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Why do so many people want us back in the office?

paulitaylor.com

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Re: Why do so many people want us back in the office?

#341

Post by Mountain_Skies »

ethbr0 wrote: post #282
lotsofpulp wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think utilities are expensive enough to compare to the explicit costs of commuting by car (fuel, wear and tear, insurance) and the implicit costs of commuting (increased morbidity/mortality risk from driving, opportunity cost of time needed to be allocated to commuting). Especially if the house isn’t completely empty when you’re at work.

Not to mention the infrastructure / tax costs! New interstate lanes to sate population growth don't build themselves. The more regular commuters we can take off the road, the better.

Some of my transit activist friends are upset over the potential of work from home to harm demand for transit service, which for some populations are used for more than commuting to work. Also if more people end up moving out of city centers because they're no longer constrained by a commute, that further erodes the demand for public transportation.

Re: Why do so many people want us back in the office?

#342

Post by stjohnswarts »

VectorLock wrote: post #284
m0zg wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could do what we did in some distributed teams at Google: just have a permanent "call" going with everyone normally muted. When someone would like to receive attention, they unmute and speak. It's not as good as walking up to someone's desk, but it's not as bad as having to schedule a call in advance.

That sounds worse in all possible ways than just having a messenger service like Slack but I suppose different teams work in different ways.

I prefer slack's @$name method better. If you don't need an answer right away just drop it in the group chat. if you need attention do an @ so they hear the bell. Of course they could have just emailed... but that is so passe now. :)

Re: Why do so many people want us back in the office?

#343

Post by maneesh »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #219
maneesh wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> if your job can be done from home, it can be done from anywhere in the world > I will call anyone's bluff who says this. Do it. Good luck. If you haven't successfully done this already, there is a reason and you know it. Welp, I'm the CEO of a smart wearable device company ( https://pavlok.com ). We were based in Boston because everyone told me, and I believed you HAD to be in one place to build a startup, and DEF…

How do you know the success explosion wasn't about to happen regardless?

Because I would have run out of money and died pretty soon after if I hadn’t left

Re: Why do so many people want us back in the office?

#344

Post by tester756 »

roenxi wrote: post #50

There is a certain mindset - turns up all the time in economic discussions too - where if a change is made and doesn't lead to a metric-observable consequence in 6 months then that is the end of the discussion. Working from home is crippling for forming new social connections. Promotions are done based, primarily, on social connections. Hiring too. There is very strong pressure for ambitious people who know how the w…

What do you mean

>There is very strong pressure for ambitious people who know how the world works to get back into the office.

Re: Why do so many people want us back in the office?

#345

Post by zrail »

tima11234 wrote: post #198
danielrhodes wrote: post #177

Outside of the pandemic, I think a company doing remote/WFH carries with it some implications people don’t seem to talk about - namely that your physical workspace and equipment used is capital, and the company is not compensating employees for the use of that capital. If a company does not need to maintain office space, that is a huge expense they don’t have to pay for - but an employee is paying for it. Right now y…

Remote work at tech companies isn't something completely new, it just wasn't the norm. The good companies compensate employees for internet and hardware.

My company pays a good chunk for startup expenses for remotes but so far we haven’t convinced them to pick up the tab for internet.

Re: Why do so many people want us back in the office?

#346

Post by quanticle »

dathinab wrote: post #309
jstanley wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if you're WFH, you don't need to live in central Tokyo, you can live anywhere. You'd probably save money by gaining an extra bedroom and moving out of central Tokyo, no?

Anywhere where you: - Have reasonable fast internet. - (Affordable) Hospitals/Police/Firewatch in reasonable distance - Are not to far away from the companies office as you likely still have to go to the office from time to time. EDIT: Most people don't live in Tokyo or cities with similar expensive housings. The cost of moving away from cities is often much bigger then "just" longer transit times from home to work.

>Are not to far away from the companies office as you likely still have to go to the office from time to time.

The length of a "tolerable commute" increases disproportionately as the frequency of said commute declines. If I have to commute every day, anything over 30 minutes is pretty tiring. If I have to commute twice a week, driving 2+ hours is fine. If I have to commute once a month, I'd be willing to live on the other side of the country and fly in.

Re: Why do so many people want us back in the office?

#347

Post by sibmike »

x87678r wrote: post #124

My commute is 20 minutes on an uncrowded ferry, and my home office is a tiny desk in my daughter's bedroom while she works on the other side on school stuff. My colleague has a massive house with a pool tennis court and so much space he has literally 3 never-used bedrooms. His wife looks after kids who are at school most of the day again. His commute is 2 hours each way. People are talking home vs office people are c…

Just 20 minutes one way adds up to 20 working days per year. That's 4 weeks of unpaid labor!

People are unhappy about extra money spent on Air Conditioning or an extra office chair but the most are happy to carry the opportunity cost of commute. :(

Re: Why do so many people want us back in the office?

#348

Post by phillip_cypher »

vonseel wrote: post #329
ghaff wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really, there are only 2 costs that matter. On the one side you have the commute--both in time and money. On the other side is whether the place you'd be living in otherwise is suitable for long-term WFH or if you have to spend more money for another bedroom or whatever. So, if you already have a dedicated office in an exurban house (as I do), not commuting--which I rarely did anyway--is a cost savings. As someone wh…

The delta in utilities, in a place like Texas, during the summer months, is certainly not trivial. Relative to a tech workers salary, sure, a hundred bucks per month isn’t that much, but it’s costing me a lot more to keep my house cool through 100F days all summer long than it would if I let the thermostat go to 80F during the workday.

Not to mention the flipside. Living in Minnesota, I have to use my furnace all day when I work from home for many months out of the year. Natural gas isn't cheap, yet an electric heater would probably even be more expensive on my electric bill.

Re: Why do so many people want us back in the office?

#349

Post by edoceo »

maest wrote: post #306
edoceo wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My team has a similar tool. So, everyone is in the room, muted and no-volume. So, if someone needs my attention they can send a bell but when my audio is off its only a visual bell, so it won't interrupt the deep work. And one can always exit the channel if needed - which is shown in status, so folks know your DND or not available. But, one can monitor the channel so it behaves like a water cooler too. And up-scales…

Is this an in-house tool?

Yep. Built with Apache, PHP, Sqlite and PeerJS

Re: Why do so many people want us back in the office?

#350

Post by what-the-grump »

dathinab wrote: post #309
jstanley wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if you're WFH, you don't need to live in central Tokyo, you can live anywhere. You'd probably save money by gaining an extra bedroom and moving out of central Tokyo, no?

Anywhere where you: - Have reasonable fast internet. - (Affordable) Hospitals/Police/Firewatch in reasonable distance - Are not to far away from the companies office as you likely still have to go to the office from time to time. EDIT: Most people don't live in Tokyo or cities with similar expensive housings. The cost of moving away from cities is often much bigger then "just" longer transit times from home to work.

If WFH was guarantee, I'd have enough money to take a helicopter down to NYC twice a month instead of paying taxes/rent/mortgage/higher cost of food/MTA/LIRR/etc.

While living in a house with too many bedrooms. And if you want to talk about environmental impact, the air is cleaner the water is blue again and maybe we start paying baristas 100k a year for the inconvenience of having to live in the city instead of software engineers that can fckoff and do this from the moon.

The obvious is slapping everyone in the face. And if you are in commercial real estate, best wishes in 2021.

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