Americans Done with 5-Days a Week in Office: What That Means for the Economy | Hacker News Reader

Americans Done with 5-Days a Week in Office: What That Means for the Economy

bloomberg.com

"my fear is the biggest cost in the long run is all the single young men come in five days a week, and college-educated women with a 6-year-old and an 8-year-old come in two days a week, and six to seven years down the road there’s a huge difference in promotion rates and you have a diversity crisis"

and a followup I saw someone post:

""I like working from home when everybody is working from home"

is not the same thing as

"I like working from home when some people are working from home and some people are grabbing lunch with the boss",

and I think a lot of us are about to figure that out."

Think a lot about the Friends episode where Rachel starts smoking, to join in on smoke-break chat.

"six to seven years" what a joke.

How many people stay on the same team for six to seven years these days to have long term effect on orgs or policy?

Just ask anyone to predict where they will be in six to seven years first or what their predictions were six to seven years back. Most have no clue because this is such a complex ever changing world for a 6 inch chimp brain to fully grok. But lets talk about where the entire chimp troupe will be in six to seven years.

That is quite short sighted view.

First of all the US department of labor says that typical salaried employees stay at a job about five years.

Secondly, even if not: even when changing jobs your prior position will affect the next job. So “falling behind” on the ladder happens across companies as well.

Same team, rarely. Same company, far more often than you'd think, and definitely enough to have an effect on policy.

> "my fear is the biggest cost in the long run is all the single young men come in five days a week, and college-educated women with a 6-year-old and an 8-year-old come in two days a week, and six to seven years down the road there’s a huge difference in promotion rates and you have a diversity crisis"

And also divorce crisis in couples where she assumed more equal split of work and things turned out much worst then previously.

> The center of American cities have had a 40-year boom. Young people have wanted to move into city centers, they haven’t rushed out to suburbs as rapidly as they got older, and empty nesters have wanted to move back. Covid has probably unwound 10 to 20 years of that. So you can think city centers are going to be the price they were, say, in 2005. Which is expensive, definitely more expensive than the suburbs, but that gap has narrowed a little bit.

I don't think so. If you can buy in Manhattan for 2005 prices, you and 100 million other people are going to be trying to do that.

I just sold my downtown high-rise condo and moved to a semi-rural area with 1+ acre lots yet only a few minutes from the commuter train (1 hour express to downtown), thanks to the new hybrid model. I expected a worse situation than reality - condo went for above asking and at 2018-ish prices.

One thing I did notice is that proximity to train stations is still a huge driver in suburban house prices. It seems that nobody is giving up on the center of the American city, even if perhaps they aren't living there.

Exactly. The cities with vibrant centers will just end up attracting a different type of folk. I’m not convinced that even when working from home I’d want to live anywhere other than Manhattan if I could choose. Unfortunately businesses that catered to the office population might take a hit (or they might not? Still not clear if the offices will just fill with different types of workers, not every job can be remote).

> I’m not convinced that even when working from home I’d want to live anywhere other than Manhattan if I could choose.

It finally makes sense for a salaried person to live in Dumbo. Before, it was way too inconvenient

Except maybe the views, why would you want to live there? Any place in nyc not near trains sounds like a bad idea. My general metric of a good location is that there should be two independent lines walkable. Otherwise you’re gonna be in a world of misery at least once a week.

> Except maybe the views, why would you want to live there?

I agree. And yet cost of renting / owning in Dumbo is higher than Manhattan and other places.

Sitting in an office all day and not at home has become completely unacceptable for me. No commute, my own food, balcony/garden, etc. Offer me an office job and I will decline.

I’ll never work in an office again. It’s worth more to me to not have to commute than any promotion could ever match.

What if you lived a 10 minute walk from work?

That only helps for the current job you have right now. What about the next job? Will you move every time you change jobs? What if the company is located in an area with far too expensive/not enough housing?

Remote work lets you live where you want, independent of where your job is (within reasonable consideration for timezone differences.)

Then work remote for your next job. But OP said "I’ll never work in an office again" not "I'll never work in my current employer's office again".

My point is that a strategy of “I will solve the commute problem by always living a 10 minute walk from work” requires you to move nearly every time you change jobs, or requires all of your potential jobs to be right near your home.

Working remotely doesn’t have such a requirement.

I think we could both be charitable to OP and agree that, in a situation where a job came up which was a 10 minute walk from their current home, it’s probably not what they meant when they said “I’ll never work in an office again.”

If you work 8 hours per day, 5 days per week, 50 weeks per year, the value of the time spent walking to and from work every day is worth 4.17% of your income. If you make $50k, that's $2,083 per year. How much are you willing to pay for the privilege of commuting?

Walking is a kind of exercise, though. And sedentary people would benefit from walking 30 or more minutes a day, every day.

But you can still walk if you work from home, and then you can walk wherever you want instead of a particular route.

20 years ago, I was working on an agency wondering why, if they issued me a mobile phone and a laptop why they were expecting me to be in the office daily. My boss wasn’t. He was trying to land mere business.

When I was on my own, I realized that if I was in my home office, I wasn’t doing the most important work - which was maintaining the customer relationship which rarely happened in their offices.

Today, the majority of my work is collaborating with people outside my home state. So…why do I need an office?

These articles are so precious. People in some roles are likely able to move to much higher rates of work from home. In practice, most people aren't in those roles and will be back in the office soon, if they aren't already.

Young people want to work in cities for the same reason kids want to return to school after summer.

For so many, work is connect to lifestyle and meeting people.

And how long does that "back to school" feeling last? 2 weeks?

There are definitely some people who have been cooped up for over a year, and not only have they been denied the companionship of their coworkers but social gatherings with family and friends have likewise been restricted. These people are legitimately excited to catch up with people they've been missing. But as soon as that itch is scratched, and normal outlets for socialization return to normal, no one is going to say "3 days a week with jerry from accounting is just not enough, I need to spend more time at work."

In reality, young people want to work in cities because they want to work close to wear they live. The attraction of the city is its rich social life. Just look at where trust fund babies who don't need to work choose to live.

> The attraction of the city is its rich social life.

Ok, we agree then?

When I say rich social life, I'm talking about bars and other social venues, and very explicitly saying that work is not a part of the rich social life. So based on your previous comment I highly doubt we agree.

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