Dreaded commute to the city is keeping offices mostly empty
wsj.com
wsj.com
At the "new" office, no one has an assigned desk, so I have to take everything I need with me to my desk and pack it up at the end of the day. My company is distributed so I spend half the day on zoom meetings with people in other offices... and even with relatively few people in the office it's already hard to book a room for a meeting. There's enough background noise in the open office that I keep headphones on most of the time while I'm at my desk. We do get free lunches at the office which is a nice perk, but food is prepared off-site, so menus tend to be designed around food that stands up to this model of food that can be prepared hours ahead of time.
My commute is less than 30 minutes (one-way) and is a pretty pleasant drive.... it takes an hour out of my day, but it's not the primary reason I don't want to go to the office.
I still don't get how we as a species went "this is fine". The complete loss of audiovisual privacy is such an immense drain. I'll buy the "being close together works better" argument, but I still can't grasp how that offsets all the distractions in the modern office.
I think a bunch of people on hacker news are discounting how much more you can learn in an office with helpful colleagues. When I was a new developer I absorbed so much information in the office just from being able to ask people questions in person. Just from people overhearing a conversation I was having and saying "I think you probably want to do it like X instead" and explaining! In my opinion many people are discounting the development of newer engineers. I'm sure it can happen remotely but remote work requires more intentional coordination and that's one area that I doubt it's happening more effectively than in an office (on the whole). I'm not saying in person meetings are awesome but comparatively, interacting with other people is easier and more enjoyable as opposed to having the same meeting digitally.
>I think a bunch of people on hacker news are discounting how much more you can learn in an office with helpful colleagues
It's tradeoffs, which I alluded to. It's not "you're forgetting X", it's more "are you really, really sure trading X against Y is the better deal here?" I'm young enough to have started in open offices, it was okay in the first few weeks and afterwards I started wondering whether being open to literally any passerby was worth the upgrade from IM to physical presence.
The moment I heard open offices reduced personal interaction compared to cubicles was the moment I casted doubt on anything regarding open offices and their efficacy.
I was also able to learn a lot more from my peers and to build work type relationships much more efficiently, many of which have paid dividends over the course of my career.
I can also clearly see that the junior engineers at my company are developing much slower than they did when we were in office. I'm pretty sure that can be rectified with better process, but I think it's really significant that being remote makes those sorts of things much harder, and when things are hard orgs will often get them badly wrong.
I think this varies dramatically based on many factors, such as ADHD, introversion, etc. When I really wanted to get work done, I'd go home even though work from home wasn't allowed. They never fired me or even reprimanded me because I think they knew the office environment was BS. Also, I was one of the most productive employees in the entire company, and that was due largely to me working from home.
A hot desking setup where you can't sit next to your colleagues like OP described is a total waste of time.
Only in the last few decades, and only a minority of Human population in that period, has there been so much emphasis on "privacy".
Many of the most complex (software) products in the world are open source: web browser engines like Blink and Gecko, operating systems like Linux and its various distributions, compilers like GCC and LLVM, nearly every programming language, etc. Nearly all of that work is done collaboratively within a group, but it is not done in physical proximity to the rest of the group. Which works fine!
Happy to bookmark this comment and check back in 2025 if startups are getting created in person or are fully remote right from the genesis.
My company shipped several ground breaking projects during COVID enforced WFH where there was not even the possibility of getting together in person.
And now as we've grown we've added teams all over the globe (3 offices in the USA, one in Canada, 2 in Europe and one coming online soon in Australia), so collaboration on a complex project means communicating with teams that are asleep during your working hours.
Now that most of the team is churned, I am observing a steep drop in productivity. New members have neither any shared context nor any meaningful bonds between them. If I were to bet, I would put my money on in-person teams easily outperforming fully-remote teams. Looking forward to see some data in the next few years.
At the start of the pandemic, my company (a large well known Bay-Area tech company) saw improvements in our developer productivity metrics.
Over 2020, they faded.
I'm at a new company now, we have done a lot of hiring, seen a lot of churn, and it is really hard to get "think big" projects running.
Meanwhile family and pets provide social companionship. Why do you consider that inferior?
Online collaboration is pretty lame. It is very transactional, builds very shallow relationships and takes immense effort to agree on complex decisions. I have been doing fully remote since March 2020 (duh) and have met almost all the new colleagues since then in person for work offsites. Most common sentiment is that no one misses commute but otherwise, in-person is so much better to work with each other.
Funnily enough, my company toots the horn of fully-remote. But execs have started meeting in person regularly. It’s just not advertised broadly, but bumping into one of them occasionally and being friends with their assistants reveal so much about “remote for proles but in-person for execs” setup.
Now when I go to the office, I sit in a row of 6 desks, with nothing blocking me from the person in front of me but a monitor, I long for the days of cubicles
No, it's some real estate agents convincing spineless C-level execs that they need a new office because Facebook did it. Having a small team, say less than 8 in the same sufficiently large room may work great, assuming that synergy translates to 30+ people who neither know nor care for each other is beyond daft.
Throughout history a huge chunk of us as a species did not have audiovisual privacy at work, and a massive percentage of the jobs throughout history never had it and still don't. Its immensely rare for us as a species to have full audiovisual privacy at our workplace, and has been for a long, long time. Do teachers have audiovisual privacy for the majority of their workday? Chefs? Construction jobs? Factory workers? Retail workers? Even back in the day tons of white collar jobs had large spaces with open desks for "computers" (the people, not the machines) or typists or drafters.
Do these scenes of design spaces and other offices seem like quiet places with private offices for each worker?
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/cb/02/98/cb02981dccefb68f67cd...
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/99/d5/b9/99d5b92533e332fbaa5c...
https://i.pinimg.com/474x/8d/c1/45/8dc145b0a90fb4509238aa145...
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/30/17/07/3017075666fb55b875bc...
https://www.officemuseum.com/IMagesWWW/UWA_Dexter_Horton_Nat...
And those are just of "white collar" office workers. Do these look like private spaces?
https://www.tshaonline.org/images/handbook/entries/TT/textil...
https://www.history.com/.image/t_share/MTU3ODc5MDg2NDM0NzU1O...
Are brickmakers and steelworkers and mechanics and factory workers and lab techs and pharmacists a different species because they never gave up the loss of audiovisual privacy at their workplace? No. Its an absurd and vastly insulting statement BlargMcLarg was making.
And then you have to be under constant surveillance, "why do you leave so early?" (I've been there for 8 hours already, so, fuck you very much)" and the "why do you go to a private cell for your meeting? (to not annoy you)"
The worst part? I sometimes do meeting with half of my colleague sitting right next to me in the same call. With my headset. Why?
If you're wfh anyway, yeah just call in over video.
And you are correct, my question was horribly phrased before =)
EDIT: and just for reference, I lead a small team and am not really management and we're still remote. We seem to do well and these are the metrics we go by, so I'm generally kind of curious about this. Occasionally my manager asks about hours worked, and I'm vague about it, but our output is better than most teams and of a high quality, so she doesn't peak inside too often =/
Hybrid remote doesn’t work - go either fully on-prem or fully remote.
Idk, I guess I haven't experienced major issues with that personally.
It's hard to do the right thing sometimes.
Focusing on "reasons why I don't like the office" is missing the point, IMO. A lot of folks are betting on the long-term results of a short-term dislocation, but ignoring why things were as they were before the dislocation. It's sort of like the commentariat who come up with hot-takes in the aftermath of a natural disaster, and conclude "life will never be the same"...but within a few years life is, almost always, pretty much the same.
Yes, there are obvious upsides to working from home, but there are also fundamental reasons that we used to go into the office, and dismissing them all as "the old way of doing it" is facile. I think, in the "long" run (i.e. the next few years), the same forces that led humans to form cities throughout all of human existence will prevail.
Said differently: offices sucked before the pandemic too. The technology existed for remote work before the pandemic, too. Yet even in the most remote-friendly work environments, we went out of our way to make time for in-person communication. There was no sudden shift in technology or quality here. We did some short-term things to deal with a short-term circumstance, and now we're seeing the hangover of those choices. But the forces at play are largely unchanged.
If I had to wager, I'd bet that being in the office will be how you get noticed and advance in your career. Making on-site visits will be how you get the sale. Having in-person communication will offer productivity gains over video chat. The incentives to in-person communication will therefore accumulate over time, until we're back to where we started.
In every job I had working from the office I didn't have to get noticed before quitting for a better job and advancing my career.
It certainly happens, but it's not a counterargument to what I'm saying.
It always helps to be visible, even if your long-term plan is to job hop into infinity (though I have to say this as another PSA: job-hopping will eventually stop working. It's a notably programmer-since-2012 phenomenon to assume that leaping from place to place will result in a monotonic increase in your salary and/or prestige forever and ever.)
Smart managers pick the best people if the project is important, they certainly won't pick a mediocre developer just because he shows up in the office every day. Attendance is no replacement for hard work and aptitude, unless you are in high school.
>It always helps to be visible
It does, but filling a seat in a cube isn't the best way. The best way is to solve business problems.
>It's a notably programmer-since-2012 phenomenon to assume that leaping from place to place will result in a monotonic increase in your salary and/or prestige forever and ever.
I don't think anyone thinks it's forever. There's certainly a cap to how much you can earn as a software developer/engineer/architect/x working for someone. There are exceptions where you can negotiate some equity or percentage of revenue, but you almost certainly can't do that outside the initial offer phase. In other words, you won't get it at the company where you are already employed; the negotiation window is most likely closed forever.
I doubled my salary 2x from 1998-2001. Then the dot bomb happened, but it's not a new phenomenon. Companies that hire for x amount only give y% when giving out raises. It's pretty close to inflation. The trick to having a larger salary is to get hired with a larger salary, full stop.
I wish it wasn't that way, I usually like staying at a company for a while, but as long as traditional raises are 2-5%, that's what the hiring market wants.
That's a classic move. Businesses could offer a significant premium over remote roles to attract candidates, and could easy afford it if you take their in office productivity claims at face value, but that costs money, much easier to make handwavy, unfalsifiable (at least with the information you have as an employee) claims about how you will be rewarded someday in the future.
As you note, you can do things to try to fight our fundamentally social nature, but it's like fighting the tides.
However I know how promotions tend to go in most companies, and 9/10 you are better off interviewing at another firm and getting promoted that way on a hours worked/pay received basis. With that knowledge I see this as a rather empty incentive.
I think this is true, somewhat. But I also will say that as remote work has become more commonplace, it is less true. In my mind, it's mostly about social norms, more than some universal absolute. It used to be the word on the street that if you wanted to get ahead at any FAANG you had to move to the Bay, rather than working in NYC, Austin, et al. That's hasn't been true for awhile, and with remote work now commonplace it's no longer true you need to be in the office to get ahead.
I've been perm remote for quite some time, and in that time I've shifted from Eng to PM, and have moved ahead in my career quite significantly. A lot of that is due to remote becoming more socially acceptable over time, and part of that is that I learned remote skills in how to appropriately communicate my successes so others know about them without needing to hear about it at the watercooler.
Different work environments require different processes for self-promotion to be noticed, but it's still definitely possible while remote, and it becomes more possible the more remote work becomes the norm rather than the exception. I see no reason that we require RTO for people to advance their careers other than butt-seatism managers who mostly should just retire at this point.
I agree that the technology have fundamentally changed and that it's difficult for companies to revoke the benefit of working from home after it was granted. I do think the needle has shifted now that there are metrics to support or oppose permanently working from home for specific positions.
The past is not a predictor for the future; if so we would still all be using horses instead of cars.
Big reason that there will likely be a fundamental shift to more remote and hybrid working options is that just there is a mountain of inertia from the Industrial age which carried over to the Information Age.
The pandemic has initiated a great experiment which individual companies would have never tried for risk-avoidance reasons.
Well, that depends on whether the point is my own job satisfaction, or my employer's belief that making me work in a different environment is better for him.
I'm at the point in my career where I can focus on the first point.
Which is the opposite direction. I don't mind being in the office, especially on a hybrid scheduled. But I hate not having my own office. I hate having to share a giant room with people.
Yeah, somehow management has conveniently forgotten that an "office" has a door. If it doesn't have a door, it's not an "office".
With open floor plans, it's hardly a surprise that nobody wants to come back to the office.
For me, it's the separation of work/home and seeing people in person. That said, there are also nice benefits - view, lunch/snacks, EV charging, better lighting and ventilation.
When it became evident we were in for the long haul we started looking to move again. We ended up moving to a 3 bed house with garden in a tiny village close to our family paying much less rent, but across the country from the office.
I can't understate the massive increase in quality of life this brought us. Being closer to the family I don't feel the need to socialize with colleagues at work, and I didn't need to meet anyone in office for about 2 years.
> Quality of life cooped up in a dense urban setting, especially with a family, is awful.
This is unbelievably subjective, and you simply cannot state this as if it's a fact. I have lived in rural, suburban, and dense urban settings, and my quality of life was by far, by far, the highest in the city. Almost every aspect of my life was improved when I moved to a dense urban center.
Urban centers are not simply desirable because of jobs! Many of us simply prefer the lifestyle they afford!
Same here, and the other families that lived in the dense urban center with us would agree. In fact, when we were thinking of moving from suburb back to city, we literally stopped families at parks in the city and asked them. Literally every one of the 10+ families we asked told us we should absolutely move!
Yes, we didn't have a driveway or big yard, but we did have a nearby park which became our yard, and most of our adventures didn't require a car, anyway. We'd simply walk out the door and go to one of the parks, restaurants, museums, etc. within a short walk. We'd bike or take the subway for longer distances. Without a yard or house to take care of, I had both weekend days available.
I could go on and on. My family and I found the energy of the city invigorating and I'm totally cool with the fact that others may not, or that going out and about all the time is not their idea of awesome.
Frequently you get people pointing out that highly dense areas require different approaches to planning and transportation, but that's hardly pushing some lifestyle on anyone who isn't interested in it.
But don't make the mistake of conflating 700 sqft apts w/urban centers. On today's remote wages, an engineer can afford the kind of modest home in a walkable urban area in many parts of the US, but affording that on even NY and Bay Area Big Tech wages is looking out of grasp for that next generation. It certainly looks a lot riskier.
As for the gym, the workshop, the office, I'd personally rather share those with the community. As mentioned, I'm in the city because I enjoy being around people, which isn't to say that I want to work in an office (hell no), but I do want to work in public among people doing their own work (and who, unlike co-workers, won't be constantly pestering me with questions).
Which is to say, my riposte is that the older I get the more I realize that community is what I crave, and that I was dissatisfied with the community that I found in my rural and suburban lives: finding a community in the city is harder, because you actually have to try, but much more fulfilling IME.
If I'm honest, a big factor for me is probably related to my financials. When I was young, I was pretty poor and lived in shitty neighborhoods in low quality but high density buildings. Thirty years later, I live in a pretty great suburb in my own house with my best friend/wife, dog and my kids (who are home from university for the summer). The night sky here is decent, but I know it could be even better.
Cities Aren't Loud: Cars Are Loud [1]
Having lived in many different types of cities, it is always the car-centric downtowns and suburban main-streets that are loudest. Well designed & walkable cities are actually pretty mild when it comes to noise.
Most of the US has outlawed the 'middle housing' [1], leaving us with massive crammed skyscraper concrete jungles or sprawling suburbia.
Cities in developed countries around the world do not have to made this trade-off between space and walkability. Apartments are sufficiently big for families, while having everything within arms reach.
If anything, public spaces allow for more amenities available for more people. Unless your definition of space is 'private' space (private gardens, private yards, private gyms), there is plenty of space in well planned cities.
Lastly, suburbs simply do not pay their fair share in taxes. [2] They are incredibly inefficient and deplete city resources such that the city goes bankrupt the second a recession hits. I would be fine with suburbs if that's what people want. But, pay your fair share in taxes, renounce any high ground on the climate change debate and for the love of God, stop making anything that isn't a suburb illegal to build. (looking at you Berkeley...and every other deep-blue liberal suburb)
If I could choose I'd probably go for a house, not as big, within 1 hour trip to a big city. That way I could get the best balance for my lifestyle.
People who want to and can work remotely should move to suburbs, dropping rents and housing costs in the dense urban centers.
Suburbs should also be redesigned with more neighborhood commercial so that they're less designed around driving for miles to massive clusters of big box stores.
It would also be interesting to have more decentralized density, so clusters of density out in present-day suburbia. That could provide a bit more population density to support the commercial real estate for the surrounding low density residential.
Look up a listing of music playing this weekend in NYC, for example. Look up arts and museums. etc.
I think the big kicker is that city living in the US is drastically overpriced.
We moved to the countryside to be closer to my wife's family. My family lives in a big city in another country, so we could have moved there instead, if that didn't involve a massive pay cut.
For every person that took a jaunty walk down the block, or a breezy bike ride to work, there were many others that had to make a major sacrifice to come in each day. We can't go back to the way things were, it just didn't make any sense.
I enjoyed my time in the office, but those days are behind me. I have more money in my pocket, more time, and more quality of life. I get to be near my family all year instead of in a random city where I am rootless. I'm not going back.
The exaggerated adjective is the argument. Your co-workers could choose to live elsewhere, so I wonder if the commute was so bad from their perspective. Those cities in particular have good public transit, which lets you live further away and commute conveniently. Many millions of people live in those cities, and choose to - the real estate prices reflect the demand.
You don't have to want that, but I don't see how we can tell everyone else what is good and bad for them.
In my experience these tend to be executives who can afford to live on expensive real estate close to the city center. And therefore, have a very short commute.
That's how cities where I live and people who I talk to live are laid out anyways. Downtown core is most expensive, and then the further out you go the cheaper it gets and the more painful the commute to the downtown core is.
Plus a decent chunk of the 43,000 road deaths a third of all spinal injuries and a million days spent in the hospital every year from collisions.
When WFH, there were days where I wouldn't even leave the house. I had no idea what the weather was outside. Now I know what you're thinking but no, I couldn't maintain a habit of getting out of the house to do exercise for exercise's sake. The bike commute always felt different because it wasn't primarily about exercise and if you're committed to going to the office, you can't skip it no matter how much you want to.
Now that all said, I don't believe any level of car commuting is healthy. Kill that with fire and WFH!
Maybe I also understated how the change of scenery from working in a different place was also helpful. It marks a mental shift between work and home but downtown is also just more visually exciting and interesting than home.
You're talking about your own subjective preferences and motivations like they're universal constants of the human condition that apply to everyone.
What you said is that you can't handle the freedom of choice and need a manager to force those decisions upon you.
Sometimes people need a forced window to do something. The commute was a nice window for reading, listening to podcasts, disconnecting.
I like driving, lots of people do. A nice 20 minute drive is a good commute. Bumper to bumper traffic for more than 40 is hell.
I moved and no longer have the bike option (taking bike friendly roads would lead to a 90+ minute bike commute), but even an easy bike commute would not make me want to return to the office.
I've replaced the bike commute with an indoor spinning bike.
As far as the Bay goes, it feels like decisions about office placement are made with things like management or prestige in mind, rather than the average worker. For all the growth in the East Bay and Tri-Valley area, it seems like most office buildings continue to be built on the peninsula. Hayward is one of the most central locations in the bay and is largely used for... logistics and distribution?
I miss the office, but there's no way I'd give my current remote lifestyle for the way things were before (average 1.5 hours of commute time per day). Mind you, this is _after_ optimizing my home buying process to shorten my commute as much as possible. I have a neighbor that bought a Tesla mainly for the tag that lets you use it in carpool lanes. Everyone has better things to do than sit in cars (or other transport) for hours a day, and its a sad thing that more effort hasn't been expended to improve this before now.
Our company made that management focus explicit - our main office is on the Peninsula and before COVID hit we opened an east bay (Pleasanton) office, which happened to be close to the homes of the CEO, CFO and a couple other C-level execs.
Employees that lived in the East bay thought "Great! We can go to that office and avoid that long cross-bay commute", but no, "Finance and Marketing are moving to the East Bay Office along with senior leadership, it is not available for drop-in by other employees". Which didn't please a lot of people that had organized their life around the Peninsula commute and now have to go to the East Bay
That actually makes perfect sense for logistics and distribution… but yes, it would make sense for office commutes as well.
Now, if the program continues to run in the event of hardware failures, we need to re-examine the assumptions we made when writing it in the first place. Especially with regards to different operating modes. I tried to emphasize this repeatedly during the meeting.
It is the same thing with our economy and work in general. In the past, there was expensive infrastructure needed to carry out the company's functions. Even if we're not talking about industrial equipment, the typical office worker would still need a typewriter, access to lots of file cabinets, other office equipment, telephones, and so on. Almost none of that could easily be replicated if the worker wanted to work from home.
And so everyone got used to the idea of going into the office or factory on work days. That became the norm, and until recently it wasn't widely questioned.
But nowadays, you basically just need power and Internet, which is widely available to most workers at home anyway.
I'd have preferred to live in a world without pandemics, but if having a pandemic causes more people to question the assumption you have to commute to work, that is a side benefit.
The power and Internet part is easy - a quiet room can be a challenge for some though. At one point in the pandemic, a friend tried coming over and working in my basement because her family was so distracting at home (2 parents + 3 kids in a 3-bedroom house with virtual work and school and a baby crying, etc). I'm told homebuyers are emphasizing having enough space for home offices these days, but that's easier to attain for some than others, especially with the run-up in housing prices over the past couple of years.
So yeah, for some people it's easy ... for others, not so much.
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20220517-the-death-of-m...
If you look at a lot of the recent layoffs, most are in tech companies doing B2C rather than B2B.
Cities are full of drug addicts, homeless people, and empty shops. And crime. I don’t even like going downtown for leisure.
House prices and rents have rocketed so people who moved the last 2 years to upsize have done so even further from the office.
Not to mention presenteeism spreading viruses.
Not to mention awful noisy offices designed by sadists.
It’s far more complicated than just the “commute”.
That doesn't at all describe the cities I've seen post-pandemic. Cities are full of restaurants, arts, people, and energy. I don't see many empty shops, though more than usual (I assume businesses went bankrupt at higher rate during the pandemic). It does describe the beliefs of people who listen to reactionary commentary but don't go to cities, or believe the talk shows rather than simply looking around them.
There are people who are homeless or addicted to drugs, but they have no impact on me and never have. Try just talking to someone - they are just people, not monsters, no different than the other people I meet except in their clothes.
Anyone with a different experience or opinion is ignorant. Got ya.
I’ve done plenty of travel recently to plenty of cities, in various countries.
Was it always like this or has this gotten worse because of the pandemic?
It took a pandemic to get people to realize that the status quo of hopping in their car and sitting in traffic twice a day to get to work and back every day is a hugely frustrating waste of time.
It doesn't have to be this way. We can build more housing near where people work. We can build bike lanes and public transit. It's entirely possible to have small and easy carless commutes to work.
> urban areas where people live closer to work have a higher return-to-office rate
No surprise here. I'll be coming back to work often I expect, but I live a 15 minute bike ride from my office. It'll be a nice change of pace for me to go to the office, and effectively an effortless shift.
We need the political will to change and stop repeating the same failed mistakes of the last 100 years that mires us in car dependency. Stop protecting SFH areas from any and all new housing development. Stop building new highways. Start creating new housing everywhere. Start creating transportation alternatives.
You find it that way, but obviously others love it. Rather than declaring it, it would be interesting to know what you found to be good and bad about city life.
Perhaps it's to some extent personal preference, but those preferences grew out of having experienced both settings under discussion. One thing that you can't get around though: getting sick is much easier inside of a city -- this is why I can't understand how many of the same individuals who often are very fond of cities can still be after also being those who are most concerned about pandemics. Research also has shown that ideal human groups are no larger than around 200. Extrapolate that to get an idea of how pathological a city-based culture can become.
If you absorb the full picture painted by the famous "mouse utopia" experiment, you can get some further insight into what, over the course of decades, built my own understanding and perspective on different living modes, especially as both relate to city life. Its goal was to talk about overpopulation, but it more accurately could comment on over-concentrated population.
In general, working from home makes cities and public transit a lot less relevant. There isn't a strong reason for everyone to get on a train to the big city, if they can just sit at home and work. When you add crime, COVID-19, pollution, etc. into the mix the case for just staying home seems even better.
Out of curiosity, could you put the kids in one of those child trailers, or on a cargo bicycle?
> When you add crime, COVID-19, pollution, etc. into the mix the case for just staying home seems even better.
This reads like (though I don't know the parent at all) the argument of someone who doesn't spend time in cities or who just doesn't value what cities offer.
Crime rates are pretty low in cities (despite the media campaign trying to say how dangerous they are); pollution is mostly non-existent in most cities in economically advanced countries. Cities have services and experiences that are not available anywhere else. Where else can you find the food, music, arts, etc. that are in NY? The people? The public beauty such as the architecture?
They tried their best to make it enjoyable but I am so much happier in my home office with no background noise, no need to get dressed up, and being able to define my own schedule (I eat lunch at 3-4pm and bay tech orgs serve lunch at noon with all the smells disturbing me).
Yet another benefit for investing in housing and public transportation. Based on my proximity to public transportation, too, I have many job options close by, so I'm not likely to get stuck in a bad spot.
So imagine the US, but maybe 5 New York level dense cities, and the rest of the country like Portsmouth.
Unfortunately though, I think we can't really undo the damage that's been done so far, so the best we can do is try to heal these cities and make them dense in a nice way. Hong Kong is an anti-pattern, and so is Houston. IMO.
An hour each way is another full work shift by the end of just one week. No thanks.
I wouldn’t want to give up the ability to work from home, but I did really miss the physical activity.
Two, satellite offices often aren't any more convenient for commuters, and often don't save as much money as you expect. You have to duplicate infrastructure in more locations. My son worked in Manhattan. His coworkers lived in Connecticut and Long Island; travelling to Brooklyn or New Jersey wasn't substantially easier for them. Even commuting between adjacent boroughs can be a pain if mass transit is oriented around getting people from the suburbs to the city core.
The NYC subway system doesn't go to Jersey, it's often subway => commuter train, you're lucky if it doesn't involve a bus at some point.
This is in addition to other issues discussed, but atleast 2 people who were planning to go back now have indefinitely postponed plans.
It really is not that unsafe (sporadic incidents) but stacked along with other disadvantages, folks just dont want to go in.
If I had a little room, I wouldn't really mind. But right now the proposition is that I come into an open office that's too noisy/distracting to get real work done, then go to a conference room (often just 1 person in a 5 person room) to talk to people elsewhere. If I had an office with a door that closed, Ic ould take all my meetings and do all my head-down work in the office building.
The institutional owners of property may end up taking a haircut. This ultimately means pension funds in large part. Alongside deglobalisation, renewables (with stranded assets) and creeping automation, I wonder what options people and governments have to protect their wealth amidst creative destruction.
This is exactly why Mayor Adams wants people to come back to the office in NYC. NYC derives a big chunk of change from taxing corporate offices, and if the value goes down then NYC loses out on a lot of money.
The logic is pretty simple, if you are going to be stuck in rush hour commute home for 2 hours or you can walk to a city gym and work out for an hour, then jump into your commute and be home in an hour and 45 minutes, so it costs you 45 minutes of total time for 1 hour of gym time + you arrive home to take a shower and get ready for the evening vs trying to work out after the drain of a commute.
Meanwhile if you work from home, you can afford the space to have a home gym that you can use whenever you have time and don't need the drain of the commute at all, because you live farther from the city.
That sounds like a nightmare.
> work out for an hour, then jump into your commute and be home in an hour and 45 minutes
Still terrible.
> 1 hour of gym time + you arrive home to take a shower
1h45m of sweaty commute after 1h of gym? I don't think so.
Working from home I have better computer equipment, I don't have to waste time getting ready and driving in, half our team is remote so any meetings have to be over zoom anyway, our office doesn’t have assigned seating so I have to spend time wandering around looking for somewhere to work, etc. Such a no brainer.
you can always find a nice place to stay near work or your favorite spots in a very short time and for reasonable prices
in western cities (tech capitals) you spend months looking for the "least worse" overly expensive option and you're stuck there, too often you're living one city away and spend 1h each way on commuting
Many cities have public transit, which can reduce or simplify commutes.
I'm not hearing the drive less, live where you work crowd celebrating. Am I just not looking in the right places?