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As much as I support what YIMBY is trying to do for San Francisco, I think this is trying to solve the symptom of a greater problem: that our economy has shifte

As much as I support what YIMBY is trying to do for San Francisco, I think this is trying to solve the symptom of a greater problem: that our economy has shifted to not needing (yet still somehow requiring) our workers to work in a physical office. I recently became a remote worker and I cannot imagine going back. If this became the norm in the US I think this would do a lot for fixing the housing problems. We have enough space to house everyone, the problem is we believe we need to house them close to where the "jobs are." But if employers allowed their workers to work from anywhere, then not everyone would need to live in NY, SF, LA, Boston, et al. The cities that experienced the worst emigration (e.g. Detroit, Cleveland, Milwaukee) could stabilize. Housing prices would normalize as a result of everyone not being forced to live within a 2-hr commute of the country's biggest employers. And those same employers could pay less for talent because they wouldn't have to give them a salary to afford places where the average starter home is over $1mm. And yet, we see articles in the NYT how big companies like IBM are already rescinding their offers for giving people more flexibility. We're not moving in the right direction.

twblalock 9y ago
Companies would love to encourage remote work if it would work out well for them. They would save tons of money by reducing their office space, and they could lower their salaries because they wouldn't need to support the big-city cost of living. So, why don't more companies encourage remote work, and why are some companies rolling back remote-work policies? Because they learned from experience that it doesn't work out well. Maybe some of them are just being stupid, but others are well-established companies that have been very good at running their businesses. I've worked at a company that had very flexible working hours and a generous work-from-home policy, and now I work somewhere that doesn't. I much prefer the situation I'm in now -- my coworkers are much more responsive when there is a problem, it's easier to schedule and conduct meetings, there are far fewer slackers, etc. Ever worked at a company that has office locations across the country (or the world), and tried to conduct important meetings with people in those other offices over Skype or the phone, or even expensive telepresence equipment? It kinda sucks. Imagine that every meeting, and every interaction with your coworkers, and every "whiteboarding" session was like that. That's not a world in which business is easy to conduct -- in fact, it's so difficult that companies are willing to forgo the massive cost savings they could realize by encouraging remote work.
- jcoffland 9y ago
  The perceived need to continually conduct meeting is itself a problem.
- ghthor 9y ago
  I think part of the in presence problems can be fixed with better virtual spaces. If slack was more like an mmorpg with buildings and rooms that you physically navigated in then teams could start building better camaraderie by having an avatar and a space that's there's. VR tech will take this to the next level and we'll have virtual offices where remote workers can all meet, collaborate, and build there own spaces to work together within. Part of me hopes that valve is working on this already, bigscreen already is an example of the beginnings of a virtual office space.
  - woolvalley 9y ago
    What is hard to escape are time zones. In practice what happens is you have a few offices in your continental timezones, and a bunch in other continents timezones, and because of team purpose churn, different continents will have to start working with each other. It doesn't matter how fancy the equipment is when you are asleep and awake at different times. You get 1 day (vs 10 minute) response times and nobody really wants to schedule a meeting because you have to get up very early or stay up very late, well out of working hours. Something that would be 1 day of back and forth becomes 1 week. It starts becoming very frustrating. On top of that with tech, the tech worker hotspots are north america, europe and india/china. And each band have big differences in timezones. It's difficult to say 'we will only hire in the american timezones', because there are barely any tech workers south of the USA.
    - imtringued 9y ago
      I don't understand the timezone argument. If your employer wants you to work from 9 to 5 in the timezone of the employer then you either don't take the job or you adjust your schedule to the timezone of the employer. This may rule out australian employees working for an american company but it doesn't rule out NYC employees working for a Washington DC company.
ghthor 9y ago
There are 2 problems to combat here. 1. Difficulty of building trust between individuals remote 2. Lack of understanding concerning communication skills & tactics required for remote work (upholding trust) Anyone that has played the older generation of mmorpgs actually has these 2 skill sets well practised. But that is a very small portion of the workforce. For this group I hypothesize a high upfront(2-3 weeks) time spent in person building trust. Once trust is established, remote work time could increase in a cyclic manner. But this required back and forth travel, but the intention is for the new employee to become 100% remote over time so they don't stress about moving and solidifying housing in the expensive markets. They can maintain a cheaper more remote long term lease, and only short term expensive leases when in person time is required for teams to synchronize.
Tehchops 9y ago
As a West Coast tech worker who relocated to the Midwest to work remotely, I certainly agree that the arrangement is an attractive, and ultimately mutually beneficial one. I have a slightly different take on a couple of points though: > If this became the norm in the US I think this would do a lot for fixing the housing problems. Ehhhh... It would allow a small subset of the tech/engineering population to relocate to places with better CoL ratios, but I think we're talking a tiny dent, if any, in housing affordability. Other comments have touched on it, but to me the most pervasive problem is that housing/real-estate has been allowed to turn into an investment/asset-class first, and living space for human beings second. As long as interest rates stay low(and they have for a very long time to this point), real-estate presents a very attractive class of investment with a non-trivial chance of providing good returns. Couple that with the rise of the sharing economy and things like AirBNB, and the system very much favors those with access to ample, cheap credit(i.e. "the rich"). Take a look at some of the 2017-2018 lists of "best places to live" and "places with most constrained housing inventory"... I guarantee a lot of them aren't tech hubs, or even close to one. Anywhere considered "desirable" by a metric that people identify with will see an influx of money/investment, and one of the first places that will land is in real-estate. As a consequence, home prices skyrocket, and rents climb as well as newly minted landlords look to start making their money back. That's why I don't think remote/telecommuting work will fix the housing problems except for those who are allowed to work remotely. With regards to remote work: > And those same employers could pay less for talent because they wouldn't have to give them a salary to afford places where the average starter home is over $1mm. Please please please do not accept this as a necessary paradigm of remote work. The company is not doing you a favor. Your skills, in a modern global economy, are worth what they are worth. Trying to use some arbitrary gauge of CoL based on your geographic area to meter your pay is a laughably futile exercise when you consider the vast sums they save in commercial real estate costs and operating overhead if they implement WFH programs for even a few employees. > And yet, we see articles in the NYT how big companies like IBM are already rescinding their offers for giving people more flexibility. We're not moving in the right direction. I swear to god someone is paying a penny to pump that story on everyone's LinkedIn feed like once a week. I gotta be honest: I'm not breaking a sweat over the "death of remote work" when the headlining examples being cited are.... wait for it... IBM, Best Buy, and Yahoo. Give me a )#($(* break. By virtually every metric relevant to a modern tech company, IBM is getting pantsed. They barely exist in some of the biggest growth verticals. They're still clinging to the same company model they ran 15 years ago. Claiming you're going to "drive innovation" by strong-arming a decent chunk of your workforce into either re-locating or quitting is thinly-veiled management speak for "we needed to let some people go, and this looks way better for us than calling it a 'layoff'." Best Buy? I guess years of hyper-expansion and being an overpriced Amazon show room have finally caught up. Like so many retail outlets, building a store anywhere you can find a big enough field that's not either a flood plain or a toxic waste dump looked good on paper(and to shareholders) for a few years, but those chickens are starting to come home to roost. They spout the same noise about "driving innovation and collaboration", but again it's a threatened, suffering company with an opportunity to trim some head count. Yahoo... well, better writers than I have penned eloquent prose to that vast empire of failure, so I'll spare my keys here. I have found a lot of remote opportunities in the last few months, more-so than I did the last time I looked even a few months ago, so every indication to me(albeit anecdotal), is that remote work is growing, not dying.

twblalock 9y ago

Companies would love to encourage remote work if it would work out well for them. They would save tons of money by reducing their office space, and they could lower their salaries because they wouldn't need to support the big-city cost of living. So, why don't more companies encourage remote work, and why are some companies rolling back remote-work policies? Because they learned from experience that it doesn't work out well. Maybe some of them are just being stupid, but others are well-established companies that have been very good at running their businesses. I've worked at a company that had very flexible working hours and a generous work-from-home policy, and now I work somewhere that doesn't. I much prefer the situation I'm in now -- my coworkers are much more responsive when there is a problem, it's easier to schedule and conduct meetings, there are far fewer slackers, etc. Ever worked at a company that has office locations across the country (or the world), and tried to conduct important meetings with people in those other offices over Skype or the phone, or even expensive telepresence equipment? It kinda sucks. Imagine that every meeting, and every interaction with your coworkers, and every "whiteboarding" session was like that. That's not a world in which business is easy to conduct -- in fact, it's so difficult that companies are willing to forgo the massive cost savings they could realize by encouraging remote work.

jcoffland 9y ago
The perceived need to continually conduct meeting is itself a problem.
ghthor 9y ago
I think part of the in presence problems can be fixed with better virtual spaces. If slack was more like an mmorpg with buildings and rooms that you physically navigated in then teams could start building better camaraderie by having an avatar and a space that's there's. VR tech will take this to the next level and we'll have virtual offices where remote workers can all meet, collaborate, and build there own spaces to work together within. Part of me hopes that valve is working on this already, bigscreen already is an example of the beginnings of a virtual office space.
- woolvalley 9y ago
  What is hard to escape are time zones. In practice what happens is you have a few offices in your continental timezones, and a bunch in other continents timezones, and because of team purpose churn, different continents will have to start working with each other. It doesn't matter how fancy the equipment is when you are asleep and awake at different times. You get 1 day (vs 10 minute) response times and nobody really wants to schedule a meeting because you have to get up very early or stay up very late, well out of working hours. Something that would be 1 day of back and forth becomes 1 week. It starts becoming very frustrating. On top of that with tech, the tech worker hotspots are north america, europe and india/china. And each band have big differences in timezones. It's difficult to say 'we will only hire in the american timezones', because there are barely any tech workers south of the USA.
  - imtringued 9y ago
    I don't understand the timezone argument. If your employer wants you to work from 9 to 5 in the timezone of the employer then you either don't take the job or you adjust your schedule to the timezone of the employer. This may rule out australian employees working for an american company but it doesn't rule out NYC employees working for a Washington DC company.

ghthor 9y ago

There are 2 problems to combat here. 1. Difficulty of building trust between individuals remote 2. Lack of understanding concerning communication skills & tactics required for remote work (upholding trust) Anyone that has played the older generation of mmorpgs actually has these 2 skill sets well practised. But that is a very small portion of the workforce. For this group I hypothesize a high upfront(2-3 weeks) time spent in person building trust. Once trust is established, remote work time could increase in a cyclic manner. But this required back and forth travel, but the intention is for the new employee to become 100% remote over time so they don't stress about moving and solidifying housing in the expensive markets. They can maintain a cheaper more remote long term lease, and only short term expensive leases when in person time is required for teams to synchronize.

Tehchops 9y ago

As a West Coast tech worker who relocated to the Midwest to work remotely, I certainly agree that the arrangement is an attractive, and ultimately mutually beneficial one. I have a slightly different take on a couple of points though: > If this became the norm in the US I think this would do a lot for fixing the housing problems. Ehhhh... It would allow a small subset of the tech/engineering population to relocate to places with better CoL ratios, but I think we're talking a tiny dent, if any, in housing affordability. Other comments have touched on it, but to me the most pervasive problem is that housing/real-estate has been allowed to turn into an investment/asset-class first, and living space for human beings second. As long as interest rates stay low(and they have for a very long time to this point), real-estate presents a very attractive class of investment with a non-trivial chance of providing good returns. Couple that with the rise of the sharing economy and things like AirBNB, and the system very much favors those with access to ample, cheap credit(i.e. "the rich"). Take a look at some of the 2017-2018 lists of "best places to live" and "places with most constrained housing inventory"... I guarantee a lot of them aren't tech hubs, or even close to one. Anywhere considered "desirable" by a metric that people identify with will see an influx of money/investment, and one of the first places that will land is in real-estate. As a consequence, home prices skyrocket, and rents climb as well as newly minted landlords look to start making their money back. That's why I don't think remote/telecommuting work will fix the housing problems except for those who are allowed to work remotely. With regards to remote work: > And those same employers could pay less for talent because they wouldn't have to give them a salary to afford places where the average starter home is over $1mm. Please please please do not accept this as a necessary paradigm of remote work. The company is not doing you a favor. Your skills, in a modern global economy, are worth what they are worth. Trying to use some arbitrary gauge of CoL based on your geographic area to meter your pay is a laughably futile exercise when you consider the vast sums they save in commercial real estate costs and operating overhead if they implement WFH programs for even a few employees. > And yet, we see articles in the NYT how big companies like IBM are already rescinding their offers for giving people more flexibility. We're not moving in the right direction. I swear to god someone is paying a penny to pump that story on everyone's LinkedIn feed like once a week. I gotta be honest: I'm not breaking a sweat over the "death of remote work" when the headlining examples being cited are.... wait for it... IBM, Best Buy, and Yahoo. Give me a )#($(* break. By virtually every metric relevant to a modern tech company, IBM is getting pantsed. They barely exist in some of the biggest growth verticals. They're still clinging to the same company model they ran 15 years ago. Claiming you're going to "drive innovation" by strong-arming a decent chunk of your workforce into either re-locating or quitting is thinly-veiled management speak for "we needed to let some people go, and this looks way better for us than calling it a 'layoff'." Best Buy? I guess years of hyper-expansion and being an overpriced Amazon show room have finally caught up. Like so many retail outlets, building a store anywhere you can find a big enough field that's not either a flood plain or a toxic waste dump looked good on paper(and to shareholders) for a few years, but those chickens are starting to come home to roost. They spout the same noise about "driving innovation and collaboration", but again it's a threatened, suffering company with an opportunity to trim some head count. Yahoo... well, better writers than I have penned eloquent prose to that vast empire of failure, so I'll spare my keys here. I have found a lot of remote opportunities in the last few months, more-so than I did the last time I looked even a few months ago, so every indication to me(albeit anecdotal), is that remote work is growing, not dying.