331–340 of 410 posts
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.
Don't hold your breath.
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Assuming the word "hybrid" is being used to mean that an individual employee has to go into the office for at least some amount of time per week/month/whatever: Here's the issue I have with the main argument I see against remote work, or rather the main argument I see in favor of forcing people to commute to an office ("satisfies the need of some workers to have regular face to face interactions with coworkers"): I w…
I would be happy to socialize only with people who opt in. That’s how it is already, no one forced you to go to the lunch table or tag along for drinks. To the extent that we collaborate on work, though, having to Zoom with you instead of having a normal free-flowing conversation forms an imposition on me. It becomes an extreme imposition when I am also prohibited from having normal free flowing conversations with ot…
This seems low as only jobs that require(!) F2F interaction with customers or coworkers can't be done remotely. This might come down to "mucking about with the hardware" being the dividing line - if you need the car, it's in the shop, otherwise you can do in on the road, via the Web, ... Psychologically, companies and (older? extroverted?) workers won't agree with this, but it's not up to them to change. Change happe…
You're right about the dividing line being mucking with hardware (I'd also add 'requires access to large or expensive equipment'). But there are plenty of jobs that don't require face-to-face interaction but do require on-site work for one reason or another. Air traffic control, janitors, machinists, garbage collectors, geologists, bakers, etc.
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Absolutely correct. Any everyone's situation is different, but let's be real - the vast majority of software engineers can afford a great home office space.
> the vast majority of software engineers can afford a great home office space Maybe, maybe not. In high cost of living areas even high salary employees with single incomes have to compete with couples pulling in the big bucks.
If everything you do goes in and out over a wire, some day your job will be either automated or offshored.
That's what a lot of people thought in the 2000s, but going by SV salaries the automate or offshore story hasn't really played out! Then again, horses seem to have lost their job in the early 20th century after cars came along, and their population just declined thereafter.
5 of us wrote Microsoft Works for the Macintosh while working at home from 1984 to 1992. Without the internet, we got together as needed to merge code, usually once a month, but sometimes once a week. We talked on the phone. We went to Microsoft once in awhile. It was ideal and worked very well. Maybe it was just our personalities that made it work, but I am astonished that any programmer would rather go into the off…
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> Not everyone can afford the space to have a proper home office, for example. Because they have to live in expensive urban areas near their workplace. Their money would stretch much further if they could remote-work from rural areas.
Until rural areas cost of living goes up because 37% of people decided to move out to unsustainable rural areas. Overall - moving to somewhere more rural is a fix for an individual looking to solve their financial problem but it is not a society wide solution. Rural homes are a net drain on society and are subsidized by city workers.
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> Not everyone can afford the space to have a proper home office, for example. Because they have to live in expensive urban areas near their workplace. Their money would stretch much further if they could remote-work from rural areas.
If we are taking into account more than 1/3 of jobs could be remote, that starts to include many white-collar jobs that are not paid that well. And if we extrapolate this from the USA to other places (like Europe) you can live in a small town and still earn just enough to live in a 2 or 3 dormitories flat, with no dedicated space for WFH for one, let alone for a couple (it's 1/3 of the jobs, so chances that both can…
It helps that those are not multiplicative probabilities. They apply to each job, so each partner will have access to ~1/3 of the jobs, totaling an access to ~1/3 of the total jobs.
5 of us wrote Microsoft Works for the Macintosh while working at home from 1984 to 1992. Without the internet, we got together as needed to merge code, usually once a month, but sometimes once a week. We talked on the phone. We went to Microsoft once in awhile. It was ideal and worked very well. Maybe it was just our personalities that made it work, but I am astonished that any programmer would rather go into the off…
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> I assume that some people are just very lonely and need face to face Anecdata from Hacker News suggests this is true. A lot of lonely young men here freely admit their coworkers are the only people they regularly interact with in-person, and remote work takes that away from them.
This doesn't make sense. There are countless opportunities for social interaction. Join a church, a club, a sports league, a gaming discord. I get that there's a lot of friction involved in joining anything, and many 'lonely young men' don't want to put forth that effort. But it's definitely less total effort than forcing people to come to an office for the purpose of social stimulation. Just measured in terms of tim…