Remote work is killing big offices. Cities must change to survive
stackoverflow.blog
stackoverflow.blog
> While a lot of ink has been spilled on the future of work, the majority of Americans, and most people around the world, can’t actually do their jobs remotely.
Ok, so a majority of workers can't do their jobs remotely. Granted, many of these are not anchored to a city (medical offices are in the suburbs, truckers are mobile etc.) but a huge swath of people will still work in cities, at least part time. So this strikes me as another example of tech's myopia and why the tech world is increasingly disconnected from the majority of the country.
Simply put, most people can't work from home. Most people can't afford to buy a house 2 hours away from their office and hope to have the leverage to stay employed. Most people don't make six-figure salaries. Most people are afraid of lay-offs, are afraid of offshoring, are afraid of being antiquated.
And as I have said elsewhere, this almost obsessive focus on remote work could very well be very detrimental to those six-figure salaries and signing bonuses. Why pay USA wages when you can hire a Canadian or Mexican at 75% the cost? We are writing our own obituary and everyone seems to be cheering.
Finally, this is also a step _backwards_ for the environment. In cities like Boston, NYC, SFO etc. most workers commuted on public transit, at least part of the way or lived in dense neighborhoods not owning a car. Now they live in the exurbs and need a car to do anything. Now when they do go into the city they don't take public transit. People didn't stop living, they just moved out of the density and thus became more reliant on ICE vehicles to move about.
Much like the long-term damage of education loss was hard to quantify against the immediate risks of COVID, we will be paying the debt incurred by this almost cultish movement to make remote work the norm.
When in the office, I had discussions, meetings, and presentations which were all geared mainly to support the idea of the office culture over it's deliverable results. While I see people slacking more while remote, they also aren't creating busy work.
We'll see how it shakes out over the next few years. I suspect that remote teams will have an easier time with recruitment and retention, while being slightly more productive than in-office teams. In-office teams will probably be slightly more innovative by virtue of colocation with non-remote teams and a semi-forced need to do "something" with the time.
I'm a big proponent of remote work, but I haven't yet found a way to recreate those experiences over video chat.
Tom Brady, Wayne Gretsky, Michael Jordon, Larry Bird, Kobe Bryant, Joe Montana, LaBron James. Actual top-of-the-line talent drives everything. Sure, Kobe Bryant would not win against another team if he was the only person on his side - 5 against 1, but that is not the case. While total talent is great in all positions, the super talented can't be over-estimated. Mozart. Beethoven, Einstein. Raw talent is not nothing.
Have you tried lugging in a whole truckload of items on the train? A train/public transit works for work commute, but not for when need to get stuff done. Even in the densest city, I had a car for 10 years. Paid for parking and had a monthly active transit pass. Different things for different purposes. Not to mention, that I walked everywhere I can.
When you can hire someone on the cheap, it becomes a skills market. You get what you pay for.
Yeah, that totally makes sense. I live in the dense downtown of a sprawling urban area and own a car, but it's simply only used for going out on nights and weekends. For most everyday trips I walk or take transit.
OP's point is not that living in a city means you get to or have to give up your car. It's that in many American suburbs, any other mode of getting around for everyday trips - including walking - is simply untenable. Living in a walkable neighborhood with access to good transit gives you the best thing - the option of either public or private transportation. Most of these places, in the US, aren't in the suburbs.
You lost the plot in your defense. If skills are equal, and the Mexican can ask for less salary _and enjoy the same quality of life and purchasing power_ (due to the cost of living in their native country) as a 200k/year American dev it isn’t a skills market. It is very much a cost savings market.
And I am sorry but don’t delude yourself, that dev in Mexico or Colombia is just as talented as state-side devs. Couple their talent with the reality that you don’t even need to be a savant to build a SaaS app in JS and you will see that the privilege enjoyed by software engineers in the USA is on life support.
Where are these mythical cheap Canadians and Mexicans just as good as six-figure American talent? Where can I meet them?
We acquired something a while back in Montreal, Canada and it sure wasn't cheap. We actually got most of the team to relocate in the valley on O-1s but still have some guys over there but it's definitely not at 75%!
I mean, it might be different for devs who can't pass the stricter bar for US immigrations, but then you aren't hiring for the same positions anyways...
Well, they're not cheap any longer! You can meet them in America.
Why hasn't this happened already?
If the workers are equivalent, but much cheaper, surely everyone would do it?
The reality is that outsourcing is never a 1:1 replacement for in-house staff - regardless of where in the world the workers are based.
The attempt to arbitrage lower wages based on geography for highly skilled roles has almost invariably, over any meaningful length of time, run up against increased organizational costs and managerial overhead for all kinds of reasons. You name it.
My general impression is that it tends to work out as a "Rob Peter to pay Paul" kind of scenario - a wash or a net negative.
There are always stories where, when everything went really well for everyone involved, it worked out as an advantage, but those - in my view - are the exception to the rule.
Now Microsoft has run a training program for IBM Amazon and Dell for the first two years and, next thing you know, you are hiring inexperienced workers with different holidays, employment regulation, time zones, and primary languages to work for the same price as the college graduate in the USA.
International workers will help keep wage costs in the USA down a little. But the talent pool for developing software is still limited. Mexico and many other countries do have some excellent universities, but companies that try to hire there are going to have to contribute to the tech sector of the host country by training and hosting entry level workers. In addition, there will be demand in those countries for the workers you are training.
Finally, if you work in finance, defense, or payments processing you can expect your off-shore, near-shore workers to be limited in what they can do. You may end up having to hire workers specifically for those contracts.
Maybe it’s just me but I don’t really give much of a shit when I’m the only one in this office while the rest of my team is all over the world. And no I’m not going to cater to their needs when it’s outside of my normal hours. Deal with it, else I will (and have).
Why don’t companies just have local teams that are nodes in the broader graph?
A fully local team in California that works on X, and interacts with team Y that’s based in Singapore, and team Z in Europe.
Each team is self sufficient and works on a piece of the work that can be done by them. In conjunction with the other teams, we get global coverage without having some dumb working hours or waste of an office.
I don’t mind going to the office, and having worked as mainly a product engineer I like whiteboarding with our Product manager and other stakeholders, or getting on calls with customers to demo something (team in the same room, read body language).
Product teams benefit the most being local and all together. It’s hard to build a great product when everyone is not in the same room. Remote might work to make a decent product, but I don’t think you can build something great.
What we have now with a global workforce working together from different timezones has a lot of benefits and some downsides
Of course, 100% office based too.
Gitlab, Automaticc, Cockroach Labs...So many companies dispute this point.
The open source Linux team is fully remote for christs sake.
Meanwhile Microsoft is office based.
It seems to me the opposite of what you're saying is true.
Remote companies make great products, office companies make average products.
This was the most egregious part of this post, for the examples you outline. But I also take issue with the framing that remote workers are remote because they have an issue with coming into the office. As a remote employee of and on both before and after the pandemic, I've never had a problem with being in an office, and fully enjoy quarterly visits for a week.
Working from home, I put in my regular 40 hours, and then another 10-20 after-hours, depending on the week/deadlines/insomnia. But outside of that time, my family is not in a tech city. If I were a bachelor with no children this fact wouldn't matter as much. But as it is, when I go afk and back into my life, I want to be physically planted _where my life is_. It is incredibly uncomplicated.
EDIT: Loving how nobody on the left can remember the arson, riots, rapes, and murders for Floyd. Don’t worry, we can remind you every day.
WFH in NYC gives me the best of all worlds. As an introverts introvert I can work from home during most days. But I have a critical mass of top people to have breakfast,lunch, coffee, drinks, a walk in the park, whatever at my immediate fingertips. I don’t need to schedule a trip and I can be home to see the kids in 5-30 minutes after wrapping up. In many ways it’s the best of all worlds.
Not planning to go back to a major city unless remote work takes a full shift back to office.
Executive summary: Cities must change. Sherlock.
Every single one of these office towers has an owner that wants to make a profit. They’ll do it if they can. Class A office buildings will take tenants from Class B towers, who in turn will take tenants from Class C towers. And if the zoning allows it, the Class C buildings will convert to residential. Because people really do like living downtown (even if you or me don’t want to). This is actually what the NYC mayor was talking about as an option but the article either didn’t realize it or decided not to engage with that idea.