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Dreaded commute to the city is keeping offices mostly empty

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Re: Dreaded commute to the city is keeping offices mostly empty

#141

Post by bsder »

Johnny555 wrote: post #6

That's one reason for sure, but even if my house was a 10 minute walk from the office, I'd still rather only go in for meetings. At home I have my own private office with a nice view. I have a nice set of speakers and can play any music I like. If I want to go for a walk, I'm in a quiet suburban neighborhood with hiking trails nearby. The kitchen is always stocked with snacks I like plus freshly prepared healthy lunc…

> At the "new" office, no one has an assigned desk

Yeah, somehow management has conveniently forgotten that an "office" has a door. If it doesn't have a door, it's not an "office".

With open floor plans, it's hardly a surprise that nobody wants to come back to the office.

Re: Dreaded commute to the city is keeping offices mostly empty

#142

Post by wolverine876 »

dougmwne wrote: post #21

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 stat…

> hellish commutes

The exaggerated adjective is the argument. Your co-workers could choose to live elsewhere, so I wonder if the commute was so bad from their perspective. Those cities in particular have good public transit, which lets you live further away and commute conveniently. Many millions of people live in those cities, and choose to - the real estate prices reflect the demand.

You don't have to want that, but I don't see how we can tell everyone else what is good and bad for them.

Re: Dreaded commute to the city is keeping offices mostly empty

#143

Post by wolverine876 »

criddell wrote: post #115
kibwen wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I grew up with one parent in the burbs and the other in the boonies, and today I live in a city and I'll never go back to anywhere that isn't eminently walkable. I don't value space, I value proximity to lots of people. I'm happy that WFH allows people who value the opposite to vacate the cities that make them miserable in order to free up room for people who crave density.

For me, what I want has changed a lot over my life. In my 20's I craved density. I loved the energy and options of cities. 30 years later, I'm the opposite. I live in the suburbs in a house big enough to give me a home gym, workshop, office, etc... but if I had a self-driving car and could get great internet, I'd move way out of the city. I want a little more space and a lot less noise.

Many people follow the same pattern as they age. I think many in this discussion are attributing to WFH and other things what is a common outcome of just getting older.

Re: Dreaded commute to the city is keeping offices mostly empty

#144

Post by wolverine876 »

goatcode wrote: post #126
Tiktaalik wrote: post #113

Turns out that we've been building cities wrong for the last 100 years. Whoopsie. It took a pandemic to get people to realize that the status quo of hopping in their car and sitting in traffic twice a day to get to work and back every day is a hugely frustrating waste of time. It doesn't have to be this way. We can build more housing near where people work. We can build bike lanes and public transit. It's entirely po…

Having lived in both city and non-city for equal portions of my life, I don't care how "efficient" the commute is (or how inefficient its alternatives are forced to become by those who dislike cars), city life is horrendous. I can't understand why, especially after covid, anyone thinks it's a good idea to lived packed like mice in a concrete box, with only a few trees you don't own and have to share with everyone. No…

> city life is horrendous

You find it that way, but obviously others love it. Rather than declaring it, it would be interesting to know what you found to be good and bad about city life.

Re: Dreaded commute to the city is keeping offices mostly empty

#145

Post by UnpossibleJim »

wollsmoth wrote: post #99
UnpossibleJim wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you're still in a meeting room on a video call, so why not just be on a video call if the rest of your day is spent in isolation with headphones on with all the inconveniences of office travel. What is the upside? Especially when there are open office plans with no assigned desks (as has been mentioned above - luckily, I haven't actually worked at a "non assigned desk role yet), which is f'ing dehumanizing.

Sounds like you're asking what's the upside vs wfh. I'm saying if y'all are at the office anyway, get into a room for the meeting instead of taking the call at your desks. If you're wfh anyway, yeah just call in over video.

Oh, I'm just asking, if you have to set up a video call in the office anyways (which is often the case, these days, due to multiple teams working in other parts of the country and off-shoring) and the rest of your time is spent siloed with headphones to block out noise, due to office distractions - the reported upsides of the office (collaboration, community, teamwork, shared sense of purpose, closeness to fellow coworkers, etc.) all seem to fall away. What then, becomes the real argument for having an "only work at the office" policy and reviews not be based on the metrics of work done and quality of work?

And you are correct, my question was horribly phrased before =)

EDIT: and just for reference, I lead a small team and am not really management and we're still remote. We seem to do well and these are the metrics we go by, so I'm generally kind of curious about this. Occasionally my manager asks about hours worked, and I'm vague about it, but our output is better than most teams and of a high quality, so she doesn't peak inside too often =/

Re: Dreaded commute to the city is keeping offices mostly empty

#146

Post by wolverine876 »

longstation wrote: post #129
Tiktaalik wrote: post #113

Turns out that we've been building cities wrong for the last 100 years. Whoopsie. It took a pandemic to get people to realize that the status quo of hopping in their car and sitting in traffic twice a day to get to work and back every day is a hugely frustrating waste of time. It doesn't have to be this way. We can build more housing near where people work. We can build bike lanes and public transit. It's entirely po…

That's exactly what the Soviet era was. Say you work in a hospital, you would be living within 10 minutes walk away from your office. You will eat in the hospital cafeteria. Your kids will go to the hospital-sponsored schools. Unsurprisingly, your neighbors will be your coworkers. Your kids' friends will be your coworkers' kids. Life is simple and efficient but there some other downsides that's probably not relevant…

The Soviet era? You mean in the USSR? How is that relevant here? And are you really claiming that everyone in the USSR had a 10 minute commute? That would be some incredible planning!

Re: Dreaded commute to the city is keeping offices mostly empty

#147

Post by wolverine876 »

colin_mccabe wrote: post #121
Tiktaalik wrote: post #113

Turns out that we've been building cities wrong for the last 100 years. Whoopsie. It took a pandemic to get people to realize that the status quo of hopping in their car and sitting in traffic twice a day to get to work and back every day is a hugely frustrating waste of time. It doesn't have to be this way. We can build more housing near where people work. We can build bike lanes and public transit. It's entirely po…

I do wish we spent more on bike paths and infrastructure. It's much cheaper than any of the other transit initiatives. However, it becomes very difficult to use them if you have to drop off kids in the morning. So it is never going to be an option for a lot of people. In general, working from home makes cities and public transit a lot less relevant. There isn't a strong reason for everyone to get on a train to the bi…

> I do wish we spent more on bike paths and infrastructure. It's much cheaper than any of the other transit initiatives. However, it becomes very difficult to use them if you have to drop off kids in the morning.

Out of curiosity, could you put the kids in one of those child trailers, or on a cargo bicycle?

> When you add crime, COVID-19, pollution, etc. into the mix the case for just staying home seems even better.

This reads like (though I don't know the parent at all) the argument of someone who doesn't spend time in cities or who just doesn't value what cities offer.

Crime rates are pretty low in cities (despite the media campaign trying to say how dangerous they are); pollution is mostly non-existent in most cities in economically advanced countries. Cities have services and experiences that are not available anywhere else. Where else can you find the food, music, arts, etc. that are in NY? The people? The public beauty such as the architecture?

Re: Dreaded commute to the city is keeping offices mostly empty

#148

Post by lamontcg »

skirmish wrote: post #133
vel0city wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I still don't get how we as a species went "this is fine". The complete loss of audiovisual privacy is such an immense drain. Throughout history a huge chunk of us as a species did not have audiovisual privacy at work, and a massive percentage of the jobs throughout history never had it and still don't. Its immensely rare for us as a species to have full audiovisual privacy at our workplace, and has been for a long…

Sure, doing repetitive thoughtless work is more fun with other people milling around. But when you are at your cognitive limit trying to consider various ways this code could be failing, conversations about weekend plans are immensely distracting and rage inducing.

And it isn't just conversations, it is the guy sitting right behind you constantly bouncing his leg up and down and you can't quite ever ignore it.

Re: Dreaded commute to the city is keeping offices mostly empty

#149

Post by wolverine876 »

ansible wrote: post #29

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…

Lots of people do not have home computers beyond their phones. When the pandemic began, one urban school district discovered that half their students didn't have a computer (desktop or laptop) at home.

Re: Dreaded commute to the city is keeping offices mostly empty

#150

Post by wolverine876 »

switch007 wrote: post #13

EU perspective: Gas is high and cars are expensive. Cities are full of drug addicts, homeless people, and empty shops. And crime. I don’t even like going downtown for leisure. House prices and rents have rocketed so people who moved the last 2 years to upsize have done so even further from the office. Not to mention presenteeism spreading viruses. Not to mention awful noisy offices designed by sadists. It’s far more…

> Cities are full of drug addicts, homeless people, and empty shops. And crime. I don’t even like going downtown for leisure.

That doesn't at all describe the cities I've seen post-pandemic. Cities are full of restaurants, arts, people, and energy. I don't see many empty shops, though more than usual (I assume businesses went bankrupt at higher rate during the pandemic). It does describe the beliefs of people who listen to reactionary commentary but don't go to cities, or believe the talk shows rather than simply looking around them.

There are people who are homeless or addicted to drugs, but they have no impact on me and never have. Try just talking to someone - they are just people, not monsters, no different than the other people I meet except in their clothes.

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