- a space large enough to comfortably work remotely (or the money to afford a bigger space)
- a partner, kids, or both, which makes extended social isolation more livable
- a rich network for career growth and opportunities
God forbid some people want to live in big cities and don't make their choices solely based on reducing costs and bottom line expenses (ironic since every other day people here rail against big corporation bean counters). Example: Facebook's latest internal polling - the majority of people want to be in the office sometimes.
People suddenly waking up and realizing the office is a huge scam is the current du jour opinion here. But time and time again the HN demographic only speaks to itself.
And of course people will reply with that it expands choice, but that doesn't stop those from cheering that companies going full remote like its a universal good thing for everyone.
And on top of that, my observations are anecdotal. No need to point that out.
edit: Going full remote is a huge cost savings to companies. A cost that is now hoisted onto employees. So unless employees are receiving some equivalent compensation for blowing out my utility bills and refitting my office, be careful who you're cheering with.
I fully agree. Another thing I'm somewhat surprised to see is a lot of influential people talking about the trend of urbanization being reversed.
To me there are more factors than "the work is there" (at least in more developed country) to move to a big growing metropolis. An anecdotal observation I read somewhere here on HN was something like "have you logged on to tinder in a suburb of some smaller US city?".
Another big factor is the environmental one, sure if we can reduce the commute for a majority of people that would be awesome, however people will not stop moving around (restaurants, entertainment, socializing). What alternatives do we have if people are going to leave the city? Public transportation is for the most part only viable in highly dense areas. Electric car is of course going to grow their share, but medium term expanded public transportation is an extremely important part of the equation.
Since America has no problem with authoritarian measures that are meant to 'protect' us from ourselves and each other, at this point we should just forcibly take away everyone's vehicles and make them ride bicycles.
It is illegal for me to do things far less dangerous to myself and others compared to driving a car, and as someone who has no plans to own a car again, I neither want to breathe in exhaust fumes or risk getting hit by a vehicle just because others feel entitled to drive. If we're going to live in a nanny state, let's actually maintain a consistent framework for measuring harm and stick to it.
>Going full remote is a huge cost savings to companies. A cost that is now hoisted onto employees.
Commuting, lunch, tons of cloths/uniforms, (likely more stuff I am not thinking off) is also a huge cost to employees.
I know my mortgage payment is due if I go to an office or WFH. My car, on the other hand, requires loads more fuel and maintenance when I work in the office.
Electricity bill goes up slightly.
Heating / cooling costs goes up a bit. I was already heating and cooling my home though but a schedule made it so I didn't heat or cool as much during business hours (when I was not home).
For lunch I am not going out nearly as much. Mostly because my home is not well positioned for a quick trip for lunch.
Seems to me there are savings on both sides here. I could be convinced otherwise though - I have not read any proper studies where the dynamics here have been fleshed out.
I feel like I am saving lots of money and a fair amount of time with WFH.
You missed a big one. Choosing where to live. If you live near downtown SF, you might get a 15 minute commute to work, which is pretty great, but it'll be super expensive and maybe more urban than you like. Or you could live like 2-3 miles away and have an hour commute to work, but live where it's a little more residential, cheaper, and close to the beach and GG park. The nicer one is somehow cheaper! Prices are a huge function of commute. In the near term, getting to work remote lets you benefit from price arbitrage to live somewhere nicer for cheaper. In the long term, getting to work remote might spread the housing costs over a large enough space that people can get the not-crazy-dense housing so many want and municipalities might keep up with demand. If we're lucky, it could lower the average price per person at the expense of maybe raising the average price per square mile.
It would be only a little cheaper and you would save some time commuting. If it was that nice before covid-19, it would have been expensive already. There was just that much demand for housing.
Where do you think all the tech people with kids moved to? And they are probably dual income. And the couples who don’t have houses were saving up for houses so that the percentage devoted to rent was limited anyway.
The beach and GG Park are mostly in the fog belt. Lived near both places. Nope. Must be thinking about one of the few really warm and sunny days. Not that nice unless you like surfing. If you are thinking the Marina area, well that is very expensive already.
Generalizing, the really nice areas in California are already pricey. You need to make a trade off for things to work out such as if you love snow and skiing, then go to Tahoe. You trade that off for food choices that won’t be nearly as good and meagre entertainment options.
The number of people in an area drives up prices but provides a quality of its own. One prime example is the variety and quality of food. So does the infrastructure/wealth of the area lead to improved education, health care services, etc...
It’s as if the wealth is mostly in the people rather than the geography and concentrating people creates more wealth.
You're totally right that everything's already super expensive all over california, and I was trying to only mention stuff within the city for a more obvious comparison, but if you leave the city, say an hour to an hour and a half from downtown, you can get an amazing house for like $2M that would cost over $6M in SF. $2M is still expensive, sure. But it's amazingly less expensive.
Fair enough. Unfortunately, the best potential neighborhoods are lower income neighborhoods that you can easily gentrify. It is sad that long time residents can no longer live in the neighborhoods they grew up in.
I had not really considered moving because WFH is an option, other than the digital nomad dreams that float through my mind. :D
In my case, I live in small town WV (pop < 2500) and work outside Pittsburgh, PA. Living in WV basically means you can afford a house with acres of property IF you can make more than 60k / year (which is a big IF for most around here).
Back to the original point - The choice to live in one place over another, shorter or longer commutes, etc.. Is not the company shifting its operating cost onto its employees. is it? Do I misunderstand still?
Seems to me, if anything, this is an opportunity to continue to live the way you did before with slightly more free time and potentially more money OR, as you say, move a bit more out of town and save even more money.
This change should decrease costs for the employee, open up the labor market for the employer thus lowering costs for them as well.
Shedding office space is a great way to save money anywhere in the country - Let alone in a hyper expensive place like downtown SF.
I am still failing to understand how this is pushing the cost of business onto employees.
I also feel like I am saving mountains of money from work from home. I have been getting takeaway from the local restaurants and pubs almost every night now and my spending is actually still down from before. If I did this for long enough I feel like I would save money on clothes as well since I can wear clothes that are too worn for public use but still perfectly fine for home use.
Does it just cool down that much in the evening? What about the weekends?
This is fascinating to me. I've lived in the rural Midwest, NYC and Texas and always had A/C everywhere I lived – only question was central or window unit.
Most older (pre-1980s) buildings in SoCal lack A/C. It all depends on how far you are from the coast, but the evenings in the summer are mostly tolerable with a fan and some open windows.
Nobody except masochists really stay inside a stuffy apartment mid-day in the summer though. The reason you pay so much in living expenses is mostly for the good weather, so people spend their weekends out and about. As a kid in the summer, I remember walking around shops in the mall just to stay cool during the hottest hours of the day, and going to the beach often. My parents would do their grocery store shopping on Saturdays and Sundays mid-day if it was going to be hot. As I got older we'd go catch a matinee, or hit up a restaurant or a bar.
I imagine workers in the L.A. area will largely flood into cafes and co-work-esque places as businesses start opening back up and remote work becomes more dominant.
Coming from someone who is a complete an utter pansy when it comes to humidity, 100F with almost no humidity is a lot more bearable than 75F and 100% humidity
Can't speak in LA, but in Switzerland where almost no one has AC it definitely does not cool enough during the night. During the summer even if I keep the windows closed all day I cannot get the temperature below 26-27 degrees. The main difference though is that I was not trying to work in this conditions as my office had AC.
I had coworkers at Google who lived without AC. Absolutely mind blowing to me. Older buildings just don't have it, and it's only really bad for a cumulative couple weeks in CA.
Yeah, once sun goes down it's actually quite cold. Tho depends how close to sea you are as well. Weekends it might be that you can actually enjoy being outside.
I live in Boston, which is relatively mild over the summer, but it still gets pretty hot, at least for me. The switch to running AC in my study room has been one of the biggest shifts for me. Since now I cannot use the AC in my bedroom. I moved it to livingroom so I can cool myself while working. But then I can't sleep well. Looks like I will have to get another AC and install it in my bedroom. WFH definitely had many unexpected short comings.
I live on the east coast and I’m sort of guilty of it too. Nowadays I open my window but I have to mute myself when I hear loud traffic about to pass by. I didn’t get an A/C because I didn’t want one more heavy object to move again.
It's a very good point. I live in central London and had a very short commute to my office and I enjoyed coming to office most of the time. Now during the lockdown I am stuck working from my small studio apartment which is just not suited as a working environment and it is starting to take its toll. Working basically next to my kitchen corner and bed is not ideal at all and I feel I would be more productive if I were allowed to work from office again.
While this is true, I'm pretty sure the referenced poll was conducted well before that was announced. In fact, I've heard internal criticisms of the opposite direction.
The prospect of a full time shift to remote was not communicated as context for the poll. Employees answered the polls thinking they were talking about how they'd go to the office given COVID-19 (a lot more people saying they'd do 50/50, when in reality, that just reflected their lack of comfort due to the disease).
Companies should be sure not to confuse actions people are willing to take due to a pandemic to be what they'd do in a post-pandemic world. Same thing with productivity: just like we don't know the long term impact of this disease, we also don't know that employees will remain as productive as they've been so far.
This is a very biased interpretation. Your salary may not be adjusted if you work in a similar CoL area. Only if you move from HCoL to LCoL (and vice-versa!)
Too many people assume remote work always means working somewhere far away from a major urban city.
For me I'm happy to go to office as long as I live near it, and working hours are flexible.
Unfortunately a lot of industries outside tech do not provide those. The cost of transport, especially the drainage of energy after squeezing into a crowded train / bus definitely outweighs utility bills.
However, if a company provides both options, remote workers are usually disadvantaged because of the reasons stated in the article and the comments.
It's a tough choice, and I think the division should at least be team-based for a fair competition.
The top comment(s) are only representative of that subset of readers who both a) agree and b) bother to upvote.
I skim read the top few comments then minimise them, or minimise them immediately. I'm looking for what's different to my current understanding, and the top comment(s) almost always are perspectives I'm already familiar with.
I was also annoyed with all the pro WFH rallying on HN pre-quarantine. But now I am happy with it consider:
- I don't want city overflowing (and price-gouged-by) wannabe suburbanites
- With a sufficiently high carbon tax, hopefully WFH can mean towns not exurb hell by those that insist on leaving the city
- long commutes are bad and denormalizing than as an exceptable part of modern life (in the USA) can help us make our land use less shit
- We should all work less, and making work as socially isolating for the upper classes as it already is for many lower class jobs will help move things in that direction.
> a rich network for career growth and opportunities
This is a I think the most important one, but the ultimate solution is to simply make "career" less important be making a decent quality of life available to most everyone. I know it's great us here that in the last 20 years society has begun to value intellectual work more, but the scarcity that caused this culture shit is just unsustainable.
In short, don't discount the urbanist accelerationist argument for WFH.
I think the OP is referring to the fact that exurbs are currently hellish because everyone living there commutes downtown. They'd have a stronger sense of community and identity if residents spent their lives actually living there, rather than sleeping there: the neighborhoods would become more like "towns" and less like "exurbs". Some NYC examples would be Yonkers, most of eastern/central NJ or the western half of CT.
Anecdotally, I've spent a fair amount of time living in both environments, and for me the quality of life difference is night and day. The lack of proper "towns" within commuting distance of NYC means that we have to live in town-y neighborhoods within the city, which are much more expensive to than the 'burbs, and don't come with an acre, a pool, and free parking. The apparent lack of towns means we're eventually going to leave the entire metropolitan area, which is kind of sad, since we like working here very much.
The exhurbs are hellish whether or not people use, because the land use is terrible and everything requires a car. (And aesthetic reasons that largely follow from the above, but which I could rant about at length.)
Just because there's no mass commuting doesn't inherently mean the exurbs are cured of that. People could still shuffle arround funneling roads making traffic to go to the mall. Every has lawns but no one has nature. Everyone is still isolated.
Traditional rural towns and villages are actually quite dense---you must discount the surrounding land. I mention the carbon tax because I think it's that or highwaymen needed to force people to clump up.
\[BTW, I think the variation is key: density should be "fractle" "scale-free" or whatever other similar buzz ord one wants to throw out. Everyone gets stairs and nature.\]
I generally with you. Do you have examples of towns that you think pull this off well?
Most towns I think of as pleasant in the US (I’m mostly familiar with western Massachusetts, central CA, and the border towns of NJ/PA) are still basically inaccessible by any mode of transportation other than a car outside of downtown. I don’t believe they would score high on your scale, but maybe I’m missing something!
I've never lived in a town, but I'm thinking premodern ones where everyone had to walked. Or through in bikes and 5x it.
No reason with enough carbon and land value tax the towns in the places you mention couldn't recover though. Plenty of nice Berkshire and foothill downtowns.
Stating that people preferring WFH is a "du jour" opinion is not based on any fact or productive at all. Utility bills are not being "blown out" by working from home [1]. Acknowledging that your observations are anecdotal doesn't absolve you of speaking honestly.
My site lead (small office, big-ish company) sent as survey. Only 25% percent of people wanted to work from home more days per week than they work in the office. Heck, 40% said they wanted to return before the date our CEO selected.
There seems to be a group on HN that really wants to make the desire to WFH seem universal. A few weeks ago a post like yours likely would have been buried.
- I do have a home office with a nicer setup than my work office
- I love and thrive on social isolation, going home to my empty house is the best part of my day...
- See above... I have no network...
>>God forbid some people want to live in big cities
yea I have never understood those people... I live in a mid sized city and have a strong desire to move back to the farm fields. Probably more on how you grew up than anything, my childhood was in a town of less than 3000 people.
if it was not for network connectivity issues in Rural America I would probably still live in the sticks.
>on top of that, my observations are anecdotal. No need to point that out.
What are you trying to say here? You seem to be agreeing with the OP. Different people like different ways of working and we should have possibilities for both.
- long commutes
- crappy coworkers or offices
- a space large enough to comfortably work remotely (or the money to afford a bigger space)
- a partner, kids, or both, which makes extended social isolation more livable
- a rich network for career growth and opportunities
God forbid some people want to live in big cities and don't make their choices solely based on reducing costs and bottom line expenses (ironic since every other day people here rail against big corporation bean counters). Example: Facebook's latest internal polling - the majority of people want to be in the office sometimes.
People suddenly waking up and realizing the office is a huge scam is the current du jour opinion here. But time and time again the HN demographic only speaks to itself.
And of course people will reply with that it expands choice, but that doesn't stop those from cheering that companies going full remote like its a universal good thing for everyone.
And on top of that, my observations are anecdotal. No need to point that out.
edit: Going full remote is a huge cost savings to companies. A cost that is now hoisted onto employees. So unless employees are receiving some equivalent compensation for blowing out my utility bills and refitting my office, be careful who you're cheering with.