At home, the benefits are extreme. Full office, private bath, private bed, private kitchen, garaged parking, asset security, and a 30 second commute. The next wave of office workers will want it better than this, or it simply won't work.
Everyone getting an office with a door -- even a small one -- would go a long way toward making the office a good place to work.
Alice looked through the small door...
https://images.genius.com/80f6b055d05188b3ae126e3be56a5134.1...
i go for a quick walk to a nearby park and i listen to an audiobook for 30min. or i walk my dog. or i get my steamdeck and play something for 30min (with baldur's gate 3, it's hard to stop after only 30).
[1]: If your employer doesn't like if you take a longer lunch break or something to get this time back, then it's time to start looking for a different one.
I do sometimes work late when chewing on a more difficult problem, but if I don't stop early enough to leave a decent gap between end of work and bedtime, it can sometimes be difficult to get my head turned off and get to sleep.
I miss my teens and early twenties when I could flop into bed and fall asleep no matter what I had been doing prior.
You can't be serious.
> During a recession, it is either social assistance or one takes the job that is available.
It's only this way because we allow it to be. Huge productivity gains over the last decades have been captured by the .1%. There's nothing ambiguous or mysterious about it.
I have to agree with the parent post here. What do you think the median age of HN commenters is? I'd say it's probably mid-late 20s, in which case most people graduated after the great recession was largely over and only experienced the COVID blip that wasn't a cyclical recession in the normal sense and mostly helped tech workers instead of harming them.
Based on that.
And this - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2322031
Which has more links to older surveys. Thus 40.
Ok, im serious. It's silly to quote someone when you don't have a rebuttal.
2008 was 15 years ago, and didn't hit tech as hard as other industries. The last serious one was early 2000s. A significant number of people "in it for the money" or with non-traditional credentials simply had to leave the field.
Anyone that worked through the dot-com bust is late-forties, at minimum. But they'd have to be mid-50s or older to really feel the effects and know what changed. And people in their mid-50s+ are a strong minority in tech.
If the median tech worker is 32, they would have graduated college after the GFC was over (2014ish).
IMHO, for jobs that can be done either in an office or remotely the crux is the company's management team: Some people want to be in office to keep an eye on staff and maintain status, some don't care as long as the work is done.
Likewise "outsourcing" could result in a net increase of WFH given that contracting companies already support it.
Not certain what you mean by vanished and where the 2.4M number came from. CDC says 1,136,473 died in the pandemic [0], although a significant portion were not likely members of the labor force. As it stands the number labor force members caught up to pre-pandemic numbers in August of 2022. [1]
Feb 2020 164M
Apr 2020 156M
Aug 2022 164M
Jul 2023 167M
The "Civilian Labor Force Level" isn't a relevant statistic because of its definition:
> Civilian Labor Force is the sum of civilian employment and civilian unemployment. These individuals are civilians (not members of the Armed Services) who are age 16 years or older, and are not in institutions such as prisons, mental hospitals, or nursing homes.
This, by definition, ignores people who exited the workforce. Here is the two charts you want to compare instead:
- 2019: https://www.bls.gov/cps/aa2019/cpsaat03.htm
- 2023 https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat03.htm
Specifically the "Not in labor force" column. That's a 4M loss. Out of those it is disproportionately women and older people.
Ok, here is the same data from fred (sourced from BLS). Both the labor force and "not in labor force" increased by ~3M from pandemic to now. Given overall population growth of 8M, it looks like normal numeric growth of any statistical cluster within a growing population.
Date. Labor Nonlabor Pop
Feb 2020 164M 95M 259M
Apr 2020 156M 104M 259M
Aug 2022 164M 99M 264M
Jul 2023 167M 98M 267M
Net. 3M 3M 8M
Nonlabor: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU05000000
Population: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CNP16OV
> Out of those it is disproportionately women and older people.
Is the loss disproportionately among women? In terms of people not in the labor force, I don't see strong evidence for that. Stats for both women and men not in the labor force have returned to pre-pandemic levels.
Is job loss disproportionately among older people? Given that numbers of people in the labor force are now above pre-pandemic levels, we would have to posit a counterfactual world without a pandemic. I'm not going to do a whole regression with it's own assumptions of biz cycle etc. Eyeballing the chart, the current level could be in the range of alternative futures starting from April 2020. Its hard to say though with the boomers retiring out how many retired early or decided to not retire late.
All, Men, Women Not in Labor Force: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?id=LNU05000000,LNU0500000...,
There are a large number of people, namely on HN, that have never known anything other than $120K+ compensation, constant stream of offers for changing jobs, all while working from their home and doing about 4 hours of real work a day.
I don't think a recession is necessarily coming, but a reversion to the mean is going to leave these people obliterated.
The thing is, this has always been the case for the white collar world. Lawyers, executives, etc. The real change is that ICs that aren’t playing politics are able to live that life now. The reversion to the mean isn’t happening until those people stop producing massive economic value.
Personally, I will work in a warehouse before I go back to the office. Do twenty hours a week temp work while I work on setting up a side business. It’s never been easier to start your own business, and we don’t need big companies to make a living anymore. The real reversion to the mean is cutting out the rent-seeking middle men that extract value from our economic output while contributing little themselves.
No idea if I should be rolling on the floor laughing or extremely saddened reading that. I might advice taking a reality check before spurring this kind of non sense in public if you want to avoid sounding both entitled and utterly disconnected.
Maybe I'm uniquely on a path to burnout, but I put in at least 6 hours of what I would call hard knowledge work per day as a SWE. Throw on 1-3 hours of collaboration and an hour of truly useless meetings and I'm at a 45+ hr week.
Factor in commute time, via bike so counts towards exercise minutes, and I'm working 50 hr weeks + 24/7 15 minute SLA on-call once every other month.
It's unfathomable to me that this isn't the average experience, and that anyone would get paid more than $120k doing any less.
One of the consequences of working from home is I tend to work 8-12 hours a day. Sometimes it's hard to mentally shut off work because it's in the same place I live. I don't know how anyone works 4 hours a day, unless they simply don't have a lot to do.
Not if they 'made hay while the sun shines' and are now financially independent
Seems like it is that employees should never ask for better working conditions because, it may be taken back when conditions allow employers to be more abusive? Is that really a point worth making?
This is only true for people who don't have essential skills at a high level. For senior people, this won't be a problem. I cleaned up during the last two recessions, partly due to the prevalence of M&A activity during recessions, and was able to buy property cheap at auction post 2008 due to high foreclosure rates.
If you're just starting your career in a recession you're pretty screwed, if you're mid-career with a specialized skillset that is essential to core business function, you'll be completely fine.
They give you the least they can possibly get away with.
Sure - some small subset of employers competing for the best employees will do this. But the average employer? I'm skeptical.
Employees are literally willing to pay employers to stay at home. The middle manager who is awful at their job and so insecure they need to "see employees working" is costing the business not just in talent acquisition but when pulling in the dregs they're paying a premium for it. The center cannot hold.
The center isn't just insecure managers. Plenty of people want to work together... together. I happen to run my team remote, but to reduce a real issue to insecurity is to starve the conversation of meaningful contributions.
What makes you think upper management in public companies isn't mos interested in self-preservation also?
The idea that upper management is some benevolent and wise dictator while middle management is a different class of incompetent morons is strange.
They're cut from the same cloth.
There's only so much upper management can do to set incentives (Goodhart's law) without micromanaging the middle managers.
Indeed, middle management is the plight of modern civilization. They'll probably get replaced by AI soon enough.
How many people do you think a VP-Eng or CTO can manage and still do the rest of the job?
So, I think we'll see 5 middle managers replaced by 1 or 2 middle managers + AI. It doesn't have to be all or nothing.
Directors are often the group that is doing all the work nobody else is assigned. This goes from scheduling off-sites to preparing for audits to determining who handles unscheduled work that doesn't neatly fit into any one team. Directors are responsible for coaching engineering managers and are the backstop for problems outside the skill level of the eng manager.
They also handle project management because in smaller organizations, those positions have already been condensed.
Now, I think there's an alternative. You could hire an executive assistant that offloads some of what directors do. You could have a project manager or two handle all the projects across the portfolio for medium sized orgs - you're likely looking at 1.5 project managers for a director salary. (I think there is a place for AI there, but I actually think we have a better algorithm with Monte Carlo simulation.) You could have non-directors doing 85% of what a director does today, but you're still hiring high-skill people.
But if AI could replace a director then so could an EM. An EM can write a weekly status better than an AI and if a VP-Eng could rely on that, directors would have been replaced long ago.
It's a big deterrent IMO especially compared to Spain where healthcare is free
I don't think people do, but the issue is that they lack the bargaining power to do anything about it.
A tech worker making 6 figures? They aren't going to pushed around as easily as someone who is living paycheck to paycheck just for rent. they can forget to empathize for those who literally are chained to a job.
Yup, and now that employees have had a taste of freedom from that, they are very resistant to returning to that. Why is that hard to grasp for companies?
Absolutely, but that line has shifted majorly. To the point where it won't make sense for "average" employers to even try to bring people into the office. I'm not going to sink money into gas or public transportation just to be imprisoned in a meeting room when I could just take the call at home from the porch, a treadmill, or a couch.
You're obviously not an average employee then.
And employees should take the most they can possibly get away with.
When an employee doesn't behave like that, he is acting against his own interests.
The working class, low class, and middle class are all tax cattle. We have to take ostensibly dangerous commutes on highways with people too tired/too rushed/too busy to care. We have to eat inside of a certain timeframe, respond chipper no matter the circumstances, and when they're done with us they just let us go in a "right-sizing". We are subject to panopticon levels of surveillance with open offices, late nights because you don't want to appear to be the guy leaving early, etc. If you're lucky you get a few dozen hours a week with your family, maybe have some hobbies.
Cattle, imo, actually have it better because at least Farmer John drives them to work and they eat for free.
The Cxx's are always so chipper about coming into the office because they make, on average, 20x more than than the engineers doing actual work, and they can work from home/beach/yacht as they please.
Employers would be wise to treat employees with what they want. WFH is a net savings for them unless they're locked into 20 year leases. Many companies happen to get their lease through their VCs so it explains entirely why they are so keen on coming back to office. Employees will just leave to companies still offering remote. The problem for the employers who refuse to change? In a "fully" employed recession wages will not match the environment. If they cannot make up for lost wages with benefits like remote, paid healthcare, 401k match, etc they will die because without tax cattle, they are nothing.
This was simply the cattle waking up and realizing that they are the ones with the actual power. Any power a CEO claims to have is simply voodoo. The issue is employees still don't see this. Even without a union having enough people just walk out because the company doesnt respect them will crush the company. Rightly so.
This. While unionisation and labor organisation in general are a good thing for the workers, just people deciding they have had enough and finding a better employer (and maybe pulling out a couple of colleagues via referrals) is going to hurt companies.
it's a prisoner's dilemma, and the risk for a minimum wage worker walking out when it's not enough people is the worst case. they get fired, nothing changes, and it may even discourage others from trying.
You can only walk when you either have a next step or the result makes no difference. Many don't have that step and it's not QUITE so dire that food stamps are better than working. It's getting close, though.
I don't get where you are coming from.
Workers want lots of things. Eg money. It's a negotiation.
One of the best tactics to learn about negotiations is negotiating on multiple fronts. Did salary negotiation turn sticky? Shift to negotiating for days off, or title... on the employer side.
One reason that this works is that negotiations have their rationale/objective side and partially contradicting other sides.
Case in point, the value of an employee, particularly a specific employee at a particular time... can be extremely high relative to alternatives. The alternative can easily be spend 12 months paying salary equivalent cost without the benefit.
Lots of positions are hard to adequately fill. 12 months of hiring, training, fail, rehiring, etc. That can easily be your mean alternative. It's very common that someone good leaves a team and 12 months later you have not really replaced them.
Yet... That reality rarely translates to practicality outside of executive comp. Investors certainly act this way, but hr doesn't. The rationale of rehiring cost and risk/difficulty of hiring are understood... but there are still limits to the number they are to put on this. It's never 300%. It's 10% or maybe 25%. Willingness to pay correlates to value, but it isn't proportional.
Anyway... WFH is currently an extremely irationale space. No one is being quite honest about it's full benefits, costs, risks, etc.
It's a benefit that neither employee or employer is usually comfortable about outright "negotiating," like offering less money for remote.
So... WFH is not-negotiable-for salary benefit that is #1 or #2 on both parties' priority list, second (often prior) to salary. Unlike other primary benefits, employees know who gets what.
Currently, it's all about perceived negotiating power.
They’ll have no choice but to work.
The expectation that it's going to be business as usual is just as short sighted and archaic with regard going into an office as it is with the idea of work in general.
I hope that by "trickle down to the workers" you aren't talking about technically illiterate workers who are not actively contributing to the automation effort. Unfortunately, they will receive some benefits as well, which is completely undeserved.
Sure, most of us have used copilot or other AI tools and seen some benefit. But there's a point of no return where suddenly those tools are able to do the other things we think only we can.
What happens then?
I'm talking about every single human being who has been brought into this world through no fault of their own and deserves our empathy on that point alone.
They'll have no choice...
- visa workers who have no bargaining power.
- younger people who are mobile
- moving offices to other places
There have been a few recent posts about struggling to find jobs... every time it turns out they are only applying to online listings for remote jobs, and have high standards. That's not a situation you're likely to stand out in.
I just don't see how global remote work as the norm is "pro worker" for anyone except those already well established in their career. Besides being more disposable, what happened to complaints about companies not providing job resources or training? Did we give up on that one?
It was necessary because many, many US citizens hit hard by The Great Depression figured out in that time how to live without depending on regular (or any) work.
Tent cities; hunting; scavenging; farming; begging; stealing; mutual aid networks; etc.
It wasn't the best life, but for many it was found to be preferable to the factories or the docks.
To even consider returning to living a life dependent on a wage, Uncle Sam needed to offer them a new deal.
But you knew that.