs
These hubs can and do exist without the cities. More and more of these are constructed outside of the cities because they are an inconvenience to the city populace. I think we will see the world moving even more in that direction. Especially modern delivery shopping has completely revolutionized how goods are acquired in rural areas. People who had to go to town to get things they needed now order online and wait for the truck to come around. If they order fertilizer or a combine harvester, those goods have probably not been in any city on their way from producer to customer.
> Likewise, facilities for essential high-skill services (e.g. advanced medical care) cannot sustainably be housed in every hamlet in the world.
Yes, I know of whole cities that are centered around hospitals and health care. It's one of those high skilled services that just have to be very centralized to be effective.
> This is only true for values of "exist" where small towns are reduced to primitive subsistence farming.
Who said the small town has to be cut off from the world?
In the past you could certainly say that urban areas give back just as much or even more, when factories where concentrated in cities. Today the factories are not only in the cities.
Where on earth did you get this impression? I have lived in both small rural towns and large cities, and this is hogwash.
I live far, far away from my company, in tiny village while earning salary like people working there
and im spending that money locally, thus supporting local businesses and communities
I imagine my hometown would be a very different place if people didn't have to leave to get decent jobs. Though of course there are plenty of other good reasons to leave.
Work-from-home ads more flexibility, but even with a traditional commute there are typically multiple towns/school districts within an easy range of any given workplace assuming you can afford good transportation.
which is why it's really a stupid policy decision to fund schooling via local taxation. There should be federally funded schools.
edit: It also rewards the wrong people. The schools which made someone capable of getting a high paying job does not get anything in return. In fact with people moving out they get less and less money to improve themselves. Even in the most individualistic view of the system, the wrong individual is being rewarded.
California moved to statewide funding parity for schools and voters simply decided they don't want to pay taxes that aren't local. This lead directly to capping property taxes in the state.
Maybe it will be more common in the future as a result of remote work. But today it seems hard to create the conditions that result in great school districts - i.e., a relatively high concentration of relatively high-income parents who value education - in a small town that's not within commuting distance of a city with good jobs.
Did I miss something in the comment you're replying to or do I need to read the article?
1500 is a small town for sure. I'd consider 12k to be a small town as well. 1500 is way bigger than the town my dad is from. There's about 100 people there now. Your small town is huge compared to that. He sometimes talks about being on the highschool football team at the school shared by a collection of towns in the county. He says they did pretty damn good in the first half, but by the second they were all so worn out that they'd just get steamrolled. They only had enough players to cover the field you see. The guys all played both offense and defense.
I imagine even a couple folks moving back there and working remotely would be a huge boon for the town. Heck, it'd make a big difference in the county, what with the biggest town only being around 3k people. It's very pretty there, but it's over an hour to the nearest city that has any kind of employment opportunities. If you can't make finances work on the pay from the gas station, your options are move out of town or move out of town. The internet is decent there and being able to work remotely would be the difference between being able to survive in that town or having to move away to find decent-paying work.
The difference between a town of 1500 and 12000 is very significant the further you get from a (real) city. Kids from nw Kansas drove to Hays to party, not Denver or KC because they were 3+ and 7+ hours away by car.
It didn't seem relevant to me in terms of the discussion, so I countered with an even smaller town. I grew up in a decent-sized metro area, but I've definitely lived the 3-hour drive to the nearest Target. I'd do it again in a heartbeat.
Something that seems similar that comes up often around here is when there are proposals to improve the road system to move traffic out of towns. Currently the main highways run through a bunch of small towns, so they get lots of non-local traffic. Frustrating for drivers due to the extra time, and its a safety issue. But whenever changes are happening businesses in those towns are up in arms omg we'll lose our passing trade, don't build the road. They've capitalised on some inconvenience, we don't owe them to keep it around.
There's a pattern of restaurant closures. People want food from restaurants, but the demand shifted to different locations and restaurants were forced to close for some time. When a restaurant re-opens, it now owes tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in back rent. The restaurant goes bankrupt and the landlords get paid from the liquidated assets.
That's nothing short of wealth transfer from restaurant owners to landlords. We can say "the economy is for the people" all we want, but in situations like this, the economy favors some over others. Increasingly, the economy favors capital + rent seeking, and does not favor labor.
what assets? If the restaurant is renting, their assets are just the equipment they own. The landlord will only get what they by selling those equipment for rent owed. I don't see how a transfer of wealth is happening in this scenario.
If the restaurant's location is owned by the proprietor, then they're their own landord. Their creditor would have a claim on the property, if they borrowed money to run the restaurant. But calling this a transfer of wealth is misleading - the owners of the restaurant signed up for the debt. Businesses and investments are not guaranteed to succeed, and using leverage increases the risks of losing more. How is this a transfer of wealth, except for the lenders recovering what they could, as is their right to do for lending out the capital in the first place?
Is that what actually happens?
"That's nothing short of wealth transfer from restaurant owners to landlords."
You're arguing that the owners of commercial real estate are winners here?
What if you work in a tech park that has few or no amenities, or your work office is in a cruddy bit of town you really dislike? When the house is tidy and the washing done in the 10 minutes an hour I can wander away from the work laptop, I feel a lot happier than worrying about trying to get it done on the weekends or the evenings.
I'd rather quit and find some other job. I'm tired of articles telling me that something I hated to do was somehow a sacrifice I have to make for made up reasons that really don't add up to a hill of beans.
[0]https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/sydney-it-s-time-to-get-...
It bothers me that it took a pandemic for companies to embrace remote work.
All because of some romantic notion about some essential element being lost.
The beauty of capitalism is that competition will either replace those people, or eventually the companies entirely.
Luckily this stance makes it very easy to identify and isolate the old guard. I should add that some kinds of engineering has to be on site due to it revolving around rockets or factories or mines or construction sites. But for IT, huge red flag. I’ve had so many offers to work on site and now I don’t even have to bother researching those clients.
This is a case of eating out a lot, cutting it entirely and the effect doesn't even cover the amount a typical home has appreciated by in the past five years.
For some people, once per week is not a lot.
Financials now for buying real estate became ridiculous for many places globally. It can be counted from ie how many salaries of similar jobs you need to buy a house in same place before and now. Not exact, but this shows how things skyrocketed due to cheap debt and speculation.
I mean, there are regular outrages here over people living frugal - not buying cars, living with parents, generally having less, having massively larger college debt to pay. It is combined with outrage over them not buying this or that subscription someone is pushing. Bycicle transport is cheaper then car and is money saving move for people living at right place too. People watch Netflix rather them going ro movie theater and pay for tickets + popcorn.
They do tons of money saving choices, get blamed for them. And then they get blame for buying anything that did not existed 30 years ago.
There is no epidemic of expensive avocado toasts being bought out in large numbers.
More importantly though, I don't think they were necessarily much happier than us either. "Settling down" essentially meant giving up your life. Nowadays you can go to a geeky renaissance fair and find it packed with all sorts of people with kids of all ages. Same thing with like, anime conventions and whatnot.
This is an interesting (and probably the only interesting) point. Normalisation of remote working likely does lead to offshoring. Hard to put that genie back in the bottle.
and you should never be making a sacrifice for someone else, without enough monetary compensation.
The only sacrifice one should make is for enrolling in the armed services.
God no, this isn't the 1940s.
Just like with joining police - in some places it is good thing to do. In others, you are joining another criminal organization.
Joining a war will always be supporting atrocities committed by your side, while preventing atrocities committed by the enemy.
Everything is always the same.
If “the economy” doesn’t like it, it needs to adapt.
The economy should support people, not the other way around.
I'd argue it's great for people. In general. I don't have family, I can spend more time with my dog, I can make morning or afternoon walk longer, I can get better at cooking cause I have more time, I have more time for hobbies, to deal with personal stuff, I can go to public institution or a doctor if I have to, without taking a day off since I can start 30min early, go after work and still get there before closing.
The only downside to remote work IMO is lack of human contact and that it requires much more effort to actually be included.
I've just started a new job for an enterprise company. It is proving insanely hard getting in contact with folk. Myself having to introduce myself every-time. Trying to find someone to give me basic mentoring, even trying to understand the hierarchy.
Not only does communications break down over email, messenger, people get the wrong intention of the email, if I wish to add input I have to encounter where it doesn't feel like I'm the bulldozer. Many skills are lost WFH.
Code reviews suck over webcam, sharing knowledge is insanely hard and I'm not lucky to have a house with a spare room where I can dedicate to work. My own personal space is not an office nor I do I want it to be.
The trip to and from work allows me to break work mode and have my own freedom without having a work laptop stashed underneath the desk. It may cost me £ to get in the office each day but heck do I prefer it. I'm 33. WFH is not for me, I find it hell.
It's interesting. I started a new job in a cube farm a few years ago after a decade of WFH and that describes my exact experience with that transition. I suspect it's all about corporate and workplace culture, not physical working arrangements.
Sure, I'll just let my dog sit for 10 hours straight on those other days. It might be a better alternative for YOU, but I doubt it's true for most peole who want fully remote work.
> It is proving insanely hard getting in contact with folk. (...) Trying to find someone to give me basic mentoring, even trying to understand the hierarchy.
Sounds like a company issue, not a problem with WFH in particular. I work remotely while my whole team is hybrid in another country, we're doing perfectly fine, hell they even praise me for actually getting in touch all the time. You need a certain type of personality to be able to thrive in remote work. You need to be able to get people to talk and point you in the right direction, get the information you need yourself. Most people are not like that, most people need someone standing over their head to show them the way.
> Not only does communications break down over email, messenger, people get the wrong intention of the email, if I wish to add input I have to encounter where it doesn't feel like I'm the bulldozer. Many skills are lost WFH.
Sounds like a YOU issue. Emails are meant to be purely async. Messaging like Teams/Slack are meant to be more of an actual conversation. If people get wrong intentions from your emails or messages then you should work on your writing, not sure what does this have to do with WFH. They'll have the same bad impression from your emails even if you write them while sitting at the office.
> Code reviews suck over webcam
Who on earth does code review while calling with webcams? The whole idea of code review is for it to be asynchronous so you don't bother other people with context switching. If you meant pair coding, then yes, it's a bit more of a hassle. Still never an issue for me, we either whip out vscode/Rider, or simply share screen. Worked ok so far, but sure, sitting next to each other is always going to be better.
> sharing knowledge is insanely hard
Again, organizational issue, remote work encourages actually documenting stuff, not just saying openly in a meeting room "I will X because of Y" and proceeding to write meaningless code because "well... everyone noded in the room". I almost forced people at my new company to write comments both in code and Jira tasks, describe what was talked through during meetings or one on one calls. Everyone loves it after a while, refining tasks is much easier, finding a reason for why certain decisions were made is also suddenly much easier.
> The trip to and from work allows me to break work mode and have my own freedom without having a work laptop stashed underneath the desk.
Great for you, but I don't have to stash anything. If you work fully remotely you learn to divide business and pleasure. I do work and play from the same desk, my work laptop is gone after the day. Organizing your workplace is another issue that is more of a 'you' rather than WFH-bad.
Again, remote work is not suited for everyone, but your arguments don't really explain why WFH would be bad. They just explain why you or your org is not suited for remote work. I started full remote fairly recently, I get paid much more because I can pick from many more offers(central EU), I have much more time for myself, my SO and my dog, I do many more things during the day that I otherwise wouldn't. It's amazing and at this point I will rather switch careers than go back to the office, especially since at current rate I will be mortgage free by the time I'm 35.
As from what I see the culture here, the prosperity that they give has been one of the I best fitted environments I've worked in. Very surprised especially for the industry. So no its not companies issue, its not a "ME" problem. Its a person issue, professional behaviour slips, people get sloppy.
I don't want to divide work with pleasure. Why should I, so you can stay home with your dog? I want to come home and know for certain there is no essence of work present. Sometimes I need that complete downtime just to recover. Let my guard down without having to create some divide.
At this point its moot. You have your view and I have mine. You won't consider from my perspective and I understand yours and the WFH perspective.
Its always "WFH is amazing" when no one takes in to account that it doesn't work for others. Its a change that needs to happen, it does give benefits and it sounds like it does for you. Good.
But my benefits are working in the office. Why is that hard to comprehend. I'm a SysAdmin and like being on premises of the hardware then a software developer like yourself (according to your profile).
I'm actually 29 but sure.
> Your joking right in thinking that no communication is loss via email?
I would argue that more details are actually _preserved_ when communicating via email rather than face to face. If you cannot properly communicate via written text then yeah, of course any kind of written channel will be worse. I actually like to have everything written down, I can refer to it at any point in the future and if I need someone's immediate attention I simply call. Also f*k emails, that needs to die. There's a reason we have multitudes of different kinds of software for project management, using email to discuss important details is counter productive and obscures information from people who aren't invloved at the time.
> Team, zoom meetings take away facial expressions and as someone with social blindness it makes my job harder to engage. Why so hostile?
But that is again, a YOU issue. I might come off as hostile because stating something that is true to you as a universal truth - that hybrid work environment is better, annoys me a lot and I'm arguing that it's not. It might be better for YOU, but not for everyone, especially not for people who actually want to be full remote.
> I want to come home and know for certain there is no essence of work present.
I work from my bedroom and my work does not interweave with my personal life whatsoever. Your point of view reeks of opinions of someone who needs the office to be productive and was forced to work from home and can't handle it. It's perfectly fine, I know people like that too, but stating that wfh bad, we need the office is... really one sided.
> Its always "WFH is amazing" when no one takes in to account that it doesn't work for others.
But everyone does take it into account. I don't think I've seen a single comment here that said 'everyone should work from home just because I say so'. Let people be fully remote, let people go to the office if they want to. I can guarantee you that majority of people won't though.
> I'm a SysAdmin and like being on premises of the hardware
Again, that's great, go to the office then? Did I ever write anywhere that you shouldn't be able to? I work with people who meet regularly in the office 8 hour drive away from me and yet I don't feel excluded at all.
Can you call them on the phone?
Sure. one could argue that this would happen in the office too but at least you can grab their attention easier.
Are some city cafes likely to go under because people aren't coming into the office? Probably.
Are people being forced to eliminate every single discretionary expense so they can pay their bills and eat in the same month? Yes, absolutely. Are some households only surviving because WFH is letting them avoid transport expenses, and reduce food costs? Also yes.
Our mortgage + insurances + rates + mobile/internet + utilities + basic food = almost what we're bringing in this month. And the last payment on the bathroom reno we started five interest rate rises ago will probably be due this month too.
So, define "economy". This bit of the economy would probably run out of money to put fuel in the car if I couldn't work from home.
1. Is there less restaurant business?
2. Does it hurt city real estate?
3. People spend more time with family.
I'm much more interested in other points about how remote work has an impact on the economy.
* How do cities and states attract well paid remote workers? Who are the winners and losers of this transition.
* How does remote work impact wages? A programmer in Nashville was probably paid less than one in San Fransisco. How is remote work impacting that discrepancy?
* How is remote work impacting residential real estate? Are home owner rates climbing as people flee the expensive cities? How is it impacting which homes are more desirable?
* How is remote work impacting energy usage?
* How is remote work impacting in office jobs for the same type of work? Are in office jobs paying a premium for labor over remote? Do employers see the increased investment as paying off? Do investors?
To me WFH aligns the incentives exactly right in this case. You attract workers by being a good place to live. Have stuff human people care about -- parks, playgrounds, schools, restaurants, nightlife, recreation, arts, theater, music, food, yada yada. Instead of right now where the strat is to get a critical mass of well-ish-paying businesses and then everything else is extra. Communities will form based on what people do outside work which sounds like actual heaven.
I'm pretty sure they'd be happy to serve the Digital Nomads or the Remote worker that picked small town, out of no where.
There are tons of jobs you can do remotely, without being good with tech. I will wager that most people working low paid manual jobs today have the full potential to handle a remote job. They just haven't had or made that opportunity.
US zoning is shitty because it doesn't allow stores or restaurants in residential areas. But if that could be fixed, you could have a corner store and a diner/restaurant within walking distance of your home.
This is an underrated comment. These are good threads to pull on in future posts - thanks.
Three months later, the same administration sent out a package against the depopulation of small towns (we live in the Alps so that's a real issue)
This is the short-sightedness of our administrators. Instead of giving the people the freedom to work where they want, they spend public resources to marginally attempt to reduce a problem they refuse to acknowledge in the fist place, for the gain of temporary consensus.
Lay optic fiber everywhere and let people work from where they prefer. We would still have dense cities and alive satellite towns.
I consider that as a win-win, supporting local businesses.
Cities have many innate advantages so long-term I’m not expecting disaster but it’s happening almost everywhere at the same time, and we have a bigger problem looming in climate change. That’s going to be more permanently disruptive but it’ll work in favor of cities’ lower environmental footprint if the leaders don’t screw up the transition.
It’s sure to only benefit a select few. We should let the free market decide what we collectively value in cities. With remote work in particular, it feels like there is more value placed on the standards of humanity than being close to a “hub” to make larger sums of money. For me, I love great weather and not spending a tenth of my day in traffic.
But good for the workers and good for the US economy as a whole as it redistributes higher paying jobs to increasingly rural areas as internet connectivity allows.
Anyone who thinks they can put the toothpaste back in this tube is kidding themselves.
1. https://www.theworlds50best.com/discovery/Establishments/Bol...
It is good for the 'business is there to serve the people' economy.
The latter distributes people across the country rather than concentrating them in megacities and forces business to go where the people want to live. It favours social capital over financial capital.
We need to decide politically which of these economies we want.
I am also curious when did north america start planning like that. Probably after modernism
There is a pull that cities have, that includes being in close proximity to people who earn a bit more, greater foot traffic, activities, and shops, among millions of other things
I guess if you want to sum up everyone else who was a part of the economic impact you used to have on them as corporations, then we have nothing to talk about
This wouldn't be the case if we optimized for the right set of constraints - all of the places you mentioned being in walking distance. If there were more restaurants in the neighborhood, I'd eat out thrice a week at the very least.
Did I misinterpret this?
Usually have a haircut either 8:30 or 9:30 am, and it’s just a few blocks walk from the office.
When I go into the office, I just eat a bowl of instant spicy noodles (there are few people there these days), and at home I just eat something from the fridge.
On a weekly basis, ranked by frequency I see - my wife, my dog, my mailman, and the attendant at the gas station. Past that I can't quote a regular person I interact with on weekly basis.
The establishment promulgated term for this is "social distancing."
Remote work as existed for a long long time.
The pandemic made more people and companies go remote but it's been there like forever.
In context of ycombinator almost all start-up companies that have ever existed will have extensively used remote workers are the start phase of their companies.
To editorialize: This is how all economic exchange works, and any talk of "the economy" being "good" or "bad" is mystification. The powers that be are cranking up rates hoping but not really expecting to avoid a recession. In their view, a recession (i.e. more pain for working people) is acceptable collateral damage when weighed against the risk of continued labor inflation (i.e. more pain for asset owners).
Not everything is some technocratic spreadsheet puzzle to be balanced. There are winners and losers.
Which I agree with.
If the answer was "Yes" however, I would question if that's even a bad thing to begin with. If our economy is reliant on people driving to an office and spending their money at a restaurant, then our economy is pretty terrible to begin with.
Maybe labor that needs induced demand shouldn’t shape society at all. Maybe it’s arbitrary makework—maybe the laborers, and the society making arbitrary work, would both benefit more by supporting those humans who’d otherwise do makework.
An economy which prioritized taking care of the people who are out of work would be beneficial for basically everyone except the people who benefit from every outcome anyway.
so your problem is the human condition? Where for someone to exist, they have to work and produce something from which others in society would pay for?
It’s a relatively new phenomenon, part of an economic system created by people who reap outsized benefits compared to their own labor. It’s also a system which has promised efficiencies which would reduce work, which it’s delivered but very unevenly and mostly inversely proportional to the people actually doing the work.
We already live in a post scarcity society for some, but the people who get to enjoy that are generally not the people who make it possible. My problem is that the people who make that possible don’t get to enjoy the fruits of their labor, and people who are actually disabled are totally at their mercy. All because we’ve collectively decided capitalism is some kind of unquestionable, perpetual compromise which never has had to make good on promises to anyone who wasn’t already wealthy.
People shouldn't be out of work, unless they want to and are able support themselves.
Per Schumpeter a 100 years ago, the economy is an ever changing process from technological change and entrepreneurship.
Of course remote work is going to have good and bad aspects that come with the change.
Practically the golden rule of economics is that everything is a trade off.
Inner city areas full of people chatting in restaurants and cafes at lunchtime and after work are the best.
> Then you get these articles about how unhealthy life is in the city. You know; mobile phone tumours - far more likely in the city. Well you know what, so is everything else! Including sex, coffee and conversation. - Dylan Moran
It's fun, but spending time with my kids is the best.
> I suspect massive adoption of restaurants would be more efficient too, if we cared about that primarily.
Not sure I agree - I can whip up an inexpensive, healthy, and satisfying meal with food from the supermarket in less time than it takes to walk a couple blocks to a restaurant.
the main problem with restaurants is lack of control of ingredients and fixed portion sizes. i can't adjust based on how hungry i am.
The economy of scale. A kitchen with professional staff and equipment making hundreds of plates do that far more efficiently than each person or family making their own food. The reason then why it is still more expensive to eat out is because of business burdens, such as parasitic rent and interest, parasitic taxes, and sometimes exaggerated profit demands from owners. And of course there are costs that are just nice to have, such as table service.
If you look how little healthy school lunches or lunches on ships cost, you see how efficient the economy of scale is in a kitchen environment. And truly, in many places in the world it is common for even the poorest labourers to eat out, because there is a balance without excess burdens taking away the advantage of the economy of scale.
If you are at a place that sells an experience that happens to come with food that may be true, but one in the business of selling food is going to beat your home kitchen every time.
The big difference is that the home kitchen costs are largely front-loaded. This does mean you generally need less free cashflow when you are hungry, which is an appealing attribute to someone who budgets by looking at their bank account balance. However, it also means you sacrifice a fair amount of opportunity. That does not come cheap.
In these parts, I can go to a restaurant in the business of selling an experience, with nice ambiance, a server who will wait on you hand and foot like you are some kind of king, etc. and can have nearly anything on the menu for $15 USD. At that price you're paying to get to act like a king for an hour or two, not for food.
If your local cost of living is that high, what's the housing market like? High CoL and high rent often to go hand in hand. If you sold your appliances and offered your kitchen space as a bedroom rental, what kind of income are we talking here?
RE is 1) material stuff being extracted, processesed and moved around by people and 2) physical services provided by people. The size of RE is constrained on the supply side i) by material scarcity, environmental considerations etc, and on the demand side by ii) saturation of material consumption needs by the average human
In contrast, the knowledge economy is essentially information: collated, processed, transmitted etc by people's brains and digital artifacts [0]. Given the zero marginal cost of reproduction, the size of KE is constrained by i) intellectual property enforceability and ii) saturation of information consuption needs by the average human
Back to the original question, remote work is making KE more efficient and is entirely natural. In fact the work-from-office pattern is mostly a historical relic of how RE was organized. Remote work can be judged as positive or negative contribution towards TE in the context of a point-in-time analysis (i.e. here and now) or the overall balance of RE/KE in a sustainable economy. Moving millions of brains around in massive 2 ton exoskeletons that consume enormous resources in order for them to type into inane powerpoints and spreadsheets is not exactly "a good economy".
In any case, it could be that a sustainable economy (where KE is mostly WFH could be "smaller" in monetary units, especially if it has a major collaborative and open source component) but it is by no means clear it would "worse".
[0] KE obviously requires some RE, which is for example why the pandemic induced bloated hardware inventories
That aside, there are so many upsides. Not the least of which are the reduction in time and energy waste, and pollution. Or less reductive sexist models of childcare and home duties. Work life balance, employment and unemployment and underemployment and mental/physical health could all improve at scale. Sure, some people suffer. Were talking aggregate here. Many sad special cases exist.
Work needs redefining but radical redefinition without planning is not sensible unless revolution is a goal.
Rate of profit, investment in people is complicated.
why is always the plebs that must adapt to every inconvenience and illogical irrationality...just because that's is how it always was :/
I miss being able to hang out with work friends at the office, but not enough to go back to the open floor plan horror show. Not to mention living downtown near 3 freeways and having to dodge traffic just to get some groceries...
Rather than public transport and commuting, folks will spend elsewhere.
Rather than office real estate, companies will spend / invest elsewhere.
Some will benefit, others will have to adapt to survive.
In the US and other places with Euclidean zoning, that's illegal. Restaurants have to be kept far apart from residences. It's better in such places for all the restaurants to go out of business, and people can just stay at home and cook microwave meals.
I wonder why we never see slippery slope arguments about unaffordable housing.
Even if remote work is bad for the economy - its good to have the option and to not enforce it on people who don't need to do it.
It relieves pressure on roads. It gives people time back they lost in commutes. If people insulate their homes properly - it will lower carbon emissions. It relieves rent pressures in the city.
That’s the root of what the economy is … how much useful stuff gets done.
Whether remote work has that effect remains to be seen. Certainly in the short term there’s a lot of evidence it has. That would make it very unlike other examples of change we have, such as switching from horse and buggy to cars.
All the other considerations are merely moving money from one area to another. This is irrelevant to a “good economy.”
In the end, the total wealth available to all participants in the economy is a function of the resources available and the meaningful work done.
That’s it.
The economy should exist for (benefit) as many as possible. This doesn't mean tearing down the entirety of the existing system, but some changes are clearly needed.
Even if remote work does end up being less than optimal for the economy, the benefits to many/most remote employees in work/life balance, health, and family life is easily worth it.
Remote work is obviously not bad for the economy because the economy is basically a closed system.
IMO way too much attention goes to beating around the bush when we need to take a step back and ask some more abstract questions about exactly what our goal as a society should be. There are some hard questions out there that are not getting enough attention.
The real question is, is it good for the population? Or individuals? The answer is clearly yes.
Nope.
You forget the business owners who fear they'll lose direction of the work.
It's not so much whether you put in the hours at home, but whether your work is directed towards a common goal.
Remote work requires a higher degree of communication, and some business owners don't possess the skill or interest to maintain out-of-office communication.
However, the opportunities are also massive. For one thing, the owners/managers get to work from home too, which I certainly wouldn't give up! You can also hire from anywhere, which is huge in terms of finding talented people. Most importantly though, I think, all the things you need to do to manage a remote team effectively are things you really should be doing anyway. Yes, maybe some of the communication would be face to face instead of Slack or whatever, but for the most part if you're managing well, it's not going to be too hard to translate that to a remote environment. It's about actually knowing what people are working on, not just making sure they're putting in the hours. Knowing the goals of the team, and the individual goals of the team members. Fostering communication and collaboration (whatever the medium). And then continuously reviewing and refining the processes by which you do all those things.
This is a negative for many businesses: their employees can get poached by competitors far away that offer better pay or benefits or working conditions.
Yes, but what about the crappy companies? It's a big net negative for them, so they're going to oppose it. They don't want to compete with companies around the nation; they want to be the only employer in town so their employees feel locked in and unable to change jobs without selling their home and moving.
Years before covid, I pushed my company out of an office to full remote for many of the reasons you listed. It allowed us to keep a few great employees who wanted to live elsewhere, and save substantial money on office space (which matters a lot for a small company). At the time Slack had just become big and we embraced the async, transparent communication style fully.
Early on one of the other owners asked me, 'if no one is in the office how do we know they are working?', and I responded 'how do we know they are working now?' That's when he 'got' it. We had never relied butts in seats, but it can still be a little scary going into an unknown.
Remote/in-person both have unique challenges, they are just different. After years of remote, I think the advantages outweigh the challenges vs in-person.
It's certainly been a continuous process learning how to effectively manage a remote team (and manage in general), but agreed that at least for us the advantages definitely outweigh the drawbacks. It's actually been nice as remote work has caught on elsewhere, because though it means more competition, it also means much better tools as well as a broader knowledge base to draw on.
What we pray for is that it may please you to pass a law ordering the shutting up of all windows, skylights, dormer-windows, outside and inside shutters, curtains, blinds, bull's-eyes; in a word, of all openings, holes, chinks, clefts, and fissures, by or through which the light of the sun has been in use to enter houses, to the prejudice of the meritorious manufactures with which we flatter ourselves that we have accommodated our country — a country that, in gratitude, ought not to abandon us now to a strife so unequal.'
Coffee breaks, social media, reading HN, which in WfH means walking the dog, spending a few minutes with your family, doing some yoga stands after a meeting.
And that is perfectly fine. Unless you're very focused and enjoying a particular task, no unassisted human being is capable of being 100% productive 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week. I might be an outlier, but in my experience, max focus can be held for up to 4 hours a day, the rest is low focus work and faffing about.
I've been doing full remote for six years now and it's wonderful, especially when you have good asynchronous workflows in your team to rid of "working hours" concept entirely. (Though possibility of that heavily depends on the role and team composition).