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Comment by mb7733 | Hacker News Reader

Not sure if you're being dismissive, but that still sounds great. It would lead to many small, livable communities with opportunity dotting the country. As opposed to everyone living in suburbs and and making long commutes to a small number of massive urban centers.

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That’s basically the model IBM was actively pursuing in the 90s-00s (no idea whether they still do). They ran a bunch of studies in the previous decades, showing the various trade-offs involved into office locations; eventually they decided the best overall policy was to prefer mid-size offices in suburban settings, away from business districts and other high-density areas. At one point I think they had an outright ban on new city-centre offices.

(Or at least this is what I was told when I was a contractor for them in the mid-00s in Europe, wondering why they avoided getting a single building in Manchester city centre and spread over two separate locations in the surrounding suburbs instead.)

HQ is in Armonk which is Westchester County. Somers (since sold) and Poughkeepsie are there as well as is IBM Research at Yoktown Heights. Raleigh is in an industrial park (RTP). I'm by no means familiar with all of IBM's locations but, yes, many of them are suburban. IBM also sold their building in Manhattan in the 90s though they may still have some space there; they did when I last visited but that was quite a while ago. Most of the IBM people I work with work remotely.

I’m not sure RTP qualifies as “an industrial park” but suburban, sure

You ever try living in SF? You seem to have described it in a sense.

Also see this great South Park clip for an analogy: https://youtu.be/a3ezyTXFgYM

I don't follow. What part of my post described SF, and what is the analogy with that South park clip?

What I said was that if small communities spring up around places where remote workers converge, that is a good thing. It doesn't defeat the purpose of remote work.

I might have misinterpreted your comment, however I’m poking fun at the cyclical nature of change.

The fact that people want to go remote and distributed and then maybe start up these things called ‘offices’ is analogous to quasi anarchist hippies at festivals that want to move off the grid and let a new society flourish organically. Ultimately we end up in the same place.

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