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That's one market that's never coming back to its former glory IMO, especially with WFH showing some real staying power in the tech industry. Give it 10 years a

That's one market that's never coming back to its former glory IMO, especially with WFH showing some real staying power in the tech industry. Give it 10 years and I predict virtually all desk jobs will be WFH or hybrid (ignoring, for a moment, whatever effects LLMs will also have on typical desk jobs) That said, yes FANG and a few of the big big corporations are adamantly trying to get/keep people back in the office. Many of these companies also just finished building multi-billion dollar campuses. Imagine the heads that will roll when they finally admit to themselves that these campuses were a total waste of money, and don't even have much re-sale value because no one needs corporate CRE anymore. This is more true than I think a lot of people realize, even where I am in fairly rural east coast USA, many of the office buildings in town have been vacant since the pandemic. No one needs these structures anymore. Even traditionally in-person venues like doctors' offices are slowly starting to shift a double digit percentage of their appointments to video calls. The writing is on the wall. sell sell sell

JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> especially with WFH showing some real staying power in the tech industry There is also something to be said about the political environment. White-collar workers, particularly tech workers, aren't popular. Tech jobs in urban centres are on the consensus chopping block. That means the space they occupied, these offices, are obsolete--irrespective of WFH v RTO.
vundercind 2y ago
In my friend group, I know four non-tech office workers (as in: they aren’t personally in tech, and also don’t work at a tech company). Two are fully remote, and two are hybrid at about 80% WFH. It’s become way more common even outside of tech.
nobodyandproud 2y ago
This may age badly, but imho: Long term, the meaningful work will be work that absolutely require in-person presence. The office space sprawl of today will adjust to small-scale, experimental industry space, with a heavy emphasis on automation and custom engineering (industry v2). Well after the collapse of today’s inflated commercial real estate.
- TheNewsIsHere 2y ago
  “Meaningful work” is relative. It’s understandable that doctors haven’t gone all in on WFH. Their profession more or less requires being hands on with patients, but that’s not the only meaningful work there is. But my work supports businesses that employ people, see patients, and provide robust tax revenues to local communities. That’s meaningful, and it doesn’t require anything more than my office at home. I think you’re right about industrial spaces. A friend of mine works for a company that creates building automation technology, and even their hardware engineers have automated a lot of the physical testing infrastructure. Not even those teams are in-office every day at his company anymore.
Mountain_Skies 2y ago
There's a large mortgage company in my area that spent heavily on building a large campus full of amenities right before the pandemic hit. They seem to be having difficulty in filling IT positions as they always have openings posted. The relevant part is that the job postings lean heavily on the value of their campus and its amenities. Perhaps these are ghost jobs or they have high turnover. Either way, they really emphasize the value of their campus. Whoever was behind the initiative to move out of their generic suburban office buildings into a custom built campus is probably sweating bullets now.

JumpCrisscross 2y ago

> especially with WFH showing some real staying power in the tech industry There is also something to be said about the political environment. White-collar workers, particularly tech workers, aren't popular. Tech jobs in urban centres are on the consensus chopping block. That means the space they occupied, these offices, are obsolete--irrespective of WFH v RTO.

vundercind 2y ago

In my friend group, I know four non-tech office workers (as in: they aren’t personally in tech, and also don’t work at a tech company). Two are fully remote, and two are hybrid at about 80% WFH. It’s become way more common even outside of tech.

nobodyandproud 2y ago

This may age badly, but imho: Long term, the meaningful work will be work that absolutely require in-person presence. The office space sprawl of today will adjust to small-scale, experimental industry space, with a heavy emphasis on automation and custom engineering (industry v2). Well after the collapse of today’s inflated commercial real estate.

TheNewsIsHere 2y ago
“Meaningful work” is relative. It’s understandable that doctors haven’t gone all in on WFH. Their profession more or less requires being hands on with patients, but that’s not the only meaningful work there is. But my work supports businesses that employ people, see patients, and provide robust tax revenues to local communities. That’s meaningful, and it doesn’t require anything more than my office at home. I think you’re right about industrial spaces. A friend of mine works for a company that creates building automation technology, and even their hardware engineers have automated a lot of the physical testing infrastructure. Not even those teams are in-office every day at his company anymore.

Mountain_Skies 2y ago

There's a large mortgage company in my area that spent heavily on building a large campus full of amenities right before the pandemic hit. They seem to be having difficulty in filling IT positions as they always have openings posted. The relevant part is that the job postings lean heavily on the value of their campus and its amenities. Perhaps these are ghost jobs or they have high turnover. Either way, they really emphasize the value of their campus. Whoever was behind the initiative to move out of their generic suburban office buildings into a custom built campus is probably sweating bullets now.