“Everything from daycare to public transportation, toll roads, fuel and fuel taxes, auto purchases and maintenance, dry cleaners, nail spas, restaurants, clothiers, hair stylists, dog walkers, nannies and office leases suffer when people work from home,”
Sounds to me like more households get to retain more of their income (and time) as a result. And that extra money will end up back in the economy albeit in different ways, so it's not like the money just disappears. Businesses and governments will just have to adapt to change, and I have no sympathy for their sob stories and stubborn instincts to resist change.
Most of these examples don’t even suffer very much.
Roads don’t “suffer” from disuse, their maintenance costs go down.
People who work at home still need child and sometimes even pet care, working from home doesn’t mean you’re magically able to watch your children and work at the same time.
People don’t get their hair and nails done to please coworkers.
Dry cleaners are already on their last legs due to changing fashion tastes and new materials that can be taken care of at home. You can buy suits that don’t require dry cleaning or ironing.
Public transportation was already too downtown focused and should be re-developed to better serve non-commuting usage anyway. Since the USA has almost no rail anyway this is a simple matter of changing bus routes.
Office leases suffering isn’t a problem. An entire thriving residential and entertainment district in Cleveland with some of the highest property values in the city is built in disused industrial buildings and land.
> People don’t get their hair and nails done to please coworkers.
On some level, my most of my routine hygiene was due to having to go into the office, including getting my hair cut. I'd likely have skipped a couple hair cuts if I never had to face people.
I'd also say it louder. These services used to be centered around offices and urban centers like that, and while it may just move, that will impact where the services were. At a macro level, it's a net-zero change, but to the mayor of the city with the downtown, it hurts to see the business leave for adjacent suburbs, which are different cities with different mayors. Incentives given to businesses for bringing people downtown go away. Poor real estate population brings different people to the area, which can increase crime.
To be clear, that's still not our problem as employees, but they are concerns and potentially reasons for the return to office push.
I think full time work in the office is 100% dead and buried. It's never coming back for people who have enough skills to leverage that kind of arrangement. I think the first place we need to start is there. Most of us are NEVER going back to 5 days a week in the office.
However, most of the folks complaining about return to work I've noticed are senior people who have enough skills to perform their job and don't require constant attention. What I've noticed is these kinds of workers absolutely thrive remotely, however younger employees greatly benefit from in person learning and mentoring.
I've personally worked with many junior engineers over the years and it's really hard to mentor someone over a computer screen. It's definitely possible, but being able sit down informally and talk about something that's hard to understand, or unclear is much harder remotely.
I haven't figured out a virtual way to give an intern a small assignment and determine if they're struggling remotely (yet) short of doing peer programming. If I ask an intern to fix a bug that's 2 lines of code and I hear furious typing over the walls for extended periods of time, that's probably a good time to ask how it's going and offer some help.
I don't have the answers here but I don't think it's fair to be so dismissive of face to face time in the office.
“…however younger employees greatly benefit from in person learning and mentoring.”
Doesn’t require a permanent office. Temp cowork spaces or bundling working with a career mentor in the final stretch of college are two options I just thought of laying in bed while also thinking about making coffee.
More of the same is not an option for all the cost-benefit analysis that’s come up before.
Prior to world war industrialization, 90% of workers were independent. Post-war office life was a result of wartime solutions to logistics. A statistical outlier in human history.
> Prior to world war industrialization, 90% of workers were independent.
If you change that to “prior to the First Industrial Revolution”, and by “independent” you mean “worked on family or village farms”, sure, that's approximately right.
Just before even the first world war, there is no sense where this is true, even loosely.
The first world war was almost a half century after the end of the first industrial revolution and the usual marker of the end of the second. Neither revolution’s work pattern changes were driven primarily by military logistics. (OTOH, changes in the patterns of warfare were driven by the same forces as the work pattern changes.)
So, no, your comment about 90% of workers being independent before “world war industrialization” is way off base.
People who have the skills to leverage a permanent WFO arrangement, actually benefit from a breakdown in mentoring.
Whatever sob story they may spin you, the ONLY thing corporations care about in the mentoring relationship is upskilling cheap juniors so they can replace their expensive mentors.
With a mentoring breakdown the seniors will stop getting sucked dry and fired at 50.
They become irreplaceable assets all the way through to retirement.
We don't have to do things exactly the same way we always did and offices will change, my point is only that a lot of these types of articles are outright dismissive of regular, in person communication at all.
I'm really not sure what the strongest possible interpretation of "lets go back to before the industrial revolution" is other than 90% of people being subsistence farmers on the verge of starving. People moved to cities because less agricultural labor was needed and people living close together makes them more productive.
> "lets go back to before the industrial revolution"
They did not say this.
> People moved to cities because less agricultural labor was needed and people living close together makes them more productive.
People moved to cities because more industrial labor was needed. Proximity made industries more productive. Now more digital labor is needed. And people living far apart can be highly productive.
> I've personally worked with many junior engineers over the years and it's really hard to mentor someone over a computer screen. It's definitely possible, but being able sit down informally and talk about something that's hard to understand, or unclear is much harder remotely.
I've done this a bunch over zoom.
> I haven't figured out a virtual way to give an intern a small assignment and determine if they're struggling remotely (yet) short of doing peer programming.
Ask them in standups? Have an "open door" policy towards them pinging you to hop on a zoom? You also probably don't need to be hovering over them making certain that they're never struggling, that's a form of micro management. Gotta let the kids fight with problems for awhile before jumping in and fixing it for them[*].
[*] and really don't fix it for them, teach them how to fix it. poor phrasing.
> I've personally worked with many junior engineers over the years and it's really hard to mentor someone over a computer screen. It's definitely possible, but being able sit down informally and talk about something that's hard to understand, or unclear is much harder remotely.
The senior+ I work with are nearly unanimous in disagreement and find remote mentoring as easy or easier than in-person. Pairing is easier on zoom, it loses the awkward personal space issues, it can be recorded, it can happen quicker and easier, and in general just works (a bit) better than in-person.
Socially, I definitely except the argument that in-office is better for young people. I can't imagine 25 year old me sitting by myself working from home, I would've turned into a very different person.
> What I've noticed is these kinds of workers absolutely thrive remotely
Thriving individually does not equate (necessarily) to thriving as a team, nor thriving as an organization. I see on HN too many people taking about how they personally perform better, which is (a) difficult to objectively self assess given all the biases involved and (b) ignores that the team might perform poorer or the organization might, due to a variety of frictions added by being remote.
It isn’t as black and white as some people like to claim.
Edit: I love how I am being downvoted on something as uncontroversial as stating that there’s more nuance than the current debate seems to devolve into on HN. Shameful.
It feels like RTO is quickly evaporating the leverage these big companies temporarily created with their mass layoffs. I think the plan was to create a poor labor market so they could demand RTO. Well, it looks like the majority of the industry is calling their bluff and refusing to go back to the office regardless of the threat of unemployment. The tech job market seems to be rejuvenating so I think if people couldn't get RTO to work in this brief window of leverage, that it's an idea that's dead forever.
No one has any master plan here, everyone is winging it and trying not to screw up so much they get fired/replaced by the board, while still achieving their preferred outcome. The end result is this kind of limbo, where no one can trust the current status quo fully.
This is incorrect. CEOs are literally planning these moves together. In a more general sense they're also creating an open culture to promote this type of thing. Take a scroll through some VC/CEO twitter accounts and see how many whine about WFH or people "cheating" at work, working two jobs, not having a work ethic...
The capital class is good at working in its own interest and it has a lot of leverage to do so.
Yup. The capital class that participates in this carp is also bad at managing. I wish I could locate it again, but a study some decades ago concluded that remote work makes good managers better and bad managers worse. Seems to be the difference between managing for results (where you DGAF about spurious indicia of work) vs managing for spurious indicia of work that are more like indicia of minute-to-minute control (e.g., seeing someone's butt in a seat, tracking keystrokes, calling ad-hoc meetings, etc.).
Any serious manager has projects and tasks for the workers, and a realistic idea of what can be accomplished. If they are handing out those tasks and resources, and work of sufficient quality is getting accomplished on time, they recognize that it does not matter if the person is in the office across the hall, in their home office, or on the beach in Bermuda.
(And if the manager is giving so little work that the worker can take two jobs, but quality work is getting done at a sufficiently profitable rate to justify that job, so what if the worker is 'moonlighting'?; the manager is getting what they need at a market rate, and has a happier employee)
Good managers also have the advantage of being able to hire from a global talent pool instead of a ~1-hour-commute radius from each office, and drastically reduced office real estate costs. Those are REAL competitive advantages that of which the smart CEOs will take advantage.
Sadly, most are not that smart, and the RTO movement is proof.
They are unhappy for sure, and are all copying each other because they are afraid of making the wrong move. They looked at what Musk did with Twitter with great interest I'm sure, looking for lessons for example to carry over, as one of the few leaders willing to stick his neck out. I don't believe there's major orchestration but it is true when everyone's on each other boards an incestuous common sense/wisdom tends to emerge about what needs to happen and what the justification will be, and I'm sure they all believe it's inevitable all the companies move back towards full time on site.
Add to that that Twitter is now letting go of office space as well. Now some of that is due to layoffs, but it could also mean Mr. Musk is not even expecting RTO to work at Twitter, or at least not to the extent he planned.
Whether it's deliberate collusion or everyone just happening to be uncreatively following each other, the outcome is the same.
That said, I've never seen Corporate America so universally aligned on a single thing than they are aligned on "Workers must return to the office." Definitely a tin-foil hat theory, but it really does strongly feel like they're all sitting in the same smoky room somewhere, making sure they all do the same thing in lock step.
It's too easy for smart CEOs to defect and gain an advantage by allowing WFH. The capital class is not reasonably aligned on the RTO issue. Many CEOs and leadership teams themselves are reluctant to come in to the office, and so end up aligned with their workers on this particular issue.
> I think the plan was to create a poor labor market so they could demand RTO.
If we hit a major recession and unemployment spikes, corporations will be looking to downsize everywhere, including jettisoning more office space.
And the Fed jacking up interest rates and trying to cap inflation and wage inflation is just what the Fed does, they're not caring about RTO. Volker didn't jack rates up in 1980 to force workers back into the office.
There may be mangers/executives cheerleading all this, along with the cuts to headcount in tech, because they personally think that it'll result in RTO. But if the economy actually blows up then CFOs and boards will be telling them to cut costs everywhere and offices are a huge sink of money.
To reply to myself: I guess I should say that what the Fed is doing is class warfare and a major unspoken reason for what they're doing is to remove bargaining power from the workers. They would be more concerned about pay and breaking the back of union organizing if they thought and talked about it more clearly. But they don't consciously talk about class warfare, they've got terms of art they use to talk about it like "2% inflation target" which is nice and ambiguous. However, "removing bargaining power from workers" is certainly a large enough bucket to stuff "remote work" into it as well.
So they certainly do want to remove bargaining power, and some managers will think it'll be effective at enforcing RTO, but it isn't clear to me that the crude mechanism they've got will actually result in that. All they can really do is run the economy into a wall. The exact way that it breaks will depend on the push/pull of desperate workers willing to take office jobs again vs. desperate CFOs wanting to get out of office leases and crashing commercial real estate. The real driving force is just reducing worker bargaining power around pay and benfits and organizing though. The effect on remote work vs. RTO will have to play out to see how it happens.
My own personal bet is that the cat is out of the bag when it comes to remote work, and that a recession will cause more companies to re-embrace full time remote work to cut costs to survive and flourish. And current RTO companies may start looking at their commercial office properties as massive boat anchors.
This seems like wishful thinking to me. It seems to me like more companies are enforcing hybrid, starting with 1 day a week, then 2, and now many are at 3. Maybe there’s a plateau somewhere, but purely remote seems to have lost a lot of steam.
For big tech maybe, but if you are a smaller startup / company it's a godsend, you can finally get elite talent at a lower cost without spending a fortune on an office in a major hub.
No it isn't, in fact I'd say not believing it plausible is the epitome of naivety, if not outright burying your head in the sand.
I'll use the ongoing writer's strike as an example: The studios outright said[1] they wanted them poor and in apartments so they'd have to take a deal.
I'll grant that studios may have the ability to do what the article says they want to do -- after all the WGA has only 11k members.
But let's just take accountants -- there are 1.4 million according to the BLS. Realistically there's just no amount of coordination that will stop a significant portion of those who want to from WFH. And that's just one type of WFH-friendly white collar job.
> I think the plan was to create a poor labor market so they could demand RTO.
I highly doubt anyone had that plan. A single company doesn't much influence the total labour market. Or do you suggest they cooperated in smoke filled backrooms?
I've seen multiple CEOs talk about how they're successful because of how they grind 16 hours and have amazing business acumen, rather than family connections or just plain luck.
Just because they say something doesn't make it true. Just because they want something doesn't mean they get it. If they did, we'd all be working 7 days a week, on site, for minimum wage (which would be lower). Even the places going RTO are mostly going hybrid.
Offices per se aren’t necessarily terrible. Commutes are terrible. Open floor plans are terrible. Companies don’t seem interested in fixing these things, though.
I live very close to an office at my company. My issue isn't with going to the office but more so the open office floor plan. At my home, I have a dedicated quiet office and can focus much easier. I don't have to wear headphones all day to cancel out the noise and distractions. The leaders making RTO mandates have personal offices and don't get to "enjoy" the same experience as the worker bees.
I have a colleague who will wear noise cancelling headphones all day but will periodically take them off to disrupt someone else to ask a question he could Google. It's insane, I'm probably going to say something to him because he isn't connecting the dots at all.
Yep. Ask any remote worker if they’d go back to the office and most would say no. Ask them if the office was within walking distance and most probably wouldn’t mind.
My office is 7 minutes on my bicycle. I work from home where I have a better screen setup, privacy, instead of having to shuffle into a cubicle to make calls. I cycle to the office to have a beer with some colleagues every few weeks on an agreed date and we meet there when we have to do some deep planning. Day to day my house is so much better
Walking distance with a private office, maybe. I wouldn't even walk to the offices I've actually had to work in, not now that my home office is a viable option.
I have certainly found this to be true. When I took a job with a remote-first startup last year, I lived on the opposite side of North America from its headquarters. My family has since moved (for almost entirely unrelated reasons!) and we now live within walking distance. I come into the office almost every day, even though it is mostly empty, because the walk is pleasant and the quiet office is a good place to get work done. If I had to drive here, or take the bus, I would almost certainly stay home instead.
Any big sudden change will have winners and losers. Managers that have gotten by measuring butt in seat time and command and control can no longer rely on these skills, of course they would prefer to go back to the old way vs the much harder work of trying to figure out which team members are really providing the best results.
The bigger the organization the more bureaucratic it becomes. High quality performance coaching and just maintaining internal communication is hard to scale. Big organizations tend to fallback to easy to measure butts in seats and lines of code.
Based on my experiences at companies ranging from 75-5000 employees, I would dispute that. I don't think any type of company is particularly good at passing on institutional knowledge.
Workers have leverage and are using it. You don’t have to understand it for workers to work towards having more agency over their working arrangements.
The NLRB is likely about to reinstate the Joy Silk doctrine, which will make it even easier to organize. Workers who want flexible work arrangements as a right should lean into that. Public support for unions exceeds 70%, the highest amount in almost 60 years.
So strange to see people with the belief system “you just have to do what your employer dictates or go elsewhere.” Perhaps in the “before times”, but with structural demographics and a decent executive branch admin in charge currently, this is simply not the case.
I believe you meant "Joy Silk" doctrine. But in any case, it is laughable. The penalties handed down from the NLRB for union busting are the equivalent of seconds of profit for most of these companies.
No unions necessary, just move your job if you don't like it (or don't take one in the first place that you don't like). In a strong labour market that's a sufficient threat.
And in a weak labour market, even a union can't rescue you.
Too early to tell if white collar is going to just roll over tbh. I’m more focused on lower income earned organizing at the moment due to the increased quality of life for those folks.
It’s fairly straightforward to notify the NLRB you want to hold an election. Just drive forward the effort if you believe in not being held hostage by employers in the aggregate. Remember, those who don’t support unions are a small minority (30% in the US). I see parallels to when HN folks confidently expounded about Dropbox not being a real business as they went on their way to becoming a large enterprise. How? You ignore the talk and naysayers and instead, default to action. Why listen to people who can’t stop you? Your agency and quality of life is more important than their opinion.
There certainly isn't a mass unionization movement in software yet, but there are some recent cases, it isn't "no one". Most recently Grindr formed a union, and company leadership retaliated by telling all software engineers to move to Chicago within the next couple months or quit.
Alphabet and Kickstarter are other notable examples.
I used to think we didn't need unions and then it came out that dozens of the big tech companies were colluding with each other to limit wages and job mobility.
> because the people who like showing up are tired of video calls anyway.
Even if you like showing up, you will likely still have video calls. Most large companies have multiple office sites and you still need to collaborate with teams/employees in different locations.
Approximately 100% of my meetings are video calls, even in office. It was that way before the pandemic too. That's what happens when your organization has multiple locations.
Not necessarily so. I worked at a large organization with offices across the US, as well as in London, Germany, and Canada. Approximately 100% of my meetings were in-person, many with a remote participant or two.
There seems to be such a strong anti-RTO/pro-remote sentiment on HN. I don’t hold that against anyone: if you prefer working from home, then I’m happy for you! But here’s another take:
I’m a software engineer and I love working from the office. I enjoy my 40 minute commute (on sunny days I ride a bike and on rainy days I read a book on the train). I enjoy the separation in my life between where I work and where I live (often I don’t take my computer home). Eating lunch with my colleagues is often the highlight of my day. Many of my current and former colleagues have become lifelong friends. If my company went fully remote permanently, I’d look for a new job.
I understand feeling this way if the company actually closed the office so you literally could not go in. But even remote-friendly places typically have an office which is big enough for the people that go, so you'd still have company even if plenty of people were remote. I understand why some people like RTO (even though I'm not one of them), I don't understand why they have such hostility towards the WFH folks.
People that want RTO usually want it because they believe it enables better collaboration. But that's only possible if the people they want to collaborate with are also at the office. I wouldn't call it hostility, there are just different philosophies about how to be productive.
I don't it's hostility per se. If a company closed down their office, then it's certain that they are now remote-only and the RTO aficionados will have no choice but to find a new employer that shares their preference.
But if only a subsection of employees work remotely in a "hybrid" or RTO setting, and the person in the office still has to sit in on Zoom calls all day then the whole point of being in the office is redundant. They're just working remotely from the office.
I like working in the office too, for similar reasons. I do think that as years go by, more people will come to realise what they have lost by working from home.
But i don't think the vigorous antipathy to working in an office is an HN thing. I think it's that many people who don't like working in an office really don't like working in an office, and so mission post about it, in a way that office appreciators don't.
The workers won't have a lot of leverage in the end. Especially in tech, it has been shown that companies can do fine with much much fewer employees. Corporates can use RTO as an excuse for further belt-tightening as needed, even if most workers end up (over)working remotely. The office has truly no reason to exist anymore, but as long as capital is still concentrated in a few cities around the world, it will have leverage
I think it's way too early to call either way. There are a lot of companies that have embraced remote work post-COVID—my own company is about to start a massive downsizing of their NYC headquarters, for example—and I believe that these companies will have better outcomes in the long run by respecting their workers' dignity. We'll see which way it goes over the next few decades.
Depending on your seniority, it may be your responsibility to foster collaboration for more junior members of your team. Conversely it may be their responsibility to ensure they are available to collaborate with you.
It doesn't happen magically, but it does happen spontaneously once people are close enough to talk without having to open a chat tool.
Thats why we stabilised on a happy 1-day-a-week in the office, and instead of using it as a dump day for meetings, its a day for people to work while near others.
And unsurprisingly mentoring and onboarding has drastically improved outcomes.
I fear that state governments will start imposing taxes on businesses which hire remote employees, but I also feel that will just drive businesses out of those states and into the midwest/south
It really should be the other way; they ought to tax office space punitively in order to coerce people not to commute at all. Commuting is a major source of emissions, personal health ailments, and encourages human-hostile urban design.
I might agree with your policy aims, but the policy cure you proposed would be worse than the disease.
If you don't like people driving, then tax that directly.
Or better, for a start, remove subsidies for driving first, whether they be explicit or implicit. Only then think about levying special taxes. Eg remove mandatory minimum parking requirements for real estate developers, convert most roads to be paid for by their users via electronic tolls instead of by general taxes, etc. (And remove 'commuting allowances' that one can claim as a deduction on income taxes.)
And if you still want to levy taxes, levy them on what you don't like, and not some imprecise proxy like office space. Eg directly on emissions or negative health externalities.
Why is your proposed solution better? What makes theirs worse than the disease?
Their solution is to tax corporations for forcing their employees to commute. Yours is to increase the costs for those employees.
These costs are already huge ($8000+ per year), and so far have had little impact on company policy. Do you really think that increasing commute costs will substantially alter the number of people who are required to commute?
It's the same principle that also explains why it doesn't make a difference (in the long run) whether it's officially the employer or employee who pays the income tax on a worker's income.
> These costs are already huge ($8000+ per year), and so far have had little impact on company policy.
What makes you think so?
> Do you really think that increasing commute costs will substantially alter the number of people who are required to commute?
The purpose of a Pigouvian tax is not necessarily to substantially alter the volume of the taxed activity, but to internalize the externalities, so private cost-benefit decisions can reflect the impact on both individual and society.
If companies somehow benefit enough from commuting that they are willing to pay people enough to make them agree to put up with it, who are we to judge the arrangement?
While I agree with your points, taxing driving is as popular as the bubonic plague. People who like cars and or freedom don't like it, the economist angle will say that it will push the cost of consumer goods way up due to trucking etc.
Honestly there should be more gas taxes (that's not per-gallon but % of sale price) but again, will fail until EVs become dominant.
Why do you suggest petrol should be taxed as a % of sales price and not per litre?
The negative externalities we are worried about occur mostly in proportion to how many litres of petrol we burn, not how many pennies we pay for them, do they?
Midwest/south have the exact same structure as coasts - most people live in large metro areas. I’m not sure they’ll be more willing to let their downtowns wilt.
I recall that idea being kicked around but I don't think it was ever implemented. I suspect states may implement some income tax changes to get a bigger piece of the action, but the biggest tax burden is from the federal government and they get their piece either way.
RTO also kills business. I had a thriving business out where all the workers were working from home, in the ground floor of a massive apartment community where many of the tech workers live. I had so much foot traffic business I didn't have to advertise. Amazon and Microsoft RTO'ed and my business dried up overnight and I can't get it back even with advertising and the foot traffic is paltry compared to what it was.
“Everything from daycare to public transportation, toll roads, fuel and fuel taxes, auto purchases and maintenance, dry cleaners, nail spas, restaurants, clothiers, hair stylists, dog walkers, nannies and office leases suffer when people work from home”
It's kind of funny to me that for a long time the people in cities looked down on rural people and life and touted the benefits of living in close proximity. When COVID hit, we saw a mass exodus from the cities and now people don't want to return.
Urban people do not look down on rural people. It’s the opposite. Rural people are the most likely to hold negative opinions about people who live in other situations, and urban dwellers are the least likely.
The contempt rural people have for urban dwellers is palpable if you ever spend any substantial time with them. God forbid if you’re from California cause then you might as well be Satan’s spawn come to harvest their children for adrenochrome.
In cities, not one single person has ever felt the need to stop their vehicle, roll down their window, and shout a homophobic epithet at me. Outside of cities, this seems to happen regularly.
When a rural person comes to town, do the local urban people take a moment to shout something derogatory at them? If that happens I have never seen it.
That second source doesn't support what you said at all. I think you need to reread it. The conclusion I'm getting from it is that people, regardless of where they are from generally think the same about people from other areas. They assume they are able to understand other's situations but don't think others are able to understand theirs's.
I appreciate the data! However on the second point, I will note that I don't know of any term used recently by rural communities to describe urban dwelling. City Slickers being the only term that I know but have never heard or seen written in news.
"Flyover Country" is thrown about often however. Especially around election time and regarding how they are controlling to much of the country's politics.
I'm not sure it's proper to conflate flyover vs. coastal states with rural vs. urban. Even the middle-most states of the continent are majority urban dwellers. Most people in Kansas live in either KC or Wichita. The only state that is really majority rural is Vermont.
Somehow I constantly see rural fans bashing cities and city people for no reason in contexts unrelated to any of that ... while rarely the opposite. I do prefer to live in a city and would not want to live in rural place, yep, mostly due to proximity to things. Both pre and post covid.
Some people like living in cities, some people like rural living.
If we let the people who like to live in cities bunch up closer together (by legalising more density there), the rest of us have more space in the rest of the country. It's a win-win situation.
"People who live in cities are not a uniform hive mind"
We need more of this! It seems so much of our public discourse is worsened by putting people and their opinions into firm groups, then assuming that anything anyone in that group ever says is a core believe of that group and then vilifying the group for that believe.
Is that "mass exodus" really that sticky though? At least in NYC, rents are back up above what they were pre-pandemic. Nobody I know can find an apartment.
Yes but this is not really exodus. What happened at the onset of COVID was that the domestic migration out of coastal megacities continued apace, and the international migration into coastal cities abruptly stopped. You have to look at both flows to understand the population process.
It's kind of funny to me that rural people are so dependent on a international system of gas/diesel production that they can be priced out of being able to get food without significant Federal Govt intervention during price shocks
Don’t forget the water subsidies and the fact that many are living on land that their family got for free through homestead acts if they’ve had “the farm” in the family for a few generations. Talk about government handouts.
Most office workers didn’t have a choice before. The jobs are in the city. A handful of software companies were fully remote but most businesses are still stuck in the industrial model of work
It really is so outdated, this commitment where you spend 40 hours a week at your machine on the assembly line, pulling the right levers to produce products to sell. Some knowledge workers really are spending 90+ hours thinking about the various problems the company has and how to fix them. Of course some are lazy and just play politics to get ahead/avoid the axe. It's all so nebulous understanding who actually provides the value, at least when you have a 10000 foot view of the organization.
Luckily, the economy has companies of all shapes and sizes. So if the (supposed?) overhead of office politics gets too large at big organisations, they can be outcompeted by nimbler outfits.
If existing laws and regulations allow competition, that is. Some sectors are severely locked down.
Sounds to me like more households get to retain more of their income (and time) as a result. And that extra money will end up back in the economy albeit in different ways, so it's not like the money just disappears. Businesses and governments will just have to adapt to change, and I have no sympathy for their sob stories and stubborn instincts to resist change.