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At home, the benefits are extreme. Full office, private bath, private bed, private kitchen, garaged parking, asset security, and a 30 second commute. The next w
by 1970-01-01 3y ago
At home, the benefits are extreme. Full office, private bath, private bed, private kitchen, garaged parking, asset security, and a 30 second commute. The next wave of office workers will want it better than this, or it simply won't work.
- Zetice 3y agoWon’t work? How will these non-workers pay for things? They’ll have no choice but to work.
- nkozyra 3y agoDepends on the timeline. Things are changing very rapidly. Automation seems to be coming at us at an exponential rate. The expectation that it's going to be business as usual is just as short sighted and archaic with regard going into an office as it is with the idea of work in general.
- missingdays 3y agoSo far automation helps rich people get richer, and that's about it
- nkozyra 3y agoIs this not true of every watershed technological breakthrough?
- halgir 3y agoOh boy, I'm excited for the massive wealth creation of this exponential growth to trickle down to workers.
- welshwelsh 3y agoNo need to wait, the future is now. I've already seen huge gains in income and work-life balance by spending time automating my workflow. I hope that by "trickle down to the workers" you aren't talking about technically illiterate workers who are not actively contributing to the automation effort. Unfortunately, they will receive some benefits as well, which is completely undeserved.
- nkozyra 3y ago> I've already seen huge gains in income and work-life balance by spending time automating my workflow. Sure, most of us have used copilot or other AI tools and seen some benefit. But there's a point of no return where suddenly those tools are able to do the other things we think only we can. What happens then?
- halgir 3y ago> I hope that by "trickle down to the workers" you aren't talking about technically illiterate workers who are not actively contributing to the automation effort. I'm talking about every single human being who has been brought into this world through no fault of their own and deserves our empathy on that point alone.
- nkozyra 3y agoCertainly not an argument I'm making. But if you're making UBI at bare minimum you won't have to iron your polo shirt and khakis every morning.
- halgir 3y agoYou're right, sorry for the cynical tone. I do hope the level of automation we're aiming for will benefit everyone, not just a few individual owners and us lucky tech workers who have found ourselves in demand lately.
- mrbgty 3y agoHow will the company stay in business without workers? They'll have no choice...
- commonlisp94 3y agoThey have plenty of choices, including: - visa workers who have no bargaining power. - younger people who are mobile - moving offices to other places There have been a few recent posts about struggling to find jobs... every time it turns out they are only applying to online listings for remote jobs, and have high standards. That's not a situation you're likely to stand out in. I just don't see how global remote work as the norm is "pro worker" for anyone except those already well established in their career. Besides being more disposable, what happened to complaints about companies not providing job resources or training? Did we give up on that one?
- Zetice 3y agoAn understaffed company will last infinitely longer than an individual without a job.
- mrbgty 3y agoThat's a wild generalization
- tiborsaas 3y agoThere's always someone who's willing to work regardless of WFH policy. What would probably happen is that companies are lowering their standards of hiring.
- rabuse 3y agoIt's a two-way street between employers and employees.
- acuozzo 3y agoEver hear of The New Deal? It was necessary because many, many US citizens hit hard by The Great Depression figured out in that time how to live without depending on regular (or any) work. Tent cities; hunting; scavenging; farming; begging; stealing; mutual aid networks; etc. It wasn't the best life, but for many it was found to be preferable to the factories or the docks. To even consider returning to living a life dependent on a wage, Uncle Sam needed to offer them a new deal.
- Zetice 3y agoWe've since invented air conditioning (among other things), so I doubt this is a relevant point.
- onlyrealcuzzo 3y agoThe idea that employers need to give you everything you want is strange. They give you the least they can possibly get away with. Sure - some small subset of employers competing for the best employees will do this. But the average employer? I'm skeptical.
- Veliladon 3y agoNot only will those employers competing for the best get the best, they'll get it at a discount rate because remote workers are on average willing to accept an 18% pay cut to remain fully remote. Employees are literally willing to pay employers to stay at home. The middle manager who is awful at their job and so insecure they need to "see employees working" is costing the business not just in talent acquisition but when pulling in the dregs they're paying a premium for it. The center cannot hold.
- tayo42 3y agoMiddle managers aren't making these decisions to have people go back to working in offices
- kjkjadksj 3y agoTheir job is to support their staff against higher management. They are failing to do that if their teams are begrudgingly going back to work. They really do have all the leverage here. A business cannot function without labor or else it would just be the c suite as the only people employed.
- volkk 3y agotell me you've never managed without telling me you've never managed
- robertlagrant 3y ago> The center cannot hold The center isn't just insecure managers. Plenty of people want to work together... together. I happen to run my team remote, but to reduce a real issue to insecurity is to starve the conversation of meaningful contributions.
- _fizz_buzz_ 3y agoI think a lot of people on here have not been through a real recession. Not saying that everybody will go back to working in an office, but thinking one can simply demand anything only works when employment is high. During a recession, it is either social assistance or one takes the job that is available.
- ye-olde-sysrq 3y agoIt also works if employees collectively bargain.
- mandmandam 3y ago> I think a lot of people on here have not been through a real recession. You can't be serious. > During a recession, it is either social assistance or one takes the job that is available. It's only this way because we allow it to be. Huge productivity gains over the last decades have been captured by the .1%. There's nothing ambiguous or mysterious about it.
- mdorazio 3y ago> You can't be serious. I have to agree with the parent post here. What do you think the median age of HN commenters is? I'd say it's probably mid-late 20s, in which case most people graduated after the great recession was largely over and only experienced the COVID blip that wasn't a cyclical recession in the normal sense and mostly helped tech workers instead of harming them.
- JohnFen 3y agoI don't think that it needs to be better than home. However, offices have been actively unpleasant places that are difficult to work in for a very, very long time. Now that everyone is reminded (or made aware, for younger workers) of that, people rightfully expect better. That much really does need to change. Everyone getting an office with a door -- even a small one -- would go a long way toward making the office a good place to work.
- Terretta 3y ago> Everyone getting an office with a door -- even a small one… Alice looked through the small door... https://images.genius.com/80f6b055d05188b3ae126e3be56a5134.1000x542x1.jpg https://images.genius.com/80f6b055d05188b3ae126e3be56a5134.1...
- jwells89 3y agoAlso, schedule flexibility. If I hit a point where my brain is a smoldering pile of ash I can get up and go do chores or get some sun by checking the mail or something, instead of sitting at my desk staring at my screen praying to the gods of productivity that my brain will start functioning again.
- laserlight 3y agoSo much this. Doing chores is a great way to have a break: physically engaging and functional.
- fernandotakai 3y agooh yes! i go for a quick walk to a nearby park and i listen to an audiobook for 30min. or i walk my dog. or i get my steamdeck and play something for 30min (with baldur's gate 3, it's hard to stop after only 30).
- quectophoton 3y agoThis also means that choosing to stay a bit late[1] because you're working on a hard problem becomes an easier choice, because you know you can stop any time and be on your bed in under 15 seconds, no bus no car no bike no commute. [1]: If your employer doesn't like if you take a longer lunch break or something to get this time back, then it's time to start looking for a different one.
- jwells89 3y agoThis is true, but depending on the individual it can also mean that one might need to be good at drawing a line and stopping at it. I do sometimes work late when chewing on a more difficult problem, but if I don't stop early enough to leave a decent gap between end of work and bedtime, it can sometimes be difficult to get my head turned off and get to sleep. I miss my teens and early twenties when I could flop into bed and fall asleep no matter what I had been doing prior.
- strikelaserclaw 3y ago
- dalbasal 3y ago>>The next wave of office workers will want it better than this, or it simply won't work. Workers want lots of things. Eg money. It's a negotiation. One of the best tactics to learn about negotiations is negotiating on multiple fronts. Did salary negotiation turn sticky? Shift to negotiating for days off, or title... on the employer side. One reason that this works is that negotiations have their rationale/objective side and partially contradicting other sides. Case in point, the value of an employee, particularly a specific employee at a particular time... can be extremely high relative to alternatives. The alternative can easily be spend 12 months paying salary equivalent cost without the benefit. Lots of positions are hard to adequately fill. 12 months of hiring, training, fail, rehiring, etc. That can easily be your mean alternative. It's very common that someone good leaves a team and 12 months later you have not really replaced them. Yet... That reality rarely translates to practicality outside of executive comp. Investors certainly act this way, but hr doesn't. The rationale of rehiring cost and risk/difficulty of hiring are understood... but there are still limits to the number they are to put on this. It's never 300%. It's 10% or maybe 25%. Willingness to pay correlates to value, but it isn't proportional. Anyway... WFH is currently an extremely irationale space. No one is being quite honest about it's full benefits, costs, risks, etc. It's a benefit that neither employee or employer is usually comfortable about outright "negotiating," like offering less money for remote. So... WFH is not-negotiable-for salary benefit that is #1 or #2 on both parties' priority list, second (often prior) to salary. Unlike other primary benefits, employees know who gets what. Currently, it's all about perceived negotiating power.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]