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Remote work could have solved this. The higher-ups had other thoughts. There’s a parallel to sending your kids off to war. Get them away from their sense of st

Remote work could have solved this. The higher-ups had other thoughts. There’s a parallel to sending your kids off to war. Get them away from their sense of stability, to a place where it’s too expensive to live, for years at a time, to fight for the United States’ GDP. It’s not just the young adults who are affected. In some cases their family members grieve the separation. And yet it seems like the only way to get ahead for many.

nradov 2y ago
Remote work couldn't have solved anything. It's a great option for some people but it can only ever be possible for a tiny fraction of jobs where everything is done online. So basically nothing in agriculture, mining, construction, manufacturing, healthcare, retail, military, transportation, utilities, tourism, hospitality, primary education, sports, etc. Even in the tech industry a lot of employees will always have to at least occasionally work at a certain physical office in order to access specialized or security controlled hardware.
- odyssey7 2y ago
  Perhaps it’s just my bubble, but I mainly see this happen with people who do knowledge work which could definitely be 100% completed online. Even if this is just a “tiny fraction” of workers, allowing them the liberty to easily pursue their career while also maintaining close relations with their family would be good, not merely something to write off as negligible. Every human life matters.
  - phil21 2y ago
    It simply creates an even more privileged knowledge worker class. I recently spent a lot of time in some more rural parts of the US. There is rapidly growing resentment over this topic. It came up nearly daily in casual conversation/overheard at bars/etc. It might be good for 5-10% of the population, but at what cost to social cohesion? These were certainly not CEO type of folks, and they were not terminally on-line or overtly political. Just quite average people across the age and industry spectrum. Now add in those knowledge workers typically making far more money than the prevailing local wages and it gets even worse as they bid up housing. This is something I think about a lot. It's easy to dismiss as many here do with "stop crying, life isn't fair" - but that's not a very satisfying answer. It's about as satisfying and corrosive to society as telling coal miners to "learn to code".
    - BehindBlueEyes 2y ago
      > Remote work couldn't have solved anything. It couldn't solve everything, that doesn't mean it can't solve anything. My experience in rural areas (northern canada) has been the opposite of yours. Locals welcome remote workers because the alternative is bidding up housing over vacation homes that sit empty. Remote workers give back to the community through civic engagement and injecting their income into it year round. Anyone not in that mindset of integrating with the community typically doesn't stay past their first winter. Locals are also the ones to decide if/when/where they advertise real estate to outsiders. Locals always get first dibs via word of mouth so there isn't as much resentment. But maybe that is the difference between rural communities and remote communities?
    - odyssey7 2y ago
      I grew up in a rural area, where everyone has a southern accent, which sounds like nothing but music to me. My relatives tend to live next to expanses of farmland, as I myself previously lived for years. Although I’ve recently moved to the city that’s about 45 minutes from where I grew up—-due to a return-to-office policy and also managing to use years of experience to land a solid software job in my home state—-I regularly drive out through woods and fields to spend time with people to whom I mean a great deal more than I ever will to any employer. Having a larger salary than most doesn’t change who I am in the least. I am one of those very people for whom you claim to speak. My family was heartbroken over the years that I lived away from them. At times, they wondered what they might have done wrong to cause me to leave them. Moving away from my roots, to pursue my only job offer after undergrad, was the opposite of social cohesion. Many of my peers from high school——the size of my graduating class was 69——do not make anywhere near my income, and none of them feel any resentment towards me about it, just like they don’t resent the farmers who own hundreds of acres of farmland (my tech salary doesn’t come close to what some rural people make) or the classmates who went to medical school or got their JD. If anything, we feel mutual pride for what one another has accomplished. (The accomplishment, in fact, is not the money, but in living true to one’s values and contributing to something greater than yourself, something I was at times forced to betray to work in software.) I feel that your sampling method didn’t pick up on something really crucial about small, rural communities, where people tend to grow up together and to know one another for life, in continuation of multi-generational relationships among their families. Rural areas will do just fine if people like myself choose to live modestly among people they care about, in a county that doesn’t even have the convenience of a grocery store, instead of in one of the most expensive places on earth.

nradov 2y ago

Remote work couldn't have solved anything. It's a great option for some people but it can only ever be possible for a tiny fraction of jobs where everything is done online. So basically nothing in agriculture, mining, construction, manufacturing, healthcare, retail, military, transportation, utilities, tourism, hospitality, primary education, sports, etc. Even in the tech industry a lot of employees will always have to at least occasionally work at a certain physical office in order to access specialized or security controlled hardware.

odyssey7 2y ago
Perhaps it’s just my bubble, but I mainly see this happen with people who do knowledge work which could definitely be 100% completed online. Even if this is just a “tiny fraction” of workers, allowing them the liberty to easily pursue their career while also maintaining close relations with their family would be good, not merely something to write off as negligible. Every human life matters.
- phil21 2y ago
  It simply creates an even more privileged knowledge worker class. I recently spent a lot of time in some more rural parts of the US. There is rapidly growing resentment over this topic. It came up nearly daily in casual conversation/overheard at bars/etc. It might be good for 5-10% of the population, but at what cost to social cohesion? These were certainly not CEO type of folks, and they were not terminally on-line or overtly political. Just quite average people across the age and industry spectrum. Now add in those knowledge workers typically making far more money than the prevailing local wages and it gets even worse as they bid up housing. This is something I think about a lot. It's easy to dismiss as many here do with "stop crying, life isn't fair" - but that's not a very satisfying answer. It's about as satisfying and corrosive to society as telling coal miners to "learn to code".
  - BehindBlueEyes 2y ago
    > Remote work couldn't have solved anything. It couldn't solve everything, that doesn't mean it can't solve anything. My experience in rural areas (northern canada) has been the opposite of yours. Locals welcome remote workers because the alternative is bidding up housing over vacation homes that sit empty. Remote workers give back to the community through civic engagement and injecting their income into it year round. Anyone not in that mindset of integrating with the community typically doesn't stay past their first winter. Locals are also the ones to decide if/when/where they advertise real estate to outsiders. Locals always get first dibs via word of mouth so there isn't as much resentment. But maybe that is the difference between rural communities and remote communities?
  - odyssey7 2y ago
    I grew up in a rural area, where everyone has a southern accent, which sounds like nothing but music to me. My relatives tend to live next to expanses of farmland, as I myself previously lived for years. Although I’ve recently moved to the city that’s about 45 minutes from where I grew up—-due to a return-to-office policy and also managing to use years of experience to land a solid software job in my home state—-I regularly drive out through woods and fields to spend time with people to whom I mean a great deal more than I ever will to any employer. Having a larger salary than most doesn’t change who I am in the least. I am one of those very people for whom you claim to speak. My family was heartbroken over the years that I lived away from them. At times, they wondered what they might have done wrong to cause me to leave them. Moving away from my roots, to pursue my only job offer after undergrad, was the opposite of social cohesion. Many of my peers from high school——the size of my graduating class was 69——do not make anywhere near my income, and none of them feel any resentment towards me about it, just like they don’t resent the farmers who own hundreds of acres of farmland (my tech salary doesn’t come close to what some rural people make) or the classmates who went to medical school or got their JD. If anything, we feel mutual pride for what one another has accomplished. (The accomplishment, in fact, is not the money, but in living true to one’s values and contributing to something greater than yourself, something I was at times forced to betray to work in software.) I feel that your sampling method didn’t pick up on something really crucial about small, rural communities, where people tend to grow up together and to know one another for life, in continuation of multi-generational relationships among their families. Rural areas will do just fine if people like myself choose to live modestly among people they care about, in a county that doesn’t even have the convenience of a grocery store, instead of in one of the most expensive places on earth.