37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home | Hacker News Reader

37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home

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414 pointsrustoo395 comments

5 of us wrote Microsoft Works for the Macintosh while working at home from 1984 to 1992. Without the internet, we got together as needed to merge code, usually once a month, but sometimes once a week. We talked on the phone. We went to Microsoft once in awhile. It was ideal and worked very well.

Maybe it was just our personalities that made it work, but I am astonished that any programmer would rather go into the office. With high speed internet and video conferencing, I assume that some people are just very lonely and need face to face. I see nothing wrong with that. I understand it, but after 1992 I took a job that forced me into an office and I hated it.

I can safely say I never wrote any good code while working in an office. There are too many distractions.

> I assume that some people are just very lonely and need face to face

Anecdata from Hacker News suggests this is true. A lot of lonely young men here freely admit their coworkers are the only people they regularly interact with in-person, and remote work takes that away from them.

I'd spin this around and cast it as a challenge -- regular, forced interactions with coworkers is minimally sufficient and retards some people from pursuing social activities outside the home.

There are already a number of options in even the smallest town. I expect that will increase as more people move to WFH and seek social outlets.

And at the end of the day "interacting with coworkers in the break room" is a pretty low quality bar for an alternative to surmount. Maybe your work conversations are more fascinating than mine, but I get more value elsewhere.

>I'd spin this around and cast it as a challenge -- regular, forced interactions with coworkers is minimally sufficient and retards some people from pursuing social activities outside the home.

Absolutely. Additionally, even getting to that set of regular, forced interactions necessarily consumes the limited time those people would have to pursue those social activities outside the home. That is, it's hard to have a strong social life when you commute, at best, 5 hours a week. And that's if you're lucky.

All of this benefits corporations. Especially, insidiously, the notion that your job can and should double as your social life.

What concerns me, today, is that that we're in this middle stage where things could tip either way. For this reason, I think it's important for us to bang the drum loudly that we won't spend 40-50 hours in the office. Hybrid is a sufficient compromise.

Hybrid has all the downsides of office work, it's just less hours of it

> Hybrid is a sufficient compromise.

No it isn't.

> That is, it's hard to have a strong social life when you commute, at best, 5 hours a week. And that's if you're lucky.

"At best"? The average commute in the US is 27.6 minutes, according to the Census Bureau. My commute is a 10 minute bike ride. Luck had nothing to do with it, just a different set of priorities in life.

https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/one-way-...

I don't particularly enjoy the forced, stilted chatter but I do get a lot of value from:

a) Being obliged to put on clothes and leave the house.

b) Spending a large part of the day at a change of scenery.

c) Having other people there, around, ambiently.

Spending 23 hours a day alone in your room + 1 hour for outdoor exercise, with occasional weekend visitation, is among the worst punishments the state has at its disposal. It boggles the mind that people do this voluntarily.

You are viewing remote work through the particular circumstance of the pandemic. Remote work before covid was very different, and I expect in time we'll get back to a lot of that.

I worked remotely before the pandemic, and most days I still have ample opportunities to meet and talk to people. Most weeks I'd attend a meetup (I'm in a small city in the midwest and we still had plenty of events to cater to most any niche technical interest you'd care to name). A couple of times a month I'd meet up with other remote workers for lunch at a restaurant somewhere convenient to all of us. I regularly hosted, or attended, game nights with friends I met- mostly through the meetups.

I was never one for coworking spaces, and I don't even have a lot of non-development hobbies that had me meeting other people, and I still managed to have a pretty rich social life and meet people, make friends, and even got some of the sorts of creative boosts people claim only come from in-office working (because you talk to people about what problems they work on, or their interests, and it sparks ideas for how to apply those to your own work).

Things right now are still bleak because of the pandemic. It sucks, and it sucks worse knowing that this could have been over by now if the response hadn't been so universally mishandled, but a lot of what sucks about the pandemic will continue to suck- or suck differently but the same amount, if you go back to an office. Remote work isn't for everyone, and you really might still find that all things being equal the office just works best for you, and that's fine, but don't confuse "the pandemic sucks" for "remote work sucks".

Don't mix up pandemic restrictions with 100% remote work from home.

I put on clothes every day. I only wear a nice t-shirt though and otherwise wear my 'at home pants' that I would also put on as soon as I'd come home from the office. My nice pants last much longer now.

I really don't like the office scenery very much. I also do not like the scenery in between, i.e. a huge city that has no greenery, the commute is equally dull, boring and unappealing. Vs. my home where in summer I can actually sit outside on the deck all day and enjoy the scenery. It's lush and green and warm vs. the cold, dry AC air blowing in my face and forcing me to wear a jacket inside the office.

Depending on whether you have family and/or family that also works from home, people are even around 'ambiently' but at least they're only around ambiently without constantly distracting you. They're in a different room doing their own work most of the time.

After 8 hours of work I am free to do what I want. Go outside, take a walk, meet friends etc.

WFH don’t require working at home, you can work wherever you want.

Laptop + 5G means you can work outside for much of the year at a local park etc. You can do all that coworker social stuff with your friends rather than people you happen to work with.

Even if you do stay home skipping your commute and eating at home saves significant time and money every week you can use to again socialize with people you want to actually be around.

Work is only 8 hours of the day, 8 to sleep, 2 for chores meals etc leaves 6 for whatever you want socializing with whoever you want?

Being obligated to go to the same place with the same people 5 days a week following the same routine seems dreadful to me.

I assume you don't have any friends or family outside of work that live close to you?

My group of friends gets lunch together 3-4 days out of the workweek. We even sometimes do dinner with eachother during the week. Sometimes we do this with family instead - my wife's sister and parents live within 15 minutes of us.

And we have kids that we lug with us.

i do all of those things while working from home. i wear my normal clothes, work from coffee shops or breweries if I need a change of scenery, and workout plenty during the day. no offense, but perhaps this is specific to how _you_ work from home?

> I'd spin this around and cast it as a challenge -- regular, forced interactions with coworkers is minimally sufficient and retards some people from pursuing social activities outside the home.

Or,it allows people with social anxiety or depression a room for social interactions with very well defined rules and in an environment where people generally interact positively with you. I like the convenience of WFH too but I do miss cooking with my colleagues and their families on Wednesdays.

This might sound weird to you but living alone and having had parents that made every meal either a screaming match or a barrage of passive aggressive comments I enjoyed those lunches with my much more reasonable colleagues a lot.

Being essentially alone most days certainly didn't help with my depression and that makes other social interactions harder.

I still won't go back though, wearing trouser being optional at work is a worthwhile tradeoff

> I like the convenience of WFH too but I do miss cooking with my colleagues and their families on Wednesdays.

Well, to fix that you can go cook with your colleagues and their families on Wednesdays.

Eh, I’m kinda implicated here but I see office interactions as some bare minimum of socialization that, yes, can lead to complacency but does not subtract from the ideal of finding meaningful relationship outside of work. If anything, face to face work helps energize me to be social, and not just with my coworkers. More like a daily practice against Cabin Fever. For some reason, for me, Cabin Fever self-perpetuates.

I still prefer WFH, but I go to a coffee shop most days of the week to work on a personal project. After a year+ my relationship with the other regulates and staff is like the best possible relationship you’d expect to have among coworkers - I’ve even grabbed a beer with the manager when then closed early one day - without the stresses of working for a common employer.

I'm approaching this from my own perspective of a fairly serious introvert, and I feel like the biggest skill I've picked up in life is pushing past the introvert wall.

Which is that thing that whispers "Going out will be a hassle. Why not just not?"

Work was one way of forcing past that, but I feel that's analogous to saying "Prison is one way of curing wanderlust." It feels more reasonable to treat the underlying issue than take a bargain that comes with serious negative consequences.

There are reasons people don't pursue activities outside of work because they only require a minimal amount of interaction with people or they don't have time for socialization outside of work. Conversations with clubmembers won't be appreciably more meaningful than conversations with coworkers.

A benefit is that your social circle exists independent of your job status but you've got to do it on your own time.

>There are already a number of options in even the smallest town

Can you elaborate on what options do you mean by this? I have to admit I'd have no idea where to go or what to do if I needed this.

>social activities outside the home

I have no idea what you meant by this.

That's true, but also very sad. I am lucky enough to have a lovely wife, kids and just enough good friends. And that's all I care about.

I don't really miss at all the office, let alone my co-workers. Working remote is just what I need, and I am way more productive.

>Working remote is just what I need, and I am way more productive.

I acknowledge that you and many others derive personal satisfaction from productivity. I do too. However, I strongly believe we should move away from productivity as the measure of whether we should work from home. Primarily because it individualizes productivity and turns any deficits into a moral failing. It is incumbent on our employers to create the conditions which align productivity with our well-being as people, and balance those. Else, we are being exploited.

Put another way, and framing it opposite from what you said:

"Working remote is not what I need because I am less productive" should not be an argument against working from home. You may not need working remotely for other reasons -- social being one of them -- but it's important not to prioritize productivity to the occlusion of all other factors.

For me being productive means that I can get stuff done in less time, hence I have more time for taking care of myself and my family.

I have all those too. But even when you are fully remote, and have a healthy outside social support system away from work, you cannot ignore the reality that is you spend the majority of your waking hours working alongside these people, often for the same goals and deadlines. It's a basic desire to connect with others we share our time with.

Unless you are one of the rare people where you truly are a solo shop (even then you have people requesting the work from you), I want to meet, converse, and get to know the people that I spend a bulk of my waking hours with, and depend on together to do a good job because I feel like that's showing those other people basic dignity.

> It's a basic desire to connect with others we share our time with.

I think you're creating a universal here where there is none. I have secure boundaries, and I can enjoy a coworker's company and work without having to be friends with them. And there's also an ugly side to this, where people don't want to have coworkers that they wouldn't want to be friends with. That's not some natural urge, that's something that people impose on a situation that is alienating to people who don't share your politics, or your tastes, or even like the way you treat people (I'm referring to the hypothetical "you" here.)

I have really enjoyed working with people who I'd never want to know outside of work, and have a huge amount of respect for those people whose work ethic and trustworthiness showed a real thoughtfulness and concern about what they were doing and for their coworkers' time and development. That's good enough for me, we don't have to share musical tastes or hobbies. On the other side, I've certainly made friends with people at work, but some of the people I made friends with I hated working with. The two things are barely connected.

> lucky enough to have a lovely wife

Me too, but I met my wife through work (we didn't work together, but I met her through a lady I did work with). I think a lot of young people - not just men - are hoping to interact with potential romantic partners through work.

This is true historically but the culture does seem to be moving away from the idea of it being OK to date coworkers. I know a lot of younger people (like me) would be quite nervous about the prospect of coming onto someone in the workplace. Even with good intentions there is potential for miscommunication or making someone uncomfortable.

That's the best part about work!

I once thought I would like to have kids, based on the incredible diversity and splendor of the experiences and people and places the world had to offer. It seemed right, to create new lives to share in that.

Now that the texture of being a person in the world is mainly to be on Zoom calls, I think it would be cruel. Zoom school, Zoom friends, Zoom job, Zoom dates, only to produce yet another human who can attend Zoom school. What kind of life is that to being a child into?

We’ll still have books! That might be worth it on its own. And places take a while to decay. Maybe we can wander the remnants of places, from back when places were a thing. Maybe there will still be enough weirdos to sustain some kind of live performance tradition in unusual and expensive places. Maybe some especially backwards communities, after they have sold the school buildings, will retain the athletic fields. But I dunno. A world where the default condition is to sit alone on the internet from your nowhere-sprawl house, cradle to grave, is pretty fucking bleak.

This doesn't make sense. There are countless opportunities for social interaction. Join a church, a club, a sports league, a gaming discord. I get that there's a lot of friction involved in joining anything, and many 'lonely young men' don't want to put forth that effort. But it's definitely less total effort than forcing people to come to an office for the purpose of social stimulation. Just measured in terms of time and fuel spent commuting by each person, it isn't even close.

I think there are a lot of reasons that people prefer offices. Most of it is probably tradition and "that's the way we've always done things". If the reason is truly lonely people needing social interaction, then there are a lot of way better solutions.

Churches and most clubs don't have extremely intelligent people with similar interests i.e. your tribe. When I talk to my friends I am usually at maybe 20% brain "power", when I'm at work I can mention basically anything and someone will have heard of it.

YMMV.

One thing to consider is the tech industry is over represented by neurodivergent people that struggle with social interaction. What you're suggesting is not feasible for everyone.

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I will. Thank you.

It's more than that. I'm mid-life, with kids, meaning that my best opportunity for getting out of the house on a regular basis is while they're at school. Without that, days can go by without a significant change of scenery, especially in winter when spending evenings at the park isn't a great option.

I'm not lonely, per se, but, all the same, the pandemic has been very, very difficult for me. I went from being a longtime remote worker who went to a coworking space most days, to what has sometimes felt like two years of house arrest.

I agree that going in to an office - especially an open plan one where they pack desks end-to-end in giant noisy rooms - is a less-than-stellar option, too. But I also suspect that many people's newfound love of WFH is fueled in part by the novelty of the experience, and that the shine will wear off after a couple more years.

I think a lot of it is the exact circumstances of you office as well. All else equal I think I would actually prefer working in an office assuming that:

1. It felt like a "real" space (i.e. not a beige cubical farm)

2. Was not excessively loud

3. I had a comfortable chair/workspace

4. I could walk there from my house in under 20 minutes

5. There was no dress code

6. There was nobody there who I found deeply annoying and also insisted on interacting with me regularly

And I think a lot of people (especially young people who live in cities close to where they work) actually do have something approximating that situation.

Being able to walk there from my house in under 20 minutes is a big thing for me. If I am a 1-3 miles walk/bike ride, I would go to the office all of the time. Assuming its a safe comfortable commute. I hate driving in rush hour personally, any amount of distance.

Also feeling like a real place is nice. I actually don't mind a cubical, though an office would be nicer. I really hate open office though, and open office makes me never want to go in. If it felt like a cozy coffee shop, or a college campus that would be ideal.

Yeah, I don't mind a cubicle per se (especially compared to the typical open office) but I found the traditional cubicle farm offices, where everything is this bland, monochromatic beige color and lit with neon lights, very depressing.

> their coworkers are the only people they regularly interact with in-person

This sort of self-alienation seems to be a pretty widespread problem larger than the in-person/remote debate. That said, it's probably better for those experiencing it to have some in-person socialization in the office than none.

How do you know they aren't travelling the world while "working from home"? Sure, they aren't keeping up with a set group of friends, but they are making new friends every day. The world is bigger than just your tiny little apartment. You can go to Latin America, where they share largely the same timezone as us, but you can play with turtles! Or rescue dogs! Or clean up after penguins (south of argentina). It's really up to you if you think humans are the only way to not be lonely, then yeah, hit up a bar and cry yourself to sleep. But there are other ways. There is so much other there if you just work from home,and stop going into the shitty office, with terrible people. Have you ever noticed the office makes people less original? They all end up looking and acting the same as each other, and I'm the only who who's just come home from petting a penguin and they're like "we just came home from the bar.... again.... for the third time this week...." The office is dead, long live working form home.

Sure you could use remote work to do things, but in practice most people don't. Forcing everyone back into the office without a good reason isn't a good solution, but I think that the option to work in person is an ideal situation to those who like to socialize with others. Personally, I have that flexibility and have started to take advantage of it by working while traveling. But I've observed of my WFH coworkers don't seem to, which goes back to the original point- the alienation is not a function of not going into the office. It's a separate issue that giving that option to people can mitigate.

I meet people outside of work “regularly” - more weekends than not - but a coffee or a hike or a live performance here and there is very different from casually sharing a building on a random Tuesday.

The comparison isn’t a social life, it’s a family or roommates.

The interesting thing is that folks on HN who want to work from the office just say “I can see why you’re remote. Just not for me. I prefer to work in a team that’s all in-office” but folks on HN who want to work remote always go “It’s because you’re lonely that you can’t work remote. I have a loving wife and children. You are miserable and using coworkers as a substitute for social company.”

Like, dude, we get it. This is important to you. So go work where you find that. A bit tiresome to constantly come into these threads and listen to this endless repetitious nonsense.

Christ on a stick. Do you never tire of it?

WFHomers need a modern equivalent of the Knitting Bee. Distinct from a co-working space since it is organized by its members who make an effort to get to know each other and it shouldn't be dependent on membership with some organization, just a grassroots locally organized thing.

Why?

> A lot of lonely young men here freely admit their coworkers are the only people they regularly interact with in-person

Well, with the 8 hours they're getting back from not commuting, they'll have more time to go out and socialize in non-work settings

It isn't my responsibility to help "lonely young men" meet people. Just go to a bar/meetup/church and start talking. That's an individual's responsibility to socialize.

join a sports activity. Free socializing, plus health benefits. :)

>Free socializing, plus health benefits. :)

Not my experience. At sports activities where I live, people come to do sports, not really to socialize. Once the sport activity is over, most go home to their kids/wives/girlfriends/etc. At least in Germany where the focus is always on the activity at hand, and socializing with strangers is a distraction from the activity you came for.

I practice 3 different sports right now (bouldering, CrossFit and dancing), hoping to maybe make some friends or find a partner out of it in this WFH world and it's all the same, once the activity is over, people want to go home, not stay and have a beer or chat. :(

Maybe I was lucky in the past but the best friends I've ever made and sometimes partners were found on the same workplace or campus, but I sure as hell feel very unlucky and miserable now, however, I really don't wish for people who don't like being in the office to be forced to come to work, that's really stupid, but this hybrid model is the norm where I live and is the worst of both worlds. Some offices are really nightmare material.

my condolences. :(

I guess it may depend on the sport group. I've had good luck with the local Basic Fit (globo-gym type outfit, but the nearby branch has some nice people), and my weighlifting club, so perhaps you may find better luck in another sports group?

Back when I lived in Marseille, I actually made a few really nice friendships from hanging out at the Prado street workout park. It was on the beach too, which was really nice.

Climbing is also quite popular, and my local climbing gyms seem rather conductive to random social interactions that could lead to deeper friendships, although honestly I don't go very ofter (less than once per month), so perhaps that's just my perception.

That said, if you're more comfortable meeting people at work, perhaps you would be happier with an office job?

Maybe try a more 'team' oriented sport? I have found padel tennis to be probably one of the most 'socializing' sports I have played (too much even for my tastes). The fact you have to play in pairs forces you to interact with someone, and is rare the game where a beer after to talk about it doesn't happen. (unless it is a weird hours).

I made also good social circles playing tennis and doing bjj, even though those are more 'individual' things, they seem to include a part of a social element to it as well.

Never tried dancing, but the times I did bouldering and crossfit, unless you were going in a group with already a beer planned after, they tend to be more start-end kind of things.

Interesting how you automatically assigned a gender. My wife has worked from home for 4 years and can't wait to get back into an office. I like to think that some people just have different preferences.

We are social creatures, there is something quite unnatural only interacting with your wife/kid or worse - with no one else at all, for weeks and months. If not the office, workers are better off using some social working space, but unfortunately WFH is so tempting and easy most will resort to that. Psychologically it's not ideal. Yes the office can be a pain, commute and what not, but loneliness could be worse.

We are social creatures, there is something quite unnatural only interacting with your wife/kid or worse - with no one else at all, for weeks and months.

Offices are significantly less 'natural' than spending time with a small group of people. If you go back a thousand years or so many people lived their entire life within a mile or two of where they were born - they grew up, worked, got married, lived and died in a single village. In lots of more isolated cases people would have only met a couple of hundred people in their entire lifetime.

It's definitely unusual to lead such a limited life today, but psychologically it's not that bad. People survived pretty well, and they continue to now.

That "small" group would consist of something like 100 people, not 5. If you want to appeal to nature, it's less natural for your family to be your entire social circle, than for it to include casual workplace acquaintances.

There was much more of a community life outside the home, with your fellow villagers.

> If not the office, workers are better off using some social working space, but unfortunately WFH is so tempting and easy most will resort to that. Psychologically it's not ideal.

I would caution against the presumption that people will do things that are "bad" for them because they're convenient and you have to force them to do things that are "good" for them instead.

In these comments you can see examples of people who are going to co-working spaces. Obviously they feel they need it and I support them. Personally I have no interest in going to a co-working space. I love my WFH solitude and autonomy, and 2021 was the most productive year of my life work-wise.

Is this psychologically bad for me, regardless of my own perceptions and experience? I suppose it's possible, but I don't think some random boss with the power to fire me unless I come into the office is a better judge of that than I am.

Random boss is not enlightened by virtue of being a boss. Surely anyone who has nodded their head to a Dilbert comic knows that by now. Random boss will do what's good for himself, not what's good for me.

Paternalistic, collectivist authoritarianism has dominated human thought for most of our history. It's only recently that individual autonomy and freedom have become more influential. I think that's a very good thing and I'm not going back.

Believe it or not, that entails lonely women too

Nothing anyone says in these comments should invalidate your own personal experiences and successes with your working arrangements.

But I have to admit I'm surprised to hear you say that you are "astonished" that any programmer would prefer to work differently.

2 things that I've learned from reading NH over the years: tech/programmer people are often very opinionated, and also have widely different opinions on just about everything :)

Admittedly what you say is true. People tend to believe other people think like them. I go on my own lived experience. Never once in 8 years did any of my coworkers suggest we get an office. We felt lucky to be able to work at home for all the reasons that people give.

I had a couple of other reasons for hating the office that I don't often see mentioned. I'm sensitive to 60 Hz fluorescent lights and also to bad air. Most offices are flooded with this kind of light and don't recirculate the plastic and office supply fumes often enough.

In this case, tech/programmer people have differing opinions about returning to the office. But the managers or at least the management have only have a single blanket policy for all. A compromise like 2-3 days in the office is one such policy.

I won't accept any non-remote job where I need long commutes and I have to sit my ass there for the whole week.

Just yesterday we had a summer day, so just after lunch I went to a remote beach, used my phone as AP and worked for about 5 hours until nightfall.

No interruptions, no annoying noises, not battling with AC.

I mean, having tasted this, Im pretty sure what would I do if my company asks me to go back to office. I still have a low paying job, but my life has improved dramatically.

And my office is literally 5m walk from my home, so Im already ahead of many people in that, but it's a noisy bunker with no window, lots of people and all kinds of other BS.

People is definitely lonely. I can understand that, but I won't pay for other peoples loneliness.

If you want friends, ask me for a beer, or come to my house, I like to cook for people.

But Id bet that this is more of a managers thing.

You have lunch a few hours before dawn?

Oops! I meant to "anochecer", which is nightfall in english according to google.

Going to the office means getting to know the people you work with to a meaningful level (there are other opportunities to do that besides meetings, such as having lunch together or going out for a coffee/walk) in a way that is simply not possible when chatting via google meets.

But there’s also the increased exposure to serendipity. Unexpected things occur in the office. Maybe you overhear a conversation that makes you think about your career, or during drinks after work you end up discussing a new cool startup idea with colleagues. None of this really happens when you stay at home.

Sure, there are pros to staying at home. You will have more free time and fewer distractions, among other things. But there are also massive perks to putting a bit of effort and going to the office sometimes. Those perks, admittedly, may be hard to understand for the average introverted, socially anxious software dev.

> Going to the office means getting to know the people you work with to a meaningful level

In 15 years in this industry, I have only developed a handful of deep relationships with former and current colleagues. The vast majority of my own work relationships have been superficial. I'm a card carrying member of the over sharer's club, and yet so many of my colleagues throughout the years don't know that I'm originally from Ohio by way of Pennsylvania... That I'm a military veteran... That I'm a strength and endurance athlete, etc. Maybe that says something about me, but I don't think I'm an outlier.

Some of the people I've worked with were utterly contemptible and, while I maintained a professional relationship with them at work, myself and many others were inwardly happy to see them go when the time came. I think we all know plenty of cantankerous assholes who we've had to call team mate, colleague, or worse, manager / boss.

We work here together for a (usually brief, in the grand scheme of things) period of time and that's often the only glue that holds the majority of us together.

One of the deepest and most impactful relationships I have forged through a shared working environment is a person who lives in Argentina and who I have never met in person. No office required, just the Internet.

> Maybe you overhear a conversation

This is the one thing I've never found a suitable replacement for in the remote world. Chance encounters are difficult to replicate. Maybe I'm discussing an issue with a colleague, and someone in earshot happens to know the answer. I've seen groups try to have policies like no DMs and only using public channels, but that sucks.

I much prefer remote life, but it's true that there are some aspects of in person work that are better.

The serendipity point is interesting.

A few years ago I had my team's desks moved to be next to our sales team. I wanted to overhear their conversations and phone calls to get a deeper understanding of client feedback and how clients used our product. It worked out well, and we got into a much better place in terms of feedback and requests.

During covid I've also had a very strong indicator of how clients view our product - the entire sales team quit over time.

>Going to the office means getting to know the people you work with to a meaningful level (there are other opportunities to do that besides meetings, such as having lunch together or going out for a coffee/walk) in a way that is simply not possible when chatting via google meets.

Who cares? I care about my family and friends. If I match with someone at the office, then it will happen anyway with remote work and I don't need to be force to interact in the hopes of having a better relationship. I work for work, not to socialize. I socialize with people by choice, not by force. And those people are those who I like.

>Unexpected things occur in the office. Maybe you overhear a conversation that makes you think about your career, or during drinks after work you end up discussing a new cool startup idea with colleagues. None of this really happens when you stay at home.

I don't need the unexpected to make me think, thanks. I like to take command of my own life instead of waiting for unexpected wind blows to drive me somewhere or make me think of where I want to go in life. I'm sorry to hear some people need that. Maybe therapy would be good for them. Or, you know, talking with friends.

> Those perks, admittedly, may be hard to understand for the average introverted, socially anxious software dev.

I feel sorry for the people who feel the need to put others down in order to try to prove a point (for which arguments are lacking, and therefore they resort to ad-hominems).

I disagree on one point. I've spent much of my career working with remote offices over the phone and with desktop sharing. I have to say, group video conferences really don't cut it. However, one on one calls and video calls work really well and you can get to know your coworkers. Its so much better to have one on ones with others and not have each other worry about posturing in front of their peers. Group video calls are at least just as useless as group meetings.

Agree with all of that. For me, the issue with working at home is that home is my relaxing and family place office is my work place. My mind focuses at work much better when i am in my work environment.

Creating real connections with co workers from my experience is not possible via zoom / google meets. There is nothing that can replace real human interaction as far as creating relationships.

> Unexpected things occur in the office. Maybe you overhear a conversation

The office rumor-mill produced a lot of bad politics in my experience

My own anecdotal and I'm sure many others have experienced this before, but getting the culture right for remote work has been a great experience. I get to know people at a meaningful level. I remember being younger in high school and making meaningful relationships on the internet through chat rooms and video games that last to today.

Translation: we should all be forced to go to work because we are dweebs and don't matter over our other social peers.

There are ways to establish communication to humans other than going into work to use their keyboard and monitor.

Most software is no longer this self contained. It doesn’t need to be that way but often is.

Around 9/11, I was responsible for a major system component that turned out (shocker) to be a lot more work than anyone had estimated, so I spent the week before and the month after 9/11 working fully remote so that I could dedicate every waking hour to the component. Putting aside the lack of balance, it was the most productive I have been in my life despite the high distraction of the news in the outside world.

But the last two years have been nothing like that. Some of that is my current role, and some of that is that building complex systems requires more coordination, but it also seems to me that there is some issue both around engineer depth on average (previous example, everyone was fluent in reading code and it spoke for itself) and that software these days in large companies has just so much internet-group overhead.

And video conferencing is a punishment in most large companies, worse than a phone call because it seems, to me, to result in people paying less attention. I may be alone in that though.

Some people also don’t have living conditions at home that are conducive to being productive. Not everyone can afford the space to have a proper home office, for example.

Absolutely correct. Any everyone's situation is different, but let's be real - the vast majority of software engineers can afford a great home office space.

> the vast majority of software engineers can afford a great home office space

Maybe, maybe not. In high cost of living areas even high salary employees with single incomes have to compete with couples pulling in the big bucks.

The thing is, if you WFH, you don't have any need to live in a high cost of living area.

> Not everyone can afford the space to have a proper home office, for example.

Because they have to live in expensive urban areas near their workplace. Their money would stretch much further if they could remote-work from rural areas.

If we are taking into account more than 1/3 of jobs could be remote, that starts to include many white-collar jobs that are not paid that well. And if we extrapolate this from the USA to other places (like Europe) you can live in a small town and still earn just enough to live in a 2 or 3 dormitories flat, with no dedicated space for WFH for one, let alone for a couple (it's 1/3 of the jobs, so chances that both can do WFH are not that low).

> it's 1/3 of the jobs, so chances that both can do WFH are not that low

It helps that those are not multiplicative probabilities. They apply to each job, so each partner will have access to ~1/3 of the jobs, totaling an access to ~1/3 of the total jobs.

Until rural areas cost of living goes up because 37% of people decided to move out to unsustainable rural areas.

Overall - moving to somewhere more rural is a fix for an individual looking to solve their financial problem but it is not a society wide solution. Rural homes are a net drain on society and are subsidized by city workers.

I bet there are plenty of medium-sized cities, with good universities and small tech poles (because let's just say it, you want to be around educated people, and yes, it's nice) with much lower costs of living than where most techies end-up living.

You also have to live in that rural area too. I think there's more to living then having a giant home with nothing to do. Likely won't be able to relate to the people around you at all.

I think if a company is going to be fully remote, they should provide an office budget to every employee, so you can either rent an extra bedroom / buy a bigger house / or rent space in a co-working facility.

Working from your bedroom with a desk crammed in the corner is a serious downgrade IMO from having an office with good vibes.

With a kid at home I'm very inclined to work in office whenever it allows. I'm also much more productive in office when everything from coffee to food are taken care of.

Nowadays I believe WFH is kinda the norm in IT as long as company policy allows. I love the hybrid mode: two days in office to relax, three days at home to help wifie with kid.

> two days in office to relax, three days at home to help wifie with kid.

This is not working from home, or working anywhere

If you think working from home means you have time to "help with the kid", you're wrong.

Have you tried actually doing that though. When you're at home you're always available to help out. If you're at the office its impossible. When your family is having a screaming argument next door how can you concentrate at home?

I don't know what you mean TBH.

If you are working from home, you are working. If you are helping out with the kid, you are not working.

> some people are just very lonely and need face to face

Sure but some of us are just more extroverted and have better energy in the office. Also having a clean separation of work vs home context can be helpful, training the brain "this is work time"[1]

I think it's totally fair to point out if people are opting for the office just due to a lack of need fulfillment elsewhere in life, but don't think its wise to assume it's only that by a wide margin.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Doorway_Effect

>"I assume that some people are just very lonely and need face to face"

This. We have managed to completely fuck up life style of the segment of the population to the point that they have no life outside of the office. This is sick.

That said, it made a huge difference that forced WFH coincided with closing all possible social outlets at the same time. If you discovered that you wanted to expand your social circle to diversify away from workmates, you were out of luck.

A good book about this is Bowling Alone. As much as I liked programming, I would also take the day off to go surfing if the waves were good. Another WFH benefit.

http://bowlingalone.com/

Didn't Microsoft give everyone their own dedicated office in those days? I thought I read/heard somewhere that is what spawned development of Outlook/Exchange.

I agree about the distractions, it's extremely bad with the open office model and hard to get anything done for me. I would much prefer cubicles or dedicated offices.

I had my own office at Microsoft as late as 2013.

It was by far the least favorite work environment I've ever had. It was lonely and unproductive for me, with a 15 minute - 2 hour commute depending on traffic. I came home from work angry every day. I have no idea how I lasted almost two years in that environment.

I really enjoy open offices. My next job was all pair programming all the time. No assigned desks. You just showed up and sat down with a different person every day. For me that's the most productive way to get work done.

For the last 3 years I've been working from home and don't see myself going back to an office ever again. I enjoy my time at home too much.

Everyone is different and not every company has to work the same way.

That's amazing to find someone who's actually in favor of open offices, but you are probably in the extreme minority, at least as these HN discussions go.

Couldn't you still pair program in personal offices? Not to mention it would allow for more discussion without background noise. Or what about offices for teams, if individual offices are too isolating?

This was true in the late 80's early 90's when we used to go up to Redmond from California to pow wow, but I heard that's not true anymore. Also, if any Microsofties are reading this, how would I got about getting the source code of Works for the Mac? It was about 200,000 lines of 68000 asm code that I'm thinking of trying to get to run in the browser. I may make a formal request to Microsoft if I get more motivated about it. I lost my copy along the way.

I remember hearing that too. Having an office with a door or at least a shared office would make it tolerable, but still the commute always put me in a sour mood to start and end the day. Now a days, the fad is open office, which is a dumpster fire for development. I can't believe Apple fell for that with their new mothership.

This is fascinating to me! How did you manage to merge code in the 80s? What tools were available? Did you have three-way merge tools or did you do it more manually?

Or rather did you talk frequently and ensure that you weren't stepping in each other's files? How did you make changes to shared APIs?

Some "old-timers" at my software company occasionally tell stories about how "checking the source code" meant physically grabbing a the one binder filled with pages of fortran and inserting your changes. Physically holding the binder gave you exclusive checkin access :)

Macintosh Programmers Workshop had some tools but we mostly did it by hand so we tended to work on different parts of the program. If that was a problem our manager who owned the company would do a road trip to collect the new code that another person needed (we all lived in the Bay Area.) He had a big financial incentive to do so. Or we would get together, but that was not optimal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Programmer%27s_Works...

There were always tools to diff two codebases and make a intermediate file that had all the changes. We did it back in the BBS days. You could always take the diff file and type the changes in manually. That's how "mods" worked. It would be something like this

  SomeFile.pas
  14: - If Variable = 1
  14: + If Variable = 2

> What tools were available?

"My Briefcase", in Windows. It was like cloud shared storage, but using removable media.

I would assume RCS and floppies. CVS later. That is what my company apparently used in that era.

Some people prefer working in an office because it helps them stay disciplined and keep a better work/life balance. Perhaps I’m just speaking for myself here, but I tend to get lazy and feel like my life has much less structure as a fully-remote worker.

ClarisWorks was created like this too.

https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/bob/clarisworks.php

> I can safely say I never wrote any good code while working in an office. There are too many distractions.

1) Not every office is Silicon Valley Open Office Garbage

I personally think this is the biggest issue.

We never threw in with the "open office" bullshit. Offices have doors. We don't have that many cubicles, and they're generally for contractors/consultants/etc. Every time we started having cubicles, it was time to move to a bigger office.

People hate commute traffic--that's sadly unavoidable in the US. But they didn't seem to hate our office (I could, of course, simply be blind like so many stupid managers).

2) Not every job is solely writing code.

I need a lab. My juniors need a lab. They don't need to be there every day, but they do need it regularly. Expecting them to set this up in their apartment is unreasonable.

3) Junior engineers need mentoring

Maybe the fact that software does this quite so terribly is hiding this need.

There is a lot of friction between simply mentioning something to a staff engineer after lunch and setting up a specific zoom call. There is also something about the staff engineer overhearing something "minor" that junior engineers are struggling with, correlating that multiple of them are having similar issues and setting up something to fix a process or educate people.

4) Lack of face to face time increases conflicts

This is anecdata. However, people who don't actually meet face to face regularly don't cut each other the same slack that those who meet regularly do. I don't know why. Although, we could probably paper over this by having regular lunches.

I like working from home. But I also liked working at the office. They are two different modes that serve two different purposes.

I will, however, agree that 9 to 5, 5 days a week in the office is dumb. At the very least, significantly condensing the number of "common hours" and letting people commute on off times needs to increase. This was happening, but very slowly. Covid accelerated this.

There are multiple reasons to want to work in an office. Makes it easier to separate home from work. Not having the space at home to work comfortably. Not having the quiet need from a busy and noisy house Being and to interact with others, even if it is just in a social capacity. Of course personally I'd prefer to work from home

If you don't mind my asking, have you spent much of your time since then working from home or in an office?

I likewise very much prefer working from home and find I get more done, but wanting to get an idea of what it's like from someone who's seen and done both over the long term.

Works was my first job out of the Navy in 84, so I had no prior office experience. I spent 94' to 2000 working in 4 separate offices for 3 different companies. I remember my first office experience I brought in a cot. People looked at me like I was insane. Well, I guess power naps are out of the question. Then I was exposed to office politics for the first time. Some people walk around hating each other all day. What a downer that was. Some women (and some men) would interrupt me to flirt with me. I didn't mind that so much. Then I would be in deep focus fixing some problem and they'd flash the lights because it was someone's birthday and we all had to go to the conference room because it was someone's birthday and there was cake and ice cream. Again, I didn't mind that so much. I felt for all these reasons and many more I was less productive in an office than I was at home. The office to me is a place a lot of people like because they can f around with their office friends.

Edit: I never worked in an office again after I resumed programming after the dotcom bubble burst. Another anecdote: I got called into HR because someone complained I was yawning too loudly.

> 5 of us wrote Microsoft Works for the Macintosh while working at home from 1984 to 1992. Without the internet

It's hard to imagine now how this could be done without the internet and a distributed vcs like git.

High speed internet and video conferencing might bring many of those distractions into your home office in a way that you didn't have to deal with during the old days.

It took me 1-2 years before WFH didn't make me depressed. I enjoy it now but I understand.

what was the merge code process like?

git merge --strategy ours

Some people live in tiny apartments without even a balcony.

The coding used by this survey is a joke. If 40% of an occupation says they work outdoors that's below 50% so it's bucketed into the work from home category on that criterion. I think if even 20% of a job is saying they work outdoors that's pretty strong evidence you're missing some information about what the other 80% are doing in their job that prevents it from being a work from home job. The net result of their setup is obviously a vast overestimate so take the 37% number with a grain of salt.

Couldn’t the job still be performed at home with the occasional on site? I’m thinking of a construction PM. The job could mainly be done at home other then when needed to meet GC on site. Seems like there is still WFH no?

That’s why the “entirely at home” from the study’s highlights is an egregious conclusion from its methods.

> I’m thinking of a construction PM. The job could mainly be done at home other then when needed to meet GC on site.

I’m sure all the blue collar construction workers would totally respect the PM even more than they do now if they didn’t show up on site…

There is an awful lot of privilege going on behind the scenes in these WFH debates.

Seriously. If the PM isn’t on site doing some basic QC .. then are they really managing a project?

Depends what you're using the WFH number for. If you want to extend it to an argument about being able to live substantially further from a job then needing to meet a GC on site some of the time is a dealbreaker. I think it's fair to say to call the job as a whole a WFH job it needs to be 100% remote. That's not to say non-WFH jobs can't have some remote time.

My office has people who live across the country and work 95% remote, and hop on a few flights per year when they're needed. Is that not WFH?

> I’m thinking of a construction PM.

The construction we've seen recently had a PM, and they were on the site about 20-25% of the time. Parts of their job can be and should be done in an office (or from home), but I can't imagine that they wouldn't visit the site regularly while keeping the quality and the schedule goals...

I know some companies are trying to get their employees to go back to a hybrid schedule, but for me, I think the bell can't be unrung. My company is a f500 company that I would not have thought would remain remote, but we have, and it really helps us hire and retain talent. It honestly helps us recruit people that would otherwise have sought out trendier employers.

I don’t hate working in an office. I hate working in an “open plan” office where someone is always interrupting my work.

Same. Seems not too long before people started really hating offices, offices started being designed to make you hate them. Open offices, no walls, 'island concept' which sounds all fun and tropical until you learn it just means you no longer even have your own desk.

If companies want people back in offices, make them enticing. Have perks! Imagine everyone getting their own room, with a nice desk and maybe small couch and mini fridge. Having a shared personal assistant to take care of some things, work related or not. Heck, even something as small as a free daycare would be a huge motivator.

If you want people back, start treating them like people and not cattle.

My wishlist is:

1. Kill the panopticon (open offices) 2. Employers should bear the cost of ALL commuting

The panopticon is truly dystopian, and whenever I’m in one, the hair on the back of my neck never lays flat. I feel watched (because I am) and it isn’t pleasant.

Forcing employers to bear the costs of commuting would really up-end things. We’d all be working from home really damned quickly, and I suspect there’d be massive gains for the environment, climate change, etc.

You think removing a massive cost of ownership will reduce America's useage of large SUVs and pickups?

I agree with everything you said but how is "free daycare" something small? Daycare costs thousands of dollars and the regulations and licensure are (rightfully) a very high bar. I would see free daycare as a huge perk and I don't even have kids.

You're right, its impact is not small at all. My wife pretty much stayed out of the labor market because day care costs so much.

I guess I was thinking the work involved seemed relatively small compared to redesigning whole offices- just carve out a couple areas and hire some caretakers. But I'm pretty ignorant of the laws, regulations, and needs as you pointed out, so that's probably not small at all either.

You get economies of scale with larger companies. The regulations are usually 1 worker per x kids, if I recall and not much more than that. It's not that strict at all. Of course if you had daycare at your company you could have a large room or a wing with a playroom and all that. It's pennies on the dollar to retain good talent, if you actually want to force people back in the office.

> offices started being designed to make you hate them

Indeed. I didn't mind at all going to the office the first many years of my career, where I always had a private office with a closing door.

But with open offices, I'll do everything I can to never be there.

Free daycare could get me back in an office. That would be a huge financial perk.

its funny, when working at Intel, one of the things people bitched about was the cubicles. (1998)

I hate open offices, but having worked in all formats, open offices are bad for mental health.

When working on MPK West for FB, they built an open office to house 3,000 employees with only 5 offices (with escape hatches) for the c-suite.

Cubicles suck compared to private offices, but they're miles better than open offices.

I used to share an office with another engineer, and one thing that we both preferred was t keep the lights off in our office (we had a window office and the ambient light was beneficial.

Lighting is SUPER important, and when youre in an pen office layout you have no control over your lighting.

For this reason alone, one should hate open office layouts.

If companies want to lure employees back into the office, they should give them offices of their own.

If you were to prefer working in an office, you can find a local office space that meets your tastes.

Or if you like open office, you could go that direction too.

This surprises...nobody? Except maybe bean counters/management types that need to show off perhaps.

With that said, I do have concerns. These issues center around a shift in benefits offered as a result of this new paradigm ( hate using that word but ) around the nature of work. I.e. the gig everything economy coming to your job...soon

Many folks in the US work a 9to5 not just for the pay, rather for healthcare and stability. However, it's only a matter of time that employees will become even more API'ified / made into independent contracts / etc. I know that many will welcome the flexibility - some though will not understand what this means.

I do wonder how the US will be able to handle this continued move away from 'trad' employment, given our rather odd situation of one's medical being tied at the hip to one's employer? Those that work in other jurisdictions need not fear the loss of a job as much as a US citizen. Literally, you could die ( just look at how many of those that were made unemployed during the pandemic lost access to medical. )

Just my musings...

2 thoughts.

First, "gig workers" can't work across the board. Companies working on products often need people to have deep understanding of the product. We all know how costly it can be to lose say a software engineer who has a few years tenure.

Second, if the gig-economy were to become very widespread, it may finally be a push to have a true, sensible market for health insurance in the US. If employers no longer pay insurance carriers/brokers to cover their employees, these carriers will need to come up with products people can afford.

If there is a large shift toward gig economy work, then the healthcare industry will shift as well. There's nothing preventing them from offering affordable healthcare to gig employees other than the status quo and their current profit models.

Something the size of the insurance industry is going to shift about 5-10 years after the general market. So if you're worried about short term gigification of your job, you might want to look into private insurance/benefit options now. Over the long term I think it will take care of itself.

I think it's dangerous when we look at gigification as a "who cares it will work out somehow".

Imagine how up-in-arms if they gigified programming. It has already happened in places, but what if they wholesale a price per line of code?

This will get a lot of replies but honestly, a codebase that is spaghetti from gigification may be cheaper than non-spaghetti codebase at 100k - 200k/year * number of developers and work just as well for the domain it is in.

If you can put the "it won't work" aside - imagine they figure out that it does. That rage right now - how is that not applicable to the people getting gigified right now?

> Imagine how up-in-arms if they gigified programming

Programmers would be up in arms in love with gig work and demand it everywhere if it turned out to actually work. The main problem with WFH is that you still have to work a set hours per week, gig work is the ideal. If you want to work 80 hours one week and 0 hours the next week you can do so. Gig work also means no deadlines, no manager, no long term worries, just write code and get instant money and feedback. The only reason you don't see developers clamoring for gig work right now is that they don't think gig work is possible for development.

People complain about "gigifiation" because of things that has been traditionally tied to employment (health insurance, 401k, etc) not the gig part of it. If someone figured out how to do it I'd assume most programmers would be all over it.

I would guess that the gig economy simply can't come for any jobs that require significant domain expertise or more than a few hour's worth of attention to any single project.

Comparable to how you don't see day laborers doing pipefitting.

I really hope American businesses don't bring this headline to its logical conclusion...

"37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home...by people in India or Eastern Europe for much less money"

Companies have been doing this for decades already.

The current situation is not going to shift even more jobs to India. Reasons being, good engineers from India are already moving to the US in sheer numbers, and good talent is unlikely to remain at Indian IT consultancy companies.

Anecdotally, I have worked along with very clever engineers who happened to be Indian nationals living in the US, but I have yet to find an above average engineer working at an Indian IT shop and based in India.

I've met a few sharp Indian engineers in India. They exist.

not if those jobs entail good written or even oral communication skills. Native English speakers have a huge leg up on Indians and Eastern Europeans in this regard.

For example, I imagine Coca-Cola is willing to pay more to have the person writing their ad copy be someone who has been immersed in American culture from birth.

A good portion of Indian engineers speak good English. Anecdotal evidence only though.

Ironically, if you google "is speak good english grammatically correct" there are a lot of articles debating whether it's ok, or if "speak English well" is better. This is the kind of subtlety that's hard to understand for non-native speakers.

But a good portion don't, which makes hiring take a lot longer.

It's already been happening and will increase for sure, but so far hasn't really affected salaries as far as I can see, U.S devs haven't felt a thing yet. If anything, salaries in East Europe went way up.

What I do fear is interest rate starting to rise and the implications of that on our industry but that's another thread.

If it becomes really bad there's a good chance governments will step in and heavily tax offshoring or provide tax benefits for reshoring.

Just like they did with all the cheap offshore manufactured goods...

Don't hold your breath.

Hard to tell. This time it isn't factory workers, it's programmers and who knows what more - finance people, marketing, sales and maybe even doctors. A country can lose its competitive edge really fast by offshoring all of that.

Imagine the environmental impact of cutting out emissions from 37% of commuters for "free". We could do it today. Its been proven to work the last 2 years. It's such low hanging fruit it's mind boggling!

Oh my god, imagine the improvement in traffic for those who do have to leave their house for work.

The effect is compounding too because those people will spend less time driving and idling their engines!

Once again, I am begging HN: this is a misleading title format for links to single papers or studies. What is being phrased as factual in the headline is merely an assertion in a paper, and should be reflected as such. “New paper claims (x)” is reasonable. “Study suggests (x)” is also reasonable. “(x)” borders on straight up falsehood when it portrays an assertion as a new finding about our world.

I think the assumption on HN should be that the title is merely what the article author is claiming. So from my perspective reading a title like "37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home" is automatically converted to "AuthorClaimsThat(37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home)".

My workplace is trying to get people to come back in the next week or two and people are suspiciously taking a lot of vacation. ~30% of engineering is out today. Methinks they’re in for a very big surprise in 2 weeks, and I don’t think they’ll have the money to counter the offers that people will naturally field in this market.

It’s an unforced error.

Has the title editorializing rule been dropped? I see even more posts with changed titles when the original isn't particularly misleading.

I've been more aware of title changes lately, but I don't know if the frequency has increased. Some of them have been egregious. I'm a fan of changes like this one, though. I can't stand clickbait titles like this article has.

Since this is the most descriptive line out of the highlights section, I personally enjoy that this is the content chosen instead of the "clickbaity" page title which would be "How many jobs can be done at home?".

The title is a verbatim copy of one of the highlights in the study.

Now think about the economic savings in the areas of energy and capital depreciation on cars. The overall economic efficiency boost from this could be unbelievably huge, not to mention the environmental benefits of less routine commuting.

I wouldn't be surprised if this approves economic efficiency by trillions of dollars.

If only there were some way to transport people that wasn’t cars!

Do you live in a major metro area? If you do, you should know that the rest of the country was designed for cars. Mass transit in your average US isn't feasible as everything is so spread out. There is no city center. There's no downtown.

That's the thing, remote working decreases the reliance on cars to some extent and not for everybody. Yes, cars are still used for transportation. In some urban settings public transportation is an option. I live in NYC and never owned a car not only because I rely on public transportation but it's a complete pain in the neck with parking, unwanted tickets and high cost for insurance.

For every one of you, how many people are priced out of living in the city and have to drive to a parking lot to take the train in, or want their kids to have some semblance of a yard so they live in New Jersey and do the same?

Telecommuting is a solution for many situations where a public transport is simply impractical. At my last in-office job we had many people who chose to live in unincorporated areas across state lines and commute 100+km via car to the office. I currently live 400km+ from my job here in the US... 4 hours by car or 14 hours by ground-based public transport.

If only there was some way to live near work.

And that's the irony. People living in the city wants people back in office, which will force all of us who were able to move to the country to find a place in the city. It will put even more pressure on the housing market of big city. And then, they'll complain that they can't buy anything and are forced to rent for life.

Yea, if only housing prices were reasonable in any major U.S. metropolitan area right now where tech companies are located.

no matter the transportation mechanism it still takes time. Unless someone can invent a star trek'esque transporter the commute will always suck.

Yeah. Personally, I don't mind working in the office really, what I really want from WFH is the elimination of my commute.

It will take some time work through, but there will also be cost savings on office spaces for companies.

Also, the effect this would have on reducing rent and cost of living.

But then the jig is up, no? I thought that was an amazing moment when recently the NYC mayor asked CEOs to "help get workers back to the office".

It's not about the work, it's not about the city, it's about making sure real estate doesn't crash and those campaign contributions can keep coming.

Maybe the mayor also cares about local businesses that get their income from city workers as well as the transport networks which need all the money they can get. Maybe they care about the tourist buzz from a busy city or the saftey in numbers.

You don't always have to assume the worst of someone just because they are powerful.

These things are not mutually exclusive.

Don’t forget the suburban sprawl this sort of stuff will cause. Eating further and further into our natural habitats building giant houses for wealthy, privileged tech workers.

Work from home could plausibly have the opposite effect by liberating a lot of buildings from office use and repurposing them as homes. I know a lot of people who would prefer to live in a city rather than the suburbs, especially young people.

The solution to that is improved urban planning, not to reduce the demand for housing.

In most surveys of this, there are substantial numbers of people who want to get back to the office. That doesn't mean we should ignore the people who don't want to, but the opposite is also true.

It's also about the other businesses that are enabled by having significant number of non-at-home workers in the neighborhood. I'm not saying that this should outweigh or override anything else, but I am saying you don't have to be this cynical.

Can Be != Should Be

By what normative standards? It's a labor market. If employers want employees to come in and get middle managed by chair watchers, I'm sure there's a number high enough to convince almost any remote-preferring worker.

Why not?

We are going to have a massive problem with taking on juniors, particularly younger people. Without many people visiting the office, there is a lack of banter, encouragement, confidence building. Imagine you were 16 and your introduction to the world of work was sitting in your own bedroom!

Honestly, I don't know how we deal with it unless we create a schedule where there has to be certain people in the office on certain days so that a junior can get the interaction and support which is as much of job training as anything they can do online.

So that's one example of when can do != should do

Firms stopped investing in talent decades ago. Go ask new grads if anyone wants to train you anymore. All the job ads I see are a laundry list of skills and they expect you to hit the ground running on day one.

Once it became necessary to look for a new job every 1 - 2 years to stay current with the market, firms stopped with the training, "they will just leave in two years" they cried. In this world your arugment no longer holds water.

Yeah. I think it's good that we are exploring what WFH options look like and where they can work, but I think a part of that needs to be recognizing where they don't work, too.

"What about the juniors" is not a super convincing argument to me since I've been on-boarding them throughout the pandemic but also prior to that, quite successfully, through the use of basic video linking and sharing of screens. Out team is scattered around the world and that has always been the case. What are some other examples of when WFH doesn't work?

This is the weirdest take on "think of the children!" that I've heard in a while.

young people are very well acclimated to social isolation and only "connecting" using online means. The younger generations are more mentally equipped (or handicapped) to wfh than any other.

Sink or swim. I think it's actually a really good way to weed out do nothings.

"Can" doesn't tell you if the job is done better or worse, happier or unhappier.

Exactly. I work remote. I am fully planning to work remote for the rest of my career. But I can imagine a number of scenarios where camaraderie, productivity, confidentiality, and quality of work are improved by having people in close proximity.

So I understand why some companies and teams bias toward everyone working in an office. And my choice to work at home will prevent me from being hired at those places. I'm blessed there's plenty of work available for everyone, remote or not.

Social interactions.

I've been remote by necessity for 8 years, since 2014.

I'd prefer to be in the office most days; but the realities of life would make it difficult for my wife and I to both have careers and be parents. If either of us had a rigid "be in the office Monday - Friday" job, the other would need to cut back to part time just to care for our young children.

What I've observed: In software, a company that wants you to be on-site Monday - Friday has control issues. Limiting your workforce to people who live within a reasonable commute who are single / single career couples / childless couples just makes it hard to hire.

I'm pretty skeptical of this methodology. They don't seem to be making any attempt to measure whether a job can be done effectively from home, only whether it's prohibited by some physical necessity. "Managers, educators, and those working in computers, finance, and law are largely able to work from home", but is having your teacher or lawyer on a little iPad really a complete substitute for having them right in front of you?

I guess I'm not sure how I would do it better, but that doesn't make it super meaningful.

Educators? Really? That alone makes me doubt the article.

100% of the jobs I want to do can be performed entirely at home, but I prefer to do 100% of them in an office.

Not trying to be sarcastic. I genuinely asking. Why?

I'm not a fan of the office because:

1. I don't like the commute 2. I have an office in my house, but at the "office"; I would be sharing some kind of space. 3. now that covid is less of an issue I plan on going to lunch more with freinds.

1. Commute is a nice way to get some alone time and unwind after work (admittedly, I wouldn't mind a shorter one though, say 15 min)

2. At home there are many more distractions (kids)

3. At work there are nice people to talk to/interact with

4. Getting lunch with coworkers is a nice way to bond and discuss ideas

5. All my friends moved away during the pandemic, and an office is a good way to make new friends

6. IME, meeting in person leads to friendlier interactions, whereas virtual interactions tend to be more hostile

7. The separation of home/office life makes it easier to focus

In addition to all of the social reasons others have listed, I'll list 2 technical reasons why an office is a more comfortable place for me to work:

I have 2 large monitors at my office desk (so when you include my laptop's screen, I have a total of 3 monitors; lots of screen space). Compared to no external monitors at home.

At the office, I have a gigabit connection to the LAN and file servers. At home, I have a VPN that is, while pretty good, not able to compete with 1GBe.

1. I like my commute. If my commute changed I would feel differently. Regardless, I feel employees should get paid for their commutes.

2. I don't have an office in my house. Even if I had the space I don't think I would want to use it for work. However, since coronavirus happened I have had way more space in my office than I did before, and I refuse to be sandwiched between two other engineers in an open office floor plan. So if my company tries to do that they will have a problem, at least from me.

3. I pack my lunch as often as possible and don't really know anyone who works near me.

I do think there are many developers for whom it makes sense to work from home. Especially if they are seniors, and their company workflow is well organized for it. Also, I do think that there are people who are very efficient working from home, but if they are WFH it will still be harder for junior engineers to collaborate with them or learn from them.

I've seen it suggested that in the future, companies who want people to come back to the office will lose all their best employees and will only be able to retain the people who can't get a WFH job. I think a lot of what makes someone a good engineer comes down to experience, so if that were to come true it would ultimately mean that senior engineers (best employees) will work remotely and junior engineers (can't get a WFH job) will be working on site. That kind of leaves junior engineers in the dust as far as mentorship is concerned so I would not consider that a good thing, even though it seems to be fine with certain people who think that they are "good engineers", when in reality they are probably just seniors.

I love working from home and remote suits me. But the past few months I’ve noticed more and more coworkers asking for zoom pairing sessions, increasing numbers of mob programming sessions, and a general craving for face time.

Personally I dislike those because they’re the worst of both worlds. Not quite remote, not quite in person. I get more done on my own.

In my observation many people are just very done with remote. Especially the younger folk whose lives aren’t as full of adult crap yet.

Not everyone has a bad commute.

Distinct place where I don't have the distractions of home. (ie feel the need to clean, fix, things)

Much nicer environment - way more open space / natural light, great air quality, views, amenities.

I can't speak for the OP and everyone has their own reasons but - Do you have a roommate? Children? Now your house/apartment is looking like a mini-office with shared space. - Your house has one office. Where will your spouse/partner work? Most houses don't have two offices. - Maybe living in a small apartment is OK for people because they can get out to larger spaces. Want to live in a studio apartment and work there too? - Offices can have cafeterias and tend to have restaurants nearby. - habit

Not the OP but for me:

1. I get very little face-to-face social interaction if I'm working from home. I need the interaction at the office or I fear I'll lose the already terrible social skills I have

2. Some conversations are just easier to have in-person, especially from a management standpoint. I don't micromanage and I am pretty hands-off but when a team leader is having issues with their team, it's generally easier for them to pull me into a conference room and chat face-to-face with me and we can figure out a resolution together. This can happen over video, but I find it's better if it's not.

3. I find you get exposure to new techniques and technologies and different perspectives on how to approach solving technical issues when you're in an office and can see a team huddling trying to figure something out.

That said, I know it's not everyone's preference and I'm in favor of a hybrid model personally. Office is available if you want to use it. If you're living in the area of the office, come in once or twice a month and have a face-to-face meeting with your project teammates and/or manager. Otherwise, you're free to be at home if you want.

This could have never happened if Jeff and Sanjay were 'working from home'

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/the-friendship...

Who knows Google would have been an also-ran Search Engine company if it weren't for those two solving the right scale problems at the right time.

And no amount of 'Productivity Metrics' can capture these leaps in value creation because it truly is of the 'Unknown-Unknown' category.

Not the person you asked, but for me it’s the social aspect.

I can’t stand being on a camera, voice and text chat don’t really replace the in-person conversations for me.

Everything else is either the same or much worse working in person.

Man, I love my commute. Losing that was one of the hardest parts of the year I spent WFH. I take the bus to work, it's about 40 minutes each way. I get time outside, I get to watch the sun rise, I spend that time reading library books and magazines, sometimes I talk with strangers for a few minutes, I stop off on my way home to get new library books or at a shop for whatever, or sometimes hit a bar on the way home. My commute rules, don't take it away from me.

1. I bike/run commute and have planned my life to let me live with 15 minutes of where I work.

2. I purposefully choose to live in a small apartment with no dedicated “work” space.

3. Yeah, me too.

Exactly — yet so many people can’t accept that ANYONE might want to work from an office.

My assumption is that people who love WFH are generally suburbanites who can’t fathom getting to work involves anything other than sitting in traffic for two hours.

People are not great at empathy.

If you have small kids working from an office gives you a good place to work with, hopefully, less distractions.

Some people like commuting because its their me time. Some people like the socialization being in an office gives them. Some careers/roles are easier when you can walk over to someones desk and talk to them.

There are plenty of reasons why working in an office might be interesting to someone. Just like there are plenty of reasons why working fully remotely is interesting to someone.

The vast vast majority of people don't have 2 hour commutes. This is pretty much an LA or NYC thing. There are other cities in the US and none of them require insane commutes like this.

My drive to work is 7 minutes, I live in a suburban neighborhood. I don't work in the office because there's no need for it.

You're asking someone to respect your choice to work from an office, while it feels like you're disparaging their choice to live where they want to (or possibly can afford as, for example, most of the suburbs have become cheaper than cities for much of America.)

Can we all just agree that people want different things?

I hate cube and half cubes or like at my current job before covid I had an office that I shared with 2 other people.

When getting to work involves a short walk to the office, getting a coffee on the way, of course that's the best commute by a country mile. When the weather's nice like this morning I'll take a longer walk, but I don't have to do that commute.

Who are these people who can't accept that anyone wants to work from an office? If there are so many of them, can we see some examples?

Office work is not just about the commute, it is also about terrible work conditions where you may be seated in an open space shared by support, engineers, sales, etc.

"So many people can't accept that ANYONE is more productive in a remote setting".

This "us vs them" discourse is so childish. Just find the company that works the way you want, either all in office, or hybrid, or all distributed and move on.

Urbanite here. I hated having to travel daily, even when my commute was around 35 minutes.

Currently working remotely and living in a city, because that's where all the services are.

I live in the dead center of a major city, but it happens to be a city that isn't much of a tech hub. Thanks to widespread work from home, I can now consider job offers from anywhere and work for a hot startup that just IPO'd and get the same benefits of a bull market for engineering labor as someone younger and/or unattached who can easily move halfway across the country for a better job.

I miss the casual chatting about all kinds of things and the ritualistic coffee breaks (Sweden) a lot.

A lot a lot.

I can't afford an apartment with another room for a proper separate office, and wouldn't want to waste that space on a room to separate work and home even if I did.

And you can't afford this apartment because up until 2 years ago everybody was forced to get a place next to the office. You should support remote/distributed work, since it will make it possible to move to the country/small towns and relieve the pressure on difficult housing markets.

Id be open to going into a office, but when I compare wages between jobs done from home and jobs that demand in office I'm not seeing a significant delta. Even if the drive was 15 minutes I'd want something to cover my costs and time.

I was interviewing a month ago and I got a in office offer that was a little lower than the remote offer I had. I brought up that I'd be willing to come in for more money or some sort of flex time around that hour commute and that was met with a audible gasp from the HR person. They acted as if the request was rude and that the occasional free lunch made up for the 10 hours a week time loss. That made the choice for me.

If I am truly more valuable to the business in a office I see no reason why I can't share in those rewards.

"That made the choice for me."

Often the way they react is more important than the actual content. Seems like if they don't understand your concerns on this topic, they likely won't be amenable to your future concerns on other topics.

I’m actually the opposite. I’d take a 10-20% pay cut today to get an in-person job vs. my current remote job. I just haven’t been motivated to job hunt lately.

If I lived in some parts of Europe, then yes, I would totally love to go back to the office. But in the United States? I can't afford to live close enough to the office for a short commute (4-5x as expensive) and transportation is garbage.

Worst of all, there is nobody else there. Our teams are spread across 8 different countries in so many different time zones. I would have maybe 1-2 office mates from my department. That show up irregularly.

I remember the happy times I had in the office and I really wish I could recapture that spirit. But the wheel of time has kind of turned.

I’m in the US, choose to live in the least expensive and smallest apartment near a large-ish city so that I can have a short and manageable commute to both work and the things I enjoy doing.

My transportation costs are essentially 0 — bicycle maintenance I can mostly do myself. My electric bill is $20-$50 a month. Sometimes $3 for a bus ticket. Plus no homeowner’s insurance, property taxes, maintenance, water/garbage bills (all included in rent).

My costs would be 4x-5x higher if I didn’t make the choices I do, simply because the style of living I prefer isn’t available outside of cities.

The fallacy reside in: "can be performed", witch do not state how they can, because so far most push "smart working" in the form of "get this laptop, this smartphone with a 4/5G plan and you are ready to work". That's obviously tend to fail and works just for people who have corrected the aim perhaps with a docking station, external monitor and external keyboard, having a spare room silent enough etc at personal level at company level it's even worse: most have no idea about remote work. The modern classic solution is having a big enough hw resources to keep a VDI infra asking workers to be on remote desktop all time, and again that's not a good idea even if seems to be the easiest.

Seriously facing such aspects and finally admit that "real" WFH means set up a home office, with relevant furniture, equipment, connections etc and organize the work to be done from remote pushing people on some proprietary platform in the hope to get a quick&done third party solution will not really push up WFH to something structural and good for all parties involved.

The lesson here is you can never really predict what will happen. This is important to remember when people make any predictions, particularly for doom and gloom scenarios.

Take the Black Plague, which killed an estimted 25-50% of the population of Europe. For those lucky enough to survive this was a huge boon for workers rights and wages [1].

There have no real increase in worker wages in 40 years [2]. The pendulum swings back and forth on any issue and we've swung too far towards unbridled capitalistic exploitation (IMHO). Labor organization (ie unions) led to things like a limited work week, safety in the workplace and so on. The flipside of that was corruption, resistance to change and so on. But ever since the farce of the Reagan trickle-down economics era, worker conditions have gotten increasingly worse (relatively) while the accumulation of wealth at the top is absolutely unprecedented.

So Covid has killed millions and this is of course tragic. But who knew that this would be the catalyst for the first real increase in wages in decades and the ability to redefine the outdated in-person work that wastes so much time on money on pointless commutes?

I'm glad that something good is coming out of this.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequences_of_the_Black_Deat....

[2]: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us...

heh it must hurt to have paid for all that commercial real estate that's now sitting empty. I bet a decent portion of the motive to get employees back in the office is to just validate the rent bill.

Mostly it's invasion of privacy. Your boss can invade your privacy trivially at work, and get reads on you about how little you can be paid, how much abuse you can actually take, to what degree he can injure you long-term so you have a worse negotiating position, what the consequences will be of going over that, all kinds of things. Like a typical boss will spend all day plotting how to get an employee to work unpaid overtime. Plus scream at you at FULL VOLUME, physical intimidation has to happen in person, it's too abstract if the volume is limited by the sound system or if the intimidation happens over video, it's not only less immediate but it can also be recorded accidentally. Like "oh I'll get my ass kicked...in 6 hours. Eh, go for it."

And no decibel meter, that ruins the fun, when he whispers and retaliates for you not hearing him, or when he squelches "I'M AN ASSHOLE" the decibel meter can't say "oh that was inaudible, but the other one was this far from a shotgun." Ruins the fun. Because later in court, if the plaintiff repeats the scream, not only with the words, but with the tone, and with the VOLUME, THE COURT HAS TO STOP AND CHECK THE ACOUSTICS, HOW WELL INSULATED IS THIS ROOM, WE CAN'T INTERRUPT THE COURT NEXT DOOR. IS THAT REALLY HOW LOUD HE SAID IT? DECIBELS? METRIC SYSTEM? IF THE JUDGE HAS TO COVER HIS EARS THROUGH THE TESTIMONY, HE WILL HAVE TO FIND A VERY GOOD CLAUSE TO JUSTIFY--I SAID JUSTIFY--THE VERDICT IN FAVOR OF THE DEFENSE [explosives starting went off as I wrote this paragraph].

The basic problem with work from home is that it's digital. Gaslighting requires analog.

(And I have had virtuous bosses, and even the boss who screamed "I AM AN ASSHOLE" into a recorded call center phone call had many virtues. In many ways employees, through their lack of work ethic, bring this upon themselves. But at the same time, he screamed "I AM AN ASSHOLE" into a recorded call center phone call. I'm not sure I disagree or agree with his confession, he said it and what is said is said.)

> Gaslighting requires analog.

No, no it doesn't. Sometimes the most powerful gas-lighter is oneself. Silence can cause me to gaslight myself. Shit, my boss isn't responding.. is he mad at me? Or fuck, a Zoom meeting at 4 PM on Friday fuck fuck. It must have been that PR.. I thought I removed the creds.. Of course I didn't, I never remember that. Fuck. Again. Damnit. I can't stand to look at it..

Also human communication is more than words and sounds, but expressions, body movement, minor twitches etc. Someone can be terrible at lying or obfuscating the truth in person and write some convincing shit in an email.

People are the problem my friend, not where you work. Your isolation at home, and the ability to force isolation by closing an app, treats the same symptoms but you misidentified the disease.

I would like to add to my other response:

> Also human communication is more than words and sounds, but expressions, body movement, minor twitches etc. Someone can be terrible at lying or obfuscating the truth in person and write some convincing shit in an email.

That's you. That's the employee. The convincing shit in an email is a raise ultimatum. The person who is terrible at lying or obfuscating the truth in person is the employee who needs to hide that his wife got pregnant or son got no financial aid from Stanford. Needs to hide his need, but needs his need to motivate him to get the raise he needs.

I'm totally open to being all wrong. What can I read that will bring me around?

On the note of gaslighting, it just doesn't work if the lamp is binary.

Wait till they find out 80% of office jobs are redundant.

I know right... If I could go through with (got health issues at the time) implementing automation of some stuff, then because of me hundreds of people would be out of their jobs... or at least that job. It would have saved the company a lot of money, too.

The company I work for had a "return to office" about two weeks ago, and while we still are 50%+ remote, those that aren't we're now in the office a lot more. My first impression after two weeks is how little the in office people get done. They spend a significant amount of time socializing and walking around to meetings and getting meeting rooms working and eating, and when they are in meetings, are less focused, and when they aren't in meetings, they talk about not being able to concentrate as well because of all the distractions.

They also seem to be having a lot more fun!

It should be interesting to see how it plays out in the next few years!

i know it seems unlikely now but i think we will return to the office. not 100% of the time. not everyone was doing 100% before either.

but a lot of people have switched jobs in the remote only era. we have experienced / are experiencing how little we know these new people. how little we feel connected to them. how strange it is to not make new friends at a new job that go beyond the work-friend level. i think most people will pay the cost of going in (again, not every day) for the gain of seeing people. this will be gradual but i think it is a common sentiment that we want to work with people we can see in person

Whether workers want it or not isn't going to be the deciding factor. Nor will it be a mental health issue. Just look at their years of ignoring studies about how open offices are bad for knowledge workers. Rather, it will be purely a financial decision.

It comes down to whether employers are going to sign many-year leases for a social hangout spot for their employees. As well as accept liability during future COVID outbreaks.

Right now there is artificial demand from employers in favor of returning, but only the ones who already signed many-year leases. For everycorp else, an office is an unnecessary expense. They will take the money they save on rent and insurance and spend some of it on wellness perks and subsidizing home offices, and come out ahead financially.

I also think the employee demand to return to the office is misplaced. We're all tired of being cooped up at home with nothing to do, but that has more to do with lockdowns than WFH. Without the lockdowns, those 2 hours you spent commuting are now time in your day to join a social club near your home, start an outdoor hobby, etc. Will WFH workers still want to return to an office once they find a new mental health balance that doesn't rely on their employer? I think no.

> Rather, it will be purely a financial decision.

I agree and think this will be the key. Most will return to the office and the companies that don't will be out-competed forcing them to close or return. Of course this will take years to fully shake out.

> As well as accept liability during future COVID outbreaks.

Yet somehow grocery store workers managed to work in their "office" and survive the last two years. Why do all these software developer people think they are so special?

It bothers me how many people use COVID as a means to push their personal agendas.

You are the person introducing politics into a conversation that had none. And your anti tech worker sentiment out of left field on a tech worker forum is unnecessarily antagonistic. Maybe you're the one with a personal agenda.

Future COVID waves are going to cost companies with offices much more money than fully remote companies. Quite literally a liability. I have no idea what this has to do with grocery stores.

> this will be gradual but i think it is a common sentiment that we want to work with people we can see in person

That's been my biggest issue, is I miss the people. I miss the coffee runs, the random lunch outings...

However, if I lived my ideal schedule I would work from 0600 to 1100 ITO, break for a 'siesta', then finish my work later in the afternoon evening as my schedule allows. And so my co-workers have also had their own ideals which overlap little to any such that we quickly reach a point of "no point in having in office, we overlap two hours at best."

Perhaps the best model to satiate flexibility but indulge the human side of the equation, is remote-first regional-companies. One can still plan to meet with some regularity without absurd amounts of travel. At my first startup, we would meet on a roughly weekly basis for a company lunch to have those conversations easiest done face-to-face, or just hang out for an afternoon enjoying the local natural beauty (#SaltLife) - anytime the Engineering VP and I needed to meetup, we'd just figure out what day we could meet up at a colo office or coffee spot.

Otherwise, remote from wherever made sense. Some days for me it was pool side, some days down by the creek, most days just in my home office. The only real down-side is that lack of a national or global talent pool, but we weren't even all that niche so it wasn't a factor for us and, I suspect, most companies which just do the same old languages on the same old platforms.

I'd happily do quarterly week long company regional on sites. It's expensive for companies to do, if they do it right and cover all costs and travel for sig others/family, but its still cheaper than rent on a big office building.

That's actually a lot to ask of people with children or other dependents in their care.

A quarterly 2-day off-site is far more digestible. Which I agree is still a great compromise in expense and f2f to an office.

I feel so much better working remotely so that I don't have to talk to my colleagues in person. We are completely different people, like from different worlds. RTO is mandatory at our place.

This made me happy every time I saw a rise in infections or new variant, for which I feel bad about myself.

Eh. I've had close work friends and even with my best efforts those still felt like work friends, basically not as close as my non work friendships, and the relationship suffered greatly once one of us left that job.

I don't try to cultivate work friendships now. It's a great way to build up a friendship that wont exists, or will only exist to a lesser extent, in 12-24 months.

I'll be nice and friendly, as always. But I'm not staying late to get beers with work folks because they are my friends. I'm going home to see my family or hangout with my actual friends.

It just doesnt feel healthy to tie work and my friendships together.

I started a new job during COVID. I've met my coworkers twice (two of them three times). There are a solid four people out of an org of ~40 who I unhesitatingly consider non-work friends now.

"You can't make friends over the Internet" hasn't been true for decades.

Indeed. How many of us have friends made through gaming over the ‘net? I’d wager 50%+

For the other 63%, I think an interesting possibility is to use a robot Turk machine type of arrangement. Take for example, the "flag person" at a road construction site, it is an outdoor job and hence would be categorized as not possible to do from home, but, one could easily design a very simple machine with a camera and the stop/slow sign that could be operated remotely. That could actually be safer and lower cost. There are lots of other possible examples, window washer, etc.

There is probably some companies working on it already, if not, it might be an interesting idea I think.

Have you ever worked as a flagger? I have. It isn't a binary "move the sign and then flip it back". Here are a list of things that you would need to consider:

1. Flaggers often go from site to site throughout the day. You would need someone to set up and take down the machine

2. The flagger is in constant radio contact with the work crew. They need to know which equipment is blocking which lane etc. And this is always changing.

3. Flaggers need to respond to emergency vehicles, busses, their own work trucks etc. You have to have your head on a swivel at all times

4. Pedestrians/bikers/other road users need to be considered as well, and may be outside of camera shot

5. What if the connection is choppy/equipment breaks. Does a tech go site to site? Does the crew stop working? Labor is the single biggest cost of construction by a large margin. Everyone minute the crew isn't working is CrewNumber * PrevailingWage lost.

6. Flaggers work at night/all weather/complex intersections. All this would need to be accounted for.

7. Like self driving cars, there are about 12 billion edge cases that take a combination of experience/reasoning.

I don't mean to be dismissive of your idea or anything. But this attitude is pervasive in our industry, that "I saw someone doing a job that looks easy, I bet I know everything about it and can design a better way to do it". That attitude is both great (inspires bold ideas) and terrible. The right question isn't "I bet this could be automated" but rather, "I should job shadow someone doing this job, see if there are any ways to improve it".

This seems low as only jobs that require(!) F2F interaction with customers or coworkers can't be done remotely. This might come down to "mucking about with the hardware" being the dividing line - if you need the car, it's in the shop, otherwise you can do in on the road, via the Web, ...

Psychologically, companies and (older? extroverted?) workers won't agree with this, but it's not up to them to change. Change happens at its own pace and you can either yell at the tide or move with it.

You're right about the dividing line being mucking with hardware (I'd also add 'requires access to large or expensive equipment'). But there are plenty of jobs that don't require face-to-face interaction but do require on-site work for one reason or another. Air traffic control, janitors, machinists, garbage collectors, geologists, bakers, etc.

Good point, feel free to expound on my definition of hardware. "Ya gotta touch it?" as I might have been to locked into my own vocabulary.

Most jobs done need to exist to begin with.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kehnIQ41y2o

This is approx ~30% in Europe, meanwhile of the positions that "can be performed entirely at home", interestingly these remote positions take half as long to fill... in comparison to fully office-based positions.

Source: https://app.careersaas.com/portal/career-search.html

But execs want you to commute because their mindset is to make worker's life miserable, and working from home is seem like a privilege.

Not everyone loves WFH, you know.

After covid we have some vague stats and yeah not everybody enjoy full remote. But 1) there's a large pool of people that do, 2) you can have hybrid 3) unless no other colleague goes to the workplace you may enjoy some workplace social context 4) we need to reduce energy expenditure and not commuting seems like a massive gain.

I don’t mind coming into the office, as needed. What I do mind is being required to be someplace daily to assuage the ego of of some C-suite stuffed suit.

And those people can deal. I dealt with their preferred work environment although I didn't love it.

In my experience, whether or not someone enjoys something is largely irrelevant when it comes to work.

Executives work towards a large number of stupid performance goals, but worker misery isn’t one of them.

Citation needed. I could gesture wildly at everything these days. It sure seems like someone is working towards worker misery.

It only seems like they do.

and a commercial real estate crash would be bad for the company's bottom line

I see this everywhere but I can't see how it's true.

I'm guessing that a company's largest expenses are (probably in order, too): People, Technology, Office space.

Most companies, especially smaller companies, do not actually own the office space they are in, they lease it. Commercial real estate crashing would greatly reduce one of their top 3 expenses... how is that bad for the bottom line?

If everything you do goes in and out over a wire, some day your job will be either automated or offshored.

That's what a lot of people thought in the 2000s, but going by SV salaries the automate or offshore story hasn't really played out! Then again, horses seem to have lost their job in the early 20th century after cars came along, and their population just declined thereafter.

You ever wonder why people in old rust belt areas complain about "the globalists" all the time?

The society has a once-a-lifetime opportunity to refactor how it can work, but it squandered it.

Imagine if office buildings are no longer necessary. A lot more hi-rise apartments can be built, cities can be a lot more dense, and light rails can be attractive again.

high rise apartments are really just office buildings. Just live at the office, it's pretty much equivalent.

Doesn't that mean a good chunk of those jobs can also be outsourced?

Working from home is great and all, but do we really want work to be within our home? I’ve been working from home the entire pandemic, and I still find it hard to stop working and “be home.”

Coworking spaces were supposed be a compromise. Individuals and small teams could work in an office-like space without home distractions for a few hundred a month. In the early days coworking provided quality bandwith and printing for less you'd pay at home. But that advantage has faded.

I have lost track of how coworking has fared during covid. For a while, pre-covid, they seemed to outnumber coffee houses in my metro area.

that definitely has to be managed well. I wfh in a room where i also do my hobbies and stuff (like a tiny workshop more or less). What i do is when i'm done with work i put my company issued laptop in a dedicated drawer and close it. When the drawer closes my mind flips to "i'm at home" mode. The next morning, when i open teh drawer, my mind flips to "i'm at work" mode. It works for me but may not work for everyone.

This would save a lot of oil.

Dr. Dingel writes - "Our code makes it easy for users to explore alternative assumptions about whether any given occupation can be done from home."

His repo - https://github.com/jdingel/DingelNeiman-workathome

Would be a worthwhile student project to replicate this in R/pandas (They used Stata on a Mac, if you know what I mean) & have an interactive online plot so one can change the survey assumptions & see what results. Just collating all this data in one place is a monumental effort.

I remember this paper was a "huge fucking deal" when it came out in Sep 2020. Has like ~1500 cites. Was used by Biden administration to set policy. Co-author Dr. Neiman was personally nominated by Biden for treasury. Authors are Booth school stalwarts. Pls do read the paper, very insightful even if you don't agree with its methodology/conclusions.

The world did not exist until Git.

I would change the title to "Approximately 37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home"

"37%" isn't a number with high precision to be begin with, so the "approximately" is implied.

I would say that it is quite specific.

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