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More Americans now work full-time from home than walk and bike to office jobs

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Re: More Americans now work full-time from home than walk and bike to office jobs

#121

Post by dkarl »

Nimitz14 wrote: post #84
dkarl wrote: post #53

It's interesting to see that the average earnings of people who bike to work are increasing so much faster than the other groups. There's a stereotype that people who bike for transportation are just rich spoiled white liberals. I have no idea where it came from, and I'm pretty sure that historically it has been the opposite of the truth, but it's used as a political weapon by people on both ends of the political spe…

It's true. Go to Europe, poor people ride the bus the better-off use a bike. I think it'd have to do because of things like getting a bike requiring a larger initial capital investment, plus there's the danger of it being stolen (which is smaller if you live in a nicer neighborhood).

Go to Europe, poor people ride the bus the better-off use a bike.

This was my impression from the United States, too, but then numbers made me look again, and I started to notice a lot of people who didn't fit my assumptions. The image that makes me think "bike commuter" is someone briskly riding a practical, efficient bike with a laptop bag of some kind, so I was ignoring a lot of other people who are often not carrying anything, not riding very fast, riding an ill-fitting bike or one not particularly suited for commuting. It never occurred to me that those people might be riding to work.

Re: More Americans now work full-time from home than walk and bike to office jobs

#122

Post by usrusr »

jonheller wrote: post #17

I consider myself, without doubt, to be an introvert. I hate parties with a passion, and am perfectly happy in my own head compared to even hanging out with a good friend. But I hated working at home. The isolation was terrible, not to mention the challenges of working on project teams (even with Slack etc). I felt lonely and less motivated. It is funny though, because my wife is the opposite of me on the social scal…

Sounds about right to me. Introverts don't necessary hate being around people, just being not being very good at actively seeking interaction can be enough. For people who tend to not make much contact unless necessary, an office environment can be very valuable.

Re: More Americans now work full-time from home than walk and bike to office jobs

#124

Post by usrusr »

Nimitz14 wrote: post #84
dkarl wrote: post #53

It's interesting to see that the average earnings of people who bike to work are increasing so much faster than the other groups. There's a stereotype that people who bike for transportation are just rich spoiled white liberals. I have no idea where it came from, and I'm pretty sure that historically it has been the opposite of the truth, but it's used as a political weapon by people on both ends of the political spe…

It's true. Go to Europe, poor people ride the bus the better-off use a bike. I think it'd have to do because of things like getting a bike requiring a larger initial capital investment, plus there's the danger of it being stolen (which is smaller if you live in a nicer neighborhood).

I think it's because navigating adult life on a bike is a skill people learn while going through university. For everybody else, bikes are just a stepping stone to being allowed to drive.

If you correlate cycling with wealth and education, I suspect that the link with education will be much stronger. It might even be a bidirectional causality, with people who can't wait for earning their first car being much less likely to "waste" years on education.

Re: More Americans now work full-time from home than walk and bike to office jobs

#125

Post by Arizhel »

brianwawok wrote: post #4
booleandilemma wrote: post #2

Why am I not one of them? :(

Why don't you find one? weworkremotely or stackoverflow careers have a fair amount.

Not in my experience. Last time I looked on weworkremotely I think I saw fewer remote-relevant jobs there than I have fingers on one hand. ("Remotely-relevant" for me means just searching for C and C++.)

Re: More Americans now work full-time from home than walk and bike to office jobs

#126

Post by papabrown »

Johnny555 wrote: post #71

One downside of full time working from home is that the WFH workers are faceless, and easier to cut if it comes time to lay off employees. It's harder to tell the worker you eat lunch with every day that you're laying him off than the worker you only know via video chat.

By extension you could say that working with a remote office would make them easier to lay off as well.

I'm sure there's some truth to it but I think it all comes down to perceived value. If you're in someone's face everyday reminding them of how valuable you are, it does make it seem you are more valuable. A remote worker or someone working in a satellite office is going to have a more difficult time tooting their own horn.

That said, I work from the main office and we have an additional three offices spread across three different countries and I don't feel that it would be easy to lay off someone in one of those offices anymore than it would be to lay someone off in my office. Each person has a specific skill they're bringing to the table and without them that work wouldn't get done.

Perhaps if there was real or perceived redundancy in job skills, the situation might be different but then you've got redundancy and if times get tough, someone has to go anyway. Now we're just talking about who. If there are 10 people on a team and only one of them works remotely, well, that might be the person who gets cut first but if you have 10 people and 4 of them are working remotely, you're back to the same issue of their perceived value to the organization. Whether working from an office or working remotely, the people who have done the best job at standing out are the least likely to get cut.

Re: More Americans now work full-time from home than walk and bike to office jobs

#127

Post by s73ver »

kgabis wrote: post #49
s73ver wrote: post #37

The biggest hurdle to biking and walking, for those who are already comfortable doing those activities, is showering. I don't want to show up to the office drenched in sweat, making the work area smell like a gym. And there are some things that you can do, like the wipes and that, but they don't feel anything like a shower. The more offices that either put in showers, or locate near gyms and places that do have showe…

If you're not fit or live in a hilly area then you can buy an electric bike to avoid sweating.

Electric bikes are crazy expensive, though.

Re: More Americans now work full-time from home than walk and bike to office jobs

#128

Post by Symbiote »

usrusr wrote: post #124
Nimitz14 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's true. Go to Europe, poor people ride the bus the better-off use a bike. I think it'd have to do because of things like getting a bike requiring a larger initial capital investment, plus there's the danger of it being stolen (which is smaller if you live in a nicer neighborhood).

I think it's because navigating adult life on a bike is a skill people learn while going through university. For everybody else, bikes are just a stepping stone to being allowed to drive. If you correlate cycling with wealth and education, I suspect that the link with education will be much stronger. It might even be a bidirectional causality, with people who can't wait for earning their first car being much less lik…

If we're generalizing to all of Europe, which is obviously unwise, then cycling is a skill used to get to school or college.

Unfortunately, I don't speak another language well enough to search for statistics outside Britain and Ireland.

Re: More Americans now work full-time from home than walk and bike to office jobs

#129

Post by arctangent »

bigtimeidiot wrote: post #106
CydeWeys wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm with you in regards to how my mind responds to working from home (not well). Humans evolved as social animals. Everything we've always done has been in groups. When you are growing up, you spend most of your waking time in the company of other people (school). The ones who don't, who are homeschooled alone, turn out "weird". Until the modern advent of telecommunications, working has meant being physically colloca…

> The ones who don't, who are homeschooled alone, turn out "weird". And those in the public school system are juuuuusssst fine...

I think CydeWays quoted the word "weird" so as to make it clear that they did not think that those people were weird (but that society at large does).

Re: More Americans now work full-time from home than walk and bike to office jobs

#130

Post by CydeWeys »

ghaff wrote: post #105
jerf wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Working remotely doesn't mean you're a hermit." Yes, I'd call it much closer to monk-like existence. It still isn't what the vast majority of humanity is going to prefer. The proof is that if there was some sort of massive preference for working from home, we should be seeing it now. The tech is here. The Internet is here. The computing power is here. All the preconditions would seem to be here. If what is missing i…

> The tech is here. While I WFH quite a bit, I have to disagree with this statement. For a lot of interaction modes, being remote still lacks a lot of the bandwidth (for lack of a better term) than in person. If you're working out a problem/presentation/etc. with a group, it's still hard to beat a conference room with a whiteboard. Things are better than they used to be. Something like Google Docs can certainly help.…

Thanks to Google Docs and video Hangouts it's gotten a lot better than it used to be when I first joined the industry a decade ago. You're right though, it's still not as good as being physically co-present in a conference room, or sitting side-by-side at a computer. I suspect it will get better with VR. For now, though, I definitely enjoy working in an office with my coworkers the most, with perhaps a very occasional work-from-home day (only 5% of all work days) thrown in as a sort of quasi-vacation.
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