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Comment by irrational | Hacker News Reader

But those 100m are going to grow up in a world where remote working is the norm.

Even during the lockdowns only 40% of the US workforce worked from home. Here’s another stat: only 33% of the us population has a bachelors degree or higher.

Step out of your bubble and think about all of the people making the goods you order, maintaining your roads, construction workers that fix your home, the workers at the grocery store, the person that delivers your packages, the warehouse workers, etc etc etc.

The world runs on people being physically present working jobs that can’t be done from home... that must continue so that you CAN work from home. Until robots can do those jobs, it'll always be the minority that works from home.

Vast majority of those jobs don’t rely on the network effects of major SF/NY/Seatle hubs. There’s little difference To prospects to someone working as a plumber in a town of 30k people vs a city of 3m people.

Sure, but you need a lot more plumbers in a city of 3M people than you do in a town of 30k. And those plumbers create demand for housing.

> Vast majority of those jobs don’t rely on the network effects of major SF/NY/Seatle hubs.

If you reduce the need to maintain both a worksite for people and a home, while you will increase the need for labor to maintain/service the home and supporting infrastructure somewwhat, it will probably be less than the reduced demand for labor to maintain and service the worksite. The initial effects of a large scale shift to telecommuting is going to include a lot of net physical service/maintenance/support jobs lost.

"only 40%"

Step out of your bubble and think about what it would mean if 40% of Americans worked from home full time.

It can be done, we've seen that, now people are running the numbers and seeing what that means. Pre-covid it was something like 3% that worked from home at least half the time.

If 3% turns into 40% - or even 20% or 6% - that starts to change things.

A small fraction of those 100m are going to be working in corporate jobs where WFH is even an option. Retail workers, trade workers, transportation workers.

The whole WFH discussion is an upper-middle class discussion. Low income workers don't have the option of working from home.

If remote was the best (most profitable) way to do things, companies would've figured this out well before COVID.

Not saying wfh is as productive as in office, but the tech stack needed to make wfh work became available only very recently. Skype didn't cut it.

I would flag github as a more crucial requirement. We've had various im/irq platforms for decades. They weren't really a substitute for video - but video is only a tiny fraction of team communications, and simple chat satisfies most of those requirements.

You're thinking too small. A tiny fraction of the people in the US use GitHub. Even a relatively small fraction (certainly under 50%) can use Zoom to do their jobs.

Remote collaboration tools like GH have been crucial for remote work for software developers, but that's a really small slice of the pie.

Even at companies that employ software developers, many don't use GitHub specifically or don't use much. And most of the sales, marketing, finance people at those companies don't use GitHub much either. Many of the developers I know were collaborating on open source projects around the world before GitHub came along so it's hardly a prereq.

Instead of github you should say code repositories. We used subversion back in the earlier 2000s to do remote work with contractors. It worked just as good as GitHub for remote collaboration.

This assumes that companies are always operating in a maximally efficient way. Anyone who has worked in a corporate setting, particularly for a large corporation, knows this is never the case. Far too often, things are done one way because that's the way its always been done.

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