Comment by asdff | Hacker News Reader

Comment by asdff | Hacker News Reader

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When you also consider the nation as you know, a nation, and not a rat race of individual interest, the best thing the government could do is encourage working from home. Break the hell up these "hubs" of white collar industry and let's disperse this work and compensation across the country. I'm betting we would see quite a lot more growth anyhow if these jobs were distributed across the country vs just concentrated in like sf/nyc/boston. like there are limits to how much growth little old south san fransisco can sustain. there are finite amount of office space. only finite amount of housing accomodations in the bay area (forgetting for a moment the rampant NIMBYism).

And what else is that everyone loses in this present situation. People in the job hub in SF also lose, because they are operating in this fundamentally broken local economy, way too enriched for high income workers making their home cost 2.5m and their compensation actually pretty poor as far as what it can get in the local economy. West Atherton would be a 400k median home neighborhood in most of the midwest. Literally same floorplans, lot sizes, fit and finish. Same country club down the road. Same private school up the road. Boutique shopping and steak dinners still available.

WFH aside. Any company that hits a certain size, starts to be broken up into multiple offices, buildings, floors, etc. and becomes de-facto remote. Meetings all become phone calls. and the team itself is mostly co-located. I am always a big confused at that point, why have a 20k person campus and 2 10k person campuses. Why not have 40 1k campuses? They are all effectively remote anyways.

On our end COVID also turned every single meeting into a videoconference anyhow, because that is how IT set up the AV inputs for our conference rooms for slideshows. No more direct AV input, ipad in every room now and you start a video conference on it, join with your laptop and share your screen. Most of the time some people had to join in remote anyhow for various reasons. Still, pretty ironic using teleconference software to sit in the same room. 95% the way there, just got to get out of the building lease.

I work for a multinational corporation and I was remote also before the pandemic. It is very smooth and everybody's happy. Once a year we meet in person in a larger group, it if an interesting experience, and then everybody goes back home and continue working as usual. When I see people bending over backwards and doing strange things out of distrust and the desire to control their employees and make their life miserable for no real reason, I feel really sorry, it makes zero sense to me.

Except you can't get that year round perfect weather in the midwest.

We are talking about Bay area here, not San Diego. Much of the US experiences 40-50 degree grey bleak cloudy winters.

Really? Genuine question - I'd like to move there.

Keep in mind "year round perfect weather" does include summers that aren't preposterously hot.

I've found that everywhere else, certainly in the midwest, where I live, either gets too hot in summer or too cold in winter (or is extremely remote, i.e. Hawaii).

> I've found that everywhere else, certainly in the midwest, where I live, either gets too hot in summer or too cold in winter

Much of the midwest gets both. Stifling humidity and temps often in the 90s, sometimes topping 100, for (effectively) a horrid 5- to 6-month-long summer. "Arctic blasts" in the Winter for sustained highs under 10 for days on end, lots of ice storms (and, if you do get a real, good snow, nowhere to ski anyway). 3 months total shared between Spring and Fall when the weather doesn't suck.

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