23 ms·

37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home

414 points by rustoo 5y ago

chasd00 5y ago
heh it must hurt to have paid for all that commercial real estate that's now sitting empty. I bet a decent portion of the motive to get employees back in the office is to just validate the rent bill.
- daniel-cussen 5y ago
  Mostly it's invasion of privacy. Your boss can invade your privacy trivially at work, and get reads on you about how little you can be paid, how much abuse you can actually take, to what degree he can injure you long-term so you have a worse negotiating position, what the consequences will be of going over that, all kinds of things. Like a typical boss will spend all day plotting how to get an employee to work unpaid overtime. Plus scream at you at FULL VOLUME, physical intimidation has to happen in person, it's too abstract if the volume is limited by the sound system or if the intimidation happens over video, it's not only less immediate but it can also be recorded accidentally. Like "oh I'll get my ass kicked...in 6 hours. Eh, go for it." And no decibel meter, that ruins the fun, when he whispers and retaliates for you not hearing him, or when he squelches "I'M AN ASSHOLE" the decibel meter can't say "oh that was inaudible, but the other one was this far from a shotgun." Ruins the fun. Because later in court, if the plaintiff repeats the scream, not only with the words, but with the tone, and with the VOLUME, THE COURT HAS TO STOP AND CHECK THE ACOUSTICS, HOW WELL INSULATED IS THIS ROOM, WE CAN'T INTERRUPT THE COURT NEXT DOOR. IS THAT REALLY HOW LOUD HE SAID IT? DECIBELS? METRIC SYSTEM? IF THE JUDGE HAS TO COVER HIS EARS THROUGH THE TESTIMONY, HE WILL HAVE TO FIND A VERY GOOD CLAUSE TO JUSTIFY--I SAID JUSTIFY--THE VERDICT IN FAVOR OF THE DEFENSE [explosives starting went off as I wrote this paragraph]. The basic problem with work from home is that it's digital. Gaslighting requires analog. (And I have had virtuous bosses, and even the boss who screamed "I AM AN ASSHOLE" into a recorded call center phone call had many virtues. In many ways employees, through their lack of work ethic, bring this upon themselves. But at the same time, he screamed "I AM AN ASSHOLE" into a recorded call center phone call. I'm not sure I disagree or agree with his confession, he said it and what is said is said.)
  - PraetorianGourd 5y ago
    > Gaslighting requires analog. No, no it doesn't. Sometimes the most powerful gas-lighter is oneself. Silence can cause me to gaslight myself. Shit, my boss isn't responding.. is he mad at me? Or fuck, a Zoom meeting at 4 PM on Friday fuck fuck. It must have been that PR.. I thought I removed the creds.. Of course I didn't, I never remember that. Fuck. Again. Damnit. I can't stand to look at it.. Also human communication is more than words and sounds, but expressions, body movement, minor twitches etc. Someone can be terrible at lying or obfuscating the truth in person and write some convincing shit in an email. People are the problem my friend, not where you work. Your isolation at home, and the ability to force isolation by closing an app, treats the same symptoms but you misidentified the disease.
    - daniel-cussen 5y ago
      I'm totally open to being all wrong. What can I read that will bring me around? On the note of gaslighting, it just doesn't work if the lamp is binary.
    - daniel-cussen 5y ago
      I would like to add to my other response: > Also human communication is more than words and sounds, but expressions, body movement, minor twitches etc. Someone can be terrible at lying or obfuscating the truth in person and write some convincing shit in an email. That's you. That's the employee. The convincing shit in an email is a raise ultimatum. The person who is terrible at lying or obfuscating the truth in person is the employee who needs to hide that his wife got pregnant or son got no financial aid from Stanford. Needs to hide his need, but needs his need to motivate him to get the raise he needs.
akagusu 5y ago
But execs want you to commute because their mindset is to make worker's life miserable, and working from home is seem like a privilege.
- warning26 5y ago
  Not everyone loves WFH, you know.
  - agumonkey 5y ago
    After covid we have some vague stats and yeah not everybody enjoy full remote. But 1) there's a large pool of people that do, 2) you can have hybrid 3) unless no other colleague goes to the workplace you may enjoy some workplace social context 4) we need to reduce energy expenditure and not commuting seems like a massive gain.
    - jdavis703 5y ago
      Unfortunately, the best remote setups are in low-density places with large homes. People moving from NYC and SF to Wyoming and Austin are going to be living in sprawl. There vehicle miles traveled (VMT) are going to increase: after all it’s not going to be a lockdown where white collar workers stay inside 24/7.
      - agumonkey 5y ago
        So (honest question), you think people doing remote-friendly jobs are in dense urban areas and don't contribute to car emission much ? so when these guys relocate far away, they're going to switch from public transportation to car ?
        kube-system 5y ago
        This is what is happening. Over the past 2 years, people have left cities with solid public transit (SF, Chicago, NYC) and have been moving towards car centric areas in places like Arizona, Florida, Texas.
api 5y ago
Now think about the economic savings in the areas of energy and capital depreciation on cars. The overall economic efficiency boost from this could be unbelievably huge, not to mention the environmental benefits of less routine commuting. I wouldn't be surprised if this approves economic efficiency by trillions of dollars.
- warning26 5y ago
  If only there were some way to transport people that wasn’t cars!
  - onemoresoop 5y ago
    That's the thing, remote working decreases the reliance on cars to some extent and not for everybody. Yes, cars are still used for transportation. In some urban settings public transportation is an option. I live in NYC and never owned a car not only because I rely on public transportation but it's a complete pain in the neck with parking, unwanted tickets and high cost for insurance.
    - UnpossibleJim 5y ago
      For every one of you, how many people are priced out of living in the city and have to drive to a parking lot to take the train in, or want their kids to have some semblance of a yard so they live in New Jersey and do the same?
      - onemoresoop 5y ago
        It's true and it's their choice of course. If I lived in NJ I'd surely own a car too. Sometimes I wish I had a car, especially on weekends so I and my family can do some outings but it's so expensive and cumbersome in NYC.
        UnpossibleJim 5y ago
        Oh, it's impractical to own a car if you live in NYC. There's really no point, unless you make stupid money or have a car fetish, or have some specific reason.
paulcole 5y ago
100% of the jobs I want to do can be performed entirely at home, but I prefer to do 100% of them in an office.
- warning26 5y ago
  Exactly — yet so many people can’t accept that ANYONE might want to work from an office. My assumption is that people who love WFH are generally suburbanites who can’t fathom getting to work involves anything other than sitting in traffic for two hours.
  - Tade0 5y ago
    Urbanite here. I hated having to travel daily, even when my commute was around 35 minutes. Currently working remotely and living in a city, because that's where all the services are.
  - iso1631 5y ago
    When getting to work involves a short walk to the office, getting a coffee on the way, of course that's the best commute by a country mile. When the weather's nice like this morning I'll take a longer walk, but I don't have to do that commute.
  - sharemywin 5y ago
    I hate cube and half cubes or like at my current job before covid I had an office that I shared with 2 other people.
    - peterb 5y ago
      This. A big problem with office work is office cube design. I'm old enough to have had a closed door office in the 90s and it was the best. I also worked in large cubes which had moveable partitions as walls where you couldn't see your neighbours. They were also good, not great, but better than today's cubes. They even had large book shelves where you could keep your reference books! At home, I can close my door and it is much superior for my personal productivity than an open office cube plan.
trentnix 5y ago
Can Be != Should Be
- kreeben 5y ago
  Why not?
  - WillPostForFood 5y ago
    "Can" doesn't tell you if the job is done better or worse, happier or unhappier.
    - trentnix 5y ago
      Exactly. I work remote. I am fully planning to work remote for the rest of my career. But I can imagine a number of scenarios where camaraderie, productivity, confidentiality, and quality of work are improved by having people in close proximity. So I understand why some companies and teams bias toward everyone working in an office. And my choice to work at home will prevent me from being hired at those places. I'm blessed there's plenty of work available for everyone, remote or not.
  - biermic 5y ago
    Social interactions.
  - lbriner 5y ago
    We are going to have a massive problem with taking on juniors, particularly younger people. Without many people visiting the office, there is a lack of banter, encouragement, confidence building. Imagine you were 16 and your introduction to the world of work was sitting in your own bedroom! Honestly, I don't know how we deal with it unless we create a schedule where there has to be certain people in the office on certain days so that a junior can get the interaction and support which is as much of job training as anything they can do online. So that's one example of when can do != should do
    - 5y ago
hsnewman 5y ago
I would change the title to "Approximately 37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home"
- neogodless 5y ago
  "37%" isn't a number with high precision to be begin with, so the "approximately" is implied.
  - hsnewman 5y ago
    I would say that it is quite specific.
foolfoolz 5y ago
i know it seems unlikely now but i think we will return to the office. not 100% of the time. not everyone was doing 100% before either. but a lot of people have switched jobs in the remote only era. we have experienced / are experiencing how little we know these new people. how little we feel connected to them. how strange it is to not make new friends at a new job that go beyond the work-friend level. i think most people will pay the cost of going in (again, not every day) for the gain of seeing people. this will be gradual but i think it is a common sentiment that we want to work with people we can see in person
- waterboigh 5y ago
  > this will be gradual but i think it is a common sentiment that we want to work with people we can see in person That's been my biggest issue, is I miss the people. I miss the coffee runs, the random lunch outings... However, if I lived my ideal schedule I would work from 0600 to 1100 ITO, break for a 'siesta', then finish my work later in the afternoon evening as my schedule allows. And so my co-workers have also had their own ideals which overlap little to any such that we quickly reach a point of "no point in having in office, we overlap two hours at best." Perhaps the best model to satiate flexibility but indulge the human side of the equation, is remote-first regional-companies. One can still plan to meet with some regularity without absurd amounts of travel. At my first startup, we would meet on a roughly weekly basis for a company lunch to have those conversations easiest done face-to-face, or just hang out for an afternoon enjoying the local natural beauty (#SaltLife) - anytime the Engineering VP and I needed to meetup, we'd just figure out what day we could meet up at a colo office or coffee spot. Otherwise, remote from wherever made sense. Some days for me it was pool side, some days down by the creek, most days just in my home office. The only real down-side is that lack of a national or global talent pool, but we weren't even all that niche so it wasn't a factor for us and, I suspect, most companies which just do the same old languages on the same old platforms.
  - AlwaysRock 5y ago
    I'd happily do quarterly week long company regional on sites. It's expensive for companies to do, if they do it right and cover all costs and travel for sig others/family, but its still cheaper than rent on a big office building.
Tenoke 5y ago
Has the title editorializing rule been dropped? I see even more posts with changed titles when the original isn't particularly misleading.
- caymanjim 5y ago
  I've been more aware of title changes lately, but I don't know if the frequency has increased. Some of them have been egregious. I'm a fan of changes like this one, though. I can't stand clickbait titles like this article has.
- htk 5y ago
  The title is a verbatim copy of one of the highlights in the study.
- Karawebnetwork 5y ago
  Since this is the most descriptive line out of the highlights section, I personally enjoy that this is the content chosen instead of the "clickbaity" page title which would be "How many jobs can be done at home?".
stefan_ 5y ago
But then the jig is up, no? I thought that was an amazing moment when recently the NYC mayor asked CEOs to "help get workers back to the office". It's not about the work, it's not about the city, it's about making sure real estate doesn't crash and those campaign contributions can keep coming.
- lbriner 5y ago
  Maybe the mayor also cares about local businesses that get their income from city workers as well as the transport networks which need all the money they can get. Maybe they care about the tourist buzz from a busy city or the saftey in numbers. You don't always have to assume the worst of someone just because they are powerful.
  - dml2135 5y ago
    These things are not mutually exclusive.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - spookthesunset 5y ago
    Don’t forget the suburban sprawl this sort of stuff will cause. Eating further and further into our natural habitats building giant houses for wealthy, privileged tech workers.
    - kwhitefoot 5y ago
      Work from home could plausibly have the opposite effect by liberating a lot of buildings from office use and repurposing them as homes. I know a lot of people who would prefer to live in a city rather than the suburbs, especially young people.
    - Apocryphon 5y ago
      The solution to that is improved urban planning, not to reduce the demand for housing.
TimPC 5y ago
The coding used by this survey is a joke. If 40% of an occupation says they work outdoors that's below 50% so it's bucketed into the work from home category on that criterion. I think if even 20% of a job is saying they work outdoors that's pretty strong evidence you're missing some information about what the other 80% are doing in their job that prevents it from being a work from home job. The net result of their setup is obviously a vast overestimate so take the 37% number with a grain of salt.
- stevenhubertron 5y ago
  Couldn’t the job still be performed at home with the occasional on site? I’m thinking of a construction PM. The job could mainly be done at home other then when needed to meet GC on site. Seems like there is still WFH no?
  - htk 5y ago
    That’s why the “entirely at home” from the study’s highlights is an egregious conclusion from its methods.
  - TimPC 5y ago
    Depends what you're using the WFH number for. If you want to extend it to an argument about being able to live substantially further from a job then needing to meet a GC on site some of the time is a dealbreaker. I think it's fair to say to call the job as a whole a WFH job it needs to be 100% remote. That's not to say non-WFH jobs can't have some remote time.
    - kube-system 5y ago
      My office has people who live across the country and work 95% remote, and hop on a few flights per year when they're needed. Is that not WFH?
  - spookthesunset 5y ago
    > I’m thinking of a construction PM. The job could mainly be done at home other then when needed to meet GC on site. I’m sure all the blue collar construction workers would totally respect the PM even more than they do now if they didn’t show up on site… There is an awful lot of privilege going on behind the scenes in these WFH debates.
wing-_-nuts 5y ago
I know some companies are trying to get their employees to go back to a hybrid schedule, but for me, I think the bell can't be unrung. My company is a f500 company that I would not have thought would remain remote, but we have, and it really helps us hire and retain talent. It honestly helps us recruit people that would otherwise have sought out trendier employers.
stevenhubertron 5y ago
I don’t hate working in an office. I hate working in an “open plan” office where someone is always interrupting my work.
- silisili 5y ago
  Same. Seems not too long before people started really hating offices, offices started being designed to make you hate them. Open offices, no walls, 'island concept' which sounds all fun and tropical until you learn it just means you no longer even have your own desk. If companies want people back in offices, make them enticing. Have perks! Imagine everyone getting their own room, with a nice desk and maybe small couch and mini fridge. Having a shared personal assistant to take care of some things, work related or not. Heck, even something as small as a free daycare would be a huge motivator. If you want people back, start treating them like people and not cattle.
  - pc86 5y ago
    I agree with everything you said but how is "free daycare" something small? Daycare costs thousands of dollars and the regulations and licensure are (rightfully) a very high bar. I would see free daycare as a huge perk and I don't even have kids.
    - silisili 5y ago
      You're right, its impact is not small at all. My wife pretty much stayed out of the labor market because day care costs so much. I guess I was thinking the work involved seemed relatively small compared to redesigning whole offices- just carve out a couple areas and hire some caretakers. But I'm pretty ignorant of the laws, regulations, and needs as you pointed out, so that's probably not small at all either.
    - Clubber 5y ago
      You get economies of scale with larger companies. The regulations are usually 1 worker per x kids, if I recall and not much more than that. It's not that strict at all. Of course if you had daycare at your company you could have a large room or a wing with a playroom and all that. It's pennies on the dollar to retain good talent, if you actually want to force people back in the office.
mwattsun 5y ago
5 of us wrote Microsoft Works for the Macintosh while working at home from 1984 to 1992. Without the internet, we got together as needed to merge code, usually once a month, but sometimes once a week. We talked on the phone. We went to Microsoft once in awhile. It was ideal and worked very well. Maybe it was just our personalities that made it work, but I am astonished that any programmer would rather go into the office. With high speed internet and video conferencing, I assume that some people are just very lonely and need face to face. I see nothing wrong with that. I understand it, but after 1992 I took a job that forced me into an office and I hated it. I can safely say I never wrote any good code while working in an office. There are too many distractions.
- odonnellryan 5y ago
  It took me 1-2 years before WFH didn't make me depressed. I enjoy it now but I understand.
- cecilpl2 5y ago
  This is fascinating to me! How did you manage to merge code in the 80s? What tools were available? Did you have three-way merge tools or did you do it more manually? Or rather did you talk frequently and ensure that you weren't stepping in each other's files? How did you make changes to shared APIs?
  - tfigment 5y ago
    I would assume RCS and floppies. CVS later. That is what my company apparently used in that era.
  - eminence32 5y ago
    Some "old-timers" at my software company occasionally tell stories about how "checking the source code" meant physically grabbing a the one binder filled with pages of fortran and inserting your changes. Physically holding the binder gave you exclusive checkin access :)
  - Clubber 5y ago
    There were always tools to diff two codebases and make a intermediate file that had all the changes. We did it back in the BBS days. You could always take the diff file and type the changes in manually. That's how "mods" worked. It would be something like this SomeFile.pas 14: - If Variable = 1 14: + If Variable = 2
DoneWithAllThat 5y ago
Once again, I am begging HN: this is a misleading title format for links to single papers or studies. What is being phrased as factual in the headline is merely an assertion in a paper, and should be reflected as such. “New paper claims (x)” is reasonable. “Study suggests (x)” is also reasonable. “(x)” borders on straight up falsehood when it portrays an assertion as a new finding about our world.
- lukas099 5y ago
  I think the assumption on HN should be that the title is merely what the article author is claiming. So from my perspective reading a title like "37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home" is automatically converted to "AuthorClaimsThat(37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home)".
monkeybutton 5y ago
Imagine the environmental impact of cutting out emissions from 37% of commuters for "free". We could do it today. Its been proven to work the last 2 years. It's such low hanging fruit it's mind boggling!
- bobbean 5y ago
  Oh my god, imagine the improvement in traffic for those who do have to leave their house for work.
  - monkeybutton 5y ago
    The effect is compounding too because those people will spend less time driving and idling their engines!
TheGigaChad 5y ago
jmyeet 5y ago
The lesson here is you can never really predict what will happen. This is important to remember when people make any predictions, particularly for doom and gloom scenarios. Take the Black Plague, which killed an estimted 25-50% of the population of Europe. For those lucky enough to survive this was a huge boon for workers rights and wages [1]. There have no real increase in worker wages in 40 years [2]. The pendulum swings back and forth on any issue and we've swung too far towards unbridled capitalistic exploitation (IMHO). Labor organization (ie unions) led to things like a limited work week, safety in the workplace and so on. The flipside of that was corruption, resistance to change and so on. But ever since the farce of the Reagan trickle-down economics era, worker conditions have gotten increasingly worse (relatively) while the accumulation of wealth at the top is absolutely unprecedented. So Covid has killed millions and this is of course tragic. But who knew that this would be the catalyst for the first real increase in wages in decades and the ability to redefine the outdated in-person work that wastes so much time on money on pointless commutes? I'm glad that something good is coming out of this. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequences_of_the_Black_Death#:~:text=If%20workers%20attempted%20to%20leave,end%20of%20the%2019th%20century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequences_of_the_Black_Deat.... [2]: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us...
nickysielicki 5y ago
My workplace is trying to get people to come back in the next week or two and people are suspiciously taking a lot of vacation. ~30% of engineering is out today. Methinks they’re in for a very big surprise in 2 weeks, and I don’t think they’ll have the money to counter the offers that people will naturally field in this market. It’s an unforced error.
jleyank 5y ago
This seems low as only jobs that require(!) F2F interaction with customers or coworkers can't be done remotely. This might come down to "mucking about with the hardware" being the dividing line - if you need the car, it's in the shop, otherwise you can do in on the road, via the Web, ... Psychologically, companies and (older? extroverted?) workers won't agree with this, but it's not up to them to change. Change happens at its own pace and you can either yell at the tide or move with it.
- etskinner 5y ago
  You're right about the dividing line being mucking with hardware (I'd also add 'requires access to large or expensive equipment'). But there are plenty of jobs that don't require face-to-face interaction but do require on-site work for one reason or another. Air traffic control, janitors, machinists, garbage collectors, geologists, bakers, etc.
  - jleyank 5y ago
    Good point, feel free to expound on my definition of hardware. "Ya gotta touch it?" as I might have been to locked into my own vocabulary.
dxbydt 5y ago
Dr. Dingel writes - "Our code makes it easy for users to explore alternative assumptions about whether any given occupation can be done from home." His repo - https://github.com/jdingel/DingelNeiman-workathome https://github.com/jdingel/DingelNeiman-workathome Would be a worthwhile student project to replicate this in R/pandas (They used Stata on a Mac, if you know what I mean) & have an interactive online plot so one can change the survey assumptions & see what results. Just collating all this data in one place is a monumental effort. I remember this paper was a "huge fucking deal" when it came out in Sep 2020. Has like ~1500 cites. Was used by Biden administration to set policy. Co-author Dr. Neiman was personally nominated by Biden for treasury. Authors are Booth school stalwarts. Pls do read the paper, very insightful even if you don't agree with its methodology/conclusions.
smm11 5y ago
The world did not exist until Git.
tharne 5y ago
I really hope American businesses don't bring this headline to its logical conclusion... "37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home...by people in India or Eastern Europe for much less money"
- achenet 5y ago
  not if those jobs entail good written or even oral communication skills. Native English speakers have a huge leg up on Indians and Eastern Europeans in this regard. For example, I imagine Coca-Cola is willing to pay more to have the person writing their ad copy be someone who has been immersed in American culture from birth.
  - samarthr1 5y ago
    A good portion of Indian engineers speak good English. Anecdotal evidence only though.
    - globular-toast 5y ago
      But a good portion don't, which makes hiring take a lot longer.
    - mprovost 5y ago
      Ironically, if you google "is speak good english grammatically correct" there are a lot of articles debating whether it's ok, or if "speak English well" is better. This is the kind of subtlety that's hard to understand for non-native speakers.
      - glandium 5y ago
        I don't think there's anything grammatically wrong with "speak good English". The difference to me is language register.
- manuelabeledo 5y ago
  Companies have been doing this for decades already. The current situation is not going to shift even more jobs to India. Reasons being, good engineers from India are already moving to the US in sheer numbers, and good talent is unlikely to remain at Indian IT consultancy companies. Anecdotally, I have worked along with very clever engineers who happened to be Indian nationals living in the US, but I have yet to find an above average engineer working at an Indian IT shop and based in India.
latenightcoding 5y ago
Doesn't that mean a good chunk of those jobs can also be outsourced?
flowersjeff 5y ago
This surprises...nobody? Except maybe bean counters/management types that need to show off perhaps. With that said, I do have concerns. These issues center around a shift in benefits offered as a result of this new paradigm ( hate using that word but ) around the nature of work. I.e. the gig everything economy coming to your job...soon Many folks in the US work a 9to5 not just for the pay, rather for healthcare and stability. However, it's only a matter of time that employees will become even more API'ified / made into independent contracts / etc. I know that many will welcome the flexibility - some though will not understand what this means. I do wonder how the US will be able to handle this continued move away from 'trad' employment, given our rather odd situation of one's medical being tied at the hip to one's employer? Those that work in other jurisdictions need not fear the loss of a job as much as a US citizen. Literally, you could die ( just look at how many of those that were made unemployed during the pandemic lost access to medical. ) Just my musings...
- mumblemumble 5y ago
  I would guess that the gig economy simply can't come for any jobs that require significant domain expertise or more than a few hour's worth of attention to any single project. Comparable to how you don't see day laborers doing pipefitting.
- dudul 5y ago
  2 thoughts. First, "gig workers" can't work across the board. Companies working on products often need people to have deep understanding of the product. We all know how costly it can be to lose say a software engineer who has a few years tenure. Second, if the gig-economy were to become very widespread, it may finally be a push to have a true, sensible market for health insurance in the US. If employers no longer pay insurance carriers/brokers to cover their employees, these carriers will need to come up with products people can afford.
- hooande 5y ago
  If there is a large shift toward gig economy work, then the healthcare industry will shift as well. There's nothing preventing them from offering affordable healthcare to gig employees other than the status quo and their current profit models. Something the size of the insurance industry is going to shift about 5-10 years after the general market. So if you're worried about short term gigification of your job, you might want to look into private insurance/benefit options now. Over the long term I think it will take care of itself.
SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
I'm pretty skeptical of this methodology. They don't seem to be making any attempt to measure whether a job can be done effectively from home, only whether it's prohibited by some physical necessity. "Managers, educators, and those working in computers, finance, and law are largely able to work from home", but is having your teacher or lawyer on a little iPad really a complete substitute for having them right in front of you? I guess I'm not sure how I would do it better, but that doesn't make it super meaningful.
- panzagl 5y ago
  Educators? Really? That alone makes me doubt the article.
cosmiccatnap 5y ago
didip 5y ago
The society has a once-a-lifetime opportunity to refactor how it can work, but it squandered it. Imagine if office buildings are no longer necessary. A lot more hi-rise apartments can be built, cities can be a lot more dense, and light rails can be attractive again.
- chasd00 5y ago
  high rise apartments are really just office buildings. Just live at the office, it's pretty much equivalent.
aaccount 5y ago
Most jobs done need to exist to begin with. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kehnIQ41y2o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kehnIQ41y2o
- holyyikes 5y ago
Overtonwindow 5y ago
Working from home is great and all, but do we really want work to be within our home? I’ve been working from home the entire pandemic, and I still find it hard to stop working and “be home.”
- chasd00 5y ago
  that definitely has to be managed well. I wfh in a room where i also do my hobbies and stuff (like a tiny workshop more or less). What i do is when i'm done with work i put my company issued laptop in a dedicated drawer and close it. When the drawer closes my mind flips to "i'm at home" mode. The next morning, when i open teh drawer, my mind flips to "i'm at work" mode. It works for me but may not work for everyone.
- peter303 5y ago
  Coworking spaces were supposed be a compromise. Individuals and small teams could work in an office-like space without home distractions for a few hundred a month. In the early days coworking provided quality bandwith and printing for less you'd pay at home. But that advantage has faded. I have lost track of how coworking has fared during covid. For a while, pre-covid, they seemed to outnumber coffee houses in my metro area.
Animats 5y ago
If everything you do goes in and out over a wire, some day your job will be either automated or offshored.
- deafcalculus 5y ago
  That's what a lot of people thought in the 2000s, but going by SV salaries the automate or offshore story hasn't really played out! Then again, horses seem to have lost their job in the early 20th century after cars came along, and their population just declined thereafter.
  - Workaccount2 5y ago
    You ever wonder why people in old rust belt areas complain about "the globalists" all the time?
    - throwaway684936 5y ago
lvl102 5y ago
Wait till they find out 80% of office jobs are redundant.
- johnisgood 5y ago
  I know right... If I could go through with (got health issues at the time) implementing automation of some stuff, then because of me hundreds of people would be out of their jobs... or at least that job. It would have saved the company a lot of money, too.
kkfx 5y ago
The fallacy reside in: "can be performed", witch do not state how they can, because so far most push "smart working" in the form of "get this laptop, this smartphone with a 4/5G plan and you are ready to work". That's obviously tend to fail and works just for people who have corrected the aim perhaps with a docking station, external monitor and external keyboard, having a spare room silent enough etc at personal level at company level it's even worse: most have no idea about remote work. The modern classic solution is having a big enough hw resources to keep a VDI infra asking workers to be on remote desktop all time, and again that's not a good idea even if seems to be the easiest. Seriously facing such aspects and finally admit that "real" WFH means set up a home office, with relevant furniture, equipment, connections etc and organize the work to be done from remote pushing people on some proprietary platform in the hope to get a quick&done third party solution will not really push up WFH to something structural and good for all parties involved.
zw123456 5y ago
For the other 63%, I think an interesting possibility is to use a robot Turk machine type of arrangement. Take for example, the "flag person" at a road construction site, it is an outdoor job and hence would be categorized as not possible to do from home, but, one could easily design a very simple machine with a camera and the stop/slow sign that could be operated remotely. That could actually be safer and lower cost. There are lots of other possible examples, window washer, etc. There is probably some companies working on it already, if not, it might be an interesting idea I think.
- PraetorianGourd 5y ago
  Have you ever worked as a flagger? I have. It isn't a binary "move the sign and then flip it back". Here are a list of things that you would need to consider: 1. Flaggers often go from site to site throughout the day. You would need someone to set up and take down the machine 2. The flagger is in constant radio contact with the work crew. They need to know which equipment is blocking which lane etc. And this is always changing. 3. Flaggers need to respond to emergency vehicles, busses, their own work trucks etc. You have to have your head on a swivel at all times 4. Pedestrians/bikers/other road users need to be considered as well, and may be outside of camera shot 5. What if the connection is choppy/equipment breaks. Does a tech go site to site? Does the crew stop working? Labor is the single biggest cost of construction by a large margin. Everyone minute the crew isn't working is CrewNumber * PrevailingWage lost. 6. Flaggers work at night/all weather/complex intersections. All this would need to be accounted for. 7. Like self driving cars, there are about 12 billion edge cases that take a combination of experience/reasoning. I don't mean to be dismissive of your idea or anything. But this attitude is pervasive in our industry, that "I saw someone doing a job that looks easy, I bet I know everything about it and can design a better way to do it". That attitude is both great (inspires bold ideas) and terrible. The right question isn't "I bet this could be automated" but rather, "I should job shadow someone doing this job, see if there are any ways to improve it".
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
gwbas1c 5y ago
I've been remote by necessity for 8 years, since 2014. I'd prefer to be in the office most days; but the realities of life would make it difficult for my wife and I to both have careers and be parents. If either of us had a rigid "be in the office Monday - Friday" job, the other would need to cut back to part time just to care for our young children. What I've observed: In software, a company that wants you to be on-site Monday - Friday has control issues. Limiting your workforce to people who live within a reasonable commute who are single / single career couples / childless couples just makes it hard to hire.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
beauzero 5y ago
This would save a lot of oil.
black_13 5y ago
careersaas 5y ago
This is approx ~30% in Europe, meanwhile of the positions that "can be performed entirely at home", interestingly these remote positions take half as long to fill... in comparison to fully office-based positions. Source: https://app.careersaas.com/portal/career-search.html https://app.careersaas.com/portal/career-search.html
gilbetron 5y ago
The company I work for had a "return to office" about two weeks ago, and while we still are 50%+ remote, those that aren't we're now in the office a lot more. My first impression after two weeks is how little the in office people get done. They spend a significant amount of time socializing and walking around to meetings and getting meeting rooms working and eating, and when they are in meetings, are less focused, and when they aren't in meetings, they talk about not being able to concentrate as well because of all the distractions. They also seem to be having a lot more fun! It should be interesting to see how it plays out in the next few years!

414 points by rustoo 5y ago

heh it must hurt to have paid for all that commercial real estate that's now sitting empty. I bet a decent portion of the motive to get employees back in the office is to just validate the rent bill.

daniel-cussen 5y ago
Mostly it's invasion of privacy. Your boss can invade your privacy trivially at work, and get reads on you about how little you can be paid, how much abuse you can actually take, to what degree he can injure you long-term so you have a worse negotiating position, what the consequences will be of going over that, all kinds of things. Like a typical boss will spend all day plotting how to get an employee to work unpaid overtime. Plus scream at you at FULL VOLUME, physical intimidation has to happen in person, it's too abstract if the volume is limited by the sound system or if the intimidation happens over video, it's not only less immediate but it can also be recorded accidentally. Like "oh I'll get my ass kicked...in 6 hours. Eh, go for it." And no decibel meter, that ruins the fun, when he whispers and retaliates for you not hearing him, or when he squelches "I'M AN ASSHOLE" the decibel meter can't say "oh that was inaudible, but the other one was this far from a shotgun." Ruins the fun. Because later in court, if the plaintiff repeats the scream, not only with the words, but with the tone, and with the VOLUME, THE COURT HAS TO STOP AND CHECK THE ACOUSTICS, HOW WELL INSULATED IS THIS ROOM, WE CAN'T INTERRUPT THE COURT NEXT DOOR. IS THAT REALLY HOW LOUD HE SAID IT? DECIBELS? METRIC SYSTEM? IF THE JUDGE HAS TO COVER HIS EARS THROUGH THE TESTIMONY, HE WILL HAVE TO FIND A VERY GOOD CLAUSE TO JUSTIFY--I SAID JUSTIFY--THE VERDICT IN FAVOR OF THE DEFENSE [explosives starting went off as I wrote this paragraph]. The basic problem with work from home is that it's digital. Gaslighting requires analog. (And I have had virtuous bosses, and even the boss who screamed "I AM AN ASSHOLE" into a recorded call center phone call had many virtues. In many ways employees, through their lack of work ethic, bring this upon themselves. But at the same time, he screamed "I AM AN ASSHOLE" into a recorded call center phone call. I'm not sure I disagree or agree with his confession, he said it and what is said is said.)
- PraetorianGourd 5y ago
  > Gaslighting requires analog. No, no it doesn't. Sometimes the most powerful gas-lighter is oneself. Silence can cause me to gaslight myself. Shit, my boss isn't responding.. is he mad at me? Or fuck, a Zoom meeting at 4 PM on Friday fuck fuck. It must have been that PR.. I thought I removed the creds.. Of course I didn't, I never remember that. Fuck. Again. Damnit. I can't stand to look at it.. Also human communication is more than words and sounds, but expressions, body movement, minor twitches etc. Someone can be terrible at lying or obfuscating the truth in person and write some convincing shit in an email. People are the problem my friend, not where you work. Your isolation at home, and the ability to force isolation by closing an app, treats the same symptoms but you misidentified the disease.
  - daniel-cussen 5y ago
    I'm totally open to being all wrong. What can I read that will bring me around? On the note of gaslighting, it just doesn't work if the lamp is binary.
  - daniel-cussen 5y ago
    I would like to add to my other response: > Also human communication is more than words and sounds, but expressions, body movement, minor twitches etc. Someone can be terrible at lying or obfuscating the truth in person and write some convincing shit in an email. That's you. That's the employee. The convincing shit in an email is a raise ultimatum. The person who is terrible at lying or obfuscating the truth in person is the employee who needs to hide that his wife got pregnant or son got no financial aid from Stanford. Needs to hide his need, but needs his need to motivate him to get the raise he needs.

akagusu 5y ago

But execs want you to commute because their mindset is to make worker's life miserable, and working from home is seem like a privilege.

warning26 5y ago
Not everyone loves WFH, you know.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  After covid we have some vague stats and yeah not everybody enjoy full remote. But 1) there's a large pool of people that do, 2) you can have hybrid 3) unless no other colleague goes to the workplace you may enjoy some workplace social context 4) we need to reduce energy expenditure and not commuting seems like a massive gain.
  - jdavis703 5y ago
    Unfortunately, the best remote setups are in low-density places with large homes. People moving from NYC and SF to Wyoming and Austin are going to be living in sprawl. There vehicle miles traveled (VMT) are going to increase: after all it’s not going to be a lockdown where white collar workers stay inside 24/7.
    - agumonkey 5y ago
      So (honest question), you think people doing remote-friendly jobs are in dense urban areas and don't contribute to car emission much ? so when these guys relocate far away, they're going to switch from public transportation to car ?
      - kube-system 5y ago
        This is what is happening. Over the past 2 years, people have left cities with solid public transit (SF, Chicago, NYC) and have been moving towards car centric areas in places like Arizona, Florida, Texas.

api 5y ago

Now think about the economic savings in the areas of energy and capital depreciation on cars. The overall economic efficiency boost from this could be unbelievably huge, not to mention the environmental benefits of less routine commuting. I wouldn't be surprised if this approves economic efficiency by trillions of dollars.

warning26 5y ago
If only there were some way to transport people that wasn’t cars!
- onemoresoop 5y ago
  That's the thing, remote working decreases the reliance on cars to some extent and not for everybody. Yes, cars are still used for transportation. In some urban settings public transportation is an option. I live in NYC and never owned a car not only because I rely on public transportation but it's a complete pain in the neck with parking, unwanted tickets and high cost for insurance.
  - UnpossibleJim 5y ago
    For every one of you, how many people are priced out of living in the city and have to drive to a parking lot to take the train in, or want their kids to have some semblance of a yard so they live in New Jersey and do the same?
    - onemoresoop 5y ago
      It's true and it's their choice of course. If I lived in NJ I'd surely own a car too. Sometimes I wish I had a car, especially on weekends so I and my family can do some outings but it's so expensive and cumbersome in NYC.
      - UnpossibleJim 5y ago
        Oh, it's impractical to own a car if you live in NYC. There's really no point, unless you make stupid money or have a car fetish, or have some specific reason.

paulcole 5y ago

100% of the jobs I want to do can be performed entirely at home, but I prefer to do 100% of them in an office.

warning26 5y ago
Exactly — yet so many people can’t accept that ANYONE might want to work from an office. My assumption is that people who love WFH are generally suburbanites who can’t fathom getting to work involves anything other than sitting in traffic for two hours.
- Tade0 5y ago
  Urbanite here. I hated having to travel daily, even when my commute was around 35 minutes. Currently working remotely and living in a city, because that's where all the services are.
- iso1631 5y ago
  When getting to work involves a short walk to the office, getting a coffee on the way, of course that's the best commute by a country mile. When the weather's nice like this morning I'll take a longer walk, but I don't have to do that commute.
- sharemywin 5y ago
  I hate cube and half cubes or like at my current job before covid I had an office that I shared with 2 other people.
  - peterb 5y ago
    This. A big problem with office work is office cube design. I'm old enough to have had a closed door office in the 90s and it was the best. I also worked in large cubes which had moveable partitions as walls where you couldn't see your neighbours. They were also good, not great, but better than today's cubes. They even had large book shelves where you could keep your reference books! At home, I can close my door and it is much superior for my personal productivity than an open office cube plan.

trentnix 5y ago

Can Be != Should Be

kreeben 5y ago
Why not?
- WillPostForFood 5y ago
  "Can" doesn't tell you if the job is done better or worse, happier or unhappier.
  - trentnix 5y ago
    Exactly. I work remote. I am fully planning to work remote for the rest of my career. But I can imagine a number of scenarios where camaraderie, productivity, confidentiality, and quality of work are improved by having people in close proximity. So I understand why some companies and teams bias toward everyone working in an office. And my choice to work at home will prevent me from being hired at those places. I'm blessed there's plenty of work available for everyone, remote or not.
- biermic 5y ago
  Social interactions.
- lbriner 5y ago
  We are going to have a massive problem with taking on juniors, particularly younger people. Without many people visiting the office, there is a lack of banter, encouragement, confidence building. Imagine you were 16 and your introduction to the world of work was sitting in your own bedroom! Honestly, I don't know how we deal with it unless we create a schedule where there has to be certain people in the office on certain days so that a junior can get the interaction and support which is as much of job training as anything they can do online. So that's one example of when can do != should do
  - 5y ago

hsnewman 5y ago

I would change the title to "Approximately 37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home"

neogodless 5y ago
"37%" isn't a number with high precision to be begin with, so the "approximately" is implied.
- hsnewman 5y ago
  I would say that it is quite specific.

foolfoolz 5y ago

i know it seems unlikely now but i think we will return to the office. not 100% of the time. not everyone was doing 100% before either. but a lot of people have switched jobs in the remote only era. we have experienced / are experiencing how little we know these new people. how little we feel connected to them. how strange it is to not make new friends at a new job that go beyond the work-friend level. i think most people will pay the cost of going in (again, not every day) for the gain of seeing people. this will be gradual but i think it is a common sentiment that we want to work with people we can see in person

waterboigh 5y ago
> this will be gradual but i think it is a common sentiment that we want to work with people we can see in person That's been my biggest issue, is I miss the people. I miss the coffee runs, the random lunch outings... However, if I lived my ideal schedule I would work from 0600 to 1100 ITO, break for a 'siesta', then finish my work later in the afternoon evening as my schedule allows. And so my co-workers have also had their own ideals which overlap little to any such that we quickly reach a point of "no point in having in office, we overlap two hours at best." Perhaps the best model to satiate flexibility but indulge the human side of the equation, is remote-first regional-companies. One can still plan to meet with some regularity without absurd amounts of travel. At my first startup, we would meet on a roughly weekly basis for a company lunch to have those conversations easiest done face-to-face, or just hang out for an afternoon enjoying the local natural beauty (#SaltLife) - anytime the Engineering VP and I needed to meetup, we'd just figure out what day we could meet up at a colo office or coffee spot. Otherwise, remote from wherever made sense. Some days for me it was pool side, some days down by the creek, most days just in my home office. The only real down-side is that lack of a national or global talent pool, but we weren't even all that niche so it wasn't a factor for us and, I suspect, most companies which just do the same old languages on the same old platforms.
- AlwaysRock 5y ago
  I'd happily do quarterly week long company regional on sites. It's expensive for companies to do, if they do it right and cover all costs and travel for sig others/family, but its still cheaper than rent on a big office building.

Tenoke 5y ago

Has the title editorializing rule been dropped? I see even more posts with changed titles when the original isn't particularly misleading.

caymanjim 5y ago
I've been more aware of title changes lately, but I don't know if the frequency has increased. Some of them have been egregious. I'm a fan of changes like this one, though. I can't stand clickbait titles like this article has.
htk 5y ago
The title is a verbatim copy of one of the highlights in the study.
Karawebnetwork 5y ago
Since this is the most descriptive line out of the highlights section, I personally enjoy that this is the content chosen instead of the "clickbaity" page title which would be "How many jobs can be done at home?".

stefan_ 5y ago

But then the jig is up, no? I thought that was an amazing moment when recently the NYC mayor asked CEOs to "help get workers back to the office". It's not about the work, it's not about the city, it's about making sure real estate doesn't crash and those campaign contributions can keep coming.

lbriner 5y ago
Maybe the mayor also cares about local businesses that get their income from city workers as well as the transport networks which need all the money they can get. Maybe they care about the tourist buzz from a busy city or the saftey in numbers. You don't always have to assume the worst of someone just because they are powerful.
- dml2135 5y ago
  These things are not mutually exclusive.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- spookthesunset 5y ago
  Don’t forget the suburban sprawl this sort of stuff will cause. Eating further and further into our natural habitats building giant houses for wealthy, privileged tech workers.
  - kwhitefoot 5y ago
    Work from home could plausibly have the opposite effect by liberating a lot of buildings from office use and repurposing them as homes. I know a lot of people who would prefer to live in a city rather than the suburbs, especially young people.
  - Apocryphon 5y ago
    The solution to that is improved urban planning, not to reduce the demand for housing.

TimPC 5y ago

The coding used by this survey is a joke. If 40% of an occupation says they work outdoors that's below 50% so it's bucketed into the work from home category on that criterion. I think if even 20% of a job is saying they work outdoors that's pretty strong evidence you're missing some information about what the other 80% are doing in their job that prevents it from being a work from home job. The net result of their setup is obviously a vast overestimate so take the 37% number with a grain of salt.

stevenhubertron 5y ago
Couldn’t the job still be performed at home with the occasional on site? I’m thinking of a construction PM. The job could mainly be done at home other then when needed to meet GC on site. Seems like there is still WFH no?
- htk 5y ago
  That’s why the “entirely at home” from the study’s highlights is an egregious conclusion from its methods.
- TimPC 5y ago
  Depends what you're using the WFH number for. If you want to extend it to an argument about being able to live substantially further from a job then needing to meet a GC on site some of the time is a dealbreaker. I think it's fair to say to call the job as a whole a WFH job it needs to be 100% remote. That's not to say non-WFH jobs can't have some remote time.
  - kube-system 5y ago
    My office has people who live across the country and work 95% remote, and hop on a few flights per year when they're needed. Is that not WFH?
- spookthesunset 5y ago
  > I’m thinking of a construction PM. The job could mainly be done at home other then when needed to meet GC on site. I’m sure all the blue collar construction workers would totally respect the PM even more than they do now if they didn’t show up on site… There is an awful lot of privilege going on behind the scenes in these WFH debates.

wing-_-nuts 5y ago

I know some companies are trying to get their employees to go back to a hybrid schedule, but for me, I think the bell can't be unrung. My company is a f500 company that I would not have thought would remain remote, but we have, and it really helps us hire and retain talent. It honestly helps us recruit people that would otherwise have sought out trendier employers.

stevenhubertron 5y ago

I don’t hate working in an office. I hate working in an “open plan” office where someone is always interrupting my work.

silisili 5y ago
Same. Seems not too long before people started really hating offices, offices started being designed to make you hate them. Open offices, no walls, 'island concept' which sounds all fun and tropical until you learn it just means you no longer even have your own desk. If companies want people back in offices, make them enticing. Have perks! Imagine everyone getting their own room, with a nice desk and maybe small couch and mini fridge. Having a shared personal assistant to take care of some things, work related or not. Heck, even something as small as a free daycare would be a huge motivator. If you want people back, start treating them like people and not cattle.
- pc86 5y ago
  I agree with everything you said but how is "free daycare" something small? Daycare costs thousands of dollars and the regulations and licensure are (rightfully) a very high bar. I would see free daycare as a huge perk and I don't even have kids.
  - silisili 5y ago
    You're right, its impact is not small at all. My wife pretty much stayed out of the labor market because day care costs so much. I guess I was thinking the work involved seemed relatively small compared to redesigning whole offices- just carve out a couple areas and hire some caretakers. But I'm pretty ignorant of the laws, regulations, and needs as you pointed out, so that's probably not small at all either.
  - Clubber 5y ago
    You get economies of scale with larger companies. The regulations are usually 1 worker per x kids, if I recall and not much more than that. It's not that strict at all. Of course if you had daycare at your company you could have a large room or a wing with a playroom and all that. It's pennies on the dollar to retain good talent, if you actually want to force people back in the office.

mwattsun 5y ago

5 of us wrote Microsoft Works for the Macintosh while working at home from 1984 to 1992. Without the internet, we got together as needed to merge code, usually once a month, but sometimes once a week. We talked on the phone. We went to Microsoft once in awhile. It was ideal and worked very well. Maybe it was just our personalities that made it work, but I am astonished that any programmer would rather go into the office. With high speed internet and video conferencing, I assume that some people are just very lonely and need face to face. I see nothing wrong with that. I understand it, but after 1992 I took a job that forced me into an office and I hated it. I can safely say I never wrote any good code while working in an office. There are too many distractions.

odonnellryan 5y ago
It took me 1-2 years before WFH didn't make me depressed. I enjoy it now but I understand.
cecilpl2 5y ago
This is fascinating to me! How did you manage to merge code in the 80s? What tools were available? Did you have three-way merge tools or did you do it more manually? Or rather did you talk frequently and ensure that you weren't stepping in each other's files? How did you make changes to shared APIs?
- tfigment 5y ago
  I would assume RCS and floppies. CVS later. That is what my company apparently used in that era.
- eminence32 5y ago
  Some "old-timers" at my software company occasionally tell stories about how "checking the source code" meant physically grabbing a the one binder filled with pages of fortran and inserting your changes. Physically holding the binder gave you exclusive checkin access :)
- Clubber 5y ago
  There were always tools to diff two codebases and make a intermediate file that had all the changes. We did it back in the BBS days. You could always take the diff file and type the changes in manually. That's how "mods" worked. It would be something like this SomeFile.pas 14: - If Variable = 1 14: + If Variable = 2

DoneWithAllThat 5y ago

Once again, I am begging HN: this is a misleading title format for links to single papers or studies. What is being phrased as factual in the headline is merely an assertion in a paper, and should be reflected as such. “New paper claims (x)” is reasonable. “Study suggests (x)” is also reasonable. “(x)” borders on straight up falsehood when it portrays an assertion as a new finding about our world.

lukas099 5y ago
I think the assumption on HN should be that the title is merely what the article author is claiming. So from my perspective reading a title like "37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home" is automatically converted to "AuthorClaimsThat(37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home)".

monkeybutton 5y ago

Imagine the environmental impact of cutting out emissions from 37% of commuters for "free". We could do it today. Its been proven to work the last 2 years. It's such low hanging fruit it's mind boggling!

bobbean 5y ago
Oh my god, imagine the improvement in traffic for those who do have to leave their house for work.
- monkeybutton 5y ago
  The effect is compounding too because those people will spend less time driving and idling their engines!

TheGigaChad 5y ago

jmyeet 5y ago

The lesson here is you can never really predict what will happen. This is important to remember when people make any predictions, particularly for doom and gloom scenarios. Take the Black Plague, which killed an estimted 25-50% of the population of Europe. For those lucky enough to survive this was a huge boon for workers rights and wages [1]. There have no real increase in worker wages in 40 years [2]. The pendulum swings back and forth on any issue and we've swung too far towards unbridled capitalistic exploitation (IMHO). Labor organization (ie unions) led to things like a limited work week, safety in the workplace and so on. The flipside of that was corruption, resistance to change and so on. But ever since the farce of the Reagan trickle-down economics era, worker conditions have gotten increasingly worse (relatively) while the accumulation of wealth at the top is absolutely unprecedented. So Covid has killed millions and this is of course tragic. But who knew that this would be the catalyst for the first real increase in wages in decades and the ability to redefine the outdated in-person work that wastes so much time on money on pointless commutes? I'm glad that something good is coming out of this. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequences_of_the_Black_Death#:~:text=If%20workers%20attempted%20to%20leave,end%20of%20the%2019th%20century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequences_of_the_Black_Deat.... [2]: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us...

nickysielicki 5y ago

My workplace is trying to get people to come back in the next week or two and people are suspiciously taking a lot of vacation. ~30% of engineering is out today. Methinks they’re in for a very big surprise in 2 weeks, and I don’t think they’ll have the money to counter the offers that people will naturally field in this market. It’s an unforced error.

jleyank 5y ago

This seems low as only jobs that require(!) F2F interaction with customers or coworkers can't be done remotely. This might come down to "mucking about with the hardware" being the dividing line - if you need the car, it's in the shop, otherwise you can do in on the road, via the Web, ... Psychologically, companies and (older? extroverted?) workers won't agree with this, but it's not up to them to change. Change happens at its own pace and you can either yell at the tide or move with it.

etskinner 5y ago
You're right about the dividing line being mucking with hardware (I'd also add 'requires access to large or expensive equipment'). But there are plenty of jobs that don't require face-to-face interaction but do require on-site work for one reason or another. Air traffic control, janitors, machinists, garbage collectors, geologists, bakers, etc.
- jleyank 5y ago
  Good point, feel free to expound on my definition of hardware. "Ya gotta touch it?" as I might have been to locked into my own vocabulary.

dxbydt 5y ago

Dr. Dingel writes - "Our code makes it easy for users to explore alternative assumptions about whether any given occupation can be done from home." His repo - https://github.com/jdingel/DingelNeiman-workathome https://github.com/jdingel/DingelNeiman-workathome Would be a worthwhile student project to replicate this in R/pandas (They used Stata on a Mac, if you know what I mean) & have an interactive online plot so one can change the survey assumptions & see what results. Just collating all this data in one place is a monumental effort. I remember this paper was a "huge fucking deal" when it came out in Sep 2020. Has like ~1500 cites. Was used by Biden administration to set policy. Co-author Dr. Neiman was personally nominated by Biden for treasury. Authors are Booth school stalwarts. Pls do read the paper, very insightful even if you don't agree with its methodology/conclusions.

smm11 5y ago

The world did not exist until Git.

tharne 5y ago

I really hope American businesses don't bring this headline to its logical conclusion... "37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home...by people in India or Eastern Europe for much less money"

achenet 5y ago
not if those jobs entail good written or even oral communication skills. Native English speakers have a huge leg up on Indians and Eastern Europeans in this regard. For example, I imagine Coca-Cola is willing to pay more to have the person writing their ad copy be someone who has been immersed in American culture from birth.
- samarthr1 5y ago
  A good portion of Indian engineers speak good English. Anecdotal evidence only though.
  - globular-toast 5y ago
    But a good portion don't, which makes hiring take a lot longer.
  - mprovost 5y ago
    Ironically, if you google "is speak good english grammatically correct" there are a lot of articles debating whether it's ok, or if "speak English well" is better. This is the kind of subtlety that's hard to understand for non-native speakers.
    - glandium 5y ago
      I don't think there's anything grammatically wrong with "speak good English". The difference to me is language register.
manuelabeledo 5y ago
Companies have been doing this for decades already. The current situation is not going to shift even more jobs to India. Reasons being, good engineers from India are already moving to the US in sheer numbers, and good talent is unlikely to remain at Indian IT consultancy companies. Anecdotally, I have worked along with very clever engineers who happened to be Indian nationals living in the US, but I have yet to find an above average engineer working at an Indian IT shop and based in India.

latenightcoding 5y ago

Doesn't that mean a good chunk of those jobs can also be outsourced?

flowersjeff 5y ago

This surprises...nobody? Except maybe bean counters/management types that need to show off perhaps. With that said, I do have concerns. These issues center around a shift in benefits offered as a result of this new paradigm ( hate using that word but ) around the nature of work. I.e. the gig everything economy coming to your job...soon Many folks in the US work a 9to5 not just for the pay, rather for healthcare and stability. However, it's only a matter of time that employees will become even more API'ified / made into independent contracts / etc. I know that many will welcome the flexibility - some though will not understand what this means. I do wonder how the US will be able to handle this continued move away from 'trad' employment, given our rather odd situation of one's medical being tied at the hip to one's employer? Those that work in other jurisdictions need not fear the loss of a job as much as a US citizen. Literally, you could die ( just look at how many of those that were made unemployed during the pandemic lost access to medical. ) Just my musings...

mumblemumble 5y ago
I would guess that the gig economy simply can't come for any jobs that require significant domain expertise or more than a few hour's worth of attention to any single project. Comparable to how you don't see day laborers doing pipefitting.
dudul 5y ago
2 thoughts. First, "gig workers" can't work across the board. Companies working on products often need people to have deep understanding of the product. We all know how costly it can be to lose say a software engineer who has a few years tenure. Second, if the gig-economy were to become very widespread, it may finally be a push to have a true, sensible market for health insurance in the US. If employers no longer pay insurance carriers/brokers to cover their employees, these carriers will need to come up with products people can afford.
hooande 5y ago
If there is a large shift toward gig economy work, then the healthcare industry will shift as well. There's nothing preventing them from offering affordable healthcare to gig employees other than the status quo and their current profit models. Something the size of the insurance industry is going to shift about 5-10 years after the general market. So if you're worried about short term gigification of your job, you might want to look into private insurance/benefit options now. Over the long term I think it will take care of itself.

SpicyLemonZest 5y ago

I'm pretty skeptical of this methodology. They don't seem to be making any attempt to measure whether a job can be done effectively from home, only whether it's prohibited by some physical necessity. "Managers, educators, and those working in computers, finance, and law are largely able to work from home", but is having your teacher or lawyer on a little iPad really a complete substitute for having them right in front of you? I guess I'm not sure how I would do it better, but that doesn't make it super meaningful.

panzagl 5y ago
Educators? Really? That alone makes me doubt the article.

cosmiccatnap 5y ago

didip 5y ago

The society has a once-a-lifetime opportunity to refactor how it can work, but it squandered it. Imagine if office buildings are no longer necessary. A lot more hi-rise apartments can be built, cities can be a lot more dense, and light rails can be attractive again.

chasd00 5y ago
high rise apartments are really just office buildings. Just live at the office, it's pretty much equivalent.

aaccount 5y ago

Most jobs done need to exist to begin with. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kehnIQ41y2o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kehnIQ41y2o

holyyikes 5y ago

Overtonwindow 5y ago

Working from home is great and all, but do we really want work to be within our home? I’ve been working from home the entire pandemic, and I still find it hard to stop working and “be home.”

chasd00 5y ago
that definitely has to be managed well. I wfh in a room where i also do my hobbies and stuff (like a tiny workshop more or less). What i do is when i'm done with work i put my company issued laptop in a dedicated drawer and close it. When the drawer closes my mind flips to "i'm at home" mode. The next morning, when i open teh drawer, my mind flips to "i'm at work" mode. It works for me but may not work for everyone.
peter303 5y ago
Coworking spaces were supposed be a compromise. Individuals and small teams could work in an office-like space without home distractions for a few hundred a month. In the early days coworking provided quality bandwith and printing for less you'd pay at home. But that advantage has faded. I have lost track of how coworking has fared during covid. For a while, pre-covid, they seemed to outnumber coffee houses in my metro area.

Animats 5y ago

If everything you do goes in and out over a wire, some day your job will be either automated or offshored.

deafcalculus 5y ago
That's what a lot of people thought in the 2000s, but going by SV salaries the automate or offshore story hasn't really played out! Then again, horses seem to have lost their job in the early 20th century after cars came along, and their population just declined thereafter.
- Workaccount2 5y ago
  You ever wonder why people in old rust belt areas complain about "the globalists" all the time?
  - throwaway684936 5y ago

lvl102 5y ago

Wait till they find out 80% of office jobs are redundant.

johnisgood 5y ago
I know right... If I could go through with (got health issues at the time) implementing automation of some stuff, then because of me hundreds of people would be out of their jobs... or at least that job. It would have saved the company a lot of money, too.

kkfx 5y ago

The fallacy reside in: "can be performed", witch do not state how they can, because so far most push "smart working" in the form of "get this laptop, this smartphone with a 4/5G plan and you are ready to work". That's obviously tend to fail and works just for people who have corrected the aim perhaps with a docking station, external monitor and external keyboard, having a spare room silent enough etc at personal level at company level it's even worse: most have no idea about remote work. The modern classic solution is having a big enough hw resources to keep a VDI infra asking workers to be on remote desktop all time, and again that's not a good idea even if seems to be the easiest. Seriously facing such aspects and finally admit that "real" WFH means set up a home office, with relevant furniture, equipment, connections etc and organize the work to be done from remote pushing people on some proprietary platform in the hope to get a quick&done third party solution will not really push up WFH to something structural and good for all parties involved.

zw123456 5y ago

For the other 63%, I think an interesting possibility is to use a robot Turk machine type of arrangement. Take for example, the "flag person" at a road construction site, it is an outdoor job and hence would be categorized as not possible to do from home, but, one could easily design a very simple machine with a camera and the stop/slow sign that could be operated remotely. That could actually be safer and lower cost. There are lots of other possible examples, window washer, etc. There is probably some companies working on it already, if not, it might be an interesting idea I think.

PraetorianGourd 5y ago
Have you ever worked as a flagger? I have. It isn't a binary "move the sign and then flip it back". Here are a list of things that you would need to consider: 1. Flaggers often go from site to site throughout the day. You would need someone to set up and take down the machine 2. The flagger is in constant radio contact with the work crew. They need to know which equipment is blocking which lane etc. And this is always changing. 3. Flaggers need to respond to emergency vehicles, busses, their own work trucks etc. You have to have your head on a swivel at all times 4. Pedestrians/bikers/other road users need to be considered as well, and may be outside of camera shot 5. What if the connection is choppy/equipment breaks. Does a tech go site to site? Does the crew stop working? Labor is the single biggest cost of construction by a large margin. Everyone minute the crew isn't working is CrewNumber * PrevailingWage lost. 6. Flaggers work at night/all weather/complex intersections. All this would need to be accounted for. 7. Like self driving cars, there are about 12 billion edge cases that take a combination of experience/reasoning. I don't mean to be dismissive of your idea or anything. But this attitude is pervasive in our industry, that "I saw someone doing a job that looks easy, I bet I know everything about it and can design a better way to do it". That attitude is both great (inspires bold ideas) and terrible. The right question isn't "I bet this could be automated" but rather, "I should job shadow someone doing this job, see if there are any ways to improve it".

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gwbas1c 5y ago

I've been remote by necessity for 8 years, since 2014. I'd prefer to be in the office most days; but the realities of life would make it difficult for my wife and I to both have careers and be parents. If either of us had a rigid "be in the office Monday - Friday" job, the other would need to cut back to part time just to care for our young children. What I've observed: In software, a company that wants you to be on-site Monday - Friday has control issues. Limiting your workforce to people who live within a reasonable commute who are single / single career couples / childless couples just makes it hard to hire.

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beauzero 5y ago

This would save a lot of oil.

black_13 5y ago

careersaas 5y ago

This is approx ~30% in Europe, meanwhile of the positions that "can be performed entirely at home", interestingly these remote positions take half as long to fill... in comparison to fully office-based positions. Source: https://app.careersaas.com/portal/career-search.html https://app.careersaas.com/portal/career-search.html

gilbetron 5y ago

The company I work for had a "return to office" about two weeks ago, and while we still are 50%+ remote, those that aren't we're now in the office a lot more. My first impression after two weeks is how little the in office people get done. They spend a significant amount of time socializing and walking around to meetings and getting meeting rooms working and eating, and when they are in meetings, are less focused, and when they aren't in meetings, they talk about not being able to concentrate as well because of all the distractions. They also seem to be having a lot more fun! It should be interesting to see how it plays out in the next few years!