luffapi

Wouldn’t wfh decrease the cost of living in the city, since currently most high paying jobs make living within commuting distance a requirement? To make an extreme example, cost of living on the Bay Area should go down if wfh becomes widespread. There are other reasons to want to live in SF aside from getting paid a high salary in tech, so housing prices should “fallback” to whatever people value the culture/scenery… at. What you would probably see is a more even (and healthy) distribution of growth in all metro areas instead of being centered in a few with all of the cost of living increases associated with that.

The best code I’ve ever written was when I was only working 10 hours a week. Hours worked has no positive correlation with quality of code written. Good managers know letting their devs watch birds and relax will result in a much higher quality of output then forcing them into the office and dropping by their desk to prod them.

It’s bad management to drop by people’s desk every day to check in with them, then “nudge” them. I’d say that’s a failure of product vision, strategy, communication and leadership.

> my "micromanagement" is their "I am supported and know what's going on".

What you’re really seeing here is people grasping at any life preserver they can grab in an incredibly poorly run organization. In a well run organization management is extremely hands off, because the machine runs smoothly and scales.

> love working from home but it’s easy to get distracted with side projects, feeding birds, germinating seeds etc.

For programmers at least “productivity” comes from writing leveragable code, not by working more hours. Watching birds, gardening and generally being relaxed and rested will increase the quality of the code you write. It may even allow you to envision solutions impossible to come up with under the daily grind of commute->stand up->lunch gossip->meetings->commute. I think managers that understand how to develop good software are few and far between.

Productivity aside, your routine sounds awesome and everyone who can should try to achieve something similar without concern for their employer’s productivity. I assure you the concern for well-being is not bi-directional.

The system is absolutely stacked against everyone but those with money. Janitors can start their own business? With what capital?

> But by and large people aren't complaining because their life sucks, they're complaining because someone has more than them.

They are complaining because life sucks. Housing, healthcare and education are either unobtainable or will sink most people into a life of debt. That’s not complaining because someone has more than you. That’s asking for the bare necessities to not take a lifetime of labor to pay off.

I really don’t think there are many people making $15 /hr stacking shelves. Yes, that is a huge problem. How much are the execs making in this company? That’s money that could go to workers and customers. The system is broken so millions-billions get captured by those at the top with no benefit to anyone else.

You said:

> That people reject taking on a career and being productive members of society is troubling. It also displays a ton of ignorance.

I’m saying it’s not ignorant at all, opting out of a system stacked against you is highly logical. I would find it far more troubling if people just ignored the inequality in their own companies and blindly worked to make others rich. That is the real problem.

I think it's a false assumption to make that there would be devastating, society stopping labor shortages with UBI. I will contend a lot of jobs today are useless (or worse, actually harmful). Many things can definitely be automated as well. I'm sure we can come up with janitorial robots, we just haven't because it's cheaper to exploit people.

The goal of society should be to become post-scarcity. All of our technological progress has led in that direction. We currently just live in a period where the majority of the gains have been captured by very few people and that has allowed them to exploit human labor to enrich themselves vs. building a self-sustainable society. Engineered or not, I think that's the inevitable end game of continuing humanity.

The universal nature of UBI is what makes it appealing. That currently only a privileged few are free from a life of labor is a societal problem that UBI helps address.

It doesn't make sense to worry about a fictional labor shortage when there is an excess of profit being captured by the wealthy. If a labor shortage actually existed that differential wouldn't exist, because it couldn't afford to.

I have no problem with people doing nothing and collecting UBI. There are tons of rich people doing nothing today and they're taking in a lot more money than UBI would provide.

It's completely logical to not want a career when executives capture all of the profits. It's irrational to work when the execs at your company make 10-100X what you do and the non-working investors capture even more value than that.

There is no labor shortage and there never will be. When exec pay equals worker pay, then all of the levers will have been pulled and we can maybe start to talk about a labor shortage. Much of which are jobs that shouldn't exist (ad sales), or things that can be automated.

If you want to progress your career, networking on the internet is far more effective than trying to grind the way up the chain in an old school IT company via in-office schmoozing. That is a dead end with or without WFH.

For a long time, it’s been true that the internet can help your career far more than whoever works in your office. Open source contributions, emailing people asking for advice, engaging people on social media… all the way up to raising money. The future was already here, it was just unevenly distributed. COVID forced some who were holding out to face reality of a global, distributed work force.

> hmm I experience it every day, where I over hear something in the hallway that another team it working on, that impacts my team.

If this is how you are finding out about things that impact your team, then your company’s communication and planning is broken and work from office is a bandaid enabling that. Wfh forces good process as it’s not sustainable without it.

It sounds like you’re talking to people who have no experience working from home. Information sharing and documentation is far better when everyone is remote. I’ve worked dozens of places, in person and remote and “happenstance innovation in the hallway” is a myth perpetuated by poor managers, sociopathic execs and those looking to turn the office into their social circle. All constituencies that negatively impact quality of work.

When you go 100% remote, you have a massive potential workforce, orders of magnitude more potential employees than those that happen to live within commuting distance to the office. The reason you go 100% wfh is because then all of the systems and relationships are tuned to remote work, which when done right is far superior to the daily office grind, middle management hell, “how was your weekend” small talk, documentation via dropping by someone’s desk…

Wfh will ultimately win here because it’s far better suited to information work than being ever present physically in a pseudo-factory.

It’s not a blindspot for many people. It’s open source and open protocols vs closed source spyware. SCP is far better than Dropbox if you value privacy for instance.

A lot of resistance to things like Dropbox come from the experience of being screwed over by closed source software. If you look at the state of Dropbox today, those initial comments look pretty spot on.

Remote work was definitely a trend, the pandemic just accelerated it.

Edit: for those downvoting, here’s the data:

https://slidemodel.com/remote-work-key-trends/

Alternative take, people didn’t like Dropbox because it was the repackaging and close sourcing of existing solutions. It was more polished and financially successful but that doesn’t mean it was good for tech. It’s corporate software, yes it became valuable but it definitely represents an anti-user trend that actually would best have been resisted. You should never give closed source software root!

I think it’s more that many of the “leaders” of this community are investors and entrepreneurs who have vested interests and use this site and community for promotion or strategic purposes. This site’s contents and commentary are mostly ads, thus not good at prediction.

I don’t think that’s clear at all.

> As for the risk of new mutations: if we were truly worried about that then perhaps the priority should be vaccinating the populations of poorer countries instead?

Vaccinate everyone, there’s no shortage of vaccine. Remember when Bill Gates fought to stop the manufacture of vaccine in other countries? People like him are the enemy to a fully vaccinated population.

I agree that the whole globe will not be vaccinated and that will continue to be a problem. That doesn’t negate what I said though, unvaccinated children are a huge part of that problem.

> And not given the low effectiveness of the vaccines.

I have no idea what this means. It sounds like you’re under false impressions. The vaccines are quite effective.

I hesitate to feed the trolls, but this is a well documented worldwide phenomenon. Hardly just my personal experience.

There are risks to all of us when we let millions of children act as a breeding and mutation substrate for the virus. I would think that would be blinding obvious to anyone with even a basic grasp of biology.

It’s also completely unknown what the long term effects of the virus are.

Edit: Disappointed but not surprised by the amount of anti-science on this site. I feel like a lot of people have let politics destroy their ability to think critically to the point of near suicidal ignorance. Sad.

> Many companies have not returned to the office. We are not back to normal.

This is the new normal (thankfully). Government regulations or not, management will not be able to force people back in the office. Office culture was a quirk of the 20th century. A halfway house between the assembly line and the internet. Covid just forced its inevitable collapse.

Both your personas are oddly constructed and not really representative of a political quadrant with state-individual empowerment on the vertical access and state backed private property on the horizontal.

Free speech, reduction of private property, dissolution of centralized state and wealth redistribution are all very classic bottom left (anarchist) principles for instance.

I would think anyone below the center line vertically (so anarchists to free market libertarians) would support what you call “cancel culture” since is a powerful form of direct action.

Humans are built to progress technologically and socially. It would be weird and unnatural if people didn’t want things to improve. It doesn’t matter how bad things were in the past. Your argument is a bit like saying we shouldn’t work on new CPUs because what we have now is so much better than an abacus.

That’s not the “dominant narrative”, it’s historical fact. Slavery, segregation and genocide of Native Americans aren’t fabricated stories, they actually happened.

Patriotism is for fools. Civil spirit starts with not rejecting citizenship for tax reasons.

They will continue to cash in from the systems of exploration they’ve already created.

Eric Schmidt is definitely ultra-wealthy.