Corporate America is done with COVID for the most part. I don’t know of any non-medical office still doing any significant COVID mitigations other than possibly retaining enhanced cleaning protocols.
Returning to an office is my idea of hell though. Getting I'll because some random employee won't take the time off or WFH because they have a cold/flu/covid is plenty enough reason to say "no"
This is how I feel. I know someone whose life was pretty severely impacted by long covid, and I don't want to be her. And I'm a 37 year old woman, which apparently is a higher risk demographic than average.
Between that and the benefits of working from home (having lunch with my local friends or eating leftovers, no commute, control over my environment, being able to work from my partner's occasionally), I really don't think there's a realistic amount of money I'd go back to an office for. Onsites are fine, but RTO 5 days a week 48 weeks a year? No thank you.
At home, the benefits are extreme. Full office, private bath, private bed, private kitchen, garaged parking, asset security, and a 30 second commute. The next wave of office workers will want it better than this, or it simply won't work.
Depends on the timeline. Things are changing very rapidly. Automation seems to be coming at us at an exponential rate.
The expectation that it's going to be business as usual is just as short sighted and archaic with regard going into an office as it is with the idea of work in general.
No need to wait, the future is now. I've already seen huge gains in income and work-life balance by spending time automating my workflow.
I hope that by "trickle down to the workers" you aren't talking about technically illiterate workers who are not actively contributing to the automation effort. Unfortunately, they will receive some benefits as well, which is completely undeserved.
> I've already seen huge gains in income and work-life balance by spending time automating my workflow.
Sure, most of us have used copilot or other AI tools and seen some benefit. But there's a point of no return where suddenly those tools are able to do the other things we think only we can.
> I hope that by "trickle down to the workers" you aren't talking about technically illiterate workers who are not actively contributing to the automation effort.
I'm talking about every single human being who has been brought into this world through no fault of their own and deserves our empathy on that point alone.
You're right, sorry for the cynical tone. I do hope the level of automation we're aiming for will benefit everyone, not just a few individual owners and us lucky tech workers who have found ourselves in demand lately.
There have been a few recent posts about struggling to find jobs... every time it turns out they are only applying to online listings for remote jobs, and have high standards. That's not a situation you're likely to stand out in.
I just don't see how global remote work as the norm is "pro worker" for anyone except those already well established in their career. Besides being more disposable, what happened to complaints about companies not providing job resources or training? Did we give up on that one?
There's always someone who's willing to work regardless of WFH policy. What would probably happen is that companies are lowering their standards of hiring.
It was necessary because many, many US citizens hit hard by The Great Depression figured out in that time how to live without depending on regular (or any) work.
Tent cities; hunting; scavenging; farming; begging; stealing; mutual aid networks; etc.
It wasn't the best life, but for many it was found to be preferable to the factories or the docks.
To even consider returning to living a life dependent on a wage, Uncle Sam needed to offer them a new deal.
Not only will those employers competing for the best get the best, they'll get it at a discount rate because remote workers are on average willing to accept an 18% pay cut to remain fully remote.
Employees are literally willing to pay employers to stay at home. The middle manager who is awful at their job and so insecure they need to "see employees working" is costing the business not just in talent acquisition but when pulling in the dregs they're paying a premium for it. The center cannot hold.
Their job is to support their staff against higher management. They are failing to do that if their teams are begrudgingly going back to work. They really do have all the leverage here. A business cannot function without labor or else it would just be the c suite as the only people employed.
The center isn't just insecure managers. Plenty of people want to work together... together. I happen to run my team remote, but to reduce a real issue to insecurity is to starve the conversation of meaningful contributions.
There's often an alignment problem where upper management often has some stake/ownership in the business being successful, where the lower/middle managers might see their work as just a salaried job, and hence not as driven to work for the success of the company, and might optimize for things like their own ego when it costs the company money.
There's only so much upper management can do to set incentives (Goodhart's law) without micromanaging the middle managers.
Once you factor in taxes and commute expenses, 18% is practically break-even for even a well compensated employee, and that doesn't include the QOL factor.
Indeed, middle management is the plight of modern civilization. They'll probably get replaced by AI soon enough.
Middle management's job seems like the easiest to replace by AI. They don't create any products directly, they only take orders from above and distribute them to below. They take feedback from below, possibly communicate it up, most likely communicate it laterally to another team, etc.
So, I think we'll see 5 middle managers replaced by 1 or 2 middle managers + AI. It doesn't have to be all or nothing.
It's like anything else - the closer you get to the problem, the more work you see that happens.
Directors are often the group that is doing all the work nobody else is assigned. This goes from scheduling off-sites to preparing for audits to determining who handles unscheduled work that doesn't neatly fit into any one team. Directors are responsible for coaching engineering managers and are the backstop for problems outside the skill level of the eng manager.
They also handle project management because in smaller organizations, those positions have already been condensed.
Now, I think there's an alternative. You could hire an executive assistant that offloads some of what directors do. You could have a project manager or two handle all the projects across the portfolio for medium sized orgs - you're likely looking at 1.5 project managers for a director salary. (I think there is a place for AI there, but I actually think we have a better algorithm with Monte Carlo simulation.) You could have non-directors doing 85% of what a director does today, but you're still hiring high-skill people.
But if AI could replace a director then so could an EM. An EM can write a weekly status better than an AI and if a VP-Eng could rely on that, directors would have been replaced long ago.
At one point in time people probably said the same thing about employer provided health insurance, and now it’s expected. Tough to get good talent if other companies are providing better perks
In the US I think it's also a retention strategy. Nobody will just up and leave before they have another job lined up because health insurance is unaffordable. One US colleague mentioned $1000 per month!
It's a big deterrent IMO especially compared to Spain where healthcare is free
Last I checked the feds treat income as an annual thing that happened a year ago. A six month period of unemployment does not mean your income is zero by their accounting.
Employer-provided health insurance comes from World War 2 and the US government locking market pay rates for the war. To compete, employers had to add non-monetary perks such as health insurance. Unfortunately we didn't transition out of this and it ballooned into the current mess.
It baffles me that people think that employees should just put up with whatever horrible environment an employer produces and be grateful for the job. Even after employers have demonstrated time and time again that they have zero interest in the wellness of their employees aside from how it affects health insurance rates.
>It baffles me that people think that employees should just put up with whatever horrible environment an employer produces and be grateful for the job.
I don't think people do, but the issue is that they lack the bargaining power to do anything about it.
A tech worker making 6 figures? They aren't going to pushed around as easily as someone who is living paycheck to paycheck just for rent. they can forget to empathize for those who literally are chained to a job.
>They give you the least they can possibly get away with.
Yup, and now that employees have had a taste of freedom from that, they are very resistant to returning to that. Why is that hard to grasp for companies?
> They give you the least they can possibly get away with.
Absolutely, but that line has shifted majorly. To the point where it won't make sense for "average" employers to even try to bring people into the office. I'm not going to sink money into gas or public transportation just to be imprisoned in a meeting room when I could just take the call at home from the porch, a treadmill, or a couch.
> I'm not going to sink money into gas or public transportation just to be imprisoned in a meeting room when I could just take the call at home from the porch, a treadmill, or a couch.
> The idea that employers need to give you everything you want is strange.
The working class, low class, and middle class are all tax cattle. We have to take ostensibly dangerous commutes on highways with people too tired/too rushed/too busy to care. We have to eat inside of a certain timeframe, respond chipper no matter the circumstances, and when they're done with us they just let us go in a "right-sizing". We are subject to panopticon levels of surveillance with open offices, late nights because you don't want to appear to be the guy leaving early, etc. If you're lucky you get a few dozen hours a week with your family, maybe have some hobbies.
Cattle, imo, actually have it better because at least Farmer John drives them to work and they eat for free.
The Cxx's are always so chipper about coming into the office because they make, on average, 20x more than than the engineers doing actual work, and they can work from home/beach/yacht as they please.
Employers would be wise to treat employees with what they want. WFH is a net savings for them unless they're locked into 20 year leases. Many companies happen to get their lease through their VCs so it explains entirely why they are so keen on coming back to office. Employees will just leave to companies still offering remote. The problem for the employers who refuse to change? In a "fully" employed recession wages will not match the environment. If they cannot make up for lost wages with benefits like remote, paid healthcare, 401k match, etc they will die because without tax cattle, they are nothing.
This was simply the cattle waking up and realizing that they are the ones with the actual power. Any power a CEO claims to have is simply voodoo. The issue is employees still don't see this. Even without a union having enough people just walk out because the company doesnt respect them will crush the company. Rightly so.
> This was simply the cattle waking up and realizing that they are the ones with the actual power. Any power a CEO claims to have is simply voodoo. The issue is employees still don't see this. Even without a union having enough people just walk out because the company doesnt respect them will crush the company. Rightly so.
This. While unionisation and labor organisation in general are a good thing for the workers, just people deciding they have had enough and finding a better employer (and maybe pulling out a couple of colleagues via referrals) is going to hurt companies.
>Even without a union having enough people just walk out because the company doesnt respect them will crush the company. Rightly so.
it's a prisoner's dilemma, and the risk for a minimum wage worker walking out when it's not enough people is the worst case. they get fired, nothing changes, and it may even discourage others from trying.
You can only walk when you either have a next step or the result makes no difference. Many don't have that step and it's not QUITE so dire that food stamps are better than working. It's getting close, though.
The idea that they will eat larger costs, so that they can not get you what you want, and part of the reason you want it is because you will be more productive... is quite strange.
I think a lot of people on here have not been through a real recession. Not saying that everybody will go back to working in an office, but thinking one can simply demand anything only works when employment is high. During a recession, it is either social assistance or one takes the job that is available.
> I think a lot of people on here have not been through a real recession.
You can't be serious.
> During a recession, it is either social assistance or one takes the job that is available.
It's only this way because we allow it to be. Huge productivity gains over the last decades have been captured by the .1%. There's nothing ambiguous or mysterious about it.
I have to agree with the parent post here. What do you think the median age of HN commenters is? I'd say it's probably mid-late 20s, in which case most people graduated after the great recession was largely over and only experienced the COVID blip that wasn't a cyclical recession in the normal sense and mostly helped tech workers instead of harming them.
Same point applies. Somebody who is 40 has seen the last bit of one recession that didn't hit tech as hard as the dot com crash (or as hard as 1991 or 1980).
Ok, im serious. It's silly to quote someone when you don't have a rebuttal.
2008 was 15 years ago, and didn't hit tech as hard as other industries. The last serious one was early 2000s. A significant number of people "in it for the money" or with non-traditional credentials simply had to leave the field.
The GFC didn't hit tech too hard. The places I worked pretended "times are tough" to justify not handing out any raises, but the place next door was always happy to pay more. I certainly was not feeling the same recession as my friends in other industries were.
Anyone that worked through the dot-com bust is late-forties, at minimum. But they'd have to be mid-50s or older to really feel the effects and know what changed. And people in their mid-50s+ are a strong minority in tech.
If the median tech worker is 32, they would have graduated college after the GFC was over (2014ish).
That's true but it's also true that during a recession companies may be more focussed on saving money, and smaller offices because employees WFH save money.
IMHO, for jobs that can be done either in an office or remotely the crux is the company's management team: Some people want to be in office to keep an eye on staff and maintain status, some don't care as long as the work is done.
There is no excess labor left in the system. We just went through a pandemic where, in the US, 2.4 million people just vanished from the labor force. If there is a recession it'll be a fully employed recession where the fed has to keep rates high because workers are fully employed and driving up wages while capital is crying uncle for lost profits and cheap money again.
I predict automation/outsourcing will keep whittling away the need for work from home computer based jobs. The labor demand will be for the in person jobs that require physical labor.
Predicting reduced need for labor due to "automation" has been a losing bet since the Luddites. Do the tasks change? Yes. Is more and different work enabled? Yes.
Likewise "outsourcing" could result in a net increase of WFH given that contracting companies already support it.
> in the US, 2.4 million people just vanished from the labor force
Not certain what you mean by vanished and where the 2.4M number came from. CDC says 1,136,473 died in the pandemic [0], although a significant portion were not likely members of the labor force. As it stands the number labor force members caught up to pre-pandemic numbers in August of 2022. [1]
Feb 2020 164M
Apr 2020 156M
Aug 2022 164M
Jul 2023 167M
A lot of people retired or otherwise left the workforce. For example stay at home parents substantially increased and has stayed increased since. They're talking about people who left the workforce as in, no longer working/looking for work, you're talking about death exclusively.
The "Civilian Labor Force Level" isn't a relevant statistic because of its definition:
> Civilian Labor Force is the sum of civilian employment and civilian unemployment. These individuals are
civilians (not members of the Armed Services) who are age 16 years or older, and are not in institutions such as prisons, mental hospitals, or nursing homes.
This, by definition, ignores people who exited the workforce. Here is the two charts you want to compare instead:
> Specifically the "Not in labor force" column. That's a 4M loss. Out of those it is disproportionately women and older people.
Ok, here is the same data from fred (sourced from BLS). Both the labor force and "not in labor force" increased by ~3M from pandemic to now. Given overall population growth of 8M, it looks like normal numeric growth of any statistical cluster within a growing population.
Date. Labor Nonlabor Pop
Feb 2020 164M 95M 259M
Apr 2020 156M 104M 259M
Aug 2022 164M 99M 264M
Jul 2023 167M 98M 267M
Net. 3M 3M 8M
> Out of those it is disproportionately women and older people.
Is the loss disproportionately among women? In terms of people not in the labor force, I don't see strong evidence for that. Stats for both women and men not in the labor force have returned to pre-pandemic levels.
Is job loss disproportionately among older people? Given that numbers of people in the labor force are now above pre-pandemic levels, we would have to posit a counterfactual world without a pandemic. I'm not going to do a whole regression with it's own assumptions of biz cycle etc. Eyeballing the chart, the current level could be in the range of alternative futures starting from April 2020. Its hard to say though with the boomers retiring out how many retired early or decided to not retire late.
I think it comes from being a software engineer in US the last 10, and especially the last 5 years, is probably the greatest working conditions of any worker ever in human history.
There are a large number of people, namely on HN, that have never known anything other than $120K+ compensation, constant stream of offers for changing jobs, all while working from their home and doing about 4 hours of real work a day.
I don't think a recession is necessarily coming, but a reversion to the mean is going to leave these people obliterated.
Four hours of knowledge work a day is actually a lot. The average corporate worker probably does far less. Meetings, small talk, answering emails, etc. feel like work, but most of the time it isn’t. Four hours of focused knowledge work can produce exponential more value that four hours of meetings.
The thing is, this has always been the case for the white collar world. Lawyers, executives, etc. The real change is that ICs that aren’t playing politics are able to live that life now. The reversion to the mean isn’t happening until those people stop producing massive economic value.
Personally, I will work in a warehouse before I go back to the office. Do twenty hours a week temp work while I work on setting up a side business. It’s never been easier to start your own business, and we don’t need big companies to make a living anymore. The real reversion to the mean is cutting out the rent-seeking middle men that extract value from our economic output while contributing little themselves.
> Four hours of knowledge work a day is actually a lot. The average corporate worker probably does far less. Meetings, small talk, answering emails, etc. feel like work, but most of the time it isn’t. Four hours of focused knowledge work can produce exponential more value that four hours of meetings.
No idea if I should be rolling on the floor laughing or extremely saddened reading that. I might advice taking a reality check before spurring this kind of non sense in public if you want to avoid sounding both entitled and utterly disconnected.
Maybe I'm uniquely on a path to burnout, but I put in at least 6 hours of what I would call hard knowledge work per day as a SWE. Throw on 1-3 hours of collaboration and an hour of truly useless meetings and I'm at a 45+ hr week.
Factor in commute time, via bike so counts towards exercise minutes, and I'm working 50 hr weeks + 24/7 15 minute SLA on-call once every other month.
It's unfathomable to me that this isn't the average experience, and that anyone would get paid more than $120k doing any less.
> while working from their home and doing about 4 hours of real work a day.
One of the consequences of working from home is I tend to work 8-12 hours a day. Sometimes it's hard to mentally shut off work because it's in the same place I live. I don't know how anyone works 4 hours a day, unless they simply don't have a lot to do.
I don't think even recession will necessarily affect this. All the employees have tasted remote work. And many (if not most) people see it as a huge benefit. So any company that forces people to visit their office for whatever reason will get a market penalty. Some will pay for it with higher compensation or other goods, but I'm sure many will seize the opportunity and will happily continue working remotely.
Seems like it is that employees should never ask for better working conditions because, it may be taken back when conditions allow employers to be more abusive? Is that really a point worth making?
> During a recession, it is either social assistance or one takes the job that is available.
This is only true for people who don't have essential skills at a high level. For senior people, this won't be a problem. I cleaned up during the last two recessions, partly due to the prevalence of M&A activity during recessions, and was able to buy property cheap at auction post 2008 due to high foreclosure rates.
If you're just starting your career in a recession you're pretty screwed, if you're mid-career with a specialized skillset that is essential to core business function, you'll be completely fine.
I don't think that it needs to be better than home. However, offices have been actively unpleasant places that are difficult to work in for a very, very long time. Now that everyone is reminded (or made aware, for younger workers) of that, people rightfully expect better. That much really does need to change.
Everyone getting an office with a door -- even a small one -- would go a long way toward making the office a good place to work.
Also, schedule flexibility. If I hit a point where my brain is a smoldering pile of ash I can get up and go do chores or get some sun by checking the mail or something, instead of sitting at my desk staring at my screen praying to the gods of productivity that my brain will start functioning again.
i go for a quick walk to a nearby park and i listen to an audiobook for 30min. or i walk my dog. or i get my steamdeck and play something for 30min (with baldur's gate 3, it's hard to stop after only 30).
This also means that choosing to stay a bit late[1] because you're working on a hard problem becomes an easier choice, because you know you can stop any time and be on your bed in under 15 seconds, no bus no car no bike no commute.
[1]: If your employer doesn't like if you take a longer lunch break or something to get this time back, then it's time to start looking for a different one.
This is true, but depending on the individual it can also mean that one might need to be good at drawing a line and stopping at it.
I do sometimes work late when chewing on a more difficult problem, but if I don't stop early enough to leave a decent gap between end of work and bedtime, it can sometimes be difficult to get my head turned off and get to sleep.
I miss my teens and early twenties when I could flop into bed and fall asleep no matter what I had been doing prior.
this is a big thing for me, some days the switch in my brain turns on at night and not during the day time, so should i sit and stare at my computer for 8 hrs, go home and then start working for real? It is much better for me to rest or take care of errands in the morning and then roll up my sleeves and get to work at night.
>>The next wave of office workers will want it better than this, or it simply won't work.
Workers want lots of things. Eg money. It's a negotiation.
One of the best tactics to learn about negotiations is negotiating on multiple fronts. Did salary negotiation turn sticky? Shift to negotiating for days off, or title... on the employer side.
One reason that this works is that negotiations have their rationale/objective side and partially contradicting other sides.
Case in point, the value of an employee, particularly a specific employee at a particular time... can be extremely high relative to alternatives. The alternative can easily be spend 12 months paying salary equivalent cost without the benefit.
Lots of positions are hard to adequately fill. 12 months of hiring, training, fail, rehiring, etc. That can easily be your mean alternative. It's very common that someone good leaves a team and 12 months later you have not really replaced them.
Yet... That reality rarely translates to practicality outside of executive comp. Investors certainly act this way, but hr doesn't. The rationale of rehiring cost and risk/difficulty of hiring are understood... but there are still limits to the number they are to put on this. It's never 300%. It's 10% or maybe 25%. Willingness to pay correlates to value, but it isn't proportional.
Anyway... WFH is currently an extremely irationale space. No one is being quite honest about it's full benefits, costs, risks, etc.
It's a benefit that neither employee or employer is usually comfortable about outright "negotiating," like offering less money for remote.
So... WFH is not-negotiable-for salary benefit that is #1 or #2 on both parties' priority list, second (often prior) to salary. Unlike other primary benefits, employees know who gets what.
Currently, it's all about perceived negotiating power.
Nah, I'm not going back to your stupid building to talk about sports in the break room while microwaving Tupperwared leftover chicken breast lol.
Gas + commute time + increased likelihood to eat out (leftover chicken breast) = more money out of my pocket.
And I could stretch even further with the endless banter, getting yelled at for not understanding things the first time (I'm not an auditory listener), disrespected for how I look, more reasons to waste money on therapy. Obviously that's personal, but you couldn't pay me more to go back to the cattle stall we call an office...
I do miss wearing dress shirts and slacks while I eat your free pizza!
Agreed, a daily cross on the beltway isn't something that should be necessary so I can sit at a computer. This isn't 1965, I'm not working at Honeywell as some mainframe engineer.
Eating out is a net positive for me. I get better, more varied food and feel better if a professional does the cooking. It's not worth saving money on what I eat - it's so important for health.
I'm not going to endure an hour's commute and all the expense involved with that to just sit in another box where communication will just marginally improve.
I can see this being highly variable for the type of position / work. As a software developer the ability to schedule face time and use messenging for low-priority is way more productive than an unexpected door-knock that demands an immediate response.
Apart from that, I was going to comment saying the exact same thing. Not having a commute is non-negotiable for me. That said, I have been working from home long before the pandemic, and for the one year out of 20 that I worked in office (was a once in a lifetime job opportunity) I rented a condo across the street from the office. Life is way too short to waste 1 - 2 hours per day driving. I also finding driving to be one of the most stressful activities in life. Not because I don't enjoy driving itself, but because of traffic and having to share the road. In other words, I am positive that working from home is literally adding years to my life due to drastically reduced stress levels in addition to having more time to actually enjoy life.
So no, I will never accept a position where I need to commute for work regularly unless it is temporary and a very special circumstance.
depends on your life goals. If you're just minmaxing money and want to retire by 40-50 with time for the family or leisure, sure. You ideally want to minimize time working, and not necessarily maximize efficiency. If your goal is (personal) growth or expertise in a domain, that communication gap can potentially impact your growth, perhaps even cap you without outside study (which turns into work outside of work).
There's no right answer, you simply have to be honest about your end game.
This is such a huge perk for me, last thing I want to do when getting home from a commute is hit a wall of chores. Much better to spread them out through the day
I often do dishes or laundry during longer calls. I find it easier to follow the topic when I do this over when I'm on a call AND a computer where I quickly end up working on code and ignoring the call.
Joel Spolesky has made this very point many times in the past: "Private offices with doors that close were absolutely required and not open to negotiation." I work on a Data Sci team that moved to an open floor plan in 2018. What happened? Anyone who needed to work intensively on a project would work from home instead of in the office.
Yes and if you're hitting or exceeding your sales goals, your boss won't care how much you are in the office. For at least some sales work, a substantial portion of it may take place outside of the office anyway.
It won't. The push for open-plan spaces was motivated by cost-cutting.
Layouts with many closed offices would cost far more to build, and take up more square footage to host the same number of employees.
At a time where savvy businesses have dropped their commercial leases / gone full remote, and the more conservative / less accepting of change ones are left holding the bag, I would not expect anyone to make big investments into office space.
To be honest I think with hybrid, open offices make a lot of sense. Realistically you want to be able to hot desk because that's where the cost savings are made in a hybrid situation. You sort of fractional-reserve your office space. Of course it works only so long as nobody calls an in-person all hands.
The in-office days are social collaboration days so it doesn't make sense to keep people in separate boxes for them. Then people's home office setups are their cubes if they want them, which most people seem to.
We had “hotelling” at Accenture in the early 2000’s and I hated it. It made sense their, because at any moment you could be called to an out of town assignment, but the lack of workspace consistency and the feeling of coming into the most generic workspace available was really draining).
> To be honest I think with hybrid, open offices make a lot of sense. Realistically you want to be able to hot desk because that's where the cost savings are made in a hybrid situation.
This doesn’t sound like a stable equilibrium to me; more like a transition to full remote that you do when you’re waiting for your lease to run out. Not even having your own permanent desk sounds like utter hell.
You said it would make sense for 3 days in office. This seems to be a common hybrid schedule. Some companies assigned shared permanent desks to people with complementary 2 day schedules. This is better than hot desks. And it is possible both of you are right.
No, thanks. If you want happy productive desk workers, give them their own desks, their own shelves, and possibly even their own blackboards.
Even ignoring increased happiness, this enables giving employees their own tools: keyboards, chairs, monitors, workstations, tea, oscilloscopes, papers, etc.
Again we're talking about a hybrid situation here where typically the employee is likely to be working from home more than they're in the office. I think what you're suggesting makes sense for 3+ days a week in office situations though but 2 days or less and it starts to get tenuous. And for me I wouldn't want to go in any more than 2 days a week so they can keep the permanent desk imo.
There have been many studies that have shown that decreased worker productivity and increased sick leave negate any cost savings from open floor plans. Their only benefit is that the my look cool, especially when recruiting junior employees.
Yeah, but it comes out of a different budget, if it's costed for at all; and if it's noticed it's blamed on workshy employees, not a tactical error by management.
See, "shared team spaces" aren't too bad; most development work I've done has been in teams of 2 - 8 people in a SCRUM setting, for that kind of work I think small team sized office spaces are ideal.
I've also worked in a big open space where, while all five teams worked on the same product, each individual team had their own section. But for that one, you could hear the next desk block over talk about football and another block talk about what THEY're working on, which is highly distracting.
Another one was an open office across three floors with a central auditorium (that is, big open central space cutting across all floors), which in theory would be bad but they had enough noise padding and ceiling-high walls / whiteboards between the blocks to not be an issue.
Another one was one where we were asked for input; they initially wanted to make it an open space, but we convinced them to divide it up into rooms instead. They ended up being rooms with glass walls, some matt glass, but that was enough for team privacy and limited noise.
My current spot has a mostly open plan space, but they have heaps of noise padding; felted panels on walls and dividers, in between rows of desks, and desks arranged in groups of 6-8. It's manageable, although unfortunately the walkways are in between the desks so people passing by having conversations is annoying, and the meeting rooms' noise insulation is inadequate. That said, we're only there two days a week so it's manageable.
my employer is currently making noises about this, currently 2 days a week from home. I have a source in the process and I'm told that for 2026 they're going to be giving up their current lease, moving to a new smaller location, and requiring people hot desk so you don't even get your own cube.
It's either going to be working from home or a new employer for me.
Do you want to share with us how that belief is incorrect?
It seems downright trivial to me that giving employees 4' desks packed side to side, back to back in rows requires less square footage and no walls, vs. an office.
(And thus, the race for short-term gains in terms of less real estate trumped the long-term gains of SWE being able to think, and the race to the bottom began. It seems to me the costs of open-office are all after the build out: lower morale, higher noise, lower productivity, faster disease transmission, etc.…)
It's trivial to you that a few extra pieces of drywall and a handful of additional planks of wood would launch the cost of a buildout into the stratosphere?
Are you even reading the comments about studies showing the lost productivity (and therefore revenue) caused by open office spaces?
I didn't say it wouldn't cost one penny more than an open office, I said it wasn't wildly different. So many buildouts go halfway already with the tiny "phone rooms"; it's not in any way a budget buster to keep that idea going, except around a central shared space where meetings can take place.
When I consider "the cost of the buildout", I consider that to be the cost to do the buildout, nothing more. Productivity gains/losses are outside the scope of that.
I.e., the claim, as I read it, is that construction of an open office is more expensive than a non-open floorplan, per employee.
(If you consider that, yes, I think open office is the long-term worse option, and the parenthetical in my comment pretty clearly denotes that.)
> I didn't say it wouldn't cost one penny more than an open office, I said it wasn't wildly different.
This still isn't clear to me. An office is probably, what, 10' square, at least? Google thinks, "The North American office size average is currently 150-175 square feet per employee. Open office spaces for tech companies typically use even less at 125-175 square feet per person". That's considerably more room than an open office floorplan, which is probably closer to 4'x4', maybe 4'x5'.
> So many buildouts go halfway already with the tiny "phone rooms"
My company had 3 of those, back to back to back, occupying what like 30–40 sq ft total? That's hardly "halfway".
I don't really know what you want me to do with this comment. Okay? What part of any of this suddenly exponentially blows up the cost of building many little offices (not average sized offices, unnecessary for this)?
You asked me to justify it, I did, and you replied with a generic moan. Alright?
What you quoted had numbers for open office spaces. It said they were not much smaller than average or the same typically. And the source was a leasing guide. Office meant company office. Not individual office.
Ha, so you're right. That's what I get for trusting AI to answer a question.
That figure absurd in the context of an open office floorplan, and I suspect they're doing some "damned lies" statistics to arrive at it, such as amortizing the common area across the occupancy. I think every open office floorplan I've been in has had 4' desks. The next desk is flush against mine, and there was someone sitting directly behind me. At best, that's 16 sq ft. Generously 20. I have no idea how you arrive at ~150 sq. ft.
You do all of that already for buildouts, you're pretending like this isn't a marginal cost question when in reality it is.
And I never said you would retain 100% of the space exactly as it is in an open plan, I said it is not wildly more expensive when you're already building out the floor.
The one counter is that commercial real estate is way cheaper than it used to be. The potential savings of putting everyone in a full open floor plan aren't as high as they used to be.
(Still don't think it will happen - but that shift occurred when leases on commercial real estate were at all time high)
> The push for open-plan spaces was motivated by cost-cutting.
I think that it was just as motivated by the way you can walk a potential investor (or a worried current investor) through them, and make grand gestures with your arm indicating all of the busy beavers working on making things happen. Then the group can be walked from rockstar ninja to rockstar ninja, looking over shoulders at unintelligible screens, while having smoke blown up their asses.
An open-plan office is primarily a theatrically staged office. 20 years ago I was paid as a temp to sit in one and type random numbers into a noisy electric printing calculator while a random spreadsheet was on the screen. After a few hours, a small group walked in, led by a man who was obviously giving a presentation, with wide gestures of his arms. They were in the room for two or three minutes before being led out. Twenty minutes after they left the room, we were mostly dismissed, except for the younger guys (like me) who were offered a few hours more work moving boxes.
The end of free money might make open plan offices more popular among a certain type of company.
Estimates I saw said individual offices were not much more expensive compared against the other costs to employ people. But the costs were simpler to quantify than the benefits. Or the benefits were denied. The motivations for open spaces included faith in collaboration or productivity increases. Even when studies found decreases.
Lots of empty / underutilized offices right now. So costs should be down, which might rip the equation. Recruiting is still a challenge for top positions, an office might be a nice way to attract talent on the cheap.
Open floorplans are especially problematic if your team handles any mix of development & operational tasks.
Wall Street tech it's pretty typical to do your own SRE/L3 and honestly even L2/L1. Everything from business user "hey how do I.." customer service questions down to "the server is on fire, alerts are coming in .. ".
Open floorplans mean even if you have an agreed PagerDuty type rotation, everyone gets sucked into or distracted by it. It's hard not to want to lend a hand when you see your buddy getting blown up by some difficult user or your inbox/slack is getting filled up with alerts.
Open floor plans are even more problematic when the R&D team shares the space with sales / marketing. In that setting only one of the teams is getting any work done, I'll leave you to guess which one.
Yes - There is less than zero thought put into open floorplan seating charts.
We had in sequential rows - Level1 support, R&D, Development. Sat like this for years.
So R&D was sandwiched between the team that was constantly on contentious urgent calls, and the dev team they ran over to ask for help.
Best open floorplan seat I ever had was in a far corner way off from most dev, sat near a trader who spent all day on the phone yakking. Just like a total storyteller kind of guy, incredible yarns were spun .. kind faded into interesting background music for me. Like leaving the History Channel on in the back. Philosophy, science, history, movies, politics.. etc.
Is that a bad thing? Since we started WFH, I’ve heard a lot of stories of oncalls spending an hour on things that could have been handled in 5 seconds if the right person had gotten sucked in on the way back from coffee. “Oh, I recognize this bug from two years ago, here’s what you gotta do.” “That customer’s symptoms are impossible, ask for more details on how they’re doing suchandsuch because they must be leaving something out.”
Well it depends on your tradeoff decision between SLAs & Development productivity.
If you hire explicit 20% staff to do operational tasks, and also wall off a fixed rotating 5% of your dev team to assist them.. then you've made a conscious decision on resource allocation of 25%. If the other 95% of the dev team is getting interrupted every 30minutes by "questions" then your operational staff/rotation is not resulting in better runbooks, etc.
If you want better SLA and your operational staffing is not sufficient, then you should see your SLA breach, make staffing/process changes, etc.
When development just papers over these issues you end up with great operational metrics and bad development metrics, so then everyone can be even more upset at dev!
Well, yes, until the stuff which has to be delivered by the people sucked in to do support stuff starts lagging and missing deadlines. Then, suddenly, lots of people start being really unhappy (usually at the expenses of the people who were helping).
If the oncalls don't have the knowledge to solve the issues they encounter, they need to escalate them and somebody needs to put more time in developing a more comprehensive knowledge base for them to reference, not just "steal" time from other company functions.
Yes. Management wants to be all about the metrics & KPIs, but then throw in this "open office plan / RTO is needed for collaboration" fuzziness on top.
If you want to be metric driven, it's important that the processes be allowed to fail. Otherwise you are robbing Peter to pay Paul, and the KPI that looks BAD is not where the process is failing necessarily, but where the time got stolen from.
But your solutions imply things that you would probably not accept to do if you were the one having to do the work for these solutions.
You are saying that people will be blamed for taking too much time to an example saying it would took 10h of someone's time instead of 5 minutes. Why the company will value more "your" deadline than "the operation" deadline? You are basically saying you are okay with "operation" being the target of people unhappy as long as they are not unhappy with you.
You are saying people should escalate. But on the example, the person who has the solution is the person you say should not be disturbed. So you are just asking to disturb uselessly people who cannot help, so your solution is even worse.
You are saying more time is needed to develop a more comprehensive knowledge base. But who should take the time to fill up the knowledge base if not the people who have the answers, which, in this example, is the people you say don't have time. (and moreover, funnily, those people complaining to be distracted are also very very often not doing any effort to share their knowledge somewhere accessible).
I'm slowly getting very irritated by the whole WFH debate: there is way too much arguments that boils down to "the problem is that _I_ am the one that people distract, so let's do my solution that is sooooo much smarter, let's do something where _I_ am happy even if it makes the situation worse for everyone else". That slowly creates this impression that a lot of pro-WFH are just little kids.
What you describe is a completely different problem which happens to (poorly, inconsistently and costly) happens to sometimes get solved by open office space.
Having proper knowledge bases and procedures, including how the ask "the team"/seniors "ad-hoc" questions and get feedback reasonable fast is what you want to have to solve that problems IMHO. Because that also tends to work if e.g. some people are sick or gone (knowledge bases) or can't come to the office (e.g. sick kids at home).
Through most important I would say is that communication in remote work is very different to office work and "just throwing slack into the mix" and doing the rest like before isn't going to cut it.
And yes that needs proper tooling, too and yes most of the tooling marked for this purpose today is .... pretty bad, sometimes utter garbage creating more work then they save time. Similar the part of procedures is often completely ignored, too.
I'm just not sure that there's any way to build a knowledge base that can fully replace asking seniors ad-hoc questions workflow. I've worked at places with amazing build tooling, monitoring, etc., and they still never came close to solving it. (This is actually the primary reason I'm excited about LLMs - I don't particularly enjoy the ad-hoc questions part of my job and they seem like the most promising avenue to finally solve it.)
It's very easy to say "hey, can you share your screen" on a remote conversation. While in person that will require moving at minimum 2 people (often more) into a compressed setting with bad visibility at some random place of the building.
And I'm also sure if Joel Spolsky created a company today it would most likely have a remote first policy. At least, I'd be disappointed if I found out he didn't support it with how forward thinking his companies have been.
I've worked in open plan spaces most of my career. I've had my own office a few times also. I don't hate all open plan arrangements, if it's a room with 4-6 developers and no sales or marketing or other functions going on, desks are large enough and spaced apart a little bit, it can be fine. Developers will mostly put on headphones and get into the zone. It can feel kind of nice to have other people around even if you aren't interacting with them.
To me it beggars belief that companies spend so much on humans only to put them in an environment where it’s impossible to concentrate. I reckon at some point someone will figure out that the physical environment can be modified to make knowledge workers more productive, and start walloping their competition.
I am on a distributed team with no in-person interaction, and I love commuting even though I don’t see anyone I work with. But, I hate the physical space.
At least you have hallways, man. Our collaboration happens in the space between desks where the power strips go. It's not so bad if we reorient the monitors just right so they don't hit our heads.
Anecdotally I think a a lot of the IT work that requires extreme focus has become commodified. That is, it's either done by some open source library or a SaaS or something.
I had a lot more of the stuff that required focus at the beginning of my career. In my last few jobs it's been more about hooking together subsystems from 11 different teams/companies in six different timezones.
Most bugs seem to happen because of misalignments or miscommunication. Intense focus just isnt as important any more.
We can tell this isn't Reddit because you don't have a top reply to your post stating, "this is what happens when we let the neurotypical into the tech industry."
Did you mean "commoditized", like work that used to be hard and custom is now generic? If so, totally agreed... we've moved up the ladder of abstractions quite a bit and there's less of a need to build up from the ground these days.
To me, though, that calls less for private offices and more for effective async collaboration. With 11 teams, nothing is going to get done over meetings except some basic alignments. The actual work of integration needs to be fully documented and agreed upon in writing in a way where provider and consumer can look at while actively developing, like a living API spec with specific schema, response and error codes etc. all laid out. If any team fails to adhere to the spec, well, the spec is right (as of any given version).
Even if we were all in person in the same conference room talking for hours one afternoon, none of that is going to stick around more than a week or two before some detail diverges.
The meetings are perhaps good for managers to walk away with some basic summary of a decision, but the actual engineering and IT work can't happen in them. I wish more managers would realize that and give teams more time to actually collaborate through individual async contributions, not just sitting together in a room -- there's a big difference.
Because we just came out of two or three decades of Google and Yahoo offices splashed across the business pages, filled with bean bags and beer taps and foosball tables, making us all think that these playgrounds created massive streams of revenue for their companies.
Turns out, it was just advertising that made the cash all along. The silly "collaborative" environment had nothing to do with it.
Microsoft used to do this. Famously, they had private offices for a long time while all the competition was open-office plans. They've scaled this way back in recent years though (to much complaining, albeit totally ignored, from employees). Whether this means the brainworms got to them too or they actually have the numbers to prove that private offices aren't worth the expense, I don't know.
In my first job after college, I worked at a federal agency where people had cubicles carved out of traditional large offices. It was actually kind of nice, because you worked with people in your office, but had some separation from them as well.
The peons all had desktop computers, while middle management had clunky laptops with docking stations. You knew who the executives were by their small laptops that were clearly designed for traveling by the jet setting class.
I’ve come to think that the ultimate power move for the movers and shakers at a company, would be to have a traditional office with a desktop computer that they cannot take with them. I remember being excited the first time I was issued a corporate laptop. I felt like I had finally arrived, and finally was one of the powerful and privileged. Now, I look back on those days of desktop computing, where I could not take my computer home, and where there was no expectation that I would randomly work from home as the very height of luxury.
Nope, cubes were reviled back in the 90s because they were a pale shadow of what knowledge workers had lost in terms of offices. Management heard our lamentations about cubicles and sent us to a deeper, colder level of hell—the open plan.
Same. Got a laptop and Blackberry at my first job out of college. Didn't take too long for me to realize that it actually sucked.
Later worked as a govt contractor and could leave my laptop at the office 90% of the time. Never realized how good that was until I switched back to a job with an on-call rotation.
To contrast this, I’d say that the “few cubicles in an office” is my least favorite approach. It makes every little noise much more noticeable, and if you get stuck with a loud talker, their voice on on virtual meetings is going to echo a lot more off of the office walls. I’d prefer a regular cubicle in a large floor where the background noise all just kinda blends together.
In my case, the cubes were in large-ish rooms with doors. This was kind of great in that if things got loud you were either shutting the door or asking two or three office mates to pipe down. There was no cut-through traffic or hallway conversation. Not as excellent as the one time in my career where I had a traditional private office, but definitely the runner-up.
I personally don't mind sharing office space with less than about four coworkers. In a small(!), shared office there is enough social pressure to keep concentration periods quiet, or agree on shared music choices, &c. and still maintain the advantages of having what amounts to a team meeting space for collaboration in the same footprint.
Heh. If there's anything worse than an open office in my mind, it's being locked in a small room with someone else. At least the pervasive need to self monitor due to constant surveillance is somewhat diffuse in an open office. In a small room, nothing can escape attention.
Knowledge workers are nominally expensive but compared to real estate? The company’s actual liquid cash outlay to a highly-paid knowledge worker barely covers the mortgage payment on a mediocre house an hour away. Tech workers are rich in many things, but not square feet. The company renting palatial amounts of class A space on their behalf could be tantamount to doubling wages, and I bet most people would take the wages.
I have worked in all of 1,3,4,20-35 office rooms and home office.
I don't think single person rooms are necessary (but better), but open office is definitely not grate and without noise canceling headphones completely unbearable.
With rooms with small number of people (2 or much worse 4) it also depends _a massive lot_ on the layout. But also the other person, i.e. do they constantly click their pens, do they interrupt you all the time, do they have ad-hoc meetings with other people at their desk etc. etc. The problem is such factors are hard to "control"/estimate/plan with.
Through similar considerations apply to home office too, i.e. people need room in their home which can become office space. E.g. working in you bedroom comes with a huge number of problem, which can be overcome, sometimes, but it's IMHO not as simple as "just" having a proper desk and chair.
I can tell what stage a project is in by which desks on my floor are empty. I go in to the office when I'm doing planning or review, but when I'm building I stay home where it's quiet and I won't be interrupted. Pretty much all of my department is the same way. I'm glad I have that freedom (and privilege) and from here on I probably won't consider jobs that don't give me that freedom.
I believe this concept came from the PeopleWare book by Demarco/Lister.
Its common sense that for work requiring deep periods of concentration, eliminating distractions is key. Easiest way to eliminate distractions in an office environment is being in a room behind a closed door. Cheapest way to do that these days is WFH, assuming people have that space where they live.
While I agree that in private offices would be amazing, the amount of space this would require seems huge.
Ideally each room would be as big as a two-person conference room, and even that would feel a little claustrophobic after several hours.
Companies can't fit enough of those in as it stands. How would they do it for every employee? The square footage needs would be huge.
Open office floorplans take ~75 sqft per employee. An office would take ~150.
I vaguely remember IBM cubicle farms from visiting their offices as a child. They took up a ton of space, requiring huge office towers. That means lots of elevator trips and conference room needs.
Yeah, whenever I need to concentrate it's earplugs + noise canceling headphones. For some reason there's a group of marketing people in the same big room as us. They are very chatty, especially in the mornings.
Since I don't have a colleague to rubber duck with, I talk to myself. Needless to say that can't happen in an open office floor plan because I don't want to be a distraction any more than I want to be distracted.
Elsewhere boiled frog and class have both been mooted with regards to office. That's definitely my experience from working the last few decades. I started my career having an office for almost every job. But that slowly fell away as corporations discovered cubes save money and is now completely gone where I work now unless you are very senior indeed. We're talking there are only a handful of offices per floor vs nothing but offices on every floor.
Class comes in to play because at least where I work the people setting policy for the average worker to sit at a cube not only have their own offices, they have their own building! One that you don't get access to by default. Yet, as cost-saving-measures we've enabled people to collaborate across regions and timezones to the point that coming in to work in a cube farm is actually counterproductive. Very few people are customer facing and need to get face time with clients to do deals. The rest of us can happily WFH. Perhaps as Wall Street slowly weans itself from CRE, that will in fact be the next benefit that's pulled back: sorry, you need to be really senior to come into the office / square footage is for closers. I can hardly wait.
I reckon at some point someone will figure out that the physical environment can be modified to make knowledge workers more productive, and start walloping their competition.
I’ve tuned out the entire wfh debate for this reason. We just need some patience and we’ll have an answer. There’s no need for all the angry debates.
We went into the office a few weeks ago, and I was much less productive due to us walking up to each other and asking questions. Rather than shoot chats to each other, or quick phone calls, each question/discussion was by far more disruptive to workflow. I didn't expect that, but it was undeniable!
> "Private offices with doors that close were absolutely required and not open to negotiation."
Where does this come from? It's something that sounds right, but then I look back at my parent's office jobs and pop culture from 20+ years ago and it doesn't line up. Open office spaces have been extremely common for a very very long time, with private offices reserved for higher level people.
I think its fair to say that RTO is not about data, or studies, or about anything really. Leaders across all industries have decided people are coming back. Perhaps there is a secret cabal of commercial office space lenders who are putting pressure as share holders, or some other conspiracy theory. But it's happening - no one can do anything about it (except vote with your feet), and no one is going to get better accommodations in this economy (e.g better offices).
I am in the middle of having to tell a top engineer (and team lead) who was hired remote that they can no longer be remote and need to move to one of our office locations (thousands of miles away of course). Just for the privilege of being on a video call with the PMs who of course don't live in the same city anyway.
Sadly, it's like people running these companies are drawing inspiration from Vladamir Putin and saying "Fuck it - I want people in the office". This may be off topic from the article - but I think leaders are just going to say fuck it - you are coming in or you are getting fired.
Yes, but you shouldn't extrapolate from that. In many cases "startups" are much much easier to manage remotely. You often have a much smaller, and more focused, employee base. There is much less room for unproductive employees to hide in the shadows.
Well - at my massive company no one is willing to share any data about these decisions. That's a huge red flag. And anecdotes about remote working are personal (individual manager) and larger team (100s) to entire orgs (500+). it's been working great.
> What data do you have to support this, other than a personal anecdote?
If RTO proponents had any hard data, wouldn't they shared it by now? It is _they_ who are making the claim that office work is more productive, so it is on them to _prove_ it. We are being fed some fables about "spontaneous interactions at water cooler" and other such bullshit instead.
I don't know if it's true or not, but it's a reasonable hypothesis. There has been no evidence that RTO decisions are being made on data, studies, or anything other than what management feels is right, either. So all we have hypotheses.
>Perhaps there is a secret cabal of commercial office space lenders
In a sense, I think this is much of it.
Commercial real estate used to be a fairly predictable investment. Costs were mostly predictable, rents would increase over time, etc.
Now, we have all these vacant buildings and it's highly disruptive to the investors and owners of those buildings. You have companies in the middle of 5, 10, 15 year leases, and they're paying on those spaces with no hope of getting out of the contract. So the companies have a large incentive to justify that spend, which is really only going to happen by utilizing the space, which means in-office work.
I think if there was a viable way for these lessors to get out of those obligations we would see more of an embrace of WFH or hybrid work.
There is also part of the issue where for some people and tasks, an in-office scenario is higher net productivity to the company (but not necessarily the employees).
Additionally, you also have companies where a large contingent of the workforce can't WFH (eg: manufacturing, assembly, etc.). It creates animosity among the workers when the higher paid people also have the luxury of not needing to come to a physical location.
Overall, I think the deck is stacked against WFH becoming a long-term trend for a majority of the workforce. I think it will become a more common perk, something that is earned and not granted.
That's a large part of it. It's especially works well to get rid of people who are older and have families, and keep mostly fresh college graduates and singles. And those usually have a lower salaries, we're getting fresh employees who are lower cost, everything looks great on paper.
Except that the first people who would leave might also be the good experienced engineers, but that loss is a little hard to see on paper at first, to predict and so it doesn't get accounted for very well.
> If you want to watch your employees work, build glass walls.
I hope this is dark humor and not meant to be taken seriously. For me, about half the reason I prefer my home office is that I don't feel like I have to look productive. I can get my stuff done in my way, and as long as my boss is happy with the result it doesn't matter if my way "looked" right.
I worked in a company that had meeting rooms with glass walls.
It was great. You could write on the glass like it was a whiteboard. And the knowledge that everyone else could see you were in a meeting was an incentive to only be in meetings when you had a real reason to be.
Often it comes down to your boss/manager wanting to get their "moneys worth".
In their minds, they don't pay you for results - but rather for your time. If you complete your tasks fast, and deliver the desired results, in let's say 20 hours instead of 40 - that means you have 20 more hours to do something else. It's the "If you have time to lean, you have time to clean" mantra brought to the white-collar world.
If you work from home, they can't micromanage or monitor your hours as well as in the office. They don't know if you're a very efficient or average worker. Their fear is that you finish your tasks, and then spend time "slacking" at home - doing house chores, watching tv shows, or whatever, on their time.
That was literally the first thing I learned when I entered the workforce. It's always better to do nothing and look like you're doing something, than to do something and look like you're doing nothing.
I don't say this often, but I feel blessed to have a remote boss that doesn't give two shits about what I / we do with our time, as long as we deliver results. But so far he seems like an anomaly.
What companies today give software engineers offices? Microsoft's used to be fantastic in 00s and early 10s but they also were moving to open spaces when I left so not sure the state today.
Not to mention they've taken to straight up lying on their job descriptions saying they're based in Chicago while having "required to relocate to Madison" in fine print at the end of the ad.
Honestly, trying to fix the problems of: 1) expensive office space and 2) people not coming into the office with 3) more _expensive_ office space is just the kind of McKinsey-level thinking we should expect.
> 1) mean fewer offices (per unit space, since they are bigger)
I think this is rather optimistic. If you give more square feet per employee and expect most/all to come in, the idea that it will mean fewer offices doesn't really add up.
Sure, that was the point of my comment. Making the offices bigger and nicer incentivizes people to come in, and reduces the building capacity, the goal should be to find the point where those two trends meet.
Of course, this is under the assumption the company wants people to come in willingly. They could just try and force their employees to come in, but people are really into work from home and good employees have more options.
If HOAs increase property values, maybe we can convince our overlords that an Office Workers' Association for planning these renovations will help save them from Numbers Go Down in the commercial real estate market.
Me too. I honestly didn't mind it as much as I thought I would. I much preferred it to the open office I ended up in for 15 years. I had some bookshelves, a whiteboard, some semblance of silence.
Open plan offices suck, no doubt, but that's not why I don't want to go back to one.
WFH means my whole life doesn't center around my job and its schedule. I'm home for when my kids go to and return from school, I can make lunch or dinner while sitting in the kitchen with my laptop, and I don't have to spend a couple hours a day commuting.
No - it may work for some employees but it's not far from what will make people who prefer remotely want to suddenly return to office.
More importantly, return to office, as the end goal isn't a good end-goal. Sure it can work reasonably well when everyone is in the office, but the pandemic 'experiment' has clearly shown us that remote, hybrid are also workable models. Each model: all on-site, hybrid, flexible have their pros and cons and the outstanding organizations of the future will be the ones that can create an environment where people who thrive in each model and co-work.
The right end-goals should be around more around the lines of productivity, teams hitting/exceeding their goals consistently, employee retention, employee happiness among other things.
Even with that, no company has paid me enough in 20 years to live near the office that is safe and family friendly. Sorry not sorry.
BTW I keep hearing benefits of "RTO" - but I've never worked for a company that only has a single office, so we end up on video calls with other teams and team members anyways even when the company didn't allow WFH.
> we end up on video calls with other teams and team members anyways even when the company didn't allow WFH.
This has been my experience at every company I've been with in the last 15 years. The reason why I don't find these "increases collaboration and teamwork" arguments persuasive is because when everyone has been in the office, the work processes and level of collaboration were not different at all.
People who like WFH will never want to return to the office unless perhaps the office is a 5 minute walk from home (they may be forced to, but they won't want to). For many people the time and cost savings of avoiding a daily commute cannot be offset by a nicer office.
Those who are happy to return to the office in general are those who do not like WFH and prefer more contacts and a change of scenery.
A nicer office makes things better but it will not change people's minds on WFH.
My vaguely populist take is that the pandemic, WFH/remote and hybrid gave the mass white collar class a taste of what the C-suite has had for years.. flexibility.
Sure, these guys might go into the office but they do so from their pied-a-terre / 3rd home / whatever within a 5 minute chauffeured drive. They do this while maintaining a nearby suburban/exurban estate and maybe a lake/beach/ski houses where they spend the majority of their actual hours.
I was listening to a podcast and they observed that US commuters might have had a boiled frog scenario where you slowly just get used to having a worse & worse commute as you age.. and COVID snapped everyone out of it cold turkey. Now attempting to go back to it is revolting for many.
He didn't say it wasn't a difficult job, just that the C-suite were always able to work flexibly, and afford to have a second flat next to the office (or in extreme cases, force the office to move near to their homes).
Not replying to you but the above comment got flagged before I responded and I already typed the comment up so I want to post it :)
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If we're specifically talking about large enterprises, these CEOs make more in a year than most Americans make their entire life. If you didn't live a Fortune 1000 CEO level lifestyle you could literally do the job for 4-6 months and retire, and that's ignoring the fact that they've typically been in the C-Suite making 20-50% of that salary for decades already. It's not often somebody living paycheck to paycheck is promoted into CEO.
I've worked jobs in public companies where the CEO and half the C-Suite was driven to work every morning. I've worked jobs where a rank and file programmer got denied a raise because he left at 4 every day (despite working 8 or more hours every day) because the policy was to work 8-5, while the CEO worked from a vacation home when the weather wasn't nice where our HQ was. Whether the job is hard is irrelevant, all the GP is saying is that you have ultimate flexibility in that role, and now the poors have a taste of it too, and most of them/us aren't going to give it up without a fight.
My favorite story on this thread is that during the hybrid period, GS CEO threw a fit when out in the Hamptons because some analyst (fairly junior role almost at the bottom) had the balls to go introduce themselves during a workday lunch at a restaurant.
He couldn't articulate a specific, valid complaint like "I was out at a client lunch and they were goofing off" or "I was on a vacation day while they were supposed to be working".
He was just mad that underlings had the same flexibility that he, as CEO, had always had. This being the same CEO who jets around DJing on the side for fun and has connections to do so at pretty high levels. So even the "cool CEO" is in fact, NOT cool.
It's like getting mad at all the other idiots on the road making traffic, lol. What do you think you are?
Precisely.
He couldn't put it into words because the words wouldn't have looked good.
But the obvious complaint was what are these slobs doing in my summer resort town, dining in the same establishment as me!! Rather than stuck in downtown Manhattan in the August heat. Or - the least they could do is go to Coney Island / Jones Beach / Jersey Shore or something eating some hotdogs.
I have not run into this attitude in tech from executives. Finance is much more of a heiracy culture I guess.
I have run into this at a peer level though. I've negotiated WFH and extra vacation and have learned to keep it in the down low. They get mad at me, but I'm not the one that is their boss and I couldn't care less if they WFH.
It certainly varies. I've had a casual relationship with senior execs (subject of course to understanding that they get to make the decisions at the end of the day). However, I've heard the stories about some senior execs that are of the mindset of "Don't make eye contact with me unless you've been spoken to." I didn't quite believe it at first because it's never been my experience but it's a thing.
I haven't taken a month-long vacation for a while but when I did a few times in a long-ago role, there were definitely people who were at least a bit incredulous that I could get off with doing so.
Yes it is a thing. It starts when you get promoted to a more senior role. The thing is, nothing much changed inside or outside, so many people feel they need to make a point. They start to dress differently, behave differently, introduce distance - to make sure others understand who is in the "superior" position.
I noticed thin in insecure types or those who need some confirmation of their value. But there are many people who are exact opposites, especially in the younger generation. They understand that being a manager doesn't mean giving orders but supporting your team in their work. It's so much easier for everybody.
There are executive-class perks in most medium-to-large companies, but at least in tech, they're kept on the down low so you have to kind of look for them to find them. Personal assistants are probably the most visible. Private meeting rooms / bathrooms / entrances for the executives, chauffeurs, cooks, masseuses, access to corporate jets, hard-to-get tickets to sporting / arts events, separate housing allowances and company-paid villas, personal security, lots of financial perks like wealth management tools, free tax services, deferred comp and supplemental retirement savings. But these things don't tend to get flashed in front of the worker-bees.
Small biz bros are worse.
My wife left finance to work for a small (50-200) person business for a few years. Couple brothers that inherited it from daddy. Got all their kids / kids friends nepobaby jobs.
Probably the worst scenario of business owners you can work for.
Small businesses can have their own set of issues which are probably different than those you encounter at a big company but they can be just as bad or worse. (Oh, and if you're in business for yourself, you need to do a lot of selling and need to deal with clients directly.)
Toxic small businesses can be really toxic. There's a lot of this in northern Italy, which is actually a pretty productive, wealthy area. But they'd be better off if there was more consolidation and some new blood. Tons of companies where grandpa founded it after WWII, and worked his hands to the bone. The son inherited it, maybe went to college and grew it and improved it some, and the grandkids are all about booze and cars and women.
OTOH, a good small company can be really good. Decisions get made quickly, you know most of the people and can talk with them, much less BS, and more of a sense of purpose in what you're doing there rather than being a cog. I worked in one a few years back and loved it. They are tough to find, though, as a real 'small company' is different than a startup in that they're a bit less crazy in terms of growth.
Yes, even well paid worker bees are still worker bees.
The queen bee who owns a share of the hive, decides how many bees to hire/fire, where they work, when they work, what % of the honey to share with the worker bees, etc.. now thats a different class.
What about managers/trainers of sports teams, if the stars of the team get a significantly higher salary? The manager/trainer might order them around, but does that make them belonging to a higher class, even if they earn way less than their "subordinates"?
you are misreading "owns a share of the hive, decides how many bees to hire/fire, where they work, when they work, what % of the honey to share with the worker bees"
Team managers/trainers do not meet most of those criteria.
At most the GM meets the majority of them.
Only the team owner would meet all the criteria.
That hive is too small to matter. Kind of like I don't really concern myself with all of the wildlife in Australia that would like to eat me. It doesn't affect me in the least day to day.
Amazon was once a small business. It's possible to grow that hive but the vast majority get exterminated.
I didn't mention salary. I mentioned other indicators; being an analyst for GS (probably went to an Ivy League school) who hangs out in the same restaurant as the CEO in the Hamptons
Class is also not these social/economic/cultural signifiers. As yogthos said in a different comment, differences in class are about having substantially different economic incentives. (I wouldn't go as far as GP and say they are unrelated. Of course they are strongly correlated. But they are different things in fundamental ways).
I think you're thinking too much about the restaurant. A CEO can go have a $1000 meal at the same place the analyst has a $200 meal. The CEO could even have the $200 meal. Even multi-millionaires might not want a seven course prix fix for lunch.
If the analyst lives in NYC and makes $250k they aren't living large. If they went to an Ivy League school and have to pay for it they really aren't living large. Regardless, the story makes the CEO look silly.
It is in part. A person on a US$20 million a year salary obviously isn’t working class or even middle class-they might truthfully say they are of “working/middle class background” (if their parents were of more modest means)
Whereas, their 10 year old kid whose annual income and assets are roughly $0 is also upper class-because their parents are. Now, if they grow up and their parents end up disowning them and they end up living on the streets homeless-then they won’t be upper class any more. But if that doesn’t happen, then they are-because even if they aren’t filthy rich yet, very likely they’ll eventually inherit a huge amount of money from their parents (assuming they don’t already have some kind of “you’ll never have to work a day in your life” trust fund set up for them). They could live their whole life in the upper class without ever getting a salary at all
"a lot" describes one area in one department in very large global organizations.
For every daddy money nepobaby, theres 1000 other roles filled by people who got there the hard way. There's only so many of these people you can find if you are hiring for orgs of 50K people.
A junior analyst at Goldman Sachs who's having lunch in the Hamptons, in a restaurant the CEO also goes to, is probably upper class, just very young/recenly graduated though we don't know the details.
Social class is not just about your current salary, although 200k soon after graduation isn't exactly 'average'...
Some might even say that walking up to the CEO like that indicates upper class self-assurance...
Taking the other side - the junior was out to lunch with a bunch of coworkers.
In the office setting the CEO would never been seen anywhere near the same floor that such junior people are working or eating, never having the opportunity to introduce themselves. One bank famously had a special CEO elevator so the guy could seamlessly get from the garage to his high-rise executive suite without bumping into a single soul.
I recently found myself out to dinner a table over from a C-suite exec at my company. I did not introduce myself because I'm a socially damaged introvert.
It's a pretty easy bet that the kid was a major extrovert on the other hand, more than some assumption they must already be upper class.
You'd be surprised about the class mobility on Wall St vs other industries. When I graduated, Google famously did not even recruit from anything other than a small handful of schools and screened out a pretty high GPA minimum like 3.75 or so. Meanwhile every bank came to my college and I had like 5 offers. A good number of my coworkers spent some time at community college, had parents without college degrees, are first gen immigrants, etc.
Outside of glad-handing networking roles that lean on peoples connections like in IB, "already rich" is the exception rather than the rule. Bear was famous for saying they didn't hire MBAs, but instead PSDs — poor, smart and had a deep desire to be rich
Finance is kind of unique is that it’s a weird mix of a strict meritocracy and a deeply seated upper crust that’s incredibly nepotistic.
The meritocrats are the ones that work the jobs where they actually have to make money and profits. Nepos are shunted to roles where that isn’t as direct.
I like to believe the analyst likely came from money. The son of another executive possibly? Which would explain why he was at this restaurant in the Hamptons. And likely why he didn’t flinch to introduce himself.
The middle class is gone now so that's kind of fitting. I like the term "working class" as in "I need to work to survive". It covers a huge breadth of the population but that's better anyway imo
This recent (and self-serving) tendency of reducing “class” to only the extremely wealthy and everyone else is reductive and obscures important economic dynamics. It’s ridiculous to treat a master plumber that owns a plumbing business as “bourgeoise” while treating an Amazon engineer who has tremendous human capital as being a “proletariat.” Even in Marx’s time, there was substantial debate about how to classify the salaried professionals that served as the agents of the capital owners.
In the modern economy, capital owners are reliant on a class of non-fungible white collar workers that bring their own human capital. The two groups have myriad common interests. Those interests are in many cases in opposition to those of ordinary workers who lack human capital and are fungible and easily replaced.
You think software engineers aren’t fungible? Facebook hires SWE’s based on generic technical interviews and doesn’t even assign them a team until week six.
That just means they’re not literally irreplaceable, not that they’re fungible. The pool of people who could do the job, even with training, is a tiny fraction of the overall population.
Well paying engineers is more of a function of US dynamics in tech. Engineering salaries are down to earth basically everywhere else.
They’re proles by the definition of how they earn their labor. If the pool of labor expands beyond the available roles, those high salaries would crash down.
If you want to get pedantic, we could more precisely define the upper-class as those who extract value from others, and the lower classes as those from which said value is extracted from.
Were we to push that to the extreme, the only upper-class at Goldman Sachs would be retirees, either as direct shareholders or as beneficiaries of some pension fund. Even if they were lower middle-class Americans living in an old aging house they can’t afford to fix.
That would be the Value Extraction definition of Class.
Others would argue that class is more diffuse, and that one’s class depends more on their family's history, where they went to school, and who they know, than on how much they have. Which is a valid point.
That would be a Social Capital definition of Class.
I doubt however that anyone would consider a street-sweeping former Emperor (eg Piyin), or some penniless heir to some old industry dynasty as still belonging to any sort of upper-class.
Meaning the actual definition actually is some fluid mix of the two. That and probably some other definitions I’m not even aware of.
> In the modern economy, capital owners are reliant on a class of non-fungible white collar workers that bring their own human capital.
It’s nothing modern. Capital owners always have, since the first scribe, and probably before that (see Japan’s former hordes of perpetually desk-bound samurai).
Still, let’s entertain the argument. I’ll use, and I’m truly sorry for that, a tired analogy.
In the modern world, many people are reliant on many different types of usually non-fungible pets and somewhat fungible, depending on who you ask, animals, for many different purposes. Some of which bring their own highly sought-after hard-earned skills.
Let’s limit ourselves to the oh so tired dog analogy.
A person and their dog have myriad common interests. Those interests are, in many cases, in opposition to those of many other people and animals. Even more so when said dog is considered a family member, serves as a guard dog, as a shepherd dog, or is specialised in drugs detection.
Does that make them equal? Does that change anything to the fact that one is extracting value from the other, and often only pays them back in dog food, usually made from our food industry’s literal scraps and refuse?
So yes, I agree with you: there’s no simple and definitely no simplistic definition of class.
I am still convinced however that, in the specific and limited context of the comment I was replying to, the one I used was good enough.
A farmer’s dog may be eating the scraps, but has a fundamentally different role in the farm as an enterprise than the animals the dog is herding.
By your value-extraction definition, Sundar Pichai isn’t upper class. He doesn’t make money from his ownership of the capital—he owns a negligible share of Alphabet. Instead, he helps the shareholders extract more value from Alphabet and is compensated for that work. A definition that excludes CEOs from the upper class isn’t a very workable one.
I think a more useful definition recognizes that, in between shareholders and the workers is a class of people who help the shareholders extract more value from the enterprise, and therefore has interests closely aligned with those of the shareholders. For example in a company like Uber, that’s what the programmers are doing. They’re not creating value, they’re building systems to extract more value from the drivers.
Another way to look at it is that there’s a large class of people whose jobs wouldn’t be nearly as well compensated without monopolistic capitalism. $500,000/year Facebook engineers only exist because Facebook as an enterprise throws off enormous amounts of cash. If you look at more social-democratic societies, the biggest difference isn’t at the very top. Sweden and Norway have more billionaires per capita than the United States. Instead, the biggest difference is in the professional class. Swedish engineers (and bankers and lawyers and other professionals) make a fraction of what their American counterparts make. And that’s because Sweden has far fewer of these insanely high margin businesses.
> A farmer’s dog may be eating the scraps, but has a fundamentally different role in the farm as an enterprise than the animals the dog is herding.
And yet they are both animals, often get treated as less than most people, the shepherd dog only gets the proverbial scraps. Precisely the analogy’s entire point. I’m Glad I didn’t have to spell it out.
> A definition that excludes CEOs from the upper class isn’t a very workable one.
Absolutely. Hence the "Were we to push that to the extreme", followed by a ridiculous application of the definition.
> Another way to look at it is that there’s a large class of people whose jobs wouldn’t be nearly as well compensated without monopolistic capitalism.
And thus we can differentiate those of these people who are part of the upper class from those who aren’t by wether they get an actual share of the value they produce, or merely scraps. Wether they are compensated as equals, or as useful tools.
Interesting bit about Sweden and Norway. I didn’t know that.
> And yet they are both animals, often get treated as less than most people, the shepherd dog only gets the proverbial scraps.
Yes, but focusing on those factors gives you an incomplete understanding of the dog’s place on the farm. At the end of the, day the dog is helping the farmer extract value from the sheep. Indeed, the dog’s very specialized skills wouldn’t have much value outside the context of the farming enterprise. That means the dog’s interests are much more aligned with the farmer’s than the sheep. His unique role, and relatively comfortable position, wouldn’t exist outside the value-extractive context of the farm.
> And thus we can differentiate those of these people who are part of the upper class from those who aren’t by wether they get an actual share of the value they produce, or merely scraps. Wether they are compensated as equals, or as useful tools
Facebook engineers building the infrastructure the company uses to extract monopolistic profits from consumers are receiving a share of the value. The actual value creation ultimately comes from someone making shoes in a factory in China, which sells them to Nike, which uses Facebook advertising and branding to sell them to consumers for far more than they’re worth. Yes, he’s a “useful tool” for the shareholders, but so are the senior executives (besides Zuck). Their ability to command $500,000 salaries or $1 million salaries, or $10 million salaries doesn’t exist outside the context of these enormous monopolistic profits.
You’re getting hung up on “equality” but being in the same class doesn’t mean you’re equal. In a feudal society, knights may be quite lowly compared to a high ranking landowner. They’re “useful tools.” But I’m not talking about equality of rank, I’m talking about interests and incentives. On that front, the knights have fundamentally different interests and incentives than the serfs. Whatever resentment they might have toward higher ranking nobility, they still reap the benefits of the feudal structure. The my would be much worse off outside that structure.
I’m not hung up on equality. I’m hung up on the huge gap between some and the rest of the world.
Which, to me, reflects a huge gap in power and freedom.
One decides what the other does. One can decide how much the other will earn. One can decide wether or not the other will still have a job tomorrow. The other needs a job if they want to have a roof over their head and food on the table in six months.
Which is why I still don’t find your definition satisfactory. Sure alignment of interests matters, but to me it’s not enough.
It’s been an insightful discussion, and I’ve truly enjoyed it, but I’m afraid we won’t be able to reach a conclusion we can both agree on.
Someone who has made twenty million for just a single year isn't working class even if they choose to continue working. They could immediately retire and perpetually draw on investments for an income several times higher than that of a person who's working for 150k.
Class can be more fine-grained than just lower/working-middle-upper
People commonly talk about “upper middle class” vs “lower middle class”, and then I suppose there are even some people in between the two (middle middle class?)
Well, in the same way there is surely lower upper class and upper upper class, and maybe even more levels than that. A person on an annual salary of US$25 million is undeniably upper class but still far beneath the centibillionaire class.
There’s also no clear boundary between upper middle and lower upper. You may think someone on US$250K is “upper class” but they probably only think of themselves as “upper middle class”, and personally I would think the same. In my own head, to really be upper class, your annual income has to be (consistently) measured in millions, not hundreds of thousands.
There are other dimensions than number of millions; money might be an universal measure, but people are different.
Who is more upper class, a relatively impoverished Prince of the Holy Roman Empire or a billionaire by marriage and luck? Managers like the mentioned bank CEO, or someone who can rent them a house in the Hamptons because they have lived there for generations? An intellectual who has never really worked, or a wealthy rapper who didn't finish high school?
> Who is more upper class, a relatively impoverished Prince of the Holy Roman Empire or a billionaire by marriage and luck?
I think Western society has been undergoing a transition between two different class systems. (Marxists would surely connect this with the economic transitions from feudalism to mercantilism to early capitalism to late capitalism.)
In the mediaeval class system, class was determined by social status which was predominantly inherited, and money alone was not enough to move from the bottom to the top. A person born poor might acquire great wealth, but they would still be locked out of the nobility/aristocracy, unless the monarch deigned to ennoble them. An impoverished baron socially outranked the far wealthier merchant who was born into poverty and worked/lucked their way out of it.
In the late capitalist class system–all that really matters is your net worth. Everything else is secondary. Who cares who your parents were or where you come from once you have a billion dollars to your name – and if a billionaire is excluded socially, it is very likely due to something about their individual behaviour (see e.g Kanye–although I suppose he's an ex-billionaire now), rather than their family background in itself.
The transition between the two systems has been ongoing; it still hasn't completely finished, but we've moved a lot closer to the late capitalist system, and a lot further away from the mediaeval system, than we were 50 or 100 years ago. I don't think the transition proceeds at the same rate in every country either – I think the UK retains more of the old class system than most other places (although even in the UK it is a lot weaker than it used to be); it also arguably retains some strength in the northeastern US, although not to the same extent as the UK.
I was just picking two specific old men that you don't know but probably knew each other, one already dead, as an extreme example of old money (and aversion to work) vs. new money (and excessive ambition).
My point is that different people look up (or down) to different people by different criteria: "net worth" interests competitive capitalist adventurers, "who your parents were or where you come from" remains a high priority when someone is wealthy enough for their lifestyle.
> My point is that different people look up (or down) to different people by different criteria: "net worth" interests competitive capitalist adventurers, "who your parents were or where you come from" remains a high priority when someone is wealthy enough for their lifestyle.
I certainly find it plausible that if A and B are of roughly similar wealth, but A was born into wealth whereas B lucked/worked/married into it, A might see that as a reason to look down on B.
However, I suspect if A was born into $100 million and B lucked/worked/etc into $100 billion, then all else being equal, I doubt A would look down on B in the same way. I expect they'd more likely view B with envy, as a potential business opportunity for themselves, as a friendship which might give them access to things they themselves can't afford, than as a social inferior. When the gap in wealth becomes big enough, it tends to drown out all the other factors.
I've always thought all those granular "upper lower upper class" and "middle lower upper class" and "upper middle upper lower middle class" distinctions were pretty pointless and mainly are for the people who care deeply about constructing a societal totem pole and placing everyone precisely somewhere on that totem pole.
The huge class divides are not between retail workers, tradesmen and software developers, the divide is between C-suite executives / old money, and... everyone else who has to work for a living.
As a tech worker, I have far more in common lifestyle-wise with a schoolteacher than I do with the SVP of Engineering in my own company.
You can be broke and upper class; rich and 'working'. Economists/historians/et al. call it socioeconomic class: I think the latter dominates in the US, and the former in the UK. If I (British) thought of or described someone as being of a particular class, it would be far more a comment on their actions or behaviour than their job or salary. To the point that it's weird to me how it's discussed here when we basically don't know either of them; if anything we know more about DJ D-Sol and it's a slightly (but certainly not definite) downward hint.
Good point. I am aware of the differences between social class as it is in the UK and economic class. I should have specified I'm talking about American-style economic class.
In the US, working class tends to mean people in food service, retail sales, low-skill manual labor, people relying on gig work, and some very low-level white-collar workers like secretaries. Upper class are basically the very few people for whom work is optional. F500 CEOs, SVPs, billionaire investors, and so on. Their existing wealth grows at a rate that can sustain their and their family's standard of living indefinitely.
The rest is middle class, a very wide range from schoolteachers, to skilled tradesmen, to engineers, to university professors, to small business owners, to doctors and so on.
My point is that people are nit-picking when they say things like "Oh, but doctors are upper middle class and teachers are lower middle class and engineers are lower upper middle class and on and on and on. Distinction without a meaningful difference.
> Good point. I am aware of the differences between social class as it is in the UK and economic class.
I think traditional concepts of social class count for a lot less in the UK of 2023 than they did in the UK of 1973. But wealth counts for just as much, even more.
Were Rishi Sunak's parents "upper class"? And yet, he'd surely be a far more valuable social connection to have than Baron Forgettable who happens to be the King's fifth cousin. And I think that will remain true even when his prime ministership is over.
The different levels of power and seniority is a class within a class. Different levels of money, power, and prestige (which seniority is a proxy for here) is all class is really
Have you heard of phrases like "old money" and "new money"? Or "upper middle" and "lower upper"?
The reason they're used more is because there is a very clear distinction between groups even at high levels of wealth due to the need to socially signal. This is what causes CEOs to flip out that an analyst is trying to casually talk to them at a non-work event as if they are equals.
This is class dynamics in action, it's not all about the working class vs upper class, but how these different classes interact internally and externally.
There can be many class horizons, it could very possibly be that the young analyst would dislike a plumber (as in someone owning a plumbing comapany) talking casually to him, the plumber a retail casher, the retail casher an homeless person.
Upper vs working the most important divide (IMHO), but not the only one.
People like to find ways to feel superior to others regardless of how much money they have. Money is just one of the easiest and most transversal ways.
But feeling like you have better opinions or thought deeper about subjects than others or that you know "how it really is", or that you're a better driver or whatever are other common ways. Whatever you feel like you are good at, or have a lot of, you will be tempted to feel superior about.
Fighting these thoughts is virtuous in my opinion. Pretending that only X type of people do it (rich or whatever) is not virtuous in my opinion.
The only meaningful way to look at class is by looking at class interests. On the one hand, you have the capitalist class who own significant amount of capital and use this capital to further their wealth. On the other hand, you have working class people for whom selling their labour is the primary source of their income.
These two classes have largely contradictory interests. People who own companies want to cut their costs, and therefore they want to lower wages, give lower benefits, less time off, and so on. Workers want the exact opposite of that.
People such as CEOs constitute a labour aristocracy where their interests largely align with the interests of large capitalists and they own some capital of their own.
It's still
more complicated than that, as ultimately a non trivial number of people end up making more from investments than labor, just from savings and time. Basically every 45 year old developer in the US that tried to save at all is a capitalist in your book.
If capital gains hand someone 300k a year, they aren't quite workers, but they aren't playing the same game as someone who is still playing the accumulation game. It's the best trick the late 20th century played: Defined contribution workers are all also capitalists, just like everyone relying on an ever more valuable house.
I don't think it's that complicated actually. The basic question is whether the individual has to keep going to work to maintain their lifestyle. Pretty much every 45 year old developer out there wouldn't last long without having a job. They probably have a mortgage to pay on their house, they have car payments, credit card debt, and so on. They're not living off their capital even though they might own some capital.
An actual capitalist makes a living by using their capital as the primary vehicle to create further wealth for themselves and to sustain their lifestyle.
Again, the key distinction is in terms of class interests. What sort of social policies would be of interest to each type of individual is the question.
So many of the comments are acting as though the underling employee actually is of a different class.
I'd bet anything this young person is used to having his family name make him welcome at any table he wishes to join, even in the Hamptons. He's on the well-worn path through a brief stint as a junior analyst before he's running some bank or hedge fund somewhere and the CEO of GS hesitates to approach his table.
This isn't the action of someone either boldly or naively misunderstanding his place. This is the action of someone who has grown up knowing his place is wherever he wishes it to be.
You just made up a scenario that has a less than 50% probability of being true, in order to.. come to the defense of a CEO worth $100M+ ? LOL cmon man.
I believe part of that is true based on the location and ivy league background but also the ceo has disdain for lower ranked employees appearing in his bubble and daring to appear on the same level
Idk that it was a defence of the CEO. Whatever class the analyst belongs to or thinks they belongs to, the CEO's behavior was clearly out of proportion.
I don't really care too much about what class X is considered, but it sure it weird trying to frame a 23YO making 200k out of college in the same sorts of language used to describe people on minimum wage barely affording rent.
Do people really think the "middle class" is dead? I feel middle class is an apt descriptor for someone who is living comfortably but also still needs to work to maintain their lifestyle.
How is this a defense of the CEO? The CEO comes out looking not just like an ass, but an ignorant one.
When someone acts as entitled to be where they are and do what they do as that junior analyst to that CEO, it's because their life experience so far has told them, consistently, that they have every right to. It even mentions that he points out his other associates.
He's acting like he's meeting someone who's, at best, an equal, because from his perspective, he is.
> The CEO was upset others were allowed to perform as if they were of the same class.
I doubt it. Companies that try to hire pedigree know that they are hiring from the same class. The disdain is shock from a junior not working 20 hour days and sleeping under the desk.
This is so often overlooked and it's true. I've done well enough in my career that I've learned to be very cautious about how much I let others know about my standard of living. I've had experiences in the past where someone who either is or feels like they should be doing better than I am based on what little they know about me becomes indignant and acts like the natural order of things has been upended.
Not even. He was upset because the presence of his middle-class employee in his previously-upper-class restaurant — especially with the employee visibly performing middle-class behaviors like a lack of consideration of discretion (and then not being told to sit down by the restaurant staff!) — was tarnishing the restaurant's upper-class image, i.e. the usefulness of using eating there as an upper-class shibboleth.
Or, to put that another way: if the CEO can't use "come eat with me at $place" as a way to say to investors and other CEOs that he's "one of them" and can be let in on the backchannel conversations, then why is he even eating there? It's expensive and the service is awful! He'd much rather not! Now he needs to find a new place to use to signal that!
I would love to hear the "backchannel" conversations happening between people like Musk, Altman, the Google guys and their cronies. It often "feels" like they are planning something nefarious longterm but I can't exactly see the big picture so im not sure.
The sad thing is that when it's come out (e.g. the twitter court case), it's been shockingly vapid. And free of people challenging each other even when the ideas are so obviously bad.
I thought that it is quite obvious: a "new aristocracy", separate from the "masses" and protected by the law while not held accountable by it. It's not quite that there is a "master plan" and coordinated "conspiracy" -- it's simply that the humans have a tendency to protect themselves by isolating from "others". And when you have the wealth and power, this separation quickly becomes very unbalanced.
In Middle Ages, this separation was based on ownership of land and societal structure which soon started being formalised in (both religious and secular) laws. Today, money has the same purpose (being a measure and store of wealth).
Exactly! It's like Musk demanding everyone comes into the office while he is only in the office at individual companies 1 or 2 times a week. CEO of Tesla, a publicly traded company spends all his time in the privately held offices of Twitter. Can other of his company employees work multiple jobs including their own personal company?
I am always surprised when I realize this in conversations with entrepreneurs. They explain something to me about how they “control” their employees, then I say it out loud that it seems weird to me and then they try to explain it to me like it has nothing to do with control or with class but that it is necessary. Sure. It’s mostly bullshit, class and mistrust.
Yes, but the funny thing is that.. for a guy worried about how hard his worker bees are working / how focussed they were during COVID.. he dropped A LOT of tracks during COVID.
In fact, almost his entire track history was during COVID.. in a time that the company he runs has had some headline-grabbing losses in their consumer division.
So I think its fair to say he should focus on his own productivity here first.
You'd be surprised how often "live set" is a synonym for "USB stick."
The scene is notorious for it. It's really not hard to find vids of DJs dancing, pointing, posing, and poking uselessly at a mixer which is obviously just there for the look.
There's also a huge difference between a "live set" and a "DJ set". I'm surprised people here on HN don't realize this.
A "live set" typically involves the performer playing synths and programming the drums live. There are no record players, no pre-recorded tracks, everything is played live on the fly. Example: https://youtu.be/cVFzblT5VPE?t=4177 (a daytime one so you can see the gear)
With a "DJ set", the DJ is playing two or more tracks, beatmatching them and mixing them together, transitioning from one track to the next. This still takes a lot of skill. If you see two or more turntables or media players and a mixer in the middle, that's a DJ set. Often the DJ brings their tracks to the venue loaded on a USB stick and plugs it into the media player. Just because there's a USB stick present doesn't mean the DJ set was pre-recorded. Example: https://youtu.be/Ubyd98XV5C0?t=1018
Does he do live sets (realizing the definitions are loose but essentially creating music live with something like an Ableton) as opposed to DJ sets (basically mixing pre-recorded tracks live, what most DJ performances are)?
I've never seen him perform but a DJ set ranges from people who just hit the play button and follow a recipe (e.g. Paris Hilton) to very technical mixing (e.g. Maceo Plex). A live set is substantially more challenging (and why few do it) but would be strong support he's not having his released tracks ghost produced.
Either way, good for him in my opinion. I also like mixing as a creative outlet but am terrible at it. If I was worth 9 figures I'd probably get a ghost producer to help me out and enjoy the experience of DJing.
David Solomon only really pitches himself as a hobbyist anyway so I don't think there's anything misleading/shameful about it if he is in fact just getting everything ghost produced and doing a 'lite' mixing DJ set live. There are plenty of full-time "professional" DJs who do the same thing.
He could be pulling something like 1/2 million as a DJ. Still a side gig, but not quite as trivial especially when his CEO pay isn’t directly tied to hours worked.
“His Spotify profile has 550,000 monthly listeners with his debut single garnering 8 million listens.”
Why are you pretending this analyst is the same or even should have the same affordances as the CEO? You might be shocked to find out the CEO even gets paid more!
Most people come up through the ranks and you can bet the CEO was one time an analyst with a demanding boss. After decades of work he made it to boss. You see this everywhere where you move up the ranks and things get better. That's the apprentice deal for all of history.
Part of his compensation is relative flexibility although I'm almost certain c suite often work a lot more and have higher demands than junior employees.
If you're very valuable to the firm (e.g. CEO) you can get away with more stuff. It's the natural order of things. I don't really see any other way around it apart from a dehumanizing process to treat everyone exactly the same regardless of capabilities
Why are you pretending like flexibility is something you cannot give freely ?
That's like saying all junior-level employees MUST carry a book on top of their heads all the time, and only C-Level executives get to skip that. If you give someone flexibility, you are not taking anything away from other people, so not giving it is only an unnecessary punishment for junior level employees.
You're assuming that someone working from the Hamptons is as productive as working from a desk in the office or his own home. I highly doubt this is true and especially so for young junior employees.
After you've been there a while, learned more and are more effective at your job, you're more likely to get the benefit of the doubt but even that has limits.
Why are we pretending like this is all weird? New or junior employees need a lot of handholding to ramp up and it's inappropriate that they just get the same consideration when compared to someone that's been there longer than the analyst has been alive. Have you guys ever worked a normal job before?
>> You're assuming that someone working from the Hamptons is as productive as working from a desk in the office or his own home. I highly doubt this is true and especially so for young junior employees.
I've had co-workers in these situations for a long time. In theory there is no difference. But then...
- suddenly you can barely hear someone on a conference call because they are on a 4G-tether on a beach,
- or because there are tons of bar sounds in the background on a call
- or you have a production issue but cant get the person to screen-share because they are on low-bandwidth
I even had individuals who would block their entire calendar on WFH days and only take meetings on in-office days.
The problem is with those who abuse privileges, not with those who are honest.
Blocking off the day makes sense because you want get work done. Meetings can wait until I'm at the office because I'm too distracted to get real work done in my flex-desk.
Who cares if employee works at the beach?
You need to provide value not appearance of value.
>> Blocking off the day makes sense because you want get work done.
I'm sure there are cases there it doesnt matter, but I was mentioning cases where teams need to work with each other and are paid to work with each other. I specifically mentioned Production Support. How can production support meetings "wait until they are back at the office?" From my standpoint, it doesnt matter where they are (home or office) but if they have no connectivity and cannot jump into troubleshooting meetings during business hours, i'm not sure how this works for numerous situations.
Through my career, i've been on the hot-seat as live applications have gone down. Imagine a DB is down or a pipeline is broken, and my DBA co-worker says "sure, lets take it up on Monday when I'm back". Note, I have no admin rights to the DB.
I had a k8s cluster run out of disk space. I had no admin rights to fix this. If the k8s admin decided he could take the meeting a day or days later, it would be a total disaster.
> You're assuming that someone working from the Hamptons is as productive as working from a desk in the office or his own home. I highly doubt this is true and especially so for young junior employees.
We're assuming you even read the article.
It clearly says "how the underling walked up at a restaurant, introduced himself and pointed to associates with him"
i.e. it was more than 1 person. Maybe they are doing face-to-face training? Are you saying that's ineffective?
> New or junior employees need a lot of handholding to ramp up
That's exactly what's happening. Why are you assuming it's not?
Exactly. What if it was a "team building lunch" or they were all out meeting a client or they are all remote together in a summer share?
And of the CEO - was he meeting a client, the board, or simply out to lunch by himself or with family/friends/etc. The article is silent on this topic.
It can turn into that, but on the flipside it's normal to get more privileges over time, either as a reward (raises, time off) or once you've shown you won't abuse it (WFH/flexibility).
> I'm almost certain c suite often work a lot more and have higher demands than junior employees.
Lmao. I'm no where near C-Suite but I've also never worked as hard as I did as an intern/junior engineer. Moving up often means working less hard.
> I don't really see any other way around it apart from a dehumanizing process to treat everyone exactly the same regardless of capabilities
This post is about WFH, not treating everyone the same regardless of capabilities. Those are such different things that I'm convinced you must be arguing in bad faith.
Yeah, Elon Musk is currently CEO of SpaceX, CEO of Tesla, owner/CTO of Twitter, and owner of The Boring Company. It is incredibly hard to believe that the C-Suite works hard when someone is able to multitask like that. Tesla is even a public company--the shareholders could have him removed if he was doing a bad job!
Visionary leaders that can also attract talent and delegate well are force multipliers. Hard work doesn’t mean it’s not easy for some and almost incredibly fast to accomplish for others.
> My vaguely populist take is that the pandemic, WFH/remote and hybrid gave the mass white collar class a taste of what the C-suite has had for years.. flexibility.
Before the pandemic, I already made a lot more money (as a lawyer) than my middle class neighbors. Now I also get to work from home three days a week, and get a lot more quality time with my kids, while they have to go to work every day because their jobs aren’t knowledge work.
Obviously, management versus other white collar workers is one class dividing line that exists. But work from home is a good example if the fact that on many important dimensions, such as work conditions and generational mobility,[1] those groups are in the same class.
[1] CEOs are obviously richer than say accountants of engineers. But in the US, CEOs largely come from the class of these white collar professionals. In that sense, they’re in the same class as most other societies understand the concept.
You could argue its not populist but we can say its like 10% vs 1%.
That said, some COVID era stats showed 50% of working population doing at least 1 day remote.. and 50% is pretty much right in the middle of middle class and fairly populist-ish?
Something like 30%+ are still remote/hybrid today in 2023, so this isn't precisely an elite-only thing ..
It’s just another example of the white collar class enjoying the benefits of technology and globalization while everyone else gets left behind
There's a lot more to it than that.
WFH has been a godsend for a millions of people who work full-time, but are also poor.
I drove for Uber for a while when I was between jobs. The majority of the people I carted around were people who thought Uber was a godsend because they were too poor to save for a car, and Uber allowed them to have a job that didn't involve manual or skilled labor they couldn't perform. People like call center operators, and medical coders (which is not the same thing as computer coding), and other jobs that aren't suitable for machines, and often done in a cube farm.
The pandemic sent all those people into WFH, and many of their companies found that the price of equipping their people with a laptop and headset was cheaper than paying rent on cubical space.
Now those working poor can put the expense of Uber into saving for a car, or buying clothes for their children, or any of the assorted other things that people need every day.
For millions of people, WFH is a helping hand out of poverty.
Don't forget it can obviate the need for extremely expensive child care. Someone working 9-5 in an office doing the work you describe needs at least 2 hours of day care with 4 hours being closer to the average. That's tens of thousands of dollars in day care costs a year.
Working from home means a parent can be home when their kids are home, available if they need to be picked up from school, and can just generally be more present for their kids. This is all especially helpful for single parents. They can't not work but day care costs keep the family destitute unless that parent makes very good money.
The similarities are skin-deep. Managers are typically capital-owners; employees are not. Capital owners get to dictate societal priorities in a way that others will simply never be able to.
Capital ownership is one distinction, but it’s not the only salient one. Other distinctions include, for example, whether your job generally benefits from communications technology and globalization. The private equity banker and the professionals that help them outsource factories to China share many common interests, and benefit from many of the same economic trends.
They may have some policy disagreements—but even those are often theoretical. How many professionals who favor universal healthcare are in the 45% of employed Americans who are “very satisfied” with their own health insurance? https://www.pacificresearch.org/americans-are-overwhelmingly.... But fundamentally, they benefit from the highly financialized, globalized economy. Their human capital mostly insulates them from labor competition, and they reap the benefits of cheap foreign products and cheap services provided by non-unionized workers.
There are millions of people who work lower wage office jobs in call centers or other clerical jobs that benefited greatly from work from home. That's pretty populist.
I'd actually argue there's a benefit to those who need to work at the job site in having the others stay home: a commute in a crowded bus / subway where you can't breathe or spending 2 hours on a gridlocked highway is an absolute PITA for everybody concerned.
So if I can jockey my keyboard while sitting in my chair at home instead of taking the subway to do it while sitting in my employer's, that's a tiny bit more space for the guy who actually needs to go somewhere and work in person.
Agreed. And when even the moderately wealthy took public transit, they could apply political pressure to make it better. As riders get poorer on average, service gets worse.
> Before the pandemic, I already made a lot more money (as a lawyer) than my middle class neighbors. Now I also get to work from home three days a week, and get a lot more quality time with my kids, while they have to go to work every day because their jobs aren’t knowledge work.
With all due respect - so what? This seems like crab in a bucket mentality, just because some of us crabs managed to climb to the top of the bucket, we deserve to be pulled down because of some warped view of fairness? We should actually be trying to pull the rest of them out with us.
You’re not a crab, you’re the chef cooking the crabs. You might work for the restaurant owner, but your material interests aren’t aligned with those of the crabs.
The wages versus capital distinction overlooks the nature of modern businesses, where ownership is diffuse, and businesses are run by a vast class of skilled professionals. For example, Tim Cook owns just 0.02% of Apple stock, but he runs the company. Many executives below him have tremendous power. Individual engineers can have a major impact on the direction of the whole business. Most importantly, the executive roles are typically filled from that same class of people.
These people aren’t Steve Jobs in terms of their ownership interest in the company, but they’re not Apple Store workers either. Their self interest is fundamentally more aligned with those of the capitalists than with the interests of labor.
np- is acknowledging a difference between their job and the jobs of others. I think it's important to acknowledge those differences, especially since those other metaphorical crabs aren't getting out of the pot any time soon. For example, I think it would be nice if workers forced to commute had additional worker protections related to cost of transit/housing.
I think the boiled frog is a perfect analogy. I grew up always assuming there would be a long commute. I couldn't afford to move out of my parents house for almost a year out of school in my first job (2008 making less than $30k/yr) so I spent 7 or 8 months driving an hour each way. I'm too young to remember but my dad spent the first few years of my life and several before that commuting 2 hours one way. Spending at least 30 minutes each way driving was just assumed.
Yes, also the typical career cycle in HCOL areas is you are 22 and live in a dumpy apartment with roommates but close to work. You maybe couple up with someone by 30 and get a nicer place a bit further, but still within a 20-40min transit commute. Finally you maybe decide to start a family by 40, and move out to somewhere 40-60min commute, if not further.
Each step is just a small increment worse. But when you go from remote back to the worst level, it's jarring.
Objectively, transit has also gotten worse in some cities (NYC, DC) since COVID and still not recovered. So we are also returning to something worse than where we left it!
NYC they are running fewer trains so even if overall ridership is down, the trains are as crowded or more crowded than ever. Further in NYC due to homeless/migrant population growth falling through the cracks, the subway ends up being the shelter of last resort. Finally violent crime on the subway increased substantially over covid, and while down is still not at 2019 levels. So while waiting longer for a train, you are more likely to be dealing with a general sense of crime/disorder/etc.
Like DC apparently, Boston has had some serious long-deferred maintenance. The commuter rail at least also has a reduced schedule and no longer has an express train from further out--so I'm a good 2 hours door to door if I use transit to go (rarely) into my city office. Driving is more flexible but it's just as slow at rush hour.
> Yes, also the typical career cycle in HCOL areas is you are 22 and live in a dumpy apartment with roommates but close to work. You maybe couple up with someone by 30 and get a nicer place a bit further, but still within a 20-40min transit commute. Finally you maybe decide to start a family by 40, and move out to somewhere 40-60min commute, if not further.
I found this to be a depressing quality of life trajectory my coworkers were on when I worked in NYC. It was fun in my 20s without kids, but after that, it seems miserable.
Of all the people in my grad school class who got jobs in NYC finance after graduation, I can think of maybe one couple who stayed in the city after getting married/having kids.
Growing up in NYC, I had three hours of commuting per day from age 14 to 26. Then I switched to work from home (this was before covid). I would never go back.
>My vaguely populist take is that the pandemic, WFH/remote and hybrid gave the mass white collar class a taste of what the C-suite has had for years.. flexibility.
Exactly. I've been working 100% from home since 2017 (3 years before covid). I'd rather take a 50% paycut than go back to the office.
Don't get me wrong. I did enjoy my life when I lived 15 min walk /5 min on a bike, from my job in a city. Before I got that job and I had to commute for 20 min I enjoyed it too.
But WFH beats that by a mile. I can live wherever I want (where cost of living is a lot cheaper than central London). I can just go down to my kitchen and make myself proper food any time (although I still miss certain of my favourite restaurants). And most importantly, I get a lot more time to myself and I'm much more effective at my work.
There is no chance in hell people like me will "go back to the office". Furthermore, companies that recognised the benefits early are reaping the benefits. Even just one. Having an order of magnitude larger talent pool by not limiting themselves to people from one place.
In today's marker that is characterised by permanent skilled labour shortage I can't imagine stupidest way to shoot ones company in the foot than trying to force people to "get back to the office".
I know I could get paid ~10-20% more somewhere else, but I stay where I am. I still make good money, I like my job and the people well enough, it's fully remote, and the quality of life of being able to take care of my 5yo son after/before school, and being present to see my expecting baby as he grows up in between meetings, instead of through messaging and photo share, is IMHO well worth the pay cut.
Not with unemployment where it is. Instead it's more likely that companies will offer more money to software engineers to compensate for a must-commute policy.
If they previously worked in some expensive city like San Fransisco and had in writing that their work from home arrangement was permanent they could move to a forest somewhere with negligible housing costs and still come out ahead.
Although most people don't work in San Francisco with inflated salaries so I'd still rather not make this the norm.
It's worse than that, I didn't just gain space and scenery. I went up an entire socioeconomic class.
Previously I was priced out of the housing market, renting a small basement suite.
Now I own a large detached home, and thanks to the rental suite, spending less each month than I did before.
And this is all before you consider the equity myself and my tenant have paid down, or even any home appreciation. It's effectively doubled my TC since I moved.
I mean, yes, that's the obvious take, but can you honestly say there's nothing you could be doing that would make you more money, but that would completely suck, prompting you to do something else instead?
Just today I'm seeing stories about how the UPS truck drivers have managed to negotiate themselves pay and benefits up to $170,000/year. Would you rather make $150,000 a year at your desk at home, or $170,000/year schlepping packages for UPS?
If your answer is "$150K," you're taking a pay cut for a better work environment. Does that make you a sucker? No? Well, that's what WFH is about. If you have to leave your current job and find another one to make it happen, it could make sense as long as your paycheck and future prospects aren't too badly hurt. (And assuming you want to WFH, of course, which many people will not.)
>regardless of how many numbers are on your paycheck.
I dunno, 7 is a lot of numbers. Work for 5 years, and be close to retirement. Definitely have my house/car and even a few luxury projects paid off in that time. I could work part time/contracts and let the rest of the money gather interest.
But I suppose you're basing this on reality, not a true ultimatum.
Your employer should actually pay you more to WFH.
Aside from saving them rent on the office space, you should be able to expense several office-supply things that they would have provided previously. Office chair and desk, internet bill (pro-rated by usage), maybe printer ink.
not really. Companies pay more in expensive cities where they locate offices because they need to attract local talent, and they have to compete against other companies. Many national companies have cost of living adjustments baked into their salary bands because of this.
Which aside from office space if you feel you need to rent/buy a bigger place in an expensive area are utterly trivial for any decent white collar job and are almost certainly counterbalanced by commuting costs for the vast bulk of people who can't just walk/cycle to their jobs.
>Aside from saving them rent on the office space, you should be able to expense several office-supply things that they would have provided previously. Office chair and desk, internet bill (pro-rated by usage), maybe printer ink.
Let's not get carried away. Back then you were paying for your own transportation costs and your commute time. Which is more valuable? Commuting to work every day to enjoy free office supplies and coffee, or WFH but paying for your own chair and desk?
I'd take the latter any day of the week as the chair & desk is a one time cost anyway and lasts 10+ years.
aye, and the difference is the commute and its resources -- gas, new tires, oil changes, etc. -- ain't coming back.
meanwhile, i bought a standing desk and it's mine, and it'll go to my next house and next job.
they can drop ship me a laptop and docking station, and if they wanna be nice throw me a couple hundred as a "office stiped", which would be way cheaper than buying business grade furniture.
As well as "I'd rather leave my current job than go back to the office."
My company has spent the last 8 months trying to explain why they want us back in the office for hybrid work. At first it was, "mentoring young staff." And lately it is, "It doesn't look great to potential clients when they visit an office and the office is empty." This new argument sounds like a BD edge case.
It seems to entirely be senior leaders and senior empty nesters pushing for this, while everyone else is not in favor.
This. Companies are already catching on to this and starting to use this as a reason to pay less.
In my latest performance review, my manager actually told he and other managers were being forced to ask the question "Do you consider WFH as part of your compensation" by HR/upper management to all his reports (including me).
I'm convinced this is in preparation to either lower salaries, or artificially lowering them by giving lower raises/bonuses to those who work from home since they are starting to call people back to office who aren't remote by title. Most people are back up to 3-days a week, even though 90% of them are very unhappy. I'm fully remote hence why he asked me this question and anyone else who is designated full remote.
Remote work was always an excuse to pay less, much to my chagrin. The fact is that as remote work became more popular, with the increase in positions, pay has actually increased. I'm not surprised that more people are seeing pushback on in the office vs remote compensation as this has been the standard play for years.
I find it doubly frustrating since remote employees are less of a cost sink due to less office space and all the costs that come with it. Remote employees are the most efficient type of employees from that perspective and so it always felt like such a flimsy excuse.
My suggestion is push back on any perceived pay gap between in office and remote work. The work done is at parity (if not more so due to efficiencies of remote work) and so there is no valid excuse to pay less.
This was always inevitable. The demand for fully remote jobs will always be higher than for in-person. With more demand for those positions, the companies can afford to pay labor less. WFH was always going to come with a pay cut. I don't know why people are simply expecting the other shoe never to drop. I'm not saying that it should, I'm saying that it will.
We go WFH but understandably not really any sort of payrise as our industry was heavily affected/repressed by the pandemic. I agree we should wfh where possible though; it's a complete waste of public transport/office space/bad for environment otherwise.
Would be nice to see some level of turnabout for everyone that banded together to weather the storm, though.
In my experience, VP+ level also maybe spend half the year on the road and are commonly on 10pm calls with e.g. customers and general managers in Asia. Certainly they're usually well-compensated but they're not spending their days by the swimming pool in their villa either. I suspect that a lot of people reading this would hate the job even if they could do it well.
Sure. I write this as someone who works 12-14hrs/day and sporadically over the weekend, but I do it all remote from home & am well compensated so I am happy with the trade.
However - I think some of the CEO class defenders shouldn't delude themselves as to why these people have 5 homes. It is not because they take a paltry 15 days paid time off per year in which they use those homes. They have the flexibility to dictate their schedule, and they use that flexibility to be where they want, when they want.
At one fund I worked they Dual-HQd NYC & Miami (plus they all keep a Greenwich footprint) so that some of the execs could sleep outside NY State for statutory 183 days/year and avoid NYS/NYC 10-15% income tax on high earners. Plus they maintained their country homes outside the city.
If you make $5M/year, the 2nd/3rd/4th home start to pay for themselves with those economics.
Sleep in Greenwich Friday to Tuesday. Monday work from CT office. Blade to midtown office Tuesday AM. Sleep in your condo Tuesday/Wednesday and then back to Greenwich Thursday night to work remote Friday.
Next thing you know you're in Manhattan for a paltry 2 nights/week, maybe not even every week if you go do a Miami 2 weeks/month, or for majority of winter, etc.
If I had a small-medium company I would hand out money for renting coworking spaces. If enough people do this, coworking spaces will pop up more and more and compete to get the best deals. People who wants to WFH can pocket the difference and those who crave for socialization will have a place for such.
A large company can probably do that with smaller offices or with setting up the coworking spaces themselves and renting the spaces left without occupants.
100% this. Remote first company and there are two offices. We get more done with in-person casual conversations than formal meetings. Our velocity from the office is significantly higher. I wish some of the other teams shared offices a few days per week.
The commute is not bad when they are localized due to the team members having worked together in the past.
And yet WeWork is probably going to end up out of business. Maybe if I didn't have any real estate footprint yet, I'd consider an all coworking spaces footprint. The more general problem is that, even if I were fine with driving into a local office, I probably wouldn't know anyone much less work with anyone there on a given day.
I like the exurbs. And my closest office--which I haven't spent a day in for at least the past 5 years--is basically in an exurb as well. (I go into our urban office more frequently for customer visits.)
My wife works for a big university and when the first "return to the office" pitch was happening, the head of HR for the whole org was on a Zoom and basically said, "If you are not back at work, you should be already. I love coming into campus and mingling with the students..." etc, etc. RIGHT at the moment, you could hear FedEX ringing his doorbell at his home. Insane.
The guys who get to choose the office locations happen to choose ones that are good for the locations of their home(s).
Also, a reminder that C-suite guys that have multiple homes do in fact actually use those multiple homes.
This is a really good take. I have some experience with it though I'm not a C-Suite person. Over my 15 years of software engineering I've always had a job that had flexibility to let me work the way I wanted. Some offices and some buildings were worse than others but in general I was always able to set my hours, work from home or from a random place (i.e. coffee shop, park, mall, whatever) as I saw fit.
There were always times I needed to be present in person and I never scoffed at those. What I found recently, is employers are trying to shift from one extreme (fully remote) to the other. I hope we land back in the middle because I'm happiest when no one tells me what to do. I want to be treated like an adult and measured on merit and performance, not physical attendance.
That's because it's the worst of both worlds. If you have to go into a particular office you are still geographically chained. Hybrid only makes sense if you can go to an office that is near you; e.g., a coworking space.
100% this. In most places I worked the C-levels were not in the office most of the time, when there were multiple offices they would mostly visit the ones closer to their homes and for the usual "weekly/monthly conversations with c-levels" they'd be at their homes or second homes zooming in.
One remote work hater I really like to listen to is Scott Galloway, that keeps on harping that remote work is horrible but doesn't even live in the same country where he's running his business anymore. Flexibility for me but not for thee.
My 2 cents, companies are effectively asking to increase working hours by 5-10 hours per week for most workers assuming a 30-60 minute commute each way. Many employers will try lure workers away from the office with remote work. These firms may offset any hypothetical productivity costs with lower wages. Some engineers will prioritize remote for the larger employer pool, and others will prioritize in-person for greater social connection.
We'll see what happens in 20 years. But my money is on a resurgence of the rural village and a lot of empty office towers.
> I was listening to a podcast and they observed that US commuters might have had a boiled frog scenario where you slowly just get used to having a worse & worse commute as you age.. and COVID snapped everyone out of it cold turkey. Now attempting to go back to it is revolting for many.
This is a key part of the discussion.
Pre-covid, I spent ~90 minutes one way to get to the office (this included a transfer from train to subway + 10 minute walk) and used to do it every day. At the time, I thought nothing of it since it was time to read/write code/watch a movie etc.
Now, I find it hard to imagine I spent ~3 hours/day commuting but part of me also misses the time to myself but it's balanced out by seeing the kids more etc.
yep, i don't care if they give me an entire palace. unless it's attached to my home, i am not going there. if my job requires me to be at the office, i will say "no" and then get another job.
In English, they're using that sentence as a figure of speech meaning that they just want to host their own office, inside of or attached to their house.
Before covid - we built a shed/bar/office/playroom that I thought I'd get to work in 1 day a week, which is what felt acceptable for whf at the time.
During covid having a place I can shut the door on at the end of the day, was amazing. I watched friends work from kitchen tables, while I had my own office in the garden.
For a while it did 'spoil' it as a playroom/fun room - but I pretty quickly learnt to make it work for me.
Having an office attached to your house is amazing (and is the largest drag for me returning to the office).
I had a private office at a large tech firm for many years. It was perfect for me, I would probably go back to the office for that setup. I’ll never go work in an open floor plan.
See if I lived five minutes walk from work, I’d want to be in the office even less. Why sit there between meetings if I am five minutes from my home? Why bag a lunch when my kitchen is down the block? I’d probably show face at the obligate meetings then just go home for the day if I could.
I used to live 5mins from work. The office catered lunch every day, but I still went home every day to eat lunch with my wife instead. Hated being at that place
Things like this make me thing the idea of basing society on monogamous marriage is unrealistic and doomed to failure. It only worked in the past when work prevented couples from spending much time together, and social pressures prevented them from separating.
What you're describing seems to be healthy vs unhealthy relationships (marriages). If two people are forced to be around each other and don't like each other you're going to speed up the decline. It wasn't WFH that did it, it was the fate of their relationship the entire time.
I tell recruiters I want remote because there's nothing better than seeing my wife or playing with my cat when I need to take a break. Every single recruiter understands completely. Some will push remote, others respectfully end the conversation because they know they cant beat that.
What's funny is my boss, a total hardo, during latter stages of COVID did live 5 minutes from work.
He used it to his advantage to show his face in the office, but rarely ever put in a full day. So sure he might show up on reports as being a 2-3x/week attender while others were doing 0-1, but many of those were morning-only, afternoon-only, or drop-ins for an in-person meeting of importance. Plus the occasional Friday solitude getaway to the empty office.
To his credit he really put no RTO pressure on us relative to his management chain.
I did what your boss did. WFH means that other people at your home might be there too, your wfh spot might be uncomfortable, and for me changing the scenery and getting some peace and quiet helped me productive. If I have a delicate call I don’t want my kids barging in telling me the Wifi is slow or my wife asking for dinner plans. Also, changing scenario helps me leaving problems at the door.
I really don’t get when people defend WFH as a Holy Grail and complain that are catalogued as lazy or freeloaders, only to become fierce critics and cataloging anyone who prefers going to the office as boot-lickers or mediocre middle-management (not your post SteveBK123, but a common attitude across this type of thread)
Everyone has different circumstances, different jobs, and our minds work differently. Let’s live and let live.
I'd do it because I think it's better to have separate work / life areas; right now my WFH spot is also my PC gaming spot and the bedroom and the place where laundry dries, and I wouldn't mind more distance between work, leisure and private life.
That said, five minutes means one could come home for lunch.
But anyway, five minute walk to work is highly unlikely; a lot of people (most? citation needed?) have a commute to work, either driving or public transit. I'd rather have a nice private office or small team room than a big open and loud office space.
>I'd do it because I think it's better to have separate work / life areas; right now my WFH spot is also my PC gaming spot and the bedroom and the place where laundry dries, and I wouldn't mind more distance between work, leisure and private life.
Long time ago I used to rent a room in a shared house 5 min walk from work. My housemates were all cool people, but working on a laptop sitting next to the bed I slept in every night would e far worse for me than just going to the office. But this was decades ago. I can understand why someone in such position would prefer an office.
But if you can have a house, and you're mid/senior in your role there is nothing better than wfh.
Also I've recently noticed a disturbing trend. Companies advertising 100% remote work, then you go through the whole recruitment process and at the very end they tell you. BTW, it's not 100% wfh. You gotta come to the office 1 day per month (sometimes even 1 per week). Anyone looking for real wfh job should be aware of such tricks to nip them in the bud early on.
There was a study about that and there was a direct correlational between the size of you home and your desire to return to the office, people with small apartments enjoyed the office much more than those with larger houses. I'd also guess that the people with larger homes live father away from work than people with smaller homes so a longer commute comes into play.
That makes total sense. My house is about 1900 sq ft over two levels. During lockdown, my wife converted our guest bedroom into her office. My HS aged son did online school in his bedroom and I basically had the entire downstairs. Our cats moved around throughout the day depending on their mood.
This would have been much more uncomfortable in a smaller 2BR apartment and almost unmanageable in any space smaller than that.
I've been WFH of over 20 years and my wife has been WFH for 10, we live in the city so our living space is smaller than most ~1100sqft and we've worked within 10 feet of each other for a decade. I do have a small office but I only go into it when I have an important customer call and I want to put everything on a bigger monitor than my laptop and I expect to do a lot of talking. Aside from that she's usually on one end of the couch and I'm on the other, with the two fat cats sleeping in between.
I had to get a second desk in my place for WFH. It was way too jarring to log off and keep sitting in the same spot. Contextual learning made me feel awkward to browse Reddit “at work”.
Given my space, my WFH desk is much crappier and smaller than my personal one, but still so much better than losing my life commuting.
I would work almost exclusively from the office in this scenario and even keep my work belongings there (if possible).
It's much easier for some to have a complete separation of work and home spaces. Also a change of scenery in the morning and getting to move a bit before starting to work is nice.
If you work 5 mins from your home you can just walk there for lunch. No need to bag a lunch, no?
I lived 5 minutes away from work for a few years, I could see my office window from my apartment window. Going into the office wasn't a big deal, it was just a 5 minute walk. I really didn't care about going home for lunch because we had a cafeteria and I'd eat lunch or go get snack with my friends and there were probably 20 restaurants within a 10 minute walk so I had better options than a PB&J. It was much more of a social thing than a work thing, why sit in my apartment by myself when I have a half dozen people I enjoy hanging out with 5 minutes away. The only disadvantage was that due to my proximity I was always the go to person in case someone had to physically go to the office, the guy who lived 80 miles away was never asked to pop in on a Saturday to reboot something but I was asked all the time.
When I lived close to my office, I found the office became an extension of my home. I don't mean that I took my work home with me, or worked longer hours. I mean that I found myself crossing the street and going into my office on weekends, to work on personal projects, or sometimes just to watch movies or play video games on my laptop. The office started to function like a second living room. It was weird and did not last long, but it was sort of nice. Occasionally someone would be there, working on the weekend, and they all thought I was a really dedicated employee because I was always there too.
Personally, the commute is secondary. I hate being at the office. The office could be right next door to me and I still wouldn't want to go. Offices are cold, sterile, mentally unstimulating environments of constant surveillance. I never want to go into another one ever again
Surveillance is my main objection too, although my commute from suburbs to city center takes 3 hours per day if I have to do that.
But at home I have side projects or learning projects. I get the 3 hours back and can spread them throughout the day. One hour in the morning, another one when I'm bored or tired of the job etc. If I go to the office it's nothing but a rather unappealing job domain and nothing else. Too tired in the evening to learn anything anymore, too stressed and still sleepy in the morning as well.
So fuck the office, they'd have to pay me 50% more to compensate for the time lost in transit and I would still not take it.
It doesn't end with WFH especially if your work computer is a Windows box. Not sure how much MS telemetry collects, but it tends to be on in org managed windows computers
Joke's on them, my work laptop hasn't checked in with the company DC in months. They don't know what I'm doing (besides tickets and commits)! Though this means all sorts of shit trying to use my AD account is broken. Hooray Windows!
That’s the benefit of having your own office — you can make it comfortable.
In mine I have music playing, I have a guitar for when I need to stop thinking about a problem, I have a bookshelf of books I love, I have a plant I care for, I have my own whiteboard, I have artwork, I have a balance board, and (fortunately) I have an amazing view. When I need a break, I can close my door to read, watch something, call a friend, or take a nap.
Now I don’t find myself watching videos, napping, or playing guitar all that often, but I don’t when I’m working from home either.
>> That’s the benefit of having your own office — you can make it comfortable.
>> In mine I have music playing, I have a guitar for when I need to stop thinking about a problem
I had a chessboard in my office at one time. It was basically a decoration, I think it was a secret santa gift or something, and it was never used until another guy and I started playing once every other week or so, at lunch.
One day, over lunch, we were playing a game (and eating at the same table), and something $PRODUCTION crashed. Someone came into ask about the problem, we stopped what we were doing, and fixed it.
Sometime after that, something else crashed, and then it became, "All they are doing in there is playing chess, no wonder x isn't working!".
The "cold" aspect is one I really do not miss. During the summer (in Austin where it gets to 100F regularly), I had to wear a sweatshirt and long pants, and I was still cold.
I'm massively in favor of WFH—but I think this is a bit of an absolutist take.
I can see plenty of people who are enjoying WFH, but would be willing to return to the office if they no longer had to work in a cube farm, but could have their own private office, that they could decorate to their taste, and where they could play their own music. And, perhaps most importantly, have a door that they could keep closed so that if anyone wants to interrupt them, they actually have to knock first.
As someone who has done a 30-minute commute to a cube farm, a 45-minute and a 5-minute commute to a private office, and WFH, there's basically no reasonable amount of money you could pay me to go back to a cube farm, but if I didn't have specific personal reasons for wanting to remain fully remote, I would be very willing to consider another job in a private office.
A cube farm is massively preferable to open offices. I never want to go back to working in an office but I especially never want to go back to an open office. The mixture of seeming too available, loud people all over the place, zero privacy, etc were revolting to me.
I was responding to the comparison being offered. The reality is there are few companies that offer individual offices and a lot of real estate that exists for open offices. It's not a false dichotomy because by-and-large it is the dichotomy. The cube farms from 1990 were just converted to open offices by removing the barriers. To be honest, in my career in tech, I've never even seen a closed-office setup.
>And, perhaps most importantly, have a door that they could keep closed so that if anyone wants to interrupt them, they actually have to knock first.
In my experience with offices at a couple of different companies (of much different sizes), the social convention was door open unless you were on a private call/meeting or really needed to go heads down on something. It would actually have been considered rude to knock on the door because they door would obviously not have been closed unless there was a good reason.
A lot of people seem to imagine that offices mean you shut the door and don't interact with anyone and that's never been my experience.
My office was in an academic building, right on a hallway. Keeping the door open would have meant letting all the bustle and noise of students changing classes in to interrupt me frequently, not to mention significantly increasing the number of confused students who would try to walk in thinking my office was a classroom.
Frankly, I consider the expectation of constant availability to be another abusive part of work culture, very closely related to the "everyone must return to the office so I can see for myself that they are in their seats (which means they must be working)" mindset. Let people keep their doors closed to promote focus.
I don't know, I worked in the 90s when I had a private office and it was very nice compared to the shitholes being offered now. To be sure salaries were like 25% of what they are now, but the thing I like about WFH, the ability to close the door and pace around and think, and also to start to research some topics and get a pile of articles and books, and then forget about them, and then come back in a few days with my former mental state roughly reflected in the physical arrangement of the documents, making it easier to weave things together in kicking ideas around/brainstormy kind of way, was very much present in the private office. It's not like people didn't wander around and chat and overhear what things were going on, but we had the ability to focus as needed. I think a nice office would be a good inducement.
I miss the commute that was my ~20m morning bike ride (now I have to motivate myself). I don’t really miss the commute that was 20m on transit but it was ok. I really don’t miss the commute that was 45-60m+ in traffic (even the times I was on a work shuttle).
I could do an office again though if it weren’t too far from home. Working from home can be strangely lonely, maybe I should just be better about organizing co-working with friends virtually or in person.
Many people with families, or even just DINKS, would opt for private offices. Unless you've got a giant home with private space, working at the same time and while your home life goes on around you is pretty bad.
I was in an airport a few weeks ago and saw a new array of soundproof "phone" booths fitted with laptop stands and high-output lighting, and it occurred to me that I should have started a business building and selling those over the past 3 years.
Anyway, I'm thinking more about city dwellers who generally live in apartments.
I'm with you. But a lot of people still want to live in the city and not go to the office. So, I'm suggesting that, for that cohort, dedicated private offices might be compelling. It means that you probably have a short commute; you can reclaim space in your home that might have been used for work; still live in city and have access to the social offerings there; and that you retain your privacy, and potentially have even more if the case that you're co-habitating.
Higher end 'luxury' apartment buildings are frequently offering FCFS hoteling spaces and also rentable-as-you-need locking private spaces in the building as well as the modern phone booths in various parts of the buildings. If you have the income and that fits your desires you can have the city life and WFthe building you live in.
Apparently bath towels can perform even better than bespoke acoustic paneling. I haven't tried it, but there are tons of tutorials. Here someone testing it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eKwb58vvFI
I had to wade through a lot of conflicting advice when I did it.
I suspect a big factor is that most people do only a handful of implementations, and might overgeneralize the lessons they draw.
Also, for a given structure and environment, most people can only afford to try 1-2 soundproofing approaches (wall structure, ventilation, etc.) So it's hard to know if they picked a good point in the tradeoffs space.
I've only got a small home. We finally turned the smallest bedroom into an office for me and the wife. It's great, and much more comfortable than commuting to an open plan noisy office. I have more desk space and nicer equipment at home.
Yes, we do use it at the same time. We also have times when we need privacy and one of us has to work elsewhere. Mostly it's just me in the office though as my wife doesn't need it as often.
For me, the commute is a short bike or train ride. It’s actually enjoyable but I still don’t want to go into the office for exactly the reason given: cubicles suck. The distraction, poor lighting, noise, etc. are a poor fit for any sort of work which isn’t constantly talking to everyone in the same room.
I think the sweet spot is at most 2-3 people in a space. That could work well collaboratively if they do the same thing but not if there are going to be lots of conflicting meetings.
There is a lot of truth to what you are saying, but I don't entirely agree.
I think I would be more amenable to working at an office if the experience felt like more than being in a high school computer lab. "Just wear headphones", imo, is not an adequate response to complaints of the office being noisy. Want me to stay in the office longer? Uninstall that piece of shit kombucha tap or sparkling water dispenser (neither of which are even operational most of the time) and replace it with another fridge so I don't have to cram my food into the one fridge shared by the entire building. Make an adequate number of power outlets available. Don't provide free snacks and then eliminate them to cut costs. If I have a designated spot, do your best not to move me around every few months.
Yet every office I have worked in embodies various failures that diminish the experience, making it hard to deny that working at home can be a lot better for many people. How am I supposed to feel dignity in my line of work as a senior engineer when I don't even get my own cubicle; meanwhile, people I know who make a third of my salary get their own cubes! And these companies are wondering why their employees would rather build their own private office at home? Are you kidding me?
I don't even need a corner office with a door that closes and a personal secretary. Just give me something more than what I would get working out of a Starbucks, and allow me to feel like the professional I am, as opposed to a replaceable cog, which is everything the modern tech workplaces symbolizes.
> People who like WFH will never want to return to the office unless perhaps the office is a 5 minute walk from home
At my current job, there's something ironic about that. The people who never come back to the office despite being allowed to are also the people who live the closest to the office. (We have a big office that allows people to come back but is totally optional. Hotel desks for the entire office basically.) I asked one of them why he doesn't come in and he told me, "The reason I moved so close to the office in the first place is so I can minimize my commute. Now that I don't have to, why would I do the commute at all?"
I think some people are just completely dead set against commuting or even working from an office. Another coworker told me, "Do you know how great this is? I can do my laundry in between meetings."
From my experience, my employer's current situation is probably the most accommodating policy. If you want to work in an office, you can. If you don't, you don't have to. I do have coworkers who are actually suffering a bit from lack of interaction with other people but I think those people are starting to trickle back into the office for no other reason than for the socialization and interaction.
A lot of people at my workplace use the office as a second "base" where they can settle for the day and is close to a lot of things.
Since I live close to it, I never even though about doing this. And of course, the people that live the furthest away get the most value out of it. So, yeah, it's probably a very strong correlation, and not only for negative reasons.
If I could walk to an office I'd probably do it now and then. But at a 30 minute drive (to an office where I wouldn't know anyone at this point) I'm not going to bother.
Similar story for my office. It's very close, but the facilities people made it terrible to work from. Why go in when I would get half as much work done?
Sorry, I think I used the wrong term. The desks we have are basically not assigned anyone permanently and are available as long as someone else hasn't reserved it for the day. I don't mean literal desks that they have at hotels. The office is rather nice TBH.
I'm not the person you're replying to, but Hotel Desks like this are a worse experience than having assigned desks. You have to adjust your chair and ergonomics every time you go into the office? What a pain in the ass.
It's not the commute that stops me- it's the "being on". At home I don't have to dress a certain way, sit a certain way, eat a certain way, etc
At home I'm either working or not working. I don't have to wear my public face. Wearing a public face is, if not tiring, at least irritating, like a mild itch you're not allowed to scratch, even though you could, but you shouldn't.
Didn't mind working in the office, it was nice enough, coworkers are all friendly.
But having to live anywhere near my office in a high COL area means I was priced out of affording even a 500 square foot apartment. Going remote meant that same salary bought me a newly built detached 6 bedroom house.
I didn't mind the office, I minded being a poor renter instead of upper middle class. Office inconveniences pale in comparison.
Yea, i loathe the commute but i also can't afford to live 5min from an office even if i wanted to.. which i most definitely don't. I want to own some small acreage (2-10 acres depending), a big enough house for a guest room and two offices, etc.
Yup. If I had a 10 minute or less commute and decent coffee at the office, I'd have no major objections. But I have a 45 minutes with zero traffic (1.5hr+ with traffic) commute and Seattle's Best essence of ashtray coffee.
> unless perhaps the office is a 5 minute walk from home
WFH for 2012-2023 here.
With our first home purchase in 2018 being on the smaller size, and the introduction of our first child to the family in 2021, I started keeping an eye on nearby options.
In March of 2023, a perfect little spot opened up that could support me and another employee in the same town. Pitched it to our small company, and now I have a dedicated office that is a 4 minute walk away.
Cannot stress enough how impactful those few minutes are (or more, if I need to decompress more than normal) are for separation of concern between home life and work, especially with young children in the picture.
Still get to enjoy lunch with stay-at-home wife and kiddo almost everyday.
It also shares property with a great pizzeria and one of the best taproom/bottleshops in town, which is a great perk beyond my waistline and liver... looking forward to taking the new bike to the nearby bike trail when it isn't 110° everyday.
It is a rather unique build done by a lawyer-turned-metalworks artist a little more than a decade ago. Multiple units with adjoining walls, each with a private patio, minisplits, and a rather raw aesthetic. Very high ceilings, plenty of outlets of various voltages/amperages available. Our neighbor makes bespoke cycling bags and such. Other tenants range from retail and services to private offices.
> and how did you pitch it?
The founder of the company lived here for many years, and paid for coworking access pre-COVID when it was still a startup (now general cloud/software consultancy for public health agencies and the like).
WFH and the vacation of many of our decent coworking spaces due to COVID took a toll on him, and moved to PHL about a year ago for a change of scenery / be closer to some of our larger clients.
With that context, it was pretty easy to pitch it as a physical "hub" for him when he visits family/friends, myself, and our other employee who lives in the same town. We still have a good physical location for our corporate entity, and the cost difference between 3x coworking offices at post-COVID rates was not too much for him to stomach.
> The other employee lived in the same town already?
Yes! We had become good acquaintances for a few years before COVID as he worked remotely for an organization in Ireland from the same coworking space.
When COVID hit, his team were among the first to be cut, and as his skills meant I would no longer be overextended between cloud and frontend, it was one of the easiest hires we've made to date.
Nice, and I agree with you. In my line of work would not be so easy, as large corpos have a bunch of job safety and info sec standards, beyond internet connection.
Clean desk policy, no take-home printouts, clear whiteboards with confidencial information, etc…
I had a WFH employee who once burn himself at home while making coffee with his own coffee pot, and sue the company as he claimed was a job-related accident. We had to settle and pay him, or have Unions making a big fuzz.
There are all sort of people in the workplace, and policies try to accommodate not only CEO whims, but also to manage a crowd full of many different types of people.
> In my line of work would not be so easy, as large corpos have a bunch of job safety and info sec standards, beyond internet connection.
Having worked DoD in the past, I can completely echo that it would be quite a challenge to explore something like this for many organizations.
> I had a WFH employee who once burn himself at home while making coffee with his own coffee pot, and sue the company as he claimed was a job-related accident. We had to settle and pay him, or have Unions making a big fuzz.
"This is why we can't have nice things," personified.
> Cannot stress enough how impactful those few minutes are (or more, if I need to decompress more than normal) are for separation of concern between home life and work, especially with young children in the picture.
been remote since 2015. absolutely agree with this, even though I'm still remote. the only way I'd go back to the office is if it's close to that experience -- a 5-10 min walk away.
living close to a coffee shops, gyms, and other amenities meant that I did a "morning commute" to get coffee most mornings -- more expensive than petrol, but still cheaper overall compared to driving. multiple choices, so could hit the local as well as chain shops.
a gym and grocery store being nearby also meant that I could so an "evening commute" and workout, snag groceries, run errands, etc.
having young kids makes it great too... most of the time. it's nice to be able to walk upstairs and play with the wee one.
Yeah, no way I can afford to move closer to work when condos/houses nearby are 1.5 million. I will continue to work from home or they can find someone else. I don't mind the office, I do mind the 2 hours lost from my day, 5 days a week.
Respectfully, this is an example of rigid thinking that isn't productive or accurate.
Apply marginal thinking the way economists do. People's propensity to return to the office falls on a spectrum ranging from 0 ( the people who are already back in their cubicles ) to 9 ( "You'll need a SWAT team to get me back to the office" ).
A 5 on that scale is a marginal worker. Provide an incentive for them to return, like a nice office, and they become a 4 and return to the office. Now give a nice office to a population of 1000 workers who are distributed evenly over the above spectrum. They all move down by 1, and about 1/10th of them return to the office.
Saying "People who like WFH will never want to return to the office" is only true of the 8's and 9's, not of the marginal worker. They are the ones who respond to incentives.
Depends on the distribution though, doesn't it. My personal hunch is that it's strongly bimodal, and that there actually aren't that many in the middle.
I agree with that point but disagree about the distribution. I myself am a 5, I go in about half the time. Obviously we can only speculate about others
It's much more "offer me work SO rewarding, the commute is worth it" or "money SO good, it makes the commute worth it." Office amenities probably won't get if done, as many folks can just setup the home office the way they want it, or at least as well as most private offices.
For me it's the colleagues. Rubbing elbows with people much smarter and further in their careers than I am is worth making the ~20 min commute. But any incentive provides the same effect.
I'm not required to return to the office. Despite having a whole floor rented for us, I rarely go in. It's only 20 min via public transport so time is not a big deal for me. That minimal movement would be even healthy. My main issue is the dining in the area. Mostly office blocks and all options are rather poor in quality. Ordering is also something I don't want because I'm too cheap to pay the premium price.
So yeah, it's almost 6PM, I'm at home and starving still because I was lazy to cook.
I think the reason is my team is fully remote for me. Not having to worry about food would be nice :)
For me a nicer office would change my mind and I have worked in that office before. Allow me to reminisce:
Was working in DC on Capitol Hill. Had a 30 minute bike ride to work right down the center of the national mall. Had a private office half the size of my apartment with a really comfy couch and a few well worn armchairs. Coworkers brought their dogs and one liked to sit on my feet under the desk. Office was chock full of interesting people, activists, authors, photographers, lawmakers wealthy folks, connected folks. After a few hours working on the databases and maybe getting roped into some tech support in the Capitol building, the CEO would grab a beer from the keg which was the signal for the rest of us that the afternoon had become wet. Then I would meet up with friends for some kickball on the Mall, then swing back through the office after a few hours at the bar for a nightcap. Very occasionally I slept over on the couch but there was a shower in the office and I kept a few changes of clothes there so it was all good.
My data point: I live 10 minutes walk from my office, the campus has a cafeteria, and I have my own office. Still I don't want to be forced to come into office, simply because I feel more comfortable and relaxed at home. It is a quiet place, I don't want to random interruptions from colleagues, and I can take a nap on my comfortable bed if needed, none of which can be offered in the office. Having prepared food is nice but not as important.
> simply because I feel more comfortable and relaxed at home
this core preference in environment and vibe is the main difference between the 2 camps. I was desperate to be in an office where there was a buzz of high energy and a go, go, go environment like skydivers jumping out of a plane. Would still prefer a private office though so get deep focus when necessary.
Not sure if its nature or nurture, since I grew up doing team sports year round.
Some people like both and are happy with some balance. It’s nice not to have to commute, but it’s also nice to see colleagues and have a place to work outside home.
I'd much rather just find another job entirely than come back to an office, and I imagine a lot of people feel the same. I think part of the problem is that a lot of companies don't really appreciate what people would be giving up, or that they see much less value in it than the people they're trying to convince.
You'd need to offer something pretty special just to compensate for the cost of the commute, let alone the time lost (which for a lot of people is significant).
My office is half an hour by foot from my house and yet I prefer to work from home exactly for this reason. Maybe in America where the commute can become ridiculous quickly it's a problem but here I just take an e-scooter if I don't want to walk.
A better office would certainly make me come to the office more. But to be fair, even the CEO doesn't have his own office currently so I don't expect any of us to get one soon.
I suspect many people on HN have never had a proper office with a door.
While I do agree with your overall premise, having had offices at multiple roles over my career, it is a major improvement over cubicles and open office.
Having a space to work in complete, uninterrupted quiet is wonderful. The simple social signal of the door being opened or close implying availability to chat works great to balancing heads down time and chat with colleagues time. Have a white board of your own that you can stare at throughout the course of a project, that evolves with discussions has not be replicated yet either remote or in a shared space.
You can also get pretty wild with customizing an office for comfort. I used to know many people that brought their own lighting in, completely solving the problem of constant overhead fluorescence. And brewing your coffee the way you like it in your own space in the afternoon is very refreshing.
Even given all that I'm sure many people would still prefer remote work (I would at this point), but I can image a fairly large number of people that would be very interested in a set up like this. It also mean your home is completely work free again.
Exactly! I used to work at a place where we had a proper office for each team, about 2-4 people in each room per day because WFH was a (real) option.
I actually enjoyed going to that office because it was very quiet and I didn't have a proper workspace at home. My commute was ~30mins with a motorcycle. Yes, sometimes the A/C or the lighting must be compromised with other coworkers, but that's still okay if you get to socialize in exchange.
The major aspect was obviously noise. But I also felt dignified in that office. It was not status like C-Suite offices, just feeling a nice environment instead of being crammed in a chicken coop.
> I suspect many people on HN have never had a proper office with a door.
In my time at Apple I had a real office with a real door for about half of my time. Of that only about half was an office I didn't have to share with someone else. The lone offices were the most productive I ever was while working there. I could close the door and go unbothered for hours. I turned off the lights and had my own lamp that was much more comfortable.
Sharing an office with coworkers wasn't bad on its face but it's difficult to focus if the other person is talking with someone else. It's all manageable but objectively worse than a single office. The open floor plan at Apple Park was just fucking horrible. Constant distractions all day. Sure you could collaborate but when trying to actually get work done it was in spite of a hundred visual and audible distractions. I'm sure I distracted others inadvertently as well.
A giant spaceship of a campus and they couldn't manage to give everyone a private space. Just the stupidest design for a building.
I'm all for work from home, and have doing it for over 10 years, but we shouldn't ignore the cost of donating an entire room of your house to your employer (two in my case since my wife also wfh). Certainly this should factor into your total comp calculation as -(rent amount in your area). Likely it is more than you would spend on the commute. Employers are well aware they are colonizing your private space for free. You are also cleaning /stocking/ maintaining this area for them for free. They are laughing all the way to the bank.
That used to be federally tax deductible, but now it probably depends on your state since the tax deduction rules seemed to have changed during the lockdowns.
If you went into the office, you'd still be paying for your empty rooms.
While spending more time at home may lead to a marginal increase in expenses for utilities, compared to the cost of commuting they would be a rounding error.
The thing that kills it for me is that where I work, before COVID it was a massive faux pas to schedule a meeting before 10:00 AM, but now I typically have multiple invites side-by-side at 9:00. In the past I could get to my office, grab some coffee, catch up on email, etc. before the grind started, but everything's been pushed back an hour and it's not coming back. So if I was getting up at 6:00 to fit in my morning routine, now I have to get up at 5:00.
The other issue is that we're a lot more globally distributed now. The 9:00 I chose to go to today had nine other people in it. Three in India, one in the UK, one in BC, two in the midwest somewhere, and two permanent WFH. Meeting with these people is always going to mean putting on a headset and looking at a screen, no matter how diligent I am at getting in to the office every morning.
A private office is very much something that causes me to toggle between wanting to WFH and go into the office.
I hate open floorplans for working (fine if I'm walking around to get coffee or something). The biggest draw of WFH is that I don't have to put on headphones just to get some quiet time.
I've been WFH for 20 years. My family's life has been built around it including choice of schools, my wife's job, activities, etc. We own one car.
If I were to take a job downtown, my wife would have to get a different job, we'd have to pay for some level of child care, arrange transportation for school, drop various activities, buy a second car so I could drive to the train station (which comes with maintenance, insurance, registration, etc).
The amount of money that would make any of this worth it is not small. You'd have to cover the additional expenses and then write a big check on top to compensate for disrupting our way of life.
I could see the coworking space take off a bit more, cause I have a colleague not far and we could walk/bike to a tiny cozy space to work on stuff out of sake of not staying at the same desk 24/7.
If work gave me an office I would come in every day vs. the mandated twice a week we have.
I worked for a company that gave everyone an office. Just long hallways of offices with floor to ceiling windows and a door. It was a startup that grew to 200 people and was the best job I've had, a large part due to the atmosphere, and part of that was the office setup.
When my current workplace shutdown the office for covid, they sent out an email asking for suggestions for a new office setup. I told them to make everyone offices. We have a huge open floor and it wouldn't take much effort, just money. Money they are planning to spend anyway. Instead they raised the height of cubicle walls, added a ton of glass (disease spread fear I guess), and gave everyone whiteboards and motorized standup desks.
Now on my required days in the office I am annoyed by the constant chatter and noises around me which I cannot escape even with headphones.
I would be far more tempted to an office (and to reclaim a room for use as another guest bedroom in my house) if I had a private office. Open plan or shared offices are an absolute no, though.
More to the point, The Office is in one place, whereas my workplace can by anywhere.
So no matter how nice a place it is, and how close to my house you put it, it's never going to be right on that good right point break in Oaxaca where I like to spend my winters and also at the AirBnB next to Green Lake where I can visit my friends and family in the summer.
It's also not in any of the other places I choose to set up shop at for a few months at a time to do my thing.
So it doesn't matter that it has free food, a masseuse, and is in a really cool neighborhood where I'd actually like to spend some time. I still don't want to commit to living there 50 weeks a year.
I think this is exactly it. I liked working from home when I had a separate room for it and it saved me about an hour every day, but I've since moved to an apartment that's smaller, but also much closer to work, and I prefer the going to the office now. Having your own office does help though (I'm sharing with one other person who's only there once a week).
I can't go back. I have family to care for who need me at home and will suffer if I'm away. And that's even before I reclaim all the time during the day when there was no work I could be doing.
I'm more productive, I find new ways to make myself valuable in some of that free time whereas in the office I'd just be bored out of my skull instead because I had to keep my butt in a seat to make someone happy.
Fortunately my management is looking into downsizing leases and recouping savings instead of forcing people into the office. They've waffled a little about pulling people back in but they just aren't that serious about it in general.
> A nicer office makes things better but it will not change people's minds on WFH.
I suggest you consider behavior on the margin. Despite the fact that there are lots of people vocal about how much they love/hate RTO, there are also people that are indifferent or slightly prefer one or the other. Improvements in office quality will meaningfully persuade some number of people on the margin.
It’s an open question how steep the curve is (ie how much office improvement required to persuade 1% of people to change their mind) but I think it’s myopic to just look at the partisans.
All that said, sure, there is a nontrivial percentage who you couldn’t change their minds with something like a dedicated office. But I think your claim is too strong that it’s binary and all WFH likers will not be persuaded by this proposal.
It’s not just that. With a WFH policy I can work for companies in Munich living in a town in northern Germany. That’s the big deal of remote work for me. Being limited to the companies that are located in the same city you live is a huge downside.
Friendly reminder that if you work an 8 hour day and you have a 24 minute one-way commute (average US commute is 27.6), WFH is equivalent to a 10% raise just from the elimination of commute time. Realistically, with the various conveniences and avoided expenses, it's likely closer to a 20% raise for most people.
That employers aren't jumping for joy that they can offer such a massive benefit for essentially free (if not save money themselves) is astounding.
very relevant thread. I stepped in my work office building for the very first time in years (switched jobs mid-pandemic). I spent 2 hours 16 mins in my car burning fossil fuel that I paid out of pocket, extra 40 mins prepping and unwinding, consumed more sugar and caffeine than I usually would working from home, re-scheduled a meeting because of the commute and feel more tired.
Its not good for the environment, bad for my company and terrible for me.
It's clear, forcing a commute is an implicit paycut.
> A nicer office makes things better but it will not change people's minds on WFH.
Disagree with caveats. A nice private office makes a world of difference. I'll do a lot (in time and/or money) to have a nice private office where I can actually work (which requires silence).
Working remotely is awesome but not literally from home. With a family, that's too distracting. Since the pandemic, I rent a small private office walking distance from home. It's a great arrangement, I'm very close to the house, can walk or bike there, private window office. But the downside is that it costs money (lease, utilities, internet). And for meetings I'm still stuck in a little zoom box.
If the company offered a nice private office, I'd take that. I'd save the costs and I could have a silent private space to work but still be able to step outside and have meetings in person. The tradeoff is a longer commute but as long as it's not too horrible, I'd take it.
My office is a 20 (tarmac) - 25 (forest) minutes bike ride. I don't have any problem working from home but if the weather isn't too bad I go to the office regulary - even if I sit there in the same remote meetings all day as I do at home.
For me the change of the scenery and the "off" time by doing the commute are worth it.
Going to move out of range of an office for this company in a year. Thinking about joining a coworking space then for it.
Most of people do not want to work if they can get paid too.
And there is no need for employers if RTO makes the overall productivity worse. RTO is really a decision made by the market not from a particular employer or employee.
I like WFH for a lot of reasons, but the "I'm more productive" part of my claim is entirely related to the torture chamber that is the open floor plan office. If I had a private office, I'd no longer be able to honestly claim that I simply cannot be as effective in the office as at home.
I'm not moving to the real-estate market near an office. Poor working conditions are certainly one reason to avoid the office, but being able to live where ever you want is also a huge deal.
Honestly, I'd even take a cube farm. I've only ever worked at tech companies with fully open offices, or, at best, some cubicle walls up around groups of 10-15 desks.
When I worked for eBay they had a hexagonal version of a cube farm.
I thought it was brilliant. Pack more people into a space, and make your distance to your nearest neighbor farther. Plus you naturally had a comfortable place to sit, 2 filing cabinets, and 2 spots for bookshelf, whiteboard, or whatever. And a lot more desk space than you'd expect.
I was always puzzled that nobody else ever tried that design.
Before cubes were a thing, open office layouts were the norm. When cubes were introduced, office workers hailed than as wonderful things because it meant no more of the hell that is open office layouts.
Open offices < cubes < private offices
Personally, I will never again work in an open office setting, or even a "pod" setup. I've learned my lesson.
I always performed better in 2-4 person offices. Not alone, but not open space either. The constant noise and people walking by all the time is terrible for concentration.
+1 my best office was a 15 minute walk through a upscale shopping area, into a cramped room alongside my teammates and boss with a great view of a large pond.
All of our desks were pushed together in the middle of the room. The _room_ itself would switch from chat mode to quiet mode.
Though I think the quietest member of the team would have preferred a solitary arraignment, I can only speak for myself.
Yeah, this seems like a fun idea. You get to make a couple of buddies and you can bounce ideas easily without being overwhelmed or treated like cattle. Team rooms.
My #1 reason for working remotely today has nothing to do with office layouts or benefits, it's that housing costs in large-city tech hubs are insane. Chances are I'd pay at least twice my mortgage in rent for a crappy apartment if I moved back now.
I wonder how much of this comes from 'war rooms' that companies like the Big 3 do. They work on a project for 5 months all smashed together in 1 meeting room.
And then you need to talk to one of them, they pick up the phone in that room, not even walking out. Absolutely horrible.
Both come from the shared common ancestor of, how do you work when you’re a small scrappy team who’s just gotta get stuff done together? You find a room, you get the equipment you need, and you work out of it until you’re big enough to need more.
I can fully understand why people dislike this kind of thing, but the fact that it shows up in multiple contexts suggests it probably does achieve what it’s aiming for.
The argument for me ends at productivity. We went full remote in march 2020, and our velocity metrics went up by 60%. All the other arguments (and they are persuasive) are worth an order of magnitude less.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 394 ms ] threadReturning to an office is my idea of hell though. Getting I'll because some random employee won't take the time off or WFH because they have a cold/flu/covid is plenty enough reason to say "no"
Between that and the benefits of working from home (having lunch with my local friends or eating leftovers, no commute, control over my environment, being able to work from my partner's occasionally), I really don't think there's a realistic amount of money I'd go back to an office for. Onsites are fine, but RTO 5 days a week 48 weeks a year? No thank you.
They’ll have no choice but to work.
The expectation that it's going to be business as usual is just as short sighted and archaic with regard going into an office as it is with the idea of work in general.
I hope that by "trickle down to the workers" you aren't talking about technically illiterate workers who are not actively contributing to the automation effort. Unfortunately, they will receive some benefits as well, which is completely undeserved.
Sure, most of us have used copilot or other AI tools and seen some benefit. But there's a point of no return where suddenly those tools are able to do the other things we think only we can.
What happens then?
I'm talking about every single human being who has been brought into this world through no fault of their own and deserves our empathy on that point alone.
They'll have no choice...
- visa workers who have no bargaining power.
- younger people who are mobile
- moving offices to other places
There have been a few recent posts about struggling to find jobs... every time it turns out they are only applying to online listings for remote jobs, and have high standards. That's not a situation you're likely to stand out in.
I just don't see how global remote work as the norm is "pro worker" for anyone except those already well established in their career. Besides being more disposable, what happened to complaints about companies not providing job resources or training? Did we give up on that one?
It was necessary because many, many US citizens hit hard by The Great Depression figured out in that time how to live without depending on regular (or any) work.
Tent cities; hunting; scavenging; farming; begging; stealing; mutual aid networks; etc.
It wasn't the best life, but for many it was found to be preferable to the factories or the docks.
To even consider returning to living a life dependent on a wage, Uncle Sam needed to offer them a new deal.
But you knew that.
They give you the least they can possibly get away with.
Sure - some small subset of employers competing for the best employees will do this. But the average employer? I'm skeptical.
Employees are literally willing to pay employers to stay at home. The middle manager who is awful at their job and so insecure they need to "see employees working" is costing the business not just in talent acquisition but when pulling in the dregs they're paying a premium for it. The center cannot hold.
The center isn't just insecure managers. Plenty of people want to work together... together. I happen to run my team remote, but to reduce a real issue to insecurity is to starve the conversation of meaningful contributions.
What makes you think upper management in public companies isn't mos interested in self-preservation also?
The idea that upper management is some benevolent and wise dictator while middle management is a different class of incompetent morons is strange.
They're cut from the same cloth.
There's only so much upper management can do to set incentives (Goodhart's law) without micromanaging the middle managers.
Indeed, middle management is the plight of modern civilization. They'll probably get replaced by AI soon enough.
How many people do you think a VP-Eng or CTO can manage and still do the rest of the job?
So, I think we'll see 5 middle managers replaced by 1 or 2 middle managers + AI. It doesn't have to be all or nothing.
Directors are often the group that is doing all the work nobody else is assigned. This goes from scheduling off-sites to preparing for audits to determining who handles unscheduled work that doesn't neatly fit into any one team. Directors are responsible for coaching engineering managers and are the backstop for problems outside the skill level of the eng manager.
They also handle project management because in smaller organizations, those positions have already been condensed.
Now, I think there's an alternative. You could hire an executive assistant that offloads some of what directors do. You could have a project manager or two handle all the projects across the portfolio for medium sized orgs - you're likely looking at 1.5 project managers for a director salary. (I think there is a place for AI there, but I actually think we have a better algorithm with Monte Carlo simulation.) You could have non-directors doing 85% of what a director does today, but you're still hiring high-skill people.
But if AI could replace a director then so could an EM. An EM can write a weekly status better than an AI and if a VP-Eng could rely on that, directors would have been replaced long ago.
It's a big deterrent IMO especially compared to Spain where healthcare is free
I don't think people do, but the issue is that they lack the bargaining power to do anything about it.
A tech worker making 6 figures? They aren't going to pushed around as easily as someone who is living paycheck to paycheck just for rent. they can forget to empathize for those who literally are chained to a job.
Yup, and now that employees have had a taste of freedom from that, they are very resistant to returning to that. Why is that hard to grasp for companies?
Absolutely, but that line has shifted majorly. To the point where it won't make sense for "average" employers to even try to bring people into the office. I'm not going to sink money into gas or public transportation just to be imprisoned in a meeting room when I could just take the call at home from the porch, a treadmill, or a couch.
You're obviously not an average employee then.
And employees should take the most they can possibly get away with.
When an employee doesn't behave like that, he is acting against his own interests.
The working class, low class, and middle class are all tax cattle. We have to take ostensibly dangerous commutes on highways with people too tired/too rushed/too busy to care. We have to eat inside of a certain timeframe, respond chipper no matter the circumstances, and when they're done with us they just let us go in a "right-sizing". We are subject to panopticon levels of surveillance with open offices, late nights because you don't want to appear to be the guy leaving early, etc. If you're lucky you get a few dozen hours a week with your family, maybe have some hobbies.
Cattle, imo, actually have it better because at least Farmer John drives them to work and they eat for free.
The Cxx's are always so chipper about coming into the office because they make, on average, 20x more than than the engineers doing actual work, and they can work from home/beach/yacht as they please.
Employers would be wise to treat employees with what they want. WFH is a net savings for them unless they're locked into 20 year leases. Many companies happen to get their lease through their VCs so it explains entirely why they are so keen on coming back to office. Employees will just leave to companies still offering remote. The problem for the employers who refuse to change? In a "fully" employed recession wages will not match the environment. If they cannot make up for lost wages with benefits like remote, paid healthcare, 401k match, etc they will die because without tax cattle, they are nothing.
This was simply the cattle waking up and realizing that they are the ones with the actual power. Any power a CEO claims to have is simply voodoo. The issue is employees still don't see this. Even without a union having enough people just walk out because the company doesnt respect them will crush the company. Rightly so.
This. While unionisation and labor organisation in general are a good thing for the workers, just people deciding they have had enough and finding a better employer (and maybe pulling out a couple of colleagues via referrals) is going to hurt companies.
it's a prisoner's dilemma, and the risk for a minimum wage worker walking out when it's not enough people is the worst case. they get fired, nothing changes, and it may even discourage others from trying.
You can only walk when you either have a next step or the result makes no difference. Many don't have that step and it's not QUITE so dire that food stamps are better than working. It's getting close, though.
I don't get where you are coming from.
You can't be serious.
> During a recession, it is either social assistance or one takes the job that is available.
It's only this way because we allow it to be. Huge productivity gains over the last decades have been captured by the .1%. There's nothing ambiguous or mysterious about it.
I have to agree with the parent post here. What do you think the median age of HN commenters is? I'd say it's probably mid-late 20s, in which case most people graduated after the great recession was largely over and only experienced the COVID blip that wasn't a cyclical recession in the normal sense and mostly helped tech workers instead of harming them.
Based on that.
And this - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2322031
Which has more links to older surveys. Thus 40.
Ok, im serious. It's silly to quote someone when you don't have a rebuttal.
2008 was 15 years ago, and didn't hit tech as hard as other industries. The last serious one was early 2000s. A significant number of people "in it for the money" or with non-traditional credentials simply had to leave the field.
Anyone that worked through the dot-com bust is late-forties, at minimum. But they'd have to be mid-50s or older to really feel the effects and know what changed. And people in their mid-50s+ are a strong minority in tech.
If the median tech worker is 32, they would have graduated college after the GFC was over (2014ish).
IMHO, for jobs that can be done either in an office or remotely the crux is the company's management team: Some people want to be in office to keep an eye on staff and maintain status, some don't care as long as the work is done.
Likewise "outsourcing" could result in a net increase of WFH given that contracting companies already support it.
Not certain what you mean by vanished and where the 2.4M number came from. CDC says 1,136,473 died in the pandemic [0], although a significant portion were not likely members of the labor force. As it stands the number labor force members caught up to pre-pandemic numbers in August of 2022. [1]
0. https://covid.cdc.gov/1. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CLF16OV
The "Civilian Labor Force Level" isn't a relevant statistic because of its definition:
> Civilian Labor Force is the sum of civilian employment and civilian unemployment. These individuals are civilians (not members of the Armed Services) who are age 16 years or older, and are not in institutions such as prisons, mental hospitals, or nursing homes.
This, by definition, ignores people who exited the workforce. Here is the two charts you want to compare instead:
- 2019: https://www.bls.gov/cps/aa2019/cpsaat03.htm
- 2023 https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat03.htm
Specifically the "Not in labor force" column. That's a 4M loss. Out of those it is disproportionately women and older people.
Ok, here is the same data from fred (sourced from BLS). Both the labor force and "not in labor force" increased by ~3M from pandemic to now. Given overall population growth of 8M, it looks like normal numeric growth of any statistical cluster within a growing population.
Labor: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CLF16OVNonlabor: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU05000000
Population: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CNP16OV
> Out of those it is disproportionately women and older people.
Is the loss disproportionately among women? In terms of people not in the labor force, I don't see strong evidence for that. Stats for both women and men not in the labor force have returned to pre-pandemic levels.
Is job loss disproportionately among older people? Given that numbers of people in the labor force are now above pre-pandemic levels, we would have to posit a counterfactual world without a pandemic. I'm not going to do a whole regression with it's own assumptions of biz cycle etc. Eyeballing the chart, the current level could be in the range of alternative futures starting from April 2020. Its hard to say though with the boomers retiring out how many retired early or decided to not retire late.
All, Men, Women Not in Labor Force: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?id=LNU05000000,LNU0500000...,
There are a large number of people, namely on HN, that have never known anything other than $120K+ compensation, constant stream of offers for changing jobs, all while working from their home and doing about 4 hours of real work a day.
I don't think a recession is necessarily coming, but a reversion to the mean is going to leave these people obliterated.
The thing is, this has always been the case for the white collar world. Lawyers, executives, etc. The real change is that ICs that aren’t playing politics are able to live that life now. The reversion to the mean isn’t happening until those people stop producing massive economic value.
Personally, I will work in a warehouse before I go back to the office. Do twenty hours a week temp work while I work on setting up a side business. It’s never been easier to start your own business, and we don’t need big companies to make a living anymore. The real reversion to the mean is cutting out the rent-seeking middle men that extract value from our economic output while contributing little themselves.
No idea if I should be rolling on the floor laughing or extremely saddened reading that. I might advice taking a reality check before spurring this kind of non sense in public if you want to avoid sounding both entitled and utterly disconnected.
Maybe I'm uniquely on a path to burnout, but I put in at least 6 hours of what I would call hard knowledge work per day as a SWE. Throw on 1-3 hours of collaboration and an hour of truly useless meetings and I'm at a 45+ hr week.
Factor in commute time, via bike so counts towards exercise minutes, and I'm working 50 hr weeks + 24/7 15 minute SLA on-call once every other month.
It's unfathomable to me that this isn't the average experience, and that anyone would get paid more than $120k doing any less.
One of the consequences of working from home is I tend to work 8-12 hours a day. Sometimes it's hard to mentally shut off work because it's in the same place I live. I don't know how anyone works 4 hours a day, unless they simply don't have a lot to do.
Not if they 'made hay while the sun shines' and are now financially independent
Seems like it is that employees should never ask for better working conditions because, it may be taken back when conditions allow employers to be more abusive? Is that really a point worth making?
This is only true for people who don't have essential skills at a high level. For senior people, this won't be a problem. I cleaned up during the last two recessions, partly due to the prevalence of M&A activity during recessions, and was able to buy property cheap at auction post 2008 due to high foreclosure rates.
If you're just starting your career in a recession you're pretty screwed, if you're mid-career with a specialized skillset that is essential to core business function, you'll be completely fine.
Everyone getting an office with a door -- even a small one -- would go a long way toward making the office a good place to work.
Alice looked through the small door...
https://images.genius.com/80f6b055d05188b3ae126e3be56a5134.1...
i go for a quick walk to a nearby park and i listen to an audiobook for 30min. or i walk my dog. or i get my steamdeck and play something for 30min (with baldur's gate 3, it's hard to stop after only 30).
[1]: If your employer doesn't like if you take a longer lunch break or something to get this time back, then it's time to start looking for a different one.
I do sometimes work late when chewing on a more difficult problem, but if I don't stop early enough to leave a decent gap between end of work and bedtime, it can sometimes be difficult to get my head turned off and get to sleep.
I miss my teens and early twenties when I could flop into bed and fall asleep no matter what I had been doing prior.
Workers want lots of things. Eg money. It's a negotiation.
One of the best tactics to learn about negotiations is negotiating on multiple fronts. Did salary negotiation turn sticky? Shift to negotiating for days off, or title... on the employer side.
One reason that this works is that negotiations have their rationale/objective side and partially contradicting other sides.
Case in point, the value of an employee, particularly a specific employee at a particular time... can be extremely high relative to alternatives. The alternative can easily be spend 12 months paying salary equivalent cost without the benefit.
Lots of positions are hard to adequately fill. 12 months of hiring, training, fail, rehiring, etc. That can easily be your mean alternative. It's very common that someone good leaves a team and 12 months later you have not really replaced them.
Yet... That reality rarely translates to practicality outside of executive comp. Investors certainly act this way, but hr doesn't. The rationale of rehiring cost and risk/difficulty of hiring are understood... but there are still limits to the number they are to put on this. It's never 300%. It's 10% or maybe 25%. Willingness to pay correlates to value, but it isn't proportional.
Anyway... WFH is currently an extremely irationale space. No one is being quite honest about it's full benefits, costs, risks, etc.
It's a benefit that neither employee or employer is usually comfortable about outright "negotiating," like offering less money for remote.
So... WFH is not-negotiable-for salary benefit that is #1 or #2 on both parties' priority list, second (often prior) to salary. Unlike other primary benefits, employees know who gets what.
Currently, it's all about perceived negotiating power.
Gas + commute time + increased likelihood to eat out (leftover chicken breast) = more money out of my pocket.
And I could stretch even further with the endless banter, getting yelled at for not understanding things the first time (I'm not an auditory listener), disrespected for how I look, more reasons to waste money on therapy. Obviously that's personal, but you couldn't pay me more to go back to the cattle stall we call an office...
I do miss wearing dress shirts and slacks while I eat your free pizza!
Dunno. I do the same during WFH, only with having no pants on.
Not only time but expense and accident risk, especially for an automobile commute.
Obviously don't get queso dip or soda, etc
Personally, if I made enough, I'd eat out all the time too.
Talking sports and politics are the main reasons why you won't find me in the break room.
I can see this being highly variable for the type of position / work. As a software developer the ability to schedule face time and use messenging for low-priority is way more productive than an unexpected door-knock that demands an immediate response.
Apart from that, I was going to comment saying the exact same thing. Not having a commute is non-negotiable for me. That said, I have been working from home long before the pandemic, and for the one year out of 20 that I worked in office (was a once in a lifetime job opportunity) I rented a condo across the street from the office. Life is way too short to waste 1 - 2 hours per day driving. I also finding driving to be one of the most stressful activities in life. Not because I don't enjoy driving itself, but because of traffic and having to share the road. In other words, I am positive that working from home is literally adding years to my life due to drastically reduced stress levels in addition to having more time to actually enjoy life.
So no, I will never accept a position where I need to commute for work regularly unless it is temporary and a very special circumstance.
The point of life is not to provide your employer with unrestricted access to your time for their convenience.
depends on your life goals. If you're just minmaxing money and want to retire by 40-50 with time for the family or leisure, sure. You ideally want to minimize time working, and not necessarily maximize efficiency. If your goal is (personal) growth or expertise in a domain, that communication gap can potentially impact your growth, perhaps even cap you without outside study (which turns into work outside of work).
There's no right answer, you simply have to be honest about your end game.
That probably sidesteps a lot of the guesswork about what makes a person most productive.
https://stackoverflow.blog/2015/01/16/why-we-still-believe-i...
Layouts with many closed offices would cost far more to build, and take up more square footage to host the same number of employees.
At a time where savvy businesses have dropped their commercial leases / gone full remote, and the more conservative / less accepting of change ones are left holding the bag, I would not expect anyone to make big investments into office space.
The in-office days are social collaboration days so it doesn't make sense to keep people in separate boxes for them. Then people's home office setups are their cubes if they want them, which most people seem to.
This doesn’t sound like a stable equilibrium to me; more like a transition to full remote that you do when you’re waiting for your lease to run out. Not even having your own permanent desk sounds like utter hell.
Even ignoring increased happiness, this enables giving employees their own tools: keyboards, chairs, monitors, workstations, tea, oscilloscopes, papers, etc.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90285582/everyone-hates-open-pla...
I've also worked in a big open space where, while all five teams worked on the same product, each individual team had their own section. But for that one, you could hear the next desk block over talk about football and another block talk about what THEY're working on, which is highly distracting.
Another one was an open office across three floors with a central auditorium (that is, big open central space cutting across all floors), which in theory would be bad but they had enough noise padding and ceiling-high walls / whiteboards between the blocks to not be an issue.
Another one was one where we were asked for input; they initially wanted to make it an open space, but we convinced them to divide it up into rooms instead. They ended up being rooms with glass walls, some matt glass, but that was enough for team privacy and limited noise.
My current spot has a mostly open plan space, but they have heaps of noise padding; felted panels on walls and dividers, in between rows of desks, and desks arranged in groups of 6-8. It's manageable, although unfortunately the walkways are in between the desks so people passing by having conversations is annoying, and the meeting rooms' noise insulation is inadequate. That said, we're only there two days a week so it's manageable.
It's either going to be working from home or a new employer for me.
It seems downright trivial to me that giving employees 4' desks packed side to side, back to back in rows requires less square footage and no walls, vs. an office.
(And thus, the race for short-term gains in terms of less real estate trumped the long-term gains of SWE being able to think, and the race to the bottom began. It seems to me the costs of open-office are all after the build out: lower morale, higher noise, lower productivity, faster disease transmission, etc.…)
Are you even reading the comments about studies showing the lost productivity (and therefore revenue) caused by open office spaces?
I didn't say it wouldn't cost one penny more than an open office, I said it wasn't wildly different. So many buildouts go halfway already with the tiny "phone rooms"; it's not in any way a budget buster to keep that idea going, except around a central shared space where meetings can take place.
I.e., the claim, as I read it, is that construction of an open office is more expensive than a non-open floorplan, per employee.
(If you consider that, yes, I think open office is the long-term worse option, and the parenthetical in my comment pretty clearly denotes that.)
> I didn't say it wouldn't cost one penny more than an open office, I said it wasn't wildly different.
This still isn't clear to me. An office is probably, what, 10' square, at least? Google thinks, "The North American office size average is currently 150-175 square feet per employee. Open office spaces for tech companies typically use even less at 125-175 square feet per person". That's considerably more room than an open office floorplan, which is probably closer to 4'x4', maybe 4'x5'.
> So many buildouts go halfway already with the tiny "phone rooms"
My company had 3 of those, back to back to back, occupying what like 30–40 sq ft total? That's hardly "halfway".
You asked me to justify it, I did, and you replied with a generic moan. Alright?
That figure absurd in the context of an open office floorplan, and I suspect they're doing some "damned lies" statistics to arrive at it, such as amortizing the common area across the occupancy. I think every open office floorplan I've been in has had 4' desks. The next desk is flush against mine, and there was someone sitting directly behind me. At best, that's 16 sq ft. Generously 20. I have no idea how you arrive at ~150 sq. ft.
And I never said you would retain 100% of the space exactly as it is in an open plan, I said it is not wildly more expensive when you're already building out the floor.
(Still don't think it will happen - but that shift occurred when leases on commercial real estate were at all time high)
I think that it was just as motivated by the way you can walk a potential investor (or a worried current investor) through them, and make grand gestures with your arm indicating all of the busy beavers working on making things happen. Then the group can be walked from rockstar ninja to rockstar ninja, looking over shoulders at unintelligible screens, while having smoke blown up their asses.
An open-plan office is primarily a theatrically staged office. 20 years ago I was paid as a temp to sit in one and type random numbers into a noisy electric printing calculator while a random spreadsheet was on the screen. After a few hours, a small group walked in, led by a man who was obviously giving a presentation, with wide gestures of his arms. They were in the room for two or three minutes before being led out. Twenty minutes after they left the room, we were mostly dismissed, except for the younger guys (like me) who were offered a few hours more work moving boxes.
The end of free money might make open plan offices more popular among a certain type of company.
https://news.yahoo.com/activate-space-wework-founder-adam-18...
Wall Street tech it's pretty typical to do your own SRE/L3 and honestly even L2/L1. Everything from business user "hey how do I.." customer service questions down to "the server is on fire, alerts are coming in .. ".
Open floorplans mean even if you have an agreed PagerDuty type rotation, everyone gets sucked into or distracted by it. It's hard not to want to lend a hand when you see your buddy getting blown up by some difficult user or your inbox/slack is getting filled up with alerts.
We had in sequential rows - Level1 support, R&D, Development. Sat like this for years.
So R&D was sandwiched between the team that was constantly on contentious urgent calls, and the dev team they ran over to ask for help.
Best open floorplan seat I ever had was in a far corner way off from most dev, sat near a trader who spent all day on the phone yakking. Just like a total storyteller kind of guy, incredible yarns were spun .. kind faded into interesting background music for me. Like leaving the History Channel on in the back. Philosophy, science, history, movies, politics.. etc.
If you hire explicit 20% staff to do operational tasks, and also wall off a fixed rotating 5% of your dev team to assist them.. then you've made a conscious decision on resource allocation of 25%. If the other 95% of the dev team is getting interrupted every 30minutes by "questions" then your operational staff/rotation is not resulting in better runbooks, etc.
If you want better SLA and your operational staffing is not sufficient, then you should see your SLA breach, make staffing/process changes, etc.
When development just papers over these issues you end up with great operational metrics and bad development metrics, so then everyone can be even more upset at dev!
If the oncalls don't have the knowledge to solve the issues they encounter, they need to escalate them and somebody needs to put more time in developing a more comprehensive knowledge base for them to reference, not just "steal" time from other company functions.
If you want to be metric driven, it's important that the processes be allowed to fail. Otherwise you are robbing Peter to pay Paul, and the KPI that looks BAD is not where the process is failing necessarily, but where the time got stolen from.
You are saying that people will be blamed for taking too much time to an example saying it would took 10h of someone's time instead of 5 minutes. Why the company will value more "your" deadline than "the operation" deadline? You are basically saying you are okay with "operation" being the target of people unhappy as long as they are not unhappy with you.
You are saying people should escalate. But on the example, the person who has the solution is the person you say should not be disturbed. So you are just asking to disturb uselessly people who cannot help, so your solution is even worse.
You are saying more time is needed to develop a more comprehensive knowledge base. But who should take the time to fill up the knowledge base if not the people who have the answers, which, in this example, is the people you say don't have time. (and moreover, funnily, those people complaining to be distracted are also very very often not doing any effort to share their knowledge somewhere accessible).
I'm slowly getting very irritated by the whole WFH debate: there is way too much arguments that boils down to "the problem is that _I_ am the one that people distract, so let's do my solution that is sooooo much smarter, let's do something where _I_ am happy even if it makes the situation worse for everyone else". That slowly creates this impression that a lot of pro-WFH are just little kids.
Having proper knowledge bases and procedures, including how the ask "the team"/seniors "ad-hoc" questions and get feedback reasonable fast is what you want to have to solve that problems IMHO. Because that also tends to work if e.g. some people are sick or gone (knowledge bases) or can't come to the office (e.g. sick kids at home).
Through most important I would say is that communication in remote work is very different to office work and "just throwing slack into the mix" and doing the rest like before isn't going to cut it.
And yes that needs proper tooling, too and yes most of the tooling marked for this purpose today is .... pretty bad, sometimes utter garbage creating more work then they save time. Similar the part of procedures is often completely ignored, too.
It's very easy to say "hey, can you share your screen" on a remote conversation. While in person that will require moving at minimum 2 people (often more) into a compressed setting with bad visibility at some random place of the building.
I am on a distributed team with no in-person interaction, and I love commuting even though I don’t see anyone I work with. But, I hate the physical space.
But "collaboration"....
I had a lot more of the stuff that required focus at the beginning of my career. In my last few jobs it's been more about hooking together subsystems from 11 different teams/companies in six different timezones.
Most bugs seem to happen because of misalignments or miscommunication. Intense focus just isnt as important any more.
To me, though, that calls less for private offices and more for effective async collaboration. With 11 teams, nothing is going to get done over meetings except some basic alignments. The actual work of integration needs to be fully documented and agreed upon in writing in a way where provider and consumer can look at while actively developing, like a living API spec with specific schema, response and error codes etc. all laid out. If any team fails to adhere to the spec, well, the spec is right (as of any given version).
Even if we were all in person in the same conference room talking for hours one afternoon, none of that is going to stick around more than a week or two before some detail diverges.
The meetings are perhaps good for managers to walk away with some basic summary of a decision, but the actual engineering and IT work can't happen in them. I wish more managers would realize that and give teams more time to actually collaborate through individual async contributions, not just sitting together in a room -- there's a big difference.
Turns out, it was just advertising that made the cash all along. The silly "collaborative" environment had nothing to do with it.
The peons all had desktop computers, while middle management had clunky laptops with docking stations. You knew who the executives were by their small laptops that were clearly designed for traveling by the jet setting class.
I’ve come to think that the ultimate power move for the movers and shakers at a company, would be to have a traditional office with a desktop computer that they cannot take with them. I remember being excited the first time I was issued a corporate laptop. I felt like I had finally arrived, and finally was one of the powerful and privileged. Now, I look back on those days of desktop computing, where I could not take my computer home, and where there was no expectation that I would randomly work from home as the very height of luxury.
I had them from 2001-2014, 2017-2018.
Later worked as a govt contractor and could leave my laptop at the office 90% of the time. Never realized how good that was until I switched back to a job with an on-call rotation.
I personally don't mind sharing office space with less than about four coworkers. In a small(!), shared office there is enough social pressure to keep concentration periods quiet, or agree on shared music choices, &c. and still maintain the advantages of having what amounts to a team meeting space for collaboration in the same footprint.
I don't think single person rooms are necessary (but better), but open office is definitely not grate and without noise canceling headphones completely unbearable.
With rooms with small number of people (2 or much worse 4) it also depends _a massive lot_ on the layout. But also the other person, i.e. do they constantly click their pens, do they interrupt you all the time, do they have ad-hoc meetings with other people at their desk etc. etc. The problem is such factors are hard to "control"/estimate/plan with.
Through similar considerations apply to home office too, i.e. people need room in their home which can become office space. E.g. working in you bedroom comes with a huge number of problem, which can be overcome, sometimes, but it's IMHO not as simple as "just" having a proper desk and chair.
Its common sense that for work requiring deep periods of concentration, eliminating distractions is key. Easiest way to eliminate distractions in an office environment is being in a room behind a closed door. Cheapest way to do that these days is WFH, assuming people have that space where they live.
Companies can't fit enough of those in as it stands. How would they do it for every employee? The square footage needs would be huge.
Open office floorplans take ~75 sqft per employee. An office would take ~150.
I vaguely remember IBM cubicle farms from visiting their offices as a child. They took up a ton of space, requiring huge office towers. That means lots of elevator trips and conference room needs.
Elsewhere boiled frog and class have both been mooted with regards to office. That's definitely my experience from working the last few decades. I started my career having an office for almost every job. But that slowly fell away as corporations discovered cubes save money and is now completely gone where I work now unless you are very senior indeed. We're talking there are only a handful of offices per floor vs nothing but offices on every floor.
Class comes in to play because at least where I work the people setting policy for the average worker to sit at a cube not only have their own offices, they have their own building! One that you don't get access to by default. Yet, as cost-saving-measures we've enabled people to collaborate across regions and timezones to the point that coming in to work in a cube farm is actually counterproductive. Very few people are customer facing and need to get face time with clients to do deals. The rest of us can happily WFH. Perhaps as Wall Street slowly weans itself from CRE, that will in fact be the next benefit that's pulled back: sorry, you need to be really senior to come into the office / square footage is for closers. I can hardly wait.
I’ve tuned out the entire wfh debate for this reason. We just need some patience and we’ll have an answer. There’s no need for all the angry debates.
Where does this come from? It's something that sounds right, but then I look back at my parent's office jobs and pop culture from 20+ years ago and it doesn't line up. Open office spaces have been extremely common for a very very long time, with private offices reserved for higher level people.
In the first case I shard a closed door office with one other person. Each of us had a large desk, bookcase and great space.
In the second case I had my own office with my own desk and even a table with two chairs for receiving people.
I was pretty low in the institute food chain. Only the PhD students were lower, and they shared 2 or at most 3 person closed door offices .
Its perfectly doable.
I am in the middle of having to tell a top engineer (and team lead) who was hired remote that they can no longer be remote and need to move to one of our office locations (thousands of miles away of course). Just for the privilege of being on a video call with the PMs who of course don't live in the same city anyway.
Sadly, it's like people running these companies are drawing inspiration from Vladamir Putin and saying "Fuck it - I want people in the office". This may be off topic from the article - but I think leaders are just going to say fuck it - you are coming in or you are getting fired.
What data do you have to support this, other than a personal anecdote?
If RTO proponents had any hard data, wouldn't they shared it by now? It is _they_ who are making the claim that office work is more productive, so it is on them to _prove_ it. We are being fed some fables about "spontaneous interactions at water cooler" and other such bullshit instead.
How is this fair to say at all? It may be true, but there’s no evidence that this is the case.
In a sense, I think this is much of it.
Commercial real estate used to be a fairly predictable investment. Costs were mostly predictable, rents would increase over time, etc.
Now, we have all these vacant buildings and it's highly disruptive to the investors and owners of those buildings. You have companies in the middle of 5, 10, 15 year leases, and they're paying on those spaces with no hope of getting out of the contract. So the companies have a large incentive to justify that spend, which is really only going to happen by utilizing the space, which means in-office work.
I think if there was a viable way for these lessors to get out of those obligations we would see more of an embrace of WFH or hybrid work.
There is also part of the issue where for some people and tasks, an in-office scenario is higher net productivity to the company (but not necessarily the employees).
Additionally, you also have companies where a large contingent of the workforce can't WFH (eg: manufacturing, assembly, etc.). It creates animosity among the workers when the higher paid people also have the luxury of not needing to come to a physical location.
Overall, I think the deck is stacked against WFH becoming a long-term trend for a majority of the workforce. I think it will become a more common perk, something that is earned and not granted.
Except that the first people who would leave might also be the good experienced engineers, but that loss is a little hard to see on paper at first, to predict and so it doesn't get accounted for very well.
I hope this is dark humor and not meant to be taken seriously. For me, about half the reason I prefer my home office is that I don't feel like I have to look productive. I can get my stuff done in my way, and as long as my boss is happy with the result it doesn't matter if my way "looked" right.
The acoustics are also terrible, as are the visual distractions of watching people walk past and peek in every 20 seconds.
It was great. You could write on the glass like it was a whiteboard. And the knowledge that everyone else could see you were in a meeting was an incentive to only be in meetings when you had a real reason to be.
In their minds, they don't pay you for results - but rather for your time. If you complete your tasks fast, and deliver the desired results, in let's say 20 hours instead of 40 - that means you have 20 more hours to do something else. It's the "If you have time to lean, you have time to clean" mantra brought to the white-collar world.
If you work from home, they can't micromanage or monitor your hours as well as in the office. They don't know if you're a very efficient or average worker. Their fear is that you finish your tasks, and then spend time "slacking" at home - doing house chores, watching tv shows, or whatever, on their time.
That was literally the first thing I learned when I entered the workforce. It's always better to do nothing and look like you're doing something, than to do something and look like you're doing nothing.
I don't say this often, but I feel blessed to have a remote boss that doesn't give two shits about what I / we do with our time, as long as we deliver results. But so far he seems like an anomaly.
Yucky company.
1) mean fewer offices (per unit space, since they are bigger)
2) make people more likely to come in (since they are nicer)
The point where those cross over seems like a good target, the highest number of happy office workers you can fit.
I think this is rather optimistic. If you give more square feet per employee and expect most/all to come in, the idea that it will mean fewer offices doesn't really add up.
Of course, this is under the assumption the company wants people to come in willingly. They could just try and force their employees to come in, but people are really into work from home and good employees have more options.
WFH means my whole life doesn't center around my job and its schedule. I'm home for when my kids go to and return from school, I can make lunch or dinner while sitting in the kitchen with my laptop, and I don't have to spend a couple hours a day commuting.
More importantly, return to office, as the end goal isn't a good end-goal. Sure it can work reasonably well when everyone is in the office, but the pandemic 'experiment' has clearly shown us that remote, hybrid are also workable models. Each model: all on-site, hybrid, flexible have their pros and cons and the outstanding organizations of the future will be the ones that can create an environment where people who thrive in each model and co-work.
The right end-goals should be around more around the lines of productivity, teams hitting/exceeding their goals consistently, employee retention, employee happiness among other things.
BTW I keep hearing benefits of "RTO" - but I've never worked for a company that only has a single office, so we end up on video calls with other teams and team members anyways even when the company didn't allow WFH.
This has been my experience at every company I've been with in the last 15 years. The reason why I don't find these "increases collaboration and teamwork" arguments persuasive is because when everyone has been in the office, the work processes and level of collaboration were not different at all.
Those who are happy to return to the office in general are those who do not like WFH and prefer more contacts and a change of scenery.
A nicer office makes things better but it will not change people's minds on WFH.
Sure, these guys might go into the office but they do so from their pied-a-terre / 3rd home / whatever within a 5 minute chauffeured drive. They do this while maintaining a nearby suburban/exurban estate and maybe a lake/beach/ski houses where they spend the majority of their actual hours.
I was listening to a podcast and they observed that US commuters might have had a boiled frog scenario where you slowly just get used to having a worse & worse commute as you age.. and COVID snapped everyone out of it cold turkey. Now attempting to go back to it is revolting for many.
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If we're specifically talking about large enterprises, these CEOs make more in a year than most Americans make their entire life. If you didn't live a Fortune 1000 CEO level lifestyle you could literally do the job for 4-6 months and retire, and that's ignoring the fact that they've typically been in the C-Suite making 20-50% of that salary for decades already. It's not often somebody living paycheck to paycheck is promoted into CEO.
I've worked jobs in public companies where the CEO and half the C-Suite was driven to work every morning. I've worked jobs where a rank and file programmer got denied a raise because he left at 4 every day (despite working 8 or more hours every day) because the policy was to work 8-5, while the CEO worked from a vacation home when the weather wasn't nice where our HQ was. Whether the job is hard is irrelevant, all the GP is saying is that you have ultimate flexibility in that role, and now the poors have a taste of it too, and most of them/us aren't going to give it up without a fight.
He couldn't articulate a specific, valid complaint like "I was out at a client lunch and they were goofing off" or "I was on a vacation day while they were supposed to be working".
He was just mad that underlings had the same flexibility that he, as CEO, had always had. This being the same CEO who jets around DJing on the side for fun and has connections to do so at pretty high levels. So even the "cool CEO" is in fact, NOT cool.
It's like getting mad at all the other idiots on the road making traffic, lol. What do you think you are?
The CEO was upset others were allowed to perform as if they were of the same class.
It’s always class when one boils it down, imho.
But the obvious complaint was what are these slobs doing in my summer resort town, dining in the same establishment as me!! Rather than stuck in downtown Manhattan in the August heat. Or - the least they could do is go to Coney Island / Jones Beach / Jersey Shore or something eating some hotdogs.
I have run into this at a peer level though. I've negotiated WFH and extra vacation and have learned to keep it in the down low. They get mad at me, but I'm not the one that is their boss and I couldn't care less if they WFH.
I haven't taken a month-long vacation for a while but when I did a few times in a long-ago role, there were definitely people who were at least a bit incredulous that I could get off with doing so.
Yes it is a thing. It starts when you get promoted to a more senior role. The thing is, nothing much changed inside or outside, so many people feel they need to make a point. They start to dress differently, behave differently, introduce distance - to make sure others understand who is in the "superior" position.
I noticed thin in insecure types or those who need some confirmation of their value. But there are many people who are exact opposites, especially in the younger generation. They understand that being a manager doesn't mean giving orders but supporting your team in their work. It's so much easier for everybody.
That's basically my point.
Probably the worst scenario of business owners you can work for.
OTOH, a good small company can be really good. Decisions get made quickly, you know most of the people and can talk with them, much less BS, and more of a sense of purpose in what you're doing there rather than being a cog. I worked in one a few years back and loved it. They are tough to find, though, as a real 'small company' is different than a startup in that they're a bit less crazy in terms of growth.
The CEO and analyst are both upper class, just different levels of power and seniority.
That CEO is just a power-tripping asshole.
The big push into consumer finance has been a complete multi-billion loss making debacle under his leadership.
The queen bee who owns a share of the hive, decides how many bees to hire/fire, where they work, when they work, what % of the honey to share with the worker bees, etc.. now thats a different class.
Team managers/trainers do not meet most of those criteria. At most the GM meets the majority of them. Only the team owner would meet all the criteria.
Amazon was once a small business. It's possible to grow that hive but the vast majority get exterminated.
It’s rare that those businesses scale to the point of where your role is purely abstract management layers removed from the front line workforce.
If the analyst lives in NYC and makes $250k they aren't living large. If they went to an Ivy League school and have to pay for it they really aren't living large. Regardless, the story makes the CEO look silly.
It is in part. A person on a US$20 million a year salary obviously isn’t working class or even middle class-they might truthfully say they are of “working/middle class background” (if their parents were of more modest means)
Whereas, their 10 year old kid whose annual income and assets are roughly $0 is also upper class-because their parents are. Now, if they grow up and their parents end up disowning them and they end up living on the streets homeless-then they won’t be upper class any more. But if that doesn’t happen, then they are-because even if they aren’t filthy rich yet, very likely they’ll eventually inherit a huge amount of money from their parents (assuming they don’t already have some kind of “you’ll never have to work a day in your life” trust fund set up for them). They could live their whole life in the upper class without ever getting a salary at all
They may never work a day because they don’t need to - they are upper or “bourg.” for sure.
It’s that weird in-between, where one still needs to earn a living and make even more money for someone else.
A 25M / year CEO is far past "earning a living" and really only works because they want to.
Upwards mobility my ass.
Social class is not just about your current salary, although 200k soon after graduation isn't exactly 'average'...
Some might even say that walking up to the CEO like that indicates upper class self-assurance...
In the office setting the CEO would never been seen anywhere near the same floor that such junior people are working or eating, never having the opportunity to introduce themselves. One bank famously had a special CEO elevator so the guy could seamlessly get from the garage to his high-rise executive suite without bumping into a single soul.
I recently found myself out to dinner a table over from a C-suite exec at my company. I did not introduce myself because I'm a socially damaged introvert.
It's a pretty easy bet that the kid was a major extrovert on the other hand, more than some assumption they must already be upper class.
You'd be surprised about the class mobility on Wall St vs other industries. When I graduated, Google famously did not even recruit from anything other than a small handful of schools and screened out a pretty high GPA minimum like 3.75 or so. Meanwhile every bank came to my college and I had like 5 offers. A good number of my coworkers spent some time at community college, had parents without college degrees, are first gen immigrants, etc.
Outside of glad-handing networking roles that lean on peoples connections like in IB, "already rich" is the exception rather than the rule. Bear was famous for saying they didn't hire MBAs, but instead PSDs — poor, smart and had a deep desire to be rich
The meritocrats are the ones that work the jobs where they actually have to make money and profits. Nepos are shunted to roles where that isn’t as direct.
or to use an older one: petit bourgeoisie
Class is defined by one's relationship to the means of production (e.g. whether you work in a factory, or own the factory where people work)
In the modern economy, capital owners are reliant on a class of non-fungible white collar workers that bring their own human capital. The two groups have myriad common interests. Those interests are in many cases in opposition to those of ordinary workers who lack human capital and are fungible and easily replaced.
They’re proles by the definition of how they earn their labor. If the pool of labor expands beyond the available roles, those high salaries would crash down.
Were we to push that to the extreme, the only upper-class at Goldman Sachs would be retirees, either as direct shareholders or as beneficiaries of some pension fund. Even if they were lower middle-class Americans living in an old aging house they can’t afford to fix.
That would be the Value Extraction definition of Class.
Others would argue that class is more diffuse, and that one’s class depends more on their family's history, where they went to school, and who they know, than on how much they have. Which is a valid point.
That would be a Social Capital definition of Class.
I doubt however that anyone would consider a street-sweeping former Emperor (eg Piyin), or some penniless heir to some old industry dynasty as still belonging to any sort of upper-class.
Meaning the actual definition actually is some fluid mix of the two. That and probably some other definitions I’m not even aware of.
> In the modern economy, capital owners are reliant on a class of non-fungible white collar workers that bring their own human capital.
It’s nothing modern. Capital owners always have, since the first scribe, and probably before that (see Japan’s former hordes of perpetually desk-bound samurai).
Still, let’s entertain the argument. I’ll use, and I’m truly sorry for that, a tired analogy.
In the modern world, many people are reliant on many different types of usually non-fungible pets and somewhat fungible, depending on who you ask, animals, for many different purposes. Some of which bring their own highly sought-after hard-earned skills.
Let’s limit ourselves to the oh so tired dog analogy.
A person and their dog have myriad common interests. Those interests are, in many cases, in opposition to those of many other people and animals. Even more so when said dog is considered a family member, serves as a guard dog, as a shepherd dog, or is specialised in drugs detection.
Does that make them equal? Does that change anything to the fact that one is extracting value from the other, and often only pays them back in dog food, usually made from our food industry’s literal scraps and refuse?
So yes, I agree with you: there’s no simple and definitely no simplistic definition of class.
I am still convinced however that, in the specific and limited context of the comment I was replying to, the one I used was good enough.
By your value-extraction definition, Sundar Pichai isn’t upper class. He doesn’t make money from his ownership of the capital—he owns a negligible share of Alphabet. Instead, he helps the shareholders extract more value from Alphabet and is compensated for that work. A definition that excludes CEOs from the upper class isn’t a very workable one.
I think a more useful definition recognizes that, in between shareholders and the workers is a class of people who help the shareholders extract more value from the enterprise, and therefore has interests closely aligned with those of the shareholders. For example in a company like Uber, that’s what the programmers are doing. They’re not creating value, they’re building systems to extract more value from the drivers.
Another way to look at it is that there’s a large class of people whose jobs wouldn’t be nearly as well compensated without monopolistic capitalism. $500,000/year Facebook engineers only exist because Facebook as an enterprise throws off enormous amounts of cash. If you look at more social-democratic societies, the biggest difference isn’t at the very top. Sweden and Norway have more billionaires per capita than the United States. Instead, the biggest difference is in the professional class. Swedish engineers (and bankers and lawyers and other professionals) make a fraction of what their American counterparts make. And that’s because Sweden has far fewer of these insanely high margin businesses.
And yet they are both animals, often get treated as less than most people, the shepherd dog only gets the proverbial scraps. Precisely the analogy’s entire point. I’m Glad I didn’t have to spell it out.
> A definition that excludes CEOs from the upper class isn’t a very workable one.
Absolutely. Hence the "Were we to push that to the extreme", followed by a ridiculous application of the definition.
> Another way to look at it is that there’s a large class of people whose jobs wouldn’t be nearly as well compensated without monopolistic capitalism.
And thus we can differentiate those of these people who are part of the upper class from those who aren’t by wether they get an actual share of the value they produce, or merely scraps. Wether they are compensated as equals, or as useful tools.
Interesting bit about Sweden and Norway. I didn’t know that.
Yes, but focusing on those factors gives you an incomplete understanding of the dog’s place on the farm. At the end of the, day the dog is helping the farmer extract value from the sheep. Indeed, the dog’s very specialized skills wouldn’t have much value outside the context of the farming enterprise. That means the dog’s interests are much more aligned with the farmer’s than the sheep. His unique role, and relatively comfortable position, wouldn’t exist outside the value-extractive context of the farm.
> And thus we can differentiate those of these people who are part of the upper class from those who aren’t by wether they get an actual share of the value they produce, or merely scraps. Wether they are compensated as equals, or as useful tools
Facebook engineers building the infrastructure the company uses to extract monopolistic profits from consumers are receiving a share of the value. The actual value creation ultimately comes from someone making shoes in a factory in China, which sells them to Nike, which uses Facebook advertising and branding to sell them to consumers for far more than they’re worth. Yes, he’s a “useful tool” for the shareholders, but so are the senior executives (besides Zuck). Their ability to command $500,000 salaries or $1 million salaries, or $10 million salaries doesn’t exist outside the context of these enormous monopolistic profits.
You’re getting hung up on “equality” but being in the same class doesn’t mean you’re equal. In a feudal society, knights may be quite lowly compared to a high ranking landowner. They’re “useful tools.” But I’m not talking about equality of rank, I’m talking about interests and incentives. On that front, the knights have fundamentally different interests and incentives than the serfs. Whatever resentment they might have toward higher ranking nobility, they still reap the benefits of the feudal structure. The my would be much worse off outside that structure.
Which, to me, reflects a huge gap in power and freedom.
One decides what the other does. One can decide how much the other will earn. One can decide wether or not the other will still have a job tomorrow. The other needs a job if they want to have a roof over their head and food on the table in six months.
Which is why I still don’t find your definition satisfactory. Sure alignment of interests matters, but to me it’s not enough.
It’s been an insightful discussion, and I’ve truly enjoyed it, but I’m afraid we won’t be able to reach a conclusion we can both agree on.
Class can be more fine-grained than just lower/working-middle-upper
People commonly talk about “upper middle class” vs “lower middle class”, and then I suppose there are even some people in between the two (middle middle class?)
Well, in the same way there is surely lower upper class and upper upper class, and maybe even more levels than that. A person on an annual salary of US$25 million is undeniably upper class but still far beneath the centibillionaire class.
There’s also no clear boundary between upper middle and lower upper. You may think someone on US$250K is “upper class” but they probably only think of themselves as “upper middle class”, and personally I would think the same. In my own head, to really be upper class, your annual income has to be (consistently) measured in millions, not hundreds of thousands.
Who is more upper class, a relatively impoverished Prince of the Holy Roman Empire or a billionaire by marriage and luck? Managers like the mentioned bank CEO, or someone who can rent them a house in the Hamptons because they have lived there for generations? An intellectual who has never really worked, or a wealthy rapper who didn't finish high school?
I think Western society has been undergoing a transition between two different class systems. (Marxists would surely connect this with the economic transitions from feudalism to mercantilism to early capitalism to late capitalism.)
In the mediaeval class system, class was determined by social status which was predominantly inherited, and money alone was not enough to move from the bottom to the top. A person born poor might acquire great wealth, but they would still be locked out of the nobility/aristocracy, unless the monarch deigned to ennoble them. An impoverished baron socially outranked the far wealthier merchant who was born into poverty and worked/lucked their way out of it.
In the late capitalist class system–all that really matters is your net worth. Everything else is secondary. Who cares who your parents were or where you come from once you have a billion dollars to your name – and if a billionaire is excluded socially, it is very likely due to something about their individual behaviour (see e.g Kanye–although I suppose he's an ex-billionaire now), rather than their family background in itself.
The transition between the two systems has been ongoing; it still hasn't completely finished, but we've moved a lot closer to the late capitalist system, and a lot further away from the mediaeval system, than we were 50 or 100 years ago. I don't think the transition proceeds at the same rate in every country either – I think the UK retains more of the old class system than most other places (although even in the UK it is a lot weaker than it used to be); it also arguably retains some strength in the northeastern US, although not to the same extent as the UK.
My point is that different people look up (or down) to different people by different criteria: "net worth" interests competitive capitalist adventurers, "who your parents were or where you come from" remains a high priority when someone is wealthy enough for their lifestyle.
I certainly find it plausible that if A and B are of roughly similar wealth, but A was born into wealth whereas B lucked/worked/married into it, A might see that as a reason to look down on B.
However, I suspect if A was born into $100 million and B lucked/worked/etc into $100 billion, then all else being equal, I doubt A would look down on B in the same way. I expect they'd more likely view B with envy, as a potential business opportunity for themselves, as a friendship which might give them access to things they themselves can't afford, than as a social inferior. When the gap in wealth becomes big enough, it tends to drown out all the other factors.
The huge class divides are not between retail workers, tradesmen and software developers, the divide is between C-suite executives / old money, and... everyone else who has to work for a living.
As a tech worker, I have far more in common lifestyle-wise with a schoolteacher than I do with the SVP of Engineering in my own company.
In the US, working class tends to mean people in food service, retail sales, low-skill manual labor, people relying on gig work, and some very low-level white-collar workers like secretaries. Upper class are basically the very few people for whom work is optional. F500 CEOs, SVPs, billionaire investors, and so on. Their existing wealth grows at a rate that can sustain their and their family's standard of living indefinitely.
The rest is middle class, a very wide range from schoolteachers, to skilled tradesmen, to engineers, to university professors, to small business owners, to doctors and so on.
My point is that people are nit-picking when they say things like "Oh, but doctors are upper middle class and teachers are lower middle class and engineers are lower upper middle class and on and on and on. Distinction without a meaningful difference.
I think traditional concepts of social class count for a lot less in the UK of 2023 than they did in the UK of 1973. But wealth counts for just as much, even more.
Were Rishi Sunak's parents "upper class"? And yet, he'd surely be a far more valuable social connection to have than Baron Forgettable who happens to be the King's fifth cousin. And I think that will remain true even when his prime ministership is over.
The reason they're used more is because there is a very clear distinction between groups even at high levels of wealth due to the need to socially signal. This is what causes CEOs to flip out that an analyst is trying to casually talk to them at a non-work event as if they are equals.
This is class dynamics in action, it's not all about the working class vs upper class, but how these different classes interact internally and externally.
Upper vs working the most important divide (IMHO), but not the only one.
But feeling like you have better opinions or thought deeper about subjects than others or that you know "how it really is", or that you're a better driver or whatever are other common ways. Whatever you feel like you are good at, or have a lot of, you will be tempted to feel superior about.
Fighting these thoughts is virtuous in my opinion. Pretending that only X type of people do it (rich or whatever) is not virtuous in my opinion.
These two classes have largely contradictory interests. People who own companies want to cut their costs, and therefore they want to lower wages, give lower benefits, less time off, and so on. Workers want the exact opposite of that.
People such as CEOs constitute a labour aristocracy where their interests largely align with the interests of large capitalists and they own some capital of their own.
If capital gains hand someone 300k a year, they aren't quite workers, but they aren't playing the same game as someone who is still playing the accumulation game. It's the best trick the late 20th century played: Defined contribution workers are all also capitalists, just like everyone relying on an ever more valuable house.
An actual capitalist makes a living by using their capital as the primary vehicle to create further wealth for themselves and to sustain their lifestyle.
Again, the key distinction is in terms of class interests. What sort of social policies would be of interest to each type of individual is the question.
I'd bet anything this young person is used to having his family name make him welcome at any table he wishes to join, even in the Hamptons. He's on the well-worn path through a brief stint as a junior analyst before he's running some bank or hedge fund somewhere and the CEO of GS hesitates to approach his table.
This isn't the action of someone either boldly or naively misunderstanding his place. This is the action of someone who has grown up knowing his place is wherever he wishes it to be.
Do people really think the "middle class" is dead? I feel middle class is an apt descriptor for someone who is living comfortably but also still needs to work to maintain their lifestyle.
When someone acts as entitled to be where they are and do what they do as that junior analyst to that CEO, it's because their life experience so far has told them, consistently, that they have every right to. It even mentions that he points out his other associates.
He's acting like he's meeting someone who's, at best, an equal, because from his perspective, he is.
I doubt it. Companies that try to hire pedigree know that they are hiring from the same class. The disdain is shock from a junior not working 20 hour days and sleeping under the desk.
Have you ever heard the term "1% of the 1%"?
Or, to put that another way: if the CEO can't use "come eat with me at $place" as a way to say to investors and other CEOs that he's "one of them" and can be let in on the backchannel conversations, then why is he even eating there? It's expensive and the service is awful! He'd much rather not! Now he needs to find a new place to use to signal that!
In Middle Ages, this separation was based on ownership of land and societal structure which soon started being formalised in (both religious and secular) laws. Today, money has the same purpose (being a measure and store of wealth).
If the answer is no then it's 100% a class thing
Musk buying Twitter was the best thing to happen to the work culture of Tesla employees.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_M._Solomon
In fact, almost his entire track history was during COVID.. in a time that the company he runs has had some headline-grabbing losses in their consumer division.
So I think its fair to say he should focus on his own productivity here first.
The scene is notorious for it. It's really not hard to find vids of DJs dancing, pointing, posing, and poking uselessly at a mixer which is obviously just there for the look.
A "live set" typically involves the performer playing synths and programming the drums live. There are no record players, no pre-recorded tracks, everything is played live on the fly. Example: https://youtu.be/cVFzblT5VPE?t=4177 (a daytime one so you can see the gear)
With a "DJ set", the DJ is playing two or more tracks, beatmatching them and mixing them together, transitioning from one track to the next. This still takes a lot of skill. If you see two or more turntables or media players and a mixer in the middle, that's a DJ set. Often the DJ brings their tracks to the venue loaded on a USB stick and plugs it into the media player. Just because there's a USB stick present doesn't mean the DJ set was pre-recorded. Example: https://youtu.be/Ubyd98XV5C0?t=1018
I've never seen him perform but a DJ set ranges from people who just hit the play button and follow a recipe (e.g. Paris Hilton) to very technical mixing (e.g. Maceo Plex). A live set is substantially more challenging (and why few do it) but would be strong support he's not having his released tracks ghost produced.
Either way, good for him in my opinion. I also like mixing as a creative outlet but am terrible at it. If I was worth 9 figures I'd probably get a ghost producer to help me out and enjoy the experience of DJing.
David Solomon only really pitches himself as a hobbyist anyway so I don't think there's anything misleading/shameful about it if he is in fact just getting everything ghost produced and doing a 'lite' mixing DJ set live. There are plenty of full-time "professional" DJs who do the same thing.
If anyone wants some house music to chill to: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7s7In5PLSY_Z1aUMHb2wyw
“His Spotify profile has 550,000 monthly listeners with his debut single garnering 8 million listens.”
It varies but this list is showing several people at close to 1$/year per monthly listener. https://www.internetdj.com/top-djs
Most people come up through the ranks and you can bet the CEO was one time an analyst with a demanding boss. After decades of work he made it to boss. You see this everywhere where you move up the ranks and things get better. That's the apprentice deal for all of history.
Part of his compensation is relative flexibility although I'm almost certain c suite often work a lot more and have higher demands than junior employees.
If you're very valuable to the firm (e.g. CEO) you can get away with more stuff. It's the natural order of things. I don't really see any other way around it apart from a dehumanizing process to treat everyone exactly the same regardless of capabilities
That's like saying all junior-level employees MUST carry a book on top of their heads all the time, and only C-Level executives get to skip that. If you give someone flexibility, you are not taking anything away from other people, so not giving it is only an unnecessary punishment for junior level employees.
After you've been there a while, learned more and are more effective at your job, you're more likely to get the benefit of the doubt but even that has limits.
Why are we pretending like this is all weird? New or junior employees need a lot of handholding to ramp up and it's inappropriate that they just get the same consideration when compared to someone that's been there longer than the analyst has been alive. Have you guys ever worked a normal job before?
I've had co-workers in these situations for a long time. In theory there is no difference. But then...
- suddenly you can barely hear someone on a conference call because they are on a 4G-tether on a beach,
- or because there are tons of bar sounds in the background on a call
- or you have a production issue but cant get the person to screen-share because they are on low-bandwidth
I even had individuals who would block their entire calendar on WFH days and only take meetings on in-office days.
The problem is with those who abuse privileges, not with those who are honest.
Who cares if employee works at the beach?
You need to provide value not appearance of value.
I'm sure there are cases there it doesnt matter, but I was mentioning cases where teams need to work with each other and are paid to work with each other. I specifically mentioned Production Support. How can production support meetings "wait until they are back at the office?" From my standpoint, it doesnt matter where they are (home or office) but if they have no connectivity and cannot jump into troubleshooting meetings during business hours, i'm not sure how this works for numerous situations.
Through my career, i've been on the hot-seat as live applications have gone down. Imagine a DB is down or a pipeline is broken, and my DBA co-worker says "sure, lets take it up on Monday when I'm back". Note, I have no admin rights to the DB.
I had a k8s cluster run out of disk space. I had no admin rights to fix this. If the k8s admin decided he could take the meeting a day or days later, it would be a total disaster.
We're assuming you even read the article.
It clearly says "how the underling walked up at a restaurant, introduced himself and pointed to associates with him"
i.e. it was more than 1 person. Maybe they are doing face-to-face training? Are you saying that's ineffective?
> New or junior employees need a lot of handholding to ramp up
That's exactly what's happening. Why are you assuming it's not?
And of the CEO - was he meeting a client, the board, or simply out to lunch by himself or with family/friends/etc. The article is silent on this topic.
Many of these things are about rite of passage, and people who have gone thru the rites want others to not skip.
It can also be about a power-dynamic, where flexibility isnt given because imposed inflexibility is a power lever.
Executives have not been promoted into their jobs since the 50s.
Lmao. I'm no where near C-Suite but I've also never worked as hard as I did as an intern/junior engineer. Moving up often means working less hard.
> I don't really see any other way around it apart from a dehumanizing process to treat everyone exactly the same regardless of capabilities
This post is about WFH, not treating everyone the same regardless of capabilities. Those are such different things that I'm convinced you must be arguing in bad faith.
That’s not populist at all. It’s just another example of the white collar class enjoying the benefits of technology and globalization while everyone else gets left behind: https://www.epi.org/blog/wage-inequality-continued-to-increa....
Before the pandemic, I already made a lot more money (as a lawyer) than my middle class neighbors. Now I also get to work from home three days a week, and get a lot more quality time with my kids, while they have to go to work every day because their jobs aren’t knowledge work.
Obviously, management versus other white collar workers is one class dividing line that exists. But work from home is a good example if the fact that on many important dimensions, such as work conditions and generational mobility,[1] those groups are in the same class.
[1] CEOs are obviously richer than say accountants of engineers. But in the US, CEOs largely come from the class of these white collar professionals. In that sense, they’re in the same class as most other societies understand the concept.
That said, some COVID era stats showed 50% of working population doing at least 1 day remote.. and 50% is pretty much right in the middle of middle class and fairly populist-ish?
Something like 30%+ are still remote/hybrid today in 2023, so this isn't precisely an elite-only thing ..
There's a lot more to it than that.
WFH has been a godsend for a millions of people who work full-time, but are also poor.
I drove for Uber for a while when I was between jobs. The majority of the people I carted around were people who thought Uber was a godsend because they were too poor to save for a car, and Uber allowed them to have a job that didn't involve manual or skilled labor they couldn't perform. People like call center operators, and medical coders (which is not the same thing as computer coding), and other jobs that aren't suitable for machines, and often done in a cube farm.
The pandemic sent all those people into WFH, and many of their companies found that the price of equipping their people with a laptop and headset was cheaper than paying rent on cubical space.
Now those working poor can put the expense of Uber into saving for a car, or buying clothes for their children, or any of the assorted other things that people need every day.
For millions of people, WFH is a helping hand out of poverty.
Working from home means a parent can be home when their kids are home, available if they need to be picked up from school, and can just generally be more present for their kids. This is all especially helpful for single parents. They can't not work but day care costs keep the family destitute unless that parent makes very good money.
They may have some policy disagreements—but even those are often theoretical. How many professionals who favor universal healthcare are in the 45% of employed Americans who are “very satisfied” with their own health insurance? https://www.pacificresearch.org/americans-are-overwhelmingly.... But fundamentally, they benefit from the highly financialized, globalized economy. Their human capital mostly insulates them from labor competition, and they reap the benefits of cheap foreign products and cheap services provided by non-unionized workers.
There’s no benefit to making everyone go to the office/job just because some people cannot do their jobs without that.
So if I can jockey my keyboard while sitting in my chair at home instead of taking the subway to do it while sitting in my employer's, that's a tiny bit more space for the guy who actually needs to go somewhere and work in person.
For a little while. Until the bus company decides not enough people are riding anf the 1/15 minutes bus becomes the 1/hour bus :/
With all due respect - so what? This seems like crab in a bucket mentality, just because some of us crabs managed to climb to the top of the bucket, we deserve to be pulled down because of some warped view of fairness? We should actually be trying to pull the rest of them out with us.
The wages versus capital distinction overlooks the nature of modern businesses, where ownership is diffuse, and businesses are run by a vast class of skilled professionals. For example, Tim Cook owns just 0.02% of Apple stock, but he runs the company. Many executives below him have tremendous power. Individual engineers can have a major impact on the direction of the whole business. Most importantly, the executive roles are typically filled from that same class of people.
These people aren’t Steve Jobs in terms of their ownership interest in the company, but they’re not Apple Store workers either. Their self interest is fundamentally more aligned with those of the capitalists than with the interests of labor.
Each step is just a small increment worse. But when you go from remote back to the worst level, it's jarring.
Objectively, transit has also gotten worse in some cities (NYC, DC) since COVID and still not recovered. So we are also returning to something worse than where we left it!
https://gothamist.com/news/lirr-riders-still-miffed-over-jam...
https://nypost.com/2023/03/06/hell-on-wheels-bklyn-shuttles-...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/09/22/met...
NYC they are running fewer trains so even if overall ridership is down, the trains are as crowded or more crowded than ever. Further in NYC due to homeless/migrant population growth falling through the cracks, the subway ends up being the shelter of last resort. Finally violent crime on the subway increased substantially over covid, and while down is still not at 2019 levels. So while waiting longer for a train, you are more likely to be dealing with a general sense of crime/disorder/etc.
I found this to be a depressing quality of life trajectory my coworkers were on when I worked in NYC. It was fun in my 20s without kids, but after that, it seems miserable.
Exactly. I've been working 100% from home since 2017 (3 years before covid). I'd rather take a 50% paycut than go back to the office.
Don't get me wrong. I did enjoy my life when I lived 15 min walk /5 min on a bike, from my job in a city. Before I got that job and I had to commute for 20 min I enjoyed it too.
But WFH beats that by a mile. I can live wherever I want (where cost of living is a lot cheaper than central London). I can just go down to my kitchen and make myself proper food any time (although I still miss certain of my favourite restaurants). And most importantly, I get a lot more time to myself and I'm much more effective at my work.
There is no chance in hell people like me will "go back to the office". Furthermore, companies that recognised the benefits early are reaping the benefits. Even just one. Having an order of magnitude larger talent pool by not limiting themselves to people from one place.
In today's marker that is characterised by permanent skilled labour shortage I can't imagine stupidest way to shoot ones company in the foot than trying to force people to "get back to the office".
People should stop saying this. Otherwise it will soon be the standard to take a serious paycut for WFH. .
Although most people don't work in San Francisco with inflated salaries so I'd still rather not make this the norm.
Previously I was priced out of the housing market, renting a small basement suite.
Now I own a large detached home, and thanks to the rental suite, spending less each month than I did before.
And this is all before you consider the equity myself and my tenant have paid down, or even any home appreciation. It's effectively doubled my TC since I moved.
on the Dir level? fine, different story, and being present to have official off the record chats may be required.
Just today I'm seeing stories about how the UPS truck drivers have managed to negotiate themselves pay and benefits up to $170,000/year. Would you rather make $150,000 a year at your desk at home, or $170,000/year schlepping packages for UPS?
If your answer is "$150K," you're taking a pay cut for a better work environment. Does that make you a sucker? No? Well, that's what WFH is about. If you have to leave your current job and find another one to make it happen, it could make sense as long as your paycheck and future prospects aren't too badly hurt. (And assuming you want to WFH, of course, which many people will not.)
I dunno, 7 is a lot of numbers. Work for 5 years, and be close to retirement. Definitely have my house/car and even a few luxury projects paid off in that time. I could work part time/contracts and let the rest of the money gather interest.
But I suppose you're basing this on reality, not a true ultimatum.
Aside from saving them rent on the office space, you should be able to expense several office-supply things that they would have provided previously. Office chair and desk, internet bill (pro-rated by usage), maybe printer ink.
Let's not get carried away. Back then you were paying for your own transportation costs and your commute time. Which is more valuable? Commuting to work every day to enjoy free office supplies and coffee, or WFH but paying for your own chair and desk?
I'd take the latter any day of the week as the chair & desk is a one time cost anyway and lasts 10+ years.
meanwhile, i bought a standing desk and it's mine, and it'll go to my next house and next job.
they can drop ship me a laptop and docking station, and if they wanna be nice throw me a couple hundred as a "office stiped", which would be way cheaper than buying business grade furniture.
My company has spent the last 8 months trying to explain why they want us back in the office for hybrid work. At first it was, "mentoring young staff." And lately it is, "It doesn't look great to potential clients when they visit an office and the office is empty." This new argument sounds like a BD edge case.
It seems to entirely be senior leaders and senior empty nesters pushing for this, while everyone else is not in favor.
In my latest performance review, my manager actually told he and other managers were being forced to ask the question "Do you consider WFH as part of your compensation" by HR/upper management to all his reports (including me).
I'm convinced this is in preparation to either lower salaries, or artificially lowering them by giving lower raises/bonuses to those who work from home since they are starting to call people back to office who aren't remote by title. Most people are back up to 3-days a week, even though 90% of them are very unhappy. I'm fully remote hence why he asked me this question and anyone else who is designated full remote.
Remote work was always an excuse to pay less, much to my chagrin. The fact is that as remote work became more popular, with the increase in positions, pay has actually increased. I'm not surprised that more people are seeing pushback on in the office vs remote compensation as this has been the standard play for years.
I find it doubly frustrating since remote employees are less of a cost sink due to less office space and all the costs that come with it. Remote employees are the most efficient type of employees from that perspective and so it always felt like such a flimsy excuse.
My suggestion is push back on any perceived pay gap between in office and remote work. The work done is at parity (if not more so due to efficiencies of remote work) and so there is no valid excuse to pay less.
Would be nice to see some level of turnabout for everyone that banded together to weather the storm, though.
However - I think some of the CEO class defenders shouldn't delude themselves as to why these people have 5 homes. It is not because they take a paltry 15 days paid time off per year in which they use those homes. They have the flexibility to dictate their schedule, and they use that flexibility to be where they want, when they want.
At one fund I worked they Dual-HQd NYC & Miami (plus they all keep a Greenwich footprint) so that some of the execs could sleep outside NY State for statutory 183 days/year and avoid NYS/NYC 10-15% income tax on high earners. Plus they maintained their country homes outside the city.
If you make $5M/year, the 2nd/3rd/4th home start to pay for themselves with those economics.
Sleep in Greenwich Friday to Tuesday. Monday work from CT office. Blade to midtown office Tuesday AM. Sleep in your condo Tuesday/Wednesday and then back to Greenwich Thursday night to work remote Friday. Next thing you know you're in Manhattan for a paltry 2 nights/week, maybe not even every week if you go do a Miami 2 weeks/month, or for majority of winter, etc.
A large company can probably do that with smaller offices or with setting up the coworking spaces themselves and renting the spaces left without occupants.
The commute is not bad when they are localized due to the team members having worked together in the past.
You never have to move to the exurbs though :)
Most of our C-Suite doesn't live near an office. Or, to be specific WE MOVED HQ to where they wanted to live.
We have other VPs and whatnot who live not near an office, or have winter/summer homes they go back and forth from.
Meanwhile our mandatory "3 days a week in the office" starts September.
The guys who get to choose the office locations happen to choose ones that are good for the locations of their home(s). Also, a reminder that C-suite guys that have multiple homes do in fact actually use those multiple homes.
How do they do so? They have flexibility!
There were always times I needed to be present in person and I never scoffed at those. What I found recently, is employers are trying to shift from one extreme (fully remote) to the other. I hope we land back in the middle because I'm happiest when no one tells me what to do. I want to be treated like an adult and measured on merit and performance, not physical attendance.
One remote work hater I really like to listen to is Scott Galloway, that keeps on harping that remote work is horrible but doesn't even live in the same country where he's running his business anymore. Flexibility for me but not for thee.
We'll see what happens in 20 years. But my money is on a resurgence of the rural village and a lot of empty office towers.
This is a key part of the discussion.
Pre-covid, I spent ~90 minutes one way to get to the office (this included a transfer from train to subway + 10 minute walk) and used to do it every day. At the time, I thought nothing of it since it was time to read/write code/watch a movie etc.
Now, I find it hard to imagine I spent ~3 hours/day commuting but part of me also misses the time to myself but it's balanced out by seeing the kids more etc.
Why on Earth would you accept an office attached to your home?! Seems like the worst of all options...
During covid having a place I can shut the door on at the end of the day, was amazing. I watched friends work from kitchen tables, while I had my own office in the garden.
For a while it did 'spoil' it as a playroom/fun room - but I pretty quickly learnt to make it work for me.
Having an office attached to your house is amazing (and is the largest drag for me returning to the office).
But I've been looking for work for 4 months, and it's a hard line to hold.
Fully remote jobs have gotten scarcer, and there's more competition for them thanks to this year's layoffs.
I.e., when the two of you are finally home alone and awake, because school is in session.
I suspect for some marriages, WFH has been a real blessing.
He used it to his advantage to show his face in the office, but rarely ever put in a full day. So sure he might show up on reports as being a 2-3x/week attender while others were doing 0-1, but many of those were morning-only, afternoon-only, or drop-ins for an in-person meeting of importance. Plus the occasional Friday solitude getaway to the empty office.
To his credit he really put no RTO pressure on us relative to his management chain.
I really don’t get when people defend WFH as a Holy Grail and complain that are catalogued as lazy or freeloaders, only to become fierce critics and cataloging anyone who prefers going to the office as boot-lickers or mediocre middle-management (not your post SteveBK123, but a common attitude across this type of thread)
Everyone has different circumstances, different jobs, and our minds work differently. Let’s live and let live.
That said, five minutes means one could come home for lunch.
But anyway, five minute walk to work is highly unlikely; a lot of people (most? citation needed?) have a commute to work, either driving or public transit. I'd rather have a nice private office or small team room than a big open and loud office space.
Long time ago I used to rent a room in a shared house 5 min walk from work. My housemates were all cool people, but working on a laptop sitting next to the bed I slept in every night would e far worse for me than just going to the office. But this was decades ago. I can understand why someone in such position would prefer an office.
But if you can have a house, and you're mid/senior in your role there is nothing better than wfh.
Also I've recently noticed a disturbing trend. Companies advertising 100% remote work, then you go through the whole recruitment process and at the very end they tell you. BTW, it's not 100% wfh. You gotta come to the office 1 day per month (sometimes even 1 per week). Anyone looking for real wfh job should be aware of such tricks to nip them in the bud early on.
This would have been much more uncomfortable in a smaller 2BR apartment and almost unmanageable in any space smaller than that.
Given my space, my WFH desk is much crappier and smaller than my personal one, but still so much better than losing my life commuting.
It's much easier for some to have a complete separation of work and home spaces. Also a change of scenery in the morning and getting to move a bit before starting to work is nice.
If you work 5 mins from your home you can just walk there for lunch. No need to bag a lunch, no?
But at home I have side projects or learning projects. I get the 3 hours back and can spread them throughout the day. One hour in the morning, another one when I'm bored or tired of the job etc. If I go to the office it's nothing but a rather unappealing job domain and nothing else. Too tired in the evening to learn anything anymore, too stressed and still sleepy in the morning as well.
So fuck the office, they'd have to pay me 50% more to compensate for the time lost in transit and I would still not take it.
In mine I have music playing, I have a guitar for when I need to stop thinking about a problem, I have a bookshelf of books I love, I have a plant I care for, I have my own whiteboard, I have artwork, I have a balance board, and (fortunately) I have an amazing view. When I need a break, I can close my door to read, watch something, call a friend, or take a nap.
Now I don’t find myself watching videos, napping, or playing guitar all that often, but I don’t when I’m working from home either.
>> In mine I have music playing, I have a guitar for when I need to stop thinking about a problem
I had a chessboard in my office at one time. It was basically a decoration, I think it was a secret santa gift or something, and it was never used until another guy and I started playing once every other week or so, at lunch.
One day, over lunch, we were playing a game (and eating at the same table), and something $PRODUCTION crashed. Someone came into ask about the problem, we stopped what we were doing, and fixed it.
Sometime after that, something else crashed, and then it became, "All they are doing in there is playing chess, no wonder x isn't working!".
I took the chessboard home.
I can see plenty of people who are enjoying WFH, but would be willing to return to the office if they no longer had to work in a cube farm, but could have their own private office, that they could decorate to their taste, and where they could play their own music. And, perhaps most importantly, have a door that they could keep closed so that if anyone wants to interrupt them, they actually have to knock first.
As someone who has done a 30-minute commute to a cube farm, a 45-minute and a 5-minute commute to a private office, and WFH, there's basically no reasonable amount of money you could pay me to go back to a cube farm, but if I didn't have specific personal reasons for wanting to remain fully remote, I would be very willing to consider another job in a private office.
A cube farm is massively preferable to open offices. I never want to go back to working in an office but I especially never want to go back to an open office. The mixture of seeming too available, loud people all over the place, zero privacy, etc were revolting to me.
In my experience with offices at a couple of different companies (of much different sizes), the social convention was door open unless you were on a private call/meeting or really needed to go heads down on something. It would actually have been considered rude to knock on the door because they door would obviously not have been closed unless there was a good reason.
A lot of people seem to imagine that offices mean you shut the door and don't interact with anyone and that's never been my experience.
Frankly, I consider the expectation of constant availability to be another abusive part of work culture, very closely related to the "everyone must return to the office so I can see for myself that they are in their seats (which means they must be working)" mindset. Let people keep their doors closed to promote focus.
Or those with distractions at home. They can WFS, but I can see them being ok returning to an official office.
i still go only once a week.
why? because i have more comfort, more silence and, most important, more privacy, at home.
I could do an office again though if it weren’t too far from home. Working from home can be strangely lonely, maybe I should just be better about organizing co-working with friends virtually or in person.
Anyway, I'm thinking more about city dwellers who generally live in apartments.
That’s a lifestyle that makes significantly less sense for remote workers in the long run though.
This is the original one I saw when I considering doing it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pABvTWSxOes
One more DIY with fabric and rock wool: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPEouyiEt3Q
I had to wade through a lot of conflicting advice when I did it.
I suspect a big factor is that most people do only a handful of implementations, and might overgeneralize the lessons they draw.
Also, for a given structure and environment, most people can only afford to try 1-2 soundproofing approaches (wall structure, ventilation, etc.) So it's hard to know if they picked a good point in the tradeoffs space.
I think the sweet spot is at most 2-3 people in a space. That could work well collaboratively if they do the same thing but not if there are going to be lots of conflicting meetings.
I think I would be more amenable to working at an office if the experience felt like more than being in a high school computer lab. "Just wear headphones", imo, is not an adequate response to complaints of the office being noisy. Want me to stay in the office longer? Uninstall that piece of shit kombucha tap or sparkling water dispenser (neither of which are even operational most of the time) and replace it with another fridge so I don't have to cram my food into the one fridge shared by the entire building. Make an adequate number of power outlets available. Don't provide free snacks and then eliminate them to cut costs. If I have a designated spot, do your best not to move me around every few months.
Yet every office I have worked in embodies various failures that diminish the experience, making it hard to deny that working at home can be a lot better for many people. How am I supposed to feel dignity in my line of work as a senior engineer when I don't even get my own cubicle; meanwhile, people I know who make a third of my salary get their own cubes! And these companies are wondering why their employees would rather build their own private office at home? Are you kidding me?
I don't even need a corner office with a door that closes and a personal secretary. Just give me something more than what I would get working out of a Starbucks, and allow me to feel like the professional I am, as opposed to a replaceable cog, which is everything the modern tech workplaces symbolizes.
At my current job, there's something ironic about that. The people who never come back to the office despite being allowed to are also the people who live the closest to the office. (We have a big office that allows people to come back but is totally optional. Hotel desks for the entire office basically.) I asked one of them why he doesn't come in and he told me, "The reason I moved so close to the office in the first place is so I can minimize my commute. Now that I don't have to, why would I do the commute at all?"
I think some people are just completely dead set against commuting or even working from an office. Another coworker told me, "Do you know how great this is? I can do my laundry in between meetings."
From my experience, my employer's current situation is probably the most accommodating policy. If you want to work in an office, you can. If you don't, you don't have to. I do have coworkers who are actually suffering a bit from lack of interaction with other people but I think those people are starting to trickle back into the office for no other reason than for the socialization and interaction.
Since I live close to it, I never even though about doing this. And of course, the people that live the furthest away get the most value out of it. So, yeah, it's probably a very strong correlation, and not only for negative reasons.
So your office is crappy?
Similar story for my office. It's very close, but the facilities people made it terrible to work from. Why go in when I would get half as much work done?
At home I'm either working or not working. I don't have to wear my public face. Wearing a public face is, if not tiring, at least irritating, like a mild itch you're not allowed to scratch, even though you could, but you shouldn't.
Didn't mind working in the office, it was nice enough, coworkers are all friendly.
But having to live anywhere near my office in a high COL area means I was priced out of affording even a 500 square foot apartment. Going remote meant that same salary bought me a newly built detached 6 bedroom house.
I didn't mind the office, I minded being a poor renter instead of upper middle class. Office inconveniences pale in comparison.
WFH for 2012-2023 here.
With our first home purchase in 2018 being on the smaller size, and the introduction of our first child to the family in 2021, I started keeping an eye on nearby options.
In March of 2023, a perfect little spot opened up that could support me and another employee in the same town. Pitched it to our small company, and now I have a dedicated office that is a 4 minute walk away.
Cannot stress enough how impactful those few minutes are (or more, if I need to decompress more than normal) are for separation of concern between home life and work, especially with young children in the picture.
Still get to enjoy lunch with stay-at-home wife and kiddo almost everyday.
It also shares property with a great pizzeria and one of the best taproom/bottleshops in town, which is a great perk beyond my waistline and liver... looking forward to taking the new bike to the nearby bike trail when it isn't 110° everyday.
I'd like to do this as well.
It is a rather unique build done by a lawyer-turned-metalworks artist a little more than a decade ago. Multiple units with adjoining walls, each with a private patio, minisplits, and a rather raw aesthetic. Very high ceilings, plenty of outlets of various voltages/amperages available. Our neighbor makes bespoke cycling bags and such. Other tenants range from retail and services to private offices.
> and how did you pitch it?
The founder of the company lived here for many years, and paid for coworking access pre-COVID when it was still a startup (now general cloud/software consultancy for public health agencies and the like).
WFH and the vacation of many of our decent coworking spaces due to COVID took a toll on him, and moved to PHL about a year ago for a change of scenery / be closer to some of our larger clients.
With that context, it was pretty easy to pitch it as a physical "hub" for him when he visits family/friends, myself, and our other employee who lives in the same town. We still have a good physical location for our corporate entity, and the cost difference between 3x coworking offices at post-COVID rates was not too much for him to stomach.
> The other employee lived in the same town already?
Yes! We had become good acquaintances for a few years before COVID as he worked remotely for an organization in Ireland from the same coworking space.
When COVID hit, his team were among the first to be cut, and as his skills meant I would no longer be overextended between cloud and frontend, it was one of the easiest hires we've made to date.
Clean desk policy, no take-home printouts, clear whiteboards with confidencial information, etc…
I had a WFH employee who once burn himself at home while making coffee with his own coffee pot, and sue the company as he claimed was a job-related accident. We had to settle and pay him, or have Unions making a big fuzz.
There are all sort of people in the workplace, and policies try to accommodate not only CEO whims, but also to manage a crowd full of many different types of people.
Having worked DoD in the past, I can completely echo that it would be quite a challenge to explore something like this for many organizations.
> I had a WFH employee who once burn himself at home while making coffee with his own coffee pot, and sue the company as he claimed was a job-related accident. We had to settle and pay him, or have Unions making a big fuzz.
"This is why we can't have nice things," personified.
been remote since 2015. absolutely agree with this, even though I'm still remote. the only way I'd go back to the office is if it's close to that experience -- a 5-10 min walk away.
living close to a coffee shops, gyms, and other amenities meant that I did a "morning commute" to get coffee most mornings -- more expensive than petrol, but still cheaper overall compared to driving. multiple choices, so could hit the local as well as chain shops.
a gym and grocery store being nearby also meant that I could so an "evening commute" and workout, snag groceries, run errands, etc.
having young kids makes it great too... most of the time. it's nice to be able to walk upstairs and play with the wee one.
If companies want people back in the office when they could WFH instead, they're going to have to compensate them, time and costs, for the commute.
Apply marginal thinking the way economists do. People's propensity to return to the office falls on a spectrum ranging from 0 ( the people who are already back in their cubicles ) to 9 ( "You'll need a SWAT team to get me back to the office" ).
A 5 on that scale is a marginal worker. Provide an incentive for them to return, like a nice office, and they become a 4 and return to the office. Now give a nice office to a population of 1000 workers who are distributed evenly over the above spectrum. They all move down by 1, and about 1/10th of them return to the office.
Saying "People who like WFH will never want to return to the office" is only true of the 8's and 9's, not of the marginal worker. They are the ones who respond to incentives.
So yeah, it's almost 6PM, I'm at home and starving still because I was lazy to cook.
I think the reason is my team is fully remote for me. Not having to worry about food would be nice :)
Was working in DC on Capitol Hill. Had a 30 minute bike ride to work right down the center of the national mall. Had a private office half the size of my apartment with a really comfy couch and a few well worn armchairs. Coworkers brought their dogs and one liked to sit on my feet under the desk. Office was chock full of interesting people, activists, authors, photographers, lawmakers wealthy folks, connected folks. After a few hours working on the databases and maybe getting roped into some tech support in the Capitol building, the CEO would grab a beer from the keg which was the signal for the rest of us that the afternoon had become wet. Then I would meet up with friends for some kickball on the Mall, then swing back through the office after a few hours at the bar for a nightcap. Very occasionally I slept over on the couch but there was a shower in the office and I kept a few changes of clothes there so it was all good.
this core preference in environment and vibe is the main difference between the 2 camps. I was desperate to be in an office where there was a buzz of high energy and a go, go, go environment like skydivers jumping out of a plane. Would still prefer a private office though so get deep focus when necessary.
Not sure if its nature or nurture, since I grew up doing team sports year round.
I'd much rather just find another job entirely than come back to an office, and I imagine a lot of people feel the same. I think part of the problem is that a lot of companies don't really appreciate what people would be giving up, or that they see much less value in it than the people they're trying to convince.
You'd need to offer something pretty special just to compensate for the cost of the commute, let alone the time lost (which for a lot of people is significant).
While I do agree with your overall premise, having had offices at multiple roles over my career, it is a major improvement over cubicles and open office.
Having a space to work in complete, uninterrupted quiet is wonderful. The simple social signal of the door being opened or close implying availability to chat works great to balancing heads down time and chat with colleagues time. Have a white board of your own that you can stare at throughout the course of a project, that evolves with discussions has not be replicated yet either remote or in a shared space.
You can also get pretty wild with customizing an office for comfort. I used to know many people that brought their own lighting in, completely solving the problem of constant overhead fluorescence. And brewing your coffee the way you like it in your own space in the afternoon is very refreshing.
Even given all that I'm sure many people would still prefer remote work (I would at this point), but I can image a fairly large number of people that would be very interested in a set up like this. It also mean your home is completely work free again.
I actually enjoyed going to that office because it was very quiet and I didn't have a proper workspace at home. My commute was ~30mins with a motorcycle. Yes, sometimes the A/C or the lighting must be compromised with other coworkers, but that's still okay if you get to socialize in exchange.
The major aspect was obviously noise. But I also felt dignified in that office. It was not status like C-Suite offices, just feeling a nice environment instead of being crammed in a chicken coop.
In my time at Apple I had a real office with a real door for about half of my time. Of that only about half was an office I didn't have to share with someone else. The lone offices were the most productive I ever was while working there. I could close the door and go unbothered for hours. I turned off the lights and had my own lamp that was much more comfortable.
Sharing an office with coworkers wasn't bad on its face but it's difficult to focus if the other person is talking with someone else. It's all manageable but objectively worse than a single office. The open floor plan at Apple Park was just fucking horrible. Constant distractions all day. Sure you could collaborate but when trying to actually get work done it was in spite of a hundred visual and audible distractions. I'm sure I distracted others inadvertently as well.
A giant spaceship of a campus and they couldn't manage to give everyone a private space. Just the stupidest design for a building.
While spending more time at home may lead to a marginal increase in expenses for utilities, compared to the cost of commuting they would be a rounding error.
The other issue is that we're a lot more globally distributed now. The 9:00 I chose to go to today had nine other people in it. Three in India, one in the UK, one in BC, two in the midwest somewhere, and two permanent WFH. Meeting with these people is always going to mean putting on a headset and looking at a screen, no matter how diligent I am at getting in to the office every morning.
I hate open floorplans for working (fine if I'm walking around to get coffee or something). The biggest draw of WFH is that I don't have to put on headphones just to get some quiet time.
If I were to take a job downtown, my wife would have to get a different job, we'd have to pay for some level of child care, arrange transportation for school, drop various activities, buy a second car so I could drive to the train station (which comes with maintenance, insurance, registration, etc).
The amount of money that would make any of this worth it is not small. You'd have to cover the additional expenses and then write a big check on top to compensate for disrupting our way of life.
I worked for a company that gave everyone an office. Just long hallways of offices with floor to ceiling windows and a door. It was a startup that grew to 200 people and was the best job I've had, a large part due to the atmosphere, and part of that was the office setup.
When my current workplace shutdown the office for covid, they sent out an email asking for suggestions for a new office setup. I told them to make everyone offices. We have a huge open floor and it wouldn't take much effort, just money. Money they are planning to spend anyway. Instead they raised the height of cubicle walls, added a ton of glass (disease spread fear I guess), and gave everyone whiteboards and motorized standup desks.
Now on my required days in the office I am annoyed by the constant chatter and noises around me which I cannot escape even with headphones.
So no matter how nice a place it is, and how close to my house you put it, it's never going to be right on that good right point break in Oaxaca where I like to spend my winters and also at the AirBnB next to Green Lake where I can visit my friends and family in the summer.
It's also not in any of the other places I choose to set up shop at for a few months at a time to do my thing.
So it doesn't matter that it has free food, a masseuse, and is in a really cool neighborhood where I'd actually like to spend some time. I still don't want to commit to living there 50 weeks a year.
That's why I'm remote.
I'm more productive, I find new ways to make myself valuable in some of that free time whereas in the office I'd just be bored out of my skull instead because I had to keep my butt in a seat to make someone happy.
Fortunately my management is looking into downsizing leases and recouping savings instead of forcing people into the office. They've waffled a little about pulling people back in but they just aren't that serious about it in general.
I suggest you consider behavior on the margin. Despite the fact that there are lots of people vocal about how much they love/hate RTO, there are also people that are indifferent or slightly prefer one or the other. Improvements in office quality will meaningfully persuade some number of people on the margin.
It’s an open question how steep the curve is (ie how much office improvement required to persuade 1% of people to change their mind) but I think it’s myopic to just look at the partisans.
All that said, sure, there is a nontrivial percentage who you couldn’t change their minds with something like a dedicated office. But I think your claim is too strong that it’s binary and all WFH likers will not be persuaded by this proposal.
That employers aren't jumping for joy that they can offer such a massive benefit for essentially free (if not save money themselves) is astounding.
Its not good for the environment, bad for my company and terrible for me.
It's clear, forcing a commute is an implicit paycut.
Disagree with caveats. A nice private office makes a world of difference. I'll do a lot (in time and/or money) to have a nice private office where I can actually work (which requires silence).
Working remotely is awesome but not literally from home. With a family, that's too distracting. Since the pandemic, I rent a small private office walking distance from home. It's a great arrangement, I'm very close to the house, can walk or bike there, private window office. But the downside is that it costs money (lease, utilities, internet). And for meetings I'm still stuck in a little zoom box.
If the company offered a nice private office, I'd take that. I'd save the costs and I could have a silent private space to work but still be able to step outside and have meetings in person. The tradeoff is a longer commute but as long as it's not too horrible, I'd take it.
My office is a 20 (tarmac) - 25 (forest) minutes bike ride. I don't have any problem working from home but if the weather isn't too bad I go to the office regulary - even if I sit there in the same remote meetings all day as I do at home. For me the change of the scenery and the "off" time by doing the commute are worth it.
Going to move out of range of an office for this company in a year. Thinking about joining a coworking space then for it.
I thought it was brilliant. Pack more people into a space, and make your distance to your nearest neighbor farther. Plus you naturally had a comfortable place to sit, 2 filing cabinets, and 2 spots for bookshelf, whiteboard, or whatever. And a lot more desk space than you'd expect.
I was always puzzled that nobody else ever tried that design.
Open offices < cubes < private offices
Personally, I will never again work in an open office setting, or even a "pod" setup. I've learned my lesson.
All of our desks were pushed together in the middle of the room. The _room_ itself would switch from chat mode to quiet mode.
Though I think the quietest member of the team would have preferred a solitary arraignment, I can only speak for myself.
The open office plan just might be #2 though. ;)
And then you need to talk to one of them, they pick up the phone in that room, not even walking out. Absolutely horrible.
Is that where this comes from?
I can fully understand why people dislike this kind of thing, but the fact that it shows up in multiple contexts suggests it probably does achieve what it’s aiming for.
I've worked not even with a decent chair.