Workers for whom remote work is an option have essentially no real demands placed on them other than fealty. They are not in a position to "revolt". Maybe a bit of job hopping as long as the economy stays good.
The theory of "revolt" isn't about workers for whom remote work is an option per se, it's about jobs/roles that could be remote but employers are dictating otherwise. Covid exposed that flexibility is possible but employers are now insisting otherwise. The friction from that disconnect certain has the potential to trigger pushback.
I honestly don't know. During last survey that senior mgmt is supposedly actually reading, there were clear prods from staff for full wfh and almost immediately afterwards we got a speech. You won't get as many opportunities when remote. Corporate America is going a different way. It is not about real estate.
I want Shiller to be right. I am just not sure we ( wfh supporters ) can effectively organize.
Sell all your stock in any company that is trying to force in-office. I guarantee you they are rapidly losing anyone vaguely competent, let alone top talent.
Rapid loss of talent is an exaggeration but the churn is real. What's likely to happen is that the churn in talent will allow smaller companies to grab remote engineers and actually compete with the large ones, while the large ones take 1 year to backfill each position in a VHCOL city that they are returning to.
If you’d like help unionizing to keep wfh as a right, email in profile. I have no economic incentive, I only want workers to have higher quality of life and agency. Empathy over income and wealth. Like a hacker, one must understand systems and then find their points of leverage to encourage desired outcomes.
NLRB is halfway toward Joy Silk doctrine in force after the last week or so.
Turns out people really don't like cities after all - as is being demonstrated when people have real choice. NYC tax deficit is over a billion now; just nuts!
It's not just the high cost that's bad about it, it's the utterly demoralizing nature of handing over thousands of dollars a month in rent and not getting anything out of it in the long run. Is it any wonder people would want to move somewhere much cheaper and turn those thousands of dollars into equity, eventually growing enough to own their own home?
I would love to leave the city, or move to a smaller, less expensive city, but I stay here because I grew up in a small town, and I want my children to have the opportunities that I didn't. Even with the Internet, I don't think they can truly get as many opportunities if they can't surround themselves with peers with similar interests, and I think the best place to do that is in large cities.
That's a pretty bad faith reading of what I said. If my children want to move to the country after they leave home, I'm all for it. Like I said, I've experienced both, I see the values in both.
My partner and I choose cities over suburban or rural areas largely because:
- diversity (you name it, you can find it, also really important if you're at all queer)
- lots more culture (museums, subcultures, music shows, food, etc.)
- way less car dependent
- lots more opportunity and choice (employers, schools, partners, friends, etc.)
- way, way less religiosity
There are some things I envy about living in a less urban area, mainly around stuff like sustainable living. We could have a big garden, we could get a lot of energy from solar panels or drill a well, stuff like that. And yeah, pollution from cars in urban areas is pretty bad. Even so, the tradeoff isn't really close for us.
I will also say something about space. I've lived in both McMansions and shoebox Manhattan apartments (our current place in Amsterdam is ~480 sq. ft.) I don't personally miss the space at all. There are some specific things I miss, wouldn't mind a little space outside to hose things off is the big one but also it can be nice to have a place big enough you can get away from everyone, but especially in the US people think they need way, way more space than they really do.
Most things about smaller spaces are a lot better, but in particular they're a lot more sustainable. There are huge energy savings to be had by just not having as big a space to heat/cool/condition.
Your experience may differ, but I find large cities to basically resemble a collection of small cities (neighborhoods) stuck together.
I don't find myself leaving my own neighborhood often because it's a pain to do so and my neighborhood has everything I need already.
So unless you spend a lot of time doing cross city transit (which normally isn't quick and easy), the benefit of a large city over a small one is marginal imo.
I love living in the City. Only problem is high rents.
I've been thinking of moving to Vienna that has a lot of socialized housing and other housing programs to keep prices affordable.
Cities with good public infrastructure are pretty nice for young-middle aged people I would say. It's just not something that exists in America. I've been to NYC, it was not at all a city I would put on my top list of cities I'd like to live in.
I think it's better to think of what cities can be when you think of Europe, cities in Spain, Germany, Denmark, Switzerland, etc. these are extremely comfortable places to live in.
We need a better kind of rent control like LVT (which doesn't control rent, but disincentivizes parasitic landlords) and a better kind of public housing (like Singapore's HDB, which is self supporting).
The US does both of these really poorly and then acts surprised when they don't work.
House prices are a good proxy for where people want to live. And turns out they want to live in New York, Seattle, San Francisco. If they want more space they move to cities like Austin or Phoenix.
1/3 of my network is not going back to the office with their current employer. They got rid of their leases and invested in infrastructure to support remote work for the next decade.
Another 1/3 are a mix of wfh and hybrid, with the wfh group already being notified they should expect to be hybrid in the near feature (my wife included).
The last group was already given the order to return to office or get fired, some did but some remain defiant, this includes a couple of friends from Amazon thousands of miles from Seattle who are expecting to be axed any day now, although it may never happen.
So I believe at the end about half of my network will be wfh permanently.
That seems to me like a critical mass to trigger a "revolution".
How could anyone stay at their current job having to commute to an office knowing half of the people they know don't do that?
This is like being ok at your current job when they don't offer something as basic as health insurance or PTO.
I would be constantly looking for a new job that allows wfh and eventually I will find it.
> How could anyone stay at their current job having to commute
I expect lower market rates for remote work, because it's harder to differentiate ourselves from anyone else in nearby timezones. If RTO is the way to continue Bay Area comp, I will, as much as I may complain about open plan desks.
However that means you also have a lot more opportunities that better fit your skills and experience.
We should also not underestimate the value many people give to life quality.
I personally find commuting extremely stressful and unhealthy and there's no realistic amount of money anyone could offer me to drive 40-60 hours every month to go to an office.
Even if the money is good I would rather take a big pay cut and remove expenses, eat more at home, buy less clothes, downsize my home, etc.
Of course for many, particularly those jump starting their careers, this may not be an option as gaining experience and paying loans should be their number one priority.
1. Climate- the amount of energy we need and emission of SOx and NOx reduces drastically.
2. Brain Drain- The brain drain of talented, cultural people from small towns to cities leaves those towns in a poorer quality and skews cities with higher talent. People in those small towns suffer with the lack of talent and the absence of high spenders which harm the economy of these places.
3. Rent- Companies don't need to rent in cities and save huge amount of money that they can spend elsewhere. This also stops feeding the leech that is rich, (literally) rent-seeking land-owners.
4. Time- Collectively, if remote work is the trend, you save millions of man-hours per day due to lack of commute. From individual level, one can spend the time with family, read a book, learn a new skill or whatever.
5. Family- If you have a family, remote work is much greater for you. Especially if you have kids, a baby or someone ill or old to take care to.
If remote work does lead to people abandoning cities en masse, the climate is a huge loser. All of a sudden you have people who are moving to more remote places, who will likely be driving instead of using public transit, buying bigger homes with extra work rooms, and so on.
Instead of reversing the 1960s trend of suburban developments, wfh will only accelerate it. No climate concerned person would cheer that on.
The one good thing about remote work is that it does reduce business travel. Maybe that’s enough to make remote work climate neutral, I don’t know.
Home workers would be driving to their friends places, their relatives places, grocery stores, restaurants, etc.
Are you saying the majority of a person’s trips are work commutes, if they are not working from home? Because that seems heavily lifestyle based - that’s certainly not the case for me - and I would hope not the case for most as that sounds unhealthy.
People in cities consume to a much larger extent simply because they are richer. 50% of the world's population live in cities but they consume 70% of the world's resources.
> All of a sudden you have people who are moving to more remote places, who will likely be driving instead of using public transit,
There's a whole spectrum between a huge city and a place so remote you drive everywhere. There's lots of smaller towns where everything is walkable or very close. For example, I'm using the car ~once a week to pick up big shopping from 3km away and for daycare runs on rainy days / when I can't cycle. Apart from weekend trips, it's basically unused. So no, not being in a big city doesn't necessarily mean you're replacing public transit with driving.
I expect that eventually there will be more residential in cities.
Anyway the solution to sprawl is not forcing everyone to commute to work. I think it's zoning and housing availability. And not allowing investors to hoarde.
For companies, rent is just the beginning of their cost savings.
Consider all overhead in aggregate: utilities, enterprise-tier Internet connectivity, computing devices and network infrastructure for all of them, break rooms and their kitchens, bathrooms, physical security for facilities, fire and liability insurance for everything, maintenance costs and staffs for all of the above, including your janitorial, security, and IT/desktop support team. More of which I haven't mentioned.
Companies worldwide should absolutely leap at the chance to slough off these costs. Remote workers, amazingly are also leaping at this chance to take on all associated costs of that overhead for ourselves, and of course these costs come with no subsidies or measurable wage/salary increases, so we get to absorb it simply as the cost of living.
The employer, meanwhile, is rewarded with all the drawbacks of consumer-tier, rather than enterprise-tier infrastructure, such as poor/slow Internet connectivity, devices and LANs that are difficult or impossible to support, LPL-friendly front doors, employees taking a few minutes on the clock to clean the kitchen or bathroom, and all the rest. It's definitely a paradise for us!
I think he means LockPickingLawyer (a very popular youtuber that picks and bypasses locks of all sorts), with the meaning that the locks aren't secure.
> 5. Family- If you have a family, remote work is much greater for you. Especially if you have kids, a baby or someone ill or old to take care to.
Isn't this supporting the belief of many employers than when WFH, employees work less in part because they use some time to run errands? If WFH benefits you because you have to take care of the baby that means eg if the baby cries and your partner is busy, you can check up on him during work time. And if you do this and omit it from the employer it's not a stretch that you won't work extra long to make up for it either....
47 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 101 ms ] threadEvery company should just give employees the option unless it is critical they are on premise or there are those who like to come in.
I want Shiller to be right. I am just not sure we ( wfh supporters ) can effectively organize.
NLRB is halfway toward Joy Silk doctrine in force after the last week or so.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37269909
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joy_Silk
https://scholarship.law.unc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=...
https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=bf8c6542-d7f9...
- diversity (you name it, you can find it, also really important if you're at all queer)
- lots more culture (museums, subcultures, music shows, food, etc.)
- way less car dependent
- lots more opportunity and choice (employers, schools, partners, friends, etc.)
- way, way less religiosity
There are some things I envy about living in a less urban area, mainly around stuff like sustainable living. We could have a big garden, we could get a lot of energy from solar panels or drill a well, stuff like that. And yeah, pollution from cars in urban areas is pretty bad. Even so, the tradeoff isn't really close for us.
I will also say something about space. I've lived in both McMansions and shoebox Manhattan apartments (our current place in Amsterdam is ~480 sq. ft.) I don't personally miss the space at all. There are some specific things I miss, wouldn't mind a little space outside to hose things off is the big one but also it can be nice to have a place big enough you can get away from everyone, but especially in the US people think they need way, way more space than they really do.
Most things about smaller spaces are a lot better, but in particular they're a lot more sustainable. There are huge energy savings to be had by just not having as big a space to heat/cool/condition.
I don't find myself leaving my own neighborhood often because it's a pain to do so and my neighborhood has everything I need already.
So unless you spend a lot of time doing cross city transit (which normally isn't quick and easy), the benefit of a large city over a small one is marginal imo.
I've been thinking of moving to Vienna that has a lot of socialized housing and other housing programs to keep prices affordable.
Cities with good public infrastructure are pretty nice for young-middle aged people I would say. It's just not something that exists in America. I've been to NYC, it was not at all a city I would put on my top list of cities I'd like to live in.
I think it's better to think of what cities can be when you think of Europe, cities in Spain, Germany, Denmark, Switzerland, etc. these are extremely comfortable places to live in.
We've tried that enough already, no?
The US does both of these really poorly and then acts surprised when they don't work.
I miss the city very very much. Really, it's the food.
I mean, if all you like is hamburgers and bar food, yeah, the boonies are great.
1/3 of my network is not going back to the office with their current employer. They got rid of their leases and invested in infrastructure to support remote work for the next decade.
Another 1/3 are a mix of wfh and hybrid, with the wfh group already being notified they should expect to be hybrid in the near feature (my wife included).
The last group was already given the order to return to office or get fired, some did but some remain defiant, this includes a couple of friends from Amazon thousands of miles from Seattle who are expecting to be axed any day now, although it may never happen.
So I believe at the end about half of my network will be wfh permanently.
That seems to me like a critical mass to trigger a "revolution".
How could anyone stay at their current job having to commute to an office knowing half of the people they know don't do that?
This is like being ok at your current job when they don't offer something as basic as health insurance or PTO.
I would be constantly looking for a new job that allows wfh and eventually I will find it.
I expect lower market rates for remote work, because it's harder to differentiate ourselves from anyone else in nearby timezones. If RTO is the way to continue Bay Area comp, I will, as much as I may complain about open plan desks.
However that means you also have a lot more opportunities that better fit your skills and experience.
We should also not underestimate the value many people give to life quality.
I personally find commuting extremely stressful and unhealthy and there's no realistic amount of money anyone could offer me to drive 40-60 hours every month to go to an office.
Even if the money is good I would rather take a big pay cut and remove expenses, eat more at home, buy less clothes, downsize my home, etc.
Of course for many, particularly those jump starting their careers, this may not be an option as gaining experience and paying loans should be their number one priority.
1. Climate- the amount of energy we need and emission of SOx and NOx reduces drastically.
2. Brain Drain- The brain drain of talented, cultural people from small towns to cities leaves those towns in a poorer quality and skews cities with higher talent. People in those small towns suffer with the lack of talent and the absence of high spenders which harm the economy of these places.
3. Rent- Companies don't need to rent in cities and save huge amount of money that they can spend elsewhere. This also stops feeding the leech that is rich, (literally) rent-seeking land-owners.
4. Time- Collectively, if remote work is the trend, you save millions of man-hours per day due to lack of commute. From individual level, one can spend the time with family, read a book, learn a new skill or whatever.
5. Family- If you have a family, remote work is much greater for you. Especially if you have kids, a baby or someone ill or old to take care to.
Remote work is such a no brainer.
If remote work does lead to people abandoning cities en masse, the climate is a huge loser. All of a sudden you have people who are moving to more remote places, who will likely be driving instead of using public transit, buying bigger homes with extra work rooms, and so on.
Instead of reversing the 1960s trend of suburban developments, wfh will only accelerate it. No climate concerned person would cheer that on.
The one good thing about remote work is that it does reduce business travel. Maybe that’s enough to make remote work climate neutral, I don’t know.
I work from home.
My car sits for so long, yard debris collects around the tires.
I have been able to push off a new car purchase because I rarely drive anymore. That alone is a huge saving for the environment.
Are you saying the majority of a person’s trips are work commutes, if they are not working from home? Because that seems heavily lifestyle based - that’s certainly not the case for me - and I would hope not the case for most as that sounds unhealthy.
There's a whole spectrum between a huge city and a place so remote you drive everywhere. There's lots of smaller towns where everything is walkable or very close. For example, I'm using the car ~once a week to pick up big shopping from 3km away and for daycare runs on rainy days / when I can't cycle. Apart from weekend trips, it's basically unused. So no, not being in a big city doesn't necessarily mean you're replacing public transit with driving.
Anyway the solution to sprawl is not forcing everyone to commute to work. I think it's zoning and housing availability. And not allowing investors to hoarde.
Consider all overhead in aggregate: utilities, enterprise-tier Internet connectivity, computing devices and network infrastructure for all of them, break rooms and their kitchens, bathrooms, physical security for facilities, fire and liability insurance for everything, maintenance costs and staffs for all of the above, including your janitorial, security, and IT/desktop support team. More of which I haven't mentioned.
Companies worldwide should absolutely leap at the chance to slough off these costs. Remote workers, amazingly are also leaping at this chance to take on all associated costs of that overhead for ourselves, and of course these costs come with no subsidies or measurable wage/salary increases, so we get to absorb it simply as the cost of living.
The employer, meanwhile, is rewarded with all the drawbacks of consumer-tier, rather than enterprise-tier infrastructure, such as poor/slow Internet connectivity, devices and LANs that are difficult or impossible to support, LPL-friendly front doors, employees taking a few minutes on the clock to clean the kitchen or bathroom, and all the rest. It's definitely a paradise for us!
What does LPL stand for?
Isn't this supporting the belief of many employers than when WFH, employees work less in part because they use some time to run errands? If WFH benefits you because you have to take care of the baby that means eg if the baby cries and your partner is busy, you can check up on him during work time. And if you do this and omit it from the employer it's not a stretch that you won't work extra long to make up for it either....