I'm curious what will happen where I work. Upper management has always hated working from home and part time work. I think eventually they'll go back to their set ways, but it will be some time in late 2021.
Our company's business happens to be booming during this pandemic, and we've handled a massive amount of unexpected growth very well and entirely without an office. I'd hope that would be sufficient proof of the efficacy of remote work.
But our CEO hates remote work. Upper management is already talking about getting some people back in the office in a few weeks. It's a bit depressing.
> But our CEO hates remote work. Upper management is already talking about getting some people back in the office in a few weeks. It's a bit depressing.
Same story with mine. (Minus the business booming - ours is fluttering along)
I've brought this up to our management: "We work in a space where most people sit within arms distance of each other. How are you going to manage that aspect?"
They said, "Oh, maybe we'll do a thing where half comes in one day and half comes in another. Like business one day, engineering another, etc."
I responded, "But... the office isn't setup for hot swapping desks at all. So, you'd have half of some teams come in? You'd force us all in small meeting rooms again with very poor ventilation where we can't do social distancing? What's the point if half of engineering is at home and half isn't? We don't have many bathrooms so we'd have a lot of shared touch points. Same with kitchen - etc."
As usual - they're not thinking past the initial words coming out of their mouth. It's utterly amazing how inept people are at all levels of the stack.
Or, will they discover what IBM discovered decades ago, that work-from-home saves $$millions on otherwise unnecessary office space. They've long had both work-from-home, and a temp office setup where you sign up where you'll need an office that day, go to the location, get assigned a desk, and everything routes to that location/desk. I've had a fam member working for them from home for nearly 20yrs.
Sure, managers may like the control of walking down the hall and standing over any employee when they feel like it.
But I expect that they'll like even better not having to spend insane commercial real estate costs, hear every worker complain about traffic, only to see lower net productivity...
(Edit: I'm assuming this must be a different IBM division from the one in which my family member works, which has see no change in her work-from-home status, even tho the article says 'IBM cancelled it'.)
You're assuming rational actors. If the company is big enough then management won't care. It doesn't come out of middle management's pocket to pay for the extra space and they enjoy the feeling of control they have being able to tell people where to be and when. As for upper management they are too busy playing political games to care about those more ephemeral issues.
Ultimately the biggest takeaway from this WFH situation might just make it clearer which employers are worth a spit, and which ones genuinely don't care about their employees.
Yes, I've also read studies showing that WFH tends to make good managers (and their teams) perform better and lesser managers & their terms perform worse. So that may end up having something to do with it too - along your lines of thought, the worse managers will want to bring ppl back to the office to cover up their performance?
How productive one can be working from home also depends on the type of job and level of experience.
As a new grad (hoping that my job offer survives covid), I'm terrified of a transition where WFH is the default. I recognize that I still have a lot to learn, and that I can't do it all on my own. Casual interactions with coworkers and the ability to passively absorb new information in the workplace are essential for entry-level employees like me. Plus, personally, I find the social aspect of work to be crucial to my well-being.
Indeed, there's a whole bunch of other axis that this could be put on, and they might very well change too. If you start a family / have a child, that could very well change it in either direction. Or if the company restructures, or changes its workflows. Etc. pp.
The one thing that probably _doesn't_ affect this is a past pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic may push some companies to improve their workflows for working from home, but, the workflows are only one thing out of a whole bunch.
I would expect maybe a few more percent of people working from home after the pandemic is over. Hopefully those would be people that are good at working from home but couldn't do so previously for some reason. It'll also happen to some people who are bad at it, but either need time to realize it, or are forced into it since the company thinks it's better or saves money.
But overall... we're still the same people after COVID-19. I don't see the office dying any time soon.
And as someone who is 20 years in, my value comes from facilitating that information flow and bringing people up to speed with the quirks of our domain and process. My slack being up all day doesn't have the same effect as my door being open.
I see this too in the way that older team members often have offices or dedicated spaces within their larger homes that they work from, making it easier to get into work mode.
I work from my small kitchen table that is about four feet from my couch which is about 7-8 feet from my bed. This makes it a lot harder to get into the work zone, as well, it makes it harder to leave it at the end of the day.
Secondly, a lot of my older team members are married or live with a significant other.
I on the other hand live by myself in a new city where the only people I know are the ones that are on my team. Or, were on my team, I should say, before my company internally shuffled roles to avoid layoffs and moved me from my analyst role that I was in for about six months (my first job out of college) down to support. So now the only people I talk to are people calling for help. Or my parents by video call. Other than that it’s just me and my thoughts, which makes it a lot more difficult mentally. I don’t have a spouse or significant other to talk to throughout the day, and the only people I do talk to, for 8 hours, are generally in a neutral to unhappy mood, which also does nothing good for my mental health. Which is just adding on top of the effect being moved from the role I went to college for, and I applied for, and that I thought would help get me on the right path for my career goals (data engineer), down to a support role less technical than the one I had as an internship during college, had on me.
I’m applying for data analyst/BI/Junior DBA/Junior Data Engineer roles across the western US, but I have a feeling it will be quite hard now with lots of experienced workers being laid off competing for lower level jobs, considering I only have six months real world experience. As well, I want to start a project for my portfolio to help learn some key technologies I don’t know, but I’m generally so mentally drained after work I just don’t want to do anything. I just want to nap or zone out. I took Friday and today off but it doesn’t feel even close to enough time to fully recharge.
I’m rambling off subject, but yeah, as you can tell, this entire thing has definitely not been easy on some of us. I think I’d like WFH if it was an option, as in, Monday and Friday WFH, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, I’m in the office. That would be a good balance for me.
I can’t imagine how bad this would have been if my wife and I had still been living in our apartment. Even then I had a separate small office and we had a treadmill in the living room.
This is in a relatively low cost of living area. So I’m definitely not bragging.
But now, it’s not too bad. I have a large separate office, we have one bedroom converted into a decently equipped gym with exercise equipment, my son has his own room, my wife converted another room that was originally her study to an ad-hoc studio so she could continue to teach her fitness classes.
You're absolutely right about random interactions being essential for your career growth. And the worst part is, even if all the juniors go back to an office, a lot of the seniors will want to WFH, so you'll lose out on a lot of that benefit even at the office.
That being said, perhaps with all the seniors working at home there might be more chance for interaction with them while also at home?
There are people bad at working in open floor plan offices, too. What did companies do? Stick with (only) open floor plans, i.e., select for those employees who can work in that environment.
Absent some external force (like, say, legislation, or a union), why would companies care that there are a subset of people who are $17,000 more expensive for the same output?
Regardless of that, I don't think traditional return to an open office for the tech industry is likely anytime soon, given the risks & the ability of many to work remotely.
Maybe a limited number of small, closed offices, rather than a desk for every employee in an open-space will be the new norm, maybe companies will buy employees equipment to accommodate them at home?
Some will just ignore COVID wherever they possibly can, but I think most won't.
Agree, like most everything it seems, I'm in the middle on this. I prefer the office, but spend 1-2 days a week working from home. We have an open office plan and I find it best to work with people at the office and concentrate at home.
Given the current working conditions, I'm getting better at the prior from home. But I know people that literally cannot function this way, and I know others who never come to the office.
I have a fried that could work from home, but is still going into the office. When I asked him why, he said that if he worked from home he would soon be divorced. His wife confirmed that was true. (I didn't ask, but I assume that means he will never retire?) So, that was an interesting perspective for me since I have loved working from home and projected my love onto everyone else. It's often hard to remember that our own beliefs, feelings, thoughts, etc. are not universally applicable.
Companies will completely disregard this information and will base the amount of office space and WFH policies based on the cost of real estate post COVID19.
I predict that when the virus situation calms down, companies will tend to prefer WFH policies until some companies start noticing how cheap office leases are. At that point, we'll ramp back up to where we are today for the same bogus reasons we have open office plans and lots of butts in seats.
I also predict that there will be a bubble of architecture changes for new housing builds: single family homes (that often have a home office space) will start to be built with 2 home offices to support married couples both working from home.
Rent expense is already a tiny fraction of labour expense. I don’t think companies will make a different decision if market lease rents decline 50%. It is tiny on the income statement. They will make the decision based on the impact to labour, as a tiny shift in productivity or retention/turnover could easily wipe out the relatively small rent expense.
"Work from home" is a misnomer. People are free to rent a shared office space if that is the environment they prefer post pandemic. So "work from home" actually works for everyone.
and there’s another subset of people who are fine working from home, but whose souls are starting to shrivel from the lack of face-to-face direct human interaction, something that i believe counts among several basic human needs. i count myself among that subset.
The problem now is that we don't have enough jobs for the people who are good at working from home due to an antiquated view on jobs and productivity.
In the future, we'll have way more jobs for these people as companies see the advantages in cost when hiring someone who will be happy to make less money and produce more because they a)don't need to live in the bay area, b)don't need to commute and c)don't get distracted all the time.
This said, I find it very unlikely that software office jobs will disappear or even reduce drastically. I'm predicting a 30% reduction in full-office jobs, not a 90% reduction. Despite all of the excitement for future WFH opportunities, remember old habits die hard.
Working in software, the idea that we should all report in at the beginning of the day, every day, feels like too much like school. It would be better if the office culture was to show up when you needed to show up, without any hidden expectations, or surprise bad reviews because the perception is you work less because you're not in early or stay late enough. Luckily this had to go away recently for obvious reasons.
On the flip side of this: I do not owe my employer space in my home. Having to dedicate some part of my home to their economic activity should be something I'm financially compensated for.
In the future employment contracts might stipulate such compensation in order to remain competitive.
Something to consider, though: Most employees today probably aren't compensated for the time and money they waste during their daily commute. What about car maintenance? Unless they're driving a company car to work most employees will have to pay for that themselves. Shouldn't the employer cover or reimburse these costs?
Do you want to have someone who lives next to work get the job rather than you because he won't have commute costs? Be careful about unintended consequences.
If you believe you are worth more money, negotiate for that.
In many ways, including WFH explicitly in salary agreements would be unusual largely because workers incur a large number of other work related expenses that are not explicitly enumerated in the agreement. But those costs are implicitly included, as employers have to compete against each other to offer salary and benefits necessary to attract talent.
But practically speaking, it would not be surprising to see WFH companies offer slightly higher salaries largely due to the significant savings associated with no offices, as well as the reduced risk of not having a lease. If I save $27K a year per employee (from the article), I can easily offer candidates $10K more than my competitors with an office, increasing profit and attracting higher quality talent.
I'm willing to draw the line at "the boss needs to pay for the things that happen at work." That would not include commute. But it does include the place I keep all my work stuff.
In general things like public transport ticket subsidies and work cars are not that rare here. But the employer also saves rent, utilities and maintenance when someone is working from home compared to that person requiring an office.
I don't, because I'm not at work while I do those things. I'm willing to take responsibility for getting myself to work; but I don't think it's fair that I'm currently loaning my employer some free square footage in my apartment that's dedicated solely to their economic activity.
FWIW, in Germany if you have a dedicated (and well-separated, "curtain at minimum", such is the legal requirement) workspace, you can deduct its costs from your taxable income.
If you're an employee, AFAIK the company is also required to cover some costs, but I don't remember what exactly & under what conditions...
We have a similar system in the US, though perhaps slightly more flexible. I've always found it to be a bizarre subsidy for those who can afford large homes. People in small apartments generally have no option but to have living space and work space completely overlapping.
With the recent tax law changes, though, I believe a majority of people end up taking the standard deduction because they can’t come up with enough itemized deductions to exceed that. The inability to fully deduct state taxes is a big one, for example.
I think that was meant to sound Dilbert-esque, but really any business impacted by the probably inevitable recession, which manages to both stay afloat (with some cutbacks) and convert to a work-from-home arrangement, is probably being pretty competently managed. What you describe is probably a relatively good outcome with all that's going on.
They do compensate you. It's called a salary. I don't get reimbursed for my work clothes, car (which I only need because I commute) or haircuts, but my company expects me to have all of these.
I'm sure that I can find a company that wouldn't require any of these, but the salary and benefits from my current job outweigh these costs.
That's kind of ludicrous and I think you know it. The space I work in in my NYC apartment is now space that is not living space. I had to carve square feet out of my apartment to provide space for my company's economic activity.
My clothes have nothing to do with my employer, nor does my car, even if I use them while working, I can also use them for other things.
It's the employer's responsibility to create the space for working. Currently we're all basically loaning our bosses some space in our homes. If everyone's boss goes "huh well, guess I don't need a physical office anymore" then all they've done is offload the responsibility for housing their work to their employees, with no compensation.
As an employer, I fully intend to pass a meaningful portion of any savings from reduced rent/real estate costs to my employees. I’m not sure exactly how much or how, yet, but some ideas:
- Expense Budget for tech upgrades (desk, hardware, etc). Probably a few hundred dollars a month per employee once you do the math.
- Or maybe Directly boost salaries by a similar amount?
- Throw a bumping annual all expense paid off-site trip with the $$$ not spent on rent
Far from being able to implement it given a long term lease but I’d really be surprised if a company dropped its real estate footprint and not pass some perk or benefit onto the employees.
I don't see why it would be important to for employers to specifically compensate people for things like that: ultimately what matters is the total amount of money earned regardless of how it is split.
Also in most cases work that is done at home is done in on a computer, so the same space that is used for home computer use can be reused at no additional space cost besides possibly an extra desktop or laptop if a dedicated machine is used.
I'm not sure why this would be worth doing for the employer. once you add up salary and associated costs (health insurance, payroll, etc.), a typical engineer costs at least $100,000/yr in most areas of the US. if a few of them abuse the system to buy $1000 graphics cards, does it really move the needle?
my employer does not reimburse home office expenses, but several of my friends work for employers that do. the way it works for them is that they get a yearly "technology" budget of about $1000-2000. then they can spend it on any equipment they want to use at home or in the office. as long as it's some sort of computer hardware or office furniture, no questions are asked.
That's basically just a $1000 bump in your salary. The fiction that you're getting an extra technology benefit is just that, a fiction.
From a pragmatic point of view, and an accounting one (for the employer), your "benefits" are taken from your salary. The only time those benefits are worth it for the employer is if it pays for something pre-tax rather than post-tax (health care falls into this category, hence the popularity of employer provided health care).
The accounting term for this is "total employee compensation". That's what matters to the employer when calculating the cost/benefit of an employee.
Be careful what you ask for in benefits. They can be expensive for the employee.
I must admit I'm not very familiar with business accounting or tax rules, and I can't find any sources that directly address this specific topic. it's my understanding that equipment purchases are counted as expenses for the business, so they get to subtract it from their taxable income. does this change when the employee directly controls equipment purchases?
> if a few of them abuse the system to buy $1000 graphics cards, does it really move the needle?
That does happen a lot with expense reports. They get abused all the time. Sometimes, though, employees do get their ERs audited, and get fired for ER fraud. Especially if the employer needs a reason to fire you.
The employer might not but the IRS might if you claim it as a home office expense. If more people work from home and beef up their home offices to accommodate that, there will be tax implications for that. When I was freelancing from home years ago, I never bothered (all I needed for work was email and a red pencil), but today it would be different.
I ride the subway for a lot of reasons (or drive a car, if you're in a car place). But I use my dedicated work space only to produce profit for my employer. They should compensate me for it if the space is space I'm paying for.
I actually like going to the office, compared to working from home (good for putting a clear divide between work and home, and it means I don't have to squeeze two home offices in my living space). I just hope COVID-19 spells the end of open offices, at least for a a decade or two. Besides the increased disease transmission (which exists for colds, flu, and covid), I don't like how noisy and visually distracting the spaces are. They're really not conductive to focused work like software development [1].
With social distancing, there's literally no reason to not surround employee workspaces with tall cube walls, besides a desire to replace personal privacy with distraction.
[1] For a good discussion of this, see Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams.
> Open offices are cheap. Re-configuring office space isn't cheap. So, no.
I think that's pre-covid thinking. The OP speaks about 1) companies dropping their office footprints due to increased WFH and 2) companies reducing office density and making other changes to accommodate social distancing. Both of those require office reconfiguration.
We'll be dealing with this pandemic for at least another year, and the psychological effects will last longer, so monomaniacal bottom-line focused thinking will have to accommodate it.
for many companies that own their own properties I doubt they will maintain work from home policies long term unless Covid19 outlooks are dire but to be honest, if they get that dire and stay there then where you work is the least of the concerns.
the issue with work from home is that jobs which are suited for it or can be adapted this require that workers have discipline to do so. for companies willing to have a portion of their employees offsite then HR programs would need to be put into place to help train people how to manage their work life at home and then to train managers in how to properly employ a work from home team.
the issue not raised here is the tax component. a collapse of the real estate market will take the tax base down a few notches. this will lead to an increase in finding a replacement and this could include proxy taxes on an employees work from home setup and costs associated with it; a few fees and tariffs here and there. Then comes the non state actors, HOAs and property management companies, whose rules will need to moderated if not outright regulated to prevent putting undue pressure on work from home employees. most can fly under the RADAR because of no increase in external activity; think shipping and receiving; to give it away but cancel culture has its adherents everywhere with people who have nothing better to do than point.
I suspect that if this really does become the new normal, in 5-10 years, part of that new normal will be providing your own equipment (computers, monitors, etc.). I predict there will be a non-trivial "startup cost" associated with taking most jobs.
I've never heard of a professional trade where they don't provide their own tools. The exception has always been big, expensive, infrequently used things but hand tools always and a lot of specialized and power tools.
This makes sense for independent contractors, etc. but I was really surprised to find out that he (and his coworkers) all have their "own" tools. To me that was a bit like bringing your own computer to work, which would run in to issues with invention assingment agreements and the like, if nothing else.
To be fair it _kinda_ makes sense in that each person will have their own preference for tools, but it's a pretty big expense.
This varies from place to place. Some provide you tools, some have a mechanism for "checking in" personal tools so they can be used at work and you can take them with you when you leave.
Depends on the job. This is very much the expectation for consulting, at least the consulting that I did. For a lot of places that are regulated entities you're gonna be hard pressed to see IT departments allowing BYOD for anything more complicated than email and calendar.
BYO monitor/keyboard/etc will of course be possible, but also I would expect a startup budget for most places.
> I suspect that if this really does become the new normal, in 5-10 years, part of that new normal will be providing your own equipment (computers, monitors, etc.). I predict there will be a non-trivial "startup cost" associated with taking most jobs.
IIRC, that's already the expectation in many professions (e.g. auto mechanics). I personally would be fine with it so long workers were compensated for the extra expense, and employers were statutorily prohibited from requiring spyware to be installed on a worker-owned machine.
But of course this is America, so the employers will jump at any opportunity to dump more uncompensated costs on workers to enrich shareholders further, and they'll fight hard against any constraints on what they can require.
I'd think the employee would basically be providing a dumb terminal to some sort of cloud instance- no company should trust their IP to a random endpoint.
The company I work for (insurance carrier) has seen the light with working from home and the big heads are starting to discuss what to do when the long term leases are up. I think even outside of tech a lot of places that can have people working from home will strongly encourage or require it. Not every job can, obviously but with the incentive to save money on expensive leases and what comes with them it's really a no-brainer.
I can imagine this pandemic is going to push WFH into the vanguard... but to imply that companies no longer need offices seems too hyperbolic a conclusion.
The reality is that if a company says they don’t need an office because you can work from home, they need to compensate you for the use of your office space. A place of work is physical capital, and you can’t simply decide that your workers provide that capital as part of their employment.
that's like $165 per foot, or roughly 3x the most expensive AAA corporate space in North America. Not sure what they're getting beyond floor space - maybe furniture, ammenities and technology?
Exactly. My company, rent + outsourced IT + utilities, etc is around $12,000/mo for 4400 sqft. So $30 per foot.
Problem I have with that is after the dot bomb we were looking at office space and it seemed that the high flyers that threw $$$[1] at their office build outs were all out of business. Where the ones where you had as a friends company, network cables stapled to the walls weren't.
It's not so much the money spent but the thought that those were the guys that didn't have a sense of how to prioritize their cash flow.
So all of this working life I always go to my office for work because at home I always found myself distracted about bunch of stuffs. I prefer to be in the office even though my companies always flexible in working remotely.
It is not until this pandemic that I was forced to work from home that I realized that I am the happiest I've ever been in years. I always felt tired daily when I used to go to office and also go to bunch of other social gatherings that I have. It turns out that I am definitely an introvert to the bone. Not only not meeting people everyday face to face has been beneficial to me, but cutting slack, social media, text, etc has been tremendously great for me. I also don't watch TV. Basically less human interaction in general (not zero at all mind you, I'm not anti social). Now I have more time to cultivate my various hobbies (which I've always been doing anyway) and become self absorbed lol.
I enjoy life better now, everyday feel fresh and energized and as a result my productivity with my work also shoot through the roof. I didn't know why I always thought I'd be distracted at home. All the simple things in life like running outside, walking outside, queueing for some snacks, just become delightful all of a sudden. Not to mention the great air quality.
I know it is bad for me to say this, but this pandemic I've been the happiest in years. I hope this pandemic is over soon but I don't hope to be back in office soon.
Do you have kids of toddler-age or younger and a spouse who also works during standard office hours? I find that makes the difference between "WFH works" and "WFH is hell on earth".
I have a 9-month old baby who is just starting to crawl all over the place and gets noisy and impatient when we don't pay attention to her. My wife and I work during office hours. Nursery is of course out of the question due to the lockdown and babysitters are illegal (because of the quarantine). Our stress levels are going through the roof. I want to go back to normality ASAP. Give me back my office, please!
Thankfully I currently don't. I'm sure it's gonna be zoo and hell on earth when I have one lol. My wife will most likely won't gonna be working when we have one.
There are plenty of people who didn't like working from home before and still don't. There are also plenty of people who just can't do their job as well from home.
What seems likely is that some managers who previously didn't think of work-from-home as a viable option before will probably be more open to the idea going forward. And some individual contributors will decide that working remotely suits them well. And companies will have a better sense of the tools required for effectively working remotely.
But the majority of people are going back to the office when this is over. It might be because managers will still be managers, and feel that they can have more control with people there in person. It might be because people like to get out of the home. Maybe they like socializing with coworkers in person. Maybe they don't have enough room at home. Or the proper equipment.
I certainly expect to see changes, but the concept of offices isn't going anywhere.
[1] and nor does the article claim it is, despite the sensationalist headline
It's one of those things that will have the rubber band effect, just like any other office trend.
First will be trendy tech organizations that will go the extreme and set a large window of WFH, then some will move a large chunk of operations to WFH, then a lot of tech companies will follow with bold claims of how good it is, and so on...
Then all of a sudden, one study or one article with the unpopular opinion - "working from home is not that good after all", then some people will vent out on how they dislike it in some situations, then one trendy company will make the bold claim: "We're bringing people back in!"
I can already see the headlines of Buzzfeed, Wired, and posts on medium: "The gold nugget of productivity! This company boosted their performance by bringing people back into what we used to call offices!", with comments of the CEO that's trying to lure in talent.
Just to end back in the middle term: some roles are suitable for work from home, while others make sense to bring in house, some people prefer work from home while others don't.
my guess is most companies that were forced into WFH by coronavirus will try to return to "business as usual" as soon as reasonably possible. if you're already paying for enough square footage and operations people to have everyone on-site, you may as well get your money's worth.
my hope is that, after seeing that work still got done during the crisis, employers will be more willing to entertain a certain number of WFH days per week. this would be ideal for me. I love the flexibility and comfort of WFH, but I would like to have at least a small window where I can reliably find people on-site for a face-to-face meeting, without having to plan that interaction far in advance.
The really interesting thing I learned during covid19 is that, the fact that everybody is WFH, makes WFH better.
In the past, when I WFH, and everybody else is in the office. I was the odd one out and people start to talk amongst themselvces. Sometimes I don't hear well, sometimes I can't get into the discussion politely.
But, since everybody is WFH right now, the whole WFH experience became better and I am more productive in WFH as a result.
Agreed, this is one of the reasons working remotely for a 100% remote company is substantially better than working remotely for a team that is partially remote and partially in the office.
The office as a concept will stay, but the notion that all employees must work from a particular office will not.
Co-working spaces will definitely benefit, imo.
I work in what the author describes as an "old school wall street firm". The senior management may be delusional about the impact of working from home (the senior management is often delusional about many things). But the consensus on the ground is that it sunk productivity massively, information is not flowing fluently, and for some people it is absolute hell (trying to work with screaming kids, young couples trying to do calls in the same room while their flatmates are trying to do the same in other rooms, etc).
Could that be a transitional period? Young couples with roommates crammed into shoeboxes live in those conditions as a compromise to be relatively close to their high-paying jobs in an expensive city. The line about "cities losing some of their lustre" resonated with me. We're basically living country life right now (not seeing much people except the odd neighbour, once a week groceries, etc) - I'd much rather do that in a country setting, if this is to continue in the long term.
It's not just proximity to the office. They could commute from some distant suburbs. But young people who chose to work in London or New York also often want to experience the cosmopolitan life of a major city.
100% agree. I live in a more expensive apartment in the middle of downtown so I get the amenities of living downtown. Except now those are gone. As well, I don’t have a car because normally the rail system or busses or ride sharing was enough to get me around, but now I feel as if I’m trapped in this small area around my apartment. Can’t go anywhere, and even if I want to walk somewhere, it’ll be aimlessly cause everything is closed.
I’d rather live in a cheap apartment further out that had parking for a car so I could drive to the mountains or just anywhere really. Instead I’ve been within probably a quarter mile of my apartment at all times for the last ten weeks. I’m paying a premium for no return right now.
That's because you need time to adapt. In half a year with proper processes things would fly. This was sudden disruption of everythong on the planet so give humans some slack.
Did any other introverts discovered that they're not as introverted as they thought they were during this pandemic? I got a pretty harsh awakening about 2 weeks into shelter in place. At the beginning I thought I would excel at this and even joke this is time for "introvert flexing". Two weeks in, I found myself anxious and kind of miserable. What I've never realized and always took for granted is how much social interaction I had with my coworkers and how those interactions help to lower my anxiety and stress. A joke here and there, etc. throughout the day really helped. I've gone back to running every day to deal with the anxiety and stress and really miss seeing my coworkers.
So I'm not so sure the office is dead. As someone else pointed out, this might be true for some people but we may still need office space for the other portion of the population.
I did not consider myself introvert until the pandemic. I have not had real human contact in more than 2 months, other than some audio-only standups and stuff + I live completely alone. I feel not that different compared to when I interacted with others on a daily basis, if anything, I would actually prefer to have even less contact with people.
> Pinpoint’s $25,000-per-month lease with WeWork for 1,800 square feet
My god, is that what it costs now?! You can rent an 1800 sq ft house in the middle of SF for about $7,000 a month. You'd get three "offices", some common space, a kitchen, some parking. You could spend another $2,000 a month to hire someone to clean the place every day, and another $2,000 to have someone bring coffee and beer and whatever else you get "for free" at WeWork, and even $1,000 a month for an "IT person" so set up and maintain wifi and conferencing equipment, and still save money.
That's 1800 sq ft of open space, you can cram way more people there than into a three-bedroom townhouse. They're not wasting any floorspace on a bathroom either, that's down the hall.
WeWork isn't a great apples-to-apples comparison with a residence; it's more like a hotel. This lease almost certainly includes insurance, maintenance, cleaning, and maybe even services like a stocked kitchen, receptionist/office manager, security
I'm skeptical. Not just of this article but really of anything written in this moment that talks about how The Way Things Will Be.
We're thick in the middle of a pandemic right now. It will subside. No one knows exactly what waits for us on the other side, or what the societal impacts will be. Yes, we're all working remotely right now. But it's been an incredibly slap-dash, thrown together effort for many companies and that might mean they become less receptive to remote work in the future, not more. We don't really have any data on what the economic impact of remote work is (separate from all the other economic impacts swirling around us right now), and until we do I'm going to hold off making too many wild predictions.
I started working from home about 10 years ago. At first I was going back to an office every 4 months. I got sick twice a year, pretty much every fall/winter and spring trip.
Each job since then the number of required trips seems to drop a little. I think I'm pretty much permanently always home now. I really don't get sick any more.
I know it hasn't really hit specific articles, but NO, nail salons are not the cause of the pandemic. The specific cause of the pandemic was airplanes (or travelling in general) and offices, which quite aptly explains new york on both counts.
I dunno about the US, but my flat in London isn’t suitable for both of us working from home. Most other flats in London aren’t suitable for two people working from home either. Unless we build a lot of new, larger homes with live/work spaces, this isn’t going to work.
The underlying assumption in a lot of these articles is that if you could work from home you'd move to the suburbs/country where space is cheaper. Very few assume people like living in a city.
I understand that living spaces are quite a bit larger on average here in the US. My home for my family of four is a 1,800 sq ft, 4 bedroom/w bath home with an office/den and large living room. It feels fairly typical for suburban/semi-rural areas.
Savings like these are generally passed on to stakeholders; existing contracts (e.g. vendors, clients, employees, contractors) are rarely automatically renegotiated to reflect lower cap ex
whats gonna happen is that companies will get rid of some real estate and convert existing office space into "agile" workspace - where anyone can come in with laptop and work. But it will be so packed, that most people will opt for WFH most of the time and come like for 1 day in a week.
Offices won’t go away, but the idea that there is a physical space permanently set aside for you in an office and that you use that space most workdays will largely be seen as a quaint relic of the past for many.
It’s not a question of if there is about to be a bloodbath in commercial real estate, just how bad it’s going to be.
If there’s a plus side smart developers could quickly repurpose commercial spaces into residential and quickly fill needed housing shortages in many cities.
A semi-permanent shift to more remote work will have large impacts on a lot of different industries. For example, the lunch joints near office towers will have to significantly rethink their strategies.
Companies that make consumables like toilet paper and soap will have to scale their residential arms and reduce their commercial arms, which in some instances requires building entire new paper mills or production facilities.
Gas, electricity, and water utilities will all see "weekend all day" patterns that they'll need to adjust for. Internet providers might start offering commercial-light plans for home offices that come with an SLA but not full business support.
I am super scared of a future where remote work could be the default. I see the amazing creative works in technology, art, etc that come from the simple act of pushing smart people into the same place and having them rapidly iterate. Do we know how to do this in a remote-first setup?
I get it; you're super productive in your job during this pandemic but is this the same thing? It feels more like optimizing for efficiency in what you do now, vs. effectiveness to do something bigger than yourself.
I manage a lot of people who focus on making themselves x% better, where x ranges from 1% to maybe 15%. I believe to scale we need to make the system better, which is more like a fractional % improvement multipled by n. Is this easier to do remotely? not yet with the tools we have IME...
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 150 ms ] threadBut our CEO hates remote work. Upper management is already talking about getting some people back in the office in a few weeks. It's a bit depressing.
Same story with mine. (Minus the business booming - ours is fluttering along)
I've brought this up to our management: "We work in a space where most people sit within arms distance of each other. How are you going to manage that aspect?"
They said, "Oh, maybe we'll do a thing where half comes in one day and half comes in another. Like business one day, engineering another, etc."
I responded, "But... the office isn't setup for hot swapping desks at all. So, you'd have half of some teams come in? You'd force us all in small meeting rooms again with very poor ventilation where we can't do social distancing? What's the point if half of engineering is at home and half isn't? We don't have many bathrooms so we'd have a lot of shared touch points. Same with kitchen - etc."
As usual - they're not thinking past the initial words coming out of their mouth. It's utterly amazing how inept people are at all levels of the stack.
Or, will they discover what IBM discovered decades ago, that work-from-home saves $$millions on otherwise unnecessary office space. They've long had both work-from-home, and a temp office setup where you sign up where you'll need an office that day, go to the location, get assigned a desk, and everything routes to that location/desk. I've had a fam member working for them from home for nearly 20yrs.
Sure, managers may like the control of walking down the hall and standing over any employee when they feel like it.
But I expect that they'll like even better not having to spend insane commercial real estate costs, hear every worker complain about traffic, only to see lower net productivity...
(Edit: I'm assuming this must be a different IBM division from the one in which my family member works, which has see no change in her work-from-home status, even tho the article says 'IBM cancelled it'.)
Ultimately the biggest takeaway from this WFH situation might just make it clearer which employers are worth a spit, and which ones genuinely don't care about their employees.
There is a subset of each of these subsets that seems to be completely unaware that the other "side" exists.
This article seems to be written from the perspective of a person unaware of the subset of people that are just straight up bad at working from home.
(The same subsets also exist for companies instead of people.)
P.S.: Of course, by the same logic, forcing people who are bad at working in an office to do so regardless is dumb too.
As a new grad (hoping that my job offer survives covid), I'm terrified of a transition where WFH is the default. I recognize that I still have a lot to learn, and that I can't do it all on my own. Casual interactions with coworkers and the ability to passively absorb new information in the workplace are essential for entry-level employees like me. Plus, personally, I find the social aspect of work to be crucial to my well-being.
The one thing that probably _doesn't_ affect this is a past pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic may push some companies to improve their workflows for working from home, but, the workflows are only one thing out of a whole bunch.
I would expect maybe a few more percent of people working from home after the pandemic is over. Hopefully those would be people that are good at working from home but couldn't do so previously for some reason. It'll also happen to some people who are bad at it, but either need time to realize it, or are forced into it since the company thinks it's better or saves money.
But overall... we're still the same people after COVID-19. I don't see the office dying any time soon.
I work from my small kitchen table that is about four feet from my couch which is about 7-8 feet from my bed. This makes it a lot harder to get into the work zone, as well, it makes it harder to leave it at the end of the day.
Secondly, a lot of my older team members are married or live with a significant other.
I on the other hand live by myself in a new city where the only people I know are the ones that are on my team. Or, were on my team, I should say, before my company internally shuffled roles to avoid layoffs and moved me from my analyst role that I was in for about six months (my first job out of college) down to support. So now the only people I talk to are people calling for help. Or my parents by video call. Other than that it’s just me and my thoughts, which makes it a lot more difficult mentally. I don’t have a spouse or significant other to talk to throughout the day, and the only people I do talk to, for 8 hours, are generally in a neutral to unhappy mood, which also does nothing good for my mental health. Which is just adding on top of the effect being moved from the role I went to college for, and I applied for, and that I thought would help get me on the right path for my career goals (data engineer), down to a support role less technical than the one I had as an internship during college, had on me.
I’m applying for data analyst/BI/Junior DBA/Junior Data Engineer roles across the western US, but I have a feeling it will be quite hard now with lots of experienced workers being laid off competing for lower level jobs, considering I only have six months real world experience. As well, I want to start a project for my portfolio to help learn some key technologies I don’t know, but I’m generally so mentally drained after work I just don’t want to do anything. I just want to nap or zone out. I took Friday and today off but it doesn’t feel even close to enough time to fully recharge.
I’m rambling off subject, but yeah, as you can tell, this entire thing has definitely not been easy on some of us. I think I’d like WFH if it was an option, as in, Monday and Friday WFH, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, I’m in the office. That would be a good balance for me.
I can’t imagine how bad this would have been if my wife and I had still been living in our apartment. Even then I had a separate small office and we had a treadmill in the living room.
This is in a relatively low cost of living area. So I’m definitely not bragging.
But now, it’s not too bad. I have a large separate office, we have one bedroom converted into a decently equipped gym with exercise equipment, my son has his own room, my wife converted another room that was originally her study to an ad-hoc studio so she could continue to teach her fitness classes.
That being said, perhaps with all the seniors working at home there might be more chance for interaction with them while also at home?
I'm liking working from home a lot, but it's okay and should be acknowledged that some people work better in the office.
Absent some external force (like, say, legislation, or a union), why would companies care that there are a subset of people who are $17,000 more expensive for the same output?
Maybe a limited number of small, closed offices, rather than a desk for every employee in an open-space will be the new norm, maybe companies will buy employees equipment to accommodate them at home?
Some will just ignore COVID wherever they possibly can, but I think most won't.
Given the current working conditions, I'm getting better at the prior from home. But I know people that literally cannot function this way, and I know others who never come to the office.
Companies will completely disregard this information and will base the amount of office space and WFH policies based on the cost of real estate post COVID19.
I predict that when the virus situation calms down, companies will tend to prefer WFH policies until some companies start noticing how cheap office leases are. At that point, we'll ramp back up to where we are today for the same bogus reasons we have open office plans and lots of butts in seats.
I also predict that there will be a bubble of architecture changes for new housing builds: single family homes (that often have a home office space) will start to be built with 2 home offices to support married couples both working from home.
In the future, we'll have way more jobs for these people as companies see the advantages in cost when hiring someone who will be happy to make less money and produce more because they a)don't need to live in the bay area, b)don't need to commute and c)don't get distracted all the time.
This said, I find it very unlikely that software office jobs will disappear or even reduce drastically. I'm predicting a 30% reduction in full-office jobs, not a 90% reduction. Despite all of the excitement for future WFH opportunities, remember old habits die hard.
Something to consider, though: Most employees today probably aren't compensated for the time and money they waste during their daily commute. What about car maintenance? Unless they're driving a company car to work most employees will have to pay for that themselves. Shouldn't the employer cover or reimburse these costs?
Do you want to have someone who lives next to work get the job rather than you because he won't have commute costs? Be careful about unintended consequences.
If you believe you are worth more money, negotiate for that.
But practically speaking, it would not be surprising to see WFH companies offer slightly higher salaries largely due to the significant savings associated with no offices, as well as the reduced risk of not having a lease. If I save $27K a year per employee (from the article), I can easily offer candidates $10K more than my competitors with an office, increasing profit and attracting higher quality talent.
Seems like fungible costs
Also seems different depending if it is a laptop, vs trilpe-workstation-10 screen setup?
When working on my own, I charge clients for travel costs or build it into their pricing.
If you're an employee, AFAIK the company is also required to cover some costs, but I don't remember what exactly & under what conditions...
Your salary has been reduced by 20% due to the recession. On the positive side, we will now give you a 3% raise to cover your home office sorts.
Sincerely Management
I'm sure that I can find a company that wouldn't require any of these, but the salary and benefits from my current job outweigh these costs.
My clothes have nothing to do with my employer, nor does my car, even if I use them while working, I can also use them for other things.
It's the employer's responsibility to create the space for working. Currently we're all basically loaning our bosses some space in our homes. If everyone's boss goes "huh well, guess I don't need a physical office anymore" then all they've done is offload the responsibility for housing their work to their employees, with no compensation.
Also in most cases work that is done at home is done in on a computer, so the same space that is used for home computer use can be reused at no additional space cost besides possibly an extra desktop or laptop if a dedicated machine is used.
my employer does not reimburse home office expenses, but several of my friends work for employers that do. the way it works for them is that they get a yearly "technology" budget of about $1000-2000. then they can spend it on any equipment they want to use at home or in the office. as long as it's some sort of computer hardware or office furniture, no questions are asked.
That's basically just a $1000 bump in your salary. The fiction that you're getting an extra technology benefit is just that, a fiction.
From a pragmatic point of view, and an accounting one (for the employer), your "benefits" are taken from your salary. The only time those benefits are worth it for the employer is if it pays for something pre-tax rather than post-tax (health care falls into this category, hence the popularity of employer provided health care).
The accounting term for this is "total employee compensation". That's what matters to the employer when calculating the cost/benefit of an employee.
Be careful what you ask for in benefits. They can be expensive for the employee.
That does happen a lot with expense reports. They get abused all the time. Sometimes, though, employees do get their ERs audited, and get fired for ER fraud. Especially if the employer needs a reason to fire you.
With social distancing, there's literally no reason to not surround employee workspaces with tall cube walls, besides a desire to replace personal privacy with distraction.
[1] For a good discussion of this, see Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams.
Open offices are cheap. Re-configuring office space isn't cheap. So, no.
Some places are probably still hot-desking.
I think that's pre-covid thinking. The OP speaks about 1) companies dropping their office footprints due to increased WFH and 2) companies reducing office density and making other changes to accommodate social distancing. Both of those require office reconfiguration.
We'll be dealing with this pandemic for at least another year, and the psychological effects will last longer, so monomaniacal bottom-line focused thinking will have to accommodate it.
the issue with work from home is that jobs which are suited for it or can be adapted this require that workers have discipline to do so. for companies willing to have a portion of their employees offsite then HR programs would need to be put into place to help train people how to manage their work life at home and then to train managers in how to properly employ a work from home team.
the issue not raised here is the tax component. a collapse of the real estate market will take the tax base down a few notches. this will lead to an increase in finding a replacement and this could include proxy taxes on an employees work from home setup and costs associated with it; a few fees and tariffs here and there. Then comes the non state actors, HOAs and property management companies, whose rules will need to moderated if not outright regulated to prevent putting undue pressure on work from home employees. most can fly under the RADAR because of no increase in external activity; think shipping and receiving; to give it away but cancel culture has its adherents everywhere with people who have nothing better to do than point.
To be fair it _kinda_ makes sense in that each person will have their own preference for tools, but it's a pretty big expense.
BYO monitor/keyboard/etc will of course be possible, but also I would expect a startup budget for most places.
IIRC, that's already the expectation in many professions (e.g. auto mechanics). I personally would be fine with it so long workers were compensated for the extra expense, and employers were statutorily prohibited from requiring spyware to be installed on a worker-owned machine.
But of course this is America, so the employers will jump at any opportunity to dump more uncompensated costs on workers to enrich shareholders further, and they'll fight hard against any constraints on what they can require.
The reality is that if a company says they don’t need an office because you can work from home, they need to compensate you for the use of your office space. A place of work is physical capital, and you can’t simply decide that your workers provide that capital as part of their employment.
Why not? I suppose it depends on the contract you signed when you were hired.
Back in the day when cell phones were new, companies provided them to you.
Now they just assume you have one.
Things that start out as work provided sometimes move into employer provided without extra compensation.
Excuse me, but WAT
Problem I have with that is after the dot bomb we were looking at office space and it seemed that the high flyers that threw $$$[1] at their office build outs were all out of business. Where the ones where you had as a friends company, network cables stapled to the walls weren't.
It's not so much the money spent but the thought that those were the guys that didn't have a sense of how to prioritize their cash flow.
[1] Like 100-300 sqft on build out.
It is not until this pandemic that I was forced to work from home that I realized that I am the happiest I've ever been in years. I always felt tired daily when I used to go to office and also go to bunch of other social gatherings that I have. It turns out that I am definitely an introvert to the bone. Not only not meeting people everyday face to face has been beneficial to me, but cutting slack, social media, text, etc has been tremendously great for me. I also don't watch TV. Basically less human interaction in general (not zero at all mind you, I'm not anti social). Now I have more time to cultivate my various hobbies (which I've always been doing anyway) and become self absorbed lol.
I enjoy life better now, everyday feel fresh and energized and as a result my productivity with my work also shoot through the roof. I didn't know why I always thought I'd be distracted at home. All the simple things in life like running outside, walking outside, queueing for some snacks, just become delightful all of a sudden. Not to mention the great air quality.
I know it is bad for me to say this, but this pandemic I've been the happiest in years. I hope this pandemic is over soon but I don't hope to be back in office soon.
I have a 9-month old baby who is just starting to crawl all over the place and gets noisy and impatient when we don't pay attention to her. My wife and I work during office hours. Nursery is of course out of the question due to the lockdown and babysitters are illegal (because of the quarantine). Our stress levels are going through the roof. I want to go back to normality ASAP. Give me back my office, please!
There are plenty of people who didn't like working from home before and still don't. There are also plenty of people who just can't do their job as well from home.
What seems likely is that some managers who previously didn't think of work-from-home as a viable option before will probably be more open to the idea going forward. And some individual contributors will decide that working remotely suits them well. And companies will have a better sense of the tools required for effectively working remotely.
But the majority of people are going back to the office when this is over. It might be because managers will still be managers, and feel that they can have more control with people there in person. It might be because people like to get out of the home. Maybe they like socializing with coworkers in person. Maybe they don't have enough room at home. Or the proper equipment.
I certainly expect to see changes, but the concept of offices isn't going anywhere.
[1] and nor does the article claim it is, despite the sensationalist headline
First will be trendy tech organizations that will go the extreme and set a large window of WFH, then some will move a large chunk of operations to WFH, then a lot of tech companies will follow with bold claims of how good it is, and so on...
Then all of a sudden, one study or one article with the unpopular opinion - "working from home is not that good after all", then some people will vent out on how they dislike it in some situations, then one trendy company will make the bold claim: "We're bringing people back in!"
I can already see the headlines of Buzzfeed, Wired, and posts on medium: "The gold nugget of productivity! This company boosted their performance by bringing people back into what we used to call offices!", with comments of the CEO that's trying to lure in talent.
Just to end back in the middle term: some roles are suitable for work from home, while others make sense to bring in house, some people prefer work from home while others don't.
My prediction is this will all occur until 2022.
Just to make it clear: I like working from home.
my hope is that, after seeing that work still got done during the crisis, employers will be more willing to entertain a certain number of WFH days per week. this would be ideal for me. I love the flexibility and comfort of WFH, but I would like to have at least a small window where I can reliably find people on-site for a face-to-face meeting, without having to plan that interaction far in advance.
In the past, when I WFH, and everybody else is in the office. I was the odd one out and people start to talk amongst themselvces. Sometimes I don't hear well, sometimes I can't get into the discussion politely.
But, since everybody is WFH right now, the whole WFH experience became better and I am more productive in WFH as a result.
I’d rather live in a cheap apartment further out that had parking for a car so I could drive to the mountains or just anywhere really. Instead I’ve been within probably a quarter mile of my apartment at all times for the last ten weeks. I’m paying a premium for no return right now.
So I'm not so sure the office is dead. As someone else pointed out, this might be true for some people but we may still need office space for the other portion of the population.
My god, is that what it costs now?! You can rent an 1800 sq ft house in the middle of SF for about $7,000 a month. You'd get three "offices", some common space, a kitchen, some parking. You could spend another $2,000 a month to hire someone to clean the place every day, and another $2,000 to have someone bring coffee and beer and whatever else you get "for free" at WeWork, and even $1,000 a month for an "IT person" so set up and maintain wifi and conferencing equipment, and still save money.
We're thick in the middle of a pandemic right now. It will subside. No one knows exactly what waits for us on the other side, or what the societal impacts will be. Yes, we're all working remotely right now. But it's been an incredibly slap-dash, thrown together effort for many companies and that might mean they become less receptive to remote work in the future, not more. We don't really have any data on what the economic impact of remote work is (separate from all the other economic impacts swirling around us right now), and until we do I'm going to hold off making too many wild predictions.
Except for the 33 million people out of jobs in the last 6 weeks.
Each job since then the number of required trips seems to drop a little. I think I'm pretty much permanently always home now. I really don't get sick any more.
I know it hasn't really hit specific articles, but NO, nail salons are not the cause of the pandemic. The specific cause of the pandemic was airplanes (or travelling in general) and offices, which quite aptly explains new york on both counts.
It’s not a question of if there is about to be a bloodbath in commercial real estate, just how bad it’s going to be.
If there’s a plus side smart developers could quickly repurpose commercial spaces into residential and quickly fill needed housing shortages in many cities.
Companies that make consumables like toilet paper and soap will have to scale their residential arms and reduce their commercial arms, which in some instances requires building entire new paper mills or production facilities.
Gas, electricity, and water utilities will all see "weekend all day" patterns that they'll need to adjust for. Internet providers might start offering commercial-light plans for home offices that come with an SLA but not full business support.
I get it; you're super productive in your job during this pandemic but is this the same thing? It feels more like optimizing for efficiency in what you do now, vs. effectiveness to do something bigger than yourself.
I manage a lot of people who focus on making themselves x% better, where x ranges from 1% to maybe 15%. I believe to scale we need to make the system better, which is more like a fractional % improvement multipled by n. Is this easier to do remotely? not yet with the tools we have IME...