The Office Is Dead

There is a subset of people who are good at working from home and there is a subset that isn't.

There is a subset of each of these subsets that seems to be completely unaware that the other "side" exists.

This article seems to be written from the perspective of a person unaware of the subset of people that are just straight up bad at working from home.

(The same subsets also exist for companies instead of people.)

P.S.: Of course, by the same logic, forcing people who are bad at working in an office to do so regardless is dumb too.

I actually like going to the office, compared to working from home (good for putting a clear divide between work and home, and it means I don't have to squeeze two home offices in my living space). I just hope COVID-19 spells the end of open offices, at least for a a decade or two. Besides the increased disease transmission (which exists for colds, flu, and covid), I don't like how noisy and visually distracting the spaces are. They're really not conductive to focused work like software development [1].

With social distancing, there's literally no reason to not surround employee workspaces with tall cube walls, besides a desire to replace personal privacy with distraction.

[1] For a good discussion of this, see Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams.

Did any other introverts discovered that they're not as introverted as they thought they were during this pandemic? I got a pretty harsh awakening about 2 weeks into shelter in place. At the beginning I thought I would excel at this and even joke this is time for "introvert flexing". Two weeks in, I found myself anxious and kind of miserable. What I've never realized and always took for granted is how much social interaction I had with my coworkers and how those interactions help to lower my anxiety and stress. A joke here and there, etc. throughout the day really helped. I've gone back to running every day to deal with the anxiety and stress and really miss seeing my coworkers.

So I'm not so sure the office is dead. As someone else pointed out, this might be true for some people but we may still need office space for the other portion of the population.

> Pinpoint’s $25,000-per-month lease with WeWork for 1,800 square feet

My god, is that what it costs now?! You can rent an 1800 sq ft house in the middle of SF for about $7,000 a month. You'd get three "offices", some common space, a kitchen, some parking. You could spend another $2,000 a month to hire someone to clean the place every day, and another $2,000 to have someone bring coffee and beer and whatever else you get "for free" at WeWork, and even $1,000 a month for an "IT person" so set up and maintain wifi and conferencing equipment, and still save money.

So all of this working life I always go to my office for work because at home I always found myself distracted about bunch of stuffs. I prefer to be in the office even though my companies always flexible in working remotely.

It is not until this pandemic that I was forced to work from home that I realized that I am the happiest I've ever been in years. I always felt tired daily when I used to go to office and also go to bunch of other social gatherings that I have. It turns out that I am definitely an introvert to the bone. Not only not meeting people everyday face to face has been beneficial to me, but cutting slack, social media, text, etc has been tremendously great for me. I also don't watch TV. Basically less human interaction in general (not zero at all mind you, I'm not anti social). Now I have more time to cultivate my various hobbies (which I've always been doing anyway) and become self absorbed lol.

I enjoy life better now, everyday feel fresh and energized and as a result my productivity with my work also shoot through the roof. I didn't know why I always thought I'd be distracted at home. All the simple things in life like running outside, walking outside, queueing for some snacks, just become delightful all of a sudden. Not to mention the great air quality.

I know it is bad for me to say this, but this pandemic I've been the happiest in years. I hope this pandemic is over soon but I don't hope to be back in office soon.

I can imagine this pandemic is going to push WFH into the vanguard... but to imply that companies no longer need offices seems too hyperbolic a conclusion.

The reality is that if a company says they don’t need an office because you can work from home, they need to compensate you for the use of your office space. A place of work is physical capital, and you can’t simply decide that your workers provide that capital as part of their employment.

A couple of thoughts, 1. My company has been building new buildings that would add 3,000,000+ square feet of office space to the campus this year. I think they will probably nix working from home when this is all over just so they don't look dumb for building all that new office space.

2. My company has been leaning heavily into not just open office space, but what they call freestyle office space. They only allocate enough desk space for 50-75% of the people working in the building with the assumption that people will be in meetings or elsewhere for enough of the day to make it work out. You do not have an assigned desk and are not allowed to sit at a certain desk for more than 2 hours. (Yes, many/most of us think this is the height of stupidity - it's like being back in college and everyone is working in the library and you have to have a backpack to carry all your stuff from place to place). Of course, this whole seating arrangement is a nightmare in a social distancing situation. What they are saying now is that when we go back you can sit at a desk the whole day, but every other desk must be empty. So, intead of having enough desks for 50-75% of people, there will only be enough for 25-37.5% of people. Clearly they are going to have to allow working from home to continue for a certain percentage of people. I'm honestly not sure how they is all going to shake out.

The office isn't dead [1].

There are plenty of people who didn't like working from home before and still don't. There are also plenty of people who just can't do their job as well from home.

What seems likely is that some managers who previously didn't think of work-from-home as a viable option before will probably be more open to the idea going forward. And some individual contributors will decide that working remotely suits them well. And companies will have a better sense of the tools required for effectively working remotely.

But the majority of people are going back to the office when this is over. It might be because managers will still be managers, and feel that they can have more control with people there in person. It might be because people like to get out of the home. Maybe they like socializing with coworkers in person. Maybe they don't have enough room at home. Or the proper equipment.

I certainly expect to see changes, but the concept of offices isn't going anywhere.

[1] and nor does the article claim it is, despite the sensationalist headline

I started working from home about 10 years ago. At first I was going back to an office every 4 months. I got sick twice a year, pretty much every fall/winter and spring trip.

Each job since then the number of required trips seems to drop a little. I think I'm pretty much permanently always home now. I really don't get sick any more.

I know it hasn't really hit specific articles, but NO, nail salons are not the cause of the pandemic. The specific cause of the pandemic was airplanes (or travelling in general) and offices, which quite aptly explains new york on both counts.

I work in what the author describes as an "old school wall street firm". The senior management may be delusional about the impact of working from home (the senior management is often delusional about many things). But the consensus on the ground is that it sunk productivity massively, information is not flowing fluently, and for some people it is absolute hell (trying to work with screaming kids, young couples trying to do calls in the same room while their flatmates are trying to do the same in other rooms, etc).

I'd been looking for a remote job for a long time before this. Never could get one, I was frequently turned down because I lacked remote work experience.

Now that I have remote work experience, everyone else does as well. So... no change in my competitive position vis-à-vis other remote job candidates. Booo, they'll just come up with new reasons to reject me :(

I like working from home, there are some disadvantages, but overall I definitely prefer it, and at a more macro level I think there's an opportunity here to fix some of the crowding issues (not to mention traffic and the concomitant pollution) in our cities by giving people flexibility in where they live and work. I for one, hate big cities, but a career in tech has generally meant living in a major metro area.

OTOH, companies are not going to just let all the office space they're paying for sit idle. If they can't divest themselves of some/most of it quickly (hello, commercial real-estate crash), all our asses are going to be back in our rickety office chairs under the flickering fluorescent lights.

For a well-organized team with top of the line collab tools? Perhaps, if everyone is comfortable with working from home, but I'm still skeptical. Finding myself in a management position, coordinating the efforts of a medium-size development team across two organizations has become an order of magnitude more challenging. I cover a lot of meetings that the developers don't have to, but sometimes we still need to sit two to five people in a room to hash out the details of some technical problem. I have not seen an adequate substitute for that process. I believe that the people who worked from home full time prior to this (and I've been one of those before) are leveraging the time others spend in face to face interactions to their indirect advantage. When no high-level planning or in-depth low-level in person conversations can happen, many organizations are simply going to move much more slowly and make more mistakes.

I am super scared of a future where remote work could be the default. I see the amazing creative works in technology, art, etc that come from the simple act of pushing smart people into the same place and having them rapidly iterate. Do we know how to do this in a remote-first setup?

I get it; you're super productive in your job during this pandemic but is this the same thing? It feels more like optimizing for efficiency in what you do now, vs. effectiveness to do something bigger than yourself.

I manage a lot of people who focus on making themselves x% better, where x ranges from 1% to maybe 15%. I believe to scale we need to make the system better, which is more like a fractional % improvement multipled by n. Is this easier to do remotely? not yet with the tools we have IME...

I've worked about half my career in an office and half from home.

Working from home just doesn't work that well if you're on a team. The constant communication with the other team members helps a great deal. For example, you can bring along the new guys and get them up to speed on how things work and what to do. Misunderstandings don't fester into disasters. Somebody veering off in the wrong direction can be quickly brought back to focus on the team goal.

Working in software, the idea that we should all report in at the beginning of the day, every day, feels like too much like school. It would be better if the office culture was to show up when you needed to show up, without any hidden expectations, or surprise bad reviews because the perception is you work less because you're not in early or stay late enough. Luckily this had to go away recently for obvious reasons.

The really interesting thing I learned during covid19 is that, the fact that everybody is WFH, makes WFH better.

In the past, when I WFH, and everybody else is in the office. I was the odd one out and people start to talk amongst themselvces. Sometimes I don't hear well, sometimes I can't get into the discussion politely.

But, since everybody is WFH right now, the whole WFH experience became better and I am more productive in WFH as a result.

It's more likely that the "giant monolithic office" is dead, and will transform into a hybrid of WeWork-esque distributed offices, complete with pay-per-minute only-works-half-the-time videoconferencing walls and $6 lattes.

If a new WeWork manages "subdivided office space" all around a city, then a company could lease space from all of them, and pay just slightly more than they used to, with the freedom that their employees can spend more time at the office because commuting is less of a chore. Supplement that with all the luxury add-ons and suddenly it looks like the office is reborn, not dead at all.

And remember: cities are getting bigger, not smaller. Why not rent an apartment in the same skyscraper as a coworking space, along with your co-workers who also live in your city? Especially if your job sets aside money to help pay for it? Again you can squeeze "more productivity" out of your little mechanical turks, but you don't have to deal with the management overhead of typical offices. Less logistics, more productivity, still (basically) an office.

I'm skeptical. Not just of this article but really of anything written in this moment that talks about how The Way Things Will Be.

We're thick in the middle of a pandemic right now. It will subside. No one knows exactly what waits for us on the other side, or what the societal impacts will be. Yes, we're all working remotely right now. But it's been an incredibly slap-dash, thrown together effort for many companies and that might mean they become less receptive to remote work in the future, not more. We don't really have any data on what the economic impact of remote work is (separate from all the other economic impacts swirling around us right now), and until we do I'm going to hold off making too many wild predictions.

I'm going to the office even though I'm not an essential worker because working from home ruins my mental health. I stayed home for the first three weeks of social distancing and I couldn't be more stressed and unhappy if I tried.

I suspect that if this really does become the new normal, in 5-10 years, part of that new normal will be providing your own equipment (computers, monitors, etc.). I predict there will be a non-trivial "startup cost" associated with taking most jobs.

A semi-permanent shift to more remote work will have large impacts on a lot of different industries. For example, the lunch joints near office towers will have to significantly rethink their strategies.

Companies that make consumables like toilet paper and soap will have to scale their residential arms and reduce their commercial arms, which in some instances requires building entire new paper mills or production facilities.

Gas, electricity, and water utilities will all see "weekend all day" patterns that they'll need to adjust for. Internet providers might start offering commercial-light plans for home offices that come with an SLA but not full business support.

The $2.5 trillion question[a] is whether companies will ever go back to using as much office space per person as they did prior to the pandemic, given that:

* they can save a ton of money by using less office space per person going forward, and

* so far, they are seeing equal or better productivity from remote employees, as this article points out.

The question answers itself, I think.

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[a] That's the estimated value of office space in the US: https://www.reit.com/data-research/research/nareit-research/...

I'm curious what will happen where I work. Upper management has always hated working from home and part time work. I think eventually they'll go back to their set ways, but it will be some time in late 2021.

for many companies that own their own properties I doubt they will maintain work from home policies long term unless Covid19 outlooks are dire but to be honest, if they get that dire and stay there then where you work is the least of the concerns.

the issue with work from home is that jobs which are suited for it or can be adapted this require that workers have discipline to do so. for companies willing to have a portion of their employees offsite then HR programs would need to be put into place to help train people how to manage their work life at home and then to train managers in how to properly employ a work from home team.

the issue not raised here is the tax component. a collapse of the real estate market will take the tax base down a few notches. this will lead to an increase in finding a replacement and this could include proxy taxes on an employees work from home setup and costs associated with it; a few fees and tariffs here and there. Then comes the non state actors, HOAs and property management companies, whose rules will need to moderated if not outright regulated to prevent putting undue pressure on work from home employees. most can fly under the RADAR because of no increase in external activity; think shipping and receiving; to give it away but cancel culture has its adherents everywhere with people who have nothing better to do than point.

Offices won’t go away, but the idea that there is a physical space permanently set aside for you in an office and that you use that space most workdays will largely be seen as a quaint relic of the past for many.

It’s not a question of if there is about to be a bloodbath in commercial real estate, just how bad it’s going to be.

If there’s a plus side smart developers could quickly repurpose commercial spaces into residential and quickly fill needed housing shortages in many cities.

The company I work for (insurance carrier) has seen the light with working from home and the big heads are starting to discuss what to do when the long term leases are up. I think even outside of tech a lot of places that can have people working from home will strongly encourage or require it. Not every job can, obviously but with the incentive to save money on expensive leases and what comes with them it's really a no-brainer.

Honestly, if you have a commute, do you actually have an opinion on WFH? If you can't separate commuting and the office, then isn't your opinion on WFH really just the inverse of your opinion of your commute? I'm pretty skeptical of people's opinions of something in which they've had no options or choice.

I dunno about the US, but my flat in London isn’t suitable for both of us working from home. Most other flats in London aren’t suitable for two people working from home either. Unless we build a lot of new, larger homes with live/work spaces, this isn’t going to work.

"$25,000-per-month lease with WeWork for 1,800 square feet"

That is absolutely absurd. $25,000 for an amount of space equivalent to a large 2 bedroom apartment? If this is what kind of rates restaurants are paying for rent, I can imagine why their margins are razor thin.

> $25,000-per-month lease with WeWork for 1,800 square feet would be up in August

Excuse me, but WAT

Remote work was already starting to happen on a larger scale for a few years. The pandemic and the world wide panicked response to it is merely accelerating the trend. However, it's a logical trend and many of us were already dealing with remote teams for a few years.

IMHO many people will actually revert back to their old behaviors for the simple reason that offices are still there and as restrictions lift in the next weeks there will be lots of pressure to show up on people.

What will take longer is changing processes to facilitate working remotely. Many smarter companies are probably looking to make this a permanent thing in their companies; because it makes sense and it undeniably can work. For developers it's easy, just do what the OSS folk are doing for the last decades; it works. And the stuff they were doing instead always was in any case a bit challenged in terms of actually working as advertised.

However, the rest of the world will need a bit longer to discover how to work asynchronously.

Also there's the notion that a lot of work is actually completely redundant and pointless. Big corporations are just as bad about generating bureaucracy as governments are. Fat profits can cover up a lot of bad management. A cynical reason for remote work not being much of a disruption is that lots of people weren't actually doing anything important anyway. So, them doing a poor job of something that never mattered to begin with is completely OK. Of course the next logical step is getting smarter about eliminating such jobs. A curious thing in today's economy is that this does not seem to happen nearly as often as you'd expect. Rather the opposite and people self congratulate each other to ever more surreal levels of dysfunctional behavior.

In any case, seeing a productivity boost if you eliminate 1-2 hour (twice per day) commutes at stupid o'clock from people's life should not come as a surprise. Being well rested and non stressed does wonders for people's focus and concentration.

In our office Covid-lockdown proved that office will never be dead.

A lot of people come to office not just to work but it’s also some sort of essential social gathering for them. This is more true for those extroverted by nature.

The premise of this article is largely based on anecdotes. The office will not be dead. Too many people will forever equate working from home with laziness.

Maybe we're headed for smaller office footprints with the same # of people. We can pack them in tighter with the super-duper open floor plan!

The big question is: with that $17,000 they save, is it going into higher worker salaries, lower prices for consumers, or executive bonuses?

whats gonna happen is that companies will get rid of some real estate and convert existing office space into "agile" workspace - where anyone can come in with laptop and work. But it will be so packed, that most people will opt for WFH most of the time and come like for 1 day in a week.

Reading all the reasons in the article, I think this applies to classrooms as well.

On the flip side of this: I do not owe my employer space in my home. Having to dedicate some part of my home to their economic activity should be something I'm financially compensated for.