Working at home has been the next big sustainability thing for about 30 years now. Why does 90+% of working population still congregate together in offices? Why does YCombinator insist on having everyone in one geographical area and meeting in person often?
Actually its far more efficient to have people work in a common building, than to build an entire edifice for each one to work in. More efficient: work where you live, all together in an ecohabitat of some sort.
Working at home has been the next big sustainability thing for about 30 years now.
The "people tried before" argument is never convincing. Enormous industry changes have occurred (for instance my home has a rock-solid, 100% reliable, 100/10Mbps internet connection, which is better than many whole office buildings had a few years ago), and work at home practices have been exploding.
I once was a unique butterfly. Now I can name dozens of people who operate just like I do.
As to YCombinator -- I don't know. I am not a startup under the tutelage of Paul Graham. I don't particularly care or need to heed what his opinions on work practices are.
Perhaps, but "it'll happen Real Soon Now" isn't either, really.
It is happening for me right now: My commute is to walk down my stairs. A moment ago I finished a teleconference with a group of distributed people thousands of miles away.
Even just looking at tools -- we once went to a central location because it had the tools necessary for work, and even as we computerized we had the desktop on the corporate LAN, etc. Communications was limited and often very expensive.
Now we all roll around with mobiles and laptops, with mobile workability that allows us to work virtually anywhere with equal ease.
It is happening for many other people right now. The "giant office" model is one that some companies still pursue, but many others are going to flexible or work at home models. And for people like me it means that I can live on acres in the countryside.
Yes, but for 90+% of the working population it is not happening right now, nor real soon.
> The "giant office" model is one that some companies still pursue
For values of "some" approaching "vast majority".
It's great that some people are able to work remotely now, and more will be able to do later. It will help the environment and generally be a good thing. But in most companies in most industries, this will not happen any time soon. It just isn't happening. Neither the hippest everything-aaS startups nor the most staid dinosaurs are eschewing coming into a common office en masse. There's no inflection point. Internet connections are faster and more reliable than ever, but so are the traffic jams at rush hour.
We've had more adoption rolling out whole new models of housing with 2.0 "walkable" suburbs than with working remotely.
Given that you oddly brought up ycombinator's habits (which accounts for approximately 0% of the workforce), you seem to be emotionally invested in this idea.
But as someone who works remotely, and who works with a large number of people who work remotely a good portion of the time, and an increasing number who work remotely the vast majority of the time, I will say that you are simply wrong. I mean, completely wrong. Even staid old corporations like banks and insurance companies are introducing multiple days of working at home policies for all level of employees. This is not some strange new thing, it is simply happening.
I brought up YC as a lot of people on HN hold it in high esteem and look up to it for inspiration and leading-edge best practices about running businesses. Obviously not everyone.
It also appears our discussion has ended up as generalizations vs anecdotes. Sorry about that.
