In my next job, it started out as a tight team of software in a larger company. It grew and then we bought our biggest competitor (we called it an acquisition; they called it a merger). Over time what was left of that staff shrunk and became remote. So we had a core group that was collocated, and then a group of remotes. The power dynamics were odd and competitive. The remotes wanted to be kept in the loop. The locals resented the extra process and protocol that had to be observed to keep the remotes in the loop. The locals also resented that the remotes got to just code, and didn’t have to deal with the interruptions that come with product managers that stop by with questions.
I was so excited when my next job was all remote, everyone. My kids were aged 3-11, and had a lot of school activities I wanted to support. We were in the “trench years” of four kids. At first, I loved the flexibility. It was great. After six years, I hated it (I’m not sure how much of this was remote vs feeling betrayed that the company was dysfunctional). I hated that I felt like I worked half time all the time. I could step out of work any little minute. But every little minute, work was only an “open up the laptop in the office” away. It was like being an on call dad and an on call worker simultaneously 100% of the time. And it seemed like a large portion of the team was basically freeloading on the gravy train. There were a core of us that could not help neatly figure out how 40ish hours at home work amounted to so little produced results.
When I got a job at a local company, I was so thrilled to go back in to work and work as part of a cohort. I have a lot of flexibility/autonomy here, so some days I stay at home and work because I’m in the groove and want to focus. But more times than not, I find I’m drawn back into the office/lab to work. There’s a lot gadgets I work with that it just wouldn’t make sense to duplicate for just me and warehouse at home. Our company has seen an uptick in can’t-do-without-em upper level staff who are now working remote. I find I often resent them.
This describes my current situation 100%. It feels both my duties at home and in the office are exaggerating themselves because I am seemingly available to both of them all the time. This is surely in large part my fault, but I struggle with finding solutions to this that don't create stress for my family.
Personally, I just set boundaries and stick to them. When I'm working, I'm unavailable to anyone else at home (except for emergencies) and will help them with whatever they need later. When I'm done with my work, I'm unavailable to the team, no Skype/Slack/Teams on my phone (though they have my phone number for work emergencies).
Admittedly, this works because I do not have kids currently, given that healthily establishing borders then could be a lot more challenging, at least in a positive manner.
That said, if I do make the choice to work longer on something really important, I can do so at a decreased personal expense to myself (no being stuck in commute late in the day), after letting everyone know so that I may leave faster on another day to not burn out.
And taking breaks is suddenly also more healthy due to my own enjoyable surroundings and nobody to care about how I spend said breaks - lazing around the couch, going outside to spend some time with my pets or going for a walk in fresh countryside air (of course, applicable in a limited set of circumstances, depending on where you live).
The environmental impact is also a nice thing, though something that's less of an important point to me - the more noticeable benefit is the lack of having to waste my time commuting.
It all very much depends on what your life circumstances are, though, as well as what your personality is like, which environment is better for you etc.
Not only: since we are social animals we need a social life, in most modern society due to the number of worked hours work life is ALSO social life, in a WFH setup we need a local social life apart of the work life.
IOW for a proper, real, scalable, effective WFH model we need to work less, like OR the morning or the afternoon, even for 6 days a week, or just 4 days a week maximum, to been able to have the work life and the local social life. We need homes with an office per human living there etc. With all that and a bit of habit well I'm pretty confident 80% of people with eligible jobs (around 30% of all jobs I imaging) would like to WFH. It's not a thing that can be done quickly simply because we can't reshape the society quickly. Here is the fault.
With enough time we can (re)build a distributed enough society with distributed enough services that cover people needs AND desire, so we can have local schools for children (as before) because for them being physically together is needed, with enough services for elders, for "middle ages" etc. few industrial districts, because certain productions can't be much distributed, and so on. Such cultural shift can probably happen in 25 years minimum, I doubt the society can be quicker than that...
- The lack of mixed use zoning makes it just that much more likely that one live so far from their workplace. The choice is too often "a house far away from everything" or "a high-rise close to the noise, smells, and un-pretty sights of town"
- There's so little space to build offices cities end up having super-dense downtowns, with very tall, expensive and crowded buildings. This is great for office real-estate, but terrible for everyone else because it means traffic. Since cities tend to have only one mega-downtown, cause zoning in the USA is pretty adamant in grouping everything together, things get even worse, because everyone is moving in the same direction at the same time.
- This hyper-dense core, but hyper-sparse suburb outskirts in cities make it very hard to bike to work; many people in the USA wouldn't even consider it an option. It's also hard to build efficient public transit. The routes that make sense are radial, so they might be good to get to work, but inefficient for leisure. Things are so far apart in the suburbs one it's hard to put stations close to everyone where they live.
The fact so many people prefer to not leave their home for work should be considered a moderate victory for remote communication technology, but an abysmal failure in urban design.
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/d...
[2] https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2021/acs/acs-47....
I live in Philadelphia and this is true there too. In general the city is dense enough that bike commuting is very viable, but the most direct routes are far too dangerous for most people.
I think the challenge is not with the specialized workers, but with the lower paid staff. The cleaners, the cooks, the maintenance crew, the guards. They won’t be able to afford to live near such places because they get displaced by specialized workers, and then they’re stuck in a commuting model.
Clusters of companies already exist. One is Manhattan where finance jobs are concentrated, another (like you say) is Silicon Valley where tech jobs are concentrated. In both, the workers choose to live across a vast area.
I wouldn’t say this is that much of a free choice in Silicon Valley, where housing density is highly limited by regulatory means.
It’s the same in Stockholm, despite laxer zoning laws. Companies tend to cluster in particular places and housing around them becomes more expensive. We chose to settle down in a less expensive (as in 50%) area but on the other hand I had at least 50 minutes one way commute to the nearest job cluster.
It's not about us, it's about the guy who delivers lunch, or the girl who owns the bagel shop.
However, offices are straight up abelist , if you have mobility issues it's absurdly hard to commute.
Commuting isn't really needed here, if I was in a wheelchair I'd take this to court.
Full tin foil hat time, if remote work was the norm the entire commercial real estate sector would collapse.
Most modern cities would collapse as well. So many industries are based around commuting, or supporting office workers. Hell, normalized remote work might destroy our entire economy.
Isn’t that just an instance of the broken window parable? There’s nothing to prevent the bagel shop locating adjacent to a residential area instead of an office park - then society sees the benefit of WFH and tasty round breads.
All this to say: there are ways to keep evolving how things are usually done.
And from a societal perspective, saving on commute time/expenses but with $15 bagels is still better than wasting 2+ hours/day, additional car expensises, and only a $7 bagel.
A huge bagel store will use humans more efficiently than a small one.
One big problem with "lots of shops" is that they require lots of retail workers, workers who spend much of their paid time not working. Prices reflect that.
It's unclear to me why urbanists think that wasting humans on retail is so important.
Cities don't have much of a reason to exist, at least not in their current form, with WFH.
Are you assuming people would rather live in suburbs and countryside then? I would definitely still live in the city, and my first thought of offices closing was "great, more space for residential buildings".
It's much much cheaper to live outside of major cities. As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, office buildings are a massive source of tax revenue for cities.
This is the entire reason you have this push to bring everyone back.
Ideally, people should be able to live where they want to. If that is in a city, great, otherwise they can live elsewhere and work from home. I don't see any great benefit in forcing people to live where they do not want to be.
They just need to slightly change focus. People still need a place to work even if remote.
Instead of trying to rent out that 20Ksqft building to some corporation, start renting out individual private offices within that building to people nearby who need a place to work remotely that's not their couch.
I've been renting out a small office room since the pandemic started, right near my house. Almost zero commute but still a separate work area. I lucked into finding someone who is happy to rent me one office room in their building.
But many commercial real estate owners still don't get it and don't want to deal with individuals. There are a few empty office buildings in the area which I know have nice offices, but they keep looking to rent the whole building out, so it continues to sit empty. I know there's demand since most people I talk to who are working from their living room love the idea of a local office when I mention I have one.
Or are you self-employed?
But the office payment is less than what I was spending in fuel having to commute, so in that sense I'm still saving money compared to pre-pandemic commute life.
Plus, there is something about just going to a breakfast where you can just people-watch the passersby without food preparation or cleanup.
Cities have much more to offer than office work. Restaurants, entertainment, shops, museums, sights. People that choose to live in the city often choose for those amenities, not a nearness to the office. Getting rid of offices might actually lead to a city that is denser with those attractive activities and therefore more welcoming for people to move there and enjoy those activities.
What seems to be happening is that local economies in smaller cities are booming, because people no longer commute to the bigger city. So it's more a shift.
And yes, work the hours you want to work. I typically don’t start until 11 or noon, and thanks to time zones and meetings tend to work until 11pm or so. It works out great since 11 is typically when the good shows start here.
Do try to be less disagreeable.
It very clearly improves the outcome of some work, and degrades the outcome of other work, and doesn't impact much some other kinds of work.
It's only unclear for the people that insist on putting every work on the same bracket.
I like the office environment. The only thing I don't like is the commute. This is why I think the future is local shared working spaces within towns so that they're in walking distance. I'd much rather have a 15 minute walk to work than a 30 minute drive.
The best I find it hybrid: a mixture of quiet home time and office meetings to talk with people.
I've never had a horrendous commute, however.
Do I have colleagues (current or former) that are friends? Yes. Do/did I feel a need to be in the office to spend time with them - no.
Work is a contract between myself and my employer to produce based on a certain set of expectations. Those expectations shall not include (nor exclude) social interactions outside those times.
Work has been a critical component of social life for many generations now. It is extremely strange to offhandedly dismiss its role like that.
> Do I have colleagues (current or former) that are friends? Yes. Do/did I feel a need to be in the office to spend time with them - no.
I started my previous job in mid 2019. I made multiple friends at the office in 8 months before the lockdowns started that I still keep in touch with. After we went full remote, I worked there for an extra year. During that time, my team have doubled in size. Not only I did not make friends with any of the new colleagues, I don’t even remember their names now.
I finally quit in 2021, because I absolutely loathed full time WFH. I am now commuting to the office every day, with rather arduous 50-60 minutes one way commute, and I am extremely happy, making friends again and feeling very motivated.
Chalk it up as an overreaction to how many startups and large tech companies with imposing corporate cultures alike have tried to foster workplaces designed to keep workers away from home for as long as they could with free dinners and foosball tables.
I've worked with people who want to have fun and hang and I found them to be a distraction and resented having them around.
Building B sits empty for 16 hours a day while Building A sits empty for 10 with both being heated/cooled for 24 hours. The employee wastes 2 of their 16 available waking hours in the non-productive commute while incurring significant financial costs (lease/insurance/fuel/energy) in order to support this patently absurd activity. Similarly the employer wastes time and energy negotiating leases, re-arranging offices, purchasing AV equipment for meeting rooms in building B, etc.,etc., in addition to paying the likely enormously expensive lease itself.
The impacts on the environment, the number of hours of human life wasted in commute, the pointless buildings and associated costs to employers as well as the public infrastructure to support it (roads, trains, busses, etc.) are all incredibly wasteful. Surely, all of this could only be justified if physical presence had a dramatic impact on productivity. Yet, we cannot tell one way or the other if it actually improves outcomes.