The Birth and Death of the Office
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Building B sits empty for 16 hours a day while Building A sits empty for 10 with both being heated/cooled for 24 hours. The employee wastes 2 of their 16 available waking hours in the non-productive commute while incurring significant financial costs (lease/insurance/fuel/energy) in order to support this patently absurd activity. Similarly the employer wastes time and energy negotiating leases, re-arranging offices, purchasing AV equipment for meeting rooms in building B, etc.,etc., in addition to paying the likely enormously expensive lease itself.
The impacts on the environment, the number of hours of human life wasted in commute, the pointless buildings and associated costs to employers as well as the public infrastructure to support it (roads, trains, busses, etc.) are all incredibly wasteful. Surely, all of this could only be justified if physical presence had a dramatic impact on productivity. Yet, we cannot tell one way or the other if it actually improves outcomes.
It very clearly improves the outcome of some work, and degrades the outcome of other work, and doesn't impact much some other kinds of work.
It's only unclear for the people that insist on putting every work on the same bracket.
It's not about us, it's about the guy who delivers lunch, or the girl who owns the bagel shop.
However, offices are straight up abelist , if you have mobility issues it's absurdly hard to commute.
Commuting isn't really needed here, if I was in a wheelchair I'd take this to court.
Full tin foil hat time, if remote work was the norm the entire commercial real estate sector would collapse.
Most modern cities would collapse as well. So many industries are based around commuting, or supporting office workers. Hell, normalized remote work might destroy our entire economy.
Plus, there is something about just going to a breakfast where you can just people-watch the passersby without food preparation or cleanup.
Isn’t that just an instance of the broken window parable? There’s nothing to prevent the bagel shop locating adjacent to a residential area instead of an office park - then society sees the benefit of WFH and tasty round breads.
All this to say: there are ways to keep evolving how things are usually done.
And from a societal perspective, saving on commute time/expenses but with $15 bagels is still better than wasting 2+ hours/day, additional car expensises, and only a $7 bagel.
A huge bagel store will use humans more efficiently than a small one.
One big problem with "lots of shops" is that they require lots of retail workers, workers who spend much of their paid time not working. Prices reflect that.
It's unclear to me why urbanists think that wasting humans on retail is so important.
Cities don't have much of a reason to exist, at least not in their current form, with WFH.
Are you assuming people would rather live in suburbs and countryside then? I would definitely still live in the city, and my first thought of offices closing was "great, more space for residential buildings".
It's much much cheaper to live outside of major cities. As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, office buildings are a massive source of tax revenue for cities.
This is the entire reason you have this push to bring everyone back.
Ideally, people should be able to live where they want to. If that is in a city, great, otherwise they can live elsewhere and work from home. I don't see any great benefit in forcing people to live where they do not want to be.
They just need to slightly change focus. People still need a place to work even if remote.
Instead of trying to rent out that 20Ksqft building to some corporation, start renting out individual private offices within that building to people nearby who need a place to work remotely that's not their couch.
I've been renting out a small office room since the pandemic started, right near my house. Almost zero commute but still a separate work area. I lucked into finding someone who is happy to rent me one office room in their building.
But many commercial real estate owners still don't get it and don't want to deal with individuals. There are a few empty office buildings in the area which I know have nice offices, but they keep looking to rent the whole building out, so it continues to sit empty. I know there's demand since most people I talk to who are working from their living room love the idea of a local office when I mention I have one.
Or are you self-employed?
But the office payment is less than what I was spending in fuel having to commute, so in that sense I'm still saving money compared to pre-pandemic commute life.
Cities have much more to offer than office work. Restaurants, entertainment, shops, museums, sights. People that choose to live in the city often choose for those amenities, not a nearness to the office. Getting rid of offices might actually lead to a city that is denser with those attractive activities and therefore more welcoming for people to move there and enjoy those activities.
What seems to be happening is that local economies in smaller cities are booming, because people no longer commute to the bigger city. So it's more a shift.
I like the office environment. The only thing I don't like is the commute. This is why I think the future is local shared working spaces within towns so that they're in walking distance. I'd much rather have a 15 minute walk to work than a 30 minute drive.
The best I find it hybrid: a mixture of quiet home time and office meetings to talk with people.
I've never had a horrendous commute, however.
Do I have colleagues (current or former) that are friends? Yes. Do/did I feel a need to be in the office to spend time with them - no.
Work is a contract between myself and my employer to produce based on a certain set of expectations. Those expectations shall not include (nor exclude) social interactions outside those times.
Work has been a critical component of social life for many generations now. It is extremely strange to offhandedly dismiss its role like that.
> Do I have colleagues (current or former) that are friends? Yes. Do/did I feel a need to be in the office to spend time with them - no.
I started my previous job in mid 2019. I made multiple friends at the office in 8 months before the lockdowns started that I still keep in touch with. After we went full remote, I worked there for an extra year. During that time, my team have doubled in size. Not only I did not make friends with any of the new colleagues, I don’t even remember their names now.
I finally quit in 2021, because I absolutely loathed full time WFH. I am now commuting to the office every day, with rather arduous 50-60 minutes one way commute, and I am extremely happy, making friends again and feeling very motivated.
Chalk it up as an overreaction to how many startups and large tech companies with imposing corporate cultures alike have tried to foster workplaces designed to keep workers away from home for as long as they could with free dinners and foosball tables.
I've worked with people who want to have fun and hang and I found them to be a distraction and resented having them around.
- The lack of mixed use zoning makes it just that much more likely that one live so far from their workplace. The choice is too often "a house far away from everything" or "a high-rise close to the noise, smells, and un-pretty sights of town"
- There's so little space to build offices cities end up having super-dense downtowns, with very tall, expensive and crowded buildings. This is great for office real-estate, but terrible for everyone else because it means traffic. Since cities tend to have only one mega-downtown, cause zoning in the USA is pretty adamant in grouping everything together, things get even worse, because everyone is moving in the same direction at the same time.
- This hyper-dense core, but hyper-sparse suburb outskirts in cities make it very hard to bike to work; many people in the USA wouldn't even consider it an option. It's also hard to build efficient public transit. The routes that make sense are radial, so they might be good to get to work, but inefficient for leisure. Things are so far apart in the suburbs one it's hard to put stations close to everyone where they live.
The fact so many people prefer to not leave their home for work should be considered a moderate victory for remote communication technology, but an abysmal failure in urban design.
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/d...
[2] https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2021/acs/acs-47....
I think the challenge is not with the specialized workers, but with the lower paid staff. The cleaners, the cooks, the maintenance crew, the guards. They won’t be able to afford to live near such places because they get displaced by specialized workers, and then they’re stuck in a commuting model.
Clusters of companies already exist. One is Manhattan where finance jobs are concentrated, another (like you say) is Silicon Valley where tech jobs are concentrated. In both, the workers choose to live across a vast area.
I wouldn’t say this is that much of a free choice in Silicon Valley, where housing density is highly limited by regulatory means.
I live in Philadelphia and this is true there too. In general the city is dense enough that bike commuting is very viable, but the most direct routes are far too dangerous for most people.
It’s the same in Stockholm, despite laxer zoning laws. Companies tend to cluster in particular places and housing around them becomes more expensive. We chose to settle down in a less expensive (as in 50%) area but on the other hand I had at least 50 minutes one way commute to the nearest job cluster.
In my next job, it started out as a tight team of software in a larger company. It grew and then we bought our biggest competitor (we called it an acquisition; they called it a merger). Over time what was left of that staff shrunk and became remote. So we had a core group that was collocated, and then a group of remotes. The power dynamics were odd and competitive. The remotes wanted to be kept in the loop. The locals resented the extra process and protocol that had to be observed to keep the remotes in the loop. The locals also resented that the remotes got to just code, and didn’t have to deal with the interruptions that come with product managers that stop by with questions.
I was so excited when my next job was all remote, everyone. My kids were aged 3-11, and had a lot of school activities I wanted to support. We were in the “trench years” of four kids. At first, I loved the flexibility. It was great. After six years, I hated it (I’m not sure how much of this was remote vs feeling betrayed that the company was dysfunctional). I hated that I felt like I worked half time all the time. I could step out of work any little minute. But every little minute, work was only an “open up the laptop in the office” away. It was like being an on call dad and an on call worker simultaneously 100% of the time. And it seemed like a large portion of the team was basically freeloading on the gravy train. There were a core of us that could not help neatly figure out how 40ish hours at home work amounted to so little produced results.
When I got a job at a local company, I was so thrilled to go back in to work and work as part of a cohort. I have a lot of flexibility/autonomy here, so some days I stay at home and work because I’m in the groove and want to focus. But more times than not, I find I’m drawn back into the office/lab to work. There’s a lot gadgets I work with that it just wouldn’t make sense to duplicate for just me and warehouse at home. Our company has seen an uptick in can’t-do-without-em upper level staff who are now working remote. I find I often resent them.
This describes my current situation 100%. It feels both my duties at home and in the office are exaggerating themselves because I am seemingly available to both of them all the time. This is surely in large part my fault, but I struggle with finding solutions to this that don't create stress for my family.
Personally, I just set boundaries and stick to them. When I'm working, I'm unavailable to anyone else at home (except for emergencies) and will help them with whatever they need later. When I'm done with my work, I'm unavailable to the team, no Skype/Slack/Teams on my phone (though they have my phone number for work emergencies).
Admittedly, this works because I do not have kids currently, given that healthily establishing borders then could be a lot more challenging, at least in a positive manner.
That said, if I do make the choice to work longer on something really important, I can do so at a decreased personal expense to myself (no being stuck in commute late in the day), after letting everyone know so that I may leave faster on another day to not burn out.
And taking breaks is suddenly also more healthy due to my own enjoyable surroundings and nobody to care about how I spend said breaks - lazing around the couch, going outside to spend some time with my pets or going for a walk in fresh countryside air (of course, applicable in a limited set of circumstances, depending on where you live).
The environmental impact is also a nice thing, though something that's less of an important point to me - the more noticeable benefit is the lack of having to waste my time commuting.
It all very much depends on what your life circumstances are, though, as well as what your personality is like, which environment is better for you etc.
Not only: since we are social animals we need a social life, in most modern society due to the number of worked hours work life is ALSO social life, in a WFH setup we need a local social life apart of the work life.
IOW for a proper, real, scalable, effective WFH model we need to work less, like OR the morning or the afternoon, even for 6 days a week, or just 4 days a week maximum, to been able to have the work life and the local social life. We need homes with an office per human living there etc. With all that and a bit of habit well I'm pretty confident 80% of people with eligible jobs (around 30% of all jobs I imaging) would like to WFH. It's not a thing that can be done quickly simply because we can't reshape the society quickly. Here is the fault.
With enough time we can (re)build a distributed enough society with distributed enough services that cover people needs AND desire, so we can have local schools for children (as before) because for them being physically together is needed, with enough services for elders, for "middle ages" etc. few industrial districts, because certain productions can't be much distributed, and so on. Such cultural shift can probably happen in 25 years minimum, I doubt the society can be quicker than that...
Not to mention how bad this is for the environment. And no, a ping-pong or foosball table doesn't make the office cool. It's like adding chocolate syrup on a rotten fruit to make it edible.
Edit - I don’t remotely miss the open office at my employer. Worst idea ever. Directors and VPs hog the conference rooms, leaving me (line manager) to roam around looking for private spaces to talk to employees. Dumb dumb dumb. End rant.
Hot desking? It is laughably inhumane that anyone thought people would be happy with this.
Constant distractions with people talking loudly on conference calls. Then someone else talks even louder on their call.
Before covid our site was mostly working on the same project. There was some fun collaboration in the conference room around white boards etc.
We had a reorg to pool resources across projects across the country so now only 3 out of 10 people on my project are at my site.
Most of us bought our own 40" 4K monitors so if I go in a conference room I can't even share my remote Linux desktop session properly because I'm scrolling within the window to find my applications to share.
Because of that I just stay at my cubicle to share my screen and end up disturbing everyone else around me with my own conference call.
Everything would be fine with offices and doors but instead we get stupid surveys about whether we want an open floorplan which is even worse.
We are supposed to go in the office 3 days a week. The reality is most people at my site show up once or twice a week for half a day for the free lunch once a week and then go home by 3pm to get work done.
We have 30 job openings and we hire about 1 person every 2 months. We lose 1 person about every 4 months. Management hasn't said anything about people not showing up probably because they don't want to push people to leave.
I’d kill for a cubicle.
Everyone is different of course but open offices, lack of visual privacy, lack of personal space, it just drains me.
Headphones are the only way to get any work done. Our US colleagues have acres of space in comparison.
Firstly, it's clear that we've had a massive "short term" upheaval in which we got to clearly find out who could work from home, and who could not. Or perhaps more accurately who can work _at_ home (white collar) and who can work _from_ home (sales etc).
We've learned that those who have space at home did better than those who were already cramped. We've learned that the number (and age!) of others in the house matter. It turns out not all homes, or offices, are created equal. Having small kids around can make life a lot harder.
We've discovered that commuting time and money is a thing - I might live 5 minutes from work, you might easily spend 2 hours a day on transport - clearly we have different experiences with regard to WFH changes.
Some offices are open plan, some have cubicals, some have actual offices with doors and individual climate control.
We've started to learn that once you work at home, home can be anywhere. Time zone, and language, are the only hindrances to you living anywhere, or indeed your job going some where cheaper (without you.)
What's my point? Well I guess that we are right at the beginning. Architecture of both offices, and homes, will adapt. Zoning will hopefully adapt. We'll start acknowledging that school is as much about day care as education. White collar jobs will (I suspect) end up paying less. Perhaps even a culling of "bullshit jobs".
The secondary impact on density, and thus secondary jobs that rely on that density, will be significant. And perhaps in some ways less predictable. New businesses will form - new ways to socialise will emerge - new work boundaries may emerge, or maybe boundaries will disappear.
However it shakes out these are interesting times - one thing is clear, the future doesn't look like 2019.
Remember these times, 30 years from now they'll be as foreign as the 80s, or 50s, are to us now.
I wonder if the same affect is going to ruin the office experience. In that what made it special was that everyone had to go to the office. Nowadays, the only people that show up are the ones that "prefer" it or whatever. And, I don't know how to word this differently, maybe, I don't care for those folks. Just something I was thinking about. When I go into the office now, something is missing. No point even going in a day or two a week.
I also have a desk in a cubicle, but there have been some chances since the pandemic. Maybe others have alluded to it as well: Work life is a bit more relaxed. Our supervisor moved to his home town, and now manages us remotely. It's working out just fine. So the thing about being in the office so we can be watched is gone, if it ever was a thing.
Folks have talked about sitting in the cubes and attending Zoom meetings (or Teams, whatever), but I think meetings have calmed down. Perhaps option of attending via Zoom has eliminated the attraction of calling everybody together into one big room. If the meeting gets too obnoxious, attendance will just evaporate, with people joining the meeting from their desk and "multitasking" to be charitable.
If somebody's not around, you don't know if they're on vacation, or sick, or just working from home. The chance of finding someone at their desk has dwindled to where it's pointless to look for them, just for a chance to interrupt them.
Judging from the people milling about the lab corridors, other people except the most senior ones and/or managers thought the same.
And sure enough, if my current workplace had a lab room to offer, I'd be much more inclined to go there.
No, I don't want to live in the Bay, New York City, Boston, Austin, or Denver. Please create small satellite offices in reasonable cities instead of mega campuses in towns that all seem to have public libraries that are now defacto homeless shelters.
Tech imports most of the talent these days anyway, so I don't buy the "talent only wants to move to the Bay!" argument.
Sure, sounds lame if I'm 23. What if -- crazy idea -- we have a variety of both options?
Certain sectors clustering together in a geographic region has nice advantages even for non-23yo non-single folk. One can hop jobs without uprooting the rest of the family.
It really isn't that bad mate. After living around the world (central Europe, SE Asia), Los Angeles, the mid west, I can say that people who complain about smells and the homeless are incredibly sheltered. I find they tell on themselves when they complain about seeing homeless people when the crime rate is down across the board from the last 20 years.
If you are so offended by seeing someone in distress, who is probably more dead on the inside trying to survive in a world whose upward mobility is strongly diminishing, then perhaps you shouldn't be going into that community to begin with.
It's perfectly fair to complain whilst having empathy for people. The lack of solutions or even enforcement is a problem, and I voted with my feet to live away from it.
It's 'horrible' from the '3rd space' perspective, in that it doesn't make for quaint high street shopping ... but it works really well for teams that want to get together every day and do stuff without the fuss of complicated little villages and twisty roads, no space for parking.
Kind of like major highways, they're good at what they were designed to do. They just have externalizations. Bad one's depending on how you measure.
The majority of the US population lives in the same 6-8 metro areas; so it's "reasonable" to put offices in those metro areas. I've worked at places with offices in downtown areas (short public transit ride or walk), in close suburbs (the extent to where public transit goes), and in remote suburbs (that require driving to get there), and the further away from city centers they are, the more brutal going to them is unless you already live in or relocate to the sleepy suburb the office is in (and then you still need to spend a not-insignificant amount of time driving, even for going places that are not your office, because suburbs are not, almost by definition, navigable without a car).
> Please create small satellite offices in reasonable cities instead of mega campuses
Do a lot of large companies have "mega campuses" in city centers? That doesn't make much sense, a campus requires a significant amount of land, land which is not available in city centers. Google's "mega campus" in the Bay Area is in the suburban part of the Bay Area (in as much as the Bay Area is mostly suburban sprawl anyway), and has "satellite offices" in downtown areas because that's where a lot of the employees live. I suppose Salesforce Tower could count as a "campus" if it's heavily populated with Salesforce employees, although I don't think one thinks of Salesforce Tower when the term "campus" comes up. Maybe the handful of buildings around Salesforce Tower that contained Salesforce employees could be considered a campus in aggregate (generally, a single building does not make a "campus").
Going into a small satellite office and interacting with most coworkers remotely is not really much different than working from home and interacting with coworkers remotely. You get the burden of going into an office without any advantages of in-person interaction. However, one of the reasons I miss having a dedicated office is that I have found that having a different place to work than my house does wonders for my general heads-down productivity and work-life balance, but that's independent of the many other advantages and disadvantages of having a communal, shared space where people working on the same thing can congregate.
Isn’t this self-reinforcing though?
I moved to london because there were no jobs for people like me _anywhere_ else near where I came from.
Thus, I contributed to the problem.
When I broached the topic some years later with a company, they said that they moved to london because that’s where the talent is.
It’s surely self-fulfilling.
All else being equal, neither the workers nor the employer has the time to wait around existing in a place where they can't get work or find employees, respectively, waiting for the other to arrive. An empty night club is just as much fun as a loner hanging out at the Circle K: no one wants to go to an empty night club, and no one is going to open a night club in a location just because people loiter there. It's about momentum, there's nothing wrong with a positive feedback cycle. The self-reinforcing is the cause of the continued and sustained congregation, because it makes it easier, more flexible, and reduces risk for all parties. Being in metro areas (traditionally) creates significant buffer and reduces risk significantly for both the employee and employer in terms of availability of prospects.
That both sides of a transaction have realized it's efficient to meet at the (defacto) marketplace (metro areas) in order to successfully and easily transact business (being employed/employing people) isn't lamentable self-fulfilling; it's descriptive of the state of how people interact and that the true value of a network is the connections, not the nodes.
According to [0] that isn't true. The eight most populous metro areas make up less than a quarter of the population in the U.S. You'd need the 48 most populous metro areas, not the 8 most populous. That means including all the way down to... Salt Lake City, Utah, at just over a million people.
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=sum+of+the+population+o...
The homelessness is simply a result of high housing prices [1] which in turn are the result of restrictive zoning. Remove restrictive zoning laws and most of the homelessness will go away.
[1] https://twitter.com/aaronAcarr/status/1515774019685036033
The office was a crappy "second place" anyways.
Churches, probably? Taverns?
I think the most common "second place" would be called "the neighborhood" nowadays.
The forming of conference-clusters, were digital nomadic workers meet up at some place by tradition to jam and work on something, like a conference without the conference hall.
I can also imagine community, who specialize in a particular field. Like a suburb, dedicated to database optimization.
Or have some programming group in the park or on a train. If you are free from social constraints and locations- all it takes is good internet.
Once the institution is exposed for what it is, it is up to the participants to fulfill their own needs.
"He constructs an office in his flat and whiles away his days copying and amending letters – he even ‘commutes’ via a walk around the block every morning. He dies ‘happy’: at his desk, halfway through penning a final document."
Now that it's been mothballed I found a job that was advertised as "work from home" but I've been going into the office instead. Not sure if it is just the mental break of what I was doing before or something else, but I found it both refreshing and frustrating.
It's nice to "dress up" a bit to go to work instead of just rolling out of bed and sit at a desk in whatever I grabbed. It's nice to interact with people outside the family.
The downside is that I forgot just how intrusive/noisy other people can be. I think there is are a lot of people who thrive on that distraction (or distracting others) whose jobs might not require the concentration of a programmer. I guess a set of headphones might sort that out but that also seems kind of rude in an environment that is supposed to encourage interaction.
I do like leaving it all at work when I come home. That is better in terms of mental health at least.
Dressing up is still casual, but I consciously pick t-shirt or polo shirt for the day.
Homeownership wouldn't be about a glorified cubicle in the suburbs, but about landwonership proper. Apartments could be treated as the temporary "live near work/in the city" thing that they are, and the city could be a walkable mixed-use environment meant to support this overall rhythm of life.
* Work from mountains
* Work from mobile
* Work from metaverse
Hmmm
By no means I am on autism spectrum but interacting with people or having to deal with strangers takes my energy away.
Staying at home is nice - but then I build up so much social anxiety that when I really have to go out and do something with people it is just awful.
Putting myself out there for "training" helps so my issues don't build up.
That is a good point and probably a nice argument for venturing outside of one's zone of comfort occasionally.
That said, what about people whose quirks make others reflect negatively upon them? Something like ticks that make other people uncomfortable (had a person occasionally grunt loudly at the office, really distracting), yet wouldn't really make their actual work performance any worse? If those ticks are involuntary, sometimes they might prefer to partake in remote work.
Moreso, what about people who are anxious, agoraphobic or have avoidant personality disorder, or something like it? People who might socialize in a limited set of circumstances, but might have to deal with panic attacks or undue stress in larger meetings or other types of social situations? Dealing with all of that due to no alternatives might be pretty debilitating and demotivating and might not be something "solvable" (at least in the short term), yet the person still should be able to make money so they can survive.
Of course, I cannot make claims for others, but personally it's nice that we can accommodate various types of people and their preferences, as long as they actually get things done at no significant expense to anyone else.
That was my question to parent poster if he considered that "always remote" might fix some issue right now so he could keep his job - but what about working to handle quirks/anxiety so in the future if he really needs to switch jobs putting himself out there with people might help.