Remote work morphs into elite status symbol for wealthy, college-educated

Go away...

If corporate wanted to reduce the desire for remote - they would have smaller satellite campuses outside the great automobile slums of America.

The wealthy don't care about efficiency, they aren't being rational about this.

They go into the office - see an empty building and say "this is wrong".

But they put the cart before the horse - they should say "why is my company operating just fine without office space?" - that should say something about how horrible open offices are for productivity.

The intangibles that come with in-office work could be addressed by augmented reality meetings (a headset costs a lot less than a year of gasoline).

The ONLY problem I see that isn't addressed with remote work is junior development. This again could be addressed by much smaller campuses and augmented reality.

After the dust settles from this I bet there will be studies showing lower wage workers were forced into the office just as much if not more than higher paid counter parts.

While she’s fighting to stay remote my job has absolutely no risk of that, same with my coworkers companies we work with.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putting-out_system

What kind of brain-dead culturally frozen and fragile org, post-covid, would resist or be incapable of managing a remote team at this point?

It is elite because I don't have to commute.

I'm wealthy now in time and proximity.

That revenue probably mostly comes from the old school hiring process where employer and employee get to know each other and then jump into a long term contract, right?

I'm surprised Upwork and Fiverr are still so small in comparison. Their model of letting people quickly band and disband on projects seems so much more natural to me in the times of remote work.

I'm 53. I've worked at home since 2001, but it happened kinda accidentally. The dot-com-era software consultancy/internet studio I worked for in the late 90s cratered in the fall of 2001, so I hung out my shingle and went back to doing hands-on technical work. This was catch-as-catch-can for a while, but I kept the lights on -- and at no point did I consider renting an office to do it.

Then I joined a startup that didn't really take off, and we BRIEFLY had an office before realizing it was dumb and giving it up (so, like, 4-6 months?). We were traveling all the time anyway.

Then I went back to consulting and worked at home or on the road.

Then I joined my current employer, which has NEVER had an office anywhere, and as such had employees spread nationwide. We used to be cagey about it with customers (who are generally large traditional companies), but since COVID normalized WFH we've been much more open about it.

I miss very few things about an office. When I think about it, what I actually miss isn't the office, but the few moments in my early career where the office was also a place generally full of people whose company I enjoyed even external to the working relationship. That's an unusual thing, and (I bet) something you're more likely to experience in your 20s than your 50s.

I would like to see my boss more often. It's been a couple years now. I haven't seen our VP of SW in person in probably 10 years. But my home office comes with cats, a better coffee machine than any in-person office has, a kitchen I can cook lunch in, and a couch if I want to catch a short nap.

Anyway, RTO is more about fucking over people with disabilities—for unclear reason, because accommodated disabled people are, in my experience, the best people to work with, because they’ve seen real shit—and this attempt to create intra-proletarian dissension is just a distraction, at the end of the day.

What job does a poor, uneducated knowledge worker do?

1. never knowing anyone on a personal level in the company (no matter how long you've been there)

2. being perceived as a sub-human disposable 'resource'

3. never being promoted

4. often hired as contractors without same benefits as employees

offering people remote jobs is done as much for cutting costs as it is to access more talent. you don't have to spend as much money when they provide everything themselves.

I moved out into the country into a more blue collar area. On the coast, I was a nobody. But out here my income alone sets me apart. I inhabit many of the same social spaces in town as the doctors and lawyers. And even they don't get to work from home! Even amongst the elite its a luxury.

It's awesome - I'm not going to go back into an office anytime soon. But I am completely clear-eyed that it is a unique privilege. It's hard to act entitled about it knowing there is absolutely no one in my circle who would give me a shoulder to cry on.

"Some college" is now ~60% of the population (closer to 2/3 in recent generations), so a similar characterisation on the wealth axis would be households with USD 100k or more in (pre-tax!) assets; holding the equivalent of a few cars or a small condo also does not strike me as being very "elite".

(in short, it would appear that "elite" in US discourse has become as meaning-free as "middle-class")

Only knowledge jobs generally can work remotely. Robotic avatars are a long ways away for the other jobs.

I mean... it would be pretty hard for a plumber, electrician, construction worker, etc. to work from home.

> "One thing appears to become clear: The chasm between the sectors in the workforce is likely to only get wider."

thats the real subtext here. and i agree.

CRE funds are so determined to get employees back into the office (while their asset class implodes) that they'll sponsor any piece of journalism that will help toe the line. Since last year it's been a steady drumbeat of articles claiming remote work is over or is "bad" for morale. And the data doesn't seem to line up.