36 ms·

Who still needs the office? U.S. companies start cutting space

• fortran77 6y ago
  I don't have to work in an office, but I do. My consulting company owns commercial space in Sunnyvale and Tel Aviv. I like separating home and work. I work at work, and do non-work activities at home. I worry that this trend is simply to squeeze employees harder. Now employees have to pay for their own workspaces, desks, chairs, etc.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • dougmwne 6y ago
    If I may ask, how far do you live from your office? Is your home comfortable and does it meet your needs? Is your office a pleasant and productive space? I know many people who do grueling 2-hour, one-way commutes so they can afford a modest-size home and half-decent schools for their kids. Consider that many people might not be in your position.
    • fortran77 6y ago
      It's a ten minute drive in Sunnyvale, walkable in Tel Aviv.
      • dougmwne 6y ago
        If I could walk to my office and could also work from home, I'll probably go 3 times a week and go home in the afternoon if I had no meetings.
• JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago
  The owners of traditional office buildings who will see the most success in this crisis will be those who realize that --while, yes, corporations may no longer need as large a footprint-- there's still valuable use of the capital infrastructure they hold. The first ones to pivot to alternate property uses will do best. Another set of commercial property owners will sit on their above-market lease agreements and try and squeeze blood from a stone.
• dave_4_bagels 6y ago
  Personally, I can't wait to get back into an office. Working from home has helped me break some previous bad habits and improve my self-discipline - which both positively impacted my productivity while working from home. However, even with commuting time, I'm happier (due to distinct separation of home-time and work-time) and more productive when I have an office I work from 3-4 days a week. During my last "remote" engagement I joined a small community co-working space in Boston after two weeks of "true" work from home. I've found my idea balance is 3-4 days a week in-office and 1-2 days "remote". I envy those of you who can work remote without issue, even as an introvert who dislikes lots of people and distractions I can't see "remote first" as something I enjoy going forward.
  • chasd00 6y ago
    i've been pretty much 100% remote the last 5 years or so. I definitely rely on coworking spaces to get out of the house and around other humans. It's especially bad when kids are in school and wife is working ( she's a teacher ). Being without human contact all day every day really weighs on me over time.
  • my_usernam3 6y ago
    I agree with this. There was a poll on linkedIn I came across with over 10k responses where the slight majority of people believe partial working from home was the best, beating out full working from home by a little, and no working from home being significantly in last.
• spectaclepiece 6y ago
  What I find most interesting is how this might transform inner cities. If central space is cheaper more space will be available to artists and other cultural activities while also making room for early stage startups which could give rise to a renewal of a vibrant inner city atmosphere in places where this has been on the decline due to high rental prices.
  • m0zg 6y ago
    Sure, the ability to work from anywhere in the world coupled with a severe epidemic, riots, looting, and boarding up of city centers will give rise to a "vibrant inner city atmosphere". Uh-huh.
    • pjmorris 6y ago
      It's not the 'everybody works there' that does it, it's the 'cheap enough that artists can live there' that does it. My mom split her time between art, her true love, and working as a secretary, or a maid, or an office manager. She had a way of living near where the art was happening, as artists tend to have very little money, as did she. She could afford to live just off the Lincoln Road Mall in South Beach in the mid-80's, as did hundreds of other artists. The South Beach that is now luxurious and pricey was once cheap, and shabby and a bit dangerous. That's really the seed of a vibrant inner city atmosphere. She repeated that (to smaller degrees) several times in her life.
      • quicklime 6y ago
        I hear about artists being the ones who create vibrant neighborhoods a lot, and I'm honestly struggling to understand the causal effect that's being claimed. Do people really care about "living near where the art is happening" to the point where it would drive up property prices? When I talk to people from demographics that are accused of being gentrifiers (young professionals), the overwhelming reasons they choose a neighborhood are to be near restaurants, bars, clubs, cafes, shops, work and friends. I don't think I've ever heard of anyone pay a premium to be near an art gallery, or live near artists' private studios. There are some gentrified neighborhoods that were known for their artists. New York's Soho is an example. These days the place is full of overpriced fashion stores, both independent ones as well as global chains. I can see why the shops were attracted - for branding purposes it might help to be associated with those artists. But I wouldn't say that artists turned it into a particularly vibrant neighborhood, at least not more than other neighborhoods in Lower Manhattan. Is it that it's about correlation, not causation? It seems reasonable that artists would be attracted to an area for the same reason as, say, independent coffee roasteries (both require cheap space). I suspect it's only really the latter that are attracting new residents though.
• irrational 6y ago
  My company is just finishing building millions of square feet of additional office space on our campus. I wonder if someone up high is starting to regret that decision.
  • Andow 6y ago
    AZ?
    • rwmj 6y ago
      If AZ = Astra Zeneca then drug research is not something you can easily do at home!
    • irrational 6y ago
      Arizona?
  • perfmode 6y ago
    Could anyone have honestly foreseen the pandemic and its ensuing upheavals? Of course, one is free to regret. Now, it would seem that the best we can do is make the most of the information available to us in the present moment.
    • acituan 6y ago
      > Could anyone have honestly foreseen the pandemic and its ensuing upheavals? Absolutely. Previous WHO classification has a "Phase 4: Sustained community-level outbreaks -> Medium to high probability of pandemic" designation, which has a roughly once-a-decade frequency historically. Compared to multi-quarter, multi-year scale of real estate planning, 10 years is not infinite long term. Of course it is so in comparison to quarterly earnings, share prices, average tenure of a fund manager, a CEO and so forth, so it doesn't get priced in or gets bundled with other catastrophes.
      • perfmode 6y ago
        Interesting. Have any people/groups/organizations been credited as having made prescient, non-trivial bets anticipating this pandemic?
• davidw 6y ago
  I miss working in the office a lot. It's nice to have a physical separation between 'work' and 'home'. And I enjoy the company of my coworkers - it's fun to occasionally chat about something tangential to work, perhaps some interesting problem they dealt with in the past, or local politics or whatever.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • foobiekr 6y ago
    I agree with this. I've known some of my coworkers 15 years. We talk now, but it's not the same as getting a bunch of people together to go to the terrible chinese place across the street for an hour and a half.
• s1t5 6y ago
  Hopefully in the future we'll have more options rather than offices becoming completely obsolete. Personally I still need a good office environment to do my best work and an all-remote future looks pretty bleak.
• jorblumesea 6y ago
  I wonder if this will result in the hollowing out of the American downtown similar to the 60s and suburban white flight. It just started to feel like the American inner urban core was coming back, density was increasing, more funding to transit. One of the great tragedies of American society in the 20th century (in my opinion) was a focus on building everything around the car, the suburb, and the commute. Producing well paid office workers disconnected from any sort of community or the issues around them. Everything is a drive away, no one walks anywhere, feelings of isolation and segregation.
  • triceratops 6y ago
    > yet more focus on sprawl and car based transit. Would it? With commutes dead, a good chunk of weekday traffic is gone.
    • jorblumesea 6y ago
      It will, because people will buy farther out. One of the major drivers of the urban core, density and transit was how bad traffic can be. You want to live closer to work, which is usually downtown. Now you want pretty much live on the outskirts or the sticks. Without the commute, nothing stopping cities from becoming extremely diffuse.
  • david927 6y ago
    This is a huge question and I don't hear a lot of people asking it. What is the future for cities? How will this change suburbs? How can we create optimal communities? I think it goes hand-in-hand with the coming loss of the car as a personal device and its transformation into "individual transit" as opposed to "mass transit". In the future, when you can use an app to get an autonomous vehicle to take you where you want to go, communities will restructure. Parking lots and garages will go away, opening up a huge amount of real estate. I wouldn't mind starting a sort of "virtual salon" to talk about these larger questions. It's fascinating.
    • ghaff 6y ago
• MangoCoffee 6y ago
  we probably going to needs Starlink to cover rural area first.
• progman32 6y ago
  A coworker of mine recently pointed out that not only are businesses saving money by closing offices, they're also offloading other costs to the employees. Things like: - Water, electricity, HVAC, sanitation - Desks, chairs, ergonomic equipment, safety equipment - Telecom, networking support - Physical security - Office supplies - Misc. amenities like coffee and snacks Some companies are taking this into account, but not all. A personal anecdote: we had an all-hands meeting today and the amount of emotion on display when the topic turned to returning to the office strongly suggests people want to go back. Whether or not that's temporary nostalgia for a previous life or an enduring need is an interesting discussion, but there are definitely people wanting to go back. I for one am even more in the no-remote-only-gigs camp given recent events. edit: formatting, I'll learn eventually
  • taurath 6y ago
    I think it depends where you live and your situation. I have coworkers in small NYC studios who just want to get outside. I have others who don't mind not taking the train for an hour a day. Many coworkers have a nice big house to work from. The ones with kids most want to come back, because they appreciate the mental separation they get. Remember, Quarentine Work Is Not Remote Work - https://www.hanselman.com/blog/QuarantineWorkIsNotRemoteWork.aspx https://www.hanselman.com/blog/QuarantineWorkIsNotRemoteWork...
    • setpatchaddress 6y ago
      This. People with many young kids, especially, seem to be absolutely miserable. More interesting than remote/in-office is that we don't seem to be acknowledging the inevitable permanence of social distancing measures. No more four-dudes-in-an-office. No more coming to work with mild cold symptoms.
      • taurath 6y ago
        Maybe, oh goodness please, the return of actual OFFICES. With DOORS. Thats the only way you're getting me to come back into a work office, barring a rediculous raise.
• oakfr 6y ago
  Companies think that remote work works but they fail to realize that most of what happened over the past few months was based on prior momentum built inside the office they are carelessly ditching.
  • sjtindell 6y ago
    I like this point, we've had a lot of success going remote but also haven't been through multiple rounds of planning out the next quarters yet, everything was in place.
  • triceratops 6y ago
    Couldn't you bring people together once a quarter or bi-yearly? Book a nice villa someplace exotic for a couple of weeks, get all the planning and coordination out of the way, give everyone the last few days off with families invited.
    • bradlys 6y ago
      Would that really be any cheaper for the business than just renting an office?? Flying people to nice destinations and putting them in expensive hotels along with their families is $$$.
      • triceratops 6y ago
        Almost certainly. Toptal used to do it. I'm not sure if they still do.
    • helltone 6y ago
      How would this work when both parents work different jobs and children in school?
      • triceratops 6y ago
        Same way they take vacations. The parent working remote has more flexibility to take on childcare responsibilities the rest of the year, so they can probably work something out together.
• huy-nguyen 6y ago
  Will this trend revive the fortune of WeWork? We can have a future where teams within a company decide on “core days” where everyone is in the office but WFH the rest of the week and the company can pay for a variable number of office spaces depending on the week day. WeWork can become the cloud but for office spaces.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • chosenbreed37 6y ago
    I think there was always a viable business in WeWork. Just not with all the excesses and crazy valuations. But prior to the current pandemic it certainly meet a need. Granted they were not the only ones offering the same service. But even that in itself would suggest that with the proper management it would be successful operation.
    • birdyrooster 6y ago
      WeWork should make studio space for YouTubers that has ambient noise dampening and good facilities for lighting and rigging.
  • paul_f 6y ago
    The general idea of WeWork, but not that business model
• chasd00 6y ago
  It's interesting to me that companies are threatening to reduce pay if a remote employee moves to a lower cost of living area. It's hard to understand the logic when geography is the only change driving the decrease in pay. Same person, same job, same skills, same productivity, the only thing that has changed is the person's cost of living. I wonder if a remote employee working in a low cost of living area moved to a high cost of living area would their pay be increased or would the company put up a fight? "You voluntarily moved to a high cost of living area, why should i pay you more?". However, "you voluntarily moved to a low cost of living area, i'm paying you less" is reality.
  • jorblumesea 6y ago
    > You voluntarily moved to a high cost of living area, why should i pay you more?". This does happen now when companies have multiple offices. I've seen people move from LCOL to HCOL and see a cost of living adjustment.
    • astura 6y ago
      It's standard operating procedure for a major relocation to come with a COL adjustment. About as normal as it gets.
  • alistairSH 6y ago
    My wife’s employer makes fairly drastic COL changes based on office location (bank with large corporate offices in 3-4 US cities and branches worldwide). From the lowest COL office to the highest, it can be 10s of thousands USD. Edit - they don’t officially do WFH (outside COVID) so cant comment on that.
  • jcmontx 6y ago
    I seriously can't believe some companies have the nerve to pull off something like this
    • rootusrootus 6y ago
      Companies are typically very impersonal about money, to a much greater extent than people. I'm sure some highly compensated employees are about to be sad, but this is just business. It's a free market, and it just got a lot bigger.
• danny_sf45 6y ago
  The only reason for me to not go back to the office is: fixed working hours. Sure, my contract says I have to work 40h/week, but I just can't. If I'm at the office, I would probably work (focused) around 4 or 5 hours. The rest is "wasted" with: chat with other coworkers (non-work related stuff), breaks... but I have to be there for 8 hours no matter what. At home, I can work those 4 or 5 hours (focused) and call it a day. I don't have to pretend I'm working, I just close the laptop. Same outcome (for the company), less (wasted) hours for me. This is impossible to achieve if one has to go to the office. (can you imagine entering at 9am and leaving at 2pm while telling everybody: "hey, I cannot work anymore, I'm only able to work focused 5 hours per day. See you tomorrow!".)
  • orwin 6y ago
    Yes, i'm the same. And if you're like me, i suppose sometime, in high pressure situation, you can easily work 10 hours straight. Doing this at the office is impossible, doing this home is easy (if it stay exceptional). I'm more productive home than i was at the office, and this is really surprising for me ( i assumed i was just a slacker).
    • cuddlecake 6y ago
      I've had one of the most productive days yesterday, because my internet went off. Went on a berserk coding spree from 1PM to 1AM with some small breaks in between. Completely cut off from any distraction, I was able to concentrate. Willpower and discipline are nice, but real restrictions that are impossible to circumvent are better, at least for me.
      • alluro2 6y ago
        I'm genuinely curious - would you be so kind to share what kind of coding do you do, and for how long have you been doing it, when you can code for 12 hours not needing to look up how to do something online (syntax, example for a best way to approach something etc)? I'm asking because this is one of my worst fears - how genuine of a senior, experienced developer am I, if I probably wouldn't be able to do 2 good hours of progress without the internet...
• m_sanders 6y ago
  There was a fansinating take on the potential impact of a WFH revolution on white collar works in The Telegraph the other day. As companies embrace working from home and downsize their offices presence, a lot of the barriers to entry to offshoring start to disappear - if everyone is remote then a remote individuals in cheaper Eastern Europe will likely integrate a lot easier than when most the employees were sitting together in expensive London. White collar workers could face the same globalisation pressure and wage deflation that’s happened to blue collar workers over the last 50 years or so. Personally, if my team stays remote, then our next hire will most likely not be London based. There’s a much larger pool of European talent available to us and we’re now better setup to and culturally open to hiring remote first. This isn’t something our company would have considered before COVID.
  • visarga 6y ago
    Doesn't work well when time zone difference is too large, though.
    • chosenbreed37 6y ago
      > Doesn't work well when time zone difference is too large, though. That is true. Although I've noticed that some outsourcing companies are comfortable working to the office hours of the headquarters.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • philjohn 6y ago
    The flip side to that is with the UK leaving the EU will there be legal and taxation hurdles. Also, sometimes having local context, and the ability to meet locally at short notice is an important requirement. I don't think it's as clear cut in all cases.
    • anpago 6y ago
      Will there? Plenty of workers fly in from non EU countries to work in the UK and rest of EU. We have staff from Asia fly in with a few days notice and vice versa. Few ever need a work visa they simply visit as a tourist. Certainly if a short trip. Not that what they are doing is correct. But it happens so regularly, I don't think many office workers even consider they need a work visa. Anyhow this saga has just proven the vast majority of meetings can be done remote hence why your all working remote will be the companies reply. If a global company the data is probably shared across the globe and regulated as need be already. I really think people need to be careful for what they wish for with remote work. Companies will see savings (well what they perceive as savings) and will see margins increasing. People thinking they will get the money back the company saves on property costs or paid that "London/New York/SF weighting". That or fully kitted home office's. I think they maybe disappointed. When a company makes big savings they then often get hungry for more.
• game_the0ry 6y ago
  Corporate managers need to run the following exercise: 1) Quantify the loss in productivity from employees working from home. Call this "x." 2) Calculate the savings in rent you don't have to pay for putting the company's employees in an office. Call this "y." 3) If x < y, pass on savings to shareholders, take your bonus, and have a nice day. 4) Explore hiring candidates outside of major metros and see if you can pay them less. Will not happen, of course. The modern corporate middle manager thrives as a sycophant, constantly praising their bosses / and boss's bosses - yes sir / ma'am, how high would you like me to jump for my bonus? Thus, they are desperate to get back into the office and play that sweet, sweet game of "office politics." Also, they probably leased additional space for more tech and digital marketing workers, so they are trying to not regret that decision.
  • rwmj 6y ago
    What loss of productivity is that? Knowledge workers get a whole lot more done when they're not being constantly interrupted in an open plan office.
    • game_the0ry 6y ago
      x can be negative.
      • Terretta 6y ago
        So call it gain and have X positive. Even the folks in non-tech jobs who hate WFH, griping about missing look-em-in-the-eyes managerialism, or how they can’t do management-by-walking-around, acknowledge the past few months have been more productive and curiously more collaborative (right people across national offices invited to “meetings” and able to attend). So actual productivity up, other factors important to Taylorist managers (but not to individual contributors) sharply down.
• jacquesm 6y ago
  If there is one business I would not want to be in right now it is commercial real estate. I'll be letting go of 2/3rds of our office space at the end of this year and I may even get rid of all of it depending on how things develop. With some luck this will have a nice downward effect on house prices in and around Amsterdam, where plenty of companies have converted houses to offices.
  • cableshaft 6y ago
    My wife used to be in commercial real estate. She said that that from what she heard from colleagues, the industry is actually doing pretty well at the moment, since so many offices have to be completely refitted for covid-19 precautions, and that's something that's also handled by those companies. But right now a lot of places are still under contract for their leases. Might be a different story in a year or so when more leases expire and they just don't bother keeping their offices. You want to know an industry that's really screwed? The industry she left commercial real estate for: events/conventions. Her current company has had basically no revenue since the first lockdowns, and that's not changing anytime soon. She's been eyeing jobs in commercial real estate again as an escape from events, as they're in better shape for the moment, at least.
    • jacquesm 6y ago
      I always keep our leases short because you never know what the future brings. I'd hate to be locked to a five or 10 year contract. Sure, I don't get the best rates. But that flexibility has paid off more than once. You're right about the events/conventions business, that's been more or less killed for the foreseeable future. I know someone that organized a few of them every year and it's not a pretty picture.
  • IAmGraydon 6y ago
    I work in CRE. There’s still a lot of demand. I think we tend to get a bit of a myopic perspective around HN due to most being in tech, which is well suited to remote work and also tends to have a lot of introverted personalities.
• throwawaysea 6y ago
  I really hope this trend sticks so that we can decentralize away from big urban centers. It would really allow us to free ourselves from crowded spaces/amenities, painful commutes, and high prices, as well as letting us seek out the community/culture that fits us best.
• j45 6y ago
  I see a real rise in each company having it's own internal coworking/hoteling. Getting together still has value but spaces will be transformed more for collaboration... and also small individual offices as work pods
• rossdavidh 6y ago
  Predicted headline about 1 year from now: "U.S. companies decide to move away from WFH arrangements, return to office". (saying this as someone who's been WFH for a few years now)
  • phendrenad2 6y ago
    Agreed. Getting managers to agree to WFH (and keep allowing WFH) has always been a struggle. Management hates it, because they can't see with their own eyeballs that everyone is "working" (with "sitting at their desk" as a somewhat-useful heuristic proxy for "working"). Lots of companies have tried full-remote, and very few stick with it long-term. I think that once the risk is low enough, we'll all be back to the exact same long packed commutes and open-plan offices.
    • rossdavidh 6y ago
      I think one way in which we saw this movie before, was with the move to offshoring programming. It was really big 5-10 years ago, and then quietly got unwound when it turned out that close communication between teams requires more than phone, email, and video. There are places where it works (I am an example of that), but it normally doesn't work all that well, because the advantages of being in one physical space are normally hard to quantify and thus hard to reproduce.
• birdyrooster 6y ago
  The reason I won’t be coming back to the office is because my managers love not having to come in anymore. It’s that simple.
• supergeek133 6y ago
  I'm still amazed the fight seems to be "everyone works from home" or "everyone works from the office". I've been fairly productive since we all started full-time from home in March. However I prefer working at the office. As time has gone on I've found myself losing routine. Either working sporadically through the day or longer hours in general. Being somewhere does a better job for me of time-boxing work. That being said, I also have my work and personal machine in the same room. So now I'm spending most of my time in one room! I'm working to rectify that situation.
  • _asummers 6y ago
    I agree with you and find myself in a similar situation and mindspace re: time boxing. I found having a KVM switch to have to actually "go to work" and "go to personal" was a good mental switch. And make sure you have a good chair. I was having minor back issues before I upgraded my chair with how long I was spending at the desk.
• holler 6y ago
  How will this affect commercial real estate? I've already noticed an uptick in "for lease" signs on commercial buildings throughout the major city I live in...
  • anpago 6y ago
    Big effect as it will on many pension funds and so on.
• uberdru 6y ago
  We need ateliers, not offices.
  • david927 6y ago
    Brilliant. I hope you don't mind if I quote you.
• jariel 6y ago
  This is going to be another short decision making drive, decided by the CFOs because they have the 'cost' numbers in front of them, whereas issues like productivity are a little more intangible. We work in 'open spaces' because the CFO can definitively say "$/employee!" - whereas the impact on staff is difficult to measure. The 'up front cost' is the driver. This same 'cost logic' will apply to remote working, once Ops can see 'how cheap it is' they will love it but it may have nothing to do with true ROI.
• bluekite2000 6y ago
  A few years ago I had to commute from Orange county to Manhattan Beach. It takes 1 hour to get to the office (leaving at 5:15am in the morning) and 1.5 hour to get home (leaving at 4pm). By the time I got home I felt dead. It was a 30 mile trip. So to me the long commute is what makes WFH convincing.
• ghaff 6y ago
  I was already unofficially remote. Meetings are actually a bit better with everyone at home on camera. The thing I miss is travel which was about 1/3 of my time. (And, fortunately, I live in a fairly rural location with a dedicated office and forest paths out my door.)
• torcete 6y ago
  I wonder if this is going to be the beginning of the decline of big cities. Who wants to live in a expensive place if you don't need to commute to work everyday?
  • mac01021 6y ago
    People who can afford to live there and enjoy the variety of cultural attractions and outside dining. The number of such people may not be enough to sustain the cities, though.
• fasteddie31003 6y ago
  We will let the free market decide if an office is a net positive to the company. Each company will be different.
  • Polylactic_acid 6y ago
    In the past it seemed that every manager saw wfh as a disaster where people will spend all day on youtube. Now at least everyone has been forced to try it out and see how it works. For us at least we have found things to be at worst, just as productive as before.
• aresant 6y ago
  Office buildings are a $2,500,000,000,000 asset class in the USA alone. Throw in retail and you're at >$5 trillion of value. And the market is in total chaos due to COVID-19, fortunes are going to be made and lost on a ridiculous scale over the next decade as institutional investors reposition their trillions of dollars of equity in this market. Institutional investors rely on commercial real estate as it's one of the only asset classes at SCALE that can: (a) Generate cash flow (b) Is asset backed (c) Is highly leverageable w/relatively low default risk (debt) As a result the world's largest institutional funds - pensions, sovereign wealth, insurance companies, etc typically invest a large allocation of their overall funds (10 - 25%) in the CRE class. This lets them pay their current liabilities - teacher pensions, public services, insurance coupons, etc - with cash, while also generating longer term IRR returns on the appreciating assets to cover ever expanding liabilities. For generations of institutional wealth managers retail and office space were the #2 and #3 largest overall allocations of their real estate portfolios (1) Part of this is due to the scale in office / retail - those two product types represent ~$5 trillion in asset value and are only outstripped by multifamily ($2.9t) in scale. (2) But as both office and retail have been slipping for the past decade institutional managers had slowly begun to reposition and reallocate to other sectors while keeping a toe in. But as it's done elsewhere COVID-19's arrival has massively pulled trends in CRE forward by probably a decade with regard to the reallocation. As a result what most CRE investment pros are expecting a significant increase in valuation multiples across alternative CRE asset classes including multifamily, self storage, industrial, etc. What's terrifying about the idea of massive winners & losers in the space is the potential further erosion of returns on institutional investors, who are typically already well behind investment targets to maintain their expanding liabilities. Great resource / primer here if you're interested - (1) https://www.leggmason.com/en-us/insights/investment-insights/cp-major-shifts-in-ocde-sector-allocations.html https://www.leggmason.com/en-us/insights/investment-insights... (2) https://www.reit.com/data-research/research/nareit-research/estimating-size-commercial-real-estate-market-us https://www.reit.com/data-research/research/nareit-research/...
• cpascal 6y ago
  So for a little anecdata: My company maintains offices in NYC and Boston (among others). We chose not to renew our Boston lease and are in the middle of breaking our NYC lease. We do still intend to maintain physical offices, but they will be much smaller and used mainly for meetings. Once its safe, employees will likely only be going in 2-3 times a week if they are near an office. I doubt there will be assigned desks in our new offices.
• blitztime 6y ago
  For me working remote has come with a mix of upsides and downsides. One of the main upsides for me has been mentioned a few times in this thread, and that's the fact that without having people physically present, your performance is now necessarily more tightly tied to what you actually accomplish rather than how long you're present in an office. This gives employees a lot more autonomy and freedom with how they spend their time as long as they manage to get everything done. No energy and time needs to be spent keeping up the unproductive facade of looking busy. On the other hand, losing the ability to have spontaneous hallway conversations does cut out a lot of the communication that would normally happen in office. The signal-to-noise of these conversations may not be so high in terms of actually communicating purely work related topics, but they do a lot to foster a sense that you're actually part of a team with people you enjoy working with. With IMs and video calls, communication happens much more deliberately so coworkers feel much more like these virtual entities who you only contact for purposeful knowledge transfer. Perhaps some people actually prefer this and see it as more efficient, but I personally find it to be a somewhat dreary proposition. Ultimately, I think what I would prefer is a flexible WFH policy, with maybe 3 days in office and 2 days of flex.
  • amiga_500 6y ago
    None of this is about your personal life. Work is just work. I get to see my kids more. I have more time. That is going to trump anything work related.
  • sszz 6y ago
    I agree! Also no one else here seems to like who they work with...? I generally like going to work not just because of what I do but who I do it with and who I chat with at lunch and get coffee with. I also like having work from home flexibility when I want/need it. Anyways, pro flex!
• catsarebetter 6y ago
  Personally I prefer an all-remote job but honestly it's really hard to grow a corporate career if you're not in the office regularly
  • mac01021 6y ago
    Will that still be true if there is no office, or if nobody is in the office regularly?
    • catsarebetter 6y ago
      If nobody is in the office, it won't be true. But is that even possible? A lot of people really like working in offices, even though the voice of those who don't are presently louder in media
• ed-209 6y ago
  2021: Who still needs US developers? They're all remote anyway, why pay more for people in the US?
  • abledon 6y ago
    inflated US developer salaries... the english speaking world is comin for ya!
    • disgruntledphd2 6y ago
      As I keep explaining to people, timezones are a harsh mistress. The furthest you can really go in terms of proper outsourcing (as opposed to building part of the team remotely) is around +- 3hrs either side. For SF, that basically only allows for the American continent. This is potentially something that could happen a lot more in the EU, as there's (somewhat) common laws and less of a timezone shift between the expensive (London, Paris) and the cheap (Sofia, Warsaw) places.
• microcolonel 6y ago
  Closing the office has increased our productivity, and for those of us who are not too socially isolated in our private lives, it hasn't cost us much. We closed very early (early February) since most of the company came in by regional mass transit and I had been tracking this thing outside of the (confused) mainstream media bubble, saw it becoming a very big deal.
• replyifuagree 6y ago
  If home based staff cost 10% less due to not having to pay building overhead, and your competition takes full advantage of that savings and you don't - that 10% cost savings might just be enough for them to win in the long haul.
• vikramkr 6y ago
  I hope this leads to drastically lower rents in the NYC area. A lot of companies like mine still need some space, but even needing a little bit means we have to head way out of the city before we can find anything affordable. That makes commutes longer and we cant rely on public transit. Less giants eating up huge amounts of space hopefully means more smaller space needing businesses getting a better shot at profitability and sustainability
• markus_zhang 6y ago
  I have mixed feelings about working from home. In one hand, it's great to be able to get up late/avoid bad weather/go shopping in the middle. On the other hand, I don't have adequate space for a proper office, and I surely miss the great food/coffee/printer/extra screen/etc. services the office provides. Plus, as a BA, communication with Teams is always less efficient. There is also a huge risk of getting more friction with family members as well. Overall I prefer to work in a proper office environment, best if I have my own office. Damn I need to be a VP to have my own office, meh, that's way beyond my pay grade.
• jamespitts 6y ago
  I see a lot more housing options ahead.
• giulianob 6y ago
  Wow I'm surprised people are so eager to go back to the office and completely aren't valuing the potential freedom of being able to live where they'd like rather than where their work happens to be.
• yogthos 6y ago
  Arthur C. Clarke predicted that by the year 2000 cities as we know them would no longer exist all the way back in 1964 [1]. We would live in a world of instant communication where we could contact anyone on Earth without leaving our home. This technology would make it possible for many people to conduct business without having to be present at a specific physical location. Today, we know the technology Clarke was talking about as the Internet. And while his technological predictions could not have been more correct, he severely underestimated the pace of social progress. Despite modern office jobs being done entirely on a computer, most workers are still expected to get up in the morning, battle the daily commute, and physically congregate at the office to work. Companies have given innumerable arguments for why this must be so, and until recently there wasn’t an empirical way to test any of them. Unfortunately, it’s often difficult to tell whether an argument holds water without running an experiment since ideas that sound great on paper can spectacularly fail in practice. However, the pandemic presented a unique scenario where it was no longer safe to continue following these practices resulting in a forced experiment of mass remote work across the world. We now know beyond a shadow of a doubt that remote work was possible all along, and a recent study [2] shows that there is no loss of productivity associated with it. It would appear that the main barrier to remote work was the desire to stick with the familiar. Now that this valuable experiment has been run we shouldn’t simply discard the results, but rather learn from it. As we start coming out of the pandemic, workers should demand the ability to continue working remotely. There is no longer any justification to keep up the daily commute. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KT_8-pjuctM&t=294 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KT_8-pjuctM&t=294 [2]: https://www.docdroid.net/vhPmnxg/valoir-report-the-real-productivity-impact-of-remote-work-pdf https://www.docdroid.net/vhPmnxg/valoir-report-the-real-prod...
• im_down_w_otp 6y ago
  We got our rent cut in half. Pre-pandemic we were getting a fantastic bargain on an office. Mid-pandemic, even with the rate cut, we're getting a terrible deal on a mailbox. :-)
• x87678r 6y ago
  For me I dont really like working from home, but I would like the flexibility of having most time in the office but spending chunks of time like a few weeks or even a whole summer elsewhere. Doesn't save much on office space though.
• irjustin 6y ago
  There are lots of "for remote" in this thread. I will take the other side that I need some sort of office. If it's only a few days a week. My cabin fever is real and I get a little depressed. I'm one of those guys who fully remote don't work so well.
• ookblah 6y ago
  Not sure if this is the best place to post, but I'm trying to gather some insights for a personal project related to working at home. If you have 5 minutes would love to get any feedback. Google form is linked below. Thank you! https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSccwNqYrdBYQSNhLrPQKR5NFvAzSnb_B1Q_XdnnowvOat4qpw/viewform https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSccwNqYrdBYQSNhLrPQ...
  • disgruntledphd2 6y ago
    So, I'm filling out your form, and on page 3 there are four point scales from Strongly disagree - Strongly agree. You really should provide a neutral option, as forcing people to make a decision when they are indifferent will mostly just provide noise (some people will just be indifferent to everything, but you can normally remove those easier).
• ipiz0618 6y ago
  I imagine remote work will be much more prevalent post-pandemic. But what would happen to H1B workers?
• adregan 6y ago
  Have any of y'all given mob programming a try? Several teams at work have adopted the practice and it's been really interesting. Essentially, we camp out in a video chat and work on the same task together. One developer will "drive" sharing their screen—ideally, a conduit to type for the rest of the group—and everyone will talk through the approach. It takes some tweaking (we're always experimenting with the driver's time), but it seems to be leading to better code. It also gives you face to face time talking with your coworkers, which you'd otherwise be lacking.
  • rubans 6y ago
    My team has been doing this almost all the time since we went remote in March. It works well for us. It helps more junior team members as well, since they're able to watch how more senior people figure stuff out and ask questions whenever they like. It also has the social element, which many people have mentioned they're lacking while working remotely. As long as you're on a team with people who can communicate well enough and are happy to have their camera on, it's great. I've only had issues when there's someone who is just lurking without a camera and they seem to refuse to turn their camera on for whatever reason. They're making people forget about them and they miss out.
• pfdietz 6y ago
  Our financial advisor has told us to reduce holding in commercial real estate.
• Razengan 6y ago
  Working from home becoming the norm can only be a net positive for society and the environment and the economy. Fewer traffic, less pollution, fewer buildings, more space, better health, more leisure time.
• beltex 6y ago
  The elephant in the room to me is that companies talked a ton about creating spaces that are conducive to great work. The design and architecture of an office matters. Not all have it right, but for those who do, it goes a long way. See Pixar as an example. But all of a sudden everyones acting as if none of that matters, all because we get to skip a commute and sit in our pyjamas? You truly don't know what you've got till its gone...
  • Tomis02 6y ago
    What's special about Pixar, that you have your own office? This is very rare in the industry, and it's unsurprising people don't miss the open office.
• jackcosgrove 6y ago
  I have relatives who grew up on a farm. Their jobs and their parents' jobs were at home on the farm, and they all worked together. It was something I was always envious of, although almost everything else about farm work is tough. Now many of us might have a chance to live similarly. The schools will eventually reopen, but in the meantime many of us are working at home with our families nearby. There is a greater sense of family connectedness, and less peer connectedness. I actually think that is a good trade-off because spending too much time with people who are similar to you in age and interests causes some social skills to atrophy. We can relearn to live how most people in history have lived.
  • bargl 6y ago
    This has been one of the positive notes of the 'Rona for me. Being home with my kids so much during the school year. Helping them with homework when I got the chance. I feel like I've seen my wife more than since we met. It's been awesome in some ways. Obviously some issues with kids and work but I have a great team and company. They understand.
• narrator 6y ago
  How about people who work with expensive equipment? Obviously not HN people who all work on MacBooks, but biotech people, etc.
• osigurdson 6y ago
  Imagine the situation were reversed: high speed internet widely available prior to the technology required to construct office buildings. Once office building technology did become available, how many would be constructed to shelter workers purely tasked with creating and manipulating information? I would think very few.
• ravenstine 6y ago
  I know it's cool now to rag on remote work, and I definitely get that not everyone wants to work remote. But boy, I don't ever want to work in an office again. It's not just the time saved, the privacy, and the lack of commute, but the simple fact that while code is building I can throw some laundry in the washing machine, check the mailbox, keep an eye on my 3d printer, have my pets around, crash on the couch for 10 minutes, make a quick trip to the grocery or post office, use my pull-up bar, be home when large packages arrive, eat out of my own fridge and pantry, have a podcast going without having to put on my headphones, not wear shoes, use my own bathroom and spend as much time as I need in there, and so much more.
  • taigi100 6y ago
    Same, it's amazing. Especially if you're an introvert. The difference is that with remote, at 5 p.m. you can also be done with all the household work easily. My home is cleaner and better maintained than ever, and I have more time. So much better than having bs talks with colleagues about things I don't really care about - now, I only have non-work related discussions with whom I actually want about topics that I actually care about. It's just so much better. Not even mentioning the cash savings since cooking at home, no more needing new clothes so often, the environmental impact etc.
    • killjoywashere 6y ago
      You want an extra-special superpower? Get a couple teammates and in east Asia or the islands of the Western Pacific, and a couple more in Europe or Africa. Once you solve the remote work problem and get over a bit of your trust issues and get used to the time zones, your team can do 3 days of work every 24 hours. Probably a little easier to add in India or some other 4th node because the 7-9 hour separations are tricky to find any overlap at all, but adding a 4th slice of the world is also a bit tricky.
  • rootusrootus 6y ago
    I agree. I take little breaks during the day, toss in some laundry, take a short break on the patio, etc. The flexibility is great. And no commute. But I'm not sure how I will like it when the world gets back to normal and the family is gone. Right now I have my two elementary age kids and my wife at home, so I'm not lonely at all. In the past I found that spending day after day in a completely empty house was a sure ticket to loneliness. Maybe that'll change this time, but I'm not counting on it.
• sriku 6y ago
  > Reductions in office spending could likely be followed by layoffs and investments in technology that should help improve productivity with a reduced workforce, said Bill McMahon, chief investment officer of active equity strategies at Charles Schwab. Why wouldn't anyone invest in such "technology that improves productivity", if that's available, outside of COVID times too?
• bozzcl 6y ago
  ...every company hoping to sponsor a green card?
• _hao 6y ago
  Company I joined recently will not renew the lease on their office next month. They'll get another smaller office that won't have the capacity for everyone and you'll have the option to go there (if you wish) on a rotation. P.S. Based in London
• kibleopard 6y ago
  Just to offer a different perspective from the people lauding WFH - I get that it's nice to have your amenities all in one place, not have to spend time commuting, etc. And I get that for people who were already working from home, making the switch wasn't that hard, since you already knew your coworkers and had built relationships with them. But consider the new people here. I've had a totally different experience coming into a company during this pandemic, not having already built those relationships with coworkers and having to ramp up on the team's tech/codebase. Every day I wish I was in the office, just because as a new person it is so much harder to get the help and guidance you need online. Whereas in the office I could casually shout over a question to a coworker, WFH I don't have that same ability. Everything feels super scheduled now, much more like a meeting, even when I just want to have casual banter. I think this is the huge downfall of WFH. What I'm hoping will be the future of tech jobs is a hybrid of WFH and in-person work. I think that if you're someone who's been at a company for a while and can be self-sufficient at home, more power to you - feel free to work from home more often. But as someone who really needs more oversight and assistance while learning how to do my job, I still believe the office has its purpose -- we shouldn't just get rid of it.
• lmilcin 6y ago
  I think this is horrible idea. Being developer and working with developers (already pretty antisocial, introverted bunch) I see only minority of people can function well working completely remotely and almost none of the newcomers. Thinking that people can work remotely for couple of months and extrapolating it to years and decades is pretty silly idea.
• stunt 6y ago
  There is just so much benefits for employees, employer, city, public health. And it's stupid that we couldn't try it at scale until we had to. Obviously, we still have lots of jobs that can't be done from home. But, even they would benefit from less people going to office everyday.
• future_unclear 6y ago
  A few things that will likely come from this: 1) It will take away the only social outlet many people have. Someone may reply that work was never the appropriate place for that anyways but the real world has never worked that way. Humans have always combined work and social life since the beginning of time. And there won’t be some spontaneous rise in people joining social clubs or anything like that. It will only result in further isolation, further mental problems, further strange behaviors. 2) This will make hiring even more parameterized. Employers will count even more on pieces of paper and LinkedIn connections to gauge whether or not to hire someone. No ability to gauge someone’s presence. 3) This further enables corporations to have no concern for geography. No skin in the game. No loyalty to a place. No loyalty to people. You are now competing with people who are willing to work for a fraction of the price you do, and on paper you both have the same credentials.
  • cblconfederate 6y ago
    sounds like what is already happening in europe where a lot more people worked remotely in tech, due to the lack of local tech. People adapt, and learn to socialize off-office. Limiting oneself to the office was always unhealthy anyway
• minusSeven 6y ago
  Am I the only affected by the work from home policy? Not having anyone to talk to for months is bad for my mental health, even as an introvert. I now wish I could go to office atleast once a week. Also I struggle to find motivation to work and procrastinate everything.
  • morbusfonticuli 6y ago
    If I'd be in your position (lacking social contacts outside of the work environment), I'd take the time to reflect my life and would try to determine what makes me happy. For example: Do you miss interactions with others? Join local clubs that fit your hobbies and meet new people. This is how life works IMO. Personally speaking, joining different local orchestras/bands in the city im currently living in (since ~1 year) helped me a lot. I decided to let my work be only work and search "purpose/fulfilling" in other aspects of life.
• cblconfederate 6y ago
  This is such an interesting turn of things. Science fiction has been talking about this since the 60s. It's a shame it took so long for a remote work revolution to happen. I am currently at my office but everyone else in the office is telecoferencing, so i have to wear headphones. This is a new normal. Office is not office anymore. Cities have been left behind all these decades, they were hyperoptimizing for people commuting daily to factories which dont exist anymore, separated in residential and commercial districts for no real reason, managing peak hour traffic as if peak hour is an inevitability (and this hyperoptimization is much more prevalent in the US). We ve learned that "work" is a place while truly it's an amount of energy that can be put any hour. The cherished "work/life separation" is just a shift in attention, or rather, it can be all life now, a life that includes work. It's not like work-life separation existed before , in the sense that people don't stop thinking about work when at home or vice-versa. 9-5 schedules are only applicable to a small percentage of remotable-work. We have now the opportunity to redefine living itself. It feels like we are finally entering the 21st century. An interesting question is what opportunities arise in this post-office world. One could see co-working offices becoming as common as corner stores for people who need them, not via global conglomerates like wework, but mom-and-pop converting their old abandoned properties to a work-from-office workplace/cafeteria. We will need new places, places to meet people that don't exist yet, services for people who will prefer nomad-style medium-term living, remote work visas, co-living spaces with all amenities, home-office retrofitting services etc. Work defines cities, and this change is not going to be different. We also need to stop treating remote work as marginal , and remote workers as some sort of pariahs that are never accounted for in public city planning. Business happens at home as much as in the busy streets now. What will come in the future boils down to psychology: Yes, being at home the entire time is miserable, we know that from animal studies. Our hippocampus gets excited by changing our environment. Going out for exercise is nice, but it's too short to matter, we need to find ways to maintain balance between movement and routine. Nomad living, or perhaps changing cities every few years (the way many academics do) may become a lot more common and commercialized. Schooling services for nomads may become a thing. It's tempting to think that we 'll go back to village-living, but if you've lived it you 'd know it's suffocating. Our new normal has to be better, not worse.
• piokoch 6y ago
  I have read somewhere that maybe in future place in the office will be given by some employers as a perk, by default people will work from home (those who do office-like work, obviously, nobody will have car production line at home). This can end up as dystopian nightmare, people will have to have cameras installed that will be watching them and some AI-like software will check if they work, when they leave designated workplace, etc. Spy software will check what they do on their computers and if this is work or something else. All of this will count how much hours people work and wages will be calculated on that base. My guess is that people would need to work more as compared to current work in the office setup.
• addHocker 6y ago
  Does this mean the controll freak middle class of managers will be thinned out? If there is no need to physically check for your presence "give me a update i dont understand" then there seems to be a implicit bigger trust in your competence.
• theshadowknows 6y ago
  My cat is getting old, one of our dogs is nearly 15, the other has cancer, and my wife has a chronic disease. I’m glad that I can work from home and make sure my family is happy and comfortable. Working in the office has its perks for sure. But at home I have my own office with a coffee bar that is always open and always has the coffee I like. I can cook my own food or order it from any number of delivery services. I can take a nap during the day if I want or go for a run to help clear my head. It’s a net gain, for me, in every way. Edit as I was thinking about it: I realize I’m lucky. I live in CT and rent is pretty cheap here. We’re only paying 2100/month for a 3br 4bath two story home + fully finished basement. Not everyone has that luxury and in a smaller space I’m sure I’d be more on the fence.
• bamboozled 6y ago
  Will I get paid more to get a bigger apartment?
  • sgt 6y ago
    Not at all, but the good news is that your company will save lots on not having to pay for your office space. This money can be used for that executive level bonus your boss has been dreaming about.
    • bamboozled 6y ago
      I've worked from home and while I do enjoy aspects of it, I feel like a lot of executives only see the money saving aspects of it. Ideally, we could have an office, but we could also have flexbility, I think this would be the ultimate outcome for both the worker and the employee, it's a shame it seems to be one or the other right now.
• ahominid 6y ago
  Everyone raves about the work-from-home deal but forgets that we’ve all only been doing it for a few months - it’s still new and fresh. After a year or so of doing it I think we’ll start to see more mixed opinion. Personally I’m OK with either arrangement, it’s more about the choice in the matter. The change of pace that comes with sometimes going into an office vs not is rejuvenating. Or even potentially the choice of being 100% remote and living in a different city for a while. Having those options are the real net benefit.
• blue52 6y ago
  Unless you are a multi-nation megacorp or a specialty who needs dedicated space, I see no reason for the need to waste funds on it.
• golergka 6y ago
  And tens of thousands of engineers from other countries around the world rejoice at what's about to happen to the job market to the remote senior developers with fluent English. What I don't understand is how HN audience, mostly from a couple of tech hubs in US, is enjoying this. Don't you guys see that we're finally coming after your FAANG salaries?
• marv3lls 6y ago
  Has "cut costs" ever meant anything other than "hurt the worker"?
• saos 6y ago
  I wonder when 4 day work week will be considered. My company did it and we took a pay cut. But man those 4 day weeks were amazing.
• cblconfederate 6y ago
  Post-corona , the offices are like churches. Yeah, you go there once a week to attend, but you do most of your prayer at home.
• dildeagallan 6y ago
  https://tailormade-shirts.com/ https://tailormade-shirts.com/ Panache Bespoke is the world’s leading provider of shirts for the gentleman of the day. We are proud to have a fanatical attention to detail, a unique customer experience and a premium product. Our staff, experience and product distinguish us in the resurgence of custom clothing. We offer tailor-made clothing for everyday people, business, semi-formal and fashion. The line of shirts includes options for everyday shirts such as button down, pin collar and work wear, weekend and travel linens, and black tie shirt options.
• focus2020 6y ago
  Remote work fights against ageism. That is one huge plus to me. I am in my 30's and worry about getting unemployed due to ageism. I am happy rote work is embraced.
• iDance 6y ago
  https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Xu2Go8aYbsY https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Xu2Go8aYbsY