Remote also greatly enhances the talent pool available for employers. It reduces cost too. It helps the environment. It's the antidote to urbanization. It potentially brings money to underdeveloped areas, which helps democracy.
Unclear that's a particularly worthy goal. I enjoy the rural life as much as anyone, but it's hard to argue that a "liveable city" (dense, planned, walkable/bikeable, work near to where you live, etc) isn't a more efficient use of society's resources than the automobile-centric suburban sprawl that much of the US is subjected to.
When you give all opportunities to a few, they don't tend to use it to everyone's benefit. People who are robbed of the consequences of their actions tend to lose sight of reality.
That's not because livable places with amenities located within walking distance are expensive to build or maintain. It's because there aren't enough of them, primarily because in very large tracts of every metropolitan area they are illegal to build under current zoning ordinances. That's how you get cute prewar streetcar suburbs that are ludicrously unaffordable - the neighborhoods were cheap to build at the time and could be cheap to build today, the prices are all because people love living there and we made it illegal to build more.
Postwar suburban sprawl is monstrously expensive to build and maintain. You need to build and maintain an incredible amount more infrastructure per person, and because the properties themselves are less livable and car-dependent, fewer people want to and can afford to live there, which makes them "cheaper."
The answer is not to force people to live in car dependent sprawl. It's to build more walkable places so that the cost comes down.
Especially in the US I don't see an issue with both building out and being walkable or livable without cars. One just has to plan it properly. There are tons of medium sized cities around the world that get some of it right already, possibly by accident. I don't think we need to go Tokyo style or New York style density with millions upon millions of people being crammed into skypscrapers and every inch of soil covered in asphalt or concrete. Sure there's Central Park but not much more and it's so full of people it's unbelievable. So many people all crammed into one space generates so many issues that otherwise don't exist.
I think lots of medium sized cities, say 150-500k, can easily provide enough public transport to make it liveable, provide enough green space to make it liveable and provide city centers with lots of concrete and asphalt for those that want that to make it completely walkable. Before you say that its impossible, I have lived in such cities and they work just fine. In my younger years I lived in such a downtown and everything was within walking distance. Work, groceries, pubs even stores. And it was absolutely safe to walk all over downtown, half drunk in the middle of the night to get from one pub to the next or home. Sure, to go to IKEA I had to take a car and drive to the outskirts of the next city of similar size. But how often do I go to IKEA? Once, when I moved in. The a bit older me had to then make a choice of moving to a particular side of town to be close enough to the office and such. With remote work it wouldn't matter. I could've stayed where I was. Get to the city center? 15 minute train ride after walking 5 minutes to the train.
Almost everyone in my circles are loving big city life while working remotely. It depends on your life circumstances, and what you enjoy, but let’s not generalize that urban lifestyle is bad. Meeting new people, enjoying indoor activities, walking around and etc. are not dying anytime soon, and rent prices show how people are still willing to join in.
In my forties I became less enamoured by city life and in my fifties, now living in a rural location and working remotely, if I never see the inside of a city again then that's fine by me.
Of course, the key is that you can have both with the right transportation options.
I don't live in a suburb so it would be very odd for me to complain about a hypothetical suburb I don't live in, even though I'd have more complaints if I did live in a suburb. Just how HN as a whole talks about making tech jobs better (e.g. this remote work thread, which isn't relevant to most jobs) far more than it does about other jobs: it's just more relevant to the people here, and even if they overall like their tech job, they want it to be better.
I agree, but even then I'm pretty much done with cities and that benefit would be wasted on me :)
I live in the city. It's loud af, but general traffic is only a small part of it. Essential services like police, ambulance, and fire sirens, and trash collection are massively loud. Then you've got bars blasting music on Fridays. People shouting, laughing, and, in general, existing (often till the wee hours of the morning). They there's the meth-fueled tweakers shouting obscenities. Construction noises. Road work. etc..
Density in general is loud.
If you are starting as an average,non FAANG engineer in an expensive city it probably sucks a bit more.
Extensive subway system has always been one of the main differences of how enjoyable city life actually is in the various cities I've lived in. Thinking about a car as just a time saving activity versus a necessity (even if it's a ride share) is extremely freeing.
If that is your metric, then there isn't a single big city in the US aside from NYC (and, maaaaybe, Chicago).
With all other big cities in the US, you can technically get away by using public transport exclusively, but with a really giant caveat - your place of living, your place of work, and all the other places you would want to visit are all, by sheer luck, located near public transport routes. There is a non-zero number of people in this situation, but it requires a great deal of luck and specific choices to be made for that to happen.
To be more specific, I will use Seattle as an example. We have a solid lightrail and bus system, and the expansion of lightrail has been going great. Public transport covers a lot of places and areas one might need or want to go to. But it doesn't cover an even larger amount of places/areas. I personally know plenty of people here who live without cars, and even the most pro-public-transport of them resort to Uber/Lyft fairly often. Not as a time-saving activity, but out of necessity.
So you need a car, just paying for one as a service instead of direct ownership.
It's kind of distressing to hear someone express "Just Uber everywhere" as the ideal template for a car-free lifestyle, with walkability and public transportation relegated to "bonus points." I live car-free in the metro area outside of D.C. and primarily get around by bus and bicycle. I suspect that it requires a much lower budget than Ubering everywhere and you can live a lot more healthily by doing so too.
edit: I'd also like to point out that when you impose such a high price tag on all of your spatial displacements, you discourage yourself from doing it more. With walking, cycling and public transit, you open yourself up to a lot more serendipitous and impulsive trips. Today I cycled a few minutes to the park and did some work on a picnic table because I just felt like I wanted a change of scenery. Then I came back an hour later. Doing that with Uber would have felt absurd.
Umm ... Those all require a car, it just might not be _your_ car. It doesn't help make cities accessible and walkable.
There's no inherent reason why this should be so. Big cities can and do provide a marvelous life experience.
But almost all big cities in the US suffer from total mismanagement. IMHO, the greatest immediate goal for the US should be to work out how to correct that.
My job is to somehow be productive despite the best efforts of management to interfere. Being remote has greatly helped that.
Neither of these things are good for an employee.
A world where none of your coworkers have any shared background with you or where you can lose an interview at a local company to someone 700 miles away sounds like hell.
Do you have an example?
The examples are the rule and it's instead hard to think of any exceptions.
So you're against diversity? Differing backgrounds and points of view can only be a good thing. For coworkers, for the product, for the company. I know it's en vogue now, but it really is important.
> where you can lose an interview at a local company to someone 700 miles away
Hiring is not zero-sum. With the current and likely future dev market, there's enough jobs for everyone. Companies should consider applicants regardless of location of residence, and offer the same compensation as well.
All of the pro-diversity platitudes like "diversity is a strength" are never justified with data, they're just said as truisms you're supposed to blindly believe and repeat.
Why does nobody ever talk about how homogeneity is a strength? The comradery you used to have in mining villages where all workers had a tightly shared heritage and all grew up together was probably the strongest workforce you could hope for. But workers with those kinds of strong bonds do scary things like forming unions and going on strike, we don't want any of that! And that's why Amazon tracks lack of workplace diversity as a metric for risk of union formation :)
As I'm sure you're aware, software development is very different from physical labor. For one, it's a creative endeavor, where different points of view stemming from different backgrounds can only have a positive effect on the end product.
Think of it in terms of code reviews. Does the product benefit more from being reviewed by teammates from the same schools and employment backgrounds, or by ones with different life and professional experiences? I can't point to any studies to prove this, but from personal experience I'd argue it's the latter.
Besides, getting to know people from different backgrounds and cultures can only expand your own view points and make you a better developer and person.
Your point about companies pushing diversity to prevent unions sounds conspiratorial at best. Strong bonds can and do form regardless of culture.
I'd say it's far more engineering than creative. You're writing code to meet the specifications of a client. I don't think the race of the person writing that code makes a difference.
>Does the product benefit more from being reviewed by teammates from the same schools and employment backgrounds, or by ones with different life and professional experiences
It benefits from being reviewed by people who have lots of experience writing different types of software. Which has nothing to do with ethnic diversity.
>Besides, getting to know people from different backgrounds and cultures can only expand your own view points and make you a better developer
Meaningless platitude, unless you can back this up with data
>Your point about companies pushing diversity to prevent unions sounds conspiratorial at best.
I stand corrected. Corporations gonna corporate /shrug
However I disagree with the conclusion:
> It appears it's nothing more than a union busting tactic to divide and conquer their own workforce so they'll be easier to control and accept lower wages.
Quite the sensationalist take. Again, I don't have data to back this up, but IME a diverse team produces better results and I'd rather work in one than not.
In practice "diversity" is more often people from the same schools and employment backgrounds, with just a bit more variation in sex or race or ethnicity.
One motivator is societal good and fairness to ensure that great opportunities are as equally available as possible, and that nobody avoids or leaves the industry due to their race or gender.
The other is making sure you have more demographic variation that can make a better product for more people. A classic example is avoiding gaffs in ML models based on skin color. All else equal, the more representative your employees are of your target user base, the more likely someone is to raise the right questions early. This is especially true for consumer tech where engineers are part of the process of deciding what gets built, but also true in cases like thinking about ML fairness.
It was certainly good for the owners of the mines and other extractive businesses to have their workers feel some sense of loyalty to each other based on where they were born. Not so much for the workers themselves that had fewer opportunities for growth, nor their families as the mines closed and the towns died.
> But workers with those kinds of strong bonds do scary things like forming unions and going on strike, we don't want any of that!
There are plenty of unions made up of people from all sorts of backgrounds. Some of them span states (or are at least affiliated with organizations that span states). I don't know where you got this idea that there's a connection between birthplace and unionization.
I assure you, diversity that would actually impact production in some big way is not the diversity being hired for. Just look at how many psychological tests emphasize a variety of personalities, meanwhile hiring tries to find the same car with a different paint job.
This really isn't the same "diversity" as "integrating marginalized communities", though.
So yes, I am against the particular kind of diversity that prefers hiring a wealthy brahman living in India over the inner-city kid who needs a leg up.
I'm also opposed to the kind of "diversity" that puts a substantial portion of our domestic workforce out of a job.
Neither of these is what "diversity" used to mean; the term is being coopted by those who would benefit from lowering working wages.
A world where I have to work with what the local market offers sounds like russian roulette. I don't want to be constrained by where my parents decided to live.
I'd feel pretty terrible about my ability if one of the best things about me was proximity to a building. I live in the midwest and I like it in the midwest, and I'm quite happy with a ~future~ present where I'm competing with people around the world for a job I want and not stuck to the one of the 10 or so places I could do my kind of work here.
You might be in the top 1%, but 99% of people aren't. Not everyone is able to compete globally against 3 billion other people. Most people are unexceptional and average. And that's okay. Those are the workers keep the world moving forward.
It is perfectly okay to just be the best person at something in your town or local area. Telling people "you should feel pretty terrible about your ability if you aren't one of the best people in the world" is telling 99.99% of the population they should feel forever worthless.
IMO, if a person somewhere in the world is better qualified for the job than me - it's ok. They worked hard to get where they are and their work should be compensated fairly.
but he did not say this at all. not even literally.
you merely think he implied it, which is still a leap, since all this person described to you was how they personally internalize their work.
your disdain for competition makes it harder to read.
It's true that if in an absolute sense you're in the bottom rung of the labor pool then a global market will be more likely to sort you into a job with low desirability. I sympathize; I'm from Cincinnati, and if my employer were in the Bay Area (and paying Bay Area wages) it would have been harder for me to get a job there. But I'm not that sympathetic, because a global market means someone with a better fit but no local options can find a job. It means that if the market for data scientists in Cincinnati dries up I still have a chance.
American cities, especially downtowns, are in the middle of doing the exact opposite of becoming unlivable. I'm not talking opinions here, I'm talking about factual changes in the context of American history.
American city downtowns started as, essentially, the entire city, with a diverse mix of residents, commerce, and industry. As the industrialization progressed, those downtowns morphed into commercial-only zones as most other uses migrated outward. [1]
Residential living was very rare in city centers in America, with only slum living left. Since then, however, American cities are re-introducing residential life to city centers and redesigning them around mixed use and essentially revitalizing them. [1]
So this idea that big cities are "increasingly unlivable" is more of a cynical opinion rather than a matter of historical fact.
Also, in terms of sustainability, cities still win out. Suburban and rural development fragments animal habitats and uses more land per person. More time and miles are needed in your car burning oil to get around. City dwellers who walk and take transit are more carbon efficient than suburban and rural drivers.
Counter-intuitively, water quality is better in cities where more people are connected to a treated municipal water source. Sewage is also better managed in cities. [2]
Now, on to what's my actual opinion...regarding asynchronous work: it's awesome if you're already at a senior level of skill, but to me it seems absolutely horrendous for new graduates and junior level employees. It's difficult to do "apprenticeship" asynchronously. The idea of a future of asynchronous work is also incredibly software-biased. For example, when Apple wants their employees back in the office there's good reason: they design hardware.
[1] https://placesjournal.org/article/downtown-a-short-history-o...
[2] https://www.treehugger.com/environmentally-responsible-urban...
Liveable is a subjective term, but water or air quality, or environmental footprint varies a great deal between countries. Cities consume most of the energy and produce most of the greenhouse gases for obvious reasons. Historically big cities became increasingly liveable, however my opinion is that we are at a turning point, in average big cities will become unliveable, some will improve slightly, and many will falter greatly. However urbanization will go on, people will continue to fill cities looking for opportunities, ironically climate change will even hasten this, eventually turning big cities into death traps.
Nothing shows that corporate support for the environment is mostly lip service when it comes to lack of support for remote work despite the major environmental benefits that it brings.