That sound you hear is a couple thousand people in the Tenderloin checking rents in places like Ft. Bragg.
As I said elsewhere: we structurally undervalue good, in-person interactions - see Sherry Turkle for that. Pleasant office spaces are rare, so my pet theory is that those who have been the loudest proponents of all-remote have never had the experience of a nice, social, engaging office.
Those two experiences can live in parallel. I used to have 2 or 3 days WFH to get shit done, and 2 or 3 days at the office to see people. I do my own time-tracking, so I can even quantify the degree to which my office days are less productive, yet I still choose to go there. Not to concentrate, but to grease the wheels of projects and work relations by being there in-person. I think it's detrimental to a team to go all-remote when the grey area of sometimes-remote contains the best of both worlds.
This is the core issue. The advantage of the office to the worker has been so severely deprecated that no one values it. Meanwhile the advantage of the office to the employer has been eroded. Fundamentally, jobs suck much harder than they used to. Working remotely dilutes the suckitude.Pleasant office spaces are rare,
Jack Dorsey: "Hang on a sec... if we just eliminate offices so people work from home, we can cut our real estate costs by 90%, and offload the costs of internet connection, desks, Aeron chairs, ping-pong tables, beanbags, and bespoke Kombucha bars onto the employees, and move those costs off our books!" This sounds like Uber and Lyft to me. And I'm not against it... I just want people to realize the ONLY reason a company does ANYTHING is to cut costs and increase profits. It's also way easier to fire someone when you just need to send them an email and disable their Active Directory login, rather than having to meet them in person, and escort them out of the building with security... - Update: Just a quick codicil to my post: I see this as a win-win for the company and the employee. As I said, "I'm not against it...." My intent here is point out that companies are going to jump on the bandwagon this time not only because the tech is better and work from home can be seamless, but because it reduces their operating costs significantly if they don't have to house and entertain and feed their staff in a big box in the center of the downtown core. And right now, a 20% turnover rate is an employee retention rate in the 90th percentile. Once WFH is standard, I expect that to triple. Especially if we can divorce health care from employment. Then the ONLY reason people stay with a "bad" job will be gone, and people will be free to come/go as they please from one employer to another... and vice versa.
I hate to be a stickler, but companies have been variously pursuing and backing off from full time work from home initiatives for decades at this point. I’m sure this news is revolutionary more because it concerns the tech industry and potentially Silicon Valley, rather than because the idea of pursuing a full time WFH workforce is revolutionary. I worked for a few years at an international company you might have heard of that that was pursuing a full time work from home 🏡 initiative back in 2010-2012. Guess what, they have pulled back from that model now. There are reasons it can work and reasons it doesn’t work. However, I’m always glad to read of another industry that at least approaches and considers full time WFH as a potential option — even though I dislike the practice intensely myself!
It's pretty nice, measured by 'can you make rent' standards. It's certainly not easy, let alone 'pretty nice,' from standards like visibility, rising in your career, and creating a strong team environment. I started my professional career working full time from home in my early twenties with an established team in an established environment and I never made a personal connection with any of them. I'm not saying that "feeling connected to your work" is something that is solely on the employer, but I do strongly feel that when you are hiring people to become part of your full time professional workplace who have never worked in that kind of environment before, not only is having them WFH full time a disservice to them, but it's also one that can't be rectified without a lively, interconnected working-at-the-office environment. AKA you can't solve the problem of new hires by simply having new hires work at work if no one else is doing it. Beyond that, I agree with comments I've seen in other threads about the mass devaluation of human interaction. I believe sincerely that your decision to stay in a current job has at least 60% to do with who you work with as compared to max 40% what it is you actually do. It's very hard to build interpersonal connections when you're WFH and you certainly don't build any of those accidental connections that can be very helpful to your network in the long term. In other words: you might become close with immediate team members through repeated and long term effort when you are full time work from home, but you are never going to become friends with anyone you don't have to work with. At the office, you gain so much from accidental and unintended interactions which will never be replicated by Slack or Hangouts. Beyond and on top of that, let's talk about what amazing inherent privilege it is, to even live in a place where you can afford to set aside some of your residential real estate to create a full, permanent office for yourself? I'll be completely transparent: yes, it's super great I have a job that lets me work from home full time, but I live in a two bedroom apartment and both bedrooms are occupied. My office, for the last two months and the next four months? It's a corner of our living room which has been rearranged three times to try to hit the optimum combination of "acceptable zoom background" and "not going to wake my roommate up or show her on video in her pjs/underwear/who cares, she didn't consent to be on video? when i have a zoom call at 9 am". Yeah, it's cool that when you don't have to drive to work you can work in your pajamas, but there is literally 0 work/home separation and that sucks from both sides: sometimes, you go to work to escape what's going on at home, and sometimes, you go home with a sigh of relief to escape what's going on at work, and when you're working at home full time you can't really effectively do either of that. You certainly can't manage it if you don't have a separate, distinct room set aside for worship at the capitalistic altar that is your job which has a nice solid door which you can close with a firm sound at the end of a day or especially, after 5 PM on friday. WFH full time totally cuts costs for the employer. in the meantime, you as the employee suddenly has to take on all the costs like additional bandwidth, electricity, heat -- basically all your utilities -- that normally would've been lowered when you weren't at home during the day. and you lose all social interaction besides what is deliberate and/or manufactured. And btw, the tax code doesn't let you write those off as business expenses for the most part. There's shit tons of reasons why I don't like WFH full time. It doesn't work for me. Work is not only my primary social outlet, but also my gym, my way to see friends, my way to sneak in a little extra daily exercise, a way to separate my work and my home and get away from either when I need to. I can't tell you how many times I've gone to VA on a business trip that was really an opportunity to get away from something I needed some space from in my real life. Work is an entire social ecosystem just like a school is for a kid. Do you think kids should go to full time online schooling? If not, then think about those reasons. They probably apply to adult life too. It's not healthy for us to be 100% virtual 100% of the time. it's simply not.
Yeah, my post reads like I don't see the WFH situation as a win/win. But I do; the company cuts costs, but the employee gets/makes more to offset their increased costs. Shit, I took a $10k pay cut to work for a company that was a 15-minute commute away, rather than one that was an hour away. And I don't regret that decision AT ALL. I also suspect that this could be either the beginning of a revival for WeWork, or that coworking spaces (like Office Nomads ) will finally reach their full potential.... because people will quickly need to draw a line in their lives defining their work/life balance, and the easiest way to do that is get a membership at a local coworking space. Gets you out of the house, gives you the infrastructure of printing/shipping/mail/conference rooms, and can literally be anywhere you can fit a few desks. I worked in one that was a converted barn, once, and had a membership at Office Nomads for 5 years during my entrepreneurial days.
...and if they can offload their lives from a place where a shitty plywood shotgun shack in Fremont goes for a million five to a place where a 40-acre ranch goes for $500k, what harm is done? You are grossly overestimating the empathy of the tech industry. Lean'n'mean is celebrated by everyone who read Reed Hastings' book, or met anyone who read Reed Hastings' book."Hang on a sec... if we just eliminate offices so people work from home, we can cut our real estate costs by 90%, and offload the costs of internet connection, desks, Aeron chairs, ping-pong tables, beanbags, and bespoke Kombucha bars onto the employees, and move those costs off our books!"
It's also way easier to fire someone when you just need to send them an email and disable their Active Directory login, rather than having to meet them in person, and escort them out of the building with security...
Yeah, my post came across more negative than I intended ... like I was proposing WFH as a lose-win situation, rather than a potential win-win for everyone involved. And I do work IN the tech industry. And have been fired twice. My most recent job (before this one) I was fired from. I've also been on the deciding end of who needs to be fired, and have been in those conversations more times than I wanted to. And these are all things that actually happen. In the tech industry. Today(-ish).
And anywhere else with a few layers of management to hide behind while making decisions.You are grossly overestimating the empathy of the tech industry
Maybe not this extreme but I really hope that this whole "have to be in the office" thing gets questioned more after this is gone. I really like my current arrangement. I am allowed to work in the afternoon shift (from 1:30pm.on) but should stay at home if I don't need to do anything in the lab. I only go to the lab when I do necessary experiments and can do all my analysis from home. Without any distractions. I wonder if I will be allowed to keep this afterwards
that shit hasn't mattered for decades, dawg Truly. The whole "I'ma work hard here and get me a pro-mo-SHUN" thinking was being called out as a bullshit lie the first time we had a tech bubble. 'boomers were getting all shitty at GenX over the fact that they'd rather bounce from job to job than sit in one shitty place for six years for two titles and a 1.5% cost-of-living increase every other year. The myth of office mobility has been dead since before you were born, son and the fact that it persists in some zombie state where you give it some credo says a lot more about the power of myth than it does about the egalitarian nature of the modern office. Melanie Griffith got Sigourney Weaver's job because Harrison Ford said she should have it, not because of her merits. You're going to work the gig until you've improved your resume and then you're going to bounce. They know it, you know it, Indeed.com knows it. Now? Now you can bounce damn near anywhere. I posted a shitty receptionist gig. I got fifty applications from over a thousand miles away. The sarariman future was dead in '88.
I think you'll find no one to dispute this, least of all me. The bigger problem is the nature of "work" has been so deprecated that face-to-face communication is a productivity suck. The last real "job" I had, I was "key man" on $23m worth of contracts, roughly 60% of the work we did. There were only about 250 people there. I interacted directly with the CEO exactly once, and despite the fact that he lived a 20 minute drive away, was only in the office a couple times a week. That was 2006. face-to-face interaction will always be king, even if you're hopping jobs like hot cakes every two years.
It kinda sucks though (in a first-world-problem kind of way). I've heard from a bunch of ex-colleagues and peers the same thing; if you bounce from place to place in your twenties, you can easily 150-200% your salary in a few years. But I like where I'm now, so all I can do is squeeze another raise out of here.
I know a guy who does research for Dartmouth and lives in Florida. He's really good at research. The threshold of "good enough to work remotely" is about to be lowered. Bullshit jobs may be on the chopping block, though.