49 karma · joined April 13, 2016
She’s been there for 4 years now so it must be going well - her house is amazing there too.
The liability sits with your employer.
As a full time employee, the liability falls on my employer.
I'm yet to see a building collapse around me in my city - I see software fail all the time though - I think we are better at building tall buildings than we are building software.
I see one car accident on the sydney harbour bridge delay thousands of parents from getting home before their children's bed times - it's just not the right way to live, no wonder everyone is depressed and family units are struggling.
I live in high density housing - it's like being a caged hen compared to the freedom I had being brought up as a child in the countryside. The noise, the pollution, the high house prices. Not good.
Not always true, I took 6 month break from a large consulting firm - they have thousands of consultants so you can take a break without killing the company but obviously they want as many consultants billing hours as possible.
Most people don't want to bounce customers to a third party site for payment, it really hurts conversions.
One thing I’ve noticed since moving to San Francisco is that my cohort
in the tech world doesn’t talk that much about the industry’s past.
Waffle
Not knowing who you live around is because that's not within the culture, if your life was based around where you live rather then where you work (and was the same for everyone) I'm sure that would change.
Your whole point about going for drinks or inviting people round is irrelevant; the point is people will be able to build local friend groups rather than work friend groups.
"Whatyagonna do? Shift your whole life around just to try and avoid that?"
Well, my whole life gets flipped around everytime I can't et home to my kids before they sleep because of an incident on the tube or the roads.
I think you mostly missed my point - you looked at your life today and decided that working from home won't work for you - you're completely ignoring all of the issues with central working locations.
Someone claiming these are my problems is nonsense; a lot of people feel the same; we are in a mental health crisis and families are under massive strain because fathers are away from their children for so long. Nobody is saying that you have to change but a lot of people are saying that the current system is causing serious issues to living standards.
Your comment about having to shift your whole life around is unreasonable and shows you haven;t thought about this outside of your situation. Every father I speak to, every couple that can't afford a house near work that I speak to, they all agree. Housing crisis, family crisis, mental health crisis; they are all heavily contributed to by this issue.
I used to be 22 and living in shoreditch, I didn't care about these issues back then either. When I don't get home in time to see my kids before bed tonight because some idiot crashes their car and delays thousands of people, I'll just say to my wife WHATYAGONNA DO!??? Can't be flipping my life around!!!
2. In theory this is correct, are there any studies that actually show productivity gains for companies in this respect? (I think the real reason for this is because a lot of the valley companies are in the middle of nowhere and therefore it's not really feasible for employees to go looking for food). I recently visited the HQ of my company in Silicon Valley and I was not impressed by how far it was from everything else.
I commute through the city, if one person crashes their car it impacts thousands of people getting home on time to see their kids before bedtime, how is that a nice way to live?
By not adopting work from home, you really are making peoples lives worse, just because that;s not you today, doesn't mean it won't be you at some point - wait until you need to buy a house within a reasonable commute to the office; a whole lot of money for no space and living with people banging around above you!
Imagine if we moved from having large cities that people lived around to a series of smaller towns. The urban sprawl that we currently have would not be a problem.
You need to stop thinking in terms of how things currently are and look at how they could be. Your social centre could be your town, your work would mostly be remote, no more urban sprawl just so everyone can be as near as possible to one square mile of central business district.
If I didn't have to work in the city, I wouldn't be living anywhere near the city, I'd pick a nice town in the north near to some excellent surf breaks; why would I even be living within the urban sprawl if I didn't need to be in the city? We're killing our planet, destroying our families and ruining our mental health. Do you think the urban sprawl around london (known as greater london) would exist if people weren't forced to commute into London everyday?
For my million dollars I get to hear upstairs go the bathroom, my child gets woken up in the early hours by upstairs walking around in high heels after a night out. Every building on the street has a minimum of 6 - 8 apartments within so there's never any peace and quiet. Sometimes the bus has so many people I have to stand for nearly an hour.
Sometimes someone will crash on the bridge which will make me an hour late home which means I miss my kids going to bed. Mental health issues here are through the roof, the stress of high density living is literally killing people through depression and hypertension.
My child doesn't even know what a back yard is, that's a foreign concept to her. The only saving grace is that we're near to two beautiful beaches, without that I think I would have had a mental breakdown.
The whole "it'll only take a minute" issue that you seem to suffer from goes back to my cultural changes, one the culture has moved to work from home, the current working from home complaints will mostly be addressed. Also, let's not compare being in an office to going out for a drink, you can still go out and drink in your town with your friends in your community, again, cultural changes required.
Other than very long term costs savings (and nobody thinks really long term), there's no money to be made from a big cultural shift that makes workers lives better.
When I was a fresh grad, I also learnt a tremendous amount from the people around me; I don't doubt our ability to get the same effect remotely.
The issues we have with everyone wanting to live in massive urban areas (near work) are not less important then you needing to figure out how to learn from home, that's the type of self centred thinking that gives us high density housing, pollution, unaffordable housing, long commutes, strained family lives, broken communities and mental health issues (also known as commuting / working from a central office).
America is experiencing its worst mental health and depression crisis ever, I would not be surprised if working conditions were a massive factor.
Companies should not live and die by water cooler conversations (and mostly don't).