Charlie Munger: We are never going back to a five-day work week in the office | Hacker News Reader

Charlie Munger: We are never going back to a five-day work week in the office

finance.yahoo.com

40 pointscnst23 comments

"It’s amazing the percentage of people in computer science that don’t want to be in the office for a normal life," - yes, but not amazing

"I don’t think we needed all these goddamn meetings and airplane flights." - yep

"simpler, cheaper, and more efficient," - yeah

"if your job in life is to get on the telephone and talk to other engineers around the world to solve problems, why do you have to do it from an office" - right

"it could be a good thing that people are going to commute less" - not could be, will be

Point 1: yeah, but you have just made yourself MORE replaceable with an offshore programmer if you don't provide the in-person feedback/communication as a programmer

Point 2: yeah, but long term you get MORE meetings for baselining, communication, etc, just like with offshore communications (for better or worse)

Point 4: yes, but again, don't make yourself offshorable

KEEP IN MIND THAT COMPANIES WILL SHOOT BACK WITH OFFSHORING. If you aren't useful in person, then... why have you at all? This may be the moment that large chunks of previously untargeted sections in middle management get wholesale sent off, and not just IT functions.

If the quiet rebellion is "not to come to the office", then they will experiment with new hires that are dirt cheap elsewhere to see if things stay the same.

Then again, it may be that management realizes how much they need ... people ... in-person for them to function, and relentless offshoring reduces their corporations to shells. ANd they'll walk the halls lonely for the olden days. HA JUST KIDDING they'll just look at the bottom line.

More relevant to the silicon valley crowd here: actual startups and collaborative development work won't change much. But a lot of expensive FAANG personnel will at a minimum get nearshored from this. Get cheaper midwestern people and the like. They already started this with HR imposing "cost of living" adjustments on offers and work locations.

A lot of the "big tech" companies will do nearshoring to cut their costs out of this era.

> But a lot of expensive FAANG personnel will at a minimum get nearshored from this. Get cheaper midwestern people and the like.

I would doubt this. amazon, google, etc were already hiring aggressively all over the world before covid. WFH does not really increase their recruitment base; the bottleneck is the pipeline itself and the entire world's supply of engineers that can solve leetcode problems.

A lot of people who can solve leetcode problems don't want to move to the west coast for a cornucopia of reasons. I don't know how much that will open the market, but it might have at least a minor impact.

you don't have to move to the west coast to be near a Google office, and you didn't precovid either. they have offices all over the place.

https://careers.google.com/locations/

there may be downsides to locations other than the main HQ; I dunno, I don't work at google. but they're not going to move all their CA positions to India. they're already hiring as many people as they can in India.

I'd argue that in the last 20+ years, all the companies that were willing to offshore have already done so. The ones that don't offshore are concerned with communication barriers, time zones and culture. All those are still in place for US workers who remote.

The push for "back into office," is more for commercial real estate markets and tax revenue I suspect. As a company, remote work is attractive for a couple reasons:

  1. Price. I could skip paying $10K+ a month on an office building.
  2. Security. Mandated shutdowns were highly disruptive for businesses. Remote work immunizes that for the most part.

Yep, going to be interesting watching NYC and SF bleed workers despite their mayors begging leaders to force their employees to return.

They need the tax money. Louis Rossmann said real estate tax was ~30% of government income. That's their motivation. I agree with your prognosis. Hopefully we will return to vibrant small towns across the whole of our landmass. That would be nice.

I think NYC and SF will bleed workers because of their mayors begging leaders to force their employees to return.

If you value property taxes more than my ability to live my life the way I want to, screw you and your city.

>What makes capitalism work is the fact that if you’re an able-bodied young person, if you refuse to work, you suffer a fair amount of agony, and because of that agony, the whole economic system works."

So if you don't work, you suffer agony (pain). What does that sound like?

"U.S. Capitalism is modeled on slavery and feudalism. You can escape, but there is nowhere to go. And that's why our system works. What else? My stimpack needs more juice. Ahh, that felt good. What else?"

Yeah what a crazy entitled opinion the leaders of capitalism have don’t they

Capitalism has provided the best outcomes for the most people around the whole world. It’s not utopia but it’s the best we have right now. It sounds like you’re insinuating that our current economic system is akin to getting lashes for not picking cotton.

>Capitalism has provided the best outcomes for the most people around the whole world. It’s not utopia but it’s the best we have right now.

Absolutely, that doesn't mean it's great in all forms though. The South's antebellum economic system was capitalist too. The US system can certainly improve.

>It sounds like you’re insinuating that our current economic system is akin to getting lashes for not picking cotton.

The lash and the cotton (mostly) is different, sure.

>It sounds like you’re insinuating that our current economic system is akin to getting lashes for not picking cotton.

No, it sounds like the article is saying that outright.

Sure, the threat might be starvation or not being able to afford medical treatment instead of a leash and it's working a shitty job in retail instead of picking cotton, but the core dynamic of forced value extraction through labor still exists.

It just has a few more levels of abstraction now.

Sure but it’s not clear that there’s a better system readily available to us.

Personally I favor worker's self-management as practiced in Yugoslavia before nationalism destroyed it.

tl;dr: An economic system where every company is a worker-owned coop, the board is elected by the workers and the various coops compete in the market.

I changed job from 1h by train or 50 min by car door to door, to 5 min by car or 15 min by bike. Also I got a private office instead of open office.

I personally see no benefit from WFH anymore, from being the best work related change thing ever due to Covid.

I have become less impressed with Charlie Munger as time goes by. He has had a lot of financial success. However, lately in his old age he is sounding more and more like a jerk and tone-deaf.

> “What makes capitalism work is the fact that if you’re an able-bodied young person, if you refuse to work, you suffer a fair amount of agony, and because of that agony, the whole economic system works,” he said, adding effective, prospering economies have traditionally imposed hardship on young people who don’t want to work.

> “You take away that hardship and say ‘you can stay home and get more than if you come in to work,’ that’s quite disruptive to an economic system like ours,” Munger added. “The next time we do this, I don’t think we ought to be so liberal.”

Also this: https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/29/business/ucsb-munger-hall/ind...

Meanwhile, my employer: "The hell you say."

This quote at the end - “You take away that hardship and say ‘you can stay home and get more than if you come in to work,’ that’s quite disruptive to an economic system like ours,” Munger added. “The next time we do this, I don’t think we ought to be so liberal.”

Wow - it wasn't about "being liberal", there IS still a global pandemic on.

> there IS still a global pandemic on.

Meh, I don't think pandemic is a binary term. If the perpetual flu pandemic is the baseline, for the forwardgoing 1 year I don't think COVID is going to be, e.g. 10x worse in deaths in vaccinated countries.

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