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Fuel prices, traffic congestion, cheaper rents, healthier air, are all advantages that cannot be taken away. Taking the commute out of my job gave me an additio

• jcims 5y ago
  I’ve been developing an opinion that it has more to do with propping up commercial real estate and protecting the value of existing investments.
  • dvtrn 5y ago
    See my other comment, but I suspect so too. Just listening to the rhetoric of my parent company about our clients (commercial real estate developers), a lot of companies are vocally fretting about what to do with their (expensive) office spaces when the BIS (butts in seats) factor is down to single digits.
    • WrtCdEvrydy 5y ago
      I am 100% ready to shut down these attempts by asking if the company is paying for extra life insurance because I want my family to get a bit more when I catch COVID and die at the office. I don't expect it to happen under current management but as we promote new middle managers, I'm sure we'll have a push for it.
      • scarface74 5y ago
        I hate to be one of those people and I’m the farthest thing from an anti-vaxxer. But all of the reliable evidence is that if you’re vaccinated, boosted, etc., the chance of you being seriously ill from catching COVID is really no more likely than the flu. And statistically, everyone is going to get it eventually.
        • neltnerb 5y ago
          But if all of these vaccines aren't enough, "getting it eventually" doesn't mean you won't just get it again later. It's just a different form of immunity, a nasty enough mutation will still bypass it. That's not to suggest no risks should ever be taken, but if going to the office in person is really basically pointless that's a very unnecessary risk on top of the inconvenience of it. May as well delay getting it as long as possible since it's constantly changing right?
          • tluyben2 5y ago
            That is the same for any disease spreading that way like the flu right? I do not want to get the flu either (I never had it badly; worst I had anything, including mono, was a mild cold. Oh and cancer, mild as well luckily, but I mean viruses). So why did we ever go to an office? Or school? I got my uni degrees and the tail of high school almost without ever going to classes. I studied and now work (for the past 30 years) in coffee shops and bars (sitting outside, always, even in winter) and have a rich social life because of it; I don’t and never did understand this forced cattle herding of people. And then even some people seem to enjoy it.
            • neltnerb 5y ago
              I think you are asking a very important and useful question, and one which seems like it could be a significant part of the conversation about climate change too... I think we know roughly why K-12 schools are like they are -- teachers didn't know how to use computers much at all in the 90s when I was a kid and it's a running gag that they never really understood them. Now they do, so it's a new option that I think it's fair to recognize truly is new. I do work in education and spent a ton of time figuring out how to make video lectures for instructors in the department that were effective, and tons of new online teaching tools were tested that there was never a huge push to play with before. I don't think it's malice, it's simply that those professors have been doing it one way for 30 years and asking them to learn to do it a whole new way is a big ask. They have to spend all their time writing grants and other bureaucracy, mentoring students, and from personal experience I think it's fair to say that there is little appetite for changing everything to something no one knows how to judge the quality of due to lack of experience in an active classroom. It is the software equivalent of pushing a change straight to a live server, except in this case if you screw it up and do a bad job you're impacting the quality of education being provided to at least dozens of students who deserve better. It's really hard to just in-place make a change without the ability to actually test it. I hope more people get something closer to your experience, I think the last few years have pushed a lot of people on that education side into a much more open mindset now that online classes are less risky. I think it does serve a purpose to have high school kids in person because of social things and the reality that a group of 20 kids will on average do a better job of finishing stuff they aren't really excited to do whereas one kid remotely is more likely to slip through the cracks. There's also issues with equity when internet and computers and space to learn aren't uniformly available. But I think you're asking the right question. Let's get cars off roads and turn these stupid commercial parks into residential areas please, we need more affordable housing, not redundant space for people to work in when they're not at home... and the climate control for these giant unnecessary buildings... heck, the parking lots alone are a huge net negative especially if you account for the reality that many many fewer people really need to visit those buildings on any given day.
  • macintux 5y ago
    There are a lot of ripple effects too: I suspect our largest local employer is getting a lot of pressure from the business community. The number of downtown businesses that are impacted by the absence of those feet & wallets is significant.
    • sokoloff 5y ago
      I have sympathy for the plight of businesses who are suffering from lack of foot traffic. There’s no conceivable way that would extend to “Welp, I better summon all my employees back to the office then…”
      • jcims 5y ago
        It couod if you were a bank and half those businesses owed you money.
  • jmole 5y ago
    I hope this finally ends the nonstop office space development in the bay area in favor of more housing.
  • langsoul-com 5y ago
    That seems likely for the biggest tech companies, that spent $1 billion+ on offices.
  • CincinnatiMan 5y ago
    If a company has their offices representing a non negligible portion of their assets/revenue, they’re either doing something wrong or they’re a property developer/owner as a business.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
• baby 5y ago
  Exactly, I'd rather work from home or from a wework or something, and then meet my coworkers for actual sessions of collaborations (or outside at a bar, or something)
• vidarh 5y ago
  Having the illusion of control and illusion of good management more than power I think. I once taught a course and the first thing I was told was to look for a green glow on people's faces: it meant people were playing solitaire on the class computers instead of listening. A whole lot of managers knows only the work equivalent of that: they've learnt simple proxies for actual management that let them think they know when people are working well from walking rooms (or having people reporting to them do so). People working from home means they actually have to figure out how to track output, and that takes effort. Effort many managers are not used to. I had to learn a whole lot to start managing remote and distributed teams. It takes away a whole lot of lazy shortcuts to management. Lucky for me I was forced to deal with that many years ago, but it was uncomfortable and a big change, so I'm not at all surprised that many resist it now.
  • dreamcompiler 5y ago
    > Having the illusion of control and illusion of good management more than power I think. It's certainly true that managers are lazy and they would rather measure illusory proxies for work rather than work itself, but America also became a major economic engine of the world by exerting control over people's bodies without paying them. Even though that practice ended several generations ago, the attitude that equates "success" with "power over bodies" is still very common in America. Many states are now trying very hard (again) to control women's bodies with the force of law, to cite just one example.
    • iol 5y ago
      They counter that you want to kill unborn babies. You counter that by either arguing that technically they're not actually human yet or that women's autonomy is more important. They disagree. You disagree. Brilliant segue.
      • atmartins 5y ago
        I think you're leaving out the part where one group feels like they can intervene in someone else's life and decisions about health based on a difference of opinion. The default should be "we disagree, you do you and I'll do me".
• itronitron 5y ago
  A lot of people in upper management are there because they aren't concerned about the effect their decisions have on their colleagues.
• gorgoiler 5y ago
  WFH is fantastic for ICs and misery for decision makers. You’re seeing pro-office bias from the latter because humans are optimised for building alignment when they meet in person. If you’re an IC that doesn’t need to build influence then, indeed, WFH is bliss. Not all tech work is about sitting in front of a glowing screen, writing code. It’s about achieving a business goal that brings in revenue, and all the alignment throughout the org that’s needed to get that done. Repository layout, test framework changes, factoring out core components to make a long term stable branch, persuading teams to collaborate at their bleeding edges rather than by internal releases, how to ship auto formatting code with the lowest negative impact on everyone else… Decision making, even on technical topics, is a people-centric skill.
  • wfh_forever 5y ago
    Every single engineering items were resolved by a well written design doc (ERD). 2-3 Google hangouts were enough to get alignment across team members.
  • dleslie 5y ago
    None of what you've described is impossible, or less effective, when performed over digital communication. If anything, digital is better for that coordination and influence gathering due to its recorded nature. Better still, because the digital communication is more time flexible the stakeholders and clients you need to coordinate have the ability to consume and process it at a rate that best suits them, rather than feign interest in yet another meeting packed with forgettable information that should have been an email.
    • gorgoiler 5y ago
      It feels like you are thinking of all the times it works well with people who engage positively and I am thinking of all the times it doesn’t with people who don’t. Like all of us here, I have had plenty of successful online and async collaborations to know it is possible and should work well. Not everything is perfect though. The problem areas — and the reason you’ve basically all got to be in the office at some point — are decision making ones where a group of two or more people fervently believe in two or more mutually exclusive ways forward. Even when I worked remote for a company multiple timezones away, I would be in the office one week every quarter to first build social capital and later to cash it in when building consensus. I also think back to one of my stakeholders was an underperforming SWE intern. The rate of online engagement that best suited them was zero, and yet — as with any intern — it was crucial to us that they left feeling positive about their time here. That stuff is really hard over the phone.
• jjav 5y ago
  > Taking the commute out of my job gave me an additional 4 hours everyday not counting lower stress levels. While I'm a huge proponent of WFH-forever and eliminating the commute, I have to say that it hasn't increased my time much. That's because with everyone commuting, we approximately never had meetings before 10am since everyone knew everyone might be stuck in traffic, so no point scheduling anything earlier. And certainly no meetings after 5pm since everyone had to hit the commute nightmare. With the pandemic WFH, I'm seeing meetings as early as 8am and up to 6pm, since there is no "excuse" of having to commute. So the time I was sitting in traffic I'm now sitting in zoom. Sure, I'd rather take zoom than traffic, but overall it didn't free up much time.
• IshKebab 5y ago
  A 2 hour commute is insane. That's on you really.
  • nemetroid 5y ago
    On them and American urban planning. I agree it’s insane, though.
    • tonyedgecombe 5y ago
      I suspect it has crept up on a lot of people as traffic has increased over time. In my last proper job I used to commute 24 miles in 30 minutes. The same journey now would be close to an hour.
  • neilalexander 5y ago
    I am not really sure whether you are suggesting people should move closer to their jobs, or to find jobs closer to where they live, but there are all sorts of externalities and life is rarely that simple.
• kirso 5y ago
  Think what it also enabled is less office politics and promotions based on the output, not who you chit chat with in the cafeteria