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37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home

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Re: 37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home

#21

Post by iso1631 »

warning26 wrote: post #10
paulcole wrote: post #5

100% of the jobs I want to do can be performed entirely at home, but I prefer to do 100% of them in an office.

Exactly — yet so many people can’t accept that ANYONE might want to work from an office. My assumption is that people who love WFH are generally suburbanites who can’t fathom getting to work involves anything other than sitting in traffic for two hours.

When getting to work involves a short walk to the office, getting a coffee on the way, of course that's the best commute by a country mile. When the weather's nice like this morning I'll take a longer walk, but I don't have to do that commute.

Re: 37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home

#22

Post by nikanj »

akagusu wrote: post #2

But execs want you to commute because their mindset is to make worker's life miserable, and working from home is seem like a privilege.

Executives work towards a large number of stupid performance goals, but worker misery isn’t one of them.

Re: 37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home

#23

Post by sharemywin »

warning26 wrote: post #10
paulcole wrote: post #5

100% of the jobs I want to do can be performed entirely at home, but I prefer to do 100% of them in an office.

Exactly — yet so many people can’t accept that ANYONE might want to work from an office. My assumption is that people who love WFH are generally suburbanites who can’t fathom getting to work involves anything other than sitting in traffic for two hours.

I hate cube and half cubes or like at my current job before covid I had an office that I shared with 2 other people.

Re: 37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home

#24

Post by tapland »

paulcole wrote: post #5

100% of the jobs I want to do can be performed entirely at home, but I prefer to do 100% of them in an office.

I miss the casual chatting about all kinds of things and the ritualistic coffee breaks (Sweden) a lot.

A lot a lot.

I can't afford an apartment with another room for a proper separate office, and wouldn't want to waste that space on a room to separate work and home even if I did.

Re: 37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home

#25

Post by MSM »

mostly_harmless wrote: post #14
akagusu wrote: post #2

But execs want you to commute because their mindset is to make worker's life miserable, and working from home is seem like a privilege.

and a commercial real estate crash would be bad for the company's bottom line

I see this everywhere but I can't see how it's true.

I'm guessing that a company's largest expenses are (probably in order, too): People, Technology, Office space.

Most companies, especially smaller companies, do not actually own the office space they are in, they lease it. Commercial real estate crashing would greatly reduce one of their top 3 expenses... how is that bad for the bottom line?

Re: 37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home

#26

Post by Tade0 »

warning26 wrote: post #10
paulcole wrote: post #5

100% of the jobs I want to do can be performed entirely at home, but I prefer to do 100% of them in an office.

Exactly — yet so many people can’t accept that ANYONE might want to work from an office. My assumption is that people who love WFH are generally suburbanites who can’t fathom getting to work involves anything other than sitting in traffic for two hours.

Urbanite here. I hated having to travel daily, even when my commute was around 35 minutes.

Currently working remotely and living in a city, because that's where all the services are.

Re: 37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home

#27

Post by waterboigh »

foolfoolz wrote: post #12

i know it seems unlikely now but i think we will return to the office. not 100% of the time. not everyone was doing 100% before either. but a lot of people have switched jobs in the remote only era. we have experienced / are experiencing how little we know these new people. how little we feel connected to them. how strange it is to not make new friends at a new job that go beyond the work-friend level. i think most p…

> this will be gradual but i think it is a common sentiment that we want to work with people we can see in person

That's been my biggest issue, is I miss the people. I miss the coffee runs, the random lunch outings...

However, if I lived my ideal schedule I would work from 0600 to 1100 ITO, break for a 'siesta', then finish my work later in the afternoon evening as my schedule allows. And so my co-workers have also had their own ideals which overlap little to any such that we quickly reach a point of "no point in having in office, we overlap two hours at best."

Perhaps the best model to satiate flexibility but indulge the human side of the equation, is remote-first regional-companies. One can still plan to meet with some regularity without absurd amounts of travel. At my first startup, we would meet on a roughly weekly basis for a company lunch to have those conversations easiest done face-to-face, or just hang out for an afternoon enjoying the local natural beauty (#SaltLife) - anytime the Engineering VP and I needed to meetup, we'd just figure out what day we could meet up at a colo office or coffee spot.

Otherwise, remote from wherever made sense. Some days for me it was pool side, some days down by the creek, most days just in my home office. The only real down-side is that lack of a national or global talent pool, but we weren't even all that niche so it wasn't a factor for us and, I suspect, most companies which just do the same old languages on the same old platforms.

Re: 37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home

#29

Post by eropple »

busterarm wrote: post #15
agumonkey wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After covid we have some vague stats and yeah not everybody enjoy full remote. But 1) there's a large pool of people that do, 2) you can have hybrid 3) unless no other colleague goes to the workplace you may enjoy some workplace social context 4) we need to reduce energy expenditure and not commuting seems like a massive gain.

I expect that over time our use of space will adapt to this new reality but it will probably take a decade. I definitely see older or taller office buildings renovating and rezoning to become mixed co-working and/or living spaces suited to remote work. Not just that but also I could see commercial space be divided up into premium one-person office spaces wired with fast internet and set up for video conferencing.

I hope this is the direction we see, but going from offices/commercial to residential is a much heavier lift than just zoning. Like, just consider the plumbing situation in a reasonably large office building. People living there will require more significant renovations than just putting up new walls. It is fixable, but it isn't cheap, and because it isn't cheap, "will it happen" gets some question marks.

Re: 37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home

#30

Post by dudul »

warning26 wrote: post #10
paulcole wrote: post #5

100% of the jobs I want to do can be performed entirely at home, but I prefer to do 100% of them in an office.

Exactly — yet so many people can’t accept that ANYONE might want to work from an office. My assumption is that people who love WFH are generally suburbanites who can’t fathom getting to work involves anything other than sitting in traffic for two hours.

Who are these people who can't accept that anyone wants to work from an office? If there are so many of them, can we see some examples?

Office work is not just about the commute, it is also about terrible work conditions where you may be seated in an open space shared by support, engineers, sales, etc.

"So many people can't accept that ANYONE is more productive in a remote setting".

This "us vs them" discourse is so childish. Just find the company that works the way you want, either all in office, or hybrid, or all distributed and move on.

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