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The long term shakeout of this will be that everybody realizes that yes, we need offices. They are spaces literally built for working. The required footprint wi

The long term shakeout of this will be that everybody realizes that yes, we need offices. They are spaces literally built for working. The required footprint will be smaller, people won't need to be in the office for absolutely everything, the demand for square footage of commercial real estate will decrease a bit—good news for cities who don't build b/c they can convert excess commercial inventory to residential. But we have also found a vast increase in productivity that we probably won't see in the numbers until we can separate it out from all the other crazy shit that's been happening. The efficiencies gained in every white collar business being forced to make remote work to some degree are significant, and I think as of yet underrated. So no we're not all going to be sipping cocktails on the beach (though more of us might) but we will be better off. Big exogenous shocks tend to find hidden productivities, even if the shock part really sucks.

mattlondon 6y ago
I am not so sure productivity has definitely improved. I agree there was a good head of steam where people were able to quietly and independently work through their "list" of stuff they wanted to do for ages but never had the chance to etc, or whatever had previously been planned out. Now months later I feel like things are starting to grind a bit and productivity is starting to wane because the "pipe" is starting to dry up. Those ad hoc conversations that lead to a new feature, bumping into someone in the corridor who mentions some big issue they're having, meeting and talking to end users, the offsites to work out the strategy for next quarter, day-long workshops with UX and management and users and post-it notes galore where we thrash out ideas and concepts are a distant memory. Instead we have stilted video calls where people sit on mute 95% of the time and there simply is not as much collaboration as there was before. Sure stuff still happens, but it feels like to me that the "spark" from people who usually generate ideas and set the agenda/work items is reduced significantly - if not entirely gone - and people are just going through the motions somewhat mechanically and "doing the best they can given the circumstances" etc.
- weeksie 6y ago
  I'm talking about macro level gains. When your small local accountant figures out how to manage work from home a few days per week that creates small, cumulative gains over the whole of the economy. Hard to quantify right now, especially because of all the noise going on. i.e. GDP is currently getting slaughtered for reasons other than lack of productive business practices. I do think that it's harder to notice from the vantage of tech since it is probably the most remote-ready industry. Talking to finance bros I get a very strong sense that people are getting a lot more done in some regards and suffering in others. When offices come back, they'll divide up the tasks appropriate to the milieu and gain some incremental productivity as a result. Similarly distance education sucks. It's sucked forever buuuuut, with whole countries attempting to manage distance education at the same time across all educational institutions, I am very optimistic that we will find some new techniques that will have huge returns but it will take a while for those techniques to gain dominance. I could be totally wrong about this, but we'll find out for sure in the next few years.
  - mattlondon 6y ago
    > When your small local accountant figures out how to manage work from home a few days per week that creates small, cumulative gains But what are those gains you get from working from home? The only "real" one I can think of is no commute ... but that removes productivity from the businesses now failing and going bankrupt because they have no/reduced customers. Plus the commute is not just dead time, at least for me I usually triage my inbox before I arrive at the office. Now I just waste time and have an extra bowl of cereal it read the internet for half an hour instead of doing anything useful.
    - Nursie 6y ago
      "The commute" is a massive societal inefficiency. How many hours, how much time (and how much CO2) is just wasted? Those businesses may fail, but the money will go somewhere else, somewhere else that doesn't involve me wasting four hours a day. I occasionaly worked on my commute, but most of the time was wasted, and now I'm free to use the time how I want.
    - leetcrew 6y ago
- alexbanks 6y ago
  I think it's more that the ability to work remotely has been unlocked for pretty much every business that operates online (which, as I type it, sounds kind of crazy that it didn't already work that way). At the very least, for the most part, businesses won't forget that possibility, even if they don't rely on it heavily post-pandemic. We've removed a significant blocker, that doesn't necessarily mean that we've reinvented the office dynamic or anything like that, but we've at least opened up a new channel for some businesses that didn't have it before, which IMO is objective improvement.
- watwut 6y ago
  The same here. In addition, I see social problems accumulate slowly and the team seems to be failing apart. Interpersonal issues are nit solved until they boil in the home office, in person people were more eager to speak up about issues faster and more often.
- goatinaboat 6y ago
  Now months later I feel like things are starting to grind a bit and productivity is starting to wane because the "pipe" is starting to dry up. My employer mandated a return to the office about 2 weeks ago. Productivity has declined compared to when we were all WFH for 6 months and I have the stats - pull requests, builds pushed to prod, tickets opened, all are down.
  - WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
    Yes, but some middle manager gets to claim his paycheck due to having more meetings in the office now.
  - egsmi 6y ago
    This whole thing is so multifaceted I think it’s hard to draw any conclusions from it. In CA, we have COVID and fires so I’m essentially a prisoner in my house. If you locked me in my office, my productivity might go up too. But now that’s school is on and my kids are locked in here too. Productivity goes down. All in all, it’s a bumpy ride.
    - mmcnl 6y ago
      Is this a problem though? Is business suffering? Are there metrics on that?
  - cmwelsh 6y ago
    Is it possible that folks substituted their commute for extra work hours? There’s really not much to do, socially, when everything is locked down. Some people might take it as a chance to be a workaholic (with the possible burnout not in mind). In the office, I am pressured by folks walking by into leaving “on time” (they don’t realize I often start later than them).
    - jonfromsf 6y ago
      Some people I have talked to are seeing this in their workplaces. They are having to tell the engineers not to work too hard so they don't burn out. Seeing 2+ hours a day of extra work.
Nursie 6y ago
I think we'll find that not every company does need an office, or the expense of an office. IMHO now is probably a good time to invest in meeting-place providers like Regus.
- voisin 6y ago
  Regus’ parent company just filed for creditor protection.
  - Nursie 6y ago
    Oh, shame, perhaps my thoughts on this are a little premature...
alexbanks 6y ago
> The long term shakeout of this will be that everybody realizes that yes, we need offices. You said this, and then wrote the rest of your post about the opposite? Why do you think we'll need offices?
- renewiltord 6y ago
  Because I know we're not going to get SnackNation forever.
- weeksie 6y ago
  Remote work is massively inefficient for some things, even if it is much more efficient for others. Smart firms will do the efficient thing in the most efficient place and see gains across the board as a result.
  - alexbanks 6y ago
    So...practically none of them...?
cntrpt9293 6y ago
Sounds like you’re arguing for WeWork not offices as usual. We don’t need corporate offices full of cubes and butts and chairs. We need co-working spaces sometimes. Personally, my employer of 92 is doing fine remote. So, you know, anecdata and all that There’s that personality though that needs a group to help them decide on the color of a button, and how thick a drop shadow should be. Let’s hope those folks are able to power through making such difficult decisions alone, without free lattes followed by yoga class to ease the chemically induced anxiety, and over thought fear of making the wrong palette choice. My goodness, tech millennials might have to move on from college life! For shame.
- walshemj 6y ago
  Yes back to individual offices
- weeksie 6y ago
  No. I'm saying many (most) firms will still require offices. The shape of the office will change as firms realize which business functions work best in the office and which are best remote. This will take many years to shake out because not every firm will correctly identify these functions.
closeparen 6y ago
We need spaces built for working. Contemporary open offices are built for talking.
- ghaff 6y ago
  If anything, I'd expect offices more built around sometimes meeting and collaborating--not butts in seats all day. I can imagine hot-desking plus a lot of enclaves and meeting rooms.
  - XorNot 6y ago
    Hot desking is a damn plague on offices, and the reason WFH has been so nice. No hot-desking. My space is my own and I can make it the way I want, leave what I want around and not worry about theft etc.
    - ghaff 6y ago
      If, as some are suggesting, a lot of people end up coming into the office one or two days a week, how could hot desking not be widely adopted?
walshemj 6y ago
I am not sure I think covid will for force a rethink of the cramped open plan hot desking trend of the last - so you might have less desks in the same footage
Nasrudith 6y ago
Needing offices doesn't mean needing them centralized neccessarily. It depends on domain as usual for how close it actually has to be. A doctor's office? Yeah. But if you have accounting siloed off anyway why not just go full remote? They aren't needed there.

mattlondon 6y ago

I am not so sure productivity has definitely improved. I agree there was a good head of steam where people were able to quietly and independently work through their "list" of stuff they wanted to do for ages but never had the chance to etc, or whatever had previously been planned out. Now months later I feel like things are starting to grind a bit and productivity is starting to wane because the "pipe" is starting to dry up. Those ad hoc conversations that lead to a new feature, bumping into someone in the corridor who mentions some big issue they're having, meeting and talking to end users, the offsites to work out the strategy for next quarter, day-long workshops with UX and management and users and post-it notes galore where we thrash out ideas and concepts are a distant memory. Instead we have stilted video calls where people sit on mute 95% of the time and there simply is not as much collaboration as there was before. Sure stuff still happens, but it feels like to me that the "spark" from people who usually generate ideas and set the agenda/work items is reduced significantly - if not entirely gone - and people are just going through the motions somewhat mechanically and "doing the best they can given the circumstances" etc.

weeksie 6y ago
I'm talking about macro level gains. When your small local accountant figures out how to manage work from home a few days per week that creates small, cumulative gains over the whole of the economy. Hard to quantify right now, especially because of all the noise going on. i.e. GDP is currently getting slaughtered for reasons other than lack of productive business practices. I do think that it's harder to notice from the vantage of tech since it is probably the most remote-ready industry. Talking to finance bros I get a very strong sense that people are getting a lot more done in some regards and suffering in others. When offices come back, they'll divide up the tasks appropriate to the milieu and gain some incremental productivity as a result. Similarly distance education sucks. It's sucked forever buuuuut, with whole countries attempting to manage distance education at the same time across all educational institutions, I am very optimistic that we will find some new techniques that will have huge returns but it will take a while for those techniques to gain dominance. I could be totally wrong about this, but we'll find out for sure in the next few years.
- mattlondon 6y ago
  > When your small local accountant figures out how to manage work from home a few days per week that creates small, cumulative gains But what are those gains you get from working from home? The only "real" one I can think of is no commute ... but that removes productivity from the businesses now failing and going bankrupt because they have no/reduced customers. Plus the commute is not just dead time, at least for me I usually triage my inbox before I arrive at the office. Now I just waste time and have an extra bowl of cereal it read the internet for half an hour instead of doing anything useful.
  - Nursie 6y ago
    "The commute" is a massive societal inefficiency. How many hours, how much time (and how much CO2) is just wasted? Those businesses may fail, but the money will go somewhere else, somewhere else that doesn't involve me wasting four hours a day. I occasionaly worked on my commute, but most of the time was wasted, and now I'm free to use the time how I want.
  - leetcrew 6y ago
alexbanks 6y ago
I think it's more that the ability to work remotely has been unlocked for pretty much every business that operates online (which, as I type it, sounds kind of crazy that it didn't already work that way). At the very least, for the most part, businesses won't forget that possibility, even if they don't rely on it heavily post-pandemic. We've removed a significant blocker, that doesn't necessarily mean that we've reinvented the office dynamic or anything like that, but we've at least opened up a new channel for some businesses that didn't have it before, which IMO is objective improvement.
watwut 6y ago
The same here. In addition, I see social problems accumulate slowly and the team seems to be failing apart. Interpersonal issues are nit solved until they boil in the home office, in person people were more eager to speak up about issues faster and more often.
goatinaboat 6y ago
Now months later I feel like things are starting to grind a bit and productivity is starting to wane because the "pipe" is starting to dry up. My employer mandated a return to the office about 2 weeks ago. Productivity has declined compared to when we were all WFH for 6 months and I have the stats - pull requests, builds pushed to prod, tickets opened, all are down.
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
  Yes, but some middle manager gets to claim his paycheck due to having more meetings in the office now.
- egsmi 6y ago
  This whole thing is so multifaceted I think it’s hard to draw any conclusions from it. In CA, we have COVID and fires so I’m essentially a prisoner in my house. If you locked me in my office, my productivity might go up too. But now that’s school is on and my kids are locked in here too. Productivity goes down. All in all, it’s a bumpy ride.
  - mmcnl 6y ago
    Is this a problem though? Is business suffering? Are there metrics on that?
- cmwelsh 6y ago
  Is it possible that folks substituted their commute for extra work hours? There’s really not much to do, socially, when everything is locked down. Some people might take it as a chance to be a workaholic (with the possible burnout not in mind). In the office, I am pressured by folks walking by into leaving “on time” (they don’t realize I often start later than them).
  - jonfromsf 6y ago
    Some people I have talked to are seeing this in their workplaces. They are having to tell the engineers not to work too hard so they don't burn out. Seeing 2+ hours a day of extra work.

Nursie 6y ago

I think we'll find that not every company does need an office, or the expense of an office. IMHO now is probably a good time to invest in meeting-place providers like Regus.

voisin 6y ago
Regus’ parent company just filed for creditor protection.
- Nursie 6y ago
  Oh, shame, perhaps my thoughts on this are a little premature...

alexbanks 6y ago

> The long term shakeout of this will be that everybody realizes that yes, we need offices. You said this, and then wrote the rest of your post about the opposite? Why do you think we'll need offices?

renewiltord 6y ago
Because I know we're not going to get SnackNation forever.
weeksie 6y ago
Remote work is massively inefficient for some things, even if it is much more efficient for others. Smart firms will do the efficient thing in the most efficient place and see gains across the board as a result.
- alexbanks 6y ago
  So...practically none of them...?

cntrpt9293 6y ago

Sounds like you’re arguing for WeWork not offices as usual. We don’t need corporate offices full of cubes and butts and chairs. We need co-working spaces sometimes. Personally, my employer of 92 is doing fine remote. So, you know, anecdata and all that There’s that personality though that needs a group to help them decide on the color of a button, and how thick a drop shadow should be. Let’s hope those folks are able to power through making such difficult decisions alone, without free lattes followed by yoga class to ease the chemically induced anxiety, and over thought fear of making the wrong palette choice. My goodness, tech millennials might have to move on from college life! For shame.

walshemj 6y ago
Yes back to individual offices
weeksie 6y ago
No. I'm saying many (most) firms will still require offices. The shape of the office will change as firms realize which business functions work best in the office and which are best remote. This will take many years to shake out because not every firm will correctly identify these functions.

closeparen 6y ago

We need spaces built for working. Contemporary open offices are built for talking.

ghaff 6y ago
If anything, I'd expect offices more built around sometimes meeting and collaborating--not butts in seats all day. I can imagine hot-desking plus a lot of enclaves and meeting rooms.
- XorNot 6y ago
  Hot desking is a damn plague on offices, and the reason WFH has been so nice. No hot-desking. My space is my own and I can make it the way I want, leave what I want around and not worry about theft etc.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    If, as some are suggesting, a lot of people end up coming into the office one or two days a week, how could hot desking not be widely adopted?

walshemj 6y ago

I am not sure I think covid will for force a rethink of the cramped open plan hot desking trend of the last - so you might have less desks in the same footage

Nasrudith 6y ago

Needing offices doesn't mean needing them centralized neccessarily. It depends on domain as usual for how close it actually has to be. A doctor's office? Yeah. But if you have accounting siloed off anyway why not just go full remote? They aren't needed there.