Who Still Works from Home?
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God forbid I forget to grab my lunch in the morning, forcing me to order takeout (then driving to get it during my lunch break, which eats away ~20 minutes). Exhausting. You people with WFH jobs are blessed, for sure.
Things definitely changed for anyone Arabic-looking, at least for a while, and for people in certain countries (or the military). It probably changed a lot for various aspects of immigration, which I suspect had downstream effects I don't recognize as being due to 9/11. But overall, I continued to live my life as normal.
COVID is pretty much the only event where I see real, lasting changes.
Are there things I'm missing about 9/11? Or other big events?
The department of homeland security and basically everything snowden brought us. The war in Iraq. The war in Afhangistan. Millions of refugees and impacted soldiers and families at home. The bringing back of militarized equipment and approaches into the cops at home.
It affected people in the military a lot—I mentioned that. It massively effected people in certain other countries, as I mentioned.
But for the majority of people living in the US, what changed?
Everyone of a certain age knows at least one of their schoolmates or college friends that died in the war.
The US government used the occasion to assassinate American citizens abroad with drones with no due process.
Everything you say or do on the Internet is tracked not only by advertisers but by the US government itself.
Trillions of dollars spent and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghani civilians are dead thanks to the war and sanctions conducted by the US. This ended up being a complete waste in Afghanistan due to the Taliban immediately retaking the country.
If you can't see these as impacts then it's because your separation from them is a privilege.
What age? As I said, I was 19 at the time. For Americans, we're looking at ~2500 for Afghanistan and another ~5000 for Iraq. That's several times fewer than the number of high schools.
A lot more were wounded. There's a good chance most people knew someone wounded in one of the wars. But "someone I know was killed" is true with or without the wars.
If the number of fatal car accidents increased by 5%, would you say this was a major change to our day to day life? That would take about three years to exceed the total US deaths from both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars over their entire many-year time span.
To couch your arguments in a death count is quite lazy.
I didn't come up with deaths as the metric. Notice that only one comment mentions people being wounded: mine.
We are all subjected to drastically more surveillance, and militarized policing, as a result of the events that day, even those of us lucky enough to be insulated from the direct kinetic impacts of the war we started as a result of it. To say nothing of extraordinary rendition, extrajudicial killings, and the trillions of our tax dollars wasted on a war against a regime that had nothing to do with the event itself. We could have made a much better world, for that money.
edit: "We" meaning citizens of the US, although to a large degree these impacts are not only felt by US citizens.
The surveillance and other Patriot Act changes were very bad. As much as I hate and have railed against them from the start, they don't have a real, tangible effect on most people in the way COVID did, but they're a real problem, and clearly direct result of 9/11.
9/11 directly contributed to the massive increase in spying against citizens and illegal activities. The fact that you don't see an issue with this, means just how successful it was in doing so.
It also has no noticeable, tangible effect on my life, or the lives of most people. It's a big problem that fucks a small number of people in a way that's semi-random.
Actually...this isn't 100% true. Abu Ghraib, and specifically Sen Inhofe's "outaged at the outrage" response, helped prompt me to donate 33% of my income to charity for several years in part. At the time, I thought that was the maximum I could deduct and I wanted to minimize the amount of tax dollars I sent to a government that was actively torturing people. My savings would be vastly larger if not for Abu Ghraib.
Edit: Downvote me harder, fascists
The "imperial presidency" was pretty much a linear progression for decades before 9/11; 9/11 didn't materially impact it, and definitely didn't "bring it back" as if it had gone somewhere between when it was first identified and 9/11,
9/11 gave the government, especially the federal government, much more power than it had before, which means everyone's slice of that power grew, but I'm not convinced that it's all that responsible for the slice for the executive branch having grown to be such a large share as it was already there before the attack.
Or try entering any New York City subway - there are random bag checks and inspection points created as a direct response to 9/11.
I think this was medium-true for a couple years, and now very rarely true, though depends exactly what you mean. People take photos and videos inside airports and subways all the time—I've never been accosted when doing it. I see videos of trains stations, subway stations, and railroad tracks all the time.
> Or try entering any New York City subway - there are random bag checks and inspection points created as a direct response to 9/11.
There definitely is much more surveillance and random security nonsense than before. It's a valid point that it's not something you only come across with the TSA.
A lot of this security nonsense should be rolled back, obviously, but the reason people don't rebel is because....it mostly doesn't affect most people. Helps to be white, of course. As I said, Arabic people, and anyone who even looks possibly-Arabic, had a really hard time for a while, and are still facing a lot of unearned abuse.
It's less noticeable in most rural areas, but some places the police have unexpected access to hardware. Think of towns of ~1000 people that have anti-riot vehicles. That kind of access came after increased security spending after 9/11. A lot of police departments saw it as money from the heavens and were worried that if they didn't spend it, they wouldn't get more of it.
There has also been an increase in police officers carrying gear that used to be restricted to SWAT teams. I've worked in a couple major cities where every day I had to walk past cops that were basically just standing around with an M4A1 strapped across their chest and their hand resting on the grip.
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The mortgage crisis around 2008 completely changed the way that homes are bought and sold. If you bought a home before that time you had to do way less paperwork and way less work to prove that you can afford the McMansion you just bought.
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The dot-com crash in the 90's fundamentally changed how startups are funded and valued. Before that crash startups didn't need to have any plan to profitability. VC decks were basically:
1. Steal underpants
2. ???
3. Go public
4. Profit
> Winthrop Harbor, Illinois, with under 7,000 residents, received 10 helicopters, a mine-resistant armored vehicle, two Humvees, and other equipment worth over $6.5 million. Officials claim these transfers help with “counterterrorism” operations, but it seems unlikely that Winthrop Harbor has a terrorism problem that requires 10 helicopters to address.
I am highly skeptical of this claim.
True, but only because you misspelled "affected" ;)
I think more of what 9/11 did is change the trajectory of the many systems that didn't yet exist at the time it happened. And it's hard to say what would have been had it not happened, and had we not seen the rise of the surveillance state. But you don't end up with the apparatus that Snowden revealed without at least some of that underlying architecture affecting the end-user experience.
Yup. The BLS suggests about a 20-25% increase on food between 2019 and 2022, and that's backed up by independent estimates. That said, we've seen much larger spikes in the past; in the 1970s you can see spikes in that ballpark in one year. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=1hsGr
> Finding a job seems way tougher now, too, even though they're claiming a 3.7% unemployment rate.
Maybe in tech (chiefly on the more junior or on the more support-ish side, from what I can tell), but that doesn't mean that "they" are describing something incorrectly--just that perhaps you're on the wrong side of an average.
I mostly run in circles that are of not-tech-people, and while the jobs may suck, I get the feeling that finding them is not the hard part right now.
I moved out of tech a few years back. I'm responding to ads that claim to be desperate to hire people, yet I'm not getting replies.
In tech, the growth of remote work is big: I just changed jobs, and I live in South Bend IN. In 2019, finding work would have been really hard—I'd estimate fewer than 10% of dev roles were remote at the time (and roughly 0% in South Bend). Today, I feel like we're probably over 50% of all dev jobs fully remote. That's a huge change.
Tech-wise, LLMs are significant, but otherwise, yeah, not a lot.
For normal people...again, LLMs. Unemployment is down a fair bit, and real wages are up, especially for the bottom quartile, so those are both good news. It's a marginal change, of course, but a big deal for a lot of people. Dobbs is a big deal for many, many people.
But compare 2014->2019: what big changes were there? Everyone switching to React? Trump?
2009->2014 does stand out a bit for smartphones going from relatively rare to ubiquitous, and tech-wise we had big growth in cloud hosting.
They feel that way because you know where your local maximum is. But that isn't the maximum for a whole organization.
If the people on the factory floor have to show up for work every day why should you get to stay home? If the business you're in has lots of gray legal risk, working from home means more things in writing. There are good interactions that can happen in bullpens and hallway and (I hate that I'm using this word) synergy from overheard conversations.
I don't think the office as it was (open floor plan) helped any one. I don't think that we all need to go in all the time. There is a happy medium that would give us "the best of all worlds" and we should be looking for that!
Different jobs, different pros and cons?
If sales reps have to be away from home 3 weeks a month, why do the factory floor workers get a stable work site?
Different jobs have different inherent constraints.
> If the business you're in has lots of gray legal risk, working from home means more things in writing.
If the justification for work from home is to avoid creating a documentation trail of illegal actions, that suggests that public policy should oppose RTO.
Your private data, showing up on a screen in someone's home is the reality of NO office. There are plenty of legal an contractual protections in place for that data. It is very easy to screw yourself and your company in the course of doing your job around these things. Good intentioned people make mistakes and now pictures of your last colonsopy are on the internet and in the next version of GPT is not what any one wants.
I didn't say they were legally gray, I said they had gray legal risks not because people are bad but because they are flawed.
Sure, being able to work from home if you need to is nice, but so is being around other people.
The most I’ve ever learned, the most fun I’ve ever had, the most rewarding and fulfilling things I’ve ever done, they’ve all been when I was around other people.
I’m not trying to say that’s what’s best for everyone but it is for me.
How many people walk over to your desk and interrupt you for things just because you're around, preventing you from getting done what you need to get done?
How distracted are you from random things going on in your environment (people coming and going, noise, etc.)?
I view working in an office like working in a busy Starbucks... why? How? If I needed to get serious work done, I'd put headphones on and go in a corner with 0 external visual/audio distractions. Not a bustling coffee shop?
Joking aside, I’m simply expressing my preference. Not implying it’s what’s best for everyone.
No. You're probably in the minority if you would go so far as to say "hate", but we don't need to agree. We just need to allow people to do whatever works best for them.
>The most I’ve ever learned, the most fun I’ve ever had, the most rewarding and fulfilling things I’ve ever done, they’ve all been when I was around other people.
This can be true for a person who also prefers working from home. E.g. myself. Not every combination of environment, people, and project works out the way you've described - in fact, I'd say the majority do not, purely statistically. Ideally people are working in whatever way most suits them at the time. Sometimes this means having a great time working with a group in person, and sometimes this means having a great time working with a group remotely.
Working from home and working in an office both come with benefits and drawbacks. But having done both, I would say that for me personally the drawbacks of working from home are greater than the drawbacks of working in an office, when viewed in the aggregate.
I know it’s not that way for everyone, or for every role, or for every project, but in the grand scheme of things the advantages of an office outweigh the advantages of working from home. For me.
The benefits of WFH steeply outweigh the fun of an office job.
I talked to a lot of tech workers in SV and found out that a plurality prefers hybrid, a smaller minority prefers fully remote and an even smaller minority prefers fully office.
People just want balance in their lives. Also, being in SV, everyone was aware of the fact that fully-remote will inevitably lead to "Detroitization" of SV, as companies can just hire in the cheapest cities around the world. So there is also a selfish motive to demand in-office work.
Of course I understand why a small cohort of people want most in offices to keep up untenable and utter business models against humanity BUT I do not understand why most accept things like hybrid absurdities that are offered just to force people to be near the office instead of rejecting them firmly. Evidently most prefer living less nicer lives and being slave/impoverished by services...
Purely remote work will be a race to the bottom in terms of wages. I would rather put up with a bit of commute a few days a week, which allows me to keep my comfortable salary. Living on salary dictated by the lowest paid workforce pool will be far less nicer.
Another point is if the bigger salary many anti-civil companies offer to workers living in big cities is worth living there, considering cost of living, quality of living, climate, personal freedom and so one.
Hybrid works for me is absurd:
- you need to be anyway near an office, and the company need anyway office space;
- you need two desk instead of one, both under-utilized, or living a disgraced life moving laptops around, to use them as desktop replacers...
All of this just to keep a salary that potentially got wasted in city services, having an inferior quality of life, no thanks. I prefer competing with my skills against the entire world than having such kind of genital laces...
Beside that: personally I own an apartment in a big city, and I rent it, so far for a nice profit (I do not know if it will last, of course) and so far stocks perform really wall (it will NOT last, but again...) meaning: if you are from middle/high income cohort you earn more moving in the nature in a well served area and rent to poor in the city. I do think this situation is fairly common, at least in southern EU for middle/high income people, who happen to be those who made the downtown of big cities. If I'm right, without downtown white collar who spend much what's left in the city? How the city economics can keep up given the fact that after the 80s logistic revolutions most manufacturing have goes out, and now most high wages have done the same leaving just low/middle-low income people in the city mostly employed in city service economy, an economy that closely depend on inhabitants mean wages...
> so well formally there is no reasons to see a drop in salary WFH.
My observation says otherwise. Lot of remote companies have expanded headcount internationally or in cheaper cities compared to their pre-covid workforce.
> if you are from middle/high income cohort you earn more moving in the nature
This simply doesn't work for big segments of population - people with kids in schools who do not want to disturb stability of their kids lives, people with big social networks of friends and families in an area, a couple where one partners works a job which is necessarily in office etc.
- I know many companies try to penalize remote workers in salary and career terms even if they bring the same value from remote or in the office, but I also know this is not for socially sound reasons: giants simply need people in cities to keep up their service-centric economy, a model HARMFUL for the humanity, small and medium want to follow the big just for ignorant reactionarism;
- I know how absurd is the hybrid model "hey, if you comply to our desire, harmful for you and the society at a whole, but we want if to exploit you, we gives you some small potatoes advantages you might think they are nice while they are not" but most seems simply to not care because they are already inhabited to city life and fear the change;
- I know WFH will happen anyway but in a VERY HARMFUL manner, with digital nomads on one side, slaves living in goshiwong without even knowing what it means living in their own homes, and I know the outcome for us all.
About the hard part of changing life, I know, I've done it myself. But I also know that for schools the mean/long term future is the remote model with some very curated and improved video lessons with a local teacher just to respond questions, offer support to dig deeper etc, in a campus-style model to offer the social part of schools to children, so remain in a city, choose to avoid the change, means only delay something that MUST happen anyway harming their child in the long term to not touching them in the short one.
The world do change, we do not have the crystal ball of course, but something is clear enough, and trying to keep up "the old known way" is trying to remain on the large sinking boat fearing the lifeboat.
So you want people to discard their existing way of life, adopt a new way but also are not sure how the new way looks like and acknowledge that there are big gaps to be filled in the new picture? No wonder people would resist that transformation.
But... Di you remember some anecdote from the history like the UK law that mandate a horse in front of every trains to moderate it's speed? When this FUD wane people that have not moved will found prices outside far higher and real estate value of the city dropped, so they'll be economically trapped, that time for real not for fear.
Of course the first who can invest are the upper/middle class, but those who do not have done that already, have already lost the train. The picture have no gaps, the WEF target is "in 2030 you'll own nothing", if you have enough money to be outside the modern city, take a look at experiments like Arkadag, Innopolis, Asman, Aqkol, Qonayev, Danghara, Telosa, ... or the modern "Fordlandia", with the same ideas and targets, do see how China works today https://youtu.be/NXyzpMDtpSE and do hear the idea of those who rule us: https://youtu.be/NWHDgXhMkgs and take your conclusion, do read https://www.easa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/dfu/uam-full-... observing that the focus is on public acceptance NOT technical feasibility AND try to reason how such mobility can't really be urban, see https://appliedevtolconcepts.com/ comparing the image with the classic pictures of gentlemen's in car in the countryside with workers (slaves) in the fields.
It's nothing new, an era of deep recession where most impoverish and few flourish. Of course, the impoverished separated by those who flourish, witch is another classic: sometimes cities was the center of richness, innovation, where those who count want to be, sometimes was the opposite where cities was polluted, poor, degraded, the slums where the poor go. We are in another turning point like that in human history.
Remote workers who will be able to implement the Green New Deal themselves, and you know ALL the green new deal targets are clearly for single-family homes where the own have the possibility to recharge vehicle at home, have p.v., heat-pump heating and so on, something not possible for dense cities buildings will be "economically covered" from the big spike of prices enough to not suffer much, those in cities will be hit hard. That's is. I feel that having left the city myself and built a new home, comparing the inflationary pressure on me respect of friends in cities. The more the electricity cost the more I pay as well, but the quick my p.v. pay back, the more gasoline/diesel climb the more I pay goods produced/transported with this energy, but the quick my EV pay back in fuel economy, same for methane prices compared to electricity. Talks about "dynamic prices" are more and more common, sooner or later we will have them for anything (here, France, we already have them for electricity with price that change following seasonal demands and time of the day (EDF Tempo), and favoring p.v. those who can buy and stock will save moneys and so on. Not counting the stock markets who will not last but so far it's perform very well, favoring those who can invest.
If you connect dots you'll see that in all cases you have risks, like you are trapped in a dense city, job markets plunge and cost of living skyrocket vs the same risk of RTO pushes against remote working. But if you are remote you can have backups, assets, if you own nothing in cities you have no backups.
On contrary in "repopulated" areas by remote workers clearly the demand of services climb so sooner or later services will grow, and here I see the growth while I see the decline in cities.
To be honest, I don't even fit all that good with my colleagues, but I still feel like I can benefit from being near other humans.
Fortunately, I still only live a 5-minute drive (or 25-minute walk) from work. I'll also be trying to get permission to work from home 1-3 days per week once the transition is complete, though I'm not sure how well that will fly with HR yet.
I have more time, I eat healthier, I can go out get some sun, I drive a lot less, I can set up my home office however I like, I can take advantage of flexible schedule and take care of tasks during the day and work in the evening. I still deliver.
It works for me. I like being alone and my optimal vacation is far from civilization.
My two boys grew up in the COVID and think that parents are just supposed to be around the house. Completely different than my daughter who remembers the before times.
There is a lot of money to lose and the executives of the companies who are dragging the workers back to offices most likely have lot to lose personally on investments in commercial paper.
https://www.businessinsider.com/new-york-mayor-eric-adams-ce...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-30/wall-stre...
https://www.connectcre.com/stories/office-to-cost-boston-1b-...
https://therealdeal.com/national/2024/02/16/cre-firm-cushman...
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/commercial-r...