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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

#101

Post by cwmoreiras »

sharemywin wrote: post #20
paulcole wrote: post #5

100% of the jobs I want to do can be performed entirely at home, but I prefer to do 100% of them in an office.

Not trying to be sarcastic. I genuinely asking. Why? I'm not a fan of the office because: 1. I don't like the commute 2. I have an office in my house, but at the "office"; I would be sharing some kind of space. 3. now that covid is less of an issue I plan on going to lunch more with freinds.

1. I like my commute. If my commute changed I would feel differently. Regardless, I feel employees should get paid for their commutes.

2. I don't have an office in my house. Even if I had the space I don't think I would want to use it for work. However, since coronavirus happened I have had way more space in my office than I did before, and I refuse to be sandwiched between two other engineers in an open office floor plan. So if my company tries to do that they will have a problem, at least from me.

3. I pack my lunch as often as possible and don't really know anyone who works near me.

I do think there are many developers for whom it makes sense to work from home. Especially if they are seniors, and their company workflow is well organized for it. Also, I do think that there are people who are very efficient working from home, but if they are WFH it will still be harder for junior engineers to collaborate with them or learn from them.

I've seen it suggested that in the future, companies who want people to come back to the office will lose all their best employees and will only be able to retain the people who can't get a WFH job. I think a lot of what makes someone a good engineer comes down to experience, so if that were to come true it would ultimately mean that senior engineers (best employees) will work remotely and junior engineers (can't get a WFH job) will be working on site. That kind of leaves junior engineers in the dust as far as mentorship is concerned so I would not consider that a good thing, even though it seems to be fine with certain people who think that they are "good engineers", when in reality they are probably just seniors.

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

#102

Post by beiller »

crent wrote: post #36
MSM wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this everywhere but I can't see how it's true. I'm guessing that a company's largest expenses are (probably in order, too): People, Technology, Office space. Most companies, especially smaller companies, do not actually own the office space they are in, they lease it. Commercial real estate crashing would greatly reduce one of their top 3 expenses... how is that bad for the bottom line?

Yeah exactly. If they signed a multi-year lease, they are still on the hook for the same amount of money but the space won't be used. It might feel bad but it was already budgeted for.

They are paying for space (sometimes beyond 100,000 per month) that the competition is not paying. Office space is the highest expense.

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

#103

Post by kube-system »

TimPC wrote: post #71
stevenhubertron wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn’t the job still be performed at home with the occasional on site? I’m thinking of a construction PM. The job could mainly be done at home other then when needed to meet GC on site. Seems like there is still WFH no?

Depends what you're using the WFH number for. If you want to extend it to an argument about being able to live substantially further from a job then needing to meet a GC on site some of the time is a dealbreaker. I think it's fair to say to call the job as a whole a WFH job it needs to be 100% remote. That's not to say non-WFH jobs can't have some remote time.

My office has people who live across the country and work 95% remote, and hop on a few flights per year when they're needed. Is that not WFH?

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

#104

Post by eminence32 »

cecilpl2 wrote: post #88
mwattsun wrote: post #67

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…

This is fascinating to me! How did you manage to merge code in the 80s? What tools were available? Did you have three-way merge tools or did you do it more manually? Or rather did you talk frequently and ensure that you weren't stepping in each other's files? How did you make changes to shared APIs?

Some "old-timers" at my software company occasionally tell stories about how "checking the source code" meant physically grabbing a the one binder filled with pages of fortran and inserting your changes. Physically holding the binder gave you exclusive checkin access :)

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

#105

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

api wrote: post #4

Now think about the economic savings in the areas of energy and capital depreciation on cars. The overall economic efficiency boost from this could be unbelievably huge, not to mention the environmental benefits of less routine commuting. I wouldn't be surprised if this approves economic efficiency by trillions of dollars.

Yeah. Personally, I don't mind working in the office really, what I really want from WFH is the elimination of my commute.

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

#106

Post by [deleted] »

lbriner wrote: post #78
stefan_ wrote: post #18

But then the jig is up, no? I thought that was an amazing moment when recently the NYC mayor asked CEOs to "help get workers back to the office". It's not about the work, it's not about the city, it's about making sure real estate doesn't crash and those campaign contributions can keep coming.

Maybe the mayor also cares about local businesses that get their income from city workers as well as the transport networks which need all the money they can get. Maybe they care about the tourist buzz from a busy city or the saftey in numbers. You don't always have to assume the worst of someone just because they are powerful.

[deleted]

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

#107

Post by TheGigaChad »

dudul wrote: post #59
tapland wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I miss the casual chatting about all kinds of things and the ritualistic coffee breaks (Sweden) a lot. A lot a lot. I can't afford an apartment with another room for a proper separate office, and wouldn't want to waste that space on a room to separate work and home even if I did.

And you can't afford this apartment because up until 2 years ago everybody was forced to get a place next to the office. You should support remote/distributed work, since it will make it possible to move to the country/small towns and relieve the pressure on difficult housing markets.

No post body was provided.

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

#108

Post by lukas099 »

DoneWithAllThat wrote: post #82

Once again, I am begging HN: this is a misleading title format for links to single papers or studies. What is being phrased as factual in the headline is merely an assertion in a paper, and should be reflected as such. “New paper claims (x)” is reasonable. “Study suggests (x)” is also reasonable. “(x)” borders on straight up falsehood when it portrays an assertion as a new finding about our world.

I think the assumption on HN should be that the title is merely what the article author is claiming. So from my perspective reading a title like "37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home" is automatically converted to "AuthorClaimsThat(37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home)".

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

#109

Post by Bluecobra »

eminence32 wrote: post #73
sharemywin wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not trying to be sarcastic. I genuinely asking. Why? I'm not a fan of the office because: 1. I don't like the commute 2. I have an office in my house, but at the "office"; I would be sharing some kind of space. 3. now that covid is less of an issue I plan on going to lunch more with freinds.

In addition to all of the social reasons others have listed, I'll list 2 technical reasons why an office is a more comfortable place for me to work: I have 2 large monitors at my office desk (so when you include my laptop's screen, I have a total of 3 monitors; lots of screen space). Compared to no external monitors at home. At the office, I have a gigabit connection to the LAN and file servers. At home, I have a VPN…

These seem like easily solvable problems though. I have three monitors at home and 1Gb AT&T Fiber Internet.

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

#110

Post by dxbydt »

Dr. Dingel writes - "Our code makes it easy for users to explore alternative assumptions about whether any given occupation can be done from home."

His repo - https://github.com/jdingel/DingelNeiman-workathome

Would be a worthwhile student project to replicate this in R/pandas (They used Stata on a Mac, if you know what I mean) & have an interactive online plot so one can change the survey assumptions & see what results. Just collating all this data in one place is a monumental effort.

I remember this paper was a "huge fucking deal" when it came out in Sep 2020. Has like ~1500 cites. Was used by Biden administration to set policy. Co-author Dr. Neiman was personally nominated by Biden for treasury. Authors are Booth school stalwarts. Pls do read the paper, very insightful even if you don't agree with its methodology/conclusions.

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