I am skeptical on this. Yes, currently the desireability and price of central, metropolitan housing is skyrocketing, and rural communities are declining. But I think once technology catches up to emulate or near-emulate in person contact, that more distributed, more at-distance work will be more common. We are not there yet, but I do think we will arrive there sometime.
On a tangent, I highly recommend "Internet of Shit" Twitter account if you want to have a laugh:
In fact, it should already be possible to gain competitive advantage to hire talent from cheaper locations using remote work. There's some great talent out there that's hungry for quality work.
It really baffles me how that is the case (I understand the tongue in cheek). I have been working remotely for just shy of 10 years. That capability was a primary reason for going into programming in the first place.
I find it so old fashioned how by default, they expect me to stand in the rain for 2 hours a day to travel to the centre of a city to sit at a desk and log into the internet for 38 out of 40 hours a week.
Have you tried having a conversation with your employer? If they view it as a negative maybe you could forego your next salary increase and ask for maybe two work-at-home days per week or something similar.
PS: Where did you first learn of the expression "code smell"? I'm curious because I recently heard of it and would like to know if it was from the same source
When you outsource you throw a spec over a wall and wait for them to throw the finished product back at you at some point, hopefully before the deadline.
If you have a remote team, you'll still have teamleaders and/or managers that keep things in sync with the company goals.
This is of course quite a caricature, but it illustrates the issue unless the company is willing to allocate manpower to be in continues dialog with an outsourcing company.
> When you outsource you throw a spec over a wall and wait for them to throw the finished product back at you at some point, hopefully before the deadline.
I have worked for an outsourcer and that's not what happened. I know dozens of people who continue to work for outsourcers, that is not what happens. They have daily standups with the team in Toronto, London, Berlin, etc. They fly back & forth at least monthly. They have video calls nearly daily. They have shared Slack instances, shared Confluence instances, shared JIRA instances.
And that's not just in software; when Tesla outsources a part, they don't just throw a spec over the wall. When Apple outsources manufacturing, they also don't have this caricatured approach. When Nike outsources manufacturing, they have Nike employees in the factories. And so on.
Since your caricature doesn't reflect the reality that I have years of experience with, I'm not sure it adds much to the argument.
But, as your own comment makes clear, outsourcing simply means moving work from an expensive city to a cheaper city. It doesn't mean collaboration between a bunch of random Joe Schmoes living in various tiny villages here and there.
The reality though is that remote work will always be priced down. Even if remote workers show up everyday by some kind of robotic telepresence, once that remote role is established there's enormous pricing pressure from literally every other worker on the planet. Everybody seems to think its corporations that are resistant to remote work when in reality its actually workers who are very hesitant to take on remote roles and do not want to be seen as some sort of outsourced and easily replaceable remote provider.
It will take a sea change in the culture and desires of workers to make remote work a real possibility at scale. Workers will have to embrace a vision of themselves as freelancers without any deep connection to any one company or city. This is happening... but very, very slowly since most workers are terrified of such an idea.
> once that remote role is established there's enormous pricing pressure from literally every other worker on the planet
This is the important point.
> freelancers without any deep connection to any one company or city. This is happening... but very, very slowly since most workers are terrified of such an idea.
That's because outsourcing and freelancing are mostly a mechanism for fleecing labor. Workers SHOULD be terrified of this.
There has been a tendency in software development in traditional companies to follow the waterfall method. Make a glorified spec, hand it over to the company that develops it and hope they meet the budget and deadline. There is plenty of examples where that is not the case, but outsourcing to an entire different company does not lend itself readily to mingling with the outsourcing company to interfere with their process.
I would love to outsource some of out development, but to align that work with our goals, I would need a full time senior dev with intimate knowledge of our company and customers working with them managing all they do. Otherwise it's not a given that we get the code quality that ensure we can evolve the software the way we need to in the future.
Outsourcing can be used to mean offshoring: physically moving part of the business to a distant country, but there could still be a physical office, just (for example) in Delhi instead of San Francisco. Alternatively it can mean delegating the work to a different company, often employing cheap engineers in a foreign country.
Meanwhile remote work means having the worker not need to come into the office at all - each employee can theoretically be anywhere in the world, whether that be in the midwest or in Eastern Europe.
Doesn't outsourcing imply you're working with other companies? If I outsource my IT staff, generally that means I am hiring another company to handle my IT work, right?
With remote work, the workers are still employees of your company, they just don't always sit in your office.
Largely it just means "hiring non US/European engineers". When a company fires some people in the US and replaces them with people in India people lose their shit. But remote work is also considered the pinnacle of enlightened hiring.
The problem is that employees want something and then justify that thing being good in whatever way works.
I'd wager that most of the "remote work" employees at US companies are US citizens living inside the US. In my experience (I'm an IT consultant who works remotely and visits many other companies) companies who hire remote employees outside of the US tend to do so as contractors, not as employees.
If a company fires their local staff and hires someone in a cheaper location for the same job, that's really shitty for the people who got fired. If a company keeps their current staff but also then hires more people, regardless of where they live, that's remote work and is far less shitty.
I mean... of course getting fired sucks. I'm actually surprised that you seem to be arguing that getting fired should be considered a good thing?
You're right! It should be possible! We certainly have the ability to collaborate on code over networks and video links.
Is it possible that there might be some complexity to this beyond boring old corporate inertia? As you so correctly say, there are talented people hungry for work everywhere.
I don't think there is any complexity as such. It is mostly just that power centralizes. This is hard to argue though since so many people an incentive to believe otherwise. But ask yourself if there is any concrete indication that e.g. the Internet has lead to decentralization? People used to say that companies were too centralized compared to co-operatives. That companies were "one dollar, one vote" instead of "one person, one vote". Today with different class shares most tech companies aren't even "one dollar, one vote". Everything is going the other way.
I think it might be worth considering that there might be some value to be gained by sharing space, rather than just the blind hoarding of power. Which, as you say, most certainly encourages people to accumulate more.
What technology do we need that we’re currently lacking? We already have fiber broadband and decent VR.
If it’s just a case of the future being unevenly distributed, where in the world is an example of the distributed future? It’s certainly not the Bay Area, for a start.
VR isn't decent yet and won't be until it's comfortable enough to slap a VR headset on and watch a movie.
That's comfortable both in terms of literal headset weight but also latency, resolution, sound, etc.
When I sit down in front of a 48" TV I'm absorbed into a different world and forget where I am. When VR is good enough you can spend hours inside the virtual world, that's when it can be called good enough.
It's not there yet, but sure we might be there in a generation or two.
I take the opposite view. Most of these debates overlook the fact that for a lot of people, it's simply more desirable to live in cities.
Compare Vancouver with a small town of less than 100k people just up the Fraser valley (Chilliwack). I've lived in both.
Vancouver has better restaurants, more concerts of every sort, better transit, access to the ocean, better internet, is more diverse, more liberal politics, better social services for the homeless and those needing mental health services, better access to diverse foods at the grocery stores, better night life, etc.
Sure, I paid a lot more when I was living in Vancouver that. I was in Chilliwack, but it's worth it.
No amount of videoconferencing technology can make up for the fact that if I want to go out for good sushi and I live in Chilliwack, I have to spend 2 fucking hours in the car each way.
Completely agreed that it takes a lot more to make a community desirable to yuppies than just fixing telecommuting. But it seems like at least some of this can change?
Smaller cities are not universally conservative. Decent coffee can be found in most places, and this didn't used to be true. Many smaller cities that get some tourist traffic have small downtowns with good restaurants; maybe not every kind of ethnic restaurant, but some good choices.
There is not a big migration of retirees to big cities, so it seems pretty clear that it's all about the jobs. Without the attraction of a big paycheck, people look for smaller "nice" cities that have enough.
> There is not a big migration of retirees to big cities, so it seems pretty clear that it's all about the jobs. Without the attraction of a big paycheck, people look for smaller "nice" cities that have enough.
Could just be that retirees can't afford to live in the big cities.
When i was in my mid 20s, living in inner London was vital to me, because it meant i was close to the cool bars, nightclubs, art galleries (really!), and all my friends, who also lived in inner London. Now i am approaching my 40s, none of those things are much use to me, but i appreciate the fact that in my not-quite-inner-London suburb i have a good neighbourhood coffee shop, and some excellent bakeries and a big DIY shop nearby. I should imagine that in my 60s, i will value different things, and in my 80s, different things again.
I think it's a generalization to say that tech can't bridge distances and improve rural development.
Our apps to communicate are run by corporations, and despite what their marketing says, are not built to connect us.
Rural economic developers are usually out of touch with the possibilities of tech, and rely on old economic development methods like how to get an Applebee's in town.
Despite the articles claim that people move to cities for face to face interaction, people report elevated levels of loneliness in our urban tech paradise.
I think it's a lot of features contributing to slow rural development, and as a society we aren't using them as productively as possible.
I don't think it's a technology issue. Remote work has been possible for years. Many people just don't want to work from home, for a whole myriad of reasons. Likewise, if I am feeling lonely the last thing I want is to confront a dystopian reality of telecommunications being my best option because I live in the sticks and society has forgotten about me.
I know it may be a bit tropey but Ready Player One book did a great job of portraying how something like that could destroy what it is to feel part of a community in the real world. Even if you step outside of your little comms den for the day, no one else has and there is no one to talk to.
It happens now with social media. People spend all day clicking about, then they stop and take a moment to realise none of it actually happened, it's just text and daydreams, and they are alone in their house again.
What I've seen work is satellite offices in other cities followed by satellites of satellite offices as people realize they don't want to commute into a beltway. No one in these satellite offices had a direct business relationship with others in the same office and I don't think that hurt, just as I see no actual business advantage to living downtown.
We want to be around people and have all the urban advantages in our free time, but most of us learned in past decades that we want to be around different people than we work with.. and this decade, we want to be around different people from work and inside a social media blackout.
2. you start to bump into same people - in fact you will likely have more in common than average office neighbour because you live in same school district, have chosen to telecommute etc
3. mostly telecommute does not happen because it's less convenient to manage not to do
I can agree to point three being a big contributor but it is definitely not the only reason. It would alienate a lot of people if you just switched to entirely remote one day.
Number 2 is highly circumstantial but it does ultimately come down to the individual to make friends. My concern is just that it becomes harder when everyone else is also locked up at home working or consuming entertainment all day. Many people are only a commute and an office away from that being their life.
I definitely prefer working from home for myself mind you, but I can see the negatives and totally understand why many peoppe would rather an office. I currently split time between office and home and they both have very diverse pros and cons.
Most of my original comment was just speculating a possible future scenario. I just see the possibility for people to fall through the cracks of society and just work and consume entertainment all day at home, and if that becomes the everyman then society will change to accommodate that.
I think the cracks innsociety are as a big as we allow them to be - but yes, they are already too big, and too many people fall through.
It's just those cracks are not easily visoble. Perhaps even putting more of our lives online will make the cracks more visible - our shared pessimism may be wrong :-)
I couldn't stand in NYC when people out-to-lunch in midtown starting changing into IT people instead of $other people. I don't want to hear about your stupid computer problems while eavesdropping over chicken-and-rice-with-white-and-red, I want to hear about your fabric distribution problems or your cold-call-scam problems or just anything not "I couldn't get that version of stuff to match up with blah so idk lol". Stupid computers eating the world.
Maybe we can live with our extended families and childhood friends then? Of course problem with that is my interests have diverged vastly from those my childhood friends.
I think the idea is that in a (small c) conservative community, everybody has the same religion and goes to the same church, say, and that fosters community spirit. In a more (small l) liberal society, people are more free to figure out religion for themselves and do their own thing, but that contributes to social atomisation.
This isn’t specific to religion, that’s just an example (but I think a pretty useful one).
I've heard the related argument that cooperation between people with more differences requires more cognitive effort, so you can get a simple economic or second law of thermodynamics explanation for loneliness. More effort equals less of something.
In closed conservative cultures, people pretend to have the same interests to fit in and avoid persecution but pursue other interests in secret.
I think philosophical explanations for our loneliness epidemic (found on both right and left) are missing more obvious practical causes: how we build, urban planning, economic systems that incentivize workaholism and anxiety, etc. Not saying other causes don't exist, but we should look at the simple ones first.
Gave you a compensatory upvote though because I am sick of ideological echo chambers. Things one disagrees with nevertheless can provoke productive discussion.
Your comment does get at the core of the issue I think. Many of us through all kinds of circumstances, have found ourselves in adulthood without a robust community.
Perhaps I am wrong about mass telecommuting isolating people. Perhaps instead it would give them more time and opportunity to be part of and support their communities.
"it's just text and daydreams, and they are alone in their house again."
The wording on this struck me as poignant. It almost sounds like it should be part of a poem or philosophical treatise. Have you used this phrasing before?
The promise of telecommuting for me isn't living three miles way from my nearest neighbor, but rather living in a town of less than 10,000 people and still making six figures. I live in a town of 7,000 with a strong community and a good downtown, but I don't have to commute a half hour into the city. Instead I can wake up at 7am, walk down to the local coffee shop and chill for a bit, then go back home and work. I can pop out for lunch to the diner, and at 5 when everyone is just getting into their cars, I'm already at the local brewery unwinding.
That's the kind of lifestyle previously reserved for people living and working downtown in major cities, but can be (and for me is) a reality in small-town America. I make more money in one year than it cost me to buy my downtown, 2000 sq ft house with a two car garage and a half acre of land. And I don't have to drive anywhere unless I want to.
That's what remote working can offer. That's what small towns should be promising today.
So very much this. I don't want to be disconnected from the world, I just want my location to be disconnected from my employment. I don't want to be forced into one of only 2 or 3 hyper-inflated housing market cities because that's where all the decent paying gigs have decided to focus their headquarters. I can and do make friends and socialize anywhere I go, but most of the places I like are nothing like New York or San Francisco, and most of them have a hell of a lot better cost of living.
I'd take it one step further and say think about a little office a floor or two above that coffee shop, across from an artist or a lawyer. There's something nice about a place for work and a place for home. It's nicer when they're separated by a few small obstacles.
With a home office, you don't have to put on pants to go to work. It's always beckoning. Although, your small town might be relaxed about walking around pantless, the walk alone will help give some hysteresis between switching from work mode to home mode.
I guess the promise of remote work is a lot about the promise of not having to pay premium for space. I can't help thinking though that once remote work become more common the same thing would happen to nice places in smaller towns as have happened to nice places in cities.
I want to live in a walkable place where I can ride my bike without dying. I also want the same for my kid.
Right now, in the US, that means cities. That's _it_. And even then, most cities are horrible places to cycle.
But it doesn't have to be that way. I'd love to walk or cycle around Houten (NL, pop ~45,000 and built for walking and cycling from the beginning), or perhaps Rothenburg Ob Der Tauber in the old town centre (Germany, pop 10,000 for the town as a whole, smaller within the medieval walls of course).
I just can't think of any place built since the rise of the car which is not a city, and pleasant to walk in, aside from some very small communities like ecovillages (which are nice but not going to be self contained) - https://ecovillage.org/ . Even towns in the US that like to think of themselves as fitting this tend to be fantastically expensive and still very car dependent (San Luis Obispo comes to mind)
You might be surprised. My Midwestern 7,000 population town doesn't have very many dedicated bike lanes, but biking in town is incredibly common (to the point that the local library allows you to check out bikes like books) and we have a long-distance bike trail connecting us to the nearest "big" city.
Not every town is like that, of course, which is why I picked this town to live in. The best walkable/bikable towns, I've found, don't advertise themselves as walkable or bikable. They just are.
I'd rather not say where I live (even though I love my city and really do want you to move here), but I can tell you how to find similar cities. Pick a mid-size Midwestern metro area (say, Madison Wisconsin), then do a Google search for "best suburbs around Madison Wisconsin". I see a site like niche.com and click on it. I know the first few results are likely to be the most expensive places to live, so if my budget is high those are where I'm going. I might go down into to 5-10 range if I'm looking for a more budget-friendly place. Now I'm looking at Oregon, WI, which is about 15 miles from downtown Madison. Bringing it up in Google Maps, looks like there's a bike trail that will take me all the way into Madison without having to ride on the road? Score. Zillow shows housing prices around $150-$300k, great. Yelp shows a coffee house and a couple of tasty looking restaurants. Doesn't seem to be any local breweries, but oh well.
I'll also check out Verona, another well rated suburb. Looks to be a bit more expensive in housing, but also more local food options. Again a solid bike trail into the big city. Monona might be a little too close to the big city. Sun Prairie might be a little too far away. Disclaimer, I've never lived in any of those cities, so this is all based on just 5 minutes worth of Internet research. YMMV.
We got lucky when we settled down in that we knew what state we wanted to live in and what metro area we wanted to be around. From there it was just trying to find a bedroom community with a good solid downtown. Most suburbs close to the city won't have a downtown (they're more like residential areas), so it really narrows your choices a lot. I like using Google Maps to find area bike trails and bike lanes, which helps show how seriously a town/area takes bike safety and their overall attitude towards bikers/pedestrians.
so as a weird counterpoint I live in a somewhat unique part of Atlanta (east-side in-town) where you could exist without a car, housing is relatively affordable (400K - 900K for single-family-house, much less for condo/townhouse) and can walk to: a small grocery, coffee shop, a few restaurants; biking opens up to pretty much anything and thanks to The Beltline and The Freedom Path is very safe
That reveals part of the bigger problem, though - it would be nice to live somewhere homes were affordable for people who don't work in tech (or the few other high paying professions out there).
While I agree that cities won't disappear due to remote work (it's kind of obvious if you live in a small town), I feel like the article introduces a false dichotomy of: the city, or the scenic mountaintops. There's so much in between where you can get both your remote work and your social interaction. Where "rural" farmers come to hack nights to play with lora module for reporting vineyard soil/weather metrics.
You can take a train to the city to experience the excitement, the fun, the new things. But work/live daily in a pleasant town - where a few of the jobs would never exist without the internet.
Also the price/distance graph was interesting. It looks like apart from the rich suburb times the price went up everywhere. It doesn't really show the centre getting more expensive. Relatively, it's the centre that doesn't grow as fast.
All the net really does is bring cities closer together. Up until, say, 2001, there was a clear directional flow of information between cities. You could chart ideas originating in SF, LA, NY and then spreading to Europe and Asia. It would take about a year for some trend to circumnavigate the world and there was money to be made in leading the charge. The flow is gone now; ideas originate everywhere and flow rapidly from city to city through social networks in a matter of hours. A new pastry shows up in Shanghai on Monday and then becomes available in LA by Thursday and then, thanks to Instagram, explodes across NY, DC, Paris and London that weekend. These major world cities constitute the most important and powerful network on the planet and this network, augmented by social networking, makes each individual city that much more valuable.
This is what everybody talking about the death of distance and remote work doesn't get: cities are not about supply, they are about demand. This has been the case since Sumer was founded 7,000 years ago. These are the most desirable markets in the world. If you have something to sell -- including yourself -- and you can create demand in one world city and then drive that demand to other world cities then you will have a money printing machine. Corporations gather in cities because they are in fact the biggest consumers on the planet and they require all types of services -- from legal advice to market research to sophisticated technology -- and the one stop shop to buy these goods -- along with every other good -- is a world city.
In previous decades (1950s-1970s), city planners in the US adopted the Robert Moses model of development--highways and cars meant that middle-class (white) workers would be encouraged to live in the suburbs, the city center would be a warehouse for the poor (ethnic, minority), with some nice areas reserved as playground for the rich. Everyone who had any say in the matter--planners, bankers, developers, HUD, and so on--bought into this idea. Redlining and race-baiting were actively used to shape neighborhoods. In more recent decades, this has somewhat reversed. Declines in crime and pollution have made the city center more desirable, and people are looking for shorter commutes and convenience to services, and less car-dependence. Now we face the problems of gentrification, as the benefits of the resurgence of the city center has not been widely shared. Rural areas, and secondary cities once dependent on heavy industry, have seen their livelihoods decimated by automation, outsourcing, and other factors, with little to replace it, because all the new money is concentrated in a few coastal cities. The possibilities of remote work are not going to benefit them very much.
Yeah just looking at the graphs on that page, it's not hard to understand where and why the MAGA movement became a thing. Or why all us city dwellers were caught so off-guard by it. And largely still live in a bubble where we assume it's a mistake that most MAGA voters regret and will be overturned in 2020.
I feel a lot of people here see this as a issue of absolutes: either living in the middle of Manhattan or in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. There are certainly intermediary points. I think the major issue is that very large corporations (think Google/Apple) have no major objective reasons to stay in such an expensive location. Or at least they don't all have a reason to be all at the same place.
People in silicon valley tell me everyone is going to move to the mountains / beach once self-driving cars can bring them to town any time, while they can do whatever in the comfortable commute. My belief though is that most people want to be able to walk to the pub, to bike to the park, and to be a short drive from work... I don't see self-driving cars changing that
Anecdote from the US: Your belief may become more true as demographics change, but my parents and my wife's parents, who are baby boomers, and the vast majority of their friends and acquaintances, have no interest whatsoever in living within walking distance of basically anything because they have such an aversion to living really close to other people. For sure they are hardcore suburban people and not representative of everyone in the US, but I also don't think they're unusual among baby boomers, at least.
My biggest fear about self driving cars (aside from cycling and motorcycling becoming incredibly dangerous or illegal as a result) is that we'll use them to destroy the last vestiges of nature within a couple hundred miles of any city.
Even if remote technology was great, demographics and healthcare are going to make it difficult to convince people in tech jobs to move to rural areas. Young, college-educated tech workers tend not to want to hang out with people who are religious and/or not well-educated, and small-town America abounds with people who can't speak three sentences without mentioning god or jesus, who don't much care for skin-tone diversity, and who cannot converse about ideas. Yes, OF COURSE this is a generalization and there are notable exceptions -- like small (secular) college towns -- but it's such a predominant phenomenon in America that the exceptions are notably rare.
The other big problem with small towns is healthcare, and this is where older tech workers are going to have a problem. Healthcare in the US is well-known to be a dumpster fire and one reason is that it has become essentially unavailable in rural America. If you're older and need access to good doctors and hospitals, you need to live close to a major city, and even then it very much matters which city and which state you live in as to the quality of healthcare you'll get.
Small American towns have a lot of desirable qualities; they're often very pretty and the cost of living is quite low compared to cities. But they have a lot of catching up to do w.r.t. education and healthcare before they'll be competitive with cities for tech workers.
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[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 134 ms ] threadOn a tangent, I highly recommend "Internet of Shit" Twitter account if you want to have a laugh:
https://twitter.com/internetofshit?lang=en
Because productivity is all about being seated on the office.
I find it so old fashioned how by default, they expect me to stand in the rain for 2 hours a day to travel to the centre of a city to sit at a desk and log into the internet for 38 out of 40 hours a week.
That is a real life equivalent of a code smell.
PS: Where did you first learn of the expression "code smell"? I'm curious because I recently heard of it and would like to know if it was from the same source
If you have a remote team, you'll still have teamleaders and/or managers that keep things in sync with the company goals.
This is of course quite a caricature, but it illustrates the issue unless the company is willing to allocate manpower to be in continues dialog with an outsourcing company.
I have worked for an outsourcer and that's not what happened. I know dozens of people who continue to work for outsourcers, that is not what happens. They have daily standups with the team in Toronto, London, Berlin, etc. They fly back & forth at least monthly. They have video calls nearly daily. They have shared Slack instances, shared Confluence instances, shared JIRA instances.
And that's not just in software; when Tesla outsources a part, they don't just throw a spec over the wall. When Apple outsources manufacturing, they also don't have this caricatured approach. When Nike outsources manufacturing, they have Nike employees in the factories. And so on.
Since your caricature doesn't reflect the reality that I have years of experience with, I'm not sure it adds much to the argument.
The reality though is that remote work will always be priced down. Even if remote workers show up everyday by some kind of robotic telepresence, once that remote role is established there's enormous pricing pressure from literally every other worker on the planet. Everybody seems to think its corporations that are resistant to remote work when in reality its actually workers who are very hesitant to take on remote roles and do not want to be seen as some sort of outsourced and easily replaceable remote provider.
It will take a sea change in the culture and desires of workers to make remote work a real possibility at scale. Workers will have to embrace a vision of themselves as freelancers without any deep connection to any one company or city. This is happening... but very, very slowly since most workers are terrified of such an idea.
This is the important point.
> freelancers without any deep connection to any one company or city. This is happening... but very, very slowly since most workers are terrified of such an idea.
That's because outsourcing and freelancing are mostly a mechanism for fleecing labor. Workers SHOULD be terrified of this.
I would love to outsource some of out development, but to align that work with our goals, I would need a full time senior dev with intimate knowledge of our company and customers working with them managing all they do. Otherwise it's not a given that we get the code quality that ensure we can evolve the software the way we need to in the future.
Meanwhile remote work means having the worker not need to come into the office at all - each employee can theoretically be anywhere in the world, whether that be in the midwest or in Eastern Europe.
With remote work, the workers are still employees of your company, they just don't always sit in your office.
The problem is that employees want something and then justify that thing being good in whatever way works.
I mean... of course getting fired sucks. I'm actually surprised that you seem to be arguing that getting fired should be considered a good thing?
Is it possible that there might be some complexity to this beyond boring old corporate inertia? As you so correctly say, there are talented people hungry for work everywhere.
My servers are on the cloud. My IDE is on the cloud. My everything is accessible through the internet.
I need to be at office everyday, for some reason.
If it’s just a case of the future being unevenly distributed, where in the world is an example of the distributed future? It’s certainly not the Bay Area, for a start.
That's comfortable both in terms of literal headset weight but also latency, resolution, sound, etc.
When I sit down in front of a 48" TV I'm absorbed into a different world and forget where I am. When VR is good enough you can spend hours inside the virtual world, that's when it can be called good enough.
It's not there yet, but sure we might be there in a generation or two.
Compare Vancouver with a small town of less than 100k people just up the Fraser valley (Chilliwack). I've lived in both.
Vancouver has better restaurants, more concerts of every sort, better transit, access to the ocean, better internet, is more diverse, more liberal politics, better social services for the homeless and those needing mental health services, better access to diverse foods at the grocery stores, better night life, etc.
Sure, I paid a lot more when I was living in Vancouver that. I was in Chilliwack, but it's worth it.
No amount of videoconferencing technology can make up for the fact that if I want to go out for good sushi and I live in Chilliwack, I have to spend 2 fucking hours in the car each way.
Smaller cities are not universally conservative. Decent coffee can be found in most places, and this didn't used to be true. Many smaller cities that get some tourist traffic have small downtowns with good restaurants; maybe not every kind of ethnic restaurant, but some good choices.
There is not a big migration of retirees to big cities, so it seems pretty clear that it's all about the jobs. Without the attraction of a big paycheck, people look for smaller "nice" cities that have enough.
Could just be that retirees can't afford to live in the big cities.
When i was in my mid 20s, living in inner London was vital to me, because it meant i was close to the cool bars, nightclubs, art galleries (really!), and all my friends, who also lived in inner London. Now i am approaching my 40s, none of those things are much use to me, but i appreciate the fact that in my not-quite-inner-London suburb i have a good neighbourhood coffee shop, and some excellent bakeries and a big DIY shop nearby. I should imagine that in my 60s, i will value different things, and in my 80s, different things again.
The article is talking about cities and community as most of the good articles on that site also cover (but in different ways).
Our apps to communicate are run by corporations, and despite what their marketing says, are not built to connect us.
Rural economic developers are usually out of touch with the possibilities of tech, and rely on old economic development methods like how to get an Applebee's in town.
Despite the articles claim that people move to cities for face to face interaction, people report elevated levels of loneliness in our urban tech paradise.
I think it's a lot of features contributing to slow rural development, and as a society we aren't using them as productively as possible.
I know it may be a bit tropey but Ready Player One book did a great job of portraying how something like that could destroy what it is to feel part of a community in the real world. Even if you step outside of your little comms den for the day, no one else has and there is no one to talk to.
It happens now with social media. People spend all day clicking about, then they stop and take a moment to realise none of it actually happened, it's just text and daydreams, and they are alone in their house again.
We want to be around people and have all the urban advantages in our free time, but most of us learned in past decades that we want to be around different people than we work with.. and this decade, we want to be around different people from work and inside a social media blackout.
2. you start to bump into same people - in fact you will likely have more in common than average office neighbour because you live in same school district, have chosen to telecommute etc
3. mostly telecommute does not happen because it's less convenient to manage not to do
Number 2 is highly circumstantial but it does ultimately come down to the individual to make friends. My concern is just that it becomes harder when everyone else is also locked up at home working or consuming entertainment all day. Many people are only a commute and an office away from that being their life.
I definitely prefer working from home for myself mind you, but I can see the negatives and totally understand why many peoppe would rather an office. I currently split time between office and home and they both have very diverse pros and cons.
Most of my original comment was just speculating a possible future scenario. I just see the possibility for people to fall through the cracks of society and just work and consume entertainment all day at home, and if that becomes the everyman then society will change to accommodate that.
It's just those cracks are not easily visoble. Perhaps even putting more of our lives online will make the cracks more visible - our shared pessimism may be wrong :-)
This isn’t specific to religion, that’s just an example (but I think a pretty useful one).
I think philosophical explanations for our loneliness epidemic (found on both right and left) are missing more obvious practical causes: how we build, urban planning, economic systems that incentivize workaholism and anxiety, etc. Not saying other causes don't exist, but we should look at the simple ones first.
Gave you a compensatory upvote though because I am sick of ideological echo chambers. Things one disagrees with nevertheless can provoke productive discussion.
Perhaps I am wrong about mass telecommuting isolating people. Perhaps instead it would give them more time and opportunity to be part of and support their communities.
The wording on this struck me as poignant. It almost sounds like it should be part of a poem or philosophical treatise. Have you used this phrasing before?
That's the kind of lifestyle previously reserved for people living and working downtown in major cities, but can be (and for me is) a reality in small-town America. I make more money in one year than it cost me to buy my downtown, 2000 sq ft house with a two car garage and a half acre of land. And I don't have to drive anywhere unless I want to.
That's what remote working can offer. That's what small towns should be promising today.
With a home office, you don't have to put on pants to go to work. It's always beckoning. Although, your small town might be relaxed about walking around pantless, the walk alone will help give some hysteresis between switching from work mode to home mode.
Right now, in the US, that means cities. That's _it_. And even then, most cities are horrible places to cycle.
But it doesn't have to be that way. I'd love to walk or cycle around Houten (NL, pop ~45,000 and built for walking and cycling from the beginning), or perhaps Rothenburg Ob Der Tauber in the old town centre (Germany, pop 10,000 for the town as a whole, smaller within the medieval walls of course).
I just can't think of any place built since the rise of the car which is not a city, and pleasant to walk in, aside from some very small communities like ecovillages (which are nice but not going to be self contained) - https://ecovillage.org/ . Even towns in the US that like to think of themselves as fitting this tend to be fantastically expensive and still very car dependent (San Luis Obispo comes to mind)
Not every town is like that, of course, which is why I picked this town to live in. The best walkable/bikable towns, I've found, don't advertise themselves as walkable or bikable. They just are.
I'll also check out Verona, another well rated suburb. Looks to be a bit more expensive in housing, but also more local food options. Again a solid bike trail into the big city. Monona might be a little too close to the big city. Sun Prairie might be a little too far away. Disclaimer, I've never lived in any of those cities, so this is all based on just 5 minutes worth of Internet research. YMMV.
We got lucky when we settled down in that we knew what state we wanted to live in and what metro area we wanted to be around. From there it was just trying to find a bedroom community with a good solid downtown. Most suburbs close to the city won't have a downtown (they're more like residential areas), so it really narrows your choices a lot. I like using Google Maps to find area bike trails and bike lanes, which helps show how seriously a town/area takes bike safety and their overall attitude towards bikers/pedestrians.
Hopefully that helps.
Hot piss, my house cost $150,000.
You can take a train to the city to experience the excitement, the fun, the new things. But work/live daily in a pleasant town - where a few of the jobs would never exist without the internet.
Also the price/distance graph was interesting. It looks like apart from the rich suburb times the price went up everywhere. It doesn't really show the centre getting more expensive. Relatively, it's the centre that doesn't grow as fast.
This is what everybody talking about the death of distance and remote work doesn't get: cities are not about supply, they are about demand. This has been the case since Sumer was founded 7,000 years ago. These are the most desirable markets in the world. If you have something to sell -- including yourself -- and you can create demand in one world city and then drive that demand to other world cities then you will have a money printing machine. Corporations gather in cities because they are in fact the biggest consumers on the planet and they require all types of services -- from legal advice to market research to sophisticated technology -- and the one stop shop to buy these goods -- along with every other good -- is a world city.
I totally understand them. I am a very late millenial (born Sept 1996), but I don‘t want to live in a city center, especially not a big city.
The other big problem with small towns is healthcare, and this is where older tech workers are going to have a problem. Healthcare in the US is well-known to be a dumpster fire and one reason is that it has become essentially unavailable in rural America. If you're older and need access to good doctors and hospitals, you need to live close to a major city, and even then it very much matters which city and which state you live in as to the quality of healthcare you'll get.
Small American towns have a lot of desirable qualities; they're often very pretty and the cost of living is quite low compared to cities. But they have a lot of catching up to do w.r.t. education and healthcare before they'll be competitive with cities for tech workers.