5 ms·

I applaud Microsoft and Google for not going with a full RTO. But hybrid work still requires you to live near an office. True remote work enables an economy tha

I applaud Microsoft and Google for not going with a full RTO. But hybrid work still requires you to live near an office. True remote work enables an economy that is spread out, resilient, and lets people live the way they want. We have this capability so why not do it?

rmbyrro 2y ago
Because they don't simply want you to perform tasks. They want to assimilate your mind and make it fully committed to a corporate cult. They can best accomplish this by having you spending most of your wake time in their corp kingdom.
- shadowgovt 2y ago
  Having been there: it's not that. It's that, unfortunately, they have enough hard numbers to know most people do their best work with a boss physically breathing down their neck. I knew some folks at Google who worked 100% remote and only came into the office for critical meetings about once a month. They had proven they could operate that way with a more-or-less stellar track record.
  - azangru 2y ago
    > It's that, unfortunately, they have enough hard numbers to know most people do their best work with a boss physically breathing down their neck. While the conclusion — that most people do their best work when in the office — may be correct, why do you think that the cause of that is the boss breathing down people's necks rather than, say, more efficient collaboration among team members? My personal observations of my team over the past couple of years are that people are much more engaged, issues get resolved much quicker, and information radiates much better when team members are co-located. This is something that many were in agreement on before covid.
    - leksak 2y ago
      Not to mention how body language helps resolve so much surrounding tone when saying something in person. Telling someone to do a thing face-to-face can easily be neutrally charged. The same sentiment expressed in text can carry more weight - feel like an order and appear as if it is more urgent leading to stress
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - shadowgovt 2y ago
      It may be more efficient collaboration among team members. The end-result is the same: more output for the same cost if people are congregating. > This is something that many were in agreement on before covid This is an excellent observation worth highlighting: Google's belief stems not just from pre-COVID / post-COVID observation but from the relative output of teams that were same-office colocated vs. inter-office located, necessitating videoconferencing, chat, and email to get work done. Now that you highlight that, I think my reasoning is in error and it's probably more about collaboration being easier in-person. But inconveniently for those who don't want to work in person, the end-result is the same.
makestuff 2y ago
IMO the downside of being that spread out is the infrastructure. Cities subsidize the suburban infrastructure because of the population density benefits. If everyone spreads out then infrastructure will suffer.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
  Do cities actually subsidize suburban infrastructure? I am skeptical but I don’t know all of the details on how people come to that conclusion. What happens if the economy is more spread out? Also a lot of the people that own and run companies that give a city its tax base live in the suburban areas. It might even be reasonable to say that they are the ones subsidizing the city and not the other way. How do you think about these angles?
  - 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
    It is simple enough to break it down by area. If a city has N people per city block, but a suburb has 1/N people per city block you lose out on all economies of scale. Each individual dwelling requires water, electrical, gas, roads, etc. More efficient to amortize that across more people per unit of infrastructure. A road is always going up cost $/foot. Best if that road is being used by 100k people per day instead of 10.
    - blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
      Yes but that’s a cost of infrastructure angle, not an argument for who is subsidizing whom. I’m saying the fact that the economy is unnecessarily focused into cities makes suburbs look worse in tax revenue but it doesn’t have to be that way.
      - 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
        You cannot ignore infrastructure costs and then ask who is subsidizing whom. Infrastructure is an enormous governmental expense. Not just the initial installation, but the ongoing maintenance as well. Economies of scale are always going to result in the higher density installation being more cost effective.
mushufasa 2y ago
> We have this capability so why not do it? sortof yes, sortof no. Aside from all the conversation about work culture, state taxes are a big barrier to fully remote work. States hate losing tax revenue. Notoriously, it is easier to register to do business in a state than to unregister. This is even harder internationally. For large organizations, remote can be the difference between one state's paperwork + regs + taxation, and every state and country under the sun's paperwork + regs + taxation. That is a real burden. Not just the paperwork + administrative overhead, but being subject to differing employment + everything else laws from *everywhere* will really muck up ability to run a consistent business. While fully remote startups can now access services to help with this, like PEO providers like Justworks/Deel, the reality is that most of the world is not setup to accept this at scale. I run a fully remote startup and still run into issues with vendor diligence departments and accounts etc. expecting us to have a physical office, and being totally bewildered when we don't. The people involved now understand remote work, but the systems --forms, insurances, tax nexus decisions, etc -- still very much aren't setup to handle it. Notably: if you are a bigger company, you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube with all these local governments, and you bet that every locality will be trying to extract tax dollars from the big firms with deeper pockets.
- whatshisface 2y ago
  "Anywhere in California" would also solve the LA density problem.
- sethhochberg 2y ago
  We see this all the time working at the intersection of the insurance / fintech space. I've had several big, legacy vendors make requests for multiple physical signatures on a piece of paper (printed and mailed or faxed, can't just annotate a PDF) from people who haven't even met eachother in person let alone ever worked at the same address. The kicker? These papers are access authorization forms to APIs. Your average tech company is probably reasonably well prepared to go truly distributed, but I bet many of their vendors aren't. Whole workflows in certain industries don't even conceptualize companies with employees distributed across offices, let alone companies with no office at all. (I've fought similar battles over not being able to provide a direct phone extension because I don't have a phone on my office desk and even if I did I'm not at the office anything close to full time, and I don't provide my personal cell phone number to vendors... but thats a whole different topic. Employees exist without phone numbers! Entire offices exist without phones!)
geodel 2y ago
From Google's perspective a lot of outsourced work is remote work. As its done away from Google offices. And they are doubling down on that.
gwbas1c 2y ago
> But hybrid work still requires you to live near an office Not as close as a daily commute, though. I live 60 miles from my office. It's just not practical to go in every day, so I go in once a week. I can also go in as needed, such as if there's a special guest, event, ect. I wish I could go in every day, but where I live is a compromise with my wife, and we have kids. If I were to go in everyday, I'd need to be much, much closer to the office. It wouldn't work for my family: Single incomes don't work very well near my office.
layer8 2y ago
I would hate to live in a world where I don’t regularly meet with coworkers face-to-face. Remote communication just isn’t the same, you lose a lot of signal and are more compartmentalized from each other. I’m saying that as an introvert. But I also have a short commute and a nice office.
- ghaff 2y ago
  At my last company I was officially in-office but I basically never went in because essentially everyone I worked with was in a different office or even a different country.

rmbyrro 2y ago

Because they don't simply want you to perform tasks. They want to assimilate your mind and make it fully committed to a corporate cult. They can best accomplish this by having you spending most of your wake time in their corp kingdom.

shadowgovt 2y ago
Having been there: it's not that. It's that, unfortunately, they have enough hard numbers to know most people do their best work with a boss physically breathing down their neck. I knew some folks at Google who worked 100% remote and only came into the office for critical meetings about once a month. They had proven they could operate that way with a more-or-less stellar track record.
- azangru 2y ago
  > It's that, unfortunately, they have enough hard numbers to know most people do their best work with a boss physically breathing down their neck. While the conclusion — that most people do their best work when in the office — may be correct, why do you think that the cause of that is the boss breathing down people's necks rather than, say, more efficient collaboration among team members? My personal observations of my team over the past couple of years are that people are much more engaged, issues get resolved much quicker, and information radiates much better when team members are co-located. This is something that many were in agreement on before covid.
  - leksak 2y ago
    Not to mention how body language helps resolve so much surrounding tone when saying something in person. Telling someone to do a thing face-to-face can easily be neutrally charged. The same sentiment expressed in text can carry more weight - feel like an order and appear as if it is more urgent leading to stress
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - shadowgovt 2y ago
    It may be more efficient collaboration among team members. The end-result is the same: more output for the same cost if people are congregating. > This is something that many were in agreement on before covid This is an excellent observation worth highlighting: Google's belief stems not just from pre-COVID / post-COVID observation but from the relative output of teams that were same-office colocated vs. inter-office located, necessitating videoconferencing, chat, and email to get work done. Now that you highlight that, I think my reasoning is in error and it's probably more about collaboration being easier in-person. But inconveniently for those who don't want to work in person, the end-result is the same.

makestuff 2y ago

IMO the downside of being that spread out is the infrastructure. Cities subsidize the suburban infrastructure because of the population density benefits. If everyone spreads out then infrastructure will suffer.

blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
Do cities actually subsidize suburban infrastructure? I am skeptical but I don’t know all of the details on how people come to that conclusion. What happens if the economy is more spread out? Also a lot of the people that own and run companies that give a city its tax base live in the suburban areas. It might even be reasonable to say that they are the ones subsidizing the city and not the other way. How do you think about these angles?
- 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
  It is simple enough to break it down by area. If a city has N people per city block, but a suburb has 1/N people per city block you lose out on all economies of scale. Each individual dwelling requires water, electrical, gas, roads, etc. More efficient to amortize that across more people per unit of infrastructure. A road is always going up cost $/foot. Best if that road is being used by 100k people per day instead of 10.
  - blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
    Yes but that’s a cost of infrastructure angle, not an argument for who is subsidizing whom. I’m saying the fact that the economy is unnecessarily focused into cities makes suburbs look worse in tax revenue but it doesn’t have to be that way.
    - 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
      You cannot ignore infrastructure costs and then ask who is subsidizing whom. Infrastructure is an enormous governmental expense. Not just the initial installation, but the ongoing maintenance as well. Economies of scale are always going to result in the higher density installation being more cost effective.

mushufasa 2y ago

> We have this capability so why not do it? sortof yes, sortof no. Aside from all the conversation about work culture, state taxes are a big barrier to fully remote work. States hate losing tax revenue. Notoriously, it is easier to register to do business in a state than to unregister. This is even harder internationally. For large organizations, remote can be the difference between one state's paperwork + regs + taxation, and every state and country under the sun's paperwork + regs + taxation. That is a real burden. Not just the paperwork + administrative overhead, but being subject to differing employment + everything else laws from *everywhere* will really muck up ability to run a consistent business. While fully remote startups can now access services to help with this, like PEO providers like Justworks/Deel, the reality is that most of the world is not setup to accept this at scale. I run a fully remote startup and still run into issues with vendor diligence departments and accounts etc. expecting us to have a physical office, and being totally bewildered when we don't. The people involved now understand remote work, but the systems --forms, insurances, tax nexus decisions, etc -- still very much aren't setup to handle it. Notably: if you are a bigger company, you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube with all these local governments, and you bet that every locality will be trying to extract tax dollars from the big firms with deeper pockets.

whatshisface 2y ago
"Anywhere in California" would also solve the LA density problem.
sethhochberg 2y ago
We see this all the time working at the intersection of the insurance / fintech space. I've had several big, legacy vendors make requests for multiple physical signatures on a piece of paper (printed and mailed or faxed, can't just annotate a PDF) from people who haven't even met eachother in person let alone ever worked at the same address. The kicker? These papers are access authorization forms to APIs. Your average tech company is probably reasonably well prepared to go truly distributed, but I bet many of their vendors aren't. Whole workflows in certain industries don't even conceptualize companies with employees distributed across offices, let alone companies with no office at all. (I've fought similar battles over not being able to provide a direct phone extension because I don't have a phone on my office desk and even if I did I'm not at the office anything close to full time, and I don't provide my personal cell phone number to vendors... but thats a whole different topic. Employees exist without phone numbers! Entire offices exist without phones!)

geodel 2y ago

From Google's perspective a lot of outsourced work is remote work. As its done away from Google offices. And they are doubling down on that.

gwbas1c 2y ago

> But hybrid work still requires you to live near an office Not as close as a daily commute, though. I live 60 miles from my office. It's just not practical to go in every day, so I go in once a week. I can also go in as needed, such as if there's a special guest, event, ect. I wish I could go in every day, but where I live is a compromise with my wife, and we have kids. If I were to go in everyday, I'd need to be much, much closer to the office. It wouldn't work for my family: Single incomes don't work very well near my office.

layer8 2y ago

I would hate to live in a world where I don’t regularly meet with coworkers face-to-face. Remote communication just isn’t the same, you lose a lot of signal and are more compartmentalized from each other. I’m saying that as an introvert. But I also have a short commute and a nice office.

ghaff 2y ago
At my last company I was officially in-office but I basically never went in because essentially everyone I worked with was in a different office or even a different country.