Winners and losers of the work-from-home revolution

Living in the city with children can be very desirable. You may have a small (or no backyard), but the city is your playground. Public parks, pools, trails, and so much more.

But the lack of people-focused planning for generations has put us in a long tail of catchup, leaving the burbs as a preferred choice for many.

How about you retrofit existing suburbs? Fill in large spaces with mixed development, construct new public transportation, etc.

However, you are wrong at least for USA. Zoning laws will slow this down and the momentum will be lost. I’d love a taste of europe in america with some mix zone areas.

I know not all cities are like the ossified ones. Ie., austin has mixed zones but many cities arent.

I want to live in the picture you paint.

An empty storefront is considered "rented, but temporarily empty, and can tack the lost rent onto the end of the mortgage". A storefront with a lower rent is considered "cost basis has changed and the mortgage holder can demand cash from you".

You can't put a barbershop into that slot as the barbershop will never meet the rent.

I was seeing a lot of empty storefronts in mixed-residential builds that hadn't been rented for years even before Covid. Covid is just going to supercharge that.

The big problem is that there's a bar to meet for Zoom which is higher than that to ask a question in the office. Rightly or wrongly, lots of people feel this way, and I ended up having to over-schedule meetings to make sure people got support.

Additionally, junior people are much, much less likely to have the space to make WFH effective, so they do benefit from having an office.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of WFH, but I'm pretty sceptical of it working for junior people as well as it does for senior. And even then, that difference will cause a bunch of problems.

I think some of the inequality comes not from the demands of the job itself but from where people are in life.

I've been working remotely for 10 years, so I bought my house because it had a home office. My WFH setup is very comfortable, and it works well for my family.

But early in my career, I was renting a cheap apartment with multiple roommates, and it was not as ideal for remote work. And I likely would have missed out on networking opportunities and just general friendships versus someone doing the same role in-office. Those aren't as important to me at this stage of my career, but they were very important back then.

What's sad is that since expectations are lower for junior people, and since the industry has embraced the idea that virtually all traditional management responsibilities in software engineering should be left for engineers to figure out themselves, new employees can hang around for months without anyone caring that nobody has put any effort into making them productive, which stunts their growth and desensitizes them to being helpless and useless.

Eventually effective onboarding for fully remote employees will become the norm, but meanwhile, a lot of people are falling through the cracks.

But there's nothing natural or ancient about going in to the office as a rite of passage - it's not necessary. It's just something this generation won't get to have, just like my generation didn't have to go through the ritual of getting our first proper business suit, and how direct deposit has taken away the moment of being physically handed a paycheck. But they'll have their own things, I'm sure. Maybe the defining moment will be when that Fedex driver arrives and you sign for your first work laptop? Maybe logging onto the corporate slack and seeing all the channels for the first time imparts some sense of shared purpose?

And maybe that means you also don't get artificially seduced by the trappings of the environment. Because the work is done in a serious building with serious glass conference rooms and serious desks, we learn to take the business seriously - maybe more seriously than it deserves. And maybe people who work in offices typing on computers every day do think a bit too much of themselves, because after all they work in an important building full of important people. Perhaps it's a good thing to miss out on that ego-stroking. Harder to take yourself too seriously when you're working on an Ikea desk at the foot of your bed surrounded by your own dirty laundry.

The big reason for this, I think, is that the whole team is remote. Since everyone communicated via zoom, and everything is coordinated online, they can slip into the team seamlessly.

I think the upcoming blended teams are going to make this more difficult. My org, like most, is pushing for two days in the office, three days remote, but a few of our hired are geographically distant, so they will always be remote.

I'm worried that they're going to start to feel isolated from the team.

To what extent are sprint points a good measure of productivity or of effort? My understanding is that they're based on estimates, which seem like a moving target to me depending on the experience and motivations of the estimator.

To be clear: out of all the sprint points you've ever completed, more than 50% of them were completed in the past 12 months? How long has your career been?