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The Winners of Remote Work

nytimes.com

21–30 of 276 posts

Re: The Winners of Remote Work

#21
post #20
post #6

> There are already examples of how gains are captured by the few and not the many. The New York Times - "Feel Bad About Everything, Always" Remote work is amazing, net on net it vastly improves lives, reduces commute time / traffic / car pollution, reverses the decades long trend of economic activity centralizing in a few boom cities, and I believe will reduce inequality longterm as workers will be able to get good,…

Try telling that to the office cleaner.

Luckily new jobs for house cleaners will be created.

Re: The Winners of Remote Work

#23
Survival of the fittest.

Human society has had a lot of versions of "how things work" in regards to obtaining and distributing resources. As some of the work force transitions from physical, in-person employment (trading labor for pay) to increasingly virtual employment, some things are de-coupled, like high "cost of living" areas being less strongly related to "high paying employment centers."

But for employees, it's just an amplification of the previous trend towards inequality in employment that was already happening.

Another way to think about this is specialization. A few people can specialize in certain remote tasks - obviously the examples of education (for fitness, academia, etc.) - because creation is not tied to consumption, especially for digital goods and services.

The distribution of employment has always shifted over time as productivity has increased for certain types of work, and then new methods of employment has popped up as technology and entertainment and culture evolved. In a free country a couple hundred years ago, many people might work their own farm and largely sustain themselves off that work. But today a tiny slice of the population manages massive scale farms. What does everyone else do? Industries have evolved from nothing - large scale housing, transportation, etc.

To try to wrap this up, this article isn't going far enough. The goal might be to predict the future. If everything we know we need and want can be produced by a shrinking work force, what will the rest of the population do to earn their keep? Will some kind of redistribution scheme of resources arise, like socialism or universal basic income?

Re: The Winners of Remote Work

#25
post #6

> There are already examples of how gains are captured by the few and not the many. The New York Times - "Feel Bad About Everything, Always" Remote work is amazing, net on net it vastly improves lives, reduces commute time / traffic / car pollution, reverses the decades long trend of economic activity centralizing in a few boom cities, and I believe will reduce inequality longterm as workers will be able to get good,…

But but but.. what about the gas stations, shiny offices and all those things we have built with an explicit purpose to take advantage of you physically moving in?

Creative destruction.

Re: The Winners of Remote Work

#26

This is partly why I keep thinking I should have become an electrician or a carpenter: the only real competition is local, there is always demand in cities. I knew a very wealthy electrician who started his own business and it seems to be a common path. Unlike programming where the common path is work for someone else and burn out.

Never too late to switch. Maybe this remote working trend will lead to outsourcing of programmers and we’ll see a rise of electrician and carpenter bootcamps as people flee software development. You’ll just be ahead of the curve.

Re: The Winners of Remote Work

#27

This is partly why I keep thinking I should have become an electrician or a carpenter: the only real competition is local, there is always demand in cities. I knew a very wealthy electrician who started his own business and it seems to be a common path. Unlike programming where the common path is work for someone else and burn out.

I believe this has something to do with the statistical distribution of compensation - normal-like for electricians, dentists, and more power-like for coders and people from highly creative or sports fields.

It's all about leverage. There are certainly less good and better electricians and dentists, but at the end of the day they can only string so much wire and drill so many teeth in a day at rates that are pretty much set by the market. They have some leverage if they set up a business and employ people but there are still both lower and upper bounds.

Whereas a Pro Bowl quarterback or A-list movie star is worth maybe $100s of millions to a team or studio relative to players/actors who are "only" very competent. Coders are somewhere in between.

Re: The Winners of Remote Work

#28

This article really isn't about remote work writ large, it's about websites/organizations that provide platforms for individuals to sell services to consumers. The fact that you can make popular workout videos from your home is orthogonal to the behavior of consumers on the Peloton platform. It's an interesting and important observation that good communicators win disproportionately as telecommunications get better -…

It's got to be clickbait. If there are winners, then how many workers are losing by working remotely? It seems obvious that the vast majority of people win big by not being forced to commute into a full day at an office where they would rather not be.

To use an example from the parent post, local, cyclist spin trainers are losing, since people are simply using the Pelaton trainers at home, rather than going to an "in person" spin class. The local, small time trainer can't compete with a celebrity/model trainer. Similar to how TV and movies hurt local theatres. In the end, it is more efficient, but there are "losers".

Re: The Winners of Remote Work

#29

If there's a large increase in the amount of remote work, I wonder how much software architectures will change in order to accommodate the lessened interaction?

Arguably, some level of modularity is good anyway and that's been the general trend. And a lot of software, perhaps especially large open source projects, are developed by a fairly distributed set of individuals and teams already.
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