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Neckties were an essential business requirement for ages. At some point, people had had enough of the mostly pointless ritual and began rejecting the norm. Ev

Neckties were an essential business requirement for ages. At some point, people had had enough of the mostly pointless ritual and began rejecting the norm. Even still, stodgy companies required it with the argument that it was necessary for being considered professional. Startups certainly saw differently, although admittedly many startups are not remotely professional (no pun intended). Now we have remote work vs office work. In an information age where physical items passed around from worker to worker are a thing of the past in most industries, the need to spend $$$ for a high profile location is going the way of the necktie. Many workers have tasted the freedom of no commute, or at least a pleasant walk/bike commute to a nearby coworking space. They don't want to go back, and like myself they will reject any job which has a firm requirement for such. Companies are torn between the old-school management notion that worker will only work while being observed and the realization that they can save a ton of money by not having a big fancy office. The day of the office is passing. There will always be offices, but they will be, like food trucks, existing where and when they are useful. The real estate world better clue into this. And beyond the office topic there is the residential topic. As prices for city apartments increase dramatically, people lose interest in living in those cities. Better to live someplace pleasant and less expensive, and then spend the saved money on trips to many different nice places.

JohnFen 3y ago
> Many workers have tasted the freedom of no commute, or at least a pleasant walk/bike commute to a nearby coworking space. Yes, although I say it a different way. Working in offices has always been fairly terrible, and had been growing increasingly terrible over the last decade or two. People put up with it in part because they had no option. But once they worked outside of those spaces and realized what hell they were, of course they resist returning. So it's not just about discovering new "freedom", it's about discovering that a major thing that makes life suck doesn't have to be a thing at all.
- bsder 3y ago
  > Working in offices has always been fairly terrible, and had been growing increasingly terrible over the last decade or two. Offices don't have to be terrible. IBM, GE, Bell, etc. knew how to put together offices that didn't suck. Occasionally the architects got out of hand and produced some monstrosity, but the offices were mostly fine. It's only the whole dumbass "open office plan" bullshit that made everything suck. Given that's the "standard", is it any wonder everybody wants to work from home?
  - startupsfail 3y ago
    It was not dumbass. It was an attempt to cut the spendings on the workspaces for the employees and increase the profits for shareholders.
    - mullingitover 3y ago
      Open plan in a nutshell: would you like to save 20% on seating costs for the low cost of a 30% reduction in productivity? Then open plan offices might be right for you.
      - antonvs 3y ago
        The nutshell takeaway here is that concrete reductions in costs will always outweigh greater but less concrete increases in costs, because... well George Carlin covered that.
        mullingitover 3y ago
        My theory is it's a classic cargo cult situation: "If we just do the same thing this successful startup did (we'll ignore that they were doing it in a different context for different reasons, and ignore the ones that did the same thing but weren't successful) then we too will have the same explosive success!"
        polynomial 3y ago
        ?
muglug 3y ago
Neckties are a great example. They're a good rejoinder to Musk's recent farcical argument that since most blue-collar workers cannot work remotely, it's immoral for white-collar workers to resist Return-To-Office mandates [1]. Some jobs still require neckties, but that does not mean we should all be obliged to wear them too. I personally enjoy commuting — a 35-minute journey in a big city via public transport. It gets me to an office full of friendly faces who also enjoy the commute. The people who prefer remote stay home. It's a happy medium. RTO mandates in US cities with poor/non-existent public transport options are bad ideas all around. [1] https://www.mediaite.com/tv/elon-musk-calls-remote-work-bullsht-and-morally-wrong/ https://www.mediaite.com/tv/elon-musk-calls-remote-work-bull...
- pb7 3y ago
  > They're a good rejoinder to Musk's recent farcical argument that since most blue-collar workers cannot work remotely, it's immoral for white-collar workers to resist Return-To-Office mandates. One of the dumbest things he’s ever said (and that’s saying something). Most people can’t fly private either but it doesn’t seem to stop him.
  - specialist 3y ago
    Translation: Your well being is a violation of my rights. Whereas a humanist might consider how to make blue-collar work less terrible.
    - lo_zamoyski 3y ago
      The entire egalitarian fad we're living through is not longer interested in alleviating poverty, but abolishing any form of "inequality" [0]. As if inequality were a bad thing and equality a good thing. [0] https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2015/09/poverty-no-inequality-si.html https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2015/09/poverty-no-inequali...
      - specialist 3y ago
        Another reactionary Catholic argues against teachings of Jesus, rejects Second Vatican Council, despises liberation theology. Lather, rinse, repeat. Yawn.
bombcar 3y ago
There's also a "status" thing for people and for companies - companies are not immune to "fake it until you make it" and many pour billions into status-buildings that are perhaps not technically necessary. And those things can change, suddenly having a huge tower in downtown NY becomes a sign of a out-of-date "old" company; perhaps the new hotness will be something like a small company "town" in the outskirts somewhere.
- akomtu 3y ago
  Skyscrapers are those neckties of the corporations.
- ragingrobot 3y ago
  > the new hotness will be something like a small company "town" in the outskirts somewhere. So the "new hotness" will be kind of like the old days where you worked for Pullman, and with those wages you earned, you: paid rent to Pullman, bought your goods at the Pullman general store, and so on in effect giving much of your earnings back to the company.
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    Hum... Did the thread stop being about remote work at some point? I missed it.
  - cratermoon 3y ago
    You mean like... https://www.npr.org/2023/05/02/1172301798/workers-affordable-housing-companies-building https://www.npr.org/2023/05/02/1172301798/workers-affordable... https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-09-16/amazon-s-new-factory-towns-will-lift-the-working-class#xj4y7vzkg https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-09-16/amazon... https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/apr/18/is-elon-musk-creating-a-utopian-city-the-hellish-heavenly-history-of-company-towns https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/apr/18/is-elon-musk...
  - ikekkdcjkfke 3y ago
    In europe that's exactly what the state it is. There's so many levels of taxation, company-, employement-, wage-, pension-, health- and property-tax. And then there is 25% vat on everything.
lisasays 3y ago
A hollow analogy, unfortunately. Unlike neckties (which are entirely about appearance and perceived norms) -- there are very considerable intrinsic benefits to having people onsite. They just don't outweigh the very considerable negatives, many are coming to find. So it's fundamentally an argument about tangible tradeoffs -- not social norms. An entirely different argument, in fact.
- michaelteter 3y ago
  > hollow I think "hollow" is a bit heavy for the judgment, but I agree they are not the same in terms of tangibility (although I'll bet if I dig enough I could find some practical use for neckties (in the office, at least)). However, like neckties, many companies do the office thing because that's what you're supposed to do. "Everybody knows this." Some (many?) offices exist without a tangible benefit.
  - lisasays 3y ago
    Right -- the RTO debate is also partially about perceived norms and "Everybody knows this". But only partially; let's say about 30 percent. Neckties however -- are 100 percent in that category.
eldavido 3y ago
Narrowing down a bit, I think it's the "downtown business district" that's on the way out -- and the accompanying high office rents, long commutes, etc. My home is a place of rest and family, not work. Work happens at a dedicated location five minutes from home, on foot. I think we'll see more of this in the future--mixed neighborhoods with a lot of residential space next to offices. What I think we won't see as much of, are huge office blocks very far from residential areas, where the majority of the workforce commutes an hour+ every day, each way, to work.
- majormajor 3y ago
  Central business districts were created by trains which let people move to suburbs; then hung around for a while due to concentration of office effects even as many commuters moved to cars. Interesting tho think about what transit looks like in a world without them. Public transit would need to move more away from the hub/spoke model, which possibly dooms new rail construction in existing car-centric cities; busses already go much more point to point with a lot more route options, but if you have less commuters, do those fail to maintain their current timetables as well?
  - onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
    Then why do cities built around cars - that never had trains - still have central business districts? i.e. the entire south & west of the US, pretty much.
    - majormajor 3y ago
      To get the same concentration-of-offices effects in new developments, like I mentioned. But take a look at the size of those central business districts compared to older cities; look at the population of LA vs Chicago or Boston vs the size of their downtowns. (And LA is one that did have some streetcars for a while - Phoenix would be an even more extreme example of a big metro area with a truly pretty small central business district.) There was a lot less pull outside of certain industries - new industries like tech largely avoided ever going downtown much in the first place, preferring big suburban office parks. So if you don't even need the suburban office parks anymore, do things sprawl out even more in places like Austin or Dallas that are surrounded by empty land (vs somewhere like the Bay Area which is hitting geographical barriers)?
jksmith 3y ago
Yeah, living in these legacy markets has become clunky, and the markets can't be changed. If I found out that I no longer needed to swallow rocks to digest my food, why would I ever go back to doing so?
zitterbewegung 3y ago
I don’t totally believe that remote work is going to go completely away . I think that personally for me never going into the office wasn’t really a great experience. It made me much more sedimentary (which in tech is almost a work hazard) but that was my fault . I do like being hybrid (but also the team I was a part of basically stopped existing) so while I think it could be a combination of working from home and the team imploding made me lonely. I rather have the option to going to work and I think companies should still offer a solution for that if they are able to. I do like traveling into the city so maybe I just like neckties. I am definitely against all of this rhetoric about how remote work is horrible and the laptop crowd isn’t doing good work when we don’t really give people enough time for childcare or elder care which I think is a much bigger problem that motivates people to work remotely. Also real estate markets are way overvalued.
- kerkeslager 3y ago
  > I don’t totally believe that remote work is going to go completely away . I think that personally for me never going into the office wasn’t really a great experience. It made me much more sedimentary (which in tech is almost a work hazard) but that was my fault . I do like being hybrid (but also the team I was a part of basically stopped existing) so while I think it could be a combination of working from home and the team imploding made me lonely. I think a lot of people ran into these problems, but there are solutions. Work doesn't have to be your only source of community, and in fact, it can be problematic when it is, because then your community only lasts as long as your job. On the one hand you might lose your job, and on the other hand you might not quit when you should. Having connections outside work is pretty key to having work/life balance IMO.
  - 972811 3y ago
    love when commenters are just immediately dismissive of other people's preferences. I feel the same as OP. I have a very healthy social life outside of work but full time remote work at home feels isolating and repetitive. My mind does not like the lack of separation between home and work and I've tried every trick in the book. This is also true for most other activities in my life (e.g. I don't like exercising at home vs. a gym). I don't want to force people to the office, but it gets tiring hearing other people assuming I haven't tried their "solutions"
actionablefiber 3y ago
> As prices for city apartments increase dramatically, people lose interest in living in those cities. I would argue that the prices reflect at least an incredibly persistent demand to live in those cities. Just for different reasons than before. For instance, since the pandemic many cities have invested heavily in bike infrastructure and pedestrianization. E-bikes have become extremely popular. And as the post-COVID reopening has progressed, people have been organizing local hobbyist meetups, many of them having acquired those hobbies during the depths of the pandemic. There is a huge lifestyle appeal to living in cities, and it will not go away anytime soon. Cities need to recognize that both the massive increase in residential demand and the massive plunge in commercial demand are incredible opportunities to differentiate themselves by converting their dead-after-6pm business districts into thriving, walkable mixed-use hubs.
- funnymony 3y ago
  Mega yacht costs bazilions. Yes, lot of people would not reject idea of having it, but at the same time actual demand (i.e. actual number of people who would think price is worth it, is quite lower compared to spagetti which is much cheaper but has many more buyers) All in all. high price does not necessarily mean huge demand.
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  Great! Then we don’t have to fill the city with offices and we can have places for humans instead of employees.
  - CydeWeys 3y ago
    Right, well, see, the problem is we already did the former instead of the latter, and it costs billions of dollars to reverse that.
    - fnordpiglet 3y ago
      Ok - well, residential in Manhattan is $150/square foot. Commercial $85. So… seems worth it? And billions of redevelopment investment? GDP and employment!
mrangle 3y ago
That's an inspirational narrative. However, offices aren't significantly vacant due to remote work. Advancing the narrative that this is the reason will in-part hide economic decline, and will help allow important people to escape the political consequences of the worst economic decline in ninety years.
- michaelteter 3y ago
  Some have apparently downvoted you, but I think you make a good point. The workers may have rejected the onsite companies such that it is difficult to fill the expensive offices. But also, it is likely that the COVID forced out-of-office situation has caused companies to re-evaluate the value of prime office locations. Fashion is a self-reinforcing feedback loop. If the scenario is visible and hyped, others will believe they must follow it to be relevant. And then it becomes stronger, and effectively relevant. Soon every real US finance company needs a prime Manhattan office... unless it's a commodities company, in which it must have a prime Chicago location. Aside from inflating finance company performance via tax laws, I don't think politics really has so much to do with this. Actually, the global upward wealth redistribution policies do mean that a smaller group has a more difficult time finding places to park money, so that indeed does inflate propertly values.
tick_tock_tick 3y ago
> Many workers have tasted the freedom of no commute, or at least a pleasant walk/bike commute to a nearby coworking space. They don't want to go back, and like myself they will reject any job which has a firm requirement for such. I assume some many continue to exist but employees will also have to get used to large pay cuts if that's a hard requirement for them. > As prices for city apartments increase dramatically, people lose interest in living in those cities. Better to live someplace pleasant and less expensive No one wants to live there too many people live there......
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  Well, yes, eventually companies will have to pay a premium if they want people to actually move there every day. Relative to what is an open question, because the jobs that require that also don't currently pay a lot.
- jvanderbot 3y ago
  I've gone over to the darkside. I live in a suburb 20 minutes from my favorite neighborhood for entertainment, 30m from my parents, 20m from endless fields, 1 hr from the rest of my family and friends. I have a yard, access to a lake, a riding mower, and no utility lines in my backyard so I can dig and build to my heart's content. I also have Gbps internet and a job at a startup as a principal. This literally is the best of both worlds for me. I'm not particularly wealthy and not particularly clever - I'm sure everyone is doing this and the best part is, there's _room_ out here, at least in the USA.
- gedy 3y ago
  > employees will also have to get used to large pay cuts if that's a hard requirement for them. I make more now in a remote position than when I commuted? I'm in California, not in a LCOL location.
- aaomidi 3y ago
  > employees will also have to get used to large pay cuts if that's a hard requirement for them Then these companies are going to have to get used to lower profit margins as time catches up and kicks them out with competitors.
daveslash 3y ago
Reading the title, my initial thought was residential skyscrapers. Reading the article clearly indicates that it's discussing offices. But back to residential: I understand that many wealthy people buy real estate for the prestige of having a certain address or as a way to "lock up" wealth in an asset. See Billionaires Row [0] [1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billionaires%27_Row_(Manhattan) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billionaires%27_Row_(Manhattan... [1] https://nypost.com/2021/08/05/nearly-half-of-luxury-units-empty-in-billionaires-row-buildings/ https://nypost.com/2021/08/05/nearly-half-of-luxury-units-em...
- bobthepanda 3y ago
  Billionaires and vacant apartments cause issues, but they at least pay taxes. An office building with no tenants will face plummeting property values and a corresponding dive in tax bills. * Note: residential property taxation in NYC is in dire need of reform but the point still stands
- michaelteter 3y ago
  Regarding property ownership, for a number of recent years it has been a challenge to find "safe" places to park money. Real estate in NYC and other prime locations is probably seen as pretty safe. Also, if you have true "FU" money, then owning a piece of prime NYC real estate is just another mark on your bedpost, like your superyacht.
doubleg72 3y ago
Unfortunately, here in the real world, people have to go to work. Hospitals, stores, schools, manufacturers, warehouses, truck drivers, and builders/maintaniers of all the infrastructure that your lifestyle depends on.. even your car salesman with necktie: these are all places that need workers and always will. The small proportion of workforce that are startup employees dont make the rules. You're crazy to think that everyone wants to work from home, I know I sure as hell dont.
bloppe 3y ago
When it comes to the office-vs-home discussion everybody is just plugging their own personal preference. Clearly there is a mix. Personally, I love going into my office: it's close to me and has amenities and coworkers I like very much, and I'm personally much more productive there than at home. I realize there are plenty of people who prefer and are more productive working from home. But clearly it's not nearly as superficial as a necktie. Onboarding in particular is demonstrably more difficult to do remotely. Maybe a happy balance for new hires is an extended in-office orientation followed by the option to go remote, although this also requires some senior employees to be in the office to help with orientation. Ofc the benefits of this have to be weighed against real estate costs. Let's just stop pretending anybody knows exactly what the office situation will be in the coming years.
- jaggederest 3y ago
  > Onboarding in particular is demonstrably more difficult to do remotely. Is it? I don't believe it is. At this point, people just plug right in - once you're used to remote work, it's a matter of learning which chat platform they use, getting access to email, and away you go. It's literally the exact same thing as in office these days, precisely due to needing to accommodate remote onboarding.
  - bloppe 3y ago
    I'm now struggling to find the study I was thinking of when I said "demonstrably", but I can say anecdotally that our new hires ask fewer questions online than in person, despite my reminders that the worst thing you can do while onboarding is ask too few questions. Coworker relationships are more formal and compartmentalized online than in person and they can be more reluctant to ping people with questions out of fear of being considered annoying. This doesn't apply to everyone but it has a noticeable effect on the average new hire. I'm sure you can come up with the perfect counterpoint to my anecdote. We'll just have to wait a few more years for more robust, large scale comparisons before we really understand how much an office is worth.
    - shard 3y ago
hettygreen 3y ago
Serious question: If I'm working from home, what's stopping my employer from replacing me with some dude in India or something for 1/3 the price? I'm just having a hard time believing that we're at this moment in time where life suddenly got better for workers.
- embwbam 3y ago
  English as a first language. Implicit shared cultural values. Time zones. You are way less work to manage than someone across the world from another culture. Some companies do outsource everything but it’s HARD.
- inowland 3y ago
  A half answer here is, given "agile devops" software development (i.e. developing with iterative tradeoffs on both features and operational stability), then regular meeting time matters a lot to resolve conflict, and so working time zone matters a lot. The more spread, and the more you get people blaming "not good enough processes" on what is really just "not enough common time to meet to collaborate". Now the other half of that is what remote-first, "all I need is more time to code" developers really don't want to hear, is that in resolving conflict, in-person communication is much higher bandwidth than even zoom communication, both for the whiteboard, and for the fact being in-person de-escalates emotion. This is particularly true for early career developers, where some pushback (i.e. conflict) in their naive assumptions is actually how they are going to learn better from senior developers. So while 5 days a week in the office is dead, its way too early to say what the eventual outcome will be. But I do agree less days a week will force some amount of square-foot downsizing, so I am glad I don't own any office buildings.
- flexie 3y ago
  A few things: 1: Indian wages are going up. The difference gets smaller every year.* Note that many of the best Indian developers are paid in USD, and even for the developers that get paid in Rupees, the company they are hired by locally often does get paid in USD by the American company that buys their services, so the fact that the Rupee goes down doesn't necessarily offset their wage increase for the American company that hires them. 2: American workers can still meet in every Tuesday. It's hard from Hyderabad. 3: Time difference can be a real issue (but of course it can also be an advantage). 4: It's often easier for Americans to understand American English than Indian English. 5: American developers might understand the American market and competing products better. * https://www.statista.com/chart/25729/india-annual-average-salary-increase/ https://www.statista.com/chart/25729/india-annual-average-sa...
eru 3y ago
> Neckties were an essential business requirement for ages. At some point, people had had enough of the mostly pointless ritual and began rejecting the norm. [...] Neckties are still widely worn. Have a look at the demise of hats throughout the 20th century for another example.
unethical_ban 3y ago
I believe both in the flexibility of remote work, and in the benefits of learning and collaborating with people in person. I think we have gained and lost things in the remote shift. I feel bad for young people starting their careers who will never know what it's like to make acquaintance with their coworkers and feel at ease with them, to work on problems together.
jillesvangurp 3y ago
It's not so much that the days of the office (and neck ties and other nonsense) is passing but that the economies of scale that made such environments economically viable are changing. It used to be that companies had to have lots of people around organized in hierarchical processes working to certain uniform processes to produce value at scale. These days, you can outsource a lot of these things, automate a lot away, to the point that many businesses are scaling down to human level. Many companies exist that are only a handful of people working together. They do business with other companies or sell to consumers directly via the internet. Instead of doing things in house, they partner with other companies for things that used to be done in house. HR, accounting, marketing, manufacturing, logistics, etc. And in so far people still need to be internal, they no longer have to be in the same place or even on the same continent. Remote work is here and still somewhat controversial. But it works and has liberated a lot of people from going to an office on a daily basis. These people are often acting more like independent companies rather than employees. Often that's exactly what they are: independent contractors, freelancers, etc. And of course, a large and growing part of the workforce is no longer permanently employed by anyone. So, having all these people come to some huge sky scraper in New York isn't that logical or productive anymore. You could do it. But it doesn't really add that much value. And it actually costs a lot of money and time to do it.
TheGigaChad 3y ago
[dead]
up2isomorphism 3y ago
I found most of this kind of argument quite unnecessary. Most of the people want less work and more pay, that’s a reality. On the other hand, staying competitive is most company’s reality too. So it is really not about you as a employee or employer’s will but rather than the market supply and demand that determines the work location flexibility. If I am employer and I have 2 candidates with similar skill level, of course I will prefer the one who can come to office everyday. And if I am an employee with two job offers with similar pay and working items of course I will choose the one with remote flexibility, because having choice is always better.

JohnFen 3y ago

> Many workers have tasted the freedom of no commute, or at least a pleasant walk/bike commute to a nearby coworking space. Yes, although I say it a different way. Working in offices has always been fairly terrible, and had been growing increasingly terrible over the last decade or two. People put up with it in part because they had no option. But once they worked outside of those spaces and realized what hell they were, of course they resist returning. So it's not just about discovering new "freedom", it's about discovering that a major thing that makes life suck doesn't have to be a thing at all.

bsder 3y ago
> Working in offices has always been fairly terrible, and had been growing increasingly terrible over the last decade or two. Offices don't have to be terrible. IBM, GE, Bell, etc. knew how to put together offices that didn't suck. Occasionally the architects got out of hand and produced some monstrosity, but the offices were mostly fine. It's only the whole dumbass "open office plan" bullshit that made everything suck. Given that's the "standard", is it any wonder everybody wants to work from home?
- startupsfail 3y ago
  It was not dumbass. It was an attempt to cut the spendings on the workspaces for the employees and increase the profits for shareholders.
  - mullingitover 3y ago
    Open plan in a nutshell: would you like to save 20% on seating costs for the low cost of a 30% reduction in productivity? Then open plan offices might be right for you.
    - antonvs 3y ago
      The nutshell takeaway here is that concrete reductions in costs will always outweigh greater but less concrete increases in costs, because... well George Carlin covered that.
      - mullingitover 3y ago
        My theory is it's a classic cargo cult situation: "If we just do the same thing this successful startup did (we'll ignore that they were doing it in a different context for different reasons, and ignore the ones that did the same thing but weren't successful) then we too will have the same explosive success!"
      - polynomial 3y ago
        ?

muglug 3y ago

Neckties are a great example. They're a good rejoinder to Musk's recent farcical argument that since most blue-collar workers cannot work remotely, it's immoral for white-collar workers to resist Return-To-Office mandates [1]. Some jobs still require neckties, but that does not mean we should all be obliged to wear them too. I personally enjoy commuting — a 35-minute journey in a big city via public transport. It gets me to an office full of friendly faces who also enjoy the commute. The people who prefer remote stay home. It's a happy medium. RTO mandates in US cities with poor/non-existent public transport options are bad ideas all around. [1] https://www.mediaite.com/tv/elon-musk-calls-remote-work-bullsht-and-morally-wrong/ https://www.mediaite.com/tv/elon-musk-calls-remote-work-bull...

pb7 3y ago
> They're a good rejoinder to Musk's recent farcical argument that since most blue-collar workers cannot work remotely, it's immoral for white-collar workers to resist Return-To-Office mandates. One of the dumbest things he’s ever said (and that’s saying something). Most people can’t fly private either but it doesn’t seem to stop him.
- specialist 3y ago
  Translation: Your well being is a violation of my rights. Whereas a humanist might consider how to make blue-collar work less terrible.
  - lo_zamoyski 3y ago
    The entire egalitarian fad we're living through is not longer interested in alleviating poverty, but abolishing any form of "inequality" [0]. As if inequality were a bad thing and equality a good thing. [0] https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2015/09/poverty-no-inequality-si.html https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2015/09/poverty-no-inequali...
    - specialist 3y ago
      Another reactionary Catholic argues against teachings of Jesus, rejects Second Vatican Council, despises liberation theology. Lather, rinse, repeat. Yawn.

bombcar 3y ago

There's also a "status" thing for people and for companies - companies are not immune to "fake it until you make it" and many pour billions into status-buildings that are perhaps not technically necessary. And those things can change, suddenly having a huge tower in downtown NY becomes a sign of a out-of-date "old" company; perhaps the new hotness will be something like a small company "town" in the outskirts somewhere.

akomtu 3y ago
Skyscrapers are those neckties of the corporations.
ragingrobot 3y ago
> the new hotness will be something like a small company "town" in the outskirts somewhere. So the "new hotness" will be kind of like the old days where you worked for Pullman, and with those wages you earned, you: paid rent to Pullman, bought your goods at the Pullman general store, and so on in effect giving much of your earnings back to the company.
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  Hum... Did the thread stop being about remote work at some point? I missed it.
- cratermoon 3y ago
  You mean like... https://www.npr.org/2023/05/02/1172301798/workers-affordable-housing-companies-building https://www.npr.org/2023/05/02/1172301798/workers-affordable... https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-09-16/amazon-s-new-factory-towns-will-lift-the-working-class#xj4y7vzkg https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-09-16/amazon... https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/apr/18/is-elon-musk-creating-a-utopian-city-the-hellish-heavenly-history-of-company-towns https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/apr/18/is-elon-musk...
- ikekkdcjkfke 3y ago
  In europe that's exactly what the state it is. There's so many levels of taxation, company-, employement-, wage-, pension-, health- and property-tax. And then there is 25% vat on everything.

lisasays 3y ago

A hollow analogy, unfortunately. Unlike neckties (which are entirely about appearance and perceived norms) -- there are very considerable intrinsic benefits to having people onsite. They just don't outweigh the very considerable negatives, many are coming to find. So it's fundamentally an argument about tangible tradeoffs -- not social norms. An entirely different argument, in fact.

michaelteter 3y ago
> hollow I think "hollow" is a bit heavy for the judgment, but I agree they are not the same in terms of tangibility (although I'll bet if I dig enough I could find some practical use for neckties (in the office, at least)). However, like neckties, many companies do the office thing because that's what you're supposed to do. "Everybody knows this." Some (many?) offices exist without a tangible benefit.
- lisasays 3y ago
  Right -- the RTO debate is also partially about perceived norms and "Everybody knows this". But only partially; let's say about 30 percent. Neckties however -- are 100 percent in that category.

eldavido 3y ago

Narrowing down a bit, I think it's the "downtown business district" that's on the way out -- and the accompanying high office rents, long commutes, etc. My home is a place of rest and family, not work. Work happens at a dedicated location five minutes from home, on foot. I think we'll see more of this in the future--mixed neighborhoods with a lot of residential space next to offices. What I think we won't see as much of, are huge office blocks very far from residential areas, where the majority of the workforce commutes an hour+ every day, each way, to work.

majormajor 3y ago
Central business districts were created by trains which let people move to suburbs; then hung around for a while due to concentration of office effects even as many commuters moved to cars. Interesting tho think about what transit looks like in a world without them. Public transit would need to move more away from the hub/spoke model, which possibly dooms new rail construction in existing car-centric cities; busses already go much more point to point with a lot more route options, but if you have less commuters, do those fail to maintain their current timetables as well?
- onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
  Then why do cities built around cars - that never had trains - still have central business districts? i.e. the entire south & west of the US, pretty much.
  - majormajor 3y ago
    To get the same concentration-of-offices effects in new developments, like I mentioned. But take a look at the size of those central business districts compared to older cities; look at the population of LA vs Chicago or Boston vs the size of their downtowns. (And LA is one that did have some streetcars for a while - Phoenix would be an even more extreme example of a big metro area with a truly pretty small central business district.) There was a lot less pull outside of certain industries - new industries like tech largely avoided ever going downtown much in the first place, preferring big suburban office parks. So if you don't even need the suburban office parks anymore, do things sprawl out even more in places like Austin or Dallas that are surrounded by empty land (vs somewhere like the Bay Area which is hitting geographical barriers)?

jksmith 3y ago

Yeah, living in these legacy markets has become clunky, and the markets can't be changed. If I found out that I no longer needed to swallow rocks to digest my food, why would I ever go back to doing so?

zitterbewegung 3y ago

I don’t totally believe that remote work is going to go completely away . I think that personally for me never going into the office wasn’t really a great experience. It made me much more sedimentary (which in tech is almost a work hazard) but that was my fault . I do like being hybrid (but also the team I was a part of basically stopped existing) so while I think it could be a combination of working from home and the team imploding made me lonely. I rather have the option to going to work and I think companies should still offer a solution for that if they are able to. I do like traveling into the city so maybe I just like neckties. I am definitely against all of this rhetoric about how remote work is horrible and the laptop crowd isn’t doing good work when we don’t really give people enough time for childcare or elder care which I think is a much bigger problem that motivates people to work remotely. Also real estate markets are way overvalued.

kerkeslager 3y ago
> I don’t totally believe that remote work is going to go completely away . I think that personally for me never going into the office wasn’t really a great experience. It made me much more sedimentary (which in tech is almost a work hazard) but that was my fault . I do like being hybrid (but also the team I was a part of basically stopped existing) so while I think it could be a combination of working from home and the team imploding made me lonely. I think a lot of people ran into these problems, but there are solutions. Work doesn't have to be your only source of community, and in fact, it can be problematic when it is, because then your community only lasts as long as your job. On the one hand you might lose your job, and on the other hand you might not quit when you should. Having connections outside work is pretty key to having work/life balance IMO.
- 972811 3y ago
  love when commenters are just immediately dismissive of other people's preferences. I feel the same as OP. I have a very healthy social life outside of work but full time remote work at home feels isolating and repetitive. My mind does not like the lack of separation between home and work and I've tried every trick in the book. This is also true for most other activities in my life (e.g. I don't like exercising at home vs. a gym). I don't want to force people to the office, but it gets tiring hearing other people assuming I haven't tried their "solutions"

actionablefiber 3y ago

> As prices for city apartments increase dramatically, people lose interest in living in those cities. I would argue that the prices reflect at least an incredibly persistent demand to live in those cities. Just for different reasons than before. For instance, since the pandemic many cities have invested heavily in bike infrastructure and pedestrianization. E-bikes have become extremely popular. And as the post-COVID reopening has progressed, people have been organizing local hobbyist meetups, many of them having acquired those hobbies during the depths of the pandemic. There is a huge lifestyle appeal to living in cities, and it will not go away anytime soon. Cities need to recognize that both the massive increase in residential demand and the massive plunge in commercial demand are incredible opportunities to differentiate themselves by converting their dead-after-6pm business districts into thriving, walkable mixed-use hubs.

funnymony 3y ago
Mega yacht costs bazilions. Yes, lot of people would not reject idea of having it, but at the same time actual demand (i.e. actual number of people who would think price is worth it, is quite lower compared to spagetti which is much cheaper but has many more buyers) All in all. high price does not necessarily mean huge demand.
fnordpiglet 3y ago
Great! Then we don’t have to fill the city with offices and we can have places for humans instead of employees.
- CydeWeys 3y ago
  Right, well, see, the problem is we already did the former instead of the latter, and it costs billions of dollars to reverse that.
  - fnordpiglet 3y ago
    Ok - well, residential in Manhattan is $150/square foot. Commercial $85. So… seems worth it? And billions of redevelopment investment? GDP and employment!

mrangle 3y ago

That's an inspirational narrative. However, offices aren't significantly vacant due to remote work. Advancing the narrative that this is the reason will in-part hide economic decline, and will help allow important people to escape the political consequences of the worst economic decline in ninety years.

michaelteter 3y ago
Some have apparently downvoted you, but I think you make a good point. The workers may have rejected the onsite companies such that it is difficult to fill the expensive offices. But also, it is likely that the COVID forced out-of-office situation has caused companies to re-evaluate the value of prime office locations. Fashion is a self-reinforcing feedback loop. If the scenario is visible and hyped, others will believe they must follow it to be relevant. And then it becomes stronger, and effectively relevant. Soon every real US finance company needs a prime Manhattan office... unless it's a commodities company, in which it must have a prime Chicago location. Aside from inflating finance company performance via tax laws, I don't think politics really has so much to do with this. Actually, the global upward wealth redistribution policies do mean that a smaller group has a more difficult time finding places to park money, so that indeed does inflate propertly values.

tick_tock_tick 3y ago

> Many workers have tasted the freedom of no commute, or at least a pleasant walk/bike commute to a nearby coworking space. They don't want to go back, and like myself they will reject any job which has a firm requirement for such. I assume some many continue to exist but employees will also have to get used to large pay cuts if that's a hard requirement for them. > As prices for city apartments increase dramatically, people lose interest in living in those cities. Better to live someplace pleasant and less expensive No one wants to live there too many people live there......

marcosdumay 3y ago
Well, yes, eventually companies will have to pay a premium if they want people to actually move there every day. Relative to what is an open question, because the jobs that require that also don't currently pay a lot.
jvanderbot 3y ago
I've gone over to the darkside. I live in a suburb 20 minutes from my favorite neighborhood for entertainment, 30m from my parents, 20m from endless fields, 1 hr from the rest of my family and friends. I have a yard, access to a lake, a riding mower, and no utility lines in my backyard so I can dig and build to my heart's content. I also have Gbps internet and a job at a startup as a principal. This literally is the best of both worlds for me. I'm not particularly wealthy and not particularly clever - I'm sure everyone is doing this and the best part is, there's _room_ out here, at least in the USA.
gedy 3y ago
> employees will also have to get used to large pay cuts if that's a hard requirement for them. I make more now in a remote position than when I commuted? I'm in California, not in a LCOL location.
aaomidi 3y ago
> employees will also have to get used to large pay cuts if that's a hard requirement for them Then these companies are going to have to get used to lower profit margins as time catches up and kicks them out with competitors.

daveslash 3y ago

Reading the title, my initial thought was residential skyscrapers. Reading the article clearly indicates that it's discussing offices. But back to residential: I understand that many wealthy people buy real estate for the prestige of having a certain address or as a way to "lock up" wealth in an asset. See Billionaires Row [0] [1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billionaires%27_Row_(Manhattan) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billionaires%27_Row_(Manhattan... [1] https://nypost.com/2021/08/05/nearly-half-of-luxury-units-empty-in-billionaires-row-buildings/ https://nypost.com/2021/08/05/nearly-half-of-luxury-units-em...

bobthepanda 3y ago
Billionaires and vacant apartments cause issues, but they at least pay taxes. An office building with no tenants will face plummeting property values and a corresponding dive in tax bills. * Note: residential property taxation in NYC is in dire need of reform but the point still stands
michaelteter 3y ago
Regarding property ownership, for a number of recent years it has been a challenge to find "safe" places to park money. Real estate in NYC and other prime locations is probably seen as pretty safe. Also, if you have true "FU" money, then owning a piece of prime NYC real estate is just another mark on your bedpost, like your superyacht.

doubleg72 3y ago

Unfortunately, here in the real world, people have to go to work. Hospitals, stores, schools, manufacturers, warehouses, truck drivers, and builders/maintaniers of all the infrastructure that your lifestyle depends on.. even your car salesman with necktie: these are all places that need workers and always will. The small proportion of workforce that are startup employees dont make the rules. You're crazy to think that everyone wants to work from home, I know I sure as hell dont.

bloppe 3y ago

When it comes to the office-vs-home discussion everybody is just plugging their own personal preference. Clearly there is a mix. Personally, I love going into my office: it's close to me and has amenities and coworkers I like very much, and I'm personally much more productive there than at home. I realize there are plenty of people who prefer and are more productive working from home. But clearly it's not nearly as superficial as a necktie. Onboarding in particular is demonstrably more difficult to do remotely. Maybe a happy balance for new hires is an extended in-office orientation followed by the option to go remote, although this also requires some senior employees to be in the office to help with orientation. Ofc the benefits of this have to be weighed against real estate costs. Let's just stop pretending anybody knows exactly what the office situation will be in the coming years.

jaggederest 3y ago
> Onboarding in particular is demonstrably more difficult to do remotely. Is it? I don't believe it is. At this point, people just plug right in - once you're used to remote work, it's a matter of learning which chat platform they use, getting access to email, and away you go. It's literally the exact same thing as in office these days, precisely due to needing to accommodate remote onboarding.
- bloppe 3y ago
  I'm now struggling to find the study I was thinking of when I said "demonstrably", but I can say anecdotally that our new hires ask fewer questions online than in person, despite my reminders that the worst thing you can do while onboarding is ask too few questions. Coworker relationships are more formal and compartmentalized online than in person and they can be more reluctant to ping people with questions out of fear of being considered annoying. This doesn't apply to everyone but it has a noticeable effect on the average new hire. I'm sure you can come up with the perfect counterpoint to my anecdote. We'll just have to wait a few more years for more robust, large scale comparisons before we really understand how much an office is worth.
  - shard 3y ago

hettygreen 3y ago

Serious question: If I'm working from home, what's stopping my employer from replacing me with some dude in India or something for 1/3 the price? I'm just having a hard time believing that we're at this moment in time where life suddenly got better for workers.

embwbam 3y ago
English as a first language. Implicit shared cultural values. Time zones. You are way less work to manage than someone across the world from another culture. Some companies do outsource everything but it’s HARD.
inowland 3y ago
A half answer here is, given "agile devops" software development (i.e. developing with iterative tradeoffs on both features and operational stability), then regular meeting time matters a lot to resolve conflict, and so working time zone matters a lot. The more spread, and the more you get people blaming "not good enough processes" on what is really just "not enough common time to meet to collaborate". Now the other half of that is what remote-first, "all I need is more time to code" developers really don't want to hear, is that in resolving conflict, in-person communication is much higher bandwidth than even zoom communication, both for the whiteboard, and for the fact being in-person de-escalates emotion. This is particularly true for early career developers, where some pushback (i.e. conflict) in their naive assumptions is actually how they are going to learn better from senior developers. So while 5 days a week in the office is dead, its way too early to say what the eventual outcome will be. But I do agree less days a week will force some amount of square-foot downsizing, so I am glad I don't own any office buildings.
flexie 3y ago
A few things: 1: Indian wages are going up. The difference gets smaller every year.* Note that many of the best Indian developers are paid in USD, and even for the developers that get paid in Rupees, the company they are hired by locally often does get paid in USD by the American company that buys their services, so the fact that the Rupee goes down doesn't necessarily offset their wage increase for the American company that hires them. 2: American workers can still meet in every Tuesday. It's hard from Hyderabad. 3: Time difference can be a real issue (but of course it can also be an advantage). 4: It's often easier for Americans to understand American English than Indian English. 5: American developers might understand the American market and competing products better. * https://www.statista.com/chart/25729/india-annual-average-salary-increase/ https://www.statista.com/chart/25729/india-annual-average-sa...

eru 3y ago

> Neckties were an essential business requirement for ages. At some point, people had had enough of the mostly pointless ritual and began rejecting the norm. [...] Neckties are still widely worn. Have a look at the demise of hats throughout the 20th century for another example.

unethical_ban 3y ago

I believe both in the flexibility of remote work, and in the benefits of learning and collaborating with people in person. I think we have gained and lost things in the remote shift. I feel bad for young people starting their careers who will never know what it's like to make acquaintance with their coworkers and feel at ease with them, to work on problems together.

jillesvangurp 3y ago

It's not so much that the days of the office (and neck ties and other nonsense) is passing but that the economies of scale that made such environments economically viable are changing. It used to be that companies had to have lots of people around organized in hierarchical processes working to certain uniform processes to produce value at scale. These days, you can outsource a lot of these things, automate a lot away, to the point that many businesses are scaling down to human level. Many companies exist that are only a handful of people working together. They do business with other companies or sell to consumers directly via the internet. Instead of doing things in house, they partner with other companies for things that used to be done in house. HR, accounting, marketing, manufacturing, logistics, etc. And in so far people still need to be internal, they no longer have to be in the same place or even on the same continent. Remote work is here and still somewhat controversial. But it works and has liberated a lot of people from going to an office on a daily basis. These people are often acting more like independent companies rather than employees. Often that's exactly what they are: independent contractors, freelancers, etc. And of course, a large and growing part of the workforce is no longer permanently employed by anyone. So, having all these people come to some huge sky scraper in New York isn't that logical or productive anymore. You could do it. But it doesn't really add that much value. And it actually costs a lot of money and time to do it.

TheGigaChad 3y ago

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up2isomorphism 3y ago

I found most of this kind of argument quite unnecessary. Most of the people want less work and more pay, that’s a reality. On the other hand, staying competitive is most company’s reality too. So it is really not about you as a employee or employer’s will but rather than the market supply and demand that determines the work location flexibility. If I am employer and I have 2 candidates with similar skill level, of course I will prefer the one who can come to office everyday. And if I am an employee with two job offers with similar pay and working items of course I will choose the one with remote flexibility, because having choice is always better.