Dreaded commute to the city is keeping offices mostly empty

This is a point that seems to be conveniently left out by most return to office advocates. My coworkers in Boston, DC and SF often had hellish commutes, up to 2 hours each way. That is a serious chunk of the waking hours of the day to spend on the road, not to mention the huge cost and environmental impact of the fuel, the emissions, and the additional roads that needed to be built to support these commutes. The status quo in major American cities was well beyond the point of insanity and the frog had truly been boiled over time.

For every person that took a jaunty walk down the block, or a breezy bike ride to work, there were many others that had to make a major sacrifice to come in each day. We can't go back to the way things were, it just didn't make any sense.

I enjoyed my time in the office, but those days are behind me. I have more money in my pocket, more time, and more quality of life. I get to be near my family all year instead of in a random city where I am rootless. I'm not going back.

All of my career I prioritized short commutes, which led to living in tiny apartments (as small as 25 sqmt) within a short commute from work. When Covid hit we had just moved to a new 1 bed flat and were paying our highest rent yet, but hey, 15 minutes commute!

When it became evident we were in for the long haul we started looking to move again. We ended up moving to a 3 bed house with garden in a tiny village close to our family paying much less rent, but across the country from the office.

I can't understate the massive increase in quality of life this brought us. Being closer to the family I don't feel the need to socialize with colleagues at work, and I didn't need to meet anyone in office for about 2 years.

No shit.

As far as the Bay goes, it feels like decisions about office placement are made with things like management or prestige in mind, rather than the average worker. For all the growth in the East Bay and Tri-Valley area, it seems like most office buildings continue to be built on the peninsula. Hayward is one of the most central locations in the bay and is largely used for... logistics and distribution?

I miss the office, but there's no way I'd give my current remote lifestyle for the way things were before (average 1.5 hours of commute time per day). Mind you, this is _after_ optimizing my home buying process to shorten my commute as much as possible. I have a neighbor that bought a Tesla mainly for the tag that lets you use it in carpool lanes. Everyone has better things to do than sit in cars (or other transport) for hours a day, and its a sad thing that more effort hasn't been expended to improve this before now.

you can always say that. the problem is, this happens slowly, then suddenly all at once. if it takes 6-8 months to get a new job, it might be in the middle of total hiring freeze everywhere.

In one of the meetings this week, we were talking about changing how a program works, to allow the user better access to the diagnostics information in the event of a hardware failure. When the program was first designed, the idea was that the program would exit, and the system would either take corrective action or restart. Easy, simple.

Now, if the program continues to run in the event of hardware failures, we need to re-examine the assumptions we made when writing it in the first place. Especially with regards to different operating modes. I tried to emphasize this repeatedly during the meeting.

It is the same thing with our economy and work in general. In the past, there was expensive infrastructure needed to carry out the company's functions. Even if we're not talking about industrial equipment, the typical office worker would still need a typewriter, access to lots of file cabinets, other office equipment, telephones, and so on. Almost none of that could easily be replicated if the worker wanted to work from home.

And so everyone got used to the idea of going into the office or factory on work days. That became the norm, and until recently it wasn't widely questioned.

But nowadays, you basically just need power and Internet, which is widely available to most workers at home anyway.

I'd have preferred to live in a world without pandemics, but if having a pandemic causes more people to question the assumption you have to commute to work, that is a side benefit.