WFH policies should be between the employer and employee and not be set by the government. If an employer wants everyone in the office 5 days a week and is willing to pay enough to get such employees, the government should not interfere.
I wouldn't see the issue here if the employer was willing to "pay handsomely" to have their employees work those hours. Some white collar workers work those hours every week - if not longer - and are paid well for it.
It is, indeed, fascinating how little respect workers have for each other. Any little concession they can offer an employer to screw over the guy beside them, they will take it.
Unionization helps develop somewhat of a brotherhood to keep the nastiness at bay, but even then the members generally want to keep it an exclusive club, not something for all workers to join. As a result even union members still see external pressure from the workers outside of the union still trying to them screw over.
Actually I'd prefer OSHA set some sane limits on hours worked instead of assuming an Invisible Hand will stop employers from working laborers to death.
I worked in a plastic factory in a small rural town that always struggled to find workers. People will refuse work and prefer poverty for a lot less than 14-7 working conditions. Lacking air conditioning is enough.
There are plenty of people who find themselves in desperate enough situations to be taken advantage of in such a way. It is for that reason that things like social welfare and employment regulation exist today.
there's got to be a reasonable point on the spectrum between "child labor is legal" and "government mandates color of post-it notes in offices"
if a company decides they function best with all their employees in the same physical space, and hires with that condition as an explicit criteria for working there, do you really think that's a violation of human rights?
A reasonable point on the spectrum between "child labor is legal" and "government mandates color of post-it notes in offices" is "People should be allowed to work from home for a job that can be done from home"
> Before COVID-19 sent one-third of the global workforce home, the Melbourne property surveyor that employs drone operator Nicholas Coomber called its 180-strong staff into the office every day at 9 a.m. to hand out assignments.
> Now that they work from home, the surveyors travel straight to the field as early as 7.30 a.m., enabling Coomber to pick up his children from daycare earlier than before the pandemic.
The example here seems like a particularly stupid (from the company POV, even) place to put an in-office mandate. Clearly much of the actual work was never happening in the office anyway.
Overall what the article describes seems pretty similar to what's happening in a lot of companies in the US (and globally, as the article notes), though with more unions involved than in the US. Bosses are much more likely to want 5 days in the office than employees, negotiation over how many days, etc. A lot of work certainly doesn't need 5 days a week in office.
I just think it's important to remember that not everyone is rich enough to have a home environment that's as good or better than the one at work. And also consider that the company bears a lot of expenses by having people work on-site and I rarely see discussions of who is going to be paying those bills or how that's supposed to work.
No, but if many people are working from home (and socializing the costs of office space), then the company has less incentive to keep an office around at all, leaving people who prefer working from an office out of luck.
I don't mean "socializing the costs" in the sense that the public sector is paying for it, but the employees are. It's a common strategy to spread your externalities and costs among your customers, employees, and the general public (see: large multi-national banks and automakers getting bought out by governments).
I want to be in the office some. Three years of trying to work on complex systems/problems/concepts purely over video calls is quite enough of that.
But it doesn't need to be every day, and I also have non-work obligations that are often far easier to accomplish during the week if there's some flexible time.
I feel the same, but I am still not going to do the commute ever again. It is much easier to do meals and start automated tasks (like a load of laundry) during a break. It is nice to have time in the evening to do things so I can actually use the weekends for myself.
This probably depends on where you live. I don't currently work in a large city, but the last time I did, I lived 5 miles as the crow flies from my workplace. The commute time averaged 90 minutes one-way if I drove, and 2 hours one-way if I took mass transit. On bad days, both of those travel times would double.
Ok, I'll bite. Where are the statistics supporting that?
In my case (Buenos Aires, IT work) it used to be the case that people all over the city and surrounding areas had to commute to the city's "microcenter" (what we call the financial/historical district), resulting in typical commute times of 1 to 2 hours. Dreadful.
So your statement doesn't ring true for us in Buenos Aires.
I think it's better in the rest of the country, but since (unlike say in the US) a disproportionate number of Argentinians are concentrated in Buenos Aires, and the major tech companies are here, the rest of the country doesn't really matter in this context (with a few exceptions that don't even come close to Buenos Aires).
What statistics are you working with to support your point about planet Earth?
> The example here seems like a particularly stupid (from the company POV, even) place to put an in-office mandate.
Doubly or triply so considering the travel times to their field sites, just look at the timeframe differences quoted for that office meeting vs when he leaves for the survey site otherwise. What an incredible gain in productivity!
If companies are going to force people to be in the office, then the government should mandate that commute time is included in office hours.
That means if you want me in the office, I will leave my house at 9AM, if you want me to be close to the office, then increase my pay and I will move closer.
I have no objection to commuting counting as paid time - at the very least, the fact that in the US even things like mandatory security processes don't count is absurd - but for all of us "lucky" enough to be "exempt" in the US... blah.
My dad worked the latter half of his career this way. He came in late and left early. But he was good enough / indispensable enough that he got away with it.
Suppose I really like driving. Under such a policy, I might be inclined to move 4 hours one-way from the office and just listen to podcasts and drive around all day.
(I don't actually want to do this, but when writing government policies, you have to consider that some people will be aggressively adversarial if it suits them.)
What does that mean when you move after employment has started? At least in this jurisdiction (and I imagine most others), being able to move is considered a human right, and employers cannot violate human rights.
I have certainly worked with more than one person at my workplace who started when they lived locally, but eventually moved to the big city over an hour away, while retaining their employment with the business even after settling into their new home. Them suddenly working 2+ fewer hours each day would be a significant change to their employment.
If the time is set in stone at the time of first hire, then I guess you're incentivized to move as far away as possible that still allows you to be hired, and then on your second day move in next door?
The employer claims the work can't be done at home – that is why they are calling the workers into the office.
So now you need a tribunal to verify the claims, and what do they go on? With respect to a parallel thread, do the people with the right machining equipment in their garage get to do their manufacturing job at home? If I have a kitchen, can't the Uber Eats driver pick up the food at my place?
Or is the law only carved out for senior web developers specifically?
> the government should mandate that commute time is included in office hours.
This is would have a bunch of perverse outcomes you probably haven’t considered. Employers would immediately start to consider the commute times of candidates before hiring them. Longer commute times is a feature of cheaper housing, so that would correlate to employers discriminating against candidates of lower socioeconomic standing. Which would in turn correlate to discrimination against the ethnic groups that are over represented in those lower socioeconomic groups.
It’s basically only a good idea if you’re trying to intentionally constrain social mobility.
> Employers would immediately start to consider the commute times of candidates before hiring them.
That's already a thing in Australia.
> Longer commute times is a feature of cheaper housing, so that would correlate to employers discriminating against candidates of lower socioeconomic standing.
The current system already does that also. Poorer people are traveling more for work, but they aren't getting compensated for the commute time.
> the government should mandate that commute time is included in office hours.
I think a strong case can be made for this. For those of us lucky enough to be able to negotiate salaries, we absolutely should be pricing that time into the rates we're negotiating for.
Bigger picture, I've always thought it was insane that we talk about "40 hour workweeks" as if they exist. Realistically, the time it takes me to commute is part of my workday. If my commute takes an hour each way, then I'm working a 50 hour workweek.
Since when has going to the office been a matter of forcing people? Until covid hit (just two years ago?) almost everyone did. So how did this turn into forcing anyone to do anything different?
EDIT: To be clear. I mean "forcing people to do anything different". Going into the office was normal for almost everyone.
> Since when has going to the office been a matter of forcing people?
Since always? Until Covid, there was no choice. People did it because they had to. Covid just reminded people that there is another way to live and how much quality of life they're actually sacrificing for their job.
Yes, and we only pay attention to studies that signal what we want - such as working from home improved productivity. It doesn't matter how many counter-examples there are, or how many business leaders say they've seen declines. No, those folks are totally wrong because we want remote work.
I don't make any arguments about productivity in general either way because I don't have any data to base them on.
That said, there's no question that I personally am much more productive at home vs in the office. Offices seem designed to interfere with productivity.
But, all that said, why does it matter either way? I am a human being. I do not exist to ensure that my employer is operating with the greatest productivity possible.
> I am a human being. I do not exist to ensure that my employer is operating with the greatest productivity possible.
You literally do if you are employed by someone. You expect money from them in exchange for productive work. You are free to start your own business if you want to be however-productive you feel like that day.
For head-down productivity, sure, you can be better at home. But that's not the entire picture, is it?
In-person collaboration is always better than remote messaging/video calling. It just is, and probably always will be.
It's very disingenuous to pretend remote collaboration is anywhere near as effective as in-person collaboration.
> You literally do if you are employed by someone. You expect money from them in exchange for productive work. You are free to start your own business if you want to be however-productive you feel like that day.
No. You're paid to deliver productive work, not to ensure you're working on the greatest productivity possible at all times. That's a fool's errand, eventually bringing you guilt when you can't perform at that level due to life's twists and turns, turning into a burnout when you aren't able to keep your productivity at 100% but keep trying (and failing). If you are employed by someone there's an expectation of doing your job, delivering value, not of chasing the greatest productivity possible. You are a person, not a fucking machine. Balance is needed to be constantly productive, to be able to be creative.
> In-person collaboration is always better than remote messaging/video calling. It just is, and probably always will be.
> It's very disingenuous to pretend remote collaboration is anywhere near as effective as in-person collaboration.
It is very myopic to state platitudes without any data to support your main argument, based on some "it just is". It might be for you and your colleagues, it might not be that important for a lot of people/processes that adapted to not be in-person.
Stop trying to force others to live how you think people should live, you do you, let others decide what's best for them.
> You're paid to deliver productive work, not to ensure you're working on the greatest productivity possible at all times.
Extremes edges of the space of possibility aren't that interesting, but if you want greater compensation, you probably do want to find ways to deliver greater value for your company (and make sure they know about it).
It's very hard for a company to continue paying out greater compensation to employees than the value delivered by those employees.
Subsequent to the agricultural revolution, big cities have been more economically efficient than suburban and rural areas. The productivity of cities massively subsidizes small towns and cul-de-sac neighborhoods.
Hedonistically, everyone wants to live on a big lot on a low-traffic road... with friends, family, and work/shopping/services a short distance away. If everyone does have that kind of housing, then - quickly - no one will have it, because evetything will be too spread out; you need to drive a big, polluting car fast through someone else's low-traffic neighborhood to get to yours.
The costs of concentrated habitation are less than the benefits - there's enough tax base and density to support roads and (emergency or mundane) services and businesses. The costs of distributed habitation are higher, and don't work if the entire nation switches to that kind of housing.
>big cities have been more economically efficient than suburban and rural areas. The productivity of cities massively subsidizes small towns and cul-de-sac neighborhoods.
Environmentally and sustainably speaking, the "productivity" of big cities is zero.
Cut from the outside, a city like New York would die in a few months when food dissapears, with people eating one another. Cut from urban centers, rural towns and villages will continue to be able to drink and feed themselves just fine.
They only exist because the people living there are subsidized, for water, food, and other such essentials, from outside. Even factory production lives outside those cities.
That's how they started actually, when the rural production because so larger, as to be able to sustain not just itself, but also a parasitic, mediating and administrating, urbal class.
>If everyone does have that kind of housing, then - quickly - no one will have it, because evetything will be too spread out; you need to drive a big, polluting car fast through someone else's low-traffic neighborhood to get to yours.
There's nothing inevitable about this, it's just how US suburbs were designed, to be car-centered.
In decentralized suburbs with local walkable distance shops (walkable as a stronger condition as opposed to merely "a short distance away"), and with local jobs and more extended work from home, it doesn't matter if they "spread out", because you don't have to drive a "a big, polluting car fast through", as the need to go elsewhere is less frequent: work, socializing, shopping is nearby.
Add a good public transportation service, and you don't even need a car.
It's not parasitism, it's mutualism. If the country nurtures, the city pays the bills. I would not want to live in a country without both. Heck a country without cities probably would not last long except as a vassal.
If you mean environmental cost, that's mainly when we only consider "less concentrate human habitation" as combined with existing patterns of consumption and waste.
> we could actually improve the housing situation across the country
The benefit of concentrating people together is that it also concentrates capital, which makes people rich, which allows them to do things like buy expensive homes.
Spread people around and the sticker price will be lower, but the capacity to buy the homes will be reduced commensurately.
Well, we have the highway, but it turns out that trucking mills and lathes around to each worker's home is less efficient than bringing people to where the capital sits. I know a nuclear reactor powering a chip fab in everyone's garage is the dream, but...
All jobs in the modern economy require capital to be on-site. Some capital is more realistically held at home than others, of course. What kind of threshold are we using to draw a dividing line? I know a number of people who really do have lathes and mills at home, so we need to be more specific here about where the line is drawn.
I have a lathe and a mill at home. Quit my job in the city 1.5 hours away during covid and now run a business from home / get to be a parent. It’s the best. I gave up $190k salary to barely make my mortgage, best decision I ever made!
There are a lot of sectors where in-person presence is needed. See the list of "essential workforce", who were essentially allowed to avoid lockdowns: https://covid19.ca.gov/essential-workforce/
Also, some jobs were moved online during COVID (eg. teaching) but it is clearly demonstrated that they work better in person.
Big cities are built for many ppl. Allowing 100% remote work makes it possible to move to smaller towns/cities, which are not prepared for the extra intake.
Many towns struggle with this exact issue in Australia. You can view it as just a temporal issue as it will settle on the long term. But on the short term many of the locals can not afford to live in the town they grew up and the same goes for their children too.
This really feels like a bad take to me. Cities are out of room and can only grow by increasing the commutes even more. Being able to share that growth with towns that have plenty of room to expand seems like a huge win. And preventing people with money from coming to your poor town is an excellent way to make sure the people who live there stay poor.
> Cities are out of room and can only grow by increasing the commutes even more.
...or more effectively, by abandoning the flawed concept of single-family zoning, thereby allowing market forces to increase housing supply where it is needed.
You still end up with a ton of commuting needs. And you get an induced demand loop with development still: lots of jobs popped up in this area around the transit stops! Now more housing is built so people can live closer to it! Now even more commercial and retail is needed and gets built! Which makes even more people want to work/live there. And not all of those people are gonna want to both work and live there (consider the trivial case, even, of a couple with one job per person, with the jobs in different parts of town), so you've also increased your commuting demand, which means fuller trains, longer waits...
I've had coworkers who lived and worked in Beijing without cars - they still had 40+ minute each direction commutes. And that's a city that was extremely aggressive in expanding its transit. It's just a basic queuing/graph problem, though.
But hard problems to convince people to want who are used to air conditioned private pods instead of hot cattlecars with groping and harrasment, if we're just picking the least attractive elements of each method. "An hour, but on your feet crammed like sardines with everyone else" will get even less appealing to someone used to the car-based life if self-driving cars ever take off.
If people only make cases for transit by straw-manning the worst part of cars and ignoring the worst part of mass transit it's gonna take a long time to convince enough people to spend the billions needed to make it happen, since most people aren't stupid and they know that there are cons of public transit too, not just unalloyed pros.
I'm sure there are pluses and minuses for both options but what works in one place won't necessarily work the same in another. It can be a boon for the areas people are migrating to but you can easily get gentrification instead.
Different parts of US, Australia, or Europe will respond differently even when subjected to the same policy. So I don't think any one answer is correct as a general rule.
I don't think cities are actually out of room. Maybe they are, but it's not obvious to me that this is the case.
> Being able to share that growth with towns that have plenty of room to expand seems like a huge win.
Not for the people who live in smaller towns because they prefer living in smaller towns.
> And preventing people with money from coming to your poor town is an excellent way to make sure the people who live there stay poor.
Not all small towns are poor. And regardless, a lot of people with money coming into a town very often causes prices for everything (especially housing) to increase, pricing poor people out of the area. And if you're poor, you probably can't afford to move elsewhere.
Not saying that these problems are inevitable, but there are certainly lots of examples of them happening. What I am saying is that this is a very complicated thing with no clear outcome for any particular place.
You'd think smaller towns could just let people build some more houses. Adding more people to e.g. Manhattan is tricky because land is scarce. But a small town should have some adjacent land available, that could be allocated for building more homes.
So? Just keep building the infrastructure at the same pace as you let people build themselves new homes.
USA Population growth rate is now at about the lowest it has ever been. All the previous generations had to also build houses and the supporting infrastructure. It's not rocket science.
When looked at a macro scale, any region, even a small town, has to import stuff into it's economy, and has to get dollars from out of the region to pay for the imports. This can come from exporting things, be it raw resources or manufacturing, tourism, or exporting services (which is how I would describe a huge part of the SF and NY economy).
Remote work allows people that work in exporting services to live anywhere. They bring cash into the economy, and any town with a good sense of economics should be trying to bring those people in. Might they temporarily raise prices in the town they move to? Yeah, but they moving out of a big city also lowers prices in that big city, what about the folks that were outpriced there, and now might have some breathing room?
> Allowing 100% remote work makes it possible to move to smaller towns/cities, which are not prepared for the extra intake.
Wow. This is the opposite of the US where most small towns have depressed real estate values and negative growth rates. What is Australia doing differently?
We're not doing anything differently. Regional and rural property prices are dropping relative to state capitals now.
During COVID some people left the biggest cities to live somewhere without lockdowns. This was a fairly small number in absolute terms but it pushed prices up in specific desirable local market and really stretched services. That's slowly reversing now.
> But on the short term many of the locals can not afford to live in the town they grew up and the same goes for their children too
This is happening everywhere. My hometown in Europe is by the sea and has nice weather. Since remote work, housing has become ridiculous, both in price and availability. Locals can hardly afford it anymore. But I do think this whole situation will balance out eventually, we're really just at the beginning of a new global trend.
Yeah, what seems to actually happen is that 1) most small cities lose people; 2) otherwise attractive small towns with weak job markets get way more expensive; 3) lots of people gather in the largest cities, anyway, because it turns out that when people can live wherever they want they choose the biggest, best cities.
In smaller towns utilization for things like restaurants, mechanics, etc is usually much lower in big cities. The amount of time spent waiting because shit was full was a big shock to me when I moved to a very large city.
So if everyone with a job that's possible to do remotely distributed themselves across the country, I think that would actually result in more people, proportionally, in in-person service-industry jobs, since each employee of those businesses would be serving fewer other people per day. (Which would be less stressful for a lot of people, probably! But it's very short-sighted to think anything like "100% work from home" is realistic for that many people.)
But I'm also not convinced by the main claim, here. Bigger, denser cities are more expensive. That's because they're more in demand. Some of that is "because that's where the jobs are." But a lot of that is things like weather, entertainment, shopping, availability of services... so I think you also open up the possibility of someone who was working in-person for an employer in Tulsa, say, now being able to move to Dallas instead for more free-time options.
In the last hundred years in the US the most effective ways of distributing people were two things: weather (sun belt vs cold-ass winters) and in-person work that got geographically distributed for big-govt/strategic reasons (e.g. let's make sure our new defense project is going to employ people in as many states as possible to get votes, or let's spread out our industry to be more robust against Soviet bombs, etc).
> Bigger, denser cities are more expensive. That's because they're more in demand.
It's mainly because they don't build enough housing. There's no fundamental reason it would happen otherwise; they use land more efficiently and have lower energy costs than suburbs do, and that should matter more than the higher competition.
Of course, there's also a selection effect; more interesting things to spend money on causes people to spend more money. (That's why people who earn more per hour tend to work more, not less.)
> It's mainly because they don't build enough housing. There's no fundamental reason it would happen otherwise; they use land more efficiently and have lower energy costs than suburbs do, and that should matter more than the higher competition.
Ok. So why does that happen? It happens basically everywhere in the world: the dense cities are more in demand and more expensive than the middle of nowhere.
If nobody can build "enough housing" in their cities, to make their cities as cheap as their rural land, I think that tells us something. We can' simply take demand entirely out of the picture, since adding more supply is both (a) a lagging process and (b) a process that itself helps promote more demand by necessitating more service business, more jobs at those businesses, etc. I.e., if you make the land more attractive to everyone, everyone who wants to use that land for their business or residence has more competition for securing a spot on it.
Theoretically it should be cheaper to live in a dense area as more people can share utilities like water, electricity, food stores etc.
First there is a worth in the house itself depending on the standard, then there are artificial market rates that is the biggest worth in big cities as people do seem to want to live there, mostly because of job opportunities.
> Ok. So why does that happen? It happens basically everywhere in the world
This is a great observation, if a problem is occurring all over the place maybe the solution isn't simple.
The cool stuff in these cities is highly centralized and just building more housing a little further out doesn't spread it automatically.
If you build a high rise apartment tower in Yonkers it might not sell. Move much loser to Manhattan and you run into all the problems of building in an area that's already pretty dense.
Are cities still more expensive than rural areas if you adjust for income of the inhabitants?
Maybe cities are just more productive economically, so people earn more, so they can pay more.
I think where having more housing helps though is making your city more diverse. If you have fancy housing for doctors and grungy housing for artists, your city will have a better art scene than if you only have fancy housing.
IMO this is actually part of the problem. How do you serve both the residents doing well, taking advantage of the opportunities, and the ones at the bottom of the totem pole? Very few places have active plans to address that, and some of the methods that do exist (like rent control) tend to be unpopular.
If you're in a city that's doing well, you have a lot of residents with money to spend. Enough to incentivize a lot of development aimed at those residents. But that jut further chokes out anything that would only serve those with incomes in the lowest percentiles.
Building housing helps, certainly, but there's a differnence between "building housing that keeps the growth engine running" and "building housing that keeps the bottom-tier population served and keeps people from being pushed into homelessness" (especially when redevelopment is financially most practical in cheaper parts of town which can cause more displacement of more economically precarious people - replacing that grungy housing, for instance), and I don't think market-based approaches will ever be enough since the financial incentives to serve the bottom of the market naturally are much smaller than to serve the middle or the top. And I think this is demonstrated by how the densest first-world-cities across the world often have affordability issues.
Yeah, and big low-income housing projects have been tried here. But concentrating poverty like that doesn't work well.
But the "just build more" path of least resistance is to bulldoze today's grungy housing to build tomorrow's new housing, and most of the time that doesn't make it easy for the existing displaced residents find enough replacement grungy housing at rates they can afford.
So I think there needs to be something more than just laissez-faire building.
Housing isn't expensive because it's grungy or not, it's expensive because the supply is less than the demand.
Some physical factors that might matter are underlying land value, single stair laws and similar things making building layout worse, how many 1br vs 3br units there are… not whether it looks old or not though.
You can't identify affordable (subsidized) housing from the outside in cities where it exists.
>People like living in big cities because they're more interesting.
Some people like living in big cities, usually because they're young and starry eyed about the "possibilities" of them being interesting. Quite often they grow out of this, and get to hate the big cities and their stress and uglyness....
Exactly this. I moved from Seattle to rural Whatcom County for a year, then out onto my sailboat for a year. It's been a great reset, but I'm now headed back to either a quiet neighborhood of the outskirts of Seattle proper, or maybe one of the suburbs/exurbs that still has a proper downtown and isn't just a bedroom community, and it's entirely for social reasons. Life in the boonies solo is hard, and the dating pool in your 20s is barely a drop, forget a puddle.
Not just the housing situation. The biggest contribution, by far, to mitigate the climate change crisis, would be to let your employees work remote. Commuting adds a ton of waste to the environment, no matter how energy efficient you get. Even if you go 100% ev, particulates are never going away,directly/indirectly killing 100k+ people annually in the US alone.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/07/elect...
That's probably more of an issue in the US. Not that commuting doesn't pollute, but in other countries a great part of the daily commute is done by public transportation or much more carbon efficient personal transportation (scooters, bicycles, etc).
You’ve probably never heard of the poster child of livable cities, the Netherlands, where almost everyone still owns a car and drives to work every day. Traffic jams are now growing even worse then pre COVID[0]. Lack of proper (investment in) public transport is still a major issue for everyone living or working outside of the big cities. And due to the density of our country it has a major impact on nature here.
Outside of cities, the car reigns supreme in practically every developed country. Including the ones people love to bring forward as 'counterexamples' to car culture.
Indeed, after 25 years of work (15 in Australia, 5 in Singapore, 5 in Malaysia) I've never driven to work except during work trips to the US where I had to rent a car.
At various times it's been train, bus, cycling, walking.
A lot of Anglosphere countries have followed the lead of the United States with spending trillions on automobile infrastructure and suburbs. Eisenhower modeled highways on the German autobahn.
Not sure what countries you have been to. But a lot of non-US countries rely heavily on your own vehicle. India is the best example, where public transportation is even worse than the US.
> right to work 100% from home is what really makes sense
*for some particular jobs
That bit is always ignored. We're arguing for a right, but that right can only possibly apply to a small subset of the entire workplace.
There will never be remote gas station attendants. There will never be remote mechanics. There will never be remote construction contractors. There will never be remote warehouse receiving clerks.
So this can't possibly be a right. Rights apply to humankind, regardless of where you exist or your job situation.
So... what people are arguing for is a privilege, for some particular industries, and protected by government regulation.
Seems like that's just never going to happen. Instead, people need to negotiate for remote work. And if an employer wants you to go to an office in exchange for a paycheck, well, get over it or find somewhere else to work.
I've met a few who don't really like remote meetings so prefer to have their employees available to talk in person, even if they themselves aren't in the office full time.
personally I wouldn't work from an office so would basically skip on applying to those places but that is the excuse I've heard most often
More realistically many only know "asses in seats" as a metric for their employees working.
what the resistance to WFH makes explicit is that when companies hire workers they don't really conceive of it as buying their labour, they conceive of it as taking control of them for eight hours and dictating how they have to behave.
That's the real reason why WFH faces so much resistance. When people are done with their work they can just play with their kid or do what they want, and it becomes obvious how much, using Foucault's analogy, of a prison aimed to discipline the office is.
I also think it shows how insufficient some management is. They coast on "butt in seats" and call it management. Being forced to actually monitor and assess work is a chore they previously skipped. Likewise ensuring that staff are properly utilized is another chore often skipped and them being remote forces you to acknowledge and confront this reality.
That's not the reason. Very few people who can work from home can be "done with their work".
As far as I can tell the real reasons are some combination of:
* Working physically next to people generally is more efficient. Of course there are some people like Knuth who need to be undisturbed for 6 hours, but for most people the ease of communicating in the real world is a big time saver. It really is.
* The benefit of face to face meetings is bigger the more meetings you have and the more talking to people your job involves. Guess how many meetings the people making these decisions have...
* You're less likely to spend time doing house chores and whatever. I generally do a solid day's work when WFH but even I sometimes just mow the lawn or whatever. If I was at work I would probably just read HN on my phone instead but I obviously hide that better. So this isn't a good reason IMO but it is a reason.
* Companies don't like paying for fancy offices that nobody is using.
* It isn't the company that pays for the time and cost of your commute, so to them that is not a downside.
I wouldn't ever work for a company that didn't let me WFH again. The lack of commute is just too good.
But I do understand the real reasons why high up managers don't like it.
I would say yes, but I'm not sure I could articulate my argument very well. I don't think that they explicitly care about it, i.e. "control of our employee is $x which we accept as a cost of doing business". I think it's more indirect, more secondary, like it's a result of other more surface-level concerns. For example, "we need employees in the office so that we can make sure they are working so that we are ensuring we get our money's worth", which possibly has effects that mirror the 'nebulous notion of control' we're talking about. I think your comment is correct in a literal sense. Doubtful anyone is sitting at the top of a tower rubbing their hands together, scheming, trying to establish/maintain prison-like employment conditions.
Aside: I sometimes see stuff like "employees are 10% less productive from home." [0]
However that's somewhat misleading, the "productivity" does NOT mean physics-style efficiency of human effort to create value and fight entropy... No, it's based on what employers had to spend. So slaves that only produce a quarter as much per day are technically "more productive."
This matters because employers that require unnecessary time/fuel for commutes typically don't pay for it. Out of tradition and negotiating-power, those costs are usually shoved off onto employees and are not being tracked.
If commuting to the office was compensated, the "productivity" differences with work-from-home would be dramatically flipped.
If employers were in fact willing to swing major policy and spending decisions based on +/- 10% knowledge worker efficiency, offices would look very different.
I can promise you the standups are not a 2% gain for 10 other people, most participants are losing efficiency compared to making async announcements of their work in a shared text communication space.
Basing the decision on a 10% productivity change is insulting when you consider that the average commute is 11.5% of an 8 hour work day (2019 numbers, [1]).
One line I can't square with mandatory returns to office is that the same orgs and agencies requiring employees in office are also waving big flags about going green and fighting climate change.
Has anyone seen a justification for the disconnect?
Climate change is a luxury belief that people wave to get federal funding or social points. Living a true low-emissions lifestyle (not one where you consume exactly as much as you did before except EVs instead of gas cars) is a serious handicap in the modern economy.
Easy. It is all about making your life poorer. The wealthy will continue to drive and fly but you and me will have to walk from the sleeping pod to the working pod. You don't see the WEF walking to Davos do you?
> One line I can't square with mandatory returns to office is that the same orgs and agencies requiring employees in office are also waving big flags about going green and fighting climate change. Has anyone seen a justification for the disconnect?
The type of argument
> It's hypocritical that they [group A] are the ones doing [some thing] but at the same time also being the ones [group B] doing [another thing]
with groups A and B being independent of each other often irks me. Who says they are actually the same people? What is this line of thought called, that must be a named fallacy of some kind.
I'm migrating to a mixed mode. And glad to be able to.
One of the nagging questions/worries I have about the increase in WFH is greener employees. I've entertained summer interns for the last 11 years at work. And I've tried to help some older but newer-to-programming peers.
I can take "experienced" contractors/helpers up to speed in one of the many domains I have to work in pretty quick. Share some code. Some chats/emails. Couple desktop shares, it's usually enough to bootstrap an ongoing remote conversation.
With younger/newer/greener people, I have found this to be nigh impossible though. I don't like the optics of "you need to get some experience before you can work from home" and it also begs the question "who's going to show up in office to do the mentoring." I do see this as a problem that's not getting addressed.
The last place I worked had full WFH and used Tuple (not affiliated) and it worked great for ramp-up and onboarding.
It basically lets you pair program where you and a remote person can control your computer (or theirs) more or less completely and seamlessly. There are competing products too, but that was the nicest I've used.
I tried it at my new job with a colleague in Brazil (I'm in US) and the performance was awful as it seemed to be routing it through the VPN for some reason.
My point is though, good pair programming software might be the solution. Zoom is inadequate in my professional opinion, though it's almost viable. Knowing how much better it could be it falls short.
For the mentoring experiences I've had, being able to observe the newer person allows me to make observations that can help them a lot. I don't need to tell more experienced people how to use their tools (shortcuts, etc) to be 10x happier. But newer employees would never know to ask that, and it's hard to pick up on those nuanced details without having them sitting across the bullpen, periodically sitting next to them, going to the whiteboard, etc.
As a concrete example: getting an intern’s corporate proxy set up for a build system over video chat can be quite difficult. If they change the system proxy settings or change networks, the screen share goes out. You don’t face these day 0 mentoring issues in person.
Still early career people are only a tiny fraction of the company’s residents to whom all the WFH culture hugely benefits and the company as a whole. Nothing is perfect, but WFH comes closer than anything I’ve in my lifetime before.
Yeah I think most people would agree that a new employees first week would usually be more productive in the office with someone sitting next to them helping.
Yes and if the intern who has never been behind a proxy before in their life just nuked their global proxy settings, that can be difficult.
>Just have the person who doesn’t understand what they’re doing revert their network settings perfectly across N esoteric config files for shell, npm, brew, gradle, cocoapods, the system itself, the video chat client itself perhaps, etc etc etc
IT departments can’t predict every build environment, and not every build environment is containerized.
Counterpoint: I work at a major tech company and I feel like our interns have been more productive since covid 19. It's forced them to establish a more diverse network of people to ask help from. Maybe it's harder for them, but they don't seemed handicapped by it at all.
The whole "juniors need easy help and struggle to get it themselves" seems like an artificially concocted narrative to me.
I’ve worked at home my whole career. First by necessity and then by choice. If I happened to live in the same city as my job, I’d be happy to come in one or two days a week. But I’d never accept having to come into the office every day. I hate driving in traffic and I don’t get much done in the office.
Working remote has let me live and travel wherever I want. I’m planning a three to six month working vacation to Asia / Australia for near the end of the year. I currently live in a cheap cost of living location, with extremely low taxes, near family, and work in a high salary location. Best of all worlds.
I wish that "working remote" translated into "live and travel wherever I want" for everyone.
So many companies now have policies that restrict where you work from for tax/payroll purposes, or because they don't want employees working in country where the employee doesn't have the proper visa (even if working for a US company).
I am so glad grocery store stockers can work from home now. Amazon workers too, a robot will send the package to the Amazon workers home so they can re-package it in a box and ship it via regularly scheduled pickups from the UPS and Fedex workers that work from home. (Their home, of course, is the Fifth Wheel the company is giving them to do deliveries from)
I'm unsure what the disgruntlement is with these efforts. Job requirements can be modified to accommodate the desires and needs of a labor force. That is what regulation, laws, and unions are for.
Jobs that must be done in person will still be done in person, jobs that can be done remotely may be empowered to be done remotely. Employment is a negotiation, not edict from nobility. Maybe you have to prove the job can't be done remotely as an employer. That is a reasonable requirement.
I guess the first disgruntlement is with the the idea of that being the purpose of regulation, law, and unions.
Unions makes total sense, but not regulation or law.
If a company wants to pay a worker to stand idle in a building to drive up realestate value, that should not be a question of law or regulation.
>Jobs that must be done in person will still be done in person, jobs that can be done remotely may be empowered to be done remotely.
This is already reverting to the assumtion that the "job" is something different than what the employer dictates. Part of the job can be to meet in person.
Having to prove the job cant be done remotely is already redifinging "the job" as something other than what the employer wants. Who exactly is running the company here?
This is not a pro-labor argument, never was. This is akin to saying that if some workers have it rough, then everyone should share the pain.
Back in the day in Europe, there was an air controller strike where the media tried to frame it as a bunch of entitled, overpaid assholes, ruining holidays for everybody. It was disheartening to see how many actually fell for that message, asking why someone should make over 100k euro a year, instead of questioning why they themselves were making so little.
> "If they were to say 'everyone back in the office', I would probably be asking for a raise," said Coomber, who still visits the office once or twice a week. "You get more family time. You can actually finish work at five, rather than finishing at five spending 45 minutes trying to get home."
I'm all for work from home, I think it's actually worth a pay decrease[1], but this quote is a form of double dipping. Presumably Coomber didnt take a pay cut when the pandemic began and they started working from home. I guess it depends on the circumstances during offer/negotiations. That being said, most US contracts more or less say the employer can change your job duties to whatever they want, without any requirement to change your pay. That could include coming to the office, working longer hours, and cleaning the toilets -- if they can get away with it.
As far as I know the primary tool by which workers have caused meaningful changes in the workplace are 1) Negotiations on initial offer and 2) Refusing to continue to work for an employer under terms that are no longer their BATNA .
[1]: I think its actually a mutually beneficial arrangement, at least for me and many of my colleagues we're simply more able to contribute -- from focus, quiet, being able to spend commute time working (reduced stress) etc. The employer is getting a better worker with less office space overhead. Naturally this is highly variable to the job, a work from home ER nurse probably doesnt make sense. But for many it does.
Quite a few companies are somewhat reasonable and steering towards a hybrid model where people come in 1-3 days a week.
The unexplored outcome of hybrid is that there's no such thing as hybrid.
In a hybrid model, you come into the office and find people sitting in chairs with a headphone on. Because they're just as much in calls as they were at home. Because part of the meeting participants on any given day is not there.
Hence, this nice physical face-to-face meeting, a supposed benefit of returning to the office, does not materialize.
Well, perhaps you'll at least do some ad-hoc brainstorming with your colleague at the coffee machine. Sure, but you need to put the outcome of that in writing...for the people that are not there.
Hence, this mode of virtual working cannot be undone. You can't do a "little" virtual working. When you come into the office you largely continue to work as if from home. Perhaps without the sweatpants.
For the record, I'm not anti-office. I enjoy the socializing, lunch walks, etc. And in our increasingly touchless home-based society, it's not that bad of a deal to get out of the house for 2 or 3 days a week. Finally, we should empathize with juniors. In my experience, remote mentoring is a piss poor substitute for the real thing.
> Because part of the meeting participants on any given day is not there.
That's not the only possible "hybrid" model though. The one where multiple large companies (or company-like divisions) are time-sharing the same facility, so that for any workday it's either 100% of the group present or 0% of the group present.
I'm not saying it'll prove practical or popular, but it does avoid the "there's always somebody missing from the meeting" issue.
> In my experience, remote mentoring is a piss poor substitute for the real thing.
This is very true. Probably the biggest contributor to my career were the first two internships I have had. I can't imagine having them done virtually over Slack and Zoom and still having the same impact and connection, it would be devoid of an essential sense of belonging and inspiration.
> Hence, this nice physical face-to-face meeting, a supposed benefit of returning to the office, does not materialize.
It does in my experience. 1 on 1s and small meetings often do have all of the attendees present, especially when in-office days are designated. Some meetings do have people attending virtually, but a good conference room setup with large screens and good interfaces for conferencing make it more comfortable than being stuck in front of your computer. Regardless, you are in the room with many people face-to-face, and you can discuss things with them after the meeting and build relationships.
I see your point, because sometimes I have to find a room in the office just to have a 1:1 virtually, which arguably is more of a hassle than just taking the call at home. But I do find that hybrid works well overall in my experience, and the interpersonal benefits are large even though not everyone is in the office at the same time.
That's an exaggeration. You can actually walk to a person, knock, and get facetime in the office. Instead of zoom-time which is arguably worse.
The issue of which-3-days is real though.
A bigger issue is the asymmetry in the system - new people get a net benefit from facetime and mentoring. Experienced employees get net loss. It's distraction, unproductive time for your own projects, unrecognized at review time.
And since experienced employees have more clout, mentoring can become a negligible part of the new employees experience. Even at companies that claim to have made a system of mentoring, stories abound of failures ('mentors' that ignore questions or requests for meeting)
Hybrid is not reasonable. Hybrid means having to maintain a home office and also remain within commuting distance. It is the worst of both worlds. Even the people who choose to work every day in office are complaining: they can’t find a desk now. It’s been a hilarious shitshow that I get to watch remotely.
People down there, let's say, do not exactly live to work. You can say that's how it ought to be, and you might well be right, but that's how it's always been. YMMV.
Individuals with obsessive compulsive "work work work" attitudes exist everywhere but as an Australian (living overseas) it's kind of crazy that "live to work" is considered normal by any large population.
I have three guys living in India in my team and the timezone difference from IST to CE(S)T is not really in issue. We have a standup every second Monday from 10-11am CE(S)T and if other meetings with them are required I schedule them between 9am and 2pm and they get preference for that time over Europe based members.
With, from my experience, a remarkable lack of quality or care. I don't know if it's cultural, but Indian workers often seem completely checked out of their work.
If your company is working with a contracting/consulting company (eg. Infosys, TCS) then you're not paying enough. Most of those consulting/contracting firms are trying to pay $3-8k/yr when market rate at Product Driven Companies across India is $20-50k/yr now.
Even farming pays around $3-8k/yr (especially when factoring that farm income isn't taxed in India).
Plenty of American companies are fine paying the true market rate (eg. With returnees from America, Canada, Germany, SG, etc) and haven't had those kinds of issues.
Well, it is like China, there are no rejects just varying levels of quality. It totally depends what kind of people you hire. Developers in India come in insane variety of things. People who only pretend to be coders to those who are exceptionally talented 20x engineers.
This assumes that all the talent in the world has a cheaper, equally skilled counterpart in India. This is not true, and even if it was, why wouldn't talented Indians leave the country in search for better wages?
> why wouldn't talented Indians leave the country in search for better wages
1. Living far away from your entire family sucks. You'll miss birthdays, weddings, funerals, and plenty of wholesome moments with family
2. The talent doesn't really leave India anymore. Product companies (both MNCs and Local) can pay $20-50k/yr now in India, which is roughly comparable to the rest of Eurasia.
Working at top Western companies like Amazon, Google, MS, Oracle, etc means that your mid-career TC can hit $60-80k/yr.
3. Depending on the industry, this shift has already happened. In the Cybersecurity, Infrastructure, and Cloud space, other than the main CSPs, most hiring of talent is now in Israel and India due to the lack of training in kernel development, OS, networking, DBs, etc at American universities.
> In the Cybersecurity, Infrastructure, and Cloud space, other than the main CSPs, most hiring of talent is now in Israel and India due to the lack of training in kernel development, OS, networking, DBs, etc at American universities.
Working in Cybersecurity for the past 6 years, based in the US.
What you say is nowhere near accurate, and the reason why the landscape is still quite green in the US is simply because money.
Have you been able to hire US based developers with experience in eBPF, C/C++, XDP, Linux internals, K8s internals, and/or Go because we sure as shit haven't despite trying for almost half a decade.
Our entire agent team is now split across Eastern Europe, Israel, and India for this very reason.
P.S. We were offering market rate (TC $200-300k/yr) before calling it quits and hiring in Eastern Europe/Israel/India for a TC of $60-110k/yr.
We had an agent team at my previous employer, five people, all with several years of experience with C/C++, Linux and Mach kernels, etc. Most based in Austin, and this wasn't a large operation by any means.
But of course you could easily find cheaper engineers somewhere else, you are looking at a pool of people two or three times larger after all.
We also outsourced to Israel, India, and Ukraine, between 2012 and 2018. The final outcome was to dismantle all the operations there, move some to Mexico, and repatriate most of the work to the US.
Idk why our search hasn't been as great (ps I'm going to assume the previous employer was CRWD because Austin).
The talent pool just doesn't seem as deep anymore in the US despite us offering pretty good salaries.
At this point we were able to get US level engineering talent outside the US and I don't see us turning back, especially now that stsrtups like Wiz, Orca, etc are further enhancing the talent pool for our needs plus VMWare, Cisco, and Symantec/Broadcom's layoffs bringing us plenty of skilled engineers who returned back to the home country.
> This assumes that all the talent in the world has a cheaper, equally skilled counterpart in India.
In the context of tech, this is true in general.
> This is not true, and even if it was, why wouldn't talented Indians leave the country in search for better wages?
You can't be this ignorant. Indians flock to USA, Canada, Australia, UK and numbers that are only limited by the receiving country's immigration laws. To give you an example, last week 7000 students from just one Indian state left for Canada. They rented an entire stadium to throw themselves a big farewell party. H1B visa lottery has only 85K spots in USA but is subscribed by around 300K folks. Out of which around 200K are Indians trying to come to /settle in USA.
When canada created a special work permit for digital nomads who have h1b visa over 10K Indians applied for it matter of 48 hours.
There is a quit India movement among Indian workers.
> In the context of tech, this is true in general.
If this was true, forty plus years of outsourcing efforts would have turned the US tech landscape into a purely legal and sales market. It is not, thus it cannot be true.
> You can't be this ignorant. Indians flock to USA, Canada, Australia, UK and numbers that are only limited by the receiving country's immigration laws.
So you are saying that we could replace all the talent in the western hemisphere with Indian graduates, and, at the same time, too many Indians try to immigrate to these same countries?
If you knew anything about immigration law, you would understand that these two are mutually exclusive. Indians in the US or Canada will not be paid the same rates as in India.
> If you[r] job can be done 100% remotely it can also be done in India.
In context of that let me examine your points:
> If this was true, forty plus years of outsourcing efforts would have turned the US tech landscape into a purely legal and sales market.
For many cases it already is. A ton of tech work has *already* moved to India making their US branches primarily sales offices. But as I said, not all work can be outsourced to India. A lot of it must happen in offices in USA. This work is often high value, high collaboration work, as many companies including Google and Meta have figured, 100% remote hurts their competitive edge, reduces innovation and hurts collaborative problem solving. Not all jobs need this and all those jobs can be 100% remote but they will eventually move to India or someplace else where they can be cheaper.
> So you are saying that we could replace all the talent in the western hemisphere with Indian graduates, and, at the same time, too many Indians try to immigrate to these same countries?
I never made such strong claim, my claim was limited to remote jobs only. Yes, every remote job that pays well can move to some other region where someone will do it better than you for a lower pay. It is not a west v/s India but that is how markets function. Indians do hire a lot of western world people for things they are cheaper for example translation and content generation.
People are useful resource and jobs are not a zero sum game. When your remote job goes to India you don't become worthless, you rather find a job that is better suited for your skills and situation making your economy more resilient and efficient.
My broader point however is that if you are living in one of those high cost areas like Silicon Valley or NYC or Sydney and if your employer is okay with you being 100% remote, trust me that you wont have that job for long.
I think framing it as a right is misleading. Working from home is simply a contract perk like compensation subject to contract negotiation.
It makes sense that workers would want it, just like they would want a 200% higher salary. Individuals with leverage or those in unions can negotiate for it and employers can come to agreements or not.
It could be a right. Couple centuries ago, factory workers had to work seven days a week, for a total of seventy hours a week. It is not far fetched that working from home could become a right, like getting some rest came to be.
Companies can still hire people to work 70 hours a week perfectly legally. There is no restriction for salaried workers. For hourly workers they just have to pay overtime.
I suppose it wouldn't be a huge stretch from current policy for the government to make employers pay workers for their commute time, because it already does similar things, but this is all for our early workers.
However, companies with just choose to hire workers that were closer because distance to your job isn't a protected class like race or gender
Not directly commenting on the topic here, but headlines of the form "X fight for the right to Y" seem to presuppose that there is such a moral right, and they are fighting just to bring it into legal recognition. When the question really starts with whether such a moral right exists or not, whether Y should be a legal right.
The problem with presuppositions is that they are preserved under negation. Whether you say you are for or against right Y, it seems that you presuppose that right Y exists in some capacity. But that's not what people who are "against" would want to assume, as they are probably denying it.
Another way to say is "They don't already have that right?". Can't they already get/negotiate work-from-home jobs voluntarily with other equally free people?
I'm not arguing against you, but you're giving the technical, logical explanation to a purposely a-technical and a-logical claim. The vast majority of people (not the ones who think like you or me) simply call the use of force against other people in order to get what they want (the social order they want, etc) "rights", whatever the moral implications (or even practical consequences).
The optimist in me hopes this sort of thing will increase class consciousness. Another example going around is billionaire Starwood Capital CEO Barry Sternlicht saying a "nice little recession" will bring people back to the office [1]. Raising interest rates, saddling people with various forms of debt (student, medical, housing) and increasing unemployment are all part of the same strategy to suppress wages and disempower labor.
Unions and the importance of labor were largely accepted a century ago. Compare Marx's Labor Theory of Value [2] to this quote from Abraham Lincoln [3]:
> Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.
What we've seen in recent times is the capital-owning class just coming out and saying the quiet part out loud. Crushing working from home is just another way of extracting even more surplus value from labor.
Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos would literally melt you into bio-matter if there was an uptick in profits. They would starve you and put you out on the street if there was an uptick in profits. I hope more people realize this. Stop defending billionaires.
What is the relevance of the Abraham Lincoln quote? He is not noted for his economic policy. In fact most presidents of his era had very bad economic policy and engaged in a great deal of protectionism, colonialism, cronyism, and inefficient agricultural subsidies, among other harmful measures.
Because most people don't realize Lincoln was basically a Marxist. The pendulum has swung so far from that norm in the modern day, thanks largely to an Ayn Rand objectivism-fuelled orgy of biollionaire "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" propaganda.
I think it's rather due to the fact that like most other disciplines, the economic sciences have been further fleshed out since 1858. We no longer re-use unwashed surgical instruments, and we no longer subscribe to marxist ideology. No one likes Lincoln for his economic opinions.
One overlooked cause of the return to office trend is local tax breaks.
Big companies negotiate large tax breaks from city and state governments in exchange for bringing a certain number of jobs to the area. But big companies haven't been delivering the jobs to the area that they promised because employees have been allowed to work remotely. So now they are at risk of huge tax bills.
Unrelated to the WFH dilemma, how is Australia generally for IT and tech workers?
I've gotten two invitations to emigrate in the past and although I naively refused, as time goes on I am strongly inclined to at least take the offers into account.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 183 ms ] threadUnionization helps develop somewhat of a brotherhood to keep the nastiness at bay, but even then the members generally want to keep it an exclusive club, not something for all workers to join. As a result even union members still see external pressure from the workers outside of the union still trying to them screw over.
No, being comprised of humans, it absolutely doesn’t.
Both are extremely privileged and ignorant positions.
That nobody would work 70 hour weeks, and that going into an office is a comparable struggle.
https://bigthink.com/surprising-science/reasons-to-take-the-...
if a company decides they function best with all their employees in the same physical space, and hires with that condition as an explicit criteria for working there, do you really think that's a violation of human rights?
> Now that they work from home, the surveyors travel straight to the field as early as 7.30 a.m., enabling Coomber to pick up his children from daycare earlier than before the pandemic.
The example here seems like a particularly stupid (from the company POV, even) place to put an in-office mandate. Clearly much of the actual work was never happening in the office anyway.
Overall what the article describes seems pretty similar to what's happening in a lot of companies in the US (and globally, as the article notes), though with more unions involved than in the US. Bosses are much more likely to want 5 days in the office than employees, negotiation over how many days, etc. A lot of work certainly doesn't need 5 days a week in office.
Also I hate being at home. Nothing good ever happens there.
Aren’t we talking about private businesses here?
But it doesn't need to be every day, and I also have non-work obligations that are often far easier to accomplish during the week if there's some flexible time.
I'm truly sorry to hear that. :-\",
The majority of people where, exactly? Your comment doesn't seem context-aware.
In my case (Buenos Aires, IT work) it used to be the case that people all over the city and surrounding areas had to commute to the city's "microcenter" (what we call the financial/historical district), resulting in typical commute times of 1 to 2 hours. Dreadful.
So your statement doesn't ring true for us in Buenos Aires.
What statistics are you working with to support your point about planet Earth?
Really, you know this for all 3 million people?
It seems that you have some issues going on, no need to drag your colleagues into that.
Doubly or triply so considering the travel times to their field sites, just look at the timeframe differences quoted for that office meeting vs when he leaves for the survey site otherwise. What an incredible gain in productivity!
That means if you want me in the office, I will leave my house at 9AM, if you want me to be close to the office, then increase my pay and I will move closer.
(I don't actually want to do this, but when writing government policies, you have to consider that some people will be aggressively adversarial if it suits them.)
I have certainly worked with more than one person at my workplace who started when they lived locally, but eventually moved to the big city over an hour away, while retaining their employment with the business even after settling into their new home. Them suddenly working 2+ fewer hours each day would be a significant change to their employment.
If the time is set in stone at the time of first hire, then I guess you're incentivized to move as far away as possible that still allows you to be hired, and then on your second day move in next door?
So now you need a tribunal to verify the claims, and what do they go on? With respect to a parallel thread, do the people with the right machining equipment in their garage get to do their manufacturing job at home? If I have a kitchen, can't the Uber Eats driver pick up the food at my place?
Or is the law only carved out for senior web developers specifically?
This is would have a bunch of perverse outcomes you probably haven’t considered. Employers would immediately start to consider the commute times of candidates before hiring them. Longer commute times is a feature of cheaper housing, so that would correlate to employers discriminating against candidates of lower socioeconomic standing. Which would in turn correlate to discrimination against the ethnic groups that are over represented in those lower socioeconomic groups.
It’s basically only a good idea if you’re trying to intentionally constrain social mobility.
Now do college degrees.
This already happens, and AFAIK it's not a protected class. "Hmm, they'd be driving an hour each direction, are they likely to stick around?"
That's already a thing in Australia.
> Longer commute times is a feature of cheaper housing, so that would correlate to employers discriminating against candidates of lower socioeconomic standing.
The current system already does that also. Poorer people are traveling more for work, but they aren't getting compensated for the commute time.
I think a strong case can be made for this. For those of us lucky enough to be able to negotiate salaries, we absolutely should be pricing that time into the rates we're negotiating for.
Bigger picture, I've always thought it was insane that we talk about "40 hour workweeks" as if they exist. Realistically, the time it takes me to commute is part of my workday. If my commute takes an hour each way, then I'm working a 50 hour workweek.
EDIT: To be clear. I mean "forcing people to do anything different". Going into the office was normal for almost everyone.
Since always? Until Covid, there was no choice. People did it because they had to. Covid just reminded people that there is another way to live and how much quality of life they're actually sacrificing for their job.
That said, there's no question that I personally am much more productive at home vs in the office. Offices seem designed to interfere with productivity.
But, all that said, why does it matter either way? I am a human being. I do not exist to ensure that my employer is operating with the greatest productivity possible.
You literally do if you are employed by someone. You expect money from them in exchange for productive work. You are free to start your own business if you want to be however-productive you feel like that day.
For head-down productivity, sure, you can be better at home. But that's not the entire picture, is it?
In-person collaboration is always better than remote messaging/video calling. It just is, and probably always will be.
It's very disingenuous to pretend remote collaboration is anywhere near as effective as in-person collaboration.
No. You're paid to deliver productive work, not to ensure you're working on the greatest productivity possible at all times. That's a fool's errand, eventually bringing you guilt when you can't perform at that level due to life's twists and turns, turning into a burnout when you aren't able to keep your productivity at 100% but keep trying (and failing). If you are employed by someone there's an expectation of doing your job, delivering value, not of chasing the greatest productivity possible. You are a person, not a fucking machine. Balance is needed to be constantly productive, to be able to be creative.
> In-person collaboration is always better than remote messaging/video calling. It just is, and probably always will be.
> It's very disingenuous to pretend remote collaboration is anywhere near as effective as in-person collaboration.
It is very myopic to state platitudes without any data to support your main argument, based on some "it just is". It might be for you and your colleagues, it might not be that important for a lot of people/processes that adapted to not be in-person.
Stop trying to force others to live how you think people should live, you do you, let others decide what's best for them.
Extremes edges of the space of possibility aren't that interesting, but if you want greater compensation, you probably do want to find ways to deliver greater value for your company (and make sure they know about it).
It's very hard for a company to continue paying out greater compensation to employees than the value delivered by those employees.
Your horizon for "always" is myopic.
This way, we could actually improve the housing situation across the country, because otherwise, it all concentrates in the biggest cities.
Less concentrated human habitation is not without cost…
Hedonistically, everyone wants to live on a big lot on a low-traffic road... with friends, family, and work/shopping/services a short distance away. If everyone does have that kind of housing, then - quickly - no one will have it, because evetything will be too spread out; you need to drive a big, polluting car fast through someone else's low-traffic neighborhood to get to yours.
The costs of concentrated habitation are less than the benefits - there's enough tax base and density to support roads and (emergency or mundane) services and businesses. The costs of distributed habitation are higher, and don't work if the entire nation switches to that kind of housing.
Environmentally and sustainably speaking, the "productivity" of big cities is zero.
Cut from the outside, a city like New York would die in a few months when food dissapears, with people eating one another. Cut from urban centers, rural towns and villages will continue to be able to drink and feed themselves just fine.
They only exist because the people living there are subsidized, for water, food, and other such essentials, from outside. Even factory production lives outside those cities.
That's how they started actually, when the rural production because so larger, as to be able to sustain not just itself, but also a parasitic, mediating and administrating, urbal class.
>If everyone does have that kind of housing, then - quickly - no one will have it, because evetything will be too spread out; you need to drive a big, polluting car fast through someone else's low-traffic neighborhood to get to yours.
There's nothing inevitable about this, it's just how US suburbs were designed, to be car-centered.
In decentralized suburbs with local walkable distance shops (walkable as a stronger condition as opposed to merely "a short distance away"), and with local jobs and more extended work from home, it doesn't matter if they "spread out", because you don't have to drive a "a big, polluting car fast through", as the need to go elsewhere is less frequent: work, socializing, shopping is nearby.
Add a good public transportation service, and you don't even need a car.
I know someone who does Den Haag-Amsterdam every day but he's Japanese so he is trained in the art of salary man.
The benefit of concentrating people together is that it also concentrates capital, which makes people rich, which allows them to do things like buy expensive homes.
Spread people around and the sticker price will be lower, but the capacity to buy the homes will be reduced commensurately.
If that ever gets developed, it will revolutionize the world.
Also, some jobs were moved online during COVID (eg. teaching) but it is clearly demonstrated that they work better in person.
Big cities are built for many ppl. Allowing 100% remote work makes it possible to move to smaller towns/cities, which are not prepared for the extra intake.
Many towns struggle with this exact issue in Australia. You can view it as just a temporal issue as it will settle on the long term. But on the short term many of the locals can not afford to live in the town they grew up and the same goes for their children too.
...or more effectively, by abandoning the flawed concept of single-family zoning, thereby allowing market forces to increase housing supply where it is needed.
I've had coworkers who lived and worked in Beijing without cars - they still had 40+ minute each direction commutes. And that's a city that was extremely aggressive in expanding its transit. It's just a basic queuing/graph problem, though.
If people only make cases for transit by straw-manning the worst part of cars and ignoring the worst part of mass transit it's gonna take a long time to convince enough people to spend the billions needed to make it happen, since most people aren't stupid and they know that there are cons of public transit too, not just unalloyed pros.
Different parts of US, Australia, or Europe will respond differently even when subjected to the same policy. So I don't think any one answer is correct as a general rule.
I don't think cities are actually out of room. Maybe they are, but it's not obvious to me that this is the case.
> Being able to share that growth with towns that have plenty of room to expand seems like a huge win.
Not for the people who live in smaller towns because they prefer living in smaller towns.
> And preventing people with money from coming to your poor town is an excellent way to make sure the people who live there stay poor.
Not all small towns are poor. And regardless, a lot of people with money coming into a town very often causes prices for everything (especially housing) to increase, pricing poor people out of the area. And if you're poor, you probably can't afford to move elsewhere.
Not saying that these problems are inevitable, but there are certainly lots of examples of them happening. What I am saying is that this is a very complicated thing with no clear outcome for any particular place.
USA Population growth rate is now at about the lowest it has ever been. All the previous generations had to also build houses and the supporting infrastructure. It's not rocket science.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_the_Uni...
Remote work allows people that work in exporting services to live anywhere. They bring cash into the economy, and any town with a good sense of economics should be trying to bring those people in. Might they temporarily raise prices in the town they move to? Yeah, but they moving out of a big city also lowers prices in that big city, what about the folks that were outpriced there, and now might have some breathing room?
Wow. This is the opposite of the US where most small towns have depressed real estate values and negative growth rates. What is Australia doing differently?
During COVID some people left the biggest cities to live somewhere without lockdowns. This was a fairly small number in absolute terms but it pushed prices up in specific desirable local market and really stretched services. That's slowly reversing now.
This is happening everywhere. My hometown in Europe is by the sea and has nice weather. Since remote work, housing has become ridiculous, both in price and availability. Locals can hardly afford it anymore. But I do think this whole situation will balance out eventually, we're really just at the beginning of a new global trend.
So if everyone with a job that's possible to do remotely distributed themselves across the country, I think that would actually result in more people, proportionally, in in-person service-industry jobs, since each employee of those businesses would be serving fewer other people per day. (Which would be less stressful for a lot of people, probably! But it's very short-sighted to think anything like "100% work from home" is realistic for that many people.)
But I'm also not convinced by the main claim, here. Bigger, denser cities are more expensive. That's because they're more in demand. Some of that is "because that's where the jobs are." But a lot of that is things like weather, entertainment, shopping, availability of services... so I think you also open up the possibility of someone who was working in-person for an employer in Tulsa, say, now being able to move to Dallas instead for more free-time options.
In the last hundred years in the US the most effective ways of distributing people were two things: weather (sun belt vs cold-ass winters) and in-person work that got geographically distributed for big-govt/strategic reasons (e.g. let's make sure our new defense project is going to employ people in as many states as possible to get votes, or let's spread out our industry to be more robust against Soviet bombs, etc).
It's mainly because they don't build enough housing. There's no fundamental reason it would happen otherwise; they use land more efficiently and have lower energy costs than suburbs do, and that should matter more than the higher competition.
Of course, there's also a selection effect; more interesting things to spend money on causes people to spend more money. (That's why people who earn more per hour tend to work more, not less.)
Ok. So why does that happen? It happens basically everywhere in the world: the dense cities are more in demand and more expensive than the middle of nowhere.
If nobody can build "enough housing" in their cities, to make their cities as cheap as their rural land, I think that tells us something. We can' simply take demand entirely out of the picture, since adding more supply is both (a) a lagging process and (b) a process that itself helps promote more demand by necessitating more service business, more jobs at those businesses, etc. I.e., if you make the land more attractive to everyone, everyone who wants to use that land for their business or residence has more competition for securing a spot on it.
This is a great observation, if a problem is occurring all over the place maybe the solution isn't simple.
The cool stuff in these cities is highly centralized and just building more housing a little further out doesn't spread it automatically.
If you build a high rise apartment tower in Yonkers it might not sell. Move much loser to Manhattan and you run into all the problems of building in an area that's already pretty dense.
Maybe cities are just more productive economically, so people earn more, so they can pay more.
I think where having more housing helps though is making your city more diverse. If you have fancy housing for doctors and grungy housing for artists, your city will have a better art scene than if you only have fancy housing.
If you're in a city that's doing well, you have a lot of residents with money to spend. Enough to incentivize a lot of development aimed at those residents. But that jut further chokes out anything that would only serve those with incomes in the lowest percentiles.
Building housing helps, certainly, but there's a differnence between "building housing that keeps the growth engine running" and "building housing that keeps the bottom-tier population served and keeps people from being pushed into homelessness" (especially when redevelopment is financially most practical in cheaper parts of town which can cause more displacement of more economically precarious people - replacing that grungy housing, for instance), and I don't think market-based approaches will ever be enough since the financial incentives to serve the bottom of the market naturally are much smaller than to serve the middle or the top. And I think this is demonstrated by how the densest first-world-cities across the world often have affordability issues.
Grungy housing was new fancy housing - decades ago.
I guess if the government is willing to build Soviet style grey blocks then you can have new but modest, relatively cheap housing.
But the "just build more" path of least resistance is to bulldoze today's grungy housing to build tomorrow's new housing, and most of the time that doesn't make it easy for the existing displaced residents find enough replacement grungy housing at rates they can afford.
So I think there needs to be something more than just laissez-faire building.
Although if they were homeowners before, they probably didn't mind selling their house, seeing as they did it.
Some physical factors that might matter are underlying land value, single stair laws and similar things making building layout worse, how many 1br vs 3br units there are… not whether it looks old or not though.
You can't identify affordable (subsidized) housing from the outside in cities where it exists.
Tokyo is the main example that isn't in this situation.
Conversely, companies will sometimes locate themselves in suburbs just to make it harder for employees to leave. IIRC that's why IBM is in Armonk.
Some people like living in big cities, usually because they're young and starry eyed about the "possibilities" of them being interesting. Quite often they grow out of this, and get to hate the big cities and their stress and uglyness....
[0] https://www.anwb.nl/verkeer/nieuws/nederland/2023/juli/filez...
At various times it's been train, bus, cycling, walking.
When people are allowed to live wherever they want they choose the biggest, best, most expensive cities.
*for some particular jobs
That bit is always ignored. We're arguing for a right, but that right can only possibly apply to a small subset of the entire workplace.
There will never be remote gas station attendants. There will never be remote mechanics. There will never be remote construction contractors. There will never be remote warehouse receiving clerks.
So this can't possibly be a right. Rights apply to humankind, regardless of where you exist or your job situation.
So... what people are arguing for is a privilege, for some particular industries, and protected by government regulation.
Seems like that's just never going to happen. Instead, people need to negotiate for remote work. And if an employer wants you to go to an office in exchange for a paycheck, well, get over it or find somewhere else to work.
personally I wouldn't work from an office so would basically skip on applying to those places but that is the excuse I've heard most often
More realistically many only know "asses in seats" as a metric for their employees working.
The same is true for most office jobs. It might appear to happen in the office, but that's because computers and desks are in the office.
That's the real reason why WFH faces so much resistance. When people are done with their work they can just play with their kid or do what they want, and it becomes obvious how much, using Foucault's analogy, of a prison aimed to discipline the office is.
As far as I can tell the real reasons are some combination of:
* Working physically next to people generally is more efficient. Of course there are some people like Knuth who need to be undisturbed for 6 hours, but for most people the ease of communicating in the real world is a big time saver. It really is.
* The benefit of face to face meetings is bigger the more meetings you have and the more talking to people your job involves. Guess how many meetings the people making these decisions have...
* You're less likely to spend time doing house chores and whatever. I generally do a solid day's work when WFH but even I sometimes just mow the lawn or whatever. If I was at work I would probably just read HN on my phone instead but I obviously hide that better. So this isn't a good reason IMO but it is a reason.
* Companies don't like paying for fancy offices that nobody is using.
* It isn't the company that pays for the time and cost of your commute, so to them that is not a downside.
I wouldn't ever work for a company that didn't let me WFH again. The lack of commute is just too good.
But I do understand the real reasons why high up managers don't like it.
No one is forcing them to? That sounds like an argument for WFH, not against.
I expect new companies will probably avoid getting large offices though.
However that's somewhat misleading, the "productivity" does NOT mean physics-style efficiency of human effort to create value and fight entropy... No, it's based on what employers had to spend. So slaves that only produce a quarter as much per day are technically "more productive."
This matters because employers that require unnecessary time/fuel for commutes typically don't pay for it. Out of tradition and negotiating-power, those costs are usually shoved off onto employees and are not being tracked.
If commuting to the office was compensated, the "productivity" differences with work-from-home would be dramatically flipped.
[0] Example: https://fortune.com/2023/07/06/remote-workers-less-productiv...
God I hate Thursdays at the office, too many meetings, day broken in a bajillion pieces, and I can't get anything done.
[1] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/one-way-...
The type of argument
> It's hypocritical that they [group A] are the ones doing [some thing] but at the same time also being the ones [group B] doing [another thing]
with groups A and B being independent of each other often irks me. Who says they are actually the same people? What is this line of thought called, that must be a named fallacy of some kind.
Again, I just want to know what the fallacy is called.
Edit: Perhaps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_composition?
One of the nagging questions/worries I have about the increase in WFH is greener employees. I've entertained summer interns for the last 11 years at work. And I've tried to help some older but newer-to-programming peers.
I can take "experienced" contractors/helpers up to speed in one of the many domains I have to work in pretty quick. Share some code. Some chats/emails. Couple desktop shares, it's usually enough to bootstrap an ongoing remote conversation.
With younger/newer/greener people, I have found this to be nigh impossible though. I don't like the optics of "you need to get some experience before you can work from home" and it also begs the question "who's going to show up in office to do the mentoring." I do see this as a problem that's not getting addressed.
It basically lets you pair program where you and a remote person can control your computer (or theirs) more or less completely and seamlessly. There are competing products too, but that was the nicest I've used.
I tried it at my new job with a colleague in Brazil (I'm in US) and the performance was awful as it seemed to be routing it through the VPN for some reason.
My point is though, good pair programming software might be the solution. Zoom is inadequate in my professional opinion, though it's almost viable. Knowing how much better it could be it falls short.
>Just have the person who doesn’t understand what they’re doing revert their network settings perfectly across N esoteric config files for shell, npm, brew, gradle, cocoapods, the system itself, the video chat client itself perhaps, etc etc etc
IT departments can’t predict every build environment, and not every build environment is containerized.
The whole "juniors need easy help and struggle to get it themselves" seems like an artificially concocted narrative to me.
Edit: fixed a word
Working remote has let me live and travel wherever I want. I’m planning a three to six month working vacation to Asia / Australia for near the end of the year. I currently live in a cheap cost of living location, with extremely low taxes, near family, and work in a high salary location. Best of all worlds.
So many companies now have policies that restrict where you work from for tax/payroll purposes, or because they don't want employees working in country where the employee doesn't have the proper visa (even if working for a US company).
All of these argument about WFH seem to assume a job's real requirements should be something different.
A good example is people talk about companies wanting in person work to drive their real-estate value, ect.
The obvious answer is "OK, so thats the job they are paying you for"
Jobs that must be done in person will still be done in person, jobs that can be done remotely may be empowered to be done remotely. Employment is a negotiation, not edict from nobility. Maybe you have to prove the job can't be done remotely as an employer. That is a reasonable requirement.
Unions makes total sense, but not regulation or law.
If a company wants to pay a worker to stand idle in a building to drive up realestate value, that should not be a question of law or regulation.
>Jobs that must be done in person will still be done in person, jobs that can be done remotely may be empowered to be done remotely.
This is already reverting to the assumtion that the "job" is something different than what the employer dictates. Part of the job can be to meet in person.
Having to prove the job cant be done remotely is already redifinging "the job" as something other than what the employer wants. Who exactly is running the company here?
I do however understand that some people think the role of the government is to just be a big labor union
Back in the day in Europe, there was an air controller strike where the media tried to frame it as a bunch of entitled, overpaid assholes, ruining holidays for everybody. It was disheartening to see how many actually fell for that message, asking why someone should make over 100k euro a year, instead of questioning why they themselves were making so little.
I'm all for work from home, I think it's actually worth a pay decrease[1], but this quote is a form of double dipping. Presumably Coomber didnt take a pay cut when the pandemic began and they started working from home. I guess it depends on the circumstances during offer/negotiations. That being said, most US contracts more or less say the employer can change your job duties to whatever they want, without any requirement to change your pay. That could include coming to the office, working longer hours, and cleaning the toilets -- if they can get away with it.
As far as I know the primary tool by which workers have caused meaningful changes in the workplace are 1) Negotiations on initial offer and 2) Refusing to continue to work for an employer under terms that are no longer their BATNA .
[1]: I think its actually a mutually beneficial arrangement, at least for me and many of my colleagues we're simply more able to contribute -- from focus, quiet, being able to spend commute time working (reduced stress) etc. The employer is getting a better worker with less office space overhead. Naturally this is highly variable to the job, a work from home ER nurse probably doesnt make sense. But for many it does.
The unexplored outcome of hybrid is that there's no such thing as hybrid.
In a hybrid model, you come into the office and find people sitting in chairs with a headphone on. Because they're just as much in calls as they were at home. Because part of the meeting participants on any given day is not there.
Hence, this nice physical face-to-face meeting, a supposed benefit of returning to the office, does not materialize.
Well, perhaps you'll at least do some ad-hoc brainstorming with your colleague at the coffee machine. Sure, but you need to put the outcome of that in writing...for the people that are not there.
Hence, this mode of virtual working cannot be undone. You can't do a "little" virtual working. When you come into the office you largely continue to work as if from home. Perhaps without the sweatpants.
For the record, I'm not anti-office. I enjoy the socializing, lunch walks, etc. And in our increasingly touchless home-based society, it's not that bad of a deal to get out of the house for 2 or 3 days a week. Finally, we should empathize with juniors. In my experience, remote mentoring is a piss poor substitute for the real thing.
That's not the only possible "hybrid" model though. The one where multiple large companies (or company-like divisions) are time-sharing the same facility, so that for any workday it's either 100% of the group present or 0% of the group present.
I'm not saying it'll prove practical or popular, but it does avoid the "there's always somebody missing from the meeting" issue.
This is very true. Probably the biggest contributor to my career were the first two internships I have had. I can't imagine having them done virtually over Slack and Zoom and still having the same impact and connection, it would be devoid of an essential sense of belonging and inspiration.
With the penalty of wasted time on commuting.
It does in my experience. 1 on 1s and small meetings often do have all of the attendees present, especially when in-office days are designated. Some meetings do have people attending virtually, but a good conference room setup with large screens and good interfaces for conferencing make it more comfortable than being stuck in front of your computer. Regardless, you are in the room with many people face-to-face, and you can discuss things with them after the meeting and build relationships.
I see your point, because sometimes I have to find a room in the office just to have a 1:1 virtually, which arguably is more of a hassle than just taking the call at home. But I do find that hybrid works well overall in my experience, and the interpersonal benefits are large even though not everyone is in the office at the same time.
The issue of which-3-days is real though.
A bigger issue is the asymmetry in the system - new people get a net benefit from facetime and mentoring. Experienced employees get net loss. It's distraction, unproductive time for your own projects, unrecognized at review time.
And since experienced employees have more clout, mentoring can become a negligible part of the new employees experience. Even at companies that claim to have made a system of mentoring, stories abound of failures ('mentors' that ignore questions or requests for meeting)
People down there, let's say, do not exactly live to work. You can say that's how it ought to be, and you might well be right, but that's how it's always been. YMMV.
Some of that time even working with gasp Indians.
If your company is working with a contracting/consulting company (eg. Infosys, TCS) then you're not paying enough. Most of those consulting/contracting firms are trying to pay $3-8k/yr when market rate at Product Driven Companies across India is $20-50k/yr now.
Even farming pays around $3-8k/yr (especially when factoring that farm income isn't taxed in India).
Plenty of American companies are fine paying the true market rate (eg. With returnees from America, Canada, Germany, SG, etc) and haven't had those kinds of issues.
This assumes that all the talent in the world has a cheaper, equally skilled counterpart in India. This is not true, and even if it was, why wouldn't talented Indians leave the country in search for better wages?
1. Living far away from your entire family sucks. You'll miss birthdays, weddings, funerals, and plenty of wholesome moments with family
2. The talent doesn't really leave India anymore. Product companies (both MNCs and Local) can pay $20-50k/yr now in India, which is roughly comparable to the rest of Eurasia.
Working at top Western companies like Amazon, Google, MS, Oracle, etc means that your mid-career TC can hit $60-80k/yr.
3. Depending on the industry, this shift has already happened. In the Cybersecurity, Infrastructure, and Cloud space, other than the main CSPs, most hiring of talent is now in Israel and India due to the lack of training in kernel development, OS, networking, DBs, etc at American universities.
Working in Cybersecurity for the past 6 years, based in the US.
What you say is nowhere near accurate, and the reason why the landscape is still quite green in the US is simply because money.
Our entire agent team is now split across Eastern Europe, Israel, and India for this very reason.
P.S. We were offering market rate (TC $200-300k/yr) before calling it quits and hiring in Eastern Europe/Israel/India for a TC of $60-110k/yr.
But of course you could easily find cheaper engineers somewhere else, you are looking at a pool of people two or three times larger after all.
We also outsourced to Israel, India, and Ukraine, between 2012 and 2018. The final outcome was to dismantle all the operations there, move some to Mexico, and repatriate most of the work to the US.
The talent pool just doesn't seem as deep anymore in the US despite us offering pretty good salaries.
At this point we were able to get US level engineering talent outside the US and I don't see us turning back, especially now that stsrtups like Wiz, Orca, etc are further enhancing the talent pool for our needs plus VMWare, Cisco, and Symantec/Broadcom's layoffs bringing us plenty of skilled engineers who returned back to the home country.
In the context of tech, this is true in general.
> This is not true, and even if it was, why wouldn't talented Indians leave the country in search for better wages?
You can't be this ignorant. Indians flock to USA, Canada, Australia, UK and numbers that are only limited by the receiving country's immigration laws. To give you an example, last week 7000 students from just one Indian state left for Canada. They rented an entire stadium to throw themselves a big farewell party. H1B visa lottery has only 85K spots in USA but is subscribed by around 300K folks. Out of which around 200K are Indians trying to come to /settle in USA.
When canada created a special work permit for digital nomads who have h1b visa over 10K Indians applied for it matter of 48 hours.
There is a quit India movement among Indian workers.
If this was true, forty plus years of outsourcing efforts would have turned the US tech landscape into a purely legal and sales market. It is not, thus it cannot be true.
> You can't be this ignorant. Indians flock to USA, Canada, Australia, UK and numbers that are only limited by the receiving country's immigration laws.
So you are saying that we could replace all the talent in the western hemisphere with Indian graduates, and, at the same time, too many Indians try to immigrate to these same countries?
If you knew anything about immigration law, you would understand that these two are mutually exclusive. Indians in the US or Canada will not be paid the same rates as in India.
> If you[r] job can be done 100% remotely it can also be done in India.
In context of that let me examine your points:
> If this was true, forty plus years of outsourcing efforts would have turned the US tech landscape into a purely legal and sales market.
For many cases it already is. A ton of tech work has *already* moved to India making their US branches primarily sales offices. But as I said, not all work can be outsourced to India. A lot of it must happen in offices in USA. This work is often high value, high collaboration work, as many companies including Google and Meta have figured, 100% remote hurts their competitive edge, reduces innovation and hurts collaborative problem solving. Not all jobs need this and all those jobs can be 100% remote but they will eventually move to India or someplace else where they can be cheaper.
> So you are saying that we could replace all the talent in the western hemisphere with Indian graduates, and, at the same time, too many Indians try to immigrate to these same countries?
I never made such strong claim, my claim was limited to remote jobs only. Yes, every remote job that pays well can move to some other region where someone will do it better than you for a lower pay. It is not a west v/s India but that is how markets function. Indians do hire a lot of western world people for things they are cheaper for example translation and content generation.
People are useful resource and jobs are not a zero sum game. When your remote job goes to India you don't become worthless, you rather find a job that is better suited for your skills and situation making your economy more resilient and efficient.
My broader point however is that if you are living in one of those high cost areas like Silicon Valley or NYC or Sydney and if your employer is okay with you being 100% remote, trust me that you wont have that job for long.
It makes sense that workers would want it, just like they would want a 200% higher salary. Individuals with leverage or those in unions can negotiate for it and employers can come to agreements or not.
I suppose it wouldn't be a huge stretch from current policy for the government to make employers pay workers for their commute time, because it already does similar things, but this is all for our early workers.
However, companies with just choose to hire workers that were closer because distance to your job isn't a protected class like race or gender
The problem with presuppositions is that they are preserved under negation. Whether you say you are for or against right Y, it seems that you presuppose that right Y exists in some capacity. But that's not what people who are "against" would want to assume, as they are probably denying it.
I'm not arguing against you, but you're giving the technical, logical explanation to a purposely a-technical and a-logical claim. The vast majority of people (not the ones who think like you or me) simply call the use of force against other people in order to get what they want (the social order they want, etc) "rights", whatever the moral implications (or even practical consequences).
Unions and the importance of labor were largely accepted a century ago. Compare Marx's Labor Theory of Value [2] to this quote from Abraham Lincoln [3]:
> Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.
What we've seen in recent times is the capital-owning class just coming out and saying the quiet part out loud. Crushing working from home is just another way of extracting even more surplus value from labor.
Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos would literally melt you into bio-matter if there was an uptick in profits. They would starve you and put you out on the street if there was an uptick in profits. I hope more people realize this. Stop defending billionaires.
[1]: https://www.fool.com/the-ascent/personal-finance/articles/bi...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value
[3]: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/first-annual-messa...
Big companies negotiate large tax breaks from city and state governments in exchange for bringing a certain number of jobs to the area. But big companies haven't been delivering the jobs to the area that they promised because employees have been allowed to work remotely. So now they are at risk of huge tax bills.
I've gotten two invitations to emigrate in the past and although I naively refused, as time goes on I am strongly inclined to at least take the offers into account.