Big-Tech Cities Are Still 'Facing a Reckoning' from Remote Work – Slashdot

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Because the first statistic is utterly worthless the way it was conducted (unless of course you try to push an agenda). 73% of businesses having no teleworking sounds like a lot until you realize that there is a nontrivial amount of businesses that simply CANNOT have teleworking. I can’t exactly identify the value of a teleworking retail checkout clerk. Or construction worker.
Could we see that kind of statistics for only the jobs that can actually be outsourced to home offices?
Indeed. When you break it down by industry you get stats like 67.4% of IT people working remotely and 49% of professional business services.

Could we see that kind of statistics for only the jobs that can actually be outsourced to home offices?
No. That would require clicking a first link.
I did, and what I got was just that, that there are certain industries with a high percentage of remote working (which are, unsurprisingly, the ones where remote working is trivial to implement), but what I didn’t get was a thorough statistics like the one done on ALL businesses in the article.
Which is, as stated before, utterly useless. Why conduct an in-depth analysis of something that has no information value and brush over the parts that actually could tell you something?
Why conduct an in-depth analysis of something that has no information value and brush over the parts that actually could tell you something?
It’s useful when you’re trying to push and agenda.
It’s useful when you’re trying to push and agenda.
It’s useful when you’re trying to push an agenda.
Ugh…gotta proof read better before hitting the submit button.
It works if ‘agenda’ has become a verb.
If it hasn’t it will do so soon. This is ‘Murica where all words become verbs sooner or later.

Or construction worker.
Remotely driving a bulldozer or operating a crane from your bathtub!
You never worked in construction, I see.
You don’t want to do this. Trust me. You don’t. Moreover, if you are responsible for what’s going on at the construction site, you DO NOT WANT THAT!
I think you’re understating the issue. If you’re responsible for a construction site, the mere thought would give you night terrors.
Then again, I think your parent was being sarcastic to begin with.
I would hope so, but you know, Poe’s Law ain’t just for religion anymore…
I think you’re understating the issue. If you’re responsible for a construction site, the mere thought would give you night terrors.
Then again, I think your parent was being sarcastic to begin with.
Remote control is a part of cranes for quite a few years now, and many remote control pieces of equipment exist. A fully remote control bulldozer is apparently leaving the labs.
The key is that it’s not quite teleworking – the cranes and such are designed so the crane operator can move around the work area to get
>Remote control is a part of cranes for quite a few years now, and many remote control pieces of equipment exist. A fully remote control bulldozer is apparently leaving the labs.
It was apparent that the very huge cranes that were operating at the fab I work at (well not any more with WFH but I go in occasionally) had no place for an operator high up on the crane.

You never worked in construction, I see.
You don’t want to do this. Trust me. You don’t. Moreover, if you are responsible for what’s going on at the construction site, you DO NOT WANT THAT!
Eh, don’t worry about it. Just get the kids [theguardian.com] to do the work. There’s plenty of them to go around.
Like it or not the industry is moving in that direction, even if slowly.
Cat® MineStar Command for Dozing [cat.com]
At CES they had some remote workstation where you could control a dozer remotely from some command stations they setup.
https://www.equipmentworld.com… [equipmentworld.com]
From the MBA viewpoint, remote driving dozers makes lots of sense.
Nothing better than having a single driver operating multiple dozers.
Think of all the man hours saved, that would have been otherwise wasted while they drove their diesel tanks in straight lines.
Think of the efficiency of running your operation around the clock with a follow-the-sun workforce, and the morale boost synergy of everyone working normal daytime hours and going home to their family every night.
Think of the reduction in operator med
FWIW, some of those types of functions are actually adding a semi-autonomous remote work component. Not things like excavators (which frankly can be almost an art form), but mass grading, mass compaction, trench compaction, and horizontal material handling come to mind. Overhead lifting has added a lot of automation, but the safety risks haven’t been solved to a level that supports offsite operators.
Something to keep in mind:

“According to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, nearly 73% of businesses reported that their workers rarely or never engaged in remote work in 2022 â” closing in on pre-pandemic levels,” writes a Seattle Times business columnist. “But this minority of the civilian workforce working remotely casts a large shadow over our economy, especially central business districts.”
This statistic is at the EMPLOYER level, not the EMPLOYEE level. For this statistic, Microsoft is an employer, Amazon is an employer, Meta is an employer, and the guy running a coffee shop or flower shop are also an employer.
Many of those jobs will disappear as well, for example I am bombarded with offers for cleaning services, catering, delivery, office renovations, whatever. Many of them will go away as well as the office buildings end up empty forever.
However a lot of people in these Big Tech Cities, who are doing Tech work, are doing a lot of work that can be done from home. Programming, Designing, Planning, and Meetings… The tech people who need to be onsite, are often Network Admins, Product Manufacturing, then you will need people to be at customer sites, for the likes of support, and consulting (while consulting could be done from home, you have to be at your customers disgression)
I live near Upstate NY. A hundred years ago, that was the Silico
A friend who works for a major financial institution is being forced back into the office 2 days a week, and reckons that the pressure for this comes from the UK government. Their legitimate concern is that the loss of asset value will seriously damage banks’ stability. Their illegitimate concern is that some of their biggest donors will lose lots of money if commercial property becomes a bust.
‘It accounts for the majority of the city’s business taxes and majority of its workers…’
Cities are unpleasant places to get to work in…
‘Whether remote or hybrid work remains for much of the local workforce or a gradual return to the office continues, the heart of the city must be healthy.’
‘must’? That’s a result of blinkered thinking that focuses on what we are used to. This crisis is an opportunity to move to a more healthy way of living. If this is blocked by this sort of unimaginative thinking, we will fail to reap the possible benefits of other ways of organising our civilisation. Let’s try and admit to each other that we have massive problems – mental health and crime being the most obvious – that we should take more seriously.
Why should I give a fuck about the heart of the city if the city doesn’t give a fuck about my heart?
More to the point for me personally, as someone who lives inner city, and spent most of the 90s and 2000s doing the Gen X thing, renting partying and working startups, I’m now in the dismal situation of being nearly 50 and still renting. Oh if I could have gone back in time and explained a few things to my 20yo version. The reality is for me, and for a good chunk of Gen Ys and probably the majority of Gen Zs home ownership, especially in the city, is beyond my reach UNLESS the whole property market shits the bed and all the worthless property speculators that spent the last 30 years relentlessly driving up property prices without regard to the whole damn purpose of land, to do STUFF on, if all those guys go bust from a massive property crash, then it might well be that my personal stakes improve dramatically and I can finally afford a f***king house.
The UK needs a complete revolution in housing. It won’t get one, but if I was benevolent dictator for a day I’d implement this…
The government needs to build lots of new towns. Not just homes, complete downs with amenities, schools, public spaces, GP surgeries, all of it. Build on green belt. We have too much of it, and we did it before after the war.
Forget commercial housebuilders. They won’t deliver what we need. They only build undersized, overpriced crap. The government should build detached, spacious,
Nothing wrong with semi detached and terraced houses. If they were to build new towns, you want a mix of building does not just a dreary suburban hellscape of detached houses. Mix of low too medium rise apartments, mixed use, small medium and large homes. If you have just large homes together you separate people strongly by income, which is bad for a variety of reasons.
Fundamentally though building whole new towns from scratch and getting up not suck is quite hard because there’s nothing there to start work
I hate attached and terrace housing. Much prefer Japan where it’s mostly detached. Aside from not having noise and party wall issues, it allows for much better designed houses and for major renovations/rebuilds when needed.
We need to completely reform the rules around privacy and what is allowed at the front of houses too. We should be building car ports and using higher walls/plants to give people privacy, instead of worrying about what the street front looks like.
I hate attached and terrace housing. Much prefer Japan where it’s mostly detached. Aside from not having noise and party wall issues, it allows for much better designed houses and for major renovations/rebuilds when needed.
I live in a terraced house, and it’s entirely fine. If you’re going to go for radical changes, why not add more Swiss style rules that criminalize being an antisocial neighbour?
But that aside, detached houses are substantially lower density and I like living in a walkable neighbourhood. W
I agree that places should be walkable. If you look at how it works in Japan, most houses are detached but the neighbourhoods are very walkable. Their houses are bigger than ours too.
Part of it is due to having smaller gardens, because they don’t need them for kids to play since they have decent public spaces within walking distance. The gardens they do have are often quite dense with plants, which helps provide privacy.
Car ports aren’t just for cars. A lot of Japanese people use them for bikes too. Of cour
Smaller gardens and no pavements sounds like a rather dramatic change. I do like having a garden and am more than happy to have a terraced house in order to have one.
Still you can’t build something based on one culture in a different one and expect the culture to be transported across for it to work by just cherry picking the pits of culture you want to import, but not the rest.
I can’t agree about the uniform street frontage though. Personally I think everyone doing their own thing looks better (and the hou
If you have just large homes together you separate people strongly by income, which is bad for a variety of reasons.
What’s wrong with that exactly?
Who wants to live in a crime ridden area?
Moreso…who wants to buy and expensive house in a crime ridden area….
And low income does tend to breed higher crime areas…
That’s an awful lot of government money to solve this problem.
Many of your issues could be addressed with zoning regulations, but that would limit home ownership to buyers that can afford those that can afford a standalone home, lower-income buyers would be priced out of the market.
Private house builders will always build shit. Public money is the only way.
Here’s something I loved about how my “socialist” home town’s city government reacted. “Huh? You gobble up all the real estate in the city and price our people out? Very well, we create cheap rent-to-pay apartments at the periphery with a dedicated subway station next to them that takes people in 10 minutes to the city center. Screw you.”
That’s supposed to be rent-to-own. Kinda complicated but pretty neat way to eventually own your apartment.
Just need to I’ve to a different city.
I graduated at 27 (fucked off, got two degrees) and moved to Anchorage Alaska. Got a job. Bought a house when I was 30. No problem! I could have bought one earlier, but I wanted to get the “lay of the land”.
I’m now 52. I have a different house, in Pittsburgh, with a $107K balance on my mortgage and $34K remaining on my student loans (;
It’s easy to buy a house if you move somewhere cheap.
My first house was $159K, in 2000.
My second house was $135K, in 2013.
Pretty much, everyone who starts out with “Oh well its doable, i did it back in my day” obviously hasnt been paying attention to housing prices in comparison to wages. I bought my first in 2011 for 220k and after 5 years it had already doubled in value, there is no way I could have bought it for it’s new value even 5 years later if I wanted to. By the time I sold it it had tripled in value (about 12 years later), and in all that time my wages had *maybe* doubled and that was only due to job hopping
There was just never a way for the people who werent at the right place at the right time with the right amount of money to have a hope of being able to even jump into the game

Pretty much, everyone who starts out with “Oh well its doable, i did it back in my day” obviously hasnt been paying attention to housing prices in comparison to wages. I bought my first in 2011 for 220k and after 5 years it had already doubled in value, there is no way I could have bought it for it’s new value even 5 years later if I wanted to. By the time I sold it it had tripled in value (about 12 years later), and in all that time my wages had *maybe* doubled and that was only due to job hopping
There was just never a way for the people who werent at the right place at the right time with the right amount of money to have a hope of being able to even jump into the game
There are towns I couldn’t afford when I was younger, and I still can’t afford them now. I moved to a town I could afford.
Now the town I am in is unaffordable for some – which means they have to do what I did. Find a town they can afford. Usually that means “further away”, but at least now remote works makes it much easier.
So the problem isn’t that there are no affordable towns. The problem is that people want to be in towns (and homes) they can’t afford.
About the same age here, and we’re probably also the last generation that really owns something.
I have mostly young coworkers (comes with the territory, security is a pretty young industry and there are few old farts). None of them can afford to buy a house, even though we’re among the 3% top earners here. The reason is that house prices not only rise faster than income levels, they rise faster than what you can save up so you qualify for a mortgage.
Basel III, which is a framework banks have to comply with

I’m now 52. I have a different house, in Pittsburgh, with a $107K balance on my mortgage and $34K remaining on my student loans (;
It’s easy to buy a house if you move somewhere cheap.
My first house was $159K, in 2000.
My second house was $135K, in 2013.
Dude, you still owe $107K in 2023 on a house you bought paid $135K for in 2013 (10 years ago)? What was your down payment?
You still owe $34K in student loans after graduating 25 years ago? Something happened to push your payments out to 25+ years…
Wow.
Sounds like you’re blaming landlords for keeping you a renter. It’s not their fault – it’s not their job to convince you to buy a home rather than rent from them.
We may indeed benefit from healthy cities… but it’s certainly not a given that, in the future, those healthy cities are going to look anything at all like their current iterations.
We benefit from a lot of things, but as you correctly stated, what a “healthy” city is like will (not may) be vastly different in the future.
We could do with a lot fewer office buildings or, rather, we could benefit from residential buildings being planned with a room for a home office in mind. Instead of packing restaurants and shops catering to lunch-business around offices, sprinkle them around town (as it is done in many European cities, where the ground floor of residential buildings is spaced and prepared to cater to a business (example [google.com]). That also has the neat side effect that you always live near some restaurants that people will then also frequent for dinner, simply because they don’t have to drive anywhere.
Yes, this is a transition moment. As we have had many in our past. When electricity came, we had to somehow put that into our homes. Same with the advent of networking, suddenly we needed network cabling all over the office. Originally, this meant that some modifications were done to the buildings and that was semi-satisfactory, but it worked. Planning new buildings, we took into account that there will have to be cables in the walls and things improved. Today, we can’t even imagine planning a house without planning where and how to run the power cables.
Same applies here. We can convert the offices into residential homes. It won’t be easy and it will not be exactly what we want, but it will work and we’ll have sensible living space. When the building gets torn down and a new one is built, we’ll take into account that we need this to be a residential building, preferably with a “office” room in mind, with a few ground floor commercial “apartments” where restaurants and shops will move in to cater to the people living upstairs of them.

We benefit from a lot of things, but as you correctly stated, what a “healthy” city is like will (not may) be vastly different in the future.
Yeah I think this is key here.
It seems as people fled for the suburbs, US cities were left to concentrate on offices and other business that directly support them – restaurants, supplies etc. If that’s gone, so is the tax base and the reason for all the buildings and infrastructure to exist the way it does.
As you say, most European cities are more diversified and there aren’t downtown districts that become ghost town after business hours. So hopefully American cities can transition to something like that to
Well, there are districts that are ghost towns after work hours. Mostly in the industrial areas.
Office “blocks” do exist, but they are often interspersed with malls and other leisure activities, the idea originally was that office workers could end their day in the gym or go shopping after work. The reality was closer that these areas became hotspots for young people to congregate, which meant that the restaurants and fast food joints there didn’t exactly suffer from the abandoned offices either.

I think a lot of people that started remote work also got in the habit of making their own lunch.
I’ve been at my current job for over 22 years, and I don’t need even one hand to count the number of times I didn’t pack my own food. Take out is some of the worst possible stuff masquerading as food that is allowed by law to be served to people for the purpose of ingestion, and I would only consume that crap if it were a choice between that and death. And even then, I wouldn’t bet on which choice I would make.
I’ve started doing that before covid, when I started working out regularly, usually during the time everyone goes out for lunch. I’m now going back to the office every day as it’s a 10 minute walk and I can use the gym there.
Anecdotal, but literally everyone I know on the floor that is still showing up now, goes out for lunch. People are very lazy and don’t seem to give a shit that prices are up like 50% from before ‘rona.
Wiring a building for electricity or networking is not nearly as complicated as plumbing an office building to become a residence. When you convert office space into residential space you have to increase water/sewage service substantially.
This is pretty much a common sentiment.
I noticed a very intriguing shift in the general view of “the rich”. I remember from when I was younger that we had TV shows about how the rich and famous lived. They’d take a tour through their homes and we’d marvel at what they have. And we dreamed of having that, too.
That changed considerably. We’re now at the point where people rejoice if these people face a setback or fall from grace. And I can somehow foresee that pretty soon we’ll arrive at the point where people would go out of their way and accept suffering setbacks themselves as long as “the rich” get to lose everything as well.
That works only for as long as people have something to lose, as history has shown us.
We’re approaching the point again where they don’t.
As some rich opportunist once said, “Never let a crisis go to waste.”
I think that came from leftist Saul Alinsky in his leftist playbook.
I believe I heard it quoted from form Chicago mayor and former Obama staff guy “Rahm Emanuel”.
It’s one of those quotes that gets bandied about so much that it’s authorship is at this point worse than just unknown. The most common attribution seems to be to Winston Churchill during WWII but some eve claim it goes back to Thomas Jefferson.
Of course today it just get attributed to one’s political enemies or friends depending on the context it’s getting used in.
“Fuck Them Kids” – Michael Jordan
Yeah, decades of increasing wealth imbalance and middle class shrinkage has created some resentment it seems. The rich have gotten richer while quite a lot of the rest of us have gotten poorer and after decades of this people are starting to notice.
And don’t even get me started on all the lies revolving around things like “trickle down economics”, as if a capitalist economy isn’t demand based.
Central London is the heart of the UK rentier industry. This is basically a national scale version of the worker housing that they still have in places like China. You go get your big impressive salary in London, and then the same hedge/pension/family fund that owns the company that is paying your salary goes ‘oh you need a room to rent now right?’, ‘or you want to go to that restaurant or barbershop’. And they own it all.
They also realised quite a while back that you can corner a local real estate market. The Qatari investment fund has done this across large parts of East London. They own the entire olympic village, and many developments around it, and just drip feed flats out to the market to maintain rents and prices. There is no requirement that maximum profitability coincides with maximum occupancy. Especially when interest rates were zero, it was far more profitable to find out what the price elasticity is and then only supply flats to maximise what you can extract from the pool of renters in an area. A similar example is the high street Exmouth Market which is entirely owned (as in every single shop and flat) by the Debenham’s Trust – rents going up but shops/flats empty.
Rentierism is the basis for feudal society, and it’s why London attracts people from wealthy authoritarian counties so easily. They don’t really understand investing in a bunch of hippie youths who don’t want to listen to you, and might change the world. They absolutely do understand cornering a market and sucking out the fat. They know the latter is predictable and a proven way to preserve wealth across many generations, which is all they care about.
If they can’t force the worker drones back into their dormitories, then the UK is at serious risk of…a final dismantling of the historic feudal system that has lasted for an inexorably long period of time.
Given the massive growth in the population of the UK and the failure to build enough accommodation for us all, a steady rise in the price of property is inevitable – as the present rise in rents is demonstrating to a horrible extent. However that’s not necessarily related to feudal land ownership patterns; do you have a source for your claim the Quataris are leaving lots of flats empty that aren’t VERY expensive? Usually such claims don’t stand up to scrutiny – though I’m happy to be corrected.
Note that loc
Please define “low cost social housing”. Are bathrooms and/or kitchens communal?
Assuming the city pays to retrofit commercial space for residential use, who pays for maintenance? Past experience with putting the unhoused in government-provided housing indicates that some fraction of them will be destructive towards it.
What would law enforcement look like in these buildings, in terms of minimizing drug use, theft, robbery, and similar crimes?
That would be a good idea… only that such “substandard housing” is against code where I live.
And that destructiveness can easily be dealt with. You get a free home, if you trash it, you’re back out on the street. You had a chance and blew it. Be gone.
And I mean from my city.
I’m pretty confident that this can be worked out. Especially if you tell the people who actually DO want a new home and who DO want to keep it that such behaviour will reflect poorly on all of them. Depending on how this pans out, you’
A vigilante death sentence for graffiti? There’s no way THAT could go wrong!
There’s plenty that could go wrong. But I think that it can work out. We just have to be very careful when planning it and I would highly suggest that we do include the people who will “suffer” from that planning in the planning process.
I mean, how happy would you be if someone else dictated how you should live without you having a say in it?

That would be a good idea… only that such “substandard housing” is against code where I live.
And that destructiveness can easily be dealt with. You get a free home, if you trash it, you’re back out on the street. You had a chance and blew it. Be gone.
And I mean from my city.
I’m pretty confident that this can be worked out. Especially if you tell the people who actually DO want a new home and who DO want to keep it that such behaviour will reflect poorly on all of them. Depending on how this pans out, you’d be happy to get out alive if you start spraying graffiti on the walls…
And what percentage of city street homeless do you imagine are capable of keeping a home properly?
All of them … if the reasons they are homeless are addressed in the first place

Past experience with putting the unhoused in government-provided housing indicates that some fraction of them will be destructive towards it.
Everybody who has ever rented out a property can tell you that some fraction of renters will be destructive toward the property. This is not a unique flaw isolated to homeless people and it’s something society deals with constantly.
But you glossed over those facts, didn’t you?

What would law enforcement look like in these buildings, in terms of minimizing drug use, theft, robbery, and similar crimes?
Sadly, it would look the same as it does today in any other apartment complex because these are not issues that are unique to homeless people.
I say sadly because law enforcement in America is still largely based on the idea that punit
Don’t be daft. The fractions of damage-causing tenants and typical degrees of damage are not fairly comparable — but you glossed over that fact.
Similarly, law enforcement looks a lot different in different apartment complexes, because there are vastly different levels of crime in different complexes. Another fact you glossed over.
I’ve lived in hundred year-old houses, but I understand public housing is typically torn-down after 40 years or so, because it’s uninhabitable? How does that happen? Theoretically the government is investing every year in the upkeep and maintenance of public housing, how does it become uninhabitable?
The owner of said office building might have something to say about this. The return on investment on a homeless shelter is lower than an office building.
But I definitely like the idea. So maybe the government should buy out the offices and turn them into subsidised housing.
You can of course turn down the offer and leave them staying empty. I’ll make sure that your investors and shareholders will know that you turned down a way to make money out of the dead weight, though.
This is also a positive attribute to a Land Value Tax, the cost of leaving a plot of land vacant will force a developers hand to either do something or sell to someone who will, especially in high demand areas.
Currently many can work around that due to appreciation and the idea of future profits.
If this was such a no-brained, why hasn’t California, with its literal tens of billions of dollars earmarked for addressing homelessness pick up on this idea?
Maybe because concentrating hundreds and hundreds of previously homeless people in a neighborhood surrounded by expensive homes/offices/stores would drive down property values and by extension tax revenues.
Maybe because retrofitting an office building costs more than just building a facility from the ground up?
It’s tougher than it looks to convert large office spaces to residential. The plumbing all goes to a few central bathrooms and kitchenettes, and would likely need to be completely rerouted to work for apartments. Likewise for the electrical, where an office has electrical supply mostly going to mechanical rooms, with probably just enough to run lighting and office PCs going out to the living space. You’d need to run way more branch power to apartment sub-panels so people could run their appliances. The

least half of the apartments being undesirable lightless “inner” units.
To make it even worse having windowless dwelling units is straight up illegal in many cities, I think NYC is trying to get some special exemptions to this to encourage this type of use but it’s just another complication on what you accurately described as a not-as-simple-as-it-sounds situation.
All those reasons stack up a situationw here developers have few incentives to do the work so it will come down to some real public cooperation, be that in subsidies and also adjustment to building codes. For a plac
Yes, I also will not be happy until the rich are happy and everyone else is unhappy.
I have to say, this feels way more normal than the pre-Covid crap.

Life needs to return back to the real normal.
The COVID pandemic was the best thing to happen to me in my entire professional lifetime of 25+ years. The lockdowns, for me, is what a real, sane “normal” should look like in the U.S. I actually get to be part of my children’s growth while working from home, and it is wonderful. I get to teach them, play with them, and be the mentoring father that my genes tell me I’m supposed to be. I am even doing that after working hours because I don’t have a central office sucking the life out of me, making me too tir
> Listening to my wife and kids laugh, play, and even yell throughout the house while I work from my home office does nothing but fill me with happiness and purpose. It is paradise on Earth.
I talk to a LOT of people working remotely. They’re always apologising for the sounds of their children or pets in the background. I don’t mind at all, it’s actually pretty awesome to hear some kid excitedly calling ‘daddy!’ because daddy’s actually there to call out to.
As long as you can still get work done (and as
And I’m more productive than I am while confined to an office space.
A very narrow minded way of thinking. You obviously do IT or software or some sort of office work. If you did anything else that just doesn’t work. Or do you prefer the mechanic who changes your brake pads “work from home?” The vast majority of human endeavors are not typing away at a computer.

Even if you develop software – there are many things that can not be done from home. I write software for huge machines that can’t even run on
Whilst there are a lot of companies whose primary workforce is office bound that have demanded a return to the office, it’s generally been a hybrid approach – 1, 2, 3 days at office etc.
The percentage of office/home will depend on the sector and probably whether the leadership of the company are dicks or not, but I can’t ever see a return to the 5 day 9 to 5 office week.
For starters, companies which let out office space haven’t been sitting on their hands and doing nothing, they’ve been adapting office space to suit hybrid work.
Large corporates that previously owned buildings are selling them and downsizing into smaller leased, fully serviced spaces, adapted for purposes of collaboration – open plan, flexible hours.
There’s no doubt that hybrid working increases productivity because it allows people a better work/home life balance.
Where it may be failing will be a failure of management rather than remote workers.
There will never be a return to office.
We’re about to face one of the most dire workforce crisis in history. We already see the onset of it, and it will only get worse. In my country, it’s easy to calculate because there is a “set” retirement age and you also have a pretty good idea what age group(s) enter the workforce. If you look at the demographics, you’ll see that the “boomers” are leaving the workforce and the “zoomers” are entering.
And while the “boomers” were one of the strongest cohorts, the “zoome
Most companies are locked into long term leases which means that although their need for office space has cratered, they can’t actually do anything about it quickly. We’re thus seeing a slow motion car crash – and the efforts of governments and the super wealthy to reduce the scale of the crash by bullying companies into enforcing return to the office mandates is an attempt to reduce the damage…
They can buy their way out of those leases, they chose not to because they don’t want to book the losses.
The rich folks are afraid they might be a tiny bit less rich if they lose money on commercial property rent, so they will tell every lie to drive people back. “Working from home makes you sad and lonely and gives you heart attacks” “How will you ever find anyone to marry if you work from home” etc.
They won’t do anything to improve the air quality or protect people from Covid in any way. They don’t care that going back to the office means getting sick constantly, until your health breaks down entirely or y

“Working from home makes you sad and lonely and gives you heart attacks”
Nope. My depression is gone and my blood levels improved throughout 20 and 21 while we had mandatory WFH. I have empiric data to contradict that.

“How will you ever find anyone to marry if you work from home”
By meeting people I like vs. meeting people I have to meet because you hired them to work alongside me. I prefer marrying someone I meet during a leisure activity that we both share rather than during a work activity we’re both forced into by economic needs.
Keep them coming, I’m on a roll!
I stroked out in Aug ’20 and got divorced in Aug of 22. Ex-wife decided booze and opioids go together, and shopping for the pills with multiple doctors really ruled.
Aren’t anecdotes fun?
Nope. My depression is gone and my blood levels improved throughout 20 and 21 while we had mandatory WFH. I have empiric data to contradict that.
These facts are being ignored, in a few cases maliciously, but without any question my mental health and general happiness while fully remote. I will do anything to return to that, and it’s just a matter of time before someone offers me a position away from my present employer to go do it. To some degree it has already happened, but credibility is low (i.e. “this

“How will you ever find anyone to marry if you work from home” etc.
Yet another reason to never go in

If you wanted to be in an office, you needed to have a reason that prevented you from working from home.
That should be the norm: work from home unless there is a compelling reason otherwise.
These cities bought into the wage slavery story and are now suffering for their part in it? Good. I only wish more of those perpetuating this culture of abuse would suffer.
I’ve been remote for 7 years. In my current role I have an office 15 minutes from my house and I still don’t go.
Nearly every meeting I am in has people from different offices and regions. Even when I am in my office I am on zoom calls.
After many years of 90 minute commutes I hope I never have to take a job with a long commute again
Workers are being told that they need to adjust to a new normal where automation changes how they work.
At the same time companies don’t want to adjust to a new normal where automation changes WHERE workers work.
Turn all these desolate office districts into homes. Or food production. Why waste land on offices if the offices aren’t actually needed? Automate them out of existence just like the companies want to do with everything else.
In the latest report, Houston led at nearly 61% occupancy. San Jose, Calif., in the heart of Silicon Valley, where remote work flourishes, was the lowest at 38%. As of May, 48% of workers in Seattle’s central core have returned to the office compared with 2019,
Not surprisingly, the occupancy rate is inversely proportional to how expensive it is to live in that city.
Work from home was always something that couldn’t possibly work …. …but when it was required, it did, and now most of the arguments for returning to the office are easily shown to be invalid
There’s far too many political interests that will stifle WFH – Levels of revenue for real estate, retail, food, hell, vehicle sales, fuel sales, even road construction/projects cash cow might be threatened if people no longer need to commute daily.
WFH would be far better for the environment and mental health overall. Repurposing these now empty office buildings rather than new construction would also significantly help our carbon footprint as well.
Huge cities are not workable. With all the office buildings clustered in a relatively small area (think NY City, San Francisco, Chicago, etc.) it creates insurmountable traffic issues. Everyone is trying to get into and out of the city at roughly the same time and the roads are simply not wide enough to accommodate all the cars. Apart from that, parking is always an issue. Some of the larger cities have public transit but, in the US at least, adoption has been sparse and many of those systems are aging badly.
Meanwhile we have suburbs, where most of the workers live, that have little to no offices. Couple that with technology advances that allow many jobs to be carried out remotely and we simply don’t need nearly as many office buildings as we have now. That much is clear. What isn’t so clear is what to do with the existing office buildings. Converting them into hotels or apartments is not as straightforward as you might think. Nobody wants an inner apartment with no windows. All of the plumbing and electrical would have to be redesigned.
Maybe they have to look at co-tenancy where they rent out a few floors to someone else. For the less desirable office buildings. either gut them out and create apartments or knock them down and rebuild.
Either way, you’re not going to get people living in suburbs to move back to the city. They are there for a reason. They want a backyard, not a balcony. Suburbs tends to have lower crime rates so they feel safer raising their families there.
Companies that build in suburbs have some distinct advantages that might appeal to some: shorter commute being an obvious draw. The company would also enjoy lower property taxes. Seems like a win-win to me.
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