Just stop it:
For the second time in a week, President Biden urged for an end to remote work on Friday, framing the much-delayed return to the office for millions of white-collar workers as necessary for the United States to move beyond the pandemic. https://t.co/bjeEMosYgD
— Yahoo News (@YahooNews) March 5, 2022
The reason Biden is talking about this is pressure from the FIRE lobby because CRE is tanking. I’d have shorted it a couple years ago if I had the money. People have seen there is NO reason to get back to the office because the bulk of what is being done there can be done elsewhere, and usually in a more pleasant environment and in a way that is better for the employees.
Were I a CEO of a big company in a city with a major chunk of office space, the absolute first thing I would do is move to the outskirts of said town and get a place 1/5th the size in a less prestigious location. Much of the bullshit in places like Manhattan is prestige bullshit and dickmeasuring.
Find some place out the outskirts, build some proper parking and make it near public transit, put the necessary offices for the bigwigs and people who NEED to be there every day, and then make communal workspaces that anyone can use whenever. If you absolutely must have people come in, do it so no more than 20% of your workforce comes in at a time and make it one day a week or 3-4 days every month. Issue everyone laptops or technology budgets, get rid of everything but servers and skeleton tech. Instead of paying exorbitant amounts on rent, maintenance, cooling, heating and other bullshit, cut those costs and either pay employees more or invest in cost saving technologies for your new workspace.
You’ll save money, people will be happier, and the few dickwaivers can just drive to the city to eat at The Capital Grille on their own god damned time.
Then turn those empty office buildings into housing.
Baud
I agree with your last point. But it’s important for us to have thriving urban centers, and that’s a bigger concern and longer term problem than short term FIRE sector interests. I’d imagine a nation of Democratic mayors would agree.
JoyceH
You’re coming from a place of reason. Office managers are more atavistic than that, pre-feudal even. Managers want to SEE Their People, all clumped together, they want to Survey Their Domain. More specifically, they want a visual assurance that their department is bigger than Brad’s.
JoyceH
BTW, “FIRE” is an acronym that I’m not familiar with. Elucidate?
John Cole
@Baud: You can have thriving cities without every building for blocks housing hedge fund douchebags
Baud
@John Cole:
Right. But that takes time and planning.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
I googled “FIRE lobby” and got pictures and info of lobbies with fireplaces in them. Don’t think that is what John meant. And what is CRE? I also don’t think he means some kind of bacteria. I guess I’m just not up on ancronyms.
Jerzy Russian
Righteous rant. I am not sure I agree with it all, but righteous nonetheless.
Villago Delenda Est
Urination competitions are as huge a thing in the corporate world as the military world. Just the way it is.
wmd
@JoyceH: FIRE: Finance, Insurance and Real Estate.
The model for large technology companies seems to be return to offices on a hybrid model: 3 days in the office, 2 days discretion of employee for remote/in office. Plus 4 full weeks of remote work from anywhere.
As an old guy I do see some value in face to face interactions. And I suspect the 3/2 is going to be very slippery and not enforced, some will be 2/3 or 1/4. I also think the 4 weeks remote will become 6 weeks.
Baud
@A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan):
FIRE = Finance, something, and Real Estate
CRE = commercial real estate
wmd
@A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan):
CRE: Commercial Real Estate.
TheOtherHank
I’m a computer geek (currently looking for work…). At my previous place of employment I went to the office in SF every day for a year, then I worked from home for 2 more years until the company’s stock lost 80% of its value over the course of year. The only thing I missed while working from home was the opportunity to go tap someone on the shoulder to have a 3 minute conversation about some issue I was having. That can be done over Zoom, but it’s a pain the ass. Everything else was better at home.
marcopolo
edited to delete this comment & save space–i’m just too slow to respond, lol.
Old Man Shadow
No. This is a time when the president should encourage companies to work from home.
Gas is pushing towards $6, less driving means less demand means downward pressure on prices.
Zzyzx
I highly doubt I will ever go back to the office again. No one in my team is in a rush.
jonas
It’s not just about office space valuations. In places like NYC, office workers support a thriving restaurant/bar scene, shopping, and other services. You go out or order in for lunch, grab drinks after work, pick up some flowers or dry cleaning on the way home, etc. If most daytime office workers go away, all that stuff dries up with it, which isn’t good. Lots of immigrants and small entrepreneurs work in those businesses. What you’ll end up with is all the huge chain restaurants serving tourists around Times Square and nothing else.
Ruckus
John
Nicely stated. I had to show up in the office when I worked in Pro Sports. During the majority of the season I’d be in the office 3-6 days a month. Now I lived in the area of the office so I was coming back but an occasional day off would have been fucking nice and was a part of the reason I finally had enough. Had the communications been as good as now there would have been no reason for me to be there at all. In fact we had employees who were on the road driving equipment to the next event and they would come into the office maybe once, possibly twice – a YEAR.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@Baud: Thank you!
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@wmd: and thank you too
laura
All of what JoyceH said! And the fetish to surveille the subordinates is undeniable. And commercial real estate is cratering. I retired from a Union that maintenance the various systems in buildings after construction and the pandemic’s impact on the hotels and office space was immediately felt. Our Mayor is raising the issue of conversion to residential housing stock and it should be given serious consideration.
MrKite
From source watch:.
“Foundation For Individual Rights in Education.
FIRE is a former member of the State Policy Network, a group of right wing think tanks and other politically active non-profits….”
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@jonas: True this, in lots of cities, and towns. Even the smallish town I live in has a lot of cafes etc. support for the small business downtown, dominated by the local bank and the county courthouse.
PsiFighter37
This seems to be a diatribe aimed specifically at NYC (and to a lesser extent, San Francisco). As someone who has worked back in the office full-time for 18 months now, there is no doubt in my mind that having folks together in a collaborative setting improves overall output and connectivity. I also think that a number of people kvetching about remote work do so because they realized how much they were commuting beforehand. They made an active choice to do that, and enforcing that in their own self-interest strikes me as somewhat selfish. I fully support flexibility, but people who want to work remotely in perpetuity are never going to be culture carriers and help contribute much to their employers beyond work product.
Of course, I think a lot of this discussion is entitled bullshit anyways – the working class that has to be in-person for their jobs don’t have the luxury of moaning about where they work.
MobiusKlein
I have to laugh at “pay more”
That seems against their core values.
Kelly
I worked from home 3 days a week my last year before retirement. I could do my coding and troubleshooting just fine. My mentoring of the new folks was not as effective.
PsiFighter37
Furthermore, building out even more infrastructure in the suburbs and exurbs will simply encourage sprawl. Shoot me if you think it’s wise to turn every urban area into the Los Angeles metro area.
wmd
@Old Man Shadow: Yup.
I’ll be using a commute shuttle bus with fellow (masked) employees when we return to the office 1 day a week in April ramping to 3 days in May. Still using fuel.
The “tap on shoulder for 3 minute conversation” issue can be resolved over zoom … yes and no. We do build professional networks virtually as well as face to face. The pack of jackals is a case in point. But the in person meet ups add a lot of value by all reports. There’s some value to this in professional work too. I’m not upset about going in 3 days a week later in the spring.
Ksmiami
@PsiFighter37: exactly- please think about the downstream effects of having defunct downtowns. My daughter has been fine w tech remote but there are huge downsides for young ppl esp ones that moved for jobs etc. And young people who need some office time to socialize and get mentorship from older colleagues. TBH, the commercial re guys are doing fine, it’s the small cafe shops and dry cleaners etc that are going to be hosed by permanent white collar work from home.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
Then the new VR workplace is for you!
My wife was reading some article this morning about the “metaverse” and how lovely it is to spend your whole day as an avatar in a VR world, go to the VR lounge and hang out with your co-workers avatars, etc.
Ah yes, here it is.
Seriously, I agree with you. The physical workplace not only gives you that ability to drop by someone’s desk for a quick consultation, but also I always found it useful to hear the conversations around me, let me know what sort of projects people were working on and who was good at what.
Not enough reason to go back to the office though.
The Dangerman
We should care as much about CRE as we do about blacksmiths (and Coal, sorry Joe). Times change. Adapt or don’t and pay the price.
Nobody in West Virginia gave a shit about the human cost of the Peace Dividend after the Soviet Union fell. I don’t recall the exact numbers or time frames, but at 1 time there were ~300,000 directs in Aerospace in SoCal. Dropped to ~30,000 after things got slashed.
Balance in everything. I live basically exactly halfway between LA and SF. About equal numbers of Giants or Dodgers fans (Go Blue). I can get to either and back easily in a long day. Perfectly balanced (except we are the highest gas in the country, but we are used to being that way).
PsiFighter37
@Ksmiami: I don’t doubt that commercial real estate owners are worried – and frankly, I’m not sure why there hasn’t been more of an impact yet. Walking through Manhattan, it’s very clear that the existing commercial RE problems (which were quite present pre-pandemic) are even worse off now. All the knock-on impacts of working remotely, as you mention, filter down onto the working class that makes up the backbone of NYC. Love him or hate him – and there’s a lot to dislike about Eric Adams – he got people’s support across the spectrum because I think he’s perceived as being someone who will get life in the city back on the track.
Mousebumples
I’m able to work from home long-term (eg post COVID, whenever that ends up being), though I will need to travel to HQ (*not my pre-COVID office location) 4 times a year for major meetings. We’ve been doing them remotely for now, which I love, but my job is way more project based than “team collaboration” so I’m not sure what added benefit we’d get out of being in the office together.
The local office is available, if needed (eg power/internet outage after a storm – which has happened, like, once in the past 3 years that I’ve worked for this company.
Glad to be WFH. One minor brightside to COVID is the forced WFH experience, i guess. My company had some wacky policies before – like 1 less week PTO per year for those that were WFH.
Spanky
Just to add to the confusion, FIRE also means “Financial Independence. Retire Early”.
Mingobat (f/k/a Karen in GA)
@PsiFighter37:
No. I made an active choice 20 years ago to live somewhere affordable with an easy commute when I had a job in what had been an insanely stable, recession-proof field. Ten years later my insanely stable field was slammed by the Great Recession and I lost my insanely stable job.
To get that paycheck now I have to work someplace with a horrible commute, or work from home. Guess what I’m going to choose? Because my husband has a stable job near where we live now, his parents moved to the same area to be closer to him, and moving closer to an urban center costs a hell of a lot more than what we’re paying now.
Interestingly, areas near me, a little farther out from an urban center, are booming now. I suspect it’s because so many people can work from anywhere and commutes aren’t as much of a factor. What about all of the jobs created in places like these?
debbie
Most cities have areas other than downtown with clusters of businesses that are serviced by restaurants, shopping, etc. Same with residential neighborhoods. I live in a suburb, and if I wanted to run out and grab some lunch, I could do so very easily.
So I call b.s. on that. I don’t give a rat’s ass about CRE. They overbuilt, they own it. Either repurpose the space or raze it.
I submitted a request to extend my medical accommodation on 2/14. I was told there would be a decision in two business days. Fourteen business days later, still no response. I’m sure they’re trying to figure out what to do with accommodations, including mine. The final word in my GP’s statement was “death,” yet no one’s had the courage to ask me about my intentions. Cowards.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
Hey, you can’t shout FIRE in a crowded blog post.
debbie
@jonas:
With rare exceptions, there are residences in the same areas. Maybe not as much business, but please don’t make it sound like we’ll be flooded with cement deserts.
Kelly
I was really good at troubleshooting IBM Mainframe application software. Managers would send the new folks to look over my shoulder while I worked and I’d explain in detail all the diagnosis and fixes as soon a the system was back up. I couldn’t do it over the phone.
Ksmiami
@PsiFighter37: The one thing the CRE guys have now is a lot of locked in leases, investor money and really low interest rates on most of their debt service. In other words, they have the means to adjust, a small service bus owner has less marginal room
CaseyL
I’m amazed at the inertial force of “how we always did things.”
A year ago, people were confidently predicting that the changes wrought by discovering people can be at least as productive WFH (and far happier) would be wide-reaching and permanent. CRE and management would simply have to adjust somehow, because people would not want a return to the office FT. This was going to be an era of employee empowerment.
Oh, well.
Or, maybe the fact that Biden felt it was a good idea to advocate on behalf of FIRE and CRE is a sign that the change is permanent, and The Usual Suspects aren’t happy. As long as all Biden does is talk, I don’t think there will be an issue – hopefully neither he nor the Democrats in Congress will come up with legislation to force the issue.
JoyceH
I have to admit that I sometimes miss having an office to go to, but what I miss is the schmoozing etc that has nothing to do with actual work output.
JoyceH
@JoyceH: Replying to myself – but what I certainly don’t miss are office clothes, commuting, and having to be coherent in the morning.
TonyG
@JoyceH: Finance Insurance Real Estate, I think. Or maybe it just means wealthy idiots setting other people’s money on fire.
debit
I think businesses and CRE owners can push as much as they like for people to come back. I’m pretty sure the employee’s responses will be along the lines of, “LOL, no.”
I know it’s not true for every person and every job, but a lot of folks have discovered they don’t have to be wage slaves anymore and have the power to leave for something better.
Eljai
@JoyceH: Your comment made me think of the partners at the law firm where I used to work. I think they hated working from home the most. They used to put on their fancy suits and work in their fancy corner offices and get all the ego pats that come with that. Then, all of a sudden, they’re stuck at home — often with a working spouse and disgruntled teenage children. Where’s the fun in that?
I do think that there is some benefit to working together in an office from time to time, but it really does depend on the job. And I don’t think it needs to happen 5 days a week. In my former job, I didn’t collaborate with others. I had to bill for my time. WFH was a godsend. No commute and I could finally work without distractions.
Omnes Omnibus
I think that the denizens of this blog tend toward introversion and potential hermit status. This is not true of everyone. Be careful about applying what would work for you to or what your preference may be to the whole country. Work from home would have me crawling up walls within a week.
Kay
I prefer going to work- going to – but I have a 7 minute commute. However- I know lots and lots of people who found out they love working from home and don’t want to go back.
Anyway
I miss the free lunches after meetings …
narya
I disagree. I think there are tasks, settings, and people for whom this is true, but I do not think a blanket statement like this is accurate. For example, we have more than ten sites: I can have meetings with people at multiple sites and none of us have to travel to another site.
My organization has moved me at least once/year for the whole time I’ve worked there. The last office, assigned to me in the middle of the pandemic, was the only one that had my name on the door–and I never occupied that office. (I’m told they have since taken my name off the door.) In the current iteration, they have (a) put me and my team on the list of positions that should be coming back to the office but (b) have eliminated all office/cubicle space assigned to us (as in, we weren’t on the latest maps). I’m fine with that, and my boss isn’t being a jerk about it; we’ll see how things evolve.
My ideal is remote til I retire. Failing that, I want to know why we need to be in the office, so I can make sure that we arrange things so that that “why” is met, and I want to have dual setups so I’m not forced to choose all one or all the other. (I need multiple large monitors, given the multiple docs/files I need open at a given time.) Monitors are cheap; this shouldn’t be an issue.
Anyway
@Omnes Omnibus:
Yep. I prefer coming in to work – have an easy commute so that makes it easy.
arrieve
@jonas:
This. I live, and for decades I worked, in Midtown Manhattan. So many restaurants and small businesses have closed permanently because those workers disappeared. And some of them will be back, but not all of them, and those businesses and livelihoods are gone forever. My former employer was always dead set against working from home, except in occasional, approved in advance, situations like sick kids or furniture deliveries. They thought it would hamper collaboration. But now I think they’re seeing that maybe they really don’t need to keep paying for fifteen floors in a prestigious, centrally located building.
Which is great for everyone still working there. The past two years proved that people really don’t need to be in the office all day every day. But I see the economy that those office workers supported in the neighborhood and it’s been decimated. So many For Rent signs and no takers.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
Good lord, talk about waving a magic wand. This is ‘Murka. Look around most metro areas at some place on the “outskirts” and see how much “public transit” is available. Such a proposal is totally dead in the water.
Don’t get me wrong, this entire get-butts-back-into-the-office-shutup-that’s-why message is equally dumb. I have no support for the FIRE lobby and most commercial real estate people (who next to banks and insurance are right up there on the first places I visit during the upcoming revolution) but to think it’s simply that easy to shift things around as described in the original post is naive at best.
I work for a federal agency that’s been bleeding edge in terms of telework and WFH prior to the plague. About 8 months ago they polled employees and for once in 37 years of working for Club Fed, they apparently listened and are following thru with what seems like reasonable plans.
Going forward, anybody who was WFH fulltime during the plague and can now telework 2 days a week, no refusal by pointy-haired GS-15 managers. You can telework 3 days a week but need to get approval from same pointy-haired GS-15 managers but it’s been made clear, they basically have to approve it.
4 days a week is possible but needs higher level approval which probably won’t happen. In fact, it seems few people asked for it when they read the fine print where it said you would then be “hoteled” vis a vis office space. Nobody wants to do that.
Fulltime WFH is on the table but probably not gonna happen for most people.
Thus, it seems at least in our departmental agency, 3/2 is the “new norm”. Baring another outbreak of the plague, we go back like that at the end of April.
It’s funny, for decades we feds in terms of workplace innovations, are seen as hidebound conservatives and yet, we’re far more flexible on this stuff than the private sector. I’ve got one friend who writes code, if ever there was job you can do from home, and more importantly show actual productivity metrics, it’s that one. And yet, his company has brought them back in twice over the last 2 years only to send em home again when the plague reared it’s head. And they’re doing it again and daring people to fight it. They clearly don’t believe in any fundamental change to the labor/management dynamic in terms of “I’ll just go find a job elsewhere.”
Thank goodness I don’t work for his company.
Eric S.
At my company there is no NEED for the c-suite to be in the office. They’re old farts and choose to be. Office space had been eliminated over the last two years but s lot of it still remains and they’re bringing back everyone they can. (My space – not my job – was eliminated making me permanently remote.)
Gvg
It depends on the business. There are a lot of different scenarios, needs of specific business, layout of different towns, and….personalities of individual workers. When we went remote because of Covid, certain people with health issues or who had been watching the news, thought we had been too slow to react, but some of those turned out to be the happiest to come back way before numbers dropped down enough or before vaccines. Some people hated it. Some people had too many other people and children home to be as productive and that made it hard on managers to be fair to everyone. They didn’t want constant confrontations with the less productive nor did they really want to try to say some specific people have to come back to the office but other people get to stay remote because they were more efficient….sure facing that can be a managers job but it was more work, harsher morale problems and the legal side was iffy. The GOP was making it a political issue too so they might have lost a lot of lawsuits.
The legal issues for management IMO are going to have to be worked out gradually by experimentation and it may take awhile with some backtracking and trial and error. That isn’t where lots of lower level managers want to be test cases in.
The other thing is the people in person interacting with management are going to have promotion advantages. They just are. I have usually benefitted myself by working directly with higher bosses as opposed to a few layers of managers. And the there is office socializing. A lot of people really really like it. I didn’t much but I liked some. Not having any got old after awhile.
we are just beginning to experiment with hybrid starting in a couple of weeks. I get 2 days at home. Not everyone is choosing it. Policy will probably change a few times. Not all offices will decide the same things.
I wish the politicians would shut up. Businesses will work it out.
Sebastian
I work in the tech industry for one of the leading vendors in the remote work space.
There is no going back from Hybrid Work, the advantages are just too numerous. As a matter of fact, there is now so much intelligence at the Edge, it makes no sense to centralize again. Don’t forget, it’s not just about sitting in an office, often you want to be closer to the customer but couldn’t because you didn’t have the tech.
The industry term is Anywhere Operations.
Soprano2
OMG, so so tired of the worship of remote work. Everyone does NOT want to work from home, and many jobs cannot be done from home anyway. Plus, it’s a good point that empty downtowns would decimate cities. Remote work can be good, but it’s not a solution to every work problem.
TonyG
@wmd: I “worked” in I.T. for almost 40 years, and, as soon as VPN technology became reliable at round the late-nineties, much of that work was done remotely. Even on the days when I was in an office, much of the work was actually remote — i.e., exchanging information with support people and software vendors who were hundreds or thousands of miles away. In a rational world, most “knowledge” work would be done remotely, maybe with occasional (monthly or quarterly) face to face pep-rally type meetings at some rented space like a hotel conference rooms. There’s no reason to force people to undergo hellish daily commutes.
trollhattan
@John Cole:
We’re in the midst of a period of infill apartments going into downtown at a time office space is overbuilt, retail space is mostly dodgy, and the state, the biggest employer, is still hybrid remote-in place.
Old downtown narrative: “they roll up the sidewalks on the weekend, because nobody goes there, it’s a commuter town. We need to attract people to visit and live downtown. Oh yeah, widen all the freeways to make it easier for suburbanites to commute, m’kay?”
New downtown narrative: “State workers need to get back to work to save our downtown businesses.”
Somehow, state workers are to blame for both visions. But, as several thousand new market-rate apartments fill with well-heeled people working from home perhaps they’ll at last have the downtown of their dreams. IDK square footages but guess converting underused office space into apartments and condos would make for a significant win-win. I do not have fuck one to give for landlords moaning they can’t fill their spaces.
Coda. Main driver of all this construction is the influx of Bay Area folks who can finally depart for more affordable pastures, driving up our housing market because they can work from home.
raven
@Kelly: I worked from home building online courses for 15 years. I retired, the plague came and everyone worked from home and did online education.
No One of Consequence
Fairly sure the intention was: Finance, Insurance, Real Estate. I could be wrong.
Couple things: Slack. If your team doesn’t use it, consider it. The new ‘huddle’ feature is a pretty close approximation of the tap on the shoulder 3 min convo.
Getting back to the office is quite simply not going to happen anywhere near the levels that it was at pre-pandemic. CRE was hurting badly in my city in the central midwest for the last decade plus. The pandemic is going to shutter a lot of it, and it should. It’s overbuilt, imho.
White collar workers who can do 75% or more of their job remotely won’t be coming back to the office full time. For those companies that force the issue, their employee turnover will see a marked increase. Frankly in most areas I am familiar with, ‘knowledge’ workers don’t have to accept conditions they find unacceptable or even too inconvenient.
If a mass return to the office occurs in this nation, the landscape will look very different now, than it did 3 years ago. Ymmv, of course.
Peace,
No One of Consequence
TonyG
@TonyG: In a make-believe ideal world an organization could maintain a scaled-down office for those people who prefer not to work remotely. The point being that the CEOs of organizations could be a lot more flexible if they’re really as smart as they claim to be.
raven
@TonyG: Yea, for two years before I got sent home I drove 60 miles to logon and work with folks all over Georgia.
PsiFighter37
@narya: I agree with you that maybe it’s not a blanket statement that should be applied. But that said, from my own personal experience, I can say that working remotely 100% as a last resort worked. It proved that flexibility could be used effectively some of the time. But it also proved, at least for what I do, that it was not at all effective 200% of the time.
arrieve
@debbie:
There were many many thousands more workers in my neighborhood than there are residents. We can only support a small fraction of those businesses. I knew several people, in businesses I’d been patronizing for years, who had to close.
I think WFH is the right thing to do. And I’m sure the big corporations will figure it out. But the fallout is very painful for a lot of people who had thriving businesses just a few years ago.
Kelly
@TonyG: Over decades of my IT career I spent a lot of time on the phone with vendor support folks and IT folks at other company sites. Experienced people talking to experienced people always worked well. New folks need face to face time to get up to speed
I should add that a conference call on a speaker phone and a bit of glitchy screen sharing was remote collaboration at the time.
Kent
There is a big loss for young people in this whole work from home movement.
My oldest daughter graduated from college in May 2020 right into the teeth of the pandemic which a degree in PR and marketing and an intended focus on travel and tourism industries. Talk about the worst timing in the world.
She’s been doing OK. She is a snowboarder and surfer and has been trading time between working at ski resorts in the winter and surf shops in the summer. But finding permanent professional work in her field has been a struggle and most of the interviews she gets are for remote internship positions, working from home doing who knows what. She REALLY REALLY doesn’t want to start a professional life from her bedroom with a company located in another state. Zoom college was bad enough.
So she is back working in the business office of a ski resort this winter, this time in Jackson WY on the theory that actual real work with actual real customers, even if it is seasonal, is better experience than doing virtual remote work on a laptop from her bedroom with no actual human contact. I hope she is right.
It is one thing to move into the spacious spare bedroom/home office of the suburban home you bought 20 years ago after having spent 20 years working in an office cube. It is another thing entirely to graduate from college, find your first tiny apartment, and then have to make a living without ever actually meeting your co-workers or having a work social life.
delk
The trend had been suburban offices moving to urban centers because younger workers don’t want to sit in a car for two hours a day burning fossil fuel.
James E Powell
@Omnes Omnibus:
Agreed. I won’t go as far as the Apple+ series Severance, but I try to avoid having work come home.
HeleninEire
I hated working from home. Absolutely hated it. I could not concentrate (and I live alone). Also I’m an old and I like printing documents out when I write, read, and edit them. And I do a lot of that. I did not have the printing capacity I needed at home.
But that’s easy for me to say. My commute is a 15 minute walk. If I had to get on the subway and commute into Manhattan every day I would have made working from home, well, work.
debbie
@arrieve:
Hope you’re right. I work in a room the size of a football field with countless half walls and many common areas. There is no protection.
NotMax
Pfeh. Perfect plan for the ruination of the outskirts.
Also ignores that there exists a social component to shared workplaces.
Salty Sam
A fellow that my wife dated 40 years ago started an engineering company- he absolutely hated meetings, considered them inefficient and major time sinks. He’s never had an office, all his employees, from engineering to accounting, were told to work from home. He told them “I don’t give a shit when you work- if 3am works for you, fine. Just get me your work product on time”
It has worked well for him for 40 years. Almost no turnover in employees either.
ETA: this was accomplished in the 80’s, well before the interwebs as we know them now. No Zoom meetings! (I despise Zoom)
Butter Emails!
As others have noted this idea of relocating to someplace on the outskirts isn’t necessarily the best idea.
1. Public transit to the outskirts isn’t necessarily available. When it is available, it’s a longer commute for those living on the outskirts on the opposite side of the city.
2. Because of lack of public transit, that means more auto based commutes. Not good for traffic or the environment.
3. Sprawl.
4. There is the prestige issue for some businesses as well as the employees.
5. Hollowing out the urban cores isn’t exactly a good thing for the craploads of other businesses that depend on those workers.
What should and hopefully will happen intermediate to longer time frame is that businesses will occupy a smaller footprint in the same locations, with more businesses in a given highrise building, while other buildings are converted to residential space.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@TonyG:
I’ve “worked” in IT since 1996. I chuckled at your VPN reference because that’s not anywhere close to ours. We didn’t begin to rollout anything that could be recognized as VPN in a 2022 sense until around 2005 and for the next decade, it was a joke. Dodgy, unreliable, not worth the bother.
Of course given it’s the feds, we most likely under budgeted for what it would take to make it work. It was not until around 2015 that we finally had a VPN system that was nominally workable.
And even then, it was dodgy and unreliable and remained that way literally until 2 years ago when we were all sent home. We spent a ton of money expanding it’s capability and reliability to the point where we can WFH for the most part.
That being said, I’ve spent probably 50% of the last two years doing support solely on issues pertaining to “my VPN won’t connect”. It’s a massive support project., aka job security.
Soprano2
@Omnes Omnibus: Yep, exactly! This is driven by people who never wanted to be in an office in the first place.
oldgold
If I was a young person Intent on working my way up through a company and had the choice of working from home or the office, I would choose the office. Generally, it is a good idea to stay close to the fire.
NotMax
@arrieve
Too, the fabled three martini lunch loses its luster when you have to mix them and do the washing up from home.
//
Sister Golden Bear
Not sure what the current back to work plans are but one my bosses sent out an email asking how much people planned to be in the office so they will can plan desk space. I said that while I’m happy to come in when needed (e.g. team-wife meetings etc.), all the people I work with on my current projects are in different time zones, it didn’t make sense for me to commute two hours a day* (even 3x/wk) to effectively work remotely from the office.
The other big thing… (which I didn’t say) is you want me to return to office, then give me an office environment I can actually be productive in. After years of having “collaborative workspaces” (pushed by people who never seem to actually work in them), the standard is now a long table with people sitting literally shoulder to shoulder. Hard enough to concentrate under the best of circumstances, and nigh impossible when you’ve got multiple conversations going on around me. (Even with noise-blocking headphones, which get painful to wear all day.)
*I got the job during pandemic and I’ve been into the office exactly once to pick up my employee badge when I started. I like working there but long-term the commute might force to go elsewhere, even if I can take the train to SF (unlike commuting to jobs in Silicon Valley).
Steeplejack
Funny comments in this thread:
JanieM
@Salty Sam:
This is huge for us non-morning people. I worked mostly from home for 30 years for a company that didn’t care if i got my work done at 1 pm or 1 am, as long as I got it done. In later years, the internet meant that I could be “present” at meetings, share screens ad hoc with people I was doing projects with, etc.
I actually went to the office for a few days every month for years. That was fun and productive in a different way.
@PsiFighter37:
I have some sympathy for this point, but the solution doesn’t have to be the same for everyone.
Kelly
@raven: Teaching is harder than doing. I could explain what went wrong, how I knew and how I fixed it. They gave me time to put a class together but I wasn’t very good at it. Just after I’d fixed something so I had an example to launch from and I suppose a bit of pride and adrenaline I was talkative, clear and hilarious.
Starfish
@TheOtherHank: I went back to the office two days, while everyone else in my working group is remote. I realized that we had gotten very efficient at Zoom shoulder taps, and it was cumbersome to be in the office.
In the office, I had to go find a tiny conference room, so I would not be loud on the Zoom with my coworker, and that takes time that you do not have to take when you are doing it from your work space at home.
We were optimized for in-office culture before. We are not optimized for that now.
Will
“If I were CEO”
This is why you are not a CEO.
trollhattan
@NotMax: Have you seen the price of olives?
narya
@Soprano2: Apparently I’m today’s Designated Contrarian :-). (Note that I do recognize that people’s needs, preferences, etc. vary all over the place here.)
I avoided WFH like the plague–UNTIL the plague. I wanted to separate work and home as completely as possible; didn’t want work in MY space. One key for me is that I’ve done that at home, both with designated work-space and by wearing work clothes during the work day and changing at day’s end. I have a very short commute on public transportation–1/2 hour, door to door, so it’s not the commute for me, either. I’m not trying to climb a ladder of any kind, and my relationship w/ senior management is such that I can contact any of them at any time over our version of Slack/Skype, which not everyone will have.
Turns out I’m way more introverted than I realized–but I think it’s mostly that I’m old, and tired of working, and just want the remaining work time to be as painless as possible, using MY definition of painless. If folks want me to be In The Office, tell me what you want me to accomplish there that I’m not accomplishing from home.
I know this differs wildly for folks, even in this particular thread! What I hope happens is that there’s a real conversation in each workplace, but I suspect that won’t be the case.
satby
@delk: This. Over the course of my working life I alternated jobs in some suburban hell-hole (like Rosemont or Schaumberg) with jobs in downtown Chicago. A cross metropolitan car commute could take two hours each way in bad weather or construction, vs. a 20 minute max relaxing ride on a train to the Loop and a brisk walk of a couple blocks to a mile, tops. To commute to the suburban jobs via public transit would normally mean train to Loop, second train to other end of city or the goal suburb, and then a bus, maybe on a reduced schedule because most suburbanites didn’t use buses; allow 2-3 hours each way. Nope. Talk about a shitty quality of life.
debbie
@Soprano2:
Not sure you realize just how many office parks and complexes there are all over the country. Most have their own cafeterias or small shops. Employees bring their own lunches or use the cafeteria and don’t leave the building until it’s time to go home.
HeleninEire
@HeleninEire: Also I hate working on a laptop. Give me a real keyboard, a mouse, and two monitors so I can copy and paste easily.
Also? Get offa my lawn.
NotMax
@trollhattan
It’s enough to drive one to drink.
:)
raven
@Kelly: We were fortunate from the beginning. We were well funded, used a collaborative course development process that included 4 content folks, and techie and myself. The courses were asynchronous and had to work on dial-up. Here’s an overview
eta The program also includes mandatory training for instructors and really well done student support.
Eljai
@Sister Golden Bear: This!
And OMG, this!
A firm I worked at remodeled and made everything “open plan” despite feedback from almost everyone not to go that route. Since the pandemic, they’ve been trying to figure out a hybrid approach to returning to the office so they can keep everyone safely distanced.
Jeffery
Remote work is here to stay. Condo conversions of office buildings soon.
NotMax
More deplorable squandering of real estate. Not to mention heat islands.
Hamlet of Melnibone
I’ve been an advocate for WFH my whole career. Of course, my whole career has been building WFH VPN networks for Corporate America, so that makes sense. ?
Even pre-pandemic, my team really functioned as remote, even when most of us were in an office. We had team members in India, the Philippines, and multiple states, so most of our work got done on Webex ( a few years ago ) or Microsoft Teams ( today ). I went into the office everyday pre-pandemic, but most of my interactions were in WebEx/Teams from my cubicle.
There was a social aspect that I miss a little. I liked going out to lunch with people.
For the most part though, all of those people commuting to sit in cubicles to be on calls with other people in cubicles in different buildings was a big waste of time, money, and resources.
satby
@debbie: see my comment above about shitty quality of life. Next we’ll just get paid in script we can only use at the company store.
I WFH for years too; consistently the last four years of my IT career when I wasn’t on the road to work at a client facility, from 2008-2013. I liked WFH, but working at an office had its benefits too, so I’m agnostic on which is better; but shovelling offices all out to the hinterlands is not a good idea. At all.
prostratedragon
@jonas: Bingo. Chicago downtown went through a cycle of this in the 80s and 90s. It did recover, due to twin commercial and residential booms. Be interesting to review what kicked off the former. I think it might have been the latter. But in a larger city a center without business is probably pretty dead.
Miss Bianca
Eh. For me it’s a matter of taste and temperament. I don’t think anyone who is happy and able to work from home should be forced back into the office. Likewise, it people want or need to go back, there should be allowances made for that as well. It not only depends on the person(s) involved, but the nature of the work. For example, one of my jobs is managing a theater. It’s hard to put on productions without being able to get together to rehearse and perform.
On the other hand, as a government reporter, I fervently bless the advent of Zoom and Youtube as vehicles for attending public meetings remotely, as my county was one of those leading the charge for “yee haw, no COVID restrictions for *us*, by cracky!” – which led to the spectacle of all three county commissioners coming down with COVID right after the big packed public meeting where they declared COVID restrictions dead. (If irony could kill, those three would be dead as doornails – and, in at least two out of the three cases, the county would arguably be better off for it. But I digress.)
Do I miss some level of informal interaction at a safely remote distance? Sure. Do I think it worth risking my health and my sanity? Surely…not.
I have had some jobs where I was indubitably more productive in an office environment. Even in the depths of the pandemic I would more often than not go to my office in the empty theater. But I appreciate the freedom of being able to make the choice that works best for me, rather than having the decision imposed on me by some arbitrary “OK, everyone back to the Office Space now!” standard.
satby
@John Cole: wee bit o’ bias showing. Just cause you don’t like cities doesn’t no one does.
Mousebumples
@HeleninEire: I got to bring my monitors home when Covid hit, but buying a wireless keyboard was an early buy for me, like, 2 years ago.
But I have a separate office space in the basement, which helps with work/home separation.
Strangely, if you had asked my if I wanted to WFH 3 years ago, I would have said no. And when my kids are off to school in a few years, maybe I’ll have a different response. But I love hearing the running of little feet to “help” me open the door when I come up for a break. Looking at pictures on my desk is nowhere near the same thing.
wmd
I started at least 2 weeks of remote work a year when I was at Sun back in 1999. I wanted to keep connection with friends and family in Indiana. VPN worked, although back then it used external 2 party authentication devices. Bandwidth sucked, but improved every year.
My current work provides a shuttle bus with high speed access to the corporate intranet about 10 minutes from my house. I spend the commute time catching up on email, reviewing bugs and slack. It is productive time, not time stuck in traffic. If this weren’t available I’d be less sanguine about returning to the office 3 days a week.
We were sent home 2 years ago. Until the end of the Delta wave to come in the office we had to have prior management approval (I used it when I had to evacuate for wild fire in August2020). Last October antigen tests were made available for free to employees – testing require daily for unvaccinated (unboosted is considered unvaccinated); weekly for vaccinated if coming to the office; daily online health check for everyone. Testing has changed to twice weekly regardless of vaccination status. I’m pretty sure this wouldn’t have changed if there were significant numbers of unvaccinated. I don’t see being in the office as a significant health risk. it will have some value for collaboration.
coin operated
As someone mentioned above, gas prices are really going to turn the screws on that idea.
I work in IT and went into the office every day for the entire pandemic. Could not wait to get out. When I left, every candidate we interviewed stoped the interview the moment they found out that remote wasn’t an option
NotMax
@satby
scrip
/pedant
When what once was the sugar cane workers’ company store here (converted to real cash decades previous) finally gave up the ghost not all that long ago they had an “everything must go” sale. I swear some of the stuff put on sale was dragged out from dank innards of the place and hadn’t seen the light of day since Coolidge was in office.
sab
I love working remote, but I have been 15 years with this company. They used to have low turnover, but the handful of newbies really floundered and then left because there was no one there interested in training them.
Suzanne
I just accepted a full-time remote work position at the firm I’ve been under contract with since last May. They really would prefer I move to Philly, but I don’t want to right now. The firm leadership are very old-school (“collaboration!!!”), but it was difficult to argue with the success of WFH. Especially since my project assignment is in NoVa, the partner firm is in NYC, and most people on my team got the Rona. And our client absolutely does not want to meet in person ever. They are finding that people will not attend meetings if they have to drive. They actively prefer virtual.
They are going to 3/2. I am taking the train in tomorrow and will be in the office for the next few days.
The workflow in my field is a lot of quick collaboration, then a round of concentrated solo effort to figure out a problem or produce a drawing. The collaboration part is great in the office. The solo effort part is terrible. The ones who are successful will figure out how to balance that. And they will give their workers the latitude to do it.
The biggest issue with 3/2 is that it still doesn’t really allow you to move out of the metro area.
Omnes Omnibus
@sab: Training new people doesn’t matter. Everyone is a well trained hermit with adequate space and resources at home. Get with the program.
satby
@NotMax: gracias.
@sab: yeah, training, mentoring, etc all harder to do remotely; but not impossible.
The main thing people hated about going into the office is normally the commute (as listed above). Eliminating a burdensome one is most people’s goal and WFH meets that. So do central downtowns with good public transportation. Both cut carbon emissions, which should be a consideration going forward.
But as someone noted above, this is really a discission of immense privilege. Most trades or service jobs can’t be done remotely.
Suzanne
FYI there will be fewer office-to-residential conversions than you think. For lots of building code reasons and technical aspects of development reasons. It will not be financially feasible in most cases, as business is a “higher use” than residential, meaning it brings in more dollars per square foot than residential.
sab
@JanieM: WFH is a luxury. My stepson the machinist works at his work on the other side of the county. Long commute. But otherwise he loves it.
debbie
@Omnes Omnibus:
A lot of new people were trained remotely. It shows. That’s something that’s better in person.
sab
@Omnes Omnibus: If they just gave them my phone number I probably could have helped.
I love working late at night, when NPR radio is jazz instead of annoying both-sides political commentary. None of which I would have dared listen to in the office.
But I know where my ten-key is in my work office. At home I have one but I don’t know where it is.
Michael Cain
@Eljai:
It is a matter of faith in management that sticking everyone in an open floor plan will somehow lead to amazingly productive collaboration that doesn’t happen in offices. Rather than that for a lot of positions, the problem is finding someplace quiet for long enough to string two thoughts together. Years and years ago, when I spent a couple of years in the supervisor job for the group, the biggest change that I noticed was how much of my work load as a manager really was face to face, and meetings, and paying attention to the scuttlebutt in the hall, just to keep other managers from stabbing us in the back. Really hard to do well by Zoom, which does tend to make body language signaling impossible.
Starfish
@PsiFighter37: The office environment got progressively shittier with open floor plans, so this is not just people getting more entitled. Offices became crappier places. Also, as housing costs went up in urban centers, a lot of people were thrown much further from their offices.
Suzanne
@Michael Cain:
No, that’s the bullshit stated reason. The reason is that it’s cheaper. A 4’x6′ workstation is less space (therefore less rent) than a 80 NSF office. And one-big-room requires less ventilation than one biggie space.
CROAKER
Amen … thank you Sister Golden Bear… we moved to shelves a few years ago and “collaborative workspace” and its poo
debbie
@Starfish:
It’s very hard to stay focused. I like chatting as much as the next person, but the endless hearing everybody else’s business is wearying.
sab
@sab: Last time I went to my office office a newby had stolen my scissors, my scotch tape and my stapler! So I took my staple remover home.
Ruckus
@The Dangerman:
A lot of that aerospace work moved to other areas as the big companies involved moved out of very expensive space. And I know this because I used to do specialty aerospace manufacturing, just before the Northridge earthquake destroyed my business – and took a good shot at killing me. And I worked the last 9 yrs of my working life – retired, YEA – in machining specialty short run or single piece projects. And yes we do less aerospace work in this country now than we did. Some parts of Boeing planes are manufactured overseas.
sab
@debbie: My at work office only has a tiny kitchen. At home I have a full kitchen and a husband, both of which cut into my productivity.
Uncle Cosmo
Other things being equal, I’d agree…but in the current environment, other things are very unlikely to be anywhere near equal.
What happens when a company realizes they can operate with 1/2 to 1/3 the amount of space if most of their staff can work from home? What happens when a new venture with minimal assets signs a lease for pricey office space & then crashes & burns, leaving the landlord holding the bag, and the space is vacant for long months?
It’s my marginally-informed opinion that if commercial-to-residential conversions are impractical, we’re going to start seeing commercial RE being sold off for dimes on the dollar and then demolished to throw up town houses on the wreckage.
CROAKER
@sab: Lol all I can think of is office space
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vsayg_S4pJg
Starfish
@Soprano2: There are quite a lot of people who are going to be working hybrid; but if gas prices are up because there is a big war going on, and we will all be at the mercy of climate change soon anyway, sitting at home makes a lot of sense.
Why are we not thinking about the environmental impact of the commute?
Ruckus
@Starfish:
When I worked in that pro sports job and was in the office most of the office was cubicles, so open space and we had one woman who would sing to herself – OK just loud enough that everyone could hear her. Yeah that helped office moral. Add in a lot of people talking on the phone/after the phone rings….. It does make for a less than stellar working environment.
sab
@Michael Cain: My sister works for a pharmaceutical company where management tried to remodel without consulting the scientists. First draft the scientists were horrified. They did not want their offices to be anywhere near their labs. ” We work with scary stuff, chemicals, viruses and bacteria. We want it across campus, not next door.”
JaneE
We have been hearing “mixed use” for development for years. Maybe someone could take an office building and put retail , offices, dining, and residential in it. Or turn the whole thing into a homeless shelter.
Starfish
@delk: Unfortunately, those urban centers became too expensive for young people to live in. Who wants a studio in San Jose for $3,000 a month.
JanieM
@sab:
Another oracle, another vast generalization. Nice to have everything settled so simple(-mindedly).
sab
@CROAKER: LOL . I hadn’t made the connection, but I was nearly as outraged.
Ruckus
@Starfish:
Because that impact is not reflected in the quarterly spreadsheet of the people making the decisions to have everyone in where they can watch them to make sure that every second of their 8 hrs is productive. IE: to control them.
CROAKER
@Starfish: Because we as a Merican society lack vision. This was an awful time but it could have been transformative and we failed. GAS is too damn high…DRILL DRILL DRILL…
WHERE are the meats!?! What about those can’t get any of those ….I need my TP… COSCO !
WereBear
When I was a coordinator between marketing and coding/engineering I discovered the most important part was making sure the first department did not constantly interrupt the second.
Which they loved to do. For some reason. Like the concept of concentration was not found in their heads.
Starfish
@Miss Bianca: You are the best. Your county commissioners are the worst.
GoBlueInOak
@PsiFighter37: I have tripled deal flow at my company over the last 2 years working remotely while also onboarding new hires who were hired during the pandemic remotely. The idea that we need to be in person to foster productivity or culture is weak tea perpetuated by lazy people who refuse to adapt to a new means of white collar work.
Starfish
@Suzanne: Being remote and working in Philadelphia is weird. Don’t you end up having to pay Philadelphia city tax or something?
sab
@JanieM: WTF.
Ruckus
@TonyG:
I’ve seen some that are and some that aren’t close. Although it seems the actual smart ones don’t need to attempt to prove it all the time. Worked the same in the military, IMHO.
Starfish
@debbie: The two days I went back to the office, the few other people in the open office floor plan were Zooming from their desks instead of going to the tiny conference rooms that we had for this. I did not kill them.
Starfish
GoBlueInOak
@Ksmiami: The small businesses located in traditional (and at this point, entirely outdated) spoke-and-hub style CBD office districts are gonna struggle and have to adapt.
The small businesses located in urban residential neighborhoods that now have a lot more WFH workers are gonna find they have new revenue stream opportunities. There’s no reason that residential neighborhoods cannot become more mixed use, supporting a hybrid of residential uses mixed in with retail/small biz.
Adapt or perish. Welcome to the free market, baby. Society doesn’t owe you a promise that your sh*tty sandwich shop in the “downtown office” district serving ham and cheese on wheat toast is gonna be there forever.
Sister Golden Bear
@Michael Cain:
Fixed it for you.
Starfish
@Ruckus: It has gotten worse than that. They took away the cubicle walls. We don’t even have that anymore. Just stuff in another desk. They did take away most of the phones too, so that helped.
GoBlueInOak
@Baud:
The “I” is for Insurance
Brent
@debbie: Because of forced single family zoning in the vast percentage of living areas in the US, its actually the case that there is far less population density everywhere, including downtowns, than there really ought to be. Without going into an extremely long rant, I have, for a very long time, advocated that doing away with the regulatory requirement of single family residency would actually solve many, many social problems, including this one. For a lot of reasons, I doubt it will happen anytime soon. But keep in mind that 75% of residential land in the US is zoned for single family use.
sab
@Starfish: Don’t know, but I feel like it was. And I hadn’t even used that office before, but I know it should have had a stapler.
Starfish
@sab: I deleted my Office Space reference because CROAKER got to it first.
NotMax
One point I don’t see being brought up is that not everyone has the luxury of setting up a dedicated space for working remotely, or neither a space propitiously located when sharing the abode with roommate(s) or family.
There’s a made for TV movie waiting to be cranked out (involving murder) upon discovering just how irritating/cumbersome having roommates each/all working from home in an apartment can be.
GoBlueInOak
@Brent: You’re not wrong. There’s been multiple economic papers published at this point of the enormous drag on U.S. GDP from restrictive zoning, esp. single family only – much like our health care system, we have way too much of our national income being hoovered up by artificial scarcity and incumbent rent seeking that would otherwise be put to much more economic productive uses.
CROAKER
@Starfish: Yes you do. Would you rather waste 2 hours of your day or pay city wage tax? Speaking of someone I may or may not know
Oh and Philly electrified the East Coast starting out of 30th street. There were multiple rail systems and still potential are. Not confirming this of course. There are different terminal locations for regional rail connections. Ran by two different systems. Now under Septa.
You can pretty much go to anywhere you want but wear thee of the Cold, Heat, Eagles Playoffs and Storms. Skipping Pope cause that was a shitshow.
Mother May I Tell You of the Sites I Have Seen
Miki
@Omnes Omnibus: I’m a committed introvert, which is one reason the anonymity of the big city is a big draw for me. I hated the parking lot life of the suburbs – what a waste of time. I’ve always been drawn to the street/skyway level immediacy of downtowns and near-downtown neighborhoods. It’s hard to explain to someone who’s drawn to perceived sameness.
Suzanne
@Uncle Cosmo:
So first off, most data on this indicates that American companies are anticipating needing approximately 70% of their current space. The bloodbath that some are predicting is not what is really anticipated. (Yes, there are differences by region and by industry.) Think about it: most offices are at least 50% shared space like conference rooms, break rooms, resource libraries, etc. Even if they got rid of many of their workstations, they still will maintain all that other stuff.
And I will note that because residential is so much less lucrative per square foot in most markets where this would occur, it would be far more likely for a developer to allow the space to remain business occupancy and stay vacant, even for long stretches of time, in the hopes that it could be occupied by a business tenant even at a reduced rate in the future.
Residential development is expensive and doesn’t return as much as business. Most municipalities have significant requirements for parking and open space that make most office parks not a great target for that conversion. Most neighborhoods will not want that type of development around them (especially if the housing is not targeted at wealthy people) and will drive up costs with a long public approval process or significant impact fees. Residential development is increasingly only a good value proposition if done at scale.
narya
@NotMax: Yeah, I totally get this. My team and I are fortunate, in that all of us have the ability to set up that separate space. One member just had a baby (well, his partner did), but as an organization we’ve also been tolerant or welcoming of babies joining calls. I really don’t think there’s a single correct decision.
sab
@sab: Don’t even start me on clients who staple stuff. We do tax prep. We know what goes where. Do not staple stuff where you think it goes because you will probably be wrong. We can sort stuff. Do you really want to pay extra for us to remove your misguided staples?
Suzanne
@Starfish: I have to pay Pittsburgh city tax.
bjacques
@narya: this was me two years ago less one week. Then mid-March and we started WFH. I really took to it—no commute, could log in Monday mornings, do a Start Work on an ongoing ticket, then sneak off to the flea market down the street for an hour, as long as I checked my work phone for emails and Slack messages every 5 minutes—and STILL more productive than when I was in the office. Then last June they dumped us all, a year later than planned, and after 22 years in my case. Nominally looking for another job, but I really don’t want to go back to commuting, to another office park with a cafeteria that switches every year to an ever-cheaper food services contractor. Despite that and the long hours, I had a sweet gig with good pay and I’ll never get another like it, not at my age.
Now, with the pandemic officially over(ish), promises of hybrid work schedules are evaporating like fairy gold. Screw it. I’m looking to retire, and maybe I can. I apply to my hobbies almost the same forensic skills I used at work, and there’s plenty to do and read. How the hell I lived my life while putting in ~50 hours a week the last several years I’ll never know.
Thanks for attending my TED talk.
Ruckus
@sab:
As I said above I worked in an office environment for 11 yrs. The other productive years of my working life after HS graduation was working in machine shops. And owning one for a good part of that. I also worked summers during HS working in machine shops. But even in the machine shop I had to work some of the time in an office, early on at a drafting table and then at a computer, which started in 1978. So I am a hybrid. But as I said here before, the last 9 yrs of my working life was in a machine shop and that can’t be done from home.
There are a lot of jobs that can not be done from home. But there are a lot of jobs that can be done remote, often most or all of the time. They will become at least part time remote because it works as good or better, it is cheaper for the worker, it will reduce pollution, And some of that office space can be turned into housing, especially for those that actually like living in a city. It can be a win-win situation if people want it to be.
Gvg
Around here commercial real estate seemed over built for years before covid. They kept building more anyway. Older buildings sat empty and some of the newer ones never filled. From what I gather, it was more profitable by a big enough margin that builders wanted to do it more. I couldn’t understand where they were getting the financing. I also don’t get why they are building fancy new stores all over that are separate but almost strip malls, but the malls are empty. Malls were so much more convenient than large shopping areas you need to move your car in each time you go to a different store. I mean, I know a lot is moved on line, but then why the new less convenient stores?
The office building for this area made even less sense. We just didn’t have the demand. Builders seem kinda nuts to me. They also prefer to build high end residential, more than the demand, and not enough mid range or starter. Then the excess didn’t sell. Not sure about now, but my house has increased in value about +50% in 2 years. Glad I bought 3 years ago.
Cacti
Because I really miss those hours each day I spent commuting.
-No one, ever
Suzanne
@Gvg:
God knows that no one dislikes developers more than I do, but their decisions make all the sense in the world if you really understand their constraints.
No developer is going to build below-market-rate housing in this country, anywhere, without regulatory intervention. It simply does not make anyone any money.
narya
@bjacques: One of the things that has gotten me through some very frustrating times at work over the past year is realizing that I could quit. It is not in my best financial interest to do so quite yet, but I could manage; turns out just knowing that makes it easier to take a deep breath and see if I can solve the issue. Also too: the pile of fks I have left to give is quite small, so I’m willing to be late with things in ways I was not before. Some deadlines are set by the government, and many of those are not flexible, but even some of those can be bent a bit. (We’re gonna be late with a big data submission, because we had another big deadline on Feb 15, then the head of data took a vacation, then I was out for surgery. People have lives; deal with it.)
sab
@Starfish: I love that movie, but I probably wouldn’t have realized that it applied to me. But thankfully I love my bosses.
Jeffro
110% with you on all counts, Cole.
Btw folks I popped up to NoVA for lunch with my RWNJ dad and bro. No politics discussed, save explaining the origins of “Let’s Go Brandon” to my dad, who was like, “well, that’s dumb and classless”. Praise be! ANYway, on the way out, I saw the “People’s Convoy” doing their thing by slow-rolling the DC Beltway…and getting passed on both shoulders by DC commuters (my people!)
Freedumb, yarrrrgh! LOL
Kay
I do think of WFH-ers like that, though :)
Almost Retired
I kinda miss going to the office, but what do I care because……I’m Almost Retired.
One often overlooked aspect of the WFH revolution is the effect on the accommodation of the disabled. I represent a lot of persons with disabilities in employment disputes, and a common accommodation request has always been a modified work from home schedule.
In the last decade, HR Directors would positively flop to the fainting couch in despair at the mere request! Productivity! Supervision! Morale! Undue hardship! Smelling salts, please.
And, by and large, the Courts, even here in California, would defer to the employers, citing “Productivity! Supervision! Morale! Undue Hardship” usually with very little analysis of the practical feasibility of the arrangement.
We’re not going back to those days. Good.
Ruckus
@arrieve:
Yes it is. I lost a business to an earthquake. In that 30 second earthquake I lost $33,000 worth of work, and thousands of dollars of putting machines (including one that had been knocked over and through a wall, back in place and rewiring an entire machine shop. Did I mention that I could do zero productive work till all of that was done? And paid for. But that can be part of owning a business, sometimes even if you do everything correct, shit still happens. I lost my second business to a republican sponsored recession. (In case you hadn’t noticed, I like republicans – not.)
Baud
@Jeffro:
After hearing you talk about your father several times, I’m pleasantly surprised.
sab
@Ruckus: My stepson loves his job, and he cannot have a machine shop at home.
My accounting firm could have us at home or in or in office.
Janie M has an issue with me. I don’t know why. But every time I toggle her out of the pie filter I am sorry. And I have restrained myself a lot on her photos in foreign countries.
germy
NotMax
@Jeffro
Maybe they’re operating under the assumption that if they can only achieve the proper critical mass of trucks all going counter-clockwise on the Beltway they can reverse time to when His Tangerineness was sitting at the top.
//
sab
Whenever my pitbull gets stressed, which is a lot, she suckles the bedspread. Weird, but that is what she needs to do. Otherwise she is a good normal dog.
CROAKER
Ode to Industrialization and Motorization
I walked the line of plant in the heat of night
Counting the jobs 1 to 60 in the glowing embers of the furnace I stood
On Broening Highway it stood but there I was alone
The workers running to and fro on the lower floors with robots they stood
That place doesn’t exist any longer in a place I no longer call home
Those woman with stood that on site
With stool inside a van, mask and tape in hand or on Elpo they would
Their strength of character withstood the males that could
All gone now for good
One more prayer than I could for alone to the furnaces I stood
Fuck it we all should
Baud
@sab:
Is your pitbull heavily invested in commercial real estate?
sab
@Baud: Naw, She is just a dawg.
Scott P.
Working from home is close to intolerable. Distractions everywhere, inability to actually talk to anyone face-to-face, my 1500 books I use for my work inaccessible (and no place to put them in my house)…
Jeffro
@Baud: me too!
Not getting my hopes up though, no way, no how. It’s just this one thing, trust me.
Miss Bianca
@Baud:
@Jeffro:
Moi aussi. Progress?
ETA: Ah, I see you remain skeptical. Oh, well.
germy
Reasons why people don’t want to return to offices:
-commuting
-dress codes
-the cost of buying lunch
-the hassle of packing lunch
-the necessity of code-switching
-distractions from open-office layouts
-poorly ventilated meeting rooms
-commuting
Other reasons people don’t want to return to offices:
-poor temperature control
-office bathrooms
-less time with children
-no pets
-forced interactions with other people
-inflexibility for medical appointments
-no nap spaces
-awkward socializing events
-work wardrobes
-commuting
Even more reasons people don’t want to return to offices:
-cost of commuting
-perfume and cigarette odors
-harsh lighting
-office politics
-workplace harassment
-hot-desking
-smells from the microwave
-care-giving responsibilities
-they are disabled or neurodivergent
-commuting
Specific things people really don’t miss about working in offices:
-hard pants
-distracting noises
-seeing other people not wash their hands
-working around the pain and hassle of menstruation
-wearing extra layers on top of “work clothes”
-rushing to pickup their kids
-commuting
https://twitter.com/karenkho/status/1500526574680125441
Jeffro
@NotMax: the worst part wasn’t the trucks…it was the dozen or so people standing and waving at each Beltway overpass, cheering these “heroes”. Give me a FUCKING BREAK.
I passed 2 obvious “Freedom Convoy” early-departers as I headed west from the Beltway. One was an economy-sized sedan with a flag flying from the right side and a ‘Save America’ poster in the left rear window. I guess they were only good for a couple laps this evening?
The other was the world’s most beat-up hooptie, with handmade signs plastered all around it. I saw one that said something like, “US war machine bombing Ukraine for Wal Mart” (yes, really). Oh, please tell me more about your interesting theory there, good sir…
Ruckus
@sab:
Exactly. Although I wasn’t as enamored with my machine shop, it was work I could do and earn a living. And that last 9 yrs was a decent job, but I still wasn’t having a machine shop in my house.
I forgot to mention that I worked very part time in another office – it was a local mental health center – 4 hrs a week – zero pay. In 4 yrs I had one suicide call and some very interesting in office and phone clients. Helped me realize that I really, really, did not want to be a shrink.
Suzanne
@germy: That list omits pooping at home, working out at lunch, midday showers, and avoiding street harassment.
Seriously, I am just as much of an urbanist as anyone, but public transportation is terrible in the US. It’s not so much the actual bus or subway car. It’s the terrible people. The men who try to pick up women, the people who don’t take care of their hygiene, the people who talk on their damn phones, the people who don’t keep their dogs quiet, the manspreaders, the drunks. Some lady in the NYC subway last week was just sitting, waiting for her train to arrive, and a man came up to her and shoved poop into her face. I hope that dude goes to prison for decades.
Jeffro
@Miss Bianca: skeptical indeed.
The ‘Brandon’ thing was probably just my dad’s sideways attempt to get some political banter going, I think. Sorry, gentlemen, that door closed several turns of the trumpov downward spiral ago, and was locked for good on Jan 6th.
debbie
@Jeffro:
Baby steps!
Timill
@bjacques: Don’t be too sure. I just got recruited for a fully-remote job at a higher rate (just) than I’ve had before. At age 66.
Ogliberal
I’ve been working from home mostly for the last 9+ years but my company is back to “return to office”. And senior management is stoked about it, as are many co-workers. I know some folks can’t wfh but that applies to almost nobody at the company I work for. We’ve got about 4k employees globally. Recently relocated HQ from expensive coastal city in the US to cheaper – but not that much at all! – city not on the coast. Many tax exclusion, etc, based on having asses in seats. So while the cat is out of the bag re: folks can’t effectively work from home- we all kicked ass in the mode, more productive than ever – they need folks sitting in seats. It’s BS – we are actually better WFH – but that’s what it is.
As for the folks who want to be in the office…I get single, younger folks. But older folks with family, kids, or after all that? Do you really want to spend all that time getting to and from the office? If you can do your job the same at home, why?
trollhattan
@Suzanne: I jumped jobs the last time for numerous reasons, one being a downtown location where I could take light rail and once the gods granted me a bike locker, cycle in. That second bit took three years.
Losing the drive time stress from my life was an unexpected treat. Light rail was certainly a mixed bag–not the service but oh, the humanity.
Once I switched to cycling I discovered my three or four colds/year disappeared. Huh.
The began building us a shiny new HQ, based on the open office plan. Ugh (a decision made at a time corporations were ditching said plan) It was at about 80% when covid hit and now that it’s complete they have converted a lot of those spaces to “hotels” in lieu of 40-hour/week workspaces.
IDK what the long-term resolution will be, but they didn’t budge from the germ-spreader model of stuffing staff together. “It’ll be great!”
OTOH the 1964 Asbestos Palace is now vacant.
Annie
I don’t agree and I am really beginning to resent people talking about those of us who want to return to the office as if our views don’t count.
I’ve been working from home in the pandemic and I HATE it. I want to return to the office because:
I’m really starting to resent it when people talk about work from home as if it’s nirvana and if you don’t agree your opinion doesn’t count.
Geminid
@germy: One of my landscaping customers is a retired corporate management consultant who worked at a fairly high level in his career, and still keeps up with the field. We were talking about the pandemic late summer of it’s first year, and Bob explained that businesses had learned several things from having their management personnel work from home. One was that before, when they aggregated people in headquarters buildings, a lot of time had been spent preparing for and holding meetings that it turned out had not actually been neccessary. Bob foresaw a real decline in brick and mortar management centers.
Suzanne
@trollhattan:
I’ve commuted by light rail and by car. Driving sucks, and it is a time suck, but it’s nice to have your own beverage, podcast, physical space.
Light rail certainly has its benefits, but I do know that many people avoid public transport because there is no one policing the bad behavior. The recent incidents of people getting pushed in front of subway cars is not helping.
There is a growing amount of research about women’s experiences in urban environments, and — surprise! — they are not the same as men’s.
Miss Bianca
@Annie: You want to go back to the office? Fine. Go back to the office. Christ Almighty, *I’m* not stopping you. Knock yourself out.
You know what *I’m* starting to resent? People who yell at me about how much they’re being oppressed by measures taken that were deemed necessary to fight a pandemic. And the fact that other people may not, in fact, resent the measures taken just as much as *they* do.
Mousebumples
@Kay: I have a 2 year old who’s unvaccinated, so some days it does feel like that. Especially during the peak of the Omicron wave…
persistentillusion
@Jeffery: Already happening here. Hotel proximate to military bases is transitioning to a combination of short term rentals and smaller hotel footprint. Looking to capture military on short term deployments to Carson, Space Command, Peterson. COS with 5 military installations.
Geminid
@persistentillusion: The hotels may be adjusting to a future with substantially less business travel. Much of the work business travelers used to do on the road has been done remotely with success, and with less expense and fatigue.
Gary K
What’s he got against remote work on Friday?
Ann Marie
@arrieve: This has happened in Philadelphia too. I live in the Center City (business) district, and so many small businesses have closed, and many of those places remain vacant still. My favorite small local restaurant was there for those in the neighborhood to get dinner, but mainly survived on the lunchtime business, which is now gone.
Tim in SF
I’ve read most the comments and I still don’t know what the FIRE lobby is.
Someone said something about Finance, which makes sense, but what’s the rest of it?
(God, I fucking hate acronyms. I wouldn’t have lasted five minutes in the service.)
Calouste
@Suzanne: Even if there are people supposedly policing the bad behavior, they don’t do anything. Like most mall cops, they’re just there to keep otherwise unemployable lazy white guys off the unemployment roles (and occasionally harass minorities).
stinger
On reading the OP, I was surprised that Biden was weighing in on the topic in the first place. Then I remembered that, in his interview with Heather Cox Richardson, he said that he really missed getting out and talking to people, working rope lines, etc. He’s spent his life hand-shaking and back-slapping and doing deals and working his charm on people face to face. So it’s not such a wonder after all that he thinks everybody needs to get back to the office.
However, what this thread shows is that you’re all correct. WFH is best; WFO is best. One for some folks/jobs and the other for other folks/jobs.
stinger
@Tim in SF: Finance, Insurance, Real Estate (somebody said up above).
PJ
@Tim in SF: Finance, Insurance, Real Estate. Why these are all lumped together, I don’t know, except the last two are part of “overhead”, and finance can be as well.
Tim in SF
@stinger: Thank you!
Kayla Rudbek
@Suzanne: a lot of the commercial office space by my government employer has been vacant for over ten years (maybe even closer to twenty; I will have to ask the old-timers who were with my employer when the agency moved into the area). Something is seriously screwy with the tax structure in that city, and/or the ownership of the buildings, as I have no idea precisely how any landlord can afford to have their property empty for that long of a time.
At this point, I would 1) cheer on the conversion of these empty offices into residential (the neighborhood has a fair amount of high-rise apartments already because it’s walking distance to a Metro stop, plus a CVS and a grocery store) and 2) if I were the Virginia Attorney General or the District Attorney for Eastern Virginia, start investigation into whether the owners of these buildings are engaged in money laundering.
Kayla Rudbek
@Almost Retired: yes, this 100%! Mr. Rudbek is hard of hearing and he loves Microsoft Teams thanks to the closed captions. He plans on staying on full telework and requesting it as a reasonable accommodation if they try to make him go back to the office. Which probably wouldn’t happen for about another six months or so.
(and we are fortunate in that we each have our own home office space to work from, so we’re not trying to work out of the same room unlike some people at my agency)
Ruckus
@Tim in SF:
Only because that five minutes always felt like five centuries.
Also, in the navy we didn’t speak in acronyms as much as I’ve heard army, marines use them. Everything was more about the boat and a location was usually the room something was in, say a fire room, which of course had fire in it, in the form of boilers to make steam. You didn’t see the fire but you could sure feel it, especially as we had one piece of equipment located behind one of the boilers. It could get just a tad warm there. In the blast of the ventilation fans it could easily be 110 deg but behind the boiler it could get a touch warmer. As in don’t ever touch anything metal, it will leave blisters. Which is fun when everything is made of metal, like the handrails of the 20 ft vertical ladder. You know the deck is warm when in less than a minute your feet would sweat – through leather soles. Good times. Now in the North Atlantic, in winter, the boiler rooms were a nice and welcome change.
surfk9
@trollhattan: Did you work at the Pink Palace?
dnfree
A relative works for Wells-Fargo in the Chicago area—office job, not a bank. They gave up their office space months ago and he has been told he’s working from home for the foreseeable future.
Nellie
My guess is you’ve never been in one of those buildings, much less worked in one. Most of the workers are clerical/data entry, many people of color, none making much money. They take the subway to work. They don’t have an extra bedroom, or a laptop, or the bandwidth to work from home. There is no cheap office space within 90 miles of NYC. Your suggestion would throw thousands of good hardworking people out of their jobs. Do you really think these companies haven’t tried to move the back office out of the city to save a buck? They would do it in a heartbeat, but they can’t get the pool of workers that they need.