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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

#281

Post by biomcgary »

closeparen wrote: post #188
onion2k wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are social creatures, there is something quite unnatural only interacting with your wife/kid or worse - with no one else at all, for weeks and months. Offices are significantly less 'natural' than spending time with a small group of people. If you go back a thousand years or so many people lived their entire life within a mile or two of where they were born - they grew up, worked, got married, lived and died in a…

There was much more of a community life outside the home, with your fellow villagers.

In this case, the community is defined by the proximity to your home. Working at an office with a typical US commute is not remotely the same.

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

#282

Post by bcrosby95 »

closeparen wrote: post #218
ethbr0 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd spin this around and cast it as a challenge -- regular, forced interactions with coworkers is minimally sufficient and retards some people from pursuing social activities outside the home. There are already a number of options in even the smallest town. I expect that will increase as more people move to WFH and seek social outlets. And at the end of the day "interacting with coworkers in the break room" is a pret…

I don't particularly enjoy the forced, stilted chatter but I do get a lot of value from: a) Being obliged to put on clothes and leave the house. b) Spending a large part of the day at a change of scenery. c) Having other people there, around, ambiently. Spending 23 hours a day alone in your room + 1 hour for outdoor exercise, with occasional weekend visitation, is among the worst punishments the state has at its disp…

I assume you don't have any friends or family outside of work that live close to you?

My group of friends gets lunch together 3-4 days out of the workweek. We even sometimes do dinner with eachother during the week. Sometimes we do this with family instead - my wife's sister and parents live within 15 minutes of us.

And we have kids that we lug with us.

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

#283

Post by peter303 »

Overtonwindow wrote: post #197

Working from home is great and all, but do we really want work to be within our home? I’ve been working from home the entire pandemic, and I still find it hard to stop working and “be home.”

Coworking spaces were supposed be a compromise. Individuals and small teams could work in an office-like space without home distractions for a few hundred a month. In the early days coworking provided quality bandwith and printing for less you'd pay at home. But that advantage has faded.

I have lost track of how coworking has fared during covid. For a while, pre-covid, they seemed to outnumber coffee houses in my metro area.

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

#284

Post by achenet »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #240
achenet wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

my condolences. :( I guess it may depend on the sport group. I've had good luck with the local Basic Fit (globo-gym type outfit, but the nearby branch has some nice people), and my weighlifting club, so perhaps you may find better luck in another sports group? Back when I lived in Marseille, I actually made a few really nice friendships from hanging out at the Prado street workout park. It was on the beach too, which…

How do you make friends at gyms? Here everyone has noise cancelling headphones on, focusing on their sets, and only staring at their equipment or their phone. There's no socializing with strangers going on on unless you brought your own friends, as everyone is busy to do their sets and go home. And what's the difference between a gym and a weightlifting club? Here we have gyms, where there's free weights, machines an…

well, I can only answer for my specific case, but the way I made friends at the gym was basically people noticing that I was doing the Olympic lifts and commenting on that, plus occasionally giving random compliments/technique tips to people.

By weightlifting club I mean an association centered around competitive Olympic lifting. So you train individually, but can sign up for competitions, and are generally always around competitive lifters.

I've also heard CrossFit has a good community, not sure how accurate this is, however.

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

#285

Post by closeparen »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #282
closeparen wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't particularly enjoy the forced, stilted chatter but I do get a lot of value from: a) Being obliged to put on clothes and leave the house. b) Spending a large part of the day at a change of scenery. c) Having other people there, around, ambiently. Spending 23 hours a day alone in your room + 1 hour for outdoor exercise, with occasional weekend visitation, is among the worst punishments the state has at its disp…

I assume you don't have any friends or family outside of work that live close to you? My group of friends gets lunch together 3-4 days out of the workweek. We even sometimes do dinner with eachother during the week. Sometimes we do this with family instead - my wife's sister and parents live within 15 minutes of us. And we have kids that we lug with us.

I meet my friends for specific events (cycling, running, lunch, coffee, concert, theater, etc) lasting a few hours each on the weekends.

I don't know anyone who wants to do those kinds of things on workdays, or to be "around" without a specific activity planned.

It's something but it's still very little compared to working together.

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

#286

Post by zw123456 »

For the other 63%, I think an interesting possibility is to use a robot Turk machine type of arrangement. Take for example, the "flag person" at a road construction site, it is an outdoor job and hence would be categorized as not possible to do from home, but, one could easily design a very simple machine with a camera and the stop/slow sign that could be operated remotely. That could actually be safer and lower cost. There are lots of other possible examples, window washer, etc.

There is probably some companies working on it already, if not, it might be an interesting idea I think.

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

#287

Post by colinmhayes »

kreeben wrote: post #190
lbriner wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are going to have a massive problem with taking on juniors, particularly younger people. Without many people visiting the office, there is a lack of banter, encouragement, confidence building. Imagine you were 16 and your introduction to the world of work was sitting in your own bedroom! Honestly, I don't know how we deal with it unless we create a schedule where there has to be certain people in the office on cer…

"What about the juniors" is not a super convincing argument to me since I've been on-boarding them throughout the pandemic but also prior to that, quite successfully, through the use of basic video linking and sharing of screens. Out team is scattered around the world and that has always been the case. What are some other examples of when WFH doesn't work?

As a junior who started in late 2019 I completely disagree. My contact with coworkers greatly decreased when we went remote. Partially that's my fault, partially it's the companies, but the reality is that this is really a hard problem to solve.

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

#288

Post by weatherlite »

tharne wrote: post #119

I really hope American businesses don't bring this headline to its logical conclusion... "37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home...by people in India or Eastern Europe for much less money"

If it becomes really bad there's a good chance governments will step in and heavily tax offshoring or provide tax benefits for reshoring.

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

#289

Post by busterarm »

eropple wrote: post #29
busterarm wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not discounting any of that. Definitely won't be easy and that's why I say about a decade before we really see a shift.

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

#290

Post by vkou »

rebeccaskinner wrote: post #275
vkou wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You are viewing remote work through the particular circumstance of the pandemic. Those particular circumstances of the pandemic haven't been with us for almost a year, now, ever since mass vaccination started. I hated WFH in 2020, and I hated WFH in 2021, and I still hate WFH today. Despite having no pandemic restrictions on what I can do today. And even prior to vaccination, if you wanted to go out and do stuff, m…

As much as people want to pretend the pandemic is over, it isn't. The legal restrictions might have lifted in most places, but there's a big gap between that and things being back to how they were before- or how they'll be once we've actually hit the endemic part of covid and have a better understanding of what that looks like. You can still go to a restaurant today, or travel, and co-working spaces might be open, bu…

> As much as people want to pretend the pandemic is over, it isn't.

No, it's not over, in fact we're at our worst rate of world-wide daily cases since November 2021. Believe me, I'm both a pessimist, and one of the more COVID-cautious people here.

But in my region/anywhere I'd like to go, I can, and currently feel comfortable doing just about anything I want[1] - and have been for most of the past year (Sans Omicron surge).

> You can still go to a restaurant today, or travel, and co-working spaces might be open, but enough people are still reluctant to attend events that a lot of things aren't sustainable right now. I certainly wouldn't go meet someone at a restaurant for lunch right now, even though I can.

Sure, you may feel that way - but I haven't felt that way. So, for me, there are no practical restrictions on what I, or my friends can do. Nothing that I liked doing three years ago is unavailable today.

... And yet, I vastly prefer going into work over WFH.

[1] I don't feel comfortable licking doorknobs or getting into a moshpit, but I didn't feel comfortable doing that pre-COVID, either.

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