71–80 of 140 posts
I fear that state governments will start imposing taxes on businesses which hire remote employees, but I also feel that will just drive businesses out of those states and into the midwest/south
The workers won't have a lot of leverage in the end. Especially in tech, it has been shown that companies can do fine with much much fewer employees. Corporates can use RTO as an excuse for further belt-tightening as needed, even if most workers end up (over)working remotely. The office has truly no reason to exist anymore, but as long as capital is still concentrated in a few cities around the world, it will have le…
I’m a software engineer and I love working from the office. I enjoy my 40 minute commute (on sunny days I ride a bike and on rainy days I read a book on the train). I enjoy the separation in my life between where I work and where I live (often I don’t take my computer home). Eating lunch with my colleagues is often the highlight of my day. Many of my current and former colleagues have become lifelong friends. If my company went fully remote permanently, I’d look for a new job.
I fear that state governments will start imposing taxes on businesses which hire remote employees, but I also feel that will just drive businesses out of those states and into the midwest/south
It really should be the other way; they ought to tax office space punitively in order to coerce people not to commute at all. Commuting is a major source of emissions, personal health ailments, and encourages human-hostile urban design.
“Everything from daycare to public transportation, toll roads, fuel and fuel taxes, auto purchases and maintenance, dry cleaners, nail spas, restaurants, clothiers, hair stylists, dog walkers, nannies and office leases suffer when people work from home,” Sounds to me like more households get to retain more of their income (and time) as a result. And that extra money will end up back in the economy albeit in different…
Roads don’t “suffer” from disuse, their maintenance costs go down.
People who work at home still need child and sometimes even pet care, working from home doesn’t mean you’re magically able to watch your children and work at the same time.
People don’t get their hair and nails done to please coworkers.
Dry cleaners are already on their last legs due to changing fashion tastes and new materials that can be taken care of at home. You can buy suits that don’t require dry cleaning or ironing.
Public transportation was already too downtown focused and should be re-developed to better serve non-commuting usage anyway. Since the USA has almost no rail anyway this is a simple matter of changing bus routes.
Office leases suffering isn’t a problem. An entire thriving residential and entertainment district in Cleveland with some of the highest property values in the city is built in disused industrial buildings and land.
I think full time work in the office is 100% dead and buried. It's never coming back for people who have enough skills to leverage that kind of arrangement. I think the first place we need to start is there. Most of us are NEVER going back to 5 days a week in the office. However, most of the folks complaining about return to work I've noticed are senior people who have enough skills to perform their job and don't req…
“…however younger employees greatly benefit from in person learning and mentoring.” Doesn’t require a permanent office. Temp cowork spaces or bundling working with a career mentor in the final stretch of college are two options I just thought of laying in bed while also thinking about making coffee. More of the same is not an option for all the cost-benefit analysis that’s come up before. Prior to world war industria…
If you change that to “prior to the First Industrial Revolution”, and by “independent” you mean “worked on family or village farms”, sure, that's approximately right.
Just before even the first world war, there is no sense where this is true, even loosely.
Offices per se aren’t necessarily terrible. Commutes are terrible. Open floor plans are terrible. Companies don’t seem interested in fixing these things, though.
Yep. Ask any remote worker if they’d go back to the office and most would say no. Ask them if the office was within walking distance and most probably wouldn’t mind.
Any big sudden change will have winners and losers. Managers that have gotten by measuring butt in seat time and command and control can no longer rely on these skills, of course they would prefer to go back to the old way vs the much harder work of trying to figure out which team members are really providing the best results.
The bigger the organization the more bureaucratic it becomes. High quality performance coaching and just maintaining internal communication is hard to scale. Big organizations tend to fallback to easy to measure butts in seats and lines of code.
The workers won't have a lot of leverage in the end. Especially in tech, it has been shown that companies can do fine with much much fewer employees. Corporates can use RTO as an excuse for further belt-tightening as needed, even if most workers end up (over)working remotely. The office has truly no reason to exist anymore, but as long as capital is still concentrated in a few cities around the world, it will have le…
Just genuinely don't see the point in this debate anymore, like some companies will want you to show up, some will be fine with you working from home. If your company is asking you to show up, time to just get another job if that's important to you. Thankfully it's an easy solve because the people who like showing up are tired of video calls anyway.