I’m a bit sad how remote work is likely to hurt my social life
I have many close friends that grew out of the intimacy of solving problems together. We could casually hangout IRL after work. Our partners and kids would get to know each other. In turn, that growing trust would feedback into a more positive workplace.
It’s not the only way to make friends, but it was an easy way. Now my relationships with coworkers can feel more transactional.
It’s further worrying considering the general trend of society to increased isolation and loneliness.
I don't think it has to be this way. The move to hybrid and remote working can be a huge advantage for everyone, from parents who get to spend more time with their children instead of spending it fighting for seat on a train, to young adults who are less likely to find themselves priced out of the housing market by nessesity of living relatively close to work.
At the moment we are living the worst type of remote working. We can't have a once a month get together or pub session. We can't work from our parents house or even a co-working space because it happens to suit us that week. Lots of us have children and other family at home (or have had for some of this period) who wouldn't normally be around.
I share your general concern. I worked remotely for most of my career before finding an office job that would pay enough for me to move to SF. I'll admit that housing in SF was a tough fit for me and my family, but outside of the housing problem we absolutely loved it. There was a great social network of people living and working in the same industry and neighborhood, and the sense of camaraderie was great.
That employer went all remote during COVID with no intent to go back, and in the end I decided the time had come for me to leave as well and I'm now working on my own startup. And of course, we're remote, because we have to be right now.
I wish we would be able to move into an office together when the pandemic is over, because I'd love to have the social life of the physical office back, but I don't think that will be practical, so we'll probably be either all or mostly all remote forever (assuming we survive :)).
It's complicated, because there are also many advantages to remote, but I honestly feel kind of disappointed that I would prefer to work in that dynamic office environment and despite preferring it I've only been able to actually have that for a few years of my career.
I wonder how much attitudes towards preferring office vs. WFH is dependent on the actual physical office environment.
I am in the prefer WFH camp. However if my office was something more akin to what I see in many Silicon Valley style tech companies, I could theoretically imagine myself enjoying the office more.
As it is, my current office (for that matter, for my entire career) is more akin to what you see in The Office TV show, or Dilbert, or other stereotypically dystopian, dull, boring, traditional offices where everyone is mandated to wear at least business casual - dress shirt, dress pants, dress shoes.
Conversely, imagine living in a lovely small town that has an active social life and a commercial scene, fuelled by the scores of people moving out there with nothing better to do in the evenings, who want to get out of the house.
People who don't spend all their energy commuting into and out of a city each day, people who are free from the crowded lonelinesses of the subway, and the hyper-busy trendy weekend coffee-shop.
Imagine a world where you might once again say hello to your neighbours, might know the folks around town. New friends we don't work with -- perhaps, a community!
If we play it right, we might possibly swing a revitalization of our social soul here, rather than sadly slouch ever further toward its final demise. At least, I hope.
I still remember getting my first Manhattan job. I was excited about experiencing the culture and nightlife of the city after work.
Little did I know that the toll of the commute would quickly kill off any such interest.
I feel this is especially because of the peculiarities of the Manhattan commute (and potentially other cities with similar commute patterns).
I was nowhere near as beaten up when I commuted in NJ. But all the hot jobs (and culture!) are in Manhattan. Ironically I had more energy to head out into the city after work from NJ.
I live in a smallish town. One positive side effect of pandemic and WFH is more socializing with neighbors. Kinda a different form of socializing, but it is a positive upside.
At the risk of sounding picky, I am statistically much more interested in socializing with a randomly chosen person from this website than a randomly chosen person from my town (excluding my household).
Even my kids’ friends’ parents are often tedious to hang out with. “Can you believe <insert thing from popular TV>?” Or some town gossip that is interesting only to the other half of the conversation.
I have non-work friends, most of which I met locally, but there’s a common interest beyond “you happen to get your mail delivered by the same person”.
Work socializing has some advantages for introverts. You don’t generally have a lack of topics to discuss; if one gets boring, you can switch to another.
Not to be unfriendly, but perhaps _you're_ projecting your desire to avoid your coworkers on to others. I think both you and the person you responded to make interesting points, both of which I can see myself relating to at different parts of my life, depending on how much I liked my work vs my local community.
> Even my kids’ friends’ parents are often tedious to hang out with.
I consider myself very lucky to live in the Bay Area, where most of my kids' friend's parents also work in tech. So hanging out at a random birthday party ends up being an unintentional networking event, where I get to meet new people working on cool tech.
I wonder as remote work continues to be popular, if that will continue.
Some people find what you describe as undesirable, but I think I'd love it. Possibly a grass is greener on the other side situation though, I admit.
In NYC, I'd say there is a lot more diversity in terms of industries people work in, but tech is noticeably a tiny minority. Finance is obviously huge - and is probably the industry closest to being in the situation you describe.
Case in point - I am, and have been part of, various social organizations, and AFAIK I'm the only SWE I've encountered. Tons of finance people, tons of medical professionals (though interestingly enough, many many dentists and nurses but M.D.s are rare), tons of people in marketing and education. But no SWEs. A tiny handful of tech professionals from the helpdesk/sysadmin/networkadmin side of things.
It also has some major disadvantages. Folks can get fired or laid off if the business goes south. You are competing with those same friends for promotions. And the HR department gets the final word on what is considered appropriate behavior.
Much better to just connect with people that share your same interests outside of work. Join a club, go to a meetup, etc... And quite frankly, when it comes to more technical matters, I find online conversation to be much more fulfilling than IRL. And there are no shortage of outlets for that, including HN.
> Imagine a world where you might once again say hello to your neighbours
When people complain about social isolation, that still doesn’t necessarily mean that they want to interact with their neighbours. It could just mean that they want to be able to interact with people who, they know for sure, share the same hobbies and interests and (in polarized countries) the same political and social views.
One of the supposed upsides of urban modernity is the ability to choose one’s acquaintances at will, which is potentially liberating from the gossip and judgement of small-town and neighbourly communities, especially for sexual or other minorities.
No, that world definitely went away in some places, even for the urban poor. For instance, residents of apartment blocks in the large Finnish cities today typically don't know their neighbors. (In fact, some would even consider it a faux pas to leave the flat without first checking through the peephole to see if someone else is in the corridor. This is because it could make both you and your neighbor uncomfortable if you passed by one another.) The literature of a century ago with its tales of frequent neighborly interaction now strikes people as a completely different world regardless of their tax bracket.
You're right, it did go away for the poor who are thoroughly under the thumb of the wealthy. Many of the less well off residents of (for example) Boston or DC would relate to that sort of "trying to keep your existence on the down low lest you draw the ire of someone who will make your life harder" pattern of action.
Places like Cleveland, Buffalo, or anywhere that the local culture if free of thinking highly of the local culture people are much more open and friendly than major metros and their high class suburbs.
Actually Michael Maccoby a sociologist discovered in his studies (1960 and 1970s) of what happens when a large factory comes to a rural town. People would no longer mix with each other to the same extent. Instead, after work, they would go home and watch TV. Work had totally altered their social lives. It will be interesting what dynamic will play out in the long-term with remote work.
> Now my relationships with coworkers can feel more transactional.
That is not just about personal relationships, that applies to work effectiveness as well.
There were hundreds of conversations over a month I had, which came from someone noticing me waiting for a coffee, come up and ask me something somewhat arbitrary - knowing that I'm free right now without any actual broadcast.
The same sort of serendipity used to happen during lunch, with people mentioning their new idea which ends up being something that boils down "oversampling all the signals to 1MHz, but then store it in a columnar db as a wide table".
The interaction process was entirely additive, with no commitments to start a conversation.
Right now, every meeting is scheduled or preceded by "are you free?", which immediately triggers a priority conversation or scheduling conflict one.
Making things which weren't transactional, into a "I have set time aside for you and only you" which is where everything starts becoming prioritized around who to talk to rather than what they have to talk about in particular.
I'd offer an alternative perspective. While I have made a small number of great friends from working together in an office, I've also made a lot of kind-of-friends who are maybe not actually great matches for me in terms of compatibility. Yet we spend time together outside of work nonetheless, usually in work-adjacent activities like happy hours.
Nothing against these relationships, but a year later I don't exactly miss them. I've found myself spending more time with a small group of people during the pandemic that are much more on my wavelength, and I much prefer this to having a chunk of my social life dedicated to people I am "friends" with due only to proximity.
Then use the commuting time you're saving now to go and make friends at the gym, at the local reading club, coffee shop, church or social centre.
I'm totally in about making friends and getting along with all coworkers, being nice to each other, etc is very important. But work is work. Despite what the "People" department says, it's not your family, not are you a "Examplecompanying".
I rant about this because I know more of one case where people missing their friend coworkers made everyone in the team have to go back so we "all work together" when people are more productive and get more job done with less distractions and more free time doing it from home.
TL;DR, look for social life out of work. Work is work.
>I have many close friends that grew out of the intimacy of solving problems together
About 20% of them have already drifted off the map for me over the past year. A lot of people seem to have just eventually drifted into introversion once the things to do in the outside world disappeared for long enough. First lockdown didn't matter too much but this second one changed a lot of people.
Lots more people I know casually mentioning suicidal thoughts too, and this is coming from people I'd never expect to hear that from.
I fear the pandemic has crushed hang out culture for the foreseeable future. Out here in the Midwest, I grew up hanging out on the back porch is talking late into the night. People don’t do that anymore it seems.
Remote is not the end all, hybrid is likely here to stay. And NYC is best place to live/work as a young person...At home all day on the computer? Sure rather have thousands of options for the evening instead of a dozen..
Agreed. NYC is still a desirable place to live, maybe even more so with Open Streets and expanded outdoor dining. I suspect that what will happen is people who only lived in NYC for work will be able to move where they want, and will be replaced by people who had previously been priced out. Both groups (and the city) will be better off for it. Tax revenues worry me, though.
> And NYC is best place to live/work as a young person
NYC is the best place to live/work if you don't plan on having children, which is the ultimate arbiter of whether a given environment is indeed "good for young people" or not. If it wasn't for the flood of people moving into NYC from regions where people still have kids at higher rates, the entire city's population would quickly collapse. It's a genetic graveyard.
Ah, completely false. NYC is a great place to raise kids and many more are born here than move in- obviously because of cost structure. It is expensive. But the resources available to and in the public school system dwarf those in any other system anywhere else in the world. And kids being able to be mobile without cars is...huge.
If you ran a Zoo and the population of your lions kept collapsing so that you must constantly important new lions from elsewhere in order to stabilize the population, you would not conclude "my zoo is a great place for lions". And when someone pointed out that perhaps your zoo isn't a good place to send lions, you would not reply with "completely false!". Someone who cares about lions and their well-being would try recognize that there is something very unhealthy about that zoo.
That New York's fertility rate is abysmal is not "completely false", it is an objective fact.
Whether you think New York is a "great place to have kids" is completely beside the point. What matters is whether the people in NYC actually have those kids, and at what rate. In New York, not enough of them are born to make the city a viable concern if it were not for massive population infusions from elsewhere. NYC is a population sink.
Nope, sorry, you really have no idea what you are talking about. Larger cities in general- and wealthy societies in general- see lower number of births per mother. That's how things go. But NYC birth rates are higher than the national average (13.6/1000 vs 11.6/1000) and fertility rate roughly on par (58/1000 vs 59/1000) and is higher than many other US cities. NYC does see population influx- more of adults than children. It has ALWAYS been a city of immigrants. That's a good thing. Keeps it interesting.
It's even more pronounced in SF, and it's probably the best thing that has happened to the city in decades, minus the obvious catastrophe of the pandemic itself. A nice studio apartment in a decent neighborhood can be had now for $1500; something unthinkable a year ago. Hopefully this can help start to revitalize the city's culture into something more than a monolithic tech frat party.
The workers will be back. As long as insufficient housing is allowed to be built, the culture will stay monolithic, split between grandfathered aging rich progressives and tech bros.
Either that or the city will crater like Detroit. Always possible.
I would argue that it's not monolithic tech bros. It's a monolithic culture that mostly has tech bros. When you don't have good boundaries on subgroups then you don't have a chance for groups to form identities.
Why learn the group's mannerisms/collective behavior when they're scared that they may be called "non-inclusive".
They seemed to have pretty much bottomed out. All of the good places and good deals get snatched up within a week or two of listing. The demand is still higher than the supply. Although there does seem to be more places available in the less desirable parts of the city (the northeastern bit) which suggests to me that a significant portion of the people who couldn't really afford to be here have left.
I can't stop but wonder why this comes from a green account :) ? (I'm a bit paranoid and I now lots of people here on HN have something to lose with the market going down)
Glad to see this is happening even with the largest employers. And for those employees who absolutely need that in-office/social experience, then you can offer them a credit to go rent a coworking space for the days that they need it.
It's worth noting that, for a long time, it's been rare for a company to compensate employees for their home office (rent/house cost + heat + electricity + everything else). I find it unlikely that, when most people are suddenly working from home, they'll decide to pay for those same people extra to have an off-site office.
Manhattan especially is conducive to remote working IMHO. There is an incredible amount of collective wasted time due to the nature of commuting into and out of Manhattan. That's not including the more difficult to measure mental and emotional toll of such commutes.
Most people working in Manhattan probably do not live in Manhattan...or even the other NYC boroughs. A huge chunk actually live across the river in NJ.
I welcome remote work, and because my current employer is adamant that it will not be allowed once the pandemic is over, it's definitely another issue that will get me to jump ship.
I may feel differently if it was a different metropolitan area. For example, I am not familiar with the Bay Area commute patterns, but some ex-coworkers who left NYC for the SFBA report that their commutes are now heavenly compared to the hell of Manhattan commuting.
Even if you live in the boroughs, it can still cost a huge chunk of time to get in. Between walking, waiting for and riding the subway, it takes me anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour to get to my office.
That's 40 hours of dead time a month, and I'm so happy to have it back.
Yeah, I would gladly work extra hours for my employer if it meant not having to waste it on commuting. I see it as a win-win for both myself and my employer. I wouldn't mind an occasional trek to the office for certain meetings, etc.
Unfortunately my employer does not see it that way. Exerting middle-managerial control over employees is considered more important than productivity.
What's really going to cause is a stir is the equal pay for equal work movement. The more remote the workplace gets, the less it will make sense for employers to pay premiums just based on location.
Indian here offering a slightly different perspective. I absolutely love remote work. Even before pandemic I used to work with remote team all the time only from office. Theirs stigma associated with remote work here. Employers don't trust their employees.
But if some employer does offer me remote with same pay as that of in the city I would love to work remotely precisely because
- I can work from hometown where living cost is minuscule of that of city. I was spending around 25K per month in city. It's just 8K now in hometown.
- I don't have to take a loan of 50 Lakh to buy a 1000 sq ft apartment in the city whose EMIs I am gonna have to pay over 20 years of my life because I already have a home. I can actually invest my earnings on my dreams. This alone is enough for me to forego any advantage that working in office might offer.
- Once you take a loan you have put a price on your freedom. You can't leave a job even if it sucks because it pays better. In India, the economics and everything plays out such that taking loan and buying apartment is considered safest route if you are going to work in city.
- People argue that remote hurts social life. I disagree. Remote work actually allows you to build your social life by letting you choose people you want in your life.
- If I am happy, I am going to put 110% of my efforts to ensure my employer remains happy with me.
Edit: I haven't even mentioned the advantages like savings on time, fuel and the fact that theirs no pollution in my hometown. It's so peaceful here I wonder how I got okay with 2 hour commutes with heavy traffic and awful pollution.
> I don't have to take a loan of 50 Lakh to buy a 1000 sq ft apartment in the city
Isn't the "city pay" made to cover the "city expense". I bet everyone wants to live in Barcelona with a Mountain View salary but that's going to boost gentrification even more
In my current salary structure, theirs no such thing as city pay. But I bet that will be introduced if remote ever becomes a norm. I guess it's not hard and fast for me to only choose remote if salary is same. Ultimately I think market will govern salaries if remote becomes norm and I will just have to adapt in that case. We'll see.
Indian companies typically have a 'metro' and 'non-metro' salary structures. People who work in one of the metropolitan cities (I believe it's now Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, and perhaps Pune) get paid slightly more than the same position in a non-metropolitan city.
If your role does not have a counterpart in a smaller city (common among sales teams), you may not see the city-pay structure simply because everyone in this role is already in a city-pay structure.
Less people in dense Manhattan offices will reduce the value of the real estate. Presumably if it's a long term trend then more of it will convert to be residential. This would bring less people by day than full offices, but probably more people by night. It still allows for a pretty vibrant city.
> if it's a long term trend then more of it will convert to be residential
Converting an office building to residential use isn't easy. For example, you'd have to add water/sewage lines running to each residential unit.
Also, in NYC, apartments are required to have a certain number of windows. In a large office building, there can be a lot of floor space that's far from any windows.
> It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.
> In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic. More here.[2]
For that matter, you can read NY Times articles just by disabling cookies/JavaScript on the site with various browser extensions (I use uMatrix in Firefox).
Manhattan will be fine. It's reinvented itself many times before.
100 years ago it was filled with warehouses and factories. Those all left and never came back, and they were renovated into housing and offices.
If the offices leave, all those buildings will be renovated into WeWork like spaces (if not WeWork itself) or into more housing. Especially if everyone is working from home, people will want bigger places to rent. A single person may want two or three bedrooms (one for them, one for the office, maybe one for a guest). Not everyone can or likes to work from home, so if offices start closing, a lot of people will still want an office like place to go to to get away from kids and family or just to get more space.
New York is still a cultural center. People will want to live there.
> New York is still a cultural center. People will want to live there.
New Orleans is also a major cultural center. Some people will pay up to live around culture. But the vast majority of people paying NYC prices are doing so because of access to high paying professional jobs. There's a reason that San Jose is nearly as expensive as NYC. There's not a single major city in the world that survives off culture alone.
Given that the population of Manhattan would double even on the weekends, I'm going to say that a lot of people come in just for the culture, and would love to live there if it were affordable.
> But the vast majority of people paying NYC prices...
Those prices have already dropped and if there's a continued, long-term drop in physical jobs then those prices will drop further, attracting a younger crowd that values aspects of the city other than proximity to a workplace. I've been apartment hunting and a lot of brokers say there's already a huge influx of younger renters, and I have multiple friends looking to migrate from Brooklyn to Manhattan due to rent drops.
Louisiana has little to offer politically compared to CA or WA/Seattle area, at least to me. I'm so happy I skipped a job in 2019 that would have out me in San Antonio this winter. I'll happily pay higher taxes so my power stays on, my partner/etc own their own bodies, and the people I live around actually want to help make this a better place for all. IMO that stability is worth the cost of a blue state+ tech minded city combo.
I'm a long-time NYC resident, looking to move next month when my lease is up.
Yes -- prices are down somewhat, and we will be upgrading, though not by as much as I expected when starting to look. And the demand is definitely there -- an apartment we were interested was leased sometime over the weekend.
Also a NYC resident. Been casually looking at apartments to take advantage of the decrease in price of the rental market. Found out 2 things; (1) that if you see an apartment you like you have to act instantly and submit an application otherwise it'll be off the market the next day, (2) the decrease in price is largely a myth. Some are cheaper but it's mostly negligible and temporary. These both tell me that the city is going to be fine. There's still a demand to be here. It's not just work. It's opportunity for culture and lifestyle that people are seeking as well. NYC is still at a premium for both of those.
At this point, I see two contrasting points being made again and again across different publications.
Articles lobbied by firms with interest in real estate are all about how people are tired of remote work and how post-Covid world will be much like the pre-Covid world.
And the other lobbied by firms with interest in technology are all raving about remote work being the new normal.
I think as usual when it comes to complex issues involving many people the truth will be somewhere in the middle. At the very least COVID has forced managers to get acquainted with managing remote teams — even if the team won’t be 100% remote a year from now, I can very well imagine a 3/2 or even 4/1 split between on site or WFH.
Most of big companies are for physical offices because it is hard to manage big work force remotely. Listen to JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon https://youtu.be/x8-eUse5hg8?t=413
Things like apprenticeship are impossible to do remotely.
Also Zuckerberg is for physical offices for the same reasons Dimon is. Hard to manage, no apprenticeship/internship, no culture.
Maybe it is possible for small companies and startups but managing thousands of employees remotely is very challenging.
I read somewhere that at first Zuckerberg was against remote work but I think he gave in because of peer pressure within Facebook and within tech industry. Facebook will probably embrace hybrid: half physical half remote work.
But I agree with JPMorgan CEO that remote work is problematic and that only some ops can go permanently remote. Maybe in the future everybody can work remotely but I think it is still too early.
I keep driving past all these half-empty buildings in Toronto and thinking this would have been a great time for urban exploration / infiltration. But cameras everywhere, and too much to lose at this age.
This is a good thing. Prior to this, we were all lemmings that were told to come into the office, to sit at a desk in front of our laptop or monitor, and type away at a keyboard.
The 2 hour daily round trip commute would wear us down. It would increase pollution and oil consumption. It would congest traffic, and city transportation services could not add enough roads, buses, trains, and subways fast enough to handle the load.
And it would get everyone sick, as everyone always caught a variant of the seasonal flu.
Now, we can all work safely from home. Just Zoom In and instant virtual meeting. Daily stand ups are a breeze. No need to schedule a small conference room that might be in overbooked availability.
It separates those that creates tools and products for business, vs those that consumes such tools to build further analytical results.
The greatest thing for me, is that I have not gotten sick in over a year. No flu. No cold. No sniffles. Incredible. Even if I worked late into the night, and on some days, I had little sleep, I still didn’t get sick. This proves to me, that the greatest vector of disease transmission is in the office. And probably the open office concept, that forced everyone into the same pig pen, and got everyone sick together.
America has enough land mass to handle the 350 million people that we have. It’s better to spread out. Instead of cramming us all in to small cities.
Perhaps hot cities like Phoenix or Houston or Austin can finally bloom, because of this pandemic. They can work remotely during the daytime, in their nice air conditioned homes. And then at night, they can go out and socialize in the city with their friends and families, or make new friends.
We can imagine a newer and better reality for all. We just need the courage and will to do it. Or maybe, we just needed a little push from a little virus to make us think a different way.
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[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 159 ms ] threadI have many close friends that grew out of the intimacy of solving problems together. We could casually hangout IRL after work. Our partners and kids would get to know each other. In turn, that growing trust would feedback into a more positive workplace.
It’s not the only way to make friends, but it was an easy way. Now my relationships with coworkers can feel more transactional.
It’s further worrying considering the general trend of society to increased isolation and loneliness.
At the moment we are living the worst type of remote working. We can't have a once a month get together or pub session. We can't work from our parents house or even a co-working space because it happens to suit us that week. Lots of us have children and other family at home (or have had for some of this period) who wouldn't normally be around.
That employer went all remote during COVID with no intent to go back, and in the end I decided the time had come for me to leave as well and I'm now working on my own startup. And of course, we're remote, because we have to be right now.
I wish we would be able to move into an office together when the pandemic is over, because I'd love to have the social life of the physical office back, but I don't think that will be practical, so we'll probably be either all or mostly all remote forever (assuming we survive :)).
It's complicated, because there are also many advantages to remote, but I honestly feel kind of disappointed that I would prefer to work in that dynamic office environment and despite preferring it I've only been able to actually have that for a few years of my career.
I am in the prefer WFH camp. However if my office was something more akin to what I see in many Silicon Valley style tech companies, I could theoretically imagine myself enjoying the office more.
As it is, my current office (for that matter, for my entire career) is more akin to what you see in The Office TV show, or Dilbert, or other stereotypically dystopian, dull, boring, traditional offices where everyone is mandated to wear at least business casual - dress shirt, dress pants, dress shoes.
People who don't spend all their energy commuting into and out of a city each day, people who are free from the crowded lonelinesses of the subway, and the hyper-busy trendy weekend coffee-shop.
Imagine a world where you might once again say hello to your neighbours, might know the folks around town. New friends we don't work with -- perhaps, a community!
If we play it right, we might possibly swing a revitalization of our social soul here, rather than sadly slouch ever further toward its final demise. At least, I hope.
Little did I know that the toll of the commute would quickly kill off any such interest.
I feel this is especially because of the peculiarities of the Manhattan commute (and potentially other cities with similar commute patterns).
I was nowhere near as beaten up when I commuted in NJ. But all the hot jobs (and culture!) are in Manhattan. Ironically I had more energy to head out into the city after work from NJ.
Even my kids’ friends’ parents are often tedious to hang out with. “Can you believe <insert thing from popular TV>?” Or some town gossip that is interesting only to the other half of the conversation.
I have non-work friends, most of which I met locally, but there’s a common interest beyond “you happen to get your mail delivered by the same person”.
Work socializing has some advantages for introverts. You don’t generally have a lack of topics to discuss; if one gets boring, you can switch to another.
We don't all want to be your friend, we want to avoid the rat race.
I consider myself very lucky to live in the Bay Area, where most of my kids' friend's parents also work in tech. So hanging out at a random birthday party ends up being an unintentional networking event, where I get to meet new people working on cool tech.
I wonder as remote work continues to be popular, if that will continue.
In NYC, I'd say there is a lot more diversity in terms of industries people work in, but tech is noticeably a tiny minority. Finance is obviously huge - and is probably the industry closest to being in the situation you describe.
Case in point - I am, and have been part of, various social organizations, and AFAIK I'm the only SWE I've encountered. Tons of finance people, tons of medical professionals (though interestingly enough, many many dentists and nurses but M.D.s are rare), tons of people in marketing and education. But no SWEs. A tiny handful of tech professionals from the helpdesk/sysadmin/networkadmin side of things.
Much better to just connect with people that share your same interests outside of work. Join a club, go to a meetup, etc... And quite frankly, when it comes to more technical matters, I find online conversation to be much more fulfilling than IRL. And there are no shortage of outlets for that, including HN.
When people complain about social isolation, that still doesn’t necessarily mean that they want to interact with their neighbours. It could just mean that they want to be able to interact with people who, they know for sure, share the same hobbies and interests and (in polarized countries) the same political and social views.
One of the supposed upsides of urban modernity is the ability to choose one’s acquaintances at will, which is potentially liberating from the gossip and judgement of small-town and neighbourly communities, especially for sexual or other minorities.
That world never went away. It's just a couple tax brackets below the typical HN user.
Places like Cleveland, Buffalo, or anywhere that the local culture if free of thinking highly of the local culture people are much more open and friendly than major metros and their high class suburbs.
Actually Michael Maccoby a sociologist discovered in his studies (1960 and 1970s) of what happens when a large factory comes to a rural town. People would no longer mix with each other to the same extent. Instead, after work, they would go home and watch TV. Work had totally altered their social lives. It will be interesting what dynamic will play out in the long-term with remote work.
Interestingly I see it the other way around, I can now focus on having a social life and seeing people outside of my work. No more 3h commute!
That is not just about personal relationships, that applies to work effectiveness as well.
There were hundreds of conversations over a month I had, which came from someone noticing me waiting for a coffee, come up and ask me something somewhat arbitrary - knowing that I'm free right now without any actual broadcast.
The same sort of serendipity used to happen during lunch, with people mentioning their new idea which ends up being something that boils down "oversampling all the signals to 1MHz, but then store it in a columnar db as a wide table".
The interaction process was entirely additive, with no commitments to start a conversation.
Right now, every meeting is scheduled or preceded by "are you free?", which immediately triggers a priority conversation or scheduling conflict one.
Making things which weren't transactional, into a "I have set time aside for you and only you" which is where everything starts becoming prioritized around who to talk to rather than what they have to talk about in particular.
Nothing against these relationships, but a year later I don't exactly miss them. I've found myself spending more time with a small group of people during the pandemic that are much more on my wavelength, and I much prefer this to having a chunk of my social life dedicated to people I am "friends" with due only to proximity.
I'm totally in about making friends and getting along with all coworkers, being nice to each other, etc is very important. But work is work. Despite what the "People" department says, it's not your family, not are you a "Examplecompanying".
I rant about this because I know more of one case where people missing their friend coworkers made everyone in the team have to go back so we "all work together" when people are more productive and get more job done with less distractions and more free time doing it from home.
TL;DR, look for social life out of work. Work is work.
About 20% of them have already drifted off the map for me over the past year. A lot of people seem to have just eventually drifted into introversion once the things to do in the outside world disappeared for long enough. First lockdown didn't matter too much but this second one changed a lot of people.
Lots more people I know casually mentioning suicidal thoughts too, and this is coming from people I'd never expect to hear that from.
Maybe if NYC builds artifical skiing slope, or nice sandy beach..
Is Meadowlands too far away ?
NYC is the best place to live/work if you don't plan on having children, which is the ultimate arbiter of whether a given environment is indeed "good for young people" or not. If it wasn't for the flood of people moving into NYC from regions where people still have kids at higher rates, the entire city's population would quickly collapse. It's a genetic graveyard.
That New York's fertility rate is abysmal is not "completely false", it is an objective fact.
Whether you think New York is a "great place to have kids" is completely beside the point. What matters is whether the people in NYC actually have those kids, and at what rate. In New York, not enough of them are born to make the city a viable concern if it were not for massive population infusions from elsewhere. NYC is a population sink.
Best wishes to you.
Either that or the city will crater like Detroit. Always possible.
Why learn the group's mannerisms/collective behavior when they're scared that they may be called "non-inclusive".
Although I'm looking at the prices and for what I used to pay for an old 1br, I can get the same but 3br and a parking in low pac height.
Most people working in Manhattan probably do not live in Manhattan...or even the other NYC boroughs. A huge chunk actually live across the river in NJ.
I welcome remote work, and because my current employer is adamant that it will not be allowed once the pandemic is over, it's definitely another issue that will get me to jump ship.
I may feel differently if it was a different metropolitan area. For example, I am not familiar with the Bay Area commute patterns, but some ex-coworkers who left NYC for the SFBA report that their commutes are now heavenly compared to the hell of Manhattan commuting.
That's 40 hours of dead time a month, and I'm so happy to have it back.
Unfortunately my employer does not see it that way. Exerting middle-managerial control over employees is considered more important than productivity.
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/fbrc-tom-dyja/
But if some employer does offer me remote with same pay as that of in the city I would love to work remotely precisely because
- I can work from hometown where living cost is minuscule of that of city. I was spending around 25K per month in city. It's just 8K now in hometown.
- I don't have to take a loan of 50 Lakh to buy a 1000 sq ft apartment in the city whose EMIs I am gonna have to pay over 20 years of my life because I already have a home. I can actually invest my earnings on my dreams. This alone is enough for me to forego any advantage that working in office might offer.
- Once you take a loan you have put a price on your freedom. You can't leave a job even if it sucks because it pays better. In India, the economics and everything plays out such that taking loan and buying apartment is considered safest route if you are going to work in city.
- People argue that remote hurts social life. I disagree. Remote work actually allows you to build your social life by letting you choose people you want in your life.
- If I am happy, I am going to put 110% of my efforts to ensure my employer remains happy with me.
Edit: I haven't even mentioned the advantages like savings on time, fuel and the fact that theirs no pollution in my hometown. It's so peaceful here I wonder how I got okay with 2 hour commutes with heavy traffic and awful pollution.
- 50 Lakhs = 5 million = around 70K USD - EMI = Monthly Mortgage Payments
> I don't have to take a loan of 50 Lakh to buy a 1000 sq ft apartment in the city
Isn't the "city pay" made to cover the "city expense". I bet everyone wants to live in Barcelona with a Mountain View salary but that's going to boost gentrification even more
If your role does not have a counterpart in a smaller city (common among sales teams), you may not see the city-pay structure simply because everyone in this role is already in a city-pay structure.
Converting an office building to residential use isn't easy. For example, you'd have to add water/sewage lines running to each residential unit.
Also, in NYC, apartments are required to have a certain number of windows. In a large office building, there can be a lot of floor space that's far from any windows.
> Are paywalls ok?
> It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.
> In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic. More here.[2]
In fact, someone posted a link to an unpaywalled copy of the article before you posted your complaint: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26623921
For that matter, you can read NY Times articles just by disabling cookies/JavaScript on the site with various browser extensions (I use uMatrix in Firefox).
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=paywalls%20by:dang&dateRange=a...
100 years ago it was filled with warehouses and factories. Those all left and never came back, and they were renovated into housing and offices.
If the offices leave, all those buildings will be renovated into WeWork like spaces (if not WeWork itself) or into more housing. Especially if everyone is working from home, people will want bigger places to rent. A single person may want two or three bedrooms (one for them, one for the office, maybe one for a guest). Not everyone can or likes to work from home, so if offices start closing, a lot of people will still want an office like place to go to to get away from kids and family or just to get more space.
New York is still a cultural center. People will want to live there.
New Orleans is also a major cultural center. Some people will pay up to live around culture. But the vast majority of people paying NYC prices are doing so because of access to high paying professional jobs. There's a reason that San Jose is nearly as expensive as NYC. There's not a single major city in the world that survives off culture alone.
Those prices have already dropped and if there's a continued, long-term drop in physical jobs then those prices will drop further, attracting a younger crowd that values aspects of the city other than proximity to a workplace. I've been apartment hunting and a lot of brokers say there's already a huge influx of younger renters, and I have multiple friends looking to migrate from Brooklyn to Manhattan due to rent drops.
I'd also wager that the people eager to leave NYC are not necessarily the same people heavily engaged in creating culture and innovation.
True, as well as healthcare - NYC has some of the best healthcare infrastructure & expertise in the world.
Yes -- prices are down somewhat, and we will be upgrading, though not by as much as I expected when starting to look. And the demand is definitely there -- an apartment we were interested was leased sometime over the weekend.
NYC will be fine.
Articles lobbied by firms with interest in real estate are all about how people are tired of remote work and how post-Covid world will be much like the pre-Covid world.
And the other lobbied by firms with interest in technology are all raving about remote work being the new normal.
Things like apprenticeship are impossible to do remotely.
Also Zuckerberg is for physical offices for the same reasons Dimon is. Hard to manage, no apprenticeship/internship, no culture.
Maybe it is possible for small companies and startups but managing thousands of employees remotely is very challenging.
the hierarchy and control they rely on to seem optimal are outmoded
That would explain why, as the article mentioned, Facebook has added 1 million square feet of Manhattan office space during the pandemic.
But I agree with JPMorgan CEO that remote work is problematic and that only some ops can go permanently remote. Maybe in the future everybody can work remotely but I think it is still too early.
The 2 hour daily round trip commute would wear us down. It would increase pollution and oil consumption. It would congest traffic, and city transportation services could not add enough roads, buses, trains, and subways fast enough to handle the load.
And it would get everyone sick, as everyone always caught a variant of the seasonal flu.
Now, we can all work safely from home. Just Zoom In and instant virtual meeting. Daily stand ups are a breeze. No need to schedule a small conference room that might be in overbooked availability.
It separates those that creates tools and products for business, vs those that consumes such tools to build further analytical results.
The greatest thing for me, is that I have not gotten sick in over a year. No flu. No cold. No sniffles. Incredible. Even if I worked late into the night, and on some days, I had little sleep, I still didn’t get sick. This proves to me, that the greatest vector of disease transmission is in the office. And probably the open office concept, that forced everyone into the same pig pen, and got everyone sick together.
America has enough land mass to handle the 350 million people that we have. It’s better to spread out. Instead of cramming us all in to small cities.
Perhaps hot cities like Phoenix or Houston or Austin can finally bloom, because of this pandemic. They can work remotely during the daytime, in their nice air conditioned homes. And then at night, they can go out and socialize in the city with their friends and families, or make new friends.
We can imagine a newer and better reality for all. We just need the courage and will to do it. Or maybe, we just needed a little push from a little virus to make us think a different way.