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Is remote work bad for the economy?

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Re: Is remote work bad for the economy?

#151

Post by atraac »

gepardi wrote: post #66

Remote work is great for: - People who want more quality time with family - Environment. Less pollution. - Businesses who can save money by not needing an office. If “the economy” doesn’t like it, it needs to adapt. The economy should support people, not the other way around.

> Remote work is great for: - People who want more quality time with family

I'd argue it's great for people. In general. I don't have family, I can spend more time with my dog, I can make morning or afternoon walk longer, I can get better at cooking cause I have more time, I have more time for hobbies, to deal with personal stuff, I can go to public institution or a doctor if I have to, without taking a day off since I can start 30min early, go after work and still get there before closing.

The only downside to remote work IMO is lack of human contact and that it requires much more effort to actually be included.

Re: Is remote work bad for the economy?

#153

Post by midoridensha »

tempestn wrote: post #149
midoridensha wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You can also hire from anywhere, which is huge in terms of finding talented people. This is a negative for many businesses: their employees can get poached by competitors far away that offer better pay or benefits or working conditions.

True, but it's still a net benefit for good companies. And it's not like it means you're competing with FAANG on every hire. There are far more developers out there (including very good ones) than those companies can employ. Especially now when most are looking to downsize instead!

>True, but it's still a net benefit for good companies.

Yes, but what about the crappy companies? It's a big net negative for them, so they're going to oppose it. They don't want to compete with companies around the nation; they want to be the only employer in town so their employees feel locked in and unable to change jobs without selling their home and moving.

Re: Is remote work bad for the economy?

#154

Post by sw104 »

lynx23 wrote: post #148
mejutoco wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems false to assume that people work less when working remotely. That is far from obvious. I personally think it is false, and have not seen any justification of it. I understand arguments about people not eating business lunch near the office. Although it looks like home delivery and extra home office snacks, coffee, etc. would also cause spend, just in different areas as before. Additionally, in places where t…

I recently listened to a casual conversation between two women talking about their husbands WFH behaviour. The general undertone was: "Yes, he can now do this or that time-consuming hobby because he can claim WFH while actually driving from A to B". Just an anecdote, I know, but this is not the first time I overheard people cheering over the personal advantages of WFH.

Those gentlemen would probably also waste time in an office environment. You're just substituting wasting time at work with wasting time at work (from home).

In the office I work in, walking past anybody's desk you see procrastination window and tabs quickly disappear. Either that, or people don't even bother hiding it (except from management).

If people working from home didn't manage the same workload at home, it would hopefully be noticed in a competently run company. If those gents can fit in a few more hobbies in that time as well, power to them. If the company is run so incompetently that they don't notice you're not meeting goals/project deadlines, or providing low quality work, then that's the managements fault.

Remote or in-person work isn't the main argument I think. There's more to it, which makes remote/in-person a good start for improving things. Working 9-5 (if you're lucky to work that) 5 days a week is insane, even for something you're passionate about (which most aren't). Our views on employment, notably:-

- The amount of time it takes out of our days and lives (70%+ of your adult life)

- The mundanity and pointlessness of (let's face it) most jobs

- The additional time lost to commuting to an office to sit amongst a 50/50 cast of people you like/dislike.

- The damage many jobs do to your health, both physical (back, eyes) and mentally from lack of stimulation or burnout.

When you take a step back to analyse it all, to accept this is like a form of mental illness. If I took my favourite hobby and treated it the same way that a job is treated, after a couple of years it wouldn't even be a hobby anymore.

Re: Is remote work bad for the economy?

#155

Post by jterrys »

saiya-jin wrote: post #115
perceptronas wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is some truth to that. My parents went to eat out like once a year for quite a while. They saved as much as they could and succeeded at that.

Generation of our parents lived much more frugal lives from current perspective. Less traveling, adventures, exciting matters and more grind of work & kids care. I utterly respect them for that, but its not a life I would call ideal and strive to have. Financials now for buying real estate became ridiculous for many places globally. It can be counted from ie how many salaries of similar jobs you need to buy a house i…

It's kind of interesting, house prices have exponentially gone up while wages remain stagnant and there's more commodities to spend your money on. I don't necessarily think our parents' generation would've been off much better if we adjusted them for our current conditions now honestly. They had less credit compared to our buying power parity, so I think ultimately down the line we probably represent the same economic spending potential despite having access to a lot more things.

More importantly though, I don't think they were necessarily much happier than us either. "Settling down" essentially meant giving up your life. Nowadays you can go to a geeky renaissance fair and find it packed with all sorts of people with kids of all ages. Same thing with like, anime conventions and whatnot.

Re: Is remote work bad for the economy?

#156

Post by klodolph »

briga wrote: post #25

Bad for which economy? Countless programmers over the years have packed up their bags and moved away from their small towns to live in big expensive tech hubs. This has certainly been beneficial for the economy of large metros--they didn't pay to educate these workers and in many cases these workers (including myself) were raised and educated in completely different countries. So these metros have a huge pool of high…

The big metros are more efficient (dollar-wise) and have a lower environmental impact than small towns. Small towns, in the US, are already subsidized by big towns, at least economically.

Re: Is remote work bad for the economy?

#157

Post by klodolph »

Tade0 wrote: post #130
smackeyacky wrote: post #79

There was another article in the Sydney Morning Herald [0] behooving everybody to get back to the CBD because...mental health...cafes will close... What if you work in a tech park that has few or no amenities, or your work office is in a cruddy bit of town you really dislike? When the house is tidy and the washing done in the 10 minutes an hour I can wander away from the work laptop, I feel a lot happier than worryin…

I started working remotely in late 2015 and when I first stepped into the office after some months of this it struck me as insane that we expend all these resources just to have people in particular places, at particular times, producing massive traffic in the process. It bothers me that it took a pandemic for companies to embrace remote work.

It may be a lot of money in total but the amount of money you spend per capita tells a different story. Big cities have traffic problems, but good cities have public transit and you don't need a car. Small towns have low traffic but the amount of money you spend, per capita, on infrastructure like roads, water, electricity is higher.

Re: Is remote work bad for the economy?

#158

Post by sw104 »

thundergolfer wrote: post #17
NickBusey wrote: post #5

The author's answer to the title question seems to be: No. Which I agree with. If the answer was "Yes" however, I would question if that's even a bad thing to begin with. If our economy is reliant on people driving to an office and spending their money at a restaurant, then our economy is pretty terrible to begin with.

Spending money at restaurants is great, way better than everybody sitting at home eating their own lunches. I suspect massive adoption of restaurants would be more efficient too, if we cared about that primarily. Inner city areas full of people chatting in restaurants and cafes at lunchtime and after work are the best. > Then you get these articles about how unhealthy life is in the city. You know; mobile phone tumou…

YMMV

Re: Is remote work bad for the economy?

#159

Post by strken »

friendzis wrote: post #97
chii wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This obviously is a financial loss for the economy it's not, because the money that was otherwise spent (wasted) can now be deployed else where. Otherwise, why not increase the GDP and economy, by periodically just breaking every window? The replacement is gonna cause huge growth!

Wellllll.... debatable. This argument of expense rerouting is a bit flawed. Suppose working from home saves one some money that they spend elsewhere. Working from the office they spend that money on fuel, indirectly spend on road maintenance, directly spend on vehicle maintenance where the shop in turn spends on parts and tools and so on. The money one spends circulates in the economy much longer and reaches more act…

This is close to the broken window fallacy. We tend to forget the flow of money is an indirect proxy for work performed. If 20% of construction workers are freed up from fixing roads because of lower traffic, they don't just sit around crying, they find other work to do. Same with tech workers, same with everyone. That's a net good because the work they'll move to will by definition be worth paying someone to do.

Wasting time fixing stuff that didn't need to be broken is intrinsically bad for the economy, but it's disruptive to suddenly have your now-pointless job taken away.

Re: Is remote work bad for the economy?

#160

Post by Skeime »

seydor wrote: post #95
randomdata wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is also that pesky problem, particularly in North America, of the shopping district being far away from the housing. At the office, shopping may be no more than a block away. At home, you're in for a big hike (or more likely a car ride) to get to places to buy things. That extra hurdle means you won't take the time as frequently.

That s where european cities have an accidental advantage

I don’t think the advantage is really accidental. It’s more a failure of zoning laws if every-day shopping requires a long(ish) trip.
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