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The workers have spoken: They're staying home

computerworld.com

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Re: The workers have spoken: They're staying home

#151

Post by ghaff »

bunderbunder wrote: post #122
mistrial9 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

traditional urban planning in the USA includes extensive field research that shows .. just what you are saying.. there is a demographic curve about time to commute and who is willing to do it, and how often.. behavior on a large scale across industries, show curves like that

I suspect that traditional urban planning in the USA also assumed that relatively few people would be trying to pack into city centers to work. Because modern office parks hadn't been invented yet, and modern curtain wall skyscrapers hadn't been invented yet, and consolidating many industries into a relatively small number of massive tech companies hadn't happened yet, and the two-income family (which doubles the pot…

There are a lot of dynamics. Certainly among my grad school class almost no one went to work/live in the city in the late 80s. And, indeed, essentially all tech had migrated out of the city (Boston/Cambridge) by then.

A lot of people did move to Manhattan for finance. But most left after they gained partners and kids.

In general, I suspect a lot of younger/better-educated/wealthier folks have latched onto some of the more elite cities, when they might not have done so in the past, but may not stay there over time.

Re: The workers have spoken: They're staying home

#152

Post by Aurornis »

godshatter wrote: post #77

I work in an admnistrative office on a university campus. Work from home was great for IT folks, but not so much for a lot of regular staff. Some people had young children that didn't understand that "you can't bother mommy or daddy right now" and it was a constant fight. Some of them had to use their own computers to connect to their machine at work through a vpn, and had a lot of trouble getting that to work. Some…

> Some people had young children that didn't understand that "you can't bother mommy or daddy right now" and it was a constant fight.

One of the tech companies where I live had a problem where a lot of parents who got to WFH went on to cancel their daycare. They thought they'd save a lot of money by watching the kids while they worked.

Companies were really lenient about kids at home for a while when daycares were frequently closed due to COVID. Some people saw this and thought it was an invitation to have their kids home all the time.

It went about as well as you'd expect.

Re: The workers have spoken: They're staying home

#153

Post by gumby »

ghaff wrote: post #23
bunderbunder wrote: post #10

I think that companies might have more success getting people back to the office if they had not also spent the past decade or two systematically updating offices to be beautiful to look at in CAD renderings but awful to actually occupy and try to work in. This move toward not giving permanent desk assignments to people who are required to be in the office also makes it worse. Open plan offices are a bit of a product…

So much relates to commute. I'd probably meander in for a halfway decent office arrangement if it were less than a 30 minute walk and there were actually people I worked with there. But that hasn't been the case so I don't.

Last year we had a lab that was 25 minutes away. I carpooled with a neighbor. It seemed, OK, especially as we only went in a couple of times a week.

We lost that space and switched to a lab about 10 minutes away. It's amazing what a difference that made! We go in more often because the psychological cost is so much lower.

We could have rented lab space that is less than 5 minutes' walk for me, but no such luck.

Re: The workers have spoken: They're staying home

#154

Post by api »

mikestew wrote: post #121
lucaspm98 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The poverty line for a family of 4 in San Francisco was $149k in 2023. I live in a MCOL city with all the modern amenities and on $150k can be a comfortably upper-middle class sole income earner, buy the average house, and send 2 kids to private school if needed. A 2-3x pay differential is a fairly accurate COL difference for a family moving to NY or SF, maybe even on the low end if comparing to a rural area.

I’m not debating the accuracy of GP’s statement, but rather the level of success one might have with that negotiation tactic. I’m waiting to hear the success stories of negotiating that 250% CoL raise.

I was advocating it more as a way of quitting TBH and rubbing the insanity of those cities' RE costs in their faces.

Re: The workers have spoken: They're staying home

#155

Post by nsguy »

jmyeet wrote: post #18

For the longest time, we tech workers have convinced ourselves we're special. We believe we can act on our own behalf against our employer on equal footing. We start to believe in the myth of meritocracy. Remember the "Day in the Life" vidoes? When was the last time you saw someone showing their amazing workspace, the free food, the amentities and all that? A few years ago they were everywhere. Now? Nowhere. We are n…

I think the reality is that demand for good software developers is only going to grow. This has been the trend since the 1960's and it shows no signs of reversing. There have been periods of slowdown and reversal (e.g. dot com bust) but the trend continues.

Good software developers are a scarce resource. There's a lot that goes into the mix of making one. AI can't replace them yet. They're critical for the success of many businesses.

We were in layoff mode but that seems to be reversing. Even if we see a bit more ups and downs the trend of more technology everywhere and the increasing demand for building and maintaining all that technology is not going away. The only real game changer is AI but when AI replaces all good software developers it has replaced everyone in the job market and we have bigger worries if we're even still around.

Re: The workers have spoken: They're staying home

#156

Post by danudey »

JohnFen wrote: post #127
bunderbunder wrote: post #10

I think that companies might have more success getting people back to the office if they had not also spent the past decade or two systematically updating offices to be beautiful to look at in CAD renderings but awful to actually occupy and try to work in. This move toward not giving permanent desk assignments to people who are required to be in the office also makes it worse. Open plan offices are a bit of a product…

Well said. During the span of my career, the office went from being a perfectly fine place to get work done; then degraded to a cube farm environment which was worse, but you you could work around it and get stuff done anyway; then to an open office environment which was hellish enough that it got me to quit my job and vow to never work in such an environment again. Commute is certainly an important aspect, too, but…

> then to an open office environment which was hellish enough that it got me to quite my job and vow to never work in such an environment again.

We're moving to an open plan office design, to help people collaborate and interact in new emergent ways and improve productivity.

Also, please don't talk to people at their desks, it's very distracting. Book a meeting room if you want to have a real conversation.

Re: The workers have spoken: They're staying home

#158

Post by wseqyrku »

pipeline_peak wrote: post #147
wseqyrku wrote: post #134

By staying home, you're making yourself (even more) replaceable with bots. Note that a 'remote worker' is increasingly used as an analogy for bot performance. (edit: I should clarify that I don't mean it in absolutes, if you got a task at hand, wfh by all means, but I won't do zoom meetings, if you wanna talk, come to the place)

>By staying home, you're making yourself (even more) replaceable with bots. How so?

Because you're just generating tokens as opposed to actually engaging in irl discourse inside the company, whatever that means for your field of expertise.

Re: The workers have spoken: They're staying home

#159

Post by kelseyfrog »

Clubber wrote: post #135
kelseyfrog wrote: post #29

We'll be writing about why this is for years. COVID gave people or in many cases made people re-evaluate what's important to them and many people concluded that their work-life balance placed too much importance on work. People had been thinking, what parts of their life were they willing to give up for work, but now the question of what parts of work are they willing to give up for their life is considered a valid,…

I feel like a lot of this could be solved with a month long holiday like they do in Europe. US workers are lucky to get a few days off in a row without interruption. Open office is also just horrendous.

> I feel like a lot of this could be solved with a month long holiday like they do in Europe.

It could, but my initial assessment is that US workers tend to not make the connection that a reduced social safety net raises the stakes of employment and results in workers eventually playing a game of chicken sacrificing aspects of their quality of life like vacation, commute, and environment for job security.

Re: The workers have spoken: They're staying home

#160

Post by bunderbunder »

crooked-v wrote: post #104
com2kid wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is your office is 20 miles from your workplace. 20 miles is more than the entire length of Seattle. Heck it is more than the entire width of the Seattle Metro area (western most tip of Seattle heading straight east until it turns into farmland). There should be sufficient housing stock such that people don't need to drive 20 miles to work!

And the lack of housing is entirely self-inflicted by locals in most US cities. There's no shadowy conspiracy; people have just spent decades opposing even the most basic new construction.

It's not quite so simple.

Another thing that's happened is that all the good jobs in many industries have hyper-concentrated into a small number of locations. There's plenty of space to live available in many "main street" towns, but not necessarily anywhere nearby to work if you do choose to live there.

My own city (Chicago) does have new construction, but it can't possibly keep up with demand from people moving into the city, because all the land is already full of lower-density housing, and you can't replace half a city block's worth of two- and three-flat dwellings with a modern high rise without first getting all the people who already live there to move out. Which, best case scenario, takes time. So instead most the new construction consists of replacing 130 year old 2- and 3-flat residences with luxury single-family homes, because nimbyism or now, reducing housing density is just more economically feasible. All it takes is one wealthy family buying one lot of land, and there area lot more individual lots up for sale than there are contiguous blocks of eight.

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