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Comment by _Adam | Hacker News Reader

Interesting. My understanding is that office space is a function of the number of white collar workers in the economy.

I expect this number to increase slowly over time. But perhaps we're approaching a point where a sort of equilibrium exists. Further societal and technological changes will need to occur to significantly shift it.

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Lots of white collar worker's work is being automated away. For example, compare the number of bank tellers twenty years ago versus now. Less visible is the effect of automation on accounting personnel. Electronic invoicing got rid of lots of data entry errors. Parts of what's left gets outsourced.

I am not sure there will be many traditional white collar workers in twenty years time.

How do you define 'white collar'? To me, it's any job that can be done at a computer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White-collar_worker. Operating a power plant is done at a computer, but I would call that blue collar; artistic painting can be done at a computer, but I would call it neither.

>My understanding is that office space is a function of the number of white collar workers in the economy.

Telecommuting makes this rule obsolete.

I understand your point (telecommuting has major effects on office space usage) but it will still be a function of white collar workers in the economy, simply because a certain percentage of white collar workers will be working in offices for the time to come (although this percentage will change over time). Office space usage will be a function (but not equal to) the number of white collar workers. There might be other variables too.

You have been drinking the telecoms company's cool aid - they want to sell expensive teleconferencing solutions which have higher profit margins than the regulated services.

face to face co-located teams are still be best for many jobs especially complex software development.

What parent or you consider best is irrelevant, what matters to this discussion is what most employers think. And most office work is not software development.

And your point is? Most employers like bums on seats as its easier to manage.

As a consultant, I get to see a wide variety of offices among a clientele and various service and technology providers I would expect to be at the progressive end of the spectrum. The offices I have seen that are solidly in the flexible/hoteling/work-at-home mode are in design firms and tech startups that decided to go distributed from the start, and O'Reilly Media and its spinout Maker Media. Disappointingly, there are a lot of tech startups that have retrograde office layouts and schedule policies. It's just not mainstream yet.

I believe these positions are a percentage of all white collar positions, and that this percentage hasn't changed much in the last few years.

Technologically, there's been no major advance that makes working from home any better than it was in 2008. The only thing I can think of is the increased prevalence of video chat. But, I can't imagine that the former lack of free, reliable and high quality video chat is what was keeping employees in the office.

Telepresence robots are little more than a novelty right now (imagine trying to lead a whiteboarding session with one of those...). To completely eliminate the handicap of working from home full time, we would need some very convincing virtual reality.

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