35 ms·

I don't think there is anything else more illogical in modern society than waking up in building A, hopping in a car and fighting traffic for an hour to get to

I don't think there is anything else more illogical in modern society than waking up in building A, hopping in a car and fighting traffic for an hour to get to building B just to sit in front of a computer for 8 hours (perhaps with a few minimally productive meetings here and there), then commute back to building A 8 hours later. Building B sits empty for 16 hours a day while Building A sits empty for 10 with both being heated/cooled for 24 hours. The employee wastes 2 of their 16 available waking hours in the non-productive commute while incurring significant financial costs (lease/insurance/fuel/energy) in order to support this patently absurd activity. Similarly the employer wastes time and energy negotiating leases, re-arranging offices, purchasing AV equipment for meeting rooms in building B, etc.,etc., in addition to paying the likely enormously expensive lease itself. The impacts on the environment, the number of hours of human life wasted in commute, the pointless buildings and associated costs to employers as well as the public infrastructure to support it (roads, trains, busses, etc.) are all incredibly wasteful. Surely, all of this could only be justified if physical presence had a dramatic impact on productivity. Yet, we cannot tell one way or the other if it actually improves outcomes. Let's face it, it's dumb.

bearjaws 5y ago
I was appalled to find our office lease was $20,000 a month. We could hire two FTEs for the price of that office, and we are not even in a premium space. To your point about efficiency: I don't believe our office produces 2 FTE's worth of additional productivity across the whole org. Leadership thinks it does, but assuming we acquire decent talent, that would be a net 10% increase in engineering. I don't believe the office could ever achieve a 10% increase in output.
- buzzdenver 5y ago
  You're making the assumption that everybody in the office prefers working from home.
  - SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
    They didn't say anything about preference, they merely said output. Does people preferring to work from the office mean they are so much more productive so as to make up that cost? That's the question that we're faced with, and if the last few years are any indication, the answer seems to be "No".
    - brandmeyer 5y ago
      This is definitely not universal. Our team switched to a soft hybrid model whereby we almost always work from the office, but use WFH for deliveries, snow days, kid sick days, etc. We did that as soon as the vaccine became widely available and it completely turbocharged our productivity. We delivered more in the first three months after coming back than the preceding year of fully-remote work.
      - taylodl 5y ago
        That's interesting - and quite the opposite of what I've personally experienced and heard. Are you saying then that when the lockdown happened and your team was sent home your productivity tanked? What happened? What wasn't it addressed? What's caused your team's productivity to soar now?
        brandmeyer 5y ago
        We're building a highly specialized product (GNSS Radiooccultation). Its specialized enough that we have to rely on hiring people with generic skills and then developing the specialized skills to work in the domain. In essence, we are relying on internal on-the-job training to build up our team. Remote work failed for us for the same reasons that remote education has been failing everywhere: 1/4 to 1/2 of the job is adult professional education.
        taylodl 5y ago
        Makes sense. Seems like we can generalize this to if you're working in a niche area requiring lots of training to bring new hires up to speed then perhaps WFH isn't the best of environments? Going forward maybe your team needs to think through how to best do your onboarding. Maybe you would need to get together for a couple weeks (or have "high touch" time) and then go back to primarily working from home? It's something to think about.
- tetromino_ 5y ago
  In the end, someone has to pay for office space: either you as the employer, or your employees in the form of higher rent/mortgage for a larger home with dedicated office areas. (And for employees with families based in urban areas, such a larger home may be entirely unaffordable.)
  - bearjaws 5y ago
    That non-affordability is created by the scarcity of housing, because many spaces are entirely dedicates to jobs that (now) don't need them. Think about a Manhattan with 40% more housing, what would that do to affordability?
    - alexanderdmitri 5y ago
      Also the 1.6 million office workers[0] would have one less reason to live in the city in the first place. [0] https://www.osc.state.ny.us/files/reports/osdc/pdf/report-11-2022.pdf https://www.osc.state.ny.us/files/reports/osdc/pdf/report-11...
  - jjav 5y ago
    > In the end, someone has to pay for office space True, of course. But geographically distributing the need for space reduces the very concentration of demand in the office park areas. The larger home (with an office) may be entirely unaffordable in the city center where HQ was, but with remote you can move elsewhere where it can be cheaper than an apartment in that city. Or you could rent a small office away from the crowds where it's cheaper. This is what I've been doing since pandemic start. Sure, I wish the employers would pay for it but it's still so much better that it's worth it. On fuel alone I save enough every month to pay the rent a couple times over. And my commute is ~5 minutes on a bike instead of 60-90 minutes sitting in traffic.
  - Chinjut 5y ago
    Larger home with dedicated office areas? How many people are living in homes without computers? People already want homes that support using a computer, WFH status or no.
dreen 5y ago
Please tell me you don't heat/cool your house 24/7. Other than that I can't agree with you more.
- dljsjr 5y ago
  Some people don't have a choice, in Florida during the summer time if you aren't running your AC full-time the humidity and heat will ruin your home. It stays in the 80's even overnight (both temp. Fº and Relative Humidity %).
  - fluoridation 5y ago
    Sounds similar to the climate here in Buenos Aires, maybe slightly warmer. To my knowledge people generally don't keep AC's running when they're not around, in the summer. I've never heard of a building being ruined by environmental humidity.
    - dljsjr 5y ago
      Black mold is a massive issue in Florida.
    - robomartin 5y ago
      Homes in Buenos Aires don’t have hollow walls made from wood and flimsy drywall panels. One good plumbing leak can destroy a house in the US.
      - fluoridation 5y ago
        Fair enough. I knew homes in the US where typically made of wood, but not that that was also true in Florida. Wood is not a traditional material here because it's obviously going to rot in a humid environment.
        dljsjr 5y ago
        Yup. Cheap 2x4 framing + drywall. Residential building/construction is more or less the same across the entire US regardless of native climate.
peoplefromibiza 5y ago
it's also a cultural thing. US commute is particularly bad, I work from home and been doing it on and off for the past 20 years. My commute has never been longer than 20 minutes total. I now live 5 minutes walk away from my office, I'm not going, but if I had to I would walk there and have a very nice breakfast in some bar on the road there. One thing that's always overlooked is how much WFH is selecting people who already have a tendency to stay home and not socialize much at work. The majority of people are not like that, most people don't have the means (spare rooms, gear, technical abilities) to do it _and_ are marginalized for not being able to socialize in person, because they tend to lean towards depression by staying home all day. Also WFH tends to discriminate people doing "less important" jobs, like for example in a couple if one of the two has a highly paid job or a responsibility job, the other one will tend to be the one doing chores (cooking, cleaning, taking care of the kids) while if both go out to work there's less pressure to compensate because both can't physically be home to do what need to be done anyway. There are studies showing that WFH makes gender inequalities worse. Basically the point is that many people find meaning and purpose in their jobs, if you remove the "purpose" (getting dressed, going out, meeting other people, sharing work experiences with them) it simply becomes a tedious activity to them that fulfills none of their needs.
- fartcannon 5y ago
  It'll be nice when the serf mentality of finding meaning in your job is finally gone from the world.
  - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
    > when the serf mentality of finding meaning in your job is finally gone from the world Emperors, scientists and other productive members of the elite have done this since age immemorial. If anything, the average person finding their work meaningful (versus simply toil) is a recent phenomenon.
    - SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
      We have a whole class of people who have finally been able to climb up Maslow's hierarchy high enough to now ask those questions.
bgro 5y ago
when I visited NYC I got the feel for the battle for every square inch of room on every sidewalk, street, and building. Being able to like sit at a table to eat at a small place you picked up your food has got to be a huge cost in space just for that to exist. Then I started thinking about all the massive skyscrapers that are just offices that people show up to for just 8 hours a day and then reallocate the space crisis to their residence elsewhere. It seems like a comical design choice almost.
boh 5y ago
If the environmental impact is the only relevant factor for human interaction, then yes you're right. However society doesn't abide by isolation.
- Apocryphon 5y ago
  The environmental impact might end up being a crucial factor for continued human existence.
bradfa 5y ago
I work remotely. I rent an office. It's only about 3.5 miles from my house, so my commute via car or bike is rather short. I don't have a space at my house where I can do my job effectively at home. Renovating my house to make such a space would incur costs which would exceed a few years of rent at the office. So from a risk reduction and net-present-value point of view, renting the office is cost effective. If I end up renting the office for a decade, then it won't end up cost effective. But I've never stayed at any job for that long before so I assume my job situation will change in a few years. If my job changes such that I am required to report to a physical office which is not the one I currently rent, I can cancel my lease (with 3 months notice). This provides me with good flexibility and minimizes my risk, my upfront costs, and any need to remodel my home. Having an office where other people are around also gets me to socialize for a small part of the day.
geodel 5y ago
Good points. If anything, it is underestimating situation for large part of the world. At one point I was spending 5 hours in commute (NOT USA) per day. I moved after few years but I am sure 100s of thousands people are still doing it. The psychological toll it took on me while travelling through crushingly crowded trains and buses still terrifies me. If large number of paper/computer workers do not have to commute, space is left for people who have to travel for more serious reasons and have their commute less unpleasant.
GoodJokes 5y ago
tapoxi 5y ago
It's not dumb, but it's dumb with what offices have become. Nobody likes the open plan office, but if I had my own office (with a door!!!) then I'd certainly go in every day. Maybe it's time to re-imagine what the office is?
ipiz0618 5y ago
Let's not deal with absolutes here. I enjoy working from home because my setup is comfy and I live mostly alone. But I'm also aware not everyone has the privilege like this. Not even myself last year before I moved out.
- asdff 5y ago
  I work from home in a 1br. I prefer my own desk area, especially my own toilet (my word the stalls at work after the first cup of coffee must have hit...), being able to concurrently do a load of laundry while concurrently doing some other work task, working out in meetings, getting random stuff from the grocery store if i need something for lunch or another bag of coffee, and being able to make appointments at government offices during the day when its actually convenient vs the limited hours they are open on saturday when the entire 9-5 contingent of the city floods the dmv. Not to mention my day just expanded by a full two hours because I am no longer burning that on commuting on a bus that bounces too much to even read my phone screen. At work I have a windowless office and a lopsided desk chair, and people have stolen my food from the fridge.
jjav 5y ago
Good comment. While it seems obvious, the whole environmental, infrastructure cost and land (mis)use aspects are not in the conversation often enough. Usually it's only work productivity and preferences. The key observation is really that the societal costs of supporting a commute culture are so enormous that for it to make any sense, the productivity of being in-office would have to be many multiples higher than remote. We can argue whether remote or office is slightly more productive this way or that way, and there are plenty of studies showing both directions so it's probably a wash, depending on team. But no study ever suggests that in-office could possibly be so immensely more productive than remote that it could justify the costs to society of doing it. Of course, it'd be great if there is some research attempting to quantify this more precisely (including road construction & maintenance, inefficient land use, pollution, time lost, health impact from the stress, and on and on). Any links?
la64710 5y ago
Exactly this is the thought that crossed my mind today. You do something good for me and I give you $X for that. Now on top of that for $X I want you to also come to a building I built for you , stay there for 8 hours a day and do the thing I want you to do. All for $X. However there is Joe who will give you $X for the same job and a little more.But you get to choose where and how you do it. Which one will you do?

bearjaws 5y ago

I was appalled to find our office lease was $20,000 a month. We could hire two FTEs for the price of that office, and we are not even in a premium space. To your point about efficiency: I don't believe our office produces 2 FTE's worth of additional productivity across the whole org. Leadership thinks it does, but assuming we acquire decent talent, that would be a net 10% increase in engineering. I don't believe the office could ever achieve a 10% increase in output.

buzzdenver 5y ago
You're making the assumption that everybody in the office prefers working from home.
- SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
  They didn't say anything about preference, they merely said output. Does people preferring to work from the office mean they are so much more productive so as to make up that cost? That's the question that we're faced with, and if the last few years are any indication, the answer seems to be "No".
  - brandmeyer 5y ago
    This is definitely not universal. Our team switched to a soft hybrid model whereby we almost always work from the office, but use WFH for deliveries, snow days, kid sick days, etc. We did that as soon as the vaccine became widely available and it completely turbocharged our productivity. We delivered more in the first three months after coming back than the preceding year of fully-remote work.
    - taylodl 5y ago
      That's interesting - and quite the opposite of what I've personally experienced and heard. Are you saying then that when the lockdown happened and your team was sent home your productivity tanked? What happened? What wasn't it addressed? What's caused your team's productivity to soar now?
      - brandmeyer 5y ago
        We're building a highly specialized product (GNSS Radiooccultation). Its specialized enough that we have to rely on hiring people with generic skills and then developing the specialized skills to work in the domain. In essence, we are relying on internal on-the-job training to build up our team. Remote work failed for us for the same reasons that remote education has been failing everywhere: 1/4 to 1/2 of the job is adult professional education.
        taylodl 5y ago
        Makes sense. Seems like we can generalize this to if you're working in a niche area requiring lots of training to bring new hires up to speed then perhaps WFH isn't the best of environments? Going forward maybe your team needs to think through how to best do your onboarding. Maybe you would need to get together for a couple weeks (or have "high touch" time) and then go back to primarily working from home? It's something to think about.
tetromino_ 5y ago
In the end, someone has to pay for office space: either you as the employer, or your employees in the form of higher rent/mortgage for a larger home with dedicated office areas. (And for employees with families based in urban areas, such a larger home may be entirely unaffordable.)
- bearjaws 5y ago
  That non-affordability is created by the scarcity of housing, because many spaces are entirely dedicates to jobs that (now) don't need them. Think about a Manhattan with 40% more housing, what would that do to affordability?
  - alexanderdmitri 5y ago
    Also the 1.6 million office workers[0] would have one less reason to live in the city in the first place. [0] https://www.osc.state.ny.us/files/reports/osdc/pdf/report-11-2022.pdf https://www.osc.state.ny.us/files/reports/osdc/pdf/report-11...
- jjav 5y ago
  > In the end, someone has to pay for office space True, of course. But geographically distributing the need for space reduces the very concentration of demand in the office park areas. The larger home (with an office) may be entirely unaffordable in the city center where HQ was, but with remote you can move elsewhere where it can be cheaper than an apartment in that city. Or you could rent a small office away from the crowds where it's cheaper. This is what I've been doing since pandemic start. Sure, I wish the employers would pay for it but it's still so much better that it's worth it. On fuel alone I save enough every month to pay the rent a couple times over. And my commute is ~5 minutes on a bike instead of 60-90 minutes sitting in traffic.
- Chinjut 5y ago
  Larger home with dedicated office areas? How many people are living in homes without computers? People already want homes that support using a computer, WFH status or no.

dreen 5y ago

Please tell me you don't heat/cool your house 24/7. Other than that I can't agree with you more.

dljsjr 5y ago
Some people don't have a choice, in Florida during the summer time if you aren't running your AC full-time the humidity and heat will ruin your home. It stays in the 80's even overnight (both temp. Fº and Relative Humidity %).
- fluoridation 5y ago
  Sounds similar to the climate here in Buenos Aires, maybe slightly warmer. To my knowledge people generally don't keep AC's running when they're not around, in the summer. I've never heard of a building being ruined by environmental humidity.
  - dljsjr 5y ago
    Black mold is a massive issue in Florida.
  - robomartin 5y ago
    Homes in Buenos Aires don’t have hollow walls made from wood and flimsy drywall panels. One good plumbing leak can destroy a house in the US.
    - fluoridation 5y ago
      Fair enough. I knew homes in the US where typically made of wood, but not that that was also true in Florida. Wood is not a traditional material here because it's obviously going to rot in a humid environment.
      - dljsjr 5y ago
        Yup. Cheap 2x4 framing + drywall. Residential building/construction is more or less the same across the entire US regardless of native climate.

peoplefromibiza 5y ago

it's also a cultural thing. US commute is particularly bad, I work from home and been doing it on and off for the past 20 years. My commute has never been longer than 20 minutes total. I now live 5 minutes walk away from my office, I'm not going, but if I had to I would walk there and have a very nice breakfast in some bar on the road there. One thing that's always overlooked is how much WFH is selecting people who already have a tendency to stay home and not socialize much at work. The majority of people are not like that, most people don't have the means (spare rooms, gear, technical abilities) to do it _and_ are marginalized for not being able to socialize in person, because they tend to lean towards depression by staying home all day. Also WFH tends to discriminate people doing "less important" jobs, like for example in a couple if one of the two has a highly paid job or a responsibility job, the other one will tend to be the one doing chores (cooking, cleaning, taking care of the kids) while if both go out to work there's less pressure to compensate because both can't physically be home to do what need to be done anyway. There are studies showing that WFH makes gender inequalities worse. Basically the point is that many people find meaning and purpose in their jobs, if you remove the "purpose" (getting dressed, going out, meeting other people, sharing work experiences with them) it simply becomes a tedious activity to them that fulfills none of their needs.

fartcannon 5y ago
It'll be nice when the serf mentality of finding meaning in your job is finally gone from the world.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  > when the serf mentality of finding meaning in your job is finally gone from the world Emperors, scientists and other productive members of the elite have done this since age immemorial. If anything, the average person finding their work meaningful (versus simply toil) is a recent phenomenon.
  - SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
    We have a whole class of people who have finally been able to climb up Maslow's hierarchy high enough to now ask those questions.

bgro 5y ago

when I visited NYC I got the feel for the battle for every square inch of room on every sidewalk, street, and building. Being able to like sit at a table to eat at a small place you picked up your food has got to be a huge cost in space just for that to exist. Then I started thinking about all the massive skyscrapers that are just offices that people show up to for just 8 hours a day and then reallocate the space crisis to their residence elsewhere. It seems like a comical design choice almost.

boh 5y ago

If the environmental impact is the only relevant factor for human interaction, then yes you're right. However society doesn't abide by isolation.

Apocryphon 5y ago
The environmental impact might end up being a crucial factor for continued human existence.

bradfa 5y ago

I work remotely. I rent an office. It's only about 3.5 miles from my house, so my commute via car or bike is rather short. I don't have a space at my house where I can do my job effectively at home. Renovating my house to make such a space would incur costs which would exceed a few years of rent at the office. So from a risk reduction and net-present-value point of view, renting the office is cost effective. If I end up renting the office for a decade, then it won't end up cost effective. But I've never stayed at any job for that long before so I assume my job situation will change in a few years. If my job changes such that I am required to report to a physical office which is not the one I currently rent, I can cancel my lease (with 3 months notice). This provides me with good flexibility and minimizes my risk, my upfront costs, and any need to remodel my home. Having an office where other people are around also gets me to socialize for a small part of the day.

geodel 5y ago

Good points. If anything, it is underestimating situation for large part of the world. At one point I was spending 5 hours in commute (NOT USA) per day. I moved after few years but I am sure 100s of thousands people are still doing it. The psychological toll it took on me while travelling through crushingly crowded trains and buses still terrifies me. If large number of paper/computer workers do not have to commute, space is left for people who have to travel for more serious reasons and have their commute less unpleasant.

GoodJokes 5y ago

tapoxi 5y ago

It's not dumb, but it's dumb with what offices have become. Nobody likes the open plan office, but if I had my own office (with a door!!!) then I'd certainly go in every day. Maybe it's time to re-imagine what the office is?

ipiz0618 5y ago

Let's not deal with absolutes here. I enjoy working from home because my setup is comfy and I live mostly alone. But I'm also aware not everyone has the privilege like this. Not even myself last year before I moved out.

asdff 5y ago
I work from home in a 1br. I prefer my own desk area, especially my own toilet (my word the stalls at work after the first cup of coffee must have hit...), being able to concurrently do a load of laundry while concurrently doing some other work task, working out in meetings, getting random stuff from the grocery store if i need something for lunch or another bag of coffee, and being able to make appointments at government offices during the day when its actually convenient vs the limited hours they are open on saturday when the entire 9-5 contingent of the city floods the dmv. Not to mention my day just expanded by a full two hours because I am no longer burning that on commuting on a bus that bounces too much to even read my phone screen. At work I have a windowless office and a lopsided desk chair, and people have stolen my food from the fridge.

jjav 5y ago

Good comment. While it seems obvious, the whole environmental, infrastructure cost and land (mis)use aspects are not in the conversation often enough. Usually it's only work productivity and preferences. The key observation is really that the societal costs of supporting a commute culture are so enormous that for it to make any sense, the productivity of being in-office would have to be many multiples higher than remote. We can argue whether remote or office is slightly more productive this way or that way, and there are plenty of studies showing both directions so it's probably a wash, depending on team. But no study ever suggests that in-office could possibly be so immensely more productive than remote that it could justify the costs to society of doing it. Of course, it'd be great if there is some research attempting to quantify this more precisely (including road construction & maintenance, inefficient land use, pollution, time lost, health impact from the stress, and on and on). Any links?

la64710 5y ago

Exactly this is the thought that crossed my mind today. You do something good for me and I give you $X for that. Now on top of that for $X I want you to also come to a building I built for you , stay there for 8 hours a day and do the thing I want you to do. All for $X. However there is Joe who will give you $X for the same job and a little more.But you get to choose where and how you do it. Which one will you do?