‘It’s Not My Responsibility’ to Save the Office Economy
wsj.com
wsj.com
Sounds to me like more households get to retain more of their income (and time) as a result. And that extra money will end up back in the economy albeit in different ways, so it's not like the money just disappears. Businesses and governments will just have to adapt to change, and I have no sympathy for their sob stories and stubborn instincts to resist change.
Roads don’t “suffer” from disuse, their maintenance costs go down.
People who work at home still need child and sometimes even pet care, working from home doesn’t mean you’re magically able to watch your children and work at the same time.
People don’t get their hair and nails done to please coworkers.
Dry cleaners are already on their last legs due to changing fashion tastes and new materials that can be taken care of at home. You can buy suits that don’t require dry cleaning or ironing.
Public transportation was already too downtown focused and should be re-developed to better serve non-commuting usage anyway. Since the USA has almost no rail anyway this is a simple matter of changing bus routes.
Office leases suffering isn’t a problem. An entire thriving residential and entertainment district in Cleveland with some of the highest property values in the city is built in disused industrial buildings and land.
> People don’t get their hair and nails done to please coworkers.
On some level, my most of my routine hygiene was due to having to go into the office, including getting my hair cut. I'd likely have skipped a couple hair cuts if I never had to face people.
Money moves from centers to outside
To be clear, that's still not our problem as employees, but they are concerns and potentially reasons for the return to office push.
It’s a good day when I only smell pot and fentanyl being smoked. Turn off downtown and let me work from home.
I certainly do, or did before I started remote.
However, most of the folks complaining about return to work I've noticed are senior people who have enough skills to perform their job and don't require constant attention. What I've noticed is these kinds of workers absolutely thrive remotely, however younger employees greatly benefit from in person learning and mentoring.
I've personally worked with many junior engineers over the years and it's really hard to mentor someone over a computer screen. It's definitely possible, but being able sit down informally and talk about something that's hard to understand, or unclear is much harder remotely.
I haven't figured out a virtual way to give an intern a small assignment and determine if they're struggling remotely (yet) short of doing peer programming. If I ask an intern to fix a bug that's 2 lines of code and I hear furious typing over the walls for extended periods of time, that's probably a good time to ask how it's going and offer some help.
I don't have the answers here but I don't think it's fair to be so dismissive of face to face time in the office.
Thriving individually does not equate (necessarily) to thriving as a team, nor thriving as an organization. I see on HN too many people taking about how they personally perform better, which is (a) difficult to objectively self assess given all the biases involved and (b) ignores that the team might perform poorer or the organization might, due to a variety of frictions added by being remote.
It isn’t as black and white as some people like to claim.
Edit: I love how I am being downvoted on something as uncontroversial as stating that there’s more nuance than the current debate seems to devolve into on HN. Shameful.
Doesn’t require a permanent office. Temp cowork spaces or bundling working with a career mentor in the final stretch of college are two options I just thought of laying in bed while also thinking about making coffee.
More of the same is not an option for all the cost-benefit analysis that’s come up before.
Prior to world war industrialization, 90% of workers were independent. Post-war office life was a result of wartime solutions to logistics. A statistical outlier in human history.
If you change that to “prior to the First Industrial Revolution”, and by “independent” you mean “worked on family or village farms”, sure, that's approximately right.
Just before even the first world war, there is no sense where this is true, even loosely.
I know what I wrote. Have a good day!
So, no, your comment about 90% of workers being independent before “world war industrialization” is way off base.
They did not say this.
> People moved to cities because less agricultural labor was needed and people living close together makes them more productive.
People moved to cities because more industrial labor was needed. Proximity made industries more productive. Now more digital labor is needed. And people living far apart can be highly productive.
Whatever sob story they may spin you, the ONLY thing corporations care about in the mentoring relationship is upskilling cheap juniors so they can replace their expensive mentors.
With a mentoring breakdown the seniors will stop getting sucked dry and fired at 50.
They become irreplaceable assets all the way through to retirement.
I've done this a bunch over zoom.
> I haven't figured out a virtual way to give an intern a small assignment and determine if they're struggling remotely (yet) short of doing peer programming.
Ask them in standups? Have an "open door" policy towards them pinging you to hop on a zoom? You also probably don't need to be hovering over them making certain that they're never struggling, that's a form of micro management. Gotta let the kids fight with problems for awhile before jumping in and fixing it for them[*].
[*] and really don't fix it for them, teach them how to fix it. poor phrasing.
Return to office.
The senior+ I work with are nearly unanimous in disagreement and find remote mentoring as easy or easier than in-person. Pairing is easier on zoom, it loses the awkward personal space issues, it can be recorded, it can happen quicker and easier, and in general just works (a bit) better than in-person.
Socially, I definitely except the argument that in-office is better for young people. I can't imagine 25 year old me sitting by myself working from home, I would've turned into a very different person.
The capital class is good at working in its own interest and it has a lot of leverage to do so.
Source? I would hope by 2023 we would agree that tweets != reality.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-66217641
And according to this the extreme tactics only destroyed Twitter, they did not even achieve an actual return to office.
https://archive.md/GvzCX (original link: https://fortune.com/2023/03/24/return-to-office-elon-musk-tw... )
Add to that that Twitter is now letting go of office space as well. Now some of that is due to layoffs, but it could also mean Mr. Musk is not even expecting RTO to work at Twitter, or at least not to the extent he planned.
That said, I've never seen Corporate America so universally aligned on a single thing than they are aligned on "Workers must return to the office." Definitely a tin-foil hat theory, but it really does strongly feel like they're all sitting in the same smoky room somewhere, making sure they all do the same thing in lock step.
Any serious manager has projects and tasks for the workers, and a realistic idea of what can be accomplished. If they are handing out those tasks and resources, and work of sufficient quality is getting accomplished on time, they recognize that it does not matter if the person is in the office across the hall, in their home office, or on the beach in Bermuda.
(And if the manager is giving so little work that the worker can take two jobs, but quality work is getting done at a sufficiently profitable rate to justify that job, so what if the worker is 'moonlighting'?; the manager is getting what they need at a market rate, and has a happier employee)
Good managers also have the advantage of being able to hire from a global talent pool instead of a ~1-hour-commute radius from each office, and drastically reduced office real estate costs. Those are REAL competitive advantages that of which the smart CEOs will take advantage.
Sadly, most are not that smart, and the RTO movement is proof.
I highly doubt anyone had that plan. A single company doesn't much influence the total labour market. Or do you suggest they cooperated in smoke filled backrooms?
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/24/apple-goo...
I've seen multiple CEOs gleefully plan for RTO and talk about the weak labor market together, so I'm surprised anyone would doubt this is happening.
Just because they say something doesn't make it true. Just because they want something doesn't mean they get it. If they did, we'd all be working 7 days a week, on site, for minimum wage (which would be lower). Even the places going RTO are mostly going hybrid.
I agree, which is why I said the push for RTO is not working in my original post.
Even if ten CEOs get together, that's a drop in the ocean.
By the way, the link you provided is nine years old. It that the most relevant one you could find?
Or can you really not imagine better ways of coordinating on this era of internet?
This is an extremely paranoid/conspiratorial way of thinking.
I'll use the ongoing writer's strike as an example: The studios outright said[1] they wanted them poor and in apartments so they'd have to take a deal.
[1] https://www.theroot.com/studios-reveal-cruel-plan-to-push-wg...
But let's just take accountants -- there are 1.4 million according to the BLS. Realistically there's just no amount of coordination that will stop a significant portion of those who want to from WFH. And that's just one type of WFH-friendly white collar job.
If we hit a major recession and unemployment spikes, corporations will be looking to downsize everywhere, including jettisoning more office space.
And the Fed jacking up interest rates and trying to cap inflation and wage inflation is just what the Fed does, they're not caring about RTO. Volker didn't jack rates up in 1980 to force workers back into the office.
There may be mangers/executives cheerleading all this, along with the cuts to headcount in tech, because they personally think that it'll result in RTO. But if the economy actually blows up then CFOs and boards will be telling them to cut costs everywhere and offices are a huge sink of money.
So they certainly do want to remove bargaining power, and some managers will think it'll be effective at enforcing RTO, but it isn't clear to me that the crude mechanism they've got will actually result in that. All they can really do is run the economy into a wall. The exact way that it breaks will depend on the push/pull of desperate workers willing to take office jobs again vs. desperate CFOs wanting to get out of office leases and crashing commercial real estate. The real driving force is just reducing worker bargaining power around pay and benfits and organizing though. The effect on remote work vs. RTO will have to play out to see how it happens.
My own personal bet is that the cat is out of the bag when it comes to remote work, and that a recession will cause more companies to re-embrace full time remote work to cut costs to survive and flourish. And current RTO companies may start looking at their commercial office properties as massive boat anchors.
If your company is asking you to show up, time to just get another job if that's important to you.
Thankfully it's an easy solve because the people who like showing up are tired of video calls anyway.
The NLRB is likely about to reinstate the Joy Silk doctrine, which will make it even easier to organize. Workers who want flexible work arrangements as a right should lean into that. Public support for unions exceeds 70%, the highest amount in almost 60 years.
So strange to see people with the belief system “you just have to do what your employer dictates or go elsewhere.” Perhaps in the “before times”, but with structural demographics and a decent executive branch admin in charge currently, this is simply not the case.
Isn't that pretty much exactly the case? No one in software is going to go to the trouble of unionizing.
It’s fairly straightforward to notify the NLRB you want to hold an election. Just drive forward the effort if you believe in not being held hostage by employers in the aggregate. Remember, those who don’t support unions are a small minority (30% in the US). I see parallels to when HN folks confidently expounded about Dropbox not being a real business as they went on their way to becoming a large enterprise. How? You ignore the talk and naysayers and instead, default to action. Why listen to people who can’t stop you? Your agency and quality of life is more important than their opinion.
Alphabet and Kickstarter are other notable examples.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200304045453/https://pando.com...
The suits ripped off the engineers to the tune of US$8,000,000,000 (est.)
And in a weak labour market, even a union can't rescue you.
Even if you like showing up, you will likely still have video calls. Most large companies have multiple office sites and you still need to collaborate with teams/employees in different locations.
I’m a software engineer and I love working from the office. I enjoy my 40 minute commute (on sunny days I ride a bike and on rainy days I read a book on the train). I enjoy the separation in my life between where I work and where I live (often I don’t take my computer home). Eating lunch with my colleagues is often the highlight of my day. Many of my current and former colleagues have become lifelong friends. If my company went fully remote permanently, I’d look for a new job.
But i don't think the vigorous antipathy to working in an office is an HN thing. I think it's that many people who don't like working in an office really don't like working in an office, and so mission post about it, in a way that office appreciators don't.
But if only a subsection of employees work remotely in a "hybrid" or RTO setting, and the person in the office still has to sit in on Zoom calls all day then the whole point of being in the office is redundant. They're just working remotely from the office.
The problem is when someone doesn't want to go into the office, but is being forced.
Has it? Twitter has lost most of its employees ... AND most of its income. I doubt this makes for a net positive for them.
My current employer seems to believe that collaboration will magically happen when people get smooshed together in the office.
It doesn't happen magically, but it does happen spontaneously once people are close enough to talk without having to open a chat tool.
Thats why we stabilised on a happy 1-day-a-week in the office, and instead of using it as a dump day for meetings, its a day for people to work while near others.
And unsurprisingly mentoring and onboarding has drastically improved outcomes.
If you don't like people driving, then tax that directly.
Or better, for a start, remove subsidies for driving first, whether they be explicit or implicit. Only then think about levying special taxes. Eg remove mandatory minimum parking requirements for real estate developers, convert most roads to be paid for by their users via electronic tolls instead of by general taxes, etc. (And remove 'commuting allowances' that one can claim as a deduction on income taxes.)
And if you still want to levy taxes, levy them on what you don't like, and not some imprecise proxy like office space. Eg directly on emissions or negative health externalities.
Their solution is to tax corporations for forcing their employees to commute. Yours is to increase the costs for those employees.
These costs are already huge ($8000+ per year), and so far have had little impact on company policy. Do you really think that increasing commute costs will substantially alter the number of people who are required to commute?
Have a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_incidence
It's the same principle that also explains why it doesn't make a difference (in the long run) whether it's officially the employer or employee who pays the income tax on a worker's income.
> These costs are already huge ($8000+ per year), and so far have had little impact on company policy.
What makes you think so?
> Do you really think that increasing commute costs will substantially alter the number of people who are required to commute?
The purpose of a Pigouvian tax is not necessarily to substantially alter the volume of the taxed activity, but to internalize the externalities, so private cost-benefit decisions can reflect the impact on both individual and society.
If companies somehow benefit enough from commuting that they are willing to pay people enough to make them agree to put up with it, who are we to judge the arrangement?
Canada is doing that with a carbon tax that impacts drivers directly, and it's become a hot target for populist outrage.
Better to tax the owners of the office buildings and parkades, as it would cause less public outrage.
Honestly there should be more gas taxes (that's not per-gallon but % of sale price) but again, will fail until EVs become dominant.
The negative externalities we are worried about occur mostly in proportion to how many litres of petrol we burn, not how many pennies we pay for them, do they?
https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiative...
That sounds terribly similar to a "you" problem
We need more of this! It seems so much of our public discourse is worsened by putting people and their opinions into firm groups, then assuming that anything anyone in that group ever says is a core believe of that group and then vilifying the group for that believe.
If existing laws and regulations allow competition, that is. Some sectors are severely locked down.
In eg Singapore rents are also up, but finding an apartment is just as easy (or hard) as ever. You just have to pay up.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/12/16/in-2020-f...
Urban people do not look down on rural people. It’s the opposite. Rural people are the most likely to hold negative opinions about people who live in other situations, and urban dwellers are the least likely.
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2018/05/22/how-peo...
When a rural person comes to town, do the local urban people take a moment to shout something derogatory at them? If that happens I have never seen it.
"Flyover Country" is thrown about often however. Especially around election time and regarding how they are controlling to much of the country's politics.
1. Those who express disparaging remarks towards others do not need to utilize a specific term.
2. A common narrative is that urban environments/cities are mismanaged, possess dangerous amounts of crime, and filled of corrupt politicians.
3. "Flyover Country", in a political context, is generally a complaint about the structure of representation.
I'm one of the ardent never-RTO crowd, leaving a 9 year tenure.
If we let the people who like to live in cities bunch up closer together (by legalising more density there), the rest of us have more space in the rest of the country. It's a win-win situation.