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Civically we allegedly care about these topics, and note their solutions via remote work - disabled accommodations: this article, and anecdotes from people we

Civically we allegedly care about these topics, and note their solutions via remote work - disabled accommodations: this article, and anecdotes from people we know in this situation - finding some method for a dramatic enough state change in environmental conditions as to back up from disconcerting climate change barriers we’re pushing into: I can’t recall the specifics but within a week of COVID lockdowns and no commutes, carbon and pollution in atmosphere plummets - preventing sexism, ageism, and other forms harassment at work: can’t sexually harass someone quite as easily in a fully auditable zoom/slack environment vs in office. - accommodating parents and their child raising needs with policies that don’t come out of 1950: every working parent I know with remote jobs experience significant flexibility here. - affordable housing space: office space conversions are starting. The longer the debate goes on about hybrid/wfh and the above tangible proven benefits vs RTO for “The Collaboration” and “My Socialization Needs,” the more I speculate our society doesn’t actually care about the above topics, at all. Or, if we do care, this should be called out over and over and over. Bc it’s not getting discussed this way.

squigz 2y ago
It's not (often) workers calling for RTO. It's not hard to imagine why.
- dogman144 2y ago
  I see a lot of workers in HN taking that position, or at least some very persistent sock puppet corporate accounts hah.
  - squigz 2y ago
    I tend to see a lot of managers calling for it. I see some workers calling for hybrid (which is perfectly reasonable) but not full RTO. Just my impressions though.
    - ghaff 2y ago
      I doubt you'd see many workers calling for in the office every day, no exceptions for in-office workers, which was mostly the norm (outside of travel and customer visits) for many professionals in, say, the 80s. However, there is a subset today that would like to see co-workers with a regular office presence.
      - squigz 2y ago
        Yes, hybrid work is a reasonable position to take, I think. One cannot deny the benefits of occasional in-office meetings/socialization while accepting the benefits of WFH.
    - closeparen 2y ago
      Hybrid is a worst of both worlds in that you still have to live in a VHCOL but also spend half your weekdays in the kind of place you can afford there.
toomuchtodo 2y ago
If someone says they care, observe their actions. This is the revealed intent. The words are meaningless, and cost nothing to speak. If it is clear someone is being dishonest due to action speech delta, say so, loudly and in a manner that leaves a durable paper trail. Accountability dies in the darkness and silence.
briffid 2y ago
Plus according to Jonathan Haidt in Happiness Hypothesis, commuting, noise and lack of control are among the most significant things that make people unhappy. All of them are manageable at home. And also these are rarely taken into the discussion.
- throwaway8456 2y ago
  If you are going to quote Jonathan Haidt, I suggest you take a look at his latest book, the Anxious Generation published in 2024. My reading is that reducing face time is definitely NOT a positive factor for happiness.
  - FredPret 2y ago
    Then let’s have clubs and hobbies and so on again
    - MenhirMike 2y ago
      Third Places really took a hit in the pandemic :( But yes, as someone who re-discovered them last year, I absolutely agree.
  - mensetmanusman 2y ago
    Replace work FaceTime with a third place FaceTime.
  - MeImCounting 2y ago
    Your primary source of face time should not be coming from your work.
    - basisword 2y ago
      Work is half of your waking day 5 days out of 7 - it’s probably your primary source of face time whether you like it or not. You might have more valuable face time elsewhere (family, friends, hobbies) but those 40-50 hours should probably be taken more seriously than they are.
whimsicalism 2y ago
revealed preference is for there to be minimal change in what people can do and material abundance
sdfgtr 2y ago
> I can’t recall the specifics but within a week of COVID lockdowns and no commutes, carbon and pollution in atmosphere plummets I don't deny the impact of lessening the number of people commuting, but how much of that was commuting and how much was everything being shut down? I don't know that there would be as large an impact as people may hope.
atlgator 2y ago
Or because the conversation is being driven by the banks that provide liquidity to the S&P500 and, coincidentally, own most of the commercial real estate.
- burningChrome 2y ago
  Anecdotal data but UHG one of the largest health care companies in the world had a huge stake in commercial real estate pre-covid. They owned virtually every building their employees worked out of all over the country. Once covid hit, they saw the writing on the wall and have been liquidating their real estate holdings over the past 3 years or so. I live in Minnesota and they've sold five of their buildings here alone, including one of their older main HQ buildings. They now have one HQ which is a three building campus and have gone to an almost 100% WFH model with an optional office arrangement where you can reserve a desk if you know you need to be in the office. Many of the downtown Minneapolis buildings have also changed hands including the Wells Fargo and Capella towers. If anything, what you're seeing is a lot of the S&P 500 companies are divesting their commercial real estate holdings since it doesn't appear as though in office time is going to increase or be anywhere near what it was pre-covid.
- ssklash 2y ago
  This is the true reason for the push back to in-office work, and gets far too little discussion.
basisword 2y ago
>> I can’t recall the specifics but within a week of COVID lockdowns and no commutes, carbon and pollution in atmosphere plummets That was more because half the planet was told not to leave their homes. Sure, stopping commutes had an impact on pollution, but the roads were literally empty in major cities - that wasn't because people could suddenly WFH.
- dogman144 2y ago
  The roads being empty at their peak commute hours probably had something to do with it…
  - jazzyjackson 2y ago
    I think the point is jobs that can be done from a computer are not necessarily the bulk of jobs that require commuting.
    - dogman144 2y ago
      Somehow, all those jobs got done without commutes for years during COVID. So a lot don’t seem to require commuting.
      - squigz 2y ago
        They all got done? What?
    - threetonesun 2y ago
      One could argue that in an ever so slightly better society all jobs wouldn't require commuting because you could live near where you work. Most of commuting comes down to the other side of the remote work problem, people can only find affordable housing that's so far from their jobs that it requires them to commute.
Aurornis 2y ago
> - accommodating parents and their child raising needs with policies that don’t come out of 1950: every working parent I know with remote jobs experience significant flexibility here. Flexibility for parents is great. I've worked remote for a long time and having additional flexibility to take care of sick kids and still get some work in while they're asleep and later in the evening is great. Much better for everyone than forcing another PTO day just to stay home. However, I've also been seeing remote work and parenting being pushed way too far since COVID. One of my friends cancelled daycare for their 3 year old, thinking they'd just watch him at home while they worked. Didn't take long to realize that they weren't getting much work done while tending to the demands of a 3 year old, and it became impossible to hide when the child would interrupt every meeting multiple times over. One local company I'm familiar with went remote during COVID and had significant problems with quality of work and communications. The kind of quality problems that impacted customers (not a traditional tech company, their product required employees to do specific work for each customer). When they started narrowing down on the problem employees, one of the top causes they uncovered was parents of young children trying to do the job while watching their kids. It can work with a 13 year old home for summer break, but it just doesn't work for very young kids who need a lot of attention. > - preventing sexism, ageism, and other forms harassment at work: can’t sexually harass someone quite as easily in a fully auditable zoom/slack environment vs in office. I'm going to have to disagree with this one. My friends in HR said the number of inter-employee problems went way, way up during COVID remote work. Employees communicate outside of official channels, in voice meetings that aren't recorded, and in chat rooms you don't control. Some people get extremely difficult to work with when they're arguing with a screen name instead of talking to a person face to face.
- kortilla 2y ago
  “Difficult to work with” is a totally different dimension from ageism, sexism, harassment. I can definitely see the former going way up but the latter going way down.
- dogman144 2y ago
  - so, again, no luck for parents of young children? Ship the parents back to the office and those issues you mention which have some sort of root cause forcing the home-rearing just… go away/out of sight out of mind? As I said, a mindset out of the 1950s. Also, hiring/firing is still a solution, wfh or not. - I work in cybersec, all those alternative channels can be monitored or blocked just fine, and still better than “closed office door + handsy VP” which has plagued the workforce for years and years. - you mention conflict resolution as the remote challenge examples. I mentioned sexual harassment and ageism. Very different.
renewiltord 2y ago
It's the same thing as everything else. Everyone cares about those things conditional on business going well. Do I care about Somalian kids starving? Yes. But conditional on my not starving. If I'm starving, and I have just enough money to eat, you bet I'm not sending shit to that kid in Africa. He's going to die. You can bill that as "This guy doesn't care about starving African kids" if you'd like.
- dogman144 2y ago
  Except all the topics/benefits I mention apply to our day to day lives and communities, not Somalia.
  - renewiltord 2y ago
    Everyone cares about those things conditional on business going well.
rty32 2y ago
The hypocrisy is that my company boasts about eliminating carbon emissions with all the solar panels and carbon credits, yet ask people to come in to work three days a week, some of which drive one hour one-way, as if that has nothing to do with the company (it's actually in the so-called "scope 3 emission"). There is nothing new here.
- gedy 2y ago
  Ha yeah, my previous company had some "most green employee" award, and praising people who biked in or took transit to office - I was told I wasn't eligible because I worked from home..
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
seoulmetro 2y ago
>can’t sexually harass someone quite as easily in a fully auditable zoom/slack environment vs in office. Huh? Yes you can. Probably easier, but in different means. In the office it's much harder to sexually assault someone and get away with it. If you mean it's physically harder to sexually assault someone, well duh.

squigz 2y ago

It's not (often) workers calling for RTO. It's not hard to imagine why.

dogman144 2y ago
I see a lot of workers in HN taking that position, or at least some very persistent sock puppet corporate accounts hah.
- squigz 2y ago
  I tend to see a lot of managers calling for it. I see some workers calling for hybrid (which is perfectly reasonable) but not full RTO. Just my impressions though.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    I doubt you'd see many workers calling for in the office every day, no exceptions for in-office workers, which was mostly the norm (outside of travel and customer visits) for many professionals in, say, the 80s. However, there is a subset today that would like to see co-workers with a regular office presence.
    - squigz 2y ago
      Yes, hybrid work is a reasonable position to take, I think. One cannot deny the benefits of occasional in-office meetings/socialization while accepting the benefits of WFH.
  - closeparen 2y ago
    Hybrid is a worst of both worlds in that you still have to live in a VHCOL but also spend half your weekdays in the kind of place you can afford there.

toomuchtodo 2y ago

If someone says they care, observe their actions. This is the revealed intent. The words are meaningless, and cost nothing to speak. If it is clear someone is being dishonest due to action speech delta, say so, loudly and in a manner that leaves a durable paper trail. Accountability dies in the darkness and silence.

briffid 2y ago

Plus according to Jonathan Haidt in Happiness Hypothesis, commuting, noise and lack of control are among the most significant things that make people unhappy. All of them are manageable at home. And also these are rarely taken into the discussion.

throwaway8456 2y ago
If you are going to quote Jonathan Haidt, I suggest you take a look at his latest book, the Anxious Generation published in 2024. My reading is that reducing face time is definitely NOT a positive factor for happiness.
- FredPret 2y ago
  Then let’s have clubs and hobbies and so on again
  - MenhirMike 2y ago
    Third Places really took a hit in the pandemic :( But yes, as someone who re-discovered them last year, I absolutely agree.
- mensetmanusman 2y ago
  Replace work FaceTime with a third place FaceTime.
- MeImCounting 2y ago
  Your primary source of face time should not be coming from your work.
  - basisword 2y ago
    Work is half of your waking day 5 days out of 7 - it’s probably your primary source of face time whether you like it or not. You might have more valuable face time elsewhere (family, friends, hobbies) but those 40-50 hours should probably be taken more seriously than they are.

whimsicalism 2y ago

revealed preference is for there to be minimal change in what people can do and material abundance

sdfgtr 2y ago

> I can’t recall the specifics but within a week of COVID lockdowns and no commutes, carbon and pollution in atmosphere plummets I don't deny the impact of lessening the number of people commuting, but how much of that was commuting and how much was everything being shut down? I don't know that there would be as large an impact as people may hope.

atlgator 2y ago

Or because the conversation is being driven by the banks that provide liquidity to the S&P500 and, coincidentally, own most of the commercial real estate.

burningChrome 2y ago
Anecdotal data but UHG one of the largest health care companies in the world had a huge stake in commercial real estate pre-covid. They owned virtually every building their employees worked out of all over the country. Once covid hit, they saw the writing on the wall and have been liquidating their real estate holdings over the past 3 years or so. I live in Minnesota and they've sold five of their buildings here alone, including one of their older main HQ buildings. They now have one HQ which is a three building campus and have gone to an almost 100% WFH model with an optional office arrangement where you can reserve a desk if you know you need to be in the office. Many of the downtown Minneapolis buildings have also changed hands including the Wells Fargo and Capella towers. If anything, what you're seeing is a lot of the S&P 500 companies are divesting their commercial real estate holdings since it doesn't appear as though in office time is going to increase or be anywhere near what it was pre-covid.
ssklash 2y ago
This is the true reason for the push back to in-office work, and gets far too little discussion.

basisword 2y ago

>> I can’t recall the specifics but within a week of COVID lockdowns and no commutes, carbon and pollution in atmosphere plummets That was more because half the planet was told not to leave their homes. Sure, stopping commutes had an impact on pollution, but the roads were literally empty in major cities - that wasn't because people could suddenly WFH.

dogman144 2y ago
The roads being empty at their peak commute hours probably had something to do with it…
- jazzyjackson 2y ago
  I think the point is jobs that can be done from a computer are not necessarily the bulk of jobs that require commuting.
  - dogman144 2y ago
    Somehow, all those jobs got done without commutes for years during COVID. So a lot don’t seem to require commuting.
    - squigz 2y ago
      They all got done? What?
  - threetonesun 2y ago
    One could argue that in an ever so slightly better society all jobs wouldn't require commuting because you could live near where you work. Most of commuting comes down to the other side of the remote work problem, people can only find affordable housing that's so far from their jobs that it requires them to commute.

Aurornis 2y ago

> - accommodating parents and their child raising needs with policies that don’t come out of 1950: every working parent I know with remote jobs experience significant flexibility here. Flexibility for parents is great. I've worked remote for a long time and having additional flexibility to take care of sick kids and still get some work in while they're asleep and later in the evening is great. Much better for everyone than forcing another PTO day just to stay home. However, I've also been seeing remote work and parenting being pushed way too far since COVID. One of my friends cancelled daycare for their 3 year old, thinking they'd just watch him at home while they worked. Didn't take long to realize that they weren't getting much work done while tending to the demands of a 3 year old, and it became impossible to hide when the child would interrupt every meeting multiple times over. One local company I'm familiar with went remote during COVID and had significant problems with quality of work and communications. The kind of quality problems that impacted customers (not a traditional tech company, their product required employees to do specific work for each customer). When they started narrowing down on the problem employees, one of the top causes they uncovered was parents of young children trying to do the job while watching their kids. It can work with a 13 year old home for summer break, but it just doesn't work for very young kids who need a lot of attention. > - preventing sexism, ageism, and other forms harassment at work: can’t sexually harass someone quite as easily in a fully auditable zoom/slack environment vs in office. I'm going to have to disagree with this one. My friends in HR said the number of inter-employee problems went way, way up during COVID remote work. Employees communicate outside of official channels, in voice meetings that aren't recorded, and in chat rooms you don't control. Some people get extremely difficult to work with when they're arguing with a screen name instead of talking to a person face to face.

kortilla 2y ago
“Difficult to work with” is a totally different dimension from ageism, sexism, harassment. I can definitely see the former going way up but the latter going way down.
dogman144 2y ago
- so, again, no luck for parents of young children? Ship the parents back to the office and those issues you mention which have some sort of root cause forcing the home-rearing just… go away/out of sight out of mind? As I said, a mindset out of the 1950s. Also, hiring/firing is still a solution, wfh or not. - I work in cybersec, all those alternative channels can be monitored or blocked just fine, and still better than “closed office door + handsy VP” which has plagued the workforce for years and years. - you mention conflict resolution as the remote challenge examples. I mentioned sexual harassment and ageism. Very different.

renewiltord 2y ago

It's the same thing as everything else. Everyone cares about those things conditional on business going well. Do I care about Somalian kids starving? Yes. But conditional on my not starving. If I'm starving, and I have just enough money to eat, you bet I'm not sending shit to that kid in Africa. He's going to die. You can bill that as "This guy doesn't care about starving African kids" if you'd like.

dogman144 2y ago
Except all the topics/benefits I mention apply to our day to day lives and communities, not Somalia.
- renewiltord 2y ago
  Everyone cares about those things conditional on business going well.

rty32 2y ago

The hypocrisy is that my company boasts about eliminating carbon emissions with all the solar panels and carbon credits, yet ask people to come in to work three days a week, some of which drive one hour one-way, as if that has nothing to do with the company (it's actually in the so-called "scope 3 emission"). There is nothing new here.

gedy 2y ago
Ha yeah, my previous company had some "most green employee" award, and praising people who biked in or took transit to office - I was told I wasn't eligible because I worked from home..

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

seoulmetro 2y ago

>can’t sexually harass someone quite as easily in a fully auditable zoom/slack environment vs in office. Huh? Yes you can. Probably easier, but in different means. In the office it's much harder to sexually assault someone and get away with it. If you mean it's physically harder to sexually assault someone, well duh.