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Comment by akagusu | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 expect that over time our use of space will adapt to this new reality but it will probably take a decade.

I definitely see older or taller office buildings renovating and rezoning to become mixed co-working and/or living spaces suited to remote work.

Not just that but also I could see commercial space be divided up into premium one-person office spaces wired with fast internet and set up for video conferencing.

I hope this is the direction we see, but going from offices/commercial to residential is a much heavier lift than just zoning. Like, just consider the plumbing situation in a reasonably large office building. People living there will require more significant renovations than just putting up new walls. It is fixable, but it isn't cheap, and because it isn't cheap, "will it happen" gets some question marks.

I'm not discounting any of that. Definitely won't be easy and that's why I say about a decade before we really see a shift.

Right now I do hybrid work and it’s great, it’s easy to get away from the house and work from a nearby city. There’s little-to-no traffic where I live, so the commute is short and enjoyable. If I want after work I can jump in the car and drive to the mountains or go pick something up at the store, or go see a friend. The car operates on my schedule.

Moving away from this seems like stepping back into the 19th century. Usually when I hear people complain about cars they live somewhere that’s over-crowded with poor road infrastructure, traffic, and inflated taxes and energy costs. Sure if you live in that scenario maybe commuting sucks, but most of the USA isn’t like that.

Unfortunately, the best remote setups are in low-density places with large homes.

People moving from NYC and SF to Wyoming and Austin are going to be living in sprawl.

There vehicle miles traveled (VMT) are going to increase: after all it’s not going to be a lockdown where white collar workers stay inside 24/7.

So (honest question), you think people doing remote-friendly jobs are in dense urban areas and don't contribute to car emission much ? so when these guys relocate far away, they're going to switch from public transportation to car ?

I don’t think this, I know this. Today the Census dropped data showing there was a net population loss in SF and NYC. If you look at a map of energy use by county (e.g. Google image search for “energy by county”) it shows folks leaving places like NYC and SF are going to increase their energy use.

This is what is happening. Over the past 2 years, people have left cities with solid public transit (SF, Chicago, NYC) and have been moving towards car centric areas in places like Arizona, Florida, Texas.

Yup. We are reversing a lot of efforts society put into reducing sprawl. More and more cookie cutter houses built on what was once a forest… taking with it tons of wildlife.

This was already happening prior to WFH spurred by pandemic. Housing prices were sharply increasing in many major cities, causing people to relocate elsewhere due to lack of affordable supply.

That’s not how supply and demand works.

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?

Yeah exactly. If they signed a multi-year lease, they are still on the hook for the same amount of money but the space won't be used. It might feel bad but it was already budgeted for.

They are paying for space (sometimes beyond 100,000 per month) that the competition is not paying. Office space is the highest expense.

That sounds weird to me. Our current office can sit 5, with conference room, kitchen, ... It costs about 20% of an engineer's salary. And we're in one of the most expensive place in the world for rent.

Is office space really that cheap?

That actually sounds like a LOT of space compared to a 2-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn that would cost quite a bit more....

I think it's around 70 sqm, so pretty equivalent to a 2-bedroom really. We have a common area with 3 people and a small kitchen, a smaller room with 2 people and a conference room. Toilets are shared with other similar offices. And it's in an industrial building a few minutes away from the city centre, so a bit cheaper.

But even then, you can put 4/5 people comfortably in a 2-bedroom in Brooklyn if it's designed for it, and it's not going to cost you multiple times an engineer salary.

It might not scale as well though if you need to own your own campus with security, catering and all that.

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