Earlier in the pandemic many news and magazine organizations would proudly write about how working from home always actually can lead to over working and being too “productive”. I am yet to collect some evidence on it but I think we remember a good amount about this.
Now after a bunch of companies want their remote workers back at the office, every one of those companies are being almost propaganda machines which do not cite sound scientific studies but cite each other and interviews with higher ups in top companies that “remote workers are less productive”. This is further cementing the general public’s opinion on this matter.
And research that shows the opposite is buried deep within any search results.
Have you noticed this? Please share what you have observed. I’m going paranoid about this.
It’s because a huge amount of business is centered around made up things for going to work.
Things you need to work in an office: suits, dry cleaning for the suits, dress shoes, a car (because public transportation is woefully inadequate for this reason), gas for the car, maintenance for the car, lunch, daycare, a dog walker, you have less time so you are more likely to eat out for dinner, also more likely to hire maids, you are stuck in a commute and radio is awful, so a music subscription, maybe a new phone, and might have to go out for drinks with the coworkers on the way home.
Staying at home, and much of the country on highly limited income, taught us how much we spend on the “privilege” of work. Everyone is still shocked at the emotional and opportunity cost work had, we’re just starting to realize that most of what it sold to us either isn’t real or isn’t needed.
If people don’t go back to work a sea of businesses will fail.
You missed the most important thing. Real estate investments that aren’t allowed to go down in value, which they would if offices became superfluous. Just imagine how many buildings would become “worthless”/could be used for something else.
Yeah, this is BY FAR the biggest reason. Pretty much all the rich people and most big companies have huge investment in portfolios that contain a lot of commercial office spaces. If we were all allowed to work from home those investments would plummet and all the rich people and big companies would take MASSIVE losses on those investments. Which is why all the media and even companies like Zoom are trying to pull a 180 on working from home.
That is a huge pressure, but it’s less obvious why a company in a business unrelated to real estate would want real estate prices high.
The secret is that companies aren’t in the business of making a good or providing a service, they actually are just giant schemes for raising money for “investments”. For example, airlines don’t make their money off of selling tickets, but through prospecting jet fuel. Most companies aren’t as direct and clear about what their business actually is.
Also the link between real estate and all of jobs isn’t very clear and is very abstract. It’s easy to see the costs and interactions with companies forced by working in an office, it’s difficult to see how a building losing value effects anyone.
A forward-thinking wealthy person would start buying these buildings at fire-sale prices and converting them to residential buildings.
Pre-pandemic. Maybe 2005 [?] one of the big American news companies assembles a team of financial experts to study various big companies. Then they deicde to apply all that brain power to an average American family. Husband and wife with three kids, two jobs and two cars. Both have middle class jobs. After running the numbers, the experts told the wife to quit her job. The savings on childcare, running the second car, no fast food dinners, etc. more than made up for the second salary.
If you read what I wrote, the experts looked at all aspects of the couple’s situation. The experts decided that the wife’s job was the one to go.
If you’re having a problem finding dates, maybe you should look at what common factor all your relationships have.
I don’t care if remote workers are less productive (although I’ve seen no evidence that they are).
You can’t convince me that spending an hour every morning travelling to get to an office, in order to sit in front of the exact two screens I have at home, is a good use of my time, nor is spending an hour getting home again.
That’s about 450 hours a year for me. 18 whole days. Those days are mine now, and you’re not having them back.
I wish I had the same setup at work as at home. My home dev environment cost 5 times as much.
Ackshually, they’re two distinct sets of two screens. Unless you’re taking your two monitors to work and back home every day.
(sorry for the pedantry I’m ashamed)
If we wanted to take the pedantry to the next level, we could get into a metaphysical discussion about whether the word “screen” refers to the physical appliance displaying the content or the content itself. When you “share your screen” in a Teams meeting, you don’t box up your monitor and mail it to your coworkers. 🤔
I have at home, is a good use of my time, nor is spending an hour getting home again.
Yeah, but those are YOUR hours and THEY don’t pay for it, so those hours don’t matter. In fact, it’d be better if you don’t get those hours to yourself. Maybe you’ll have more time to apply to other jobs or something.
What about 2-3 days a week and an extra week or two of PTO to compensate? I’m trying to think of ways to incentivize more office work that will appeal to stingy boomer leadership and the younger ‘fuck offices’ crowd.
I have noticed that working remotely really opened up the job market for me. Instead of being limited to where public transportation can bring me within 45 minutes, I can work for any company within Europe from the comfort of my home office. It makes switching jobs so much easier and I am willing to tolerate much less shit before I quit. That degree of freedom might scare companies. They can’t trap me anymore with the costs of uprooting my life for a better job.
I’ve never worked from home, but it seems to me that even if everything else were kept equal, you just saved an hour and a half commute plus the cost of doing so, every day! When you add in the lower cost of food and healthier diet eating at home and a whole host of other advantages. It’s a huge win! Congrats.
I worked from home for ~6 months full time, my experience was that I will never do it full time again. For me, it was waking up, watch the same four walls for 8 hours, eat dinner, sleep, repeat. Perhaps my office could have been better but because I was working with support and had to be available on the phone, I could not really leave my computer for an extended period of time (except for lunch break).
A lot of people make it out to be heaven, working from home. I really missed having people to talk to. I believe that it would have been a much better experience if I could have worked from home 0-5 days per week as I saw fit. Bad morning? Work from home. Waking up fresh? Go to work. I’m assuming that you can walk or bike to work. Few things are worse than being stuck in traffic or being on a crowed bus/train, or missing the bus with 1 min, having to wait 15 min for the next one, when with the bike I can leave whenever I want.
Conversely, I found out just how many spoons I was using to function interacting with folks on a daily basis and that the strains my extroverted colleagues were talking about without having people were things I’d just lived with and normalized for my entire life because our society forced you to be around people all of the time.
Give me my four walls, pls. I spend every waking hour on a computer anyway, either working or personal, so it’s going to be four walls one way or another.
I think it’s very situational. I’m already a big shut-in. Working full time at home might not be great for my mental health. It’s sad to admit I use work for social contact, but it’s true. If you have good social connections outside of work, great.
All that said, this whole debate is very classist. There are loads of jobs, including mine incidentally, that require physically being there. I mostly haven’t paid attention to this debate because it doesn’t apply to me or the people I know, and probably never will.
The negativity comes almost entirely from two sorts of people
- Rich property owners who are seeing their valuable office buildings plummet in value.
- People who socialize primarily with work-mates and don’t have other groups
To 1, fuck 'em. To 2, eh, maybe find a hobby now that you don’t have to commute 2 hours a day
One of my sups from my old job was recently complaining that people weren’t required to come in more than two days a week and pushing to increase it because the office is lonely without them. She and people like her are the absolute worst. Main character syndrome doesn’t even begin to describe them and I wish nothing but the worst for them in life tbh
There’s money in real estate. There’s even more in commercial real estate. There’s less money in commercial real estate that’s vacant because people work from home.