Remote work is here to stay – Manhattan may never be the same
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
But if some employer does offer me remote with same pay as that of in the city I would love to work remotely precisely because
- I can work from hometown where living cost is minuscule of that of city. I was spending around 25K per month in city. It's just 8K now in hometown.
- I don't have to take a loan of 50 Lakh to buy a 1000 sq ft apartment in the city whose EMIs I am gonna have to pay over 20 years of my life because I already have a home. I can actually invest my earnings on my dreams. This alone is enough for me to forego any advantage that working in office might offer.
- Once you take a loan you have put a price on your freedom. You can't leave a job even if it sucks because it pays better. In India, the economics and everything plays out such that taking loan and buying apartment is considered safest route if you are going to work in city.
- People argue that remote hurts social life. I disagree. Remote work actually allows you to build your social life by letting you choose people you want in your life.
- If I am happy, I am going to put 110% of my efforts to ensure my employer remains happy with me.
Edit: I haven't even mentioned the advantages like savings on time, fuel and the fact that theirs no pollution in my hometown. It's so peaceful here I wonder how I got okay with 2 hour commutes with heavy traffic and awful pollution.
- 50 Lakhs = 5 million = around 70K USD - EMI = Monthly Mortgage Payments
> I don't have to take a loan of 50 Lakh to buy a 1000 sq ft apartment in the city
Isn't the "city pay" made to cover the "city expense". I bet everyone wants to live in Barcelona with a Mountain View salary but that's going to boost gentrification even more
If your role does not have a counterpart in a smaller city (common among sales teams), you may not see the city-pay structure simply because everyone in this role is already in a city-pay structure.
I have many close friends that grew out of the intimacy of solving problems together. We could casually hangout IRL after work. Our partners and kids would get to know each other. In turn, that growing trust would feedback into a more positive workplace.
It’s not the only way to make friends, but it was an easy way. Now my relationships with coworkers can feel more transactional.
It’s further worrying considering the general trend of society to increased isolation and loneliness.
At the moment we are living the worst type of remote working. We can't have a once a month get together or pub session. We can't work from our parents house or even a co-working space because it happens to suit us that week. Lots of us have children and other family at home (or have had for some of this period) who wouldn't normally be around.
That employer went all remote during COVID with no intent to go back, and in the end I decided the time had come for me to leave as well and I'm now working on my own startup. And of course, we're remote, because we have to be right now.
I wish we would be able to move into an office together when the pandemic is over, because I'd love to have the social life of the physical office back, but I don't think that will be practical, so we'll probably be either all or mostly all remote forever (assuming we survive :)).
It's complicated, because there are also many advantages to remote, but I honestly feel kind of disappointed that I would prefer to work in that dynamic office environment and despite preferring it I've only been able to actually have that for a few years of my career.
I am in the prefer WFH camp. However if my office was something more akin to what I see in many Silicon Valley style tech companies, I could theoretically imagine myself enjoying the office more.
As it is, my current office (for that matter, for my entire career) is more akin to what you see in The Office TV show, or Dilbert, or other stereotypically dystopian, dull, boring, traditional offices where everyone is mandated to wear at least business casual - dress shirt, dress pants, dress shoes.
People who don't spend all their energy commuting into and out of a city each day, people who are free from the crowded lonelinesses of the subway, and the hyper-busy trendy weekend coffee-shop.
Imagine a world where you might once again say hello to your neighbours, might know the folks around town. New friends we don't work with -- perhaps, a community!
If we play it right, we might possibly swing a revitalization of our social soul here, rather than sadly slouch ever further toward its final demise. At least, I hope.
Little did I know that the toll of the commute would quickly kill off any such interest.
I feel this is especially because of the peculiarities of the Manhattan commute (and potentially other cities with similar commute patterns).
I was nowhere near as beaten up when I commuted in NJ. But all the hot jobs (and culture!) are in Manhattan. Ironically I had more energy to head out into the city after work from NJ.
Even my kids’ friends’ parents are often tedious to hang out with. “Can you believe <insert thing from popular TV>?” Or some town gossip that is interesting only to the other half of the conversation.
I have non-work friends, most of which I met locally, but there’s a common interest beyond “you happen to get your mail delivered by the same person”.
Work socializing has some advantages for introverts. You don’t generally have a lack of topics to discuss; if one gets boring, you can switch to another.
We don't all want to be your friend, we want to avoid the rat race.
I consider myself very lucky to live in the Bay Area, where most of my kids' friend's parents also work in tech. So hanging out at a random birthday party ends up being an unintentional networking event, where I get to meet new people working on cool tech.
I wonder as remote work continues to be popular, if that will continue.
In NYC, I'd say there is a lot more diversity in terms of industries people work in, but tech is noticeably a tiny minority. Finance is obviously huge - and is probably the industry closest to being in the situation you describe.
Case in point - I am, and have been part of, various social organizations, and AFAIK I'm the only SWE I've encountered. Tons of finance people, tons of medical professionals (though interestingly enough, many many dentists and nurses but M.D.s are rare), tons of people in marketing and education. But no SWEs. A tiny handful of tech professionals from the helpdesk/sysadmin/networkadmin side of things.
Much better to just connect with people that share your same interests outside of work. Join a club, go to a meetup, etc... And quite frankly, when it comes to more technical matters, I find online conversation to be much more fulfilling than IRL. And there are no shortage of outlets for that, including HN.
When people complain about social isolation, that still doesn’t necessarily mean that they want to interact with their neighbours. It could just mean that they want to be able to interact with people who, they know for sure, share the same hobbies and interests and (in polarized countries) the same political and social views.
One of the supposed upsides of urban modernity is the ability to choose one’s acquaintances at will, which is potentially liberating from the gossip and judgement of small-town and neighbourly communities, especially for sexual or other minorities.
That world never went away. It's just a couple tax brackets below the typical HN user.
Places like Cleveland, Buffalo, or anywhere that the local culture if free of thinking highly of the local culture people are much more open and friendly than major metros and their high class suburbs.
Actually Michael Maccoby a sociologist discovered in his studies (1960 and 1970s) of what happens when a large factory comes to a rural town. People would no longer mix with each other to the same extent. Instead, after work, they would go home and watch TV. Work had totally altered their social lives. It will be interesting what dynamic will play out in the long-term with remote work.
Interestingly I see it the other way around, I can now focus on having a social life and seeing people outside of my work. No more 3h commute!
That is not just about personal relationships, that applies to work effectiveness as well.
There were hundreds of conversations over a month I had, which came from someone noticing me waiting for a coffee, come up and ask me something somewhat arbitrary - knowing that I'm free right now without any actual broadcast.
The same sort of serendipity used to happen during lunch, with people mentioning their new idea which ends up being something that boils down "oversampling all the signals to 1MHz, but then store it in a columnar db as a wide table".
The interaction process was entirely additive, with no commitments to start a conversation.
Right now, every meeting is scheduled or preceded by "are you free?", which immediately triggers a priority conversation or scheduling conflict one.
Making things which weren't transactional, into a "I have set time aside for you and only you" which is where everything starts becoming prioritized around who to talk to rather than what they have to talk about in particular.
Nothing against these relationships, but a year later I don't exactly miss them. I've found myself spending more time with a small group of people during the pandemic that are much more on my wavelength, and I much prefer this to having a chunk of my social life dedicated to people I am "friends" with due only to proximity.
I'm totally in about making friends and getting along with all coworkers, being nice to each other, etc is very important. But work is work. Despite what the "People" department says, it's not your family, not are you a "Examplecompanying".
I rant about this because I know more of one case where people missing their friend coworkers made everyone in the team have to go back so we "all work together" when people are more productive and get more job done with less distractions and more free time doing it from home.
TL;DR, look for social life out of work. Work is work.
About 20% of them have already drifted off the map for me over the past year. A lot of people seem to have just eventually drifted into introversion once the things to do in the outside world disappeared for long enough. First lockdown didn't matter too much but this second one changed a lot of people.
Lots more people I know casually mentioning suicidal thoughts too, and this is coming from people I'd never expect to hear that from.
100 years ago it was filled with warehouses and factories. Those all left and never came back, and they were renovated into housing and offices.
If the offices leave, all those buildings will be renovated into WeWork like spaces (if not WeWork itself) or into more housing. Especially if everyone is working from home, people will want bigger places to rent. A single person may want two or three bedrooms (one for them, one for the office, maybe one for a guest). Not everyone can or likes to work from home, so if offices start closing, a lot of people will still want an office like place to go to to get away from kids and family or just to get more space.
New York is still a cultural center. People will want to live there.
New Orleans is also a major cultural center. Some people will pay up to live around culture. But the vast majority of people paying NYC prices are doing so because of access to high paying professional jobs. There's a reason that San Jose is nearly as expensive as NYC. There's not a single major city in the world that survives off culture alone.
Those prices have already dropped and if there's a continued, long-term drop in physical jobs then those prices will drop further, attracting a younger crowd that values aspects of the city other than proximity to a workplace. I've been apartment hunting and a lot of brokers say there's already a huge influx of younger renters, and I have multiple friends looking to migrate from Brooklyn to Manhattan due to rent drops.
I'd also wager that the people eager to leave NYC are not necessarily the same people heavily engaged in creating culture and innovation.
True, as well as healthcare - NYC has some of the best healthcare infrastructure & expertise in the world.
Either that or the city will crater like Detroit. Always possible.
Why learn the group's mannerisms/collective behavior when they're scared that they may be called "non-inclusive".
Although I'm looking at the prices and for what I used to pay for an old 1br, I can get the same but 3br and a parking in low pac height.
Most people working in Manhattan probably do not live in Manhattan...or even the other NYC boroughs. A huge chunk actually live across the river in NJ.
I welcome remote work, and because my current employer is adamant that it will not be allowed once the pandemic is over, it's definitely another issue that will get me to jump ship.
I may feel differently if it was a different metropolitan area. For example, I am not familiar with the Bay Area commute patterns, but some ex-coworkers who left NYC for the SFBA report that their commutes are now heavenly compared to the hell of Manhattan commuting.
That's 40 hours of dead time a month, and I'm so happy to have it back.
Unfortunately my employer does not see it that way. Exerting middle-managerial control over employees is considered more important than productivity.
Maybe if NYC builds artifical skiing slope, or nice sandy beach..
Is Meadowlands too far away ?
NYC is the best place to live/work if you don't plan on having children, which is the ultimate arbiter of whether a given environment is indeed "good for young people" or not. If it wasn't for the flood of people moving into NYC from regions where people still have kids at higher rates, the entire city's population would quickly collapse. It's a genetic graveyard.
That New York's fertility rate is abysmal is not "completely false", it is an objective fact.
Whether you think New York is a "great place to have kids" is completely beside the point. What matters is whether the people in NYC actually have those kids, and at what rate. In New York, not enough of them are born to make the city a viable concern if it were not for massive population infusions from elsewhere. NYC is a population sink.
Best wishes to you.
Articles lobbied by firms with interest in real estate are all about how people are tired of remote work and how post-Covid world will be much like the pre-Covid world.
And the other lobbied by firms with interest in technology are all raving about remote work being the new normal.
Yes -- prices are down somewhat, and we will be upgrading, though not by as much as I expected when starting to look. And the demand is definitely there -- an apartment we were interested was leased sometime over the weekend.
NYC will be fine.
Things like apprenticeship are impossible to do remotely.
Also Zuckerberg is for physical offices for the same reasons Dimon is. Hard to manage, no apprenticeship/internship, no culture.
Maybe it is possible for small companies and startups but managing thousands of employees remotely is very challenging.
the hierarchy and control they rely on to seem optimal are outmoded
That would explain why, as the article mentioned, Facebook has added 1 million square feet of Manhattan office space during the pandemic.
But I agree with JPMorgan CEO that remote work is problematic and that only some ops can go permanently remote. Maybe in the future everybody can work remotely but I think it is still too early.
Converting an office building to residential use isn't easy. For example, you'd have to add water/sewage lines running to each residential unit.
Also, in NYC, apartments are required to have a certain number of windows. In a large office building, there can be a lot of floor space that's far from any windows.
The 2 hour daily round trip commute would wear us down. It would increase pollution and oil consumption. It would congest traffic, and city transportation services could not add enough roads, buses, trains, and subways fast enough to handle the load.
And it would get everyone sick, as everyone always caught a variant of the seasonal flu.
Now, we can all work safely from home. Just Zoom In and instant virtual meeting. Daily stand ups are a breeze. No need to schedule a small conference room that might be in overbooked availability.
It separates those that creates tools and products for business, vs those that consumes such tools to build further analytical results.
The greatest thing for me, is that I have not gotten sick in over a year. No flu. No cold. No sniffles. Incredible. Even if I worked late into the night, and on some days, I had little sleep, I still didn’t get sick. This proves to me, that the greatest vector of disease transmission is in the office. And probably the open office concept, that forced everyone into the same pig pen, and got everyone sick together.
America has enough land mass to handle the 350 million people that we have. It’s better to spread out. Instead of cramming us all in to small cities.
Perhaps hot cities like Phoenix or Houston or Austin can finally bloom, because of this pandemic. They can work remotely during the daytime, in their nice air conditioned homes. And then at night, they can go out and socialize in the city with their friends and families, or make new friends.
We can imagine a newer and better reality for all. We just need the courage and will to do it. Or maybe, we just needed a little push from a little virus to make us think a different way.