The whole matter is debated (understandably in a way) on big numbers and averages.

I could write a long post but I'll cut it short to this paragraph stating that humans differ.

For some commuting is stressful, the offices are noisy and full of distractions and those individuals may thrive in a remote setup. There's people that work in the opposite way. Their house offer many distractions from laundry to videogames. Some people require micro management and constant oversight some tilt in such environments.

Some teams require a lot of meaningful in-person interactions, brainstorming sessions or work chats around the coffee machine. Some teams thrive with good central top/down planning and workload splitting where syncing isn't very important.

At the end of the day the decision C-suite have to make when planning projects is not remote vs non-remote and apply blindly rather in forming teams with people that by their own nature or preferences will thrive in the setup that's decided.

As you stated, this is variable.

If you have a short commute, or you like it, or you get some exercise - office is great.

If you hate your commute, if its 3 hours in pollution and traffic - not so much.

Earlier the position was that WFH was not possible. Now we know it is, and I hazard that this change isn't factored in job postings.

Considering what an hour of time means in this era, its not a trivial cost. This means an hour which could be spent just unwinding, studying, on hobbies, procrastinating, whatever.

If you have any drive, or strong interests, thats time you would want to spend on something other than a commute.

Unfortunately a lot of things conflate over time as you become more senior to generally make your commute worse.

For me - my last 2 roles have earlier required start time, with a hard start (morning meeting / standup / L3 support presence), company office locations got a little further, and trains got a little less reliable.

Fortunately I am remote since COVID, but when I was going in / or have to go in now.. I need to bake in 45-60min depending on how much I'm willing to risk being late that day.

For me I'd rather work 11-12 hours/day at home then go into office for 10 hours & spend 1.5-2 hours on the commute. Company is getting 10-20% more time out of me, and I at least save the money & "commute prep time".

In some cases, it was getting brought into more senior manager meetings I previously wasn't privy to, that had always been too early (7-8am).

In other cases, it was moving those same managers goal posts because they'd always been online early and hey if you want access to them, the only place to find time on their calendar was like 8am or 5pm.

I know A LOT of senior IC / team lead people who fell into this trap during COVID.

How sustainable is to work 11-12 hours a day though? If we do 5 hours of intense work and the rest is spent in meetings or other overhead activities make 8 hours just enough to make it sustainable over long periods of time…

How I spend the time in between in terms of doing research/reading/etc is up to me. If I had to do this in an office setting it would suck to be stuck there when stuff does come up.

Why? Are you contracted for 45-50 hours per week? Or if contracted less, are you compensated for the additional hours?

I'm contracted for 38.5 hours per week. That's 8.125 hours Monday to Thursday and 6.00 on Friday. If I work longer than this I am compensated with time off in lieu. I do have to log my time daily. Overall works great. I'm fairly paid and have a good lifestyle.

I actually find it hard to imagine working 9-10 hours every day for any extended time period.

Public transit use:

https://vividmaps.com/public-transportation-in-the-united-st...

https://vividmaps.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/public-tran...

Population density:

https://www.axios.com/2023/10/28/americans-moving-map-2022-f...

https://www.axios.com/2023/01/31/cities-pandemic-moving-tren...

https://www.axios.com/2023/09/14/where-america-stands

Just as an example, right now I am in an Indian city where there is some minimal public transport but a majority of people need their own vehicle to commute for most of their journeys. And it is not an unusual scenario for India, which contains more population than Europe and North America combined.

I don't think OP understands the meaning of the word globally

When comparing similarly wealthy countries the US is absolutely an outlier in this.

Because you said - "Thankfully the US is a major outlier in this aspect globally." "Globally" implies the entire world. Now why are you moving the goalposts? If you wanted to confine the discussion to the developed world, just call out US being an outlier in the developed world.

We can compare US to Japan, to Europe, perhaps to some parts of China but certainly not to India - it would be too much apples to cucumbers comparison.

Imagine that we but every country and their development index and their public transportation development index on a XY graph? Would US still stand out?

Let's assume that it does. Then we can say that US is a global outlier.

This is very subjective, as well as personal and irrational, but I find it to be true. I benefit from having a reason to go out into the world in the morning. WFH and the freedom to go to the coffeeshop or take a walk didn't match up.

This means that I couldn't read anything. Shaking of the bus also gives me time to time a mild headache. Now if the ride was smoother (like a train or a tram) and I still could sit and read then indeed I would agree with you.

Fortunately I don't have to commute very often so I can tolerate this to a degree but if I had to commute every day then it would add considerable extra strain into my life.

Normally the day should be divided into 3 equal parts: 1 sleep time, 2 work time, 3 personal time.

Commute time effectively steals from either personal time or from sleep time and this comes on top of getting ready for work that is also a major waste of time in the mornings.

But I also self-selected roles closer to the end station in London so the commute at the other end was short-ish.

Whenever I had to do any other commute: by car, bus, multiple changes, etc it was always a grind and shortlived.

However, I was able to stop even the not-so-bad commute long before COVID as I wanted to be at home when the kids came back from school as they are only young once and briefly so. Though I miss the "me-time".

In the end I ended up working remote, which is what I preferred, which wasn't surprising given how much the commuting time was worth to me.

Also, my profession is being a Software Engineer, not a train passenger.

I made a calculator for this a while ago: https://flat.social/blog/get-a-remote-team-back-in-the-offic... (scroll a bit down for the inputs).

E.g. my yearly cost of commuting when I did added equivalent to about $2.5k/year in after tax transport costs.

I've typically told recruiters about 20%, from a high base, and frankly that is lower than it ought to be when accounting for both the time and costs, but given I already live where I live, I feel I could justify it in terms putting extra cash straight into my pension pot and retiring earlier. But not enough to lower it further to find a point where someone is more likely to take me up on it.

Kind of wish I hadn't looked... :(

... but not even close to enough to car-commute more than about 10 minutes to it, given the option. That's roughly the cut-off. Under 1.5 bikeable miles (that's ideal!) or maybe 5 miles by car.

And to get that short a commute, I'd need all kinds of other compromises in most cities. Worse schools, more expensive and smaller housing.

Is my preference for the office worth hundreds of hours a year lost commuting, thousands of dollars a year in transportation costs, and all the extra micromorts from the commute? LOL. LMFAO. God no, it's not even close. No typical commute is a low enough cost that I'd pay it to be in the office. It's way off.

So, though I do in fact prefer working in the office... nah.

>Company A is 2.5 hours of drive time

>Company B is remote

Pay is the same.

lol I imagine that Company A will find some sucker, but instead of getting A+ workers that can realize company B> company A, they are going to get the leftover workers, their second choice. To be fair, leftover workers seem to stick around at a company for 10-20 years.

> To be fair, leftover workers seem to stick around at a company for 10-20 years.

Even if they were "leftovers", their value to the company they know in and out after 10 to 20 years and their productivity skyrockets compared to the A+ rock stars that left the company after one year.

If anything it’s people failing to consider commute times when looking for work that’s the issue not company’s requirements. Going they will pay me 10k more per year but I’ll spend X more hours a week commuting is effectively being paid to commute.

At some point I got a week more holiday than every other employee in the UK at my employer at the time because I was the only hire who had questioned a contract clause and gotten them to confirm my preferred interpretation of a woefully misleading clause in writing before signing, and when they later wanted to stick to the technicalities of how it was written I was able to just forward them an email from the COO confirming that in my case they'd agreed to my interpretation.

Most people seem to only pay attention to the headline amount, and then grumble about the consequences after the fact.

On the contrary, not being forced into the office let's you choose your journeys.

If I’m feeling up to it, I get another 30-40 minute walk in once it cools off in the evening.

I don’t mind driving in during the winter though, because then I don’t have to pay to heat my house (beyond 15C for the cat) for the day.

I love to go to the park with my kids. I love going to parties.

I don't like sitting in my car unpaid to do work that doesnt require sitting in the car unpaid.

I find this very unintuitive and even mentally rebel at the idea when I think about it, but I still think it's true.

But for example, consider three scenarios:

1. Work from home, with a consistent habit of going on a ten minute walk and reading for half an hour before and after work. 2. Commute with a ten minute walk and half hour train ride, with a consistent habit of reading on the train. 3. Same as (1), but family responsibilities and other distractions end the moment work begins and begin the moment work ends. 4. Same as (2), but spend the train ride doom scrolling.

For me (1) is best but also unlikely because there are too many other "choices" of what to do before and after work, so in practice I end up doing (3).

But option (2) of commuting by train would actually be better than (3) despite having less optionality! I would have more wind-up and -down time each day, and get more reading done.

But the risk of option (2) is that there is still too much optionality; instead of reading, I could scroll crap on my phone. Removing that optionality somehow - by getting a dumb phone or some other solution to keep myself from this bad habit - would be another improvement.

Clearly it would be better to make better choices without limiting options, but human nature being what it is, it often turns out better in practice to not have the other options at all.

In what other things is 1.4% considered "significant?"

What about the top of the crop who live around the corner and prefer office over WFH for a clear separation between work and personal life?

(And when they're not being loud, they're being cute, and it's a tempting and easy distraction to go spend some time with them in the middle of a work day.)

In this sort of dynamic, I see working at an office as a fairly healthy option. I know it's a bit of an outlier (SAH mother + WFH father), but I'm definitely more productive and less stressed out working from an office.

A reply to you mentioned noise-canceling headphones. That doesn’t work for me, because the kids want to engage and play with the parents when they’re at home. It’s not just a matter of noise.

That said! I still agree with OP’s sentiment. I find that I’m much more relaxed without having to worry about the commute. More time to help the kids get ready and just enjoy the moment. More time to walk them to school.

Before, I would be a ball of stress trying to get people out the door in the morning so I could catch one of only two buses that could take me across the bay to work.

Same thing in the evenings. More time to pick them up, walk home, take serendipitous side adventures and help foster their curiosity. I love it.

I would still not accept working from office jobs though.

57% have both parents working full time

28% have one parent working full time and the other not working at all.

The remaining 16% is one full time, one part time.

As another commenter pointed out - while not the majority, it's definitely not an outlier.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2020/article/comparing-characte...

So, less common, but not an incredible outlier.

At no income level is it lower than 20% stay at home parent though, so not too much of an outlier in any case.

Personally, I don't believe I must either be working or spending time with my children every moment they are awake. I'm a person too, not just a worker and parent, and need to have my own time.

>98% of workers want to work remote at least some of the time 65% report wanting to work remote all of the time.

https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/remote-work-statisti...

If 1/3 of your workforce meets 2 days a week your average utilization is about 14%. The logical conclusion is a ghost town that goes away as soon as your employer cuts the building off like a diseased hand.

That's a good point. All that fancy real estate and coffee machines start to look like a wasted investment when they're used 14% of the time.

Employers reimbursing your travel expenses if they need you to travel to a conference on the other side of the country is already the norm so why shouldn't they reimburse your travel expenses if they want you to travel somewhere in the same geographic area?

We actually deal with this nonsense in our household; my wife is hourly and between the commute, parking, and walking to/from her workplace she loses about 20-25% compared to the time she actually gets paid for. We also spend a lot on gas, and have been putting ridiculous miles on her daily driver. Not to mention physical fatigue and emotional stress; she talks about quitting at least once a week. All for a mediocre wage (I would have said it’s garbage if she was our sole earner - my compensation is about double hers and I WFH).

Edit: also, I remember company cars being a thing not too long ago. I don’t hear about them as much as I used to.

The problem becomes now my home is tied to my work place. If the company moves or I change companies, I have move or stress at a new commute. I did move once during a job change, and it didn't last long.

Another compounding issue is that I like to stay at companies for a long time, 10 years. This is frequently becoming difficult for a number of reasons not entirely in my control.

I wonder if others are in the same situation.

I too prefer a voluntary 20 minute walk over a mandatory one. Then my brain can be aimed at what I value, not work.

It’s waking time, not sleeping time, which is out of a 16 hour waking day.

5 hours a week makes about 20 hours a month roughly, which is about half an extra work week to live that you miss out on.

Multiply that 30 minute commute each way by 12 months and it’s close to 260 hours a year.

160 hours a month of work so you get back about 1.6 working months to put into something else.

I had a few minute commute for 10 years. It was an unfair advantage.

Edit: Subcontractor at bp. Opec crunch. entire floor fired. Hardware startup, unexpected giant bill overnight. Layoffs. Fullstack webshop, sales didnt land. Crypto finance gig, asset prices crashed, clients all went broke instantly.

Sometimes thats just how it is.

That said, time is important to me and I have a 5min commute, 20min if I walk. For that reason I do prefer the office. Better meals and better coffee and nice colleagues.

If employers want to force people into offices, maybe pay them a bonus.

There is a meme, or some "motivational" thing that floats around. "Exercise for an hour a day. It's less than 5% of your day - what's your excuse?"

Uhh... because, if I factor in: - 8 hours for sleeping

- 8 hours for working

- 1.5-2 hours for commuting

- 0.5-1 hour to get ready for work

- 1 hour to prepare and eat dinner

All of a sudden we are at 19-20 hours, and it's not less than 5% of my day, it's actually 25% of my day.

The transition time of arrival and departure is easily 30-45m daily, on my employers dime.

I do 50% and it works for me. End of the day most of the problems associated with this issue are workplace and cultural issues that come to a head with remote/hybrid. The only novel dysfunctions with employees that I see (and I’m an exec with about 900) are people doing things like secretly moving away and abusing medical accommodation. There’s also an issue where people build their life around remote and are disappointed when they miss opportunities, but are unwilling to meet in the middle.

End of the day. The lazy idiots are just as lazy, grinders grind, and smart people continue to be smart.

So basically, waste of time.

Taking an average view isn't useful at all, apart from maybe insinuating more people carry out jobs that are suitable for remote working.

Come to think of it, I'm wondering if that's where the split comes in. Upper management sees their productivity go down -- on what's fundamentally an interpersonal endeavour -- while individual contributors see theirs go up -- on what's primarily solitary ones. As a result, there is friction with top-down work-from-office mandates.

Getting your head down and coding on your personal goal is easy remotely.

I think some ICs like that it's harder for people to say to them that they are driving in the wrong direction, even if it's still true.

If you've played MMOs, been parts of raids, or been active in a guild - you figure out how to solve these problems.

I've been in a community management and moderation role entirely online - those interactions and issues were, by far, the most subjective and complex project discussions I have had to conduct.

I believe that there is an entire generation of workers AND managers, who will be entering the workforce with highly effective remote working habits.

The caveat is, that this applies to work that can be done online, where your product can be examined and verified online.

You are right, however I would say that raids and coordinated e-sports were on the periphery when I was playing. I had to set up my own teams and lan tournaments.

Nice distinction to highlight though, thank you! The skill set would require specific coordination skills, not just being able to play team matches occasionally.

I suppose its proof that the skill exists, just not its distribution in the workforce.

As a manager, with both WFH and in-office employees, the difference is very clear on my end: In-office employees do undeniably better. In my personal experience, of course.

Most offices I’ve been in have had deficient conference room setups and open floor plans, and I’ve come to enjoy the ease with which private conversations, pairing, and ad hoc meetings can happen without being disruptive to others or booking a room way in advance.

I do think that conversations have higher bandwidth in person, and I’ve really missed having a proper big whiteboard to gather around, but I’ve come to realize that this restriction can be a positive forcing function for organizations to write things out and maintain more organized planning documents, which is a desirable outcome.

I think this is extremely cynical. Feedback makes for good organizations, and when I built teams, anyone who doesn't value, actively solicit, and provide good feedback doesn't have a very long tenure.

There are many things which go into building this culture, but I think I've only had one or two cases where this led to negative career impact for individuals. Most people adopt to this very quickly, very well, and work well in high-feedback settings.

I've absolutely never had, nor could imagine having, this problem on teams I've led.

Much more, I find the limitation is on my end. Going for a walk-and-talk is relaxing. A Zoom meeting is tiring. 1-2 Zoom meetings per day is not a problem, but a day of Zoom meetings basically leaves me a zombie. Group meetings are also much more tiring online than 1:1s.

I'm a good in-person manager. I'm also a good remote IC. I not nearly as good with those flipped around.

I also don't find any of these to be the case for me:

> keeping people on target is difficult remotely. Consensus is difficult remotely. Feedback is difficult remotely

I can do all of those individually -- quite well -- remotely. I just can't do those for anywhere close to 8 hours per day.

To be very clear: That's me. I'm not speaking for you or for anyone else, and YMMV. I'd be genuinely interested in hearing other stories or contradictory opinions, and how things work for others.

Managing people is really really hard, but we seem to have a managerial class who seem to be getting away with doing it very poorly.

I like your reply, but for different reasons. I am a middle school teacher, and my day to day is managing people. It is tiring, decidedly so, and yet at the end of the day, management is rewarding for me for because it is relationship building through gaining individual understanding and building classroom consensus.

I love my job and am good at my job. But if I’m to step outside of my classroom your latter quote becomes far too truthful for me:

“we seem to have a managerial class who seem to be getting away with doing it very poorly”

Your quote applies directly to my supposed superiors; assistant principals, principals, and higher ups in the school board. Most of the managerial class outside of a classroom is trash at their jobs. Their management style seems mostly morale busting and ego inflation at day’s end.

I agree with you, just from a different occupational domain.

It also adds an extra hurdle for those who aren't particularly skilled at management.

I hypothesize, however, that a lot of these decisions at a c-suite level have more to do with other considerations, like property investments, headcount, salaries, or (worst of all) egos.

If your team level management org cannot organically work out the right mix on a team/role basis, then you probably should look at what else they are doing poorly.

I've worked for 20 years in global teams, and written communication is very important. Having US/UK/Ireland/HK/Singapore split team isn't much different from remote. Over the years I've worked in smaller orgs with a higher % of local people.

What I can tell you is that the amount of chatter grew exponentially. One place I used to call it "bilateral communication" because A-B would side-talk then A-C, then A-D, then B-C, then B-D.. all in-person. Tremendous games of telephone constantly.

Remote is a forcing function on better written communication.

It's funny that half this site is people working on various SaaS tools that are supposed to make work collaboration better, but somehow we need to sit next to each other to be productive?

The obvious solution is to fix your very-noticeably fucked up communication culture, since that would also improve in-person work.

Some orgs and managers seem to have decided, comically incorrectly, that WFH is the problem element in the above scenario, however.

Or having the universe revolve around Jira, berating devs for lack of story progress in standup, and shouting about velocity in sprint ceremonies.. while also doing the above said verbal drive-bys? Who is causing all this churn?? Where is our focus? Where are people spending their time??

It's unknowable.

The cost of doing all this measuring and evaluating and preparing-to-measure certainly isn't being measured, though, so we'll never know.

It's entirely possible to construct beautiful metrics, amazing velocity charts, etc and have a terrible product with miserable users. Many such cases.

Some of this metrics stuff is like "expressed vs revealed preferences". Users who complain about your product and demand new features more quickly don't want a beautiful burndown chart. They want you to improve your product. You may actually need to slowdown to speedup. It's likely you need to do some R&D, and lots of experiments that will look bad on metrics.

You see this a lot when you quantize teams into little buckets like operations vs new features vs customer success vs core engineering teams. It's possible for a team run by a bad actor to have nice metrics while being a net drag on the other parts of the org.

How important is that stuff, I have no idea, but if half the team are friends at work and the rest can only be reached over slack, that doesn’t sound like much of a team

Places that are very focussed on "culture fit" or if they'd "have a beer" with the person they are interviewing.. leaves a lot of people behind. Women / non native speakers / older folks generally fail these types of implicit or explicit screens.

Building a development team is something like building a baseball team. A bunch of specialists, a few generalists, and the ability to get along. Whether they'd grab a pint after a game isn't really important.

I certainly have and maintain friendships at work, some of them from before remote, some of them from after. Some of them are people whom I've never lived in the same continent or city as.

I have plenty of friends outside of work. I work for a living and I'm a professional doing a job, not a kid on a play date.

The cynic in me always felt that people who emphasize this benefit of office work just can't make friends unless people are forced to hang out with them every day.

It can't be an everyone gets a gold star situation. Encouragement/reward is good when warranted, and encouraging everyone to recognize their strengths and weaknesses is required.

I'd argue this shouldn't be a top-down decision - you can just let teams and individuals decide what works best for them, then that can be communicated upwards so the company can plan office space/resource allocation

Finding this many self-motivated conscientious employees is uncommon. Consider yourself lucky. This has never been a winning strategy that I've seen anywhere.

I worked at way too many startups where the CEO was far too involved with day to day minutiae.

> workload splitting where syncing isn't very important

I'm not convinced that remote means syncing is harder. There is a case to be made that: it's easier because it compels teams to have a structure for syncing, and structured syncing may be more efficient than ad hoc. Put another way, you potentially lose the crutch and end up stronger as a result.

This isn't a whimsical theory either- structured business processes are often missing and causing hidden costs and inefficiencies.

Work requires effective communication. Global teams place a premium on that and nurture it if they're successful. The remote work dilemma is non-global teams discovering this well-trodden ground and attempting to reinvent the wheel, with a sprinkling of terrible commercial real estate decisions on top.

(Nothing in this response addresses specific team types that benefit from in person work or the entirely valid in-office preferences of individual workers.)

> The fundamental issue I see in this debate is a lack of sensibility and nuance in human nature.

> The whole matter is debated (understandably in a way) on big numbers and averages.

If statistics is invalid, then how do you propose companies decide, based on a reasonable and empirical estimate of reality, on what work arrangement to implement? Do you believe that it is not expensive and disruptive to introduce as many variations of work setups as there are people in a company? What if the people deciding company policy simply prefer and believe in the advantages of onsite, which they have the freedom and right to believe---so why do people who prefer remote force themselves in such places?

As Einstein said, you should make every problem as simple as possible, but no more simple.

The problem we're describing cannot be reduced to few simple statistics, it's exactly making the problem simpler than it is.

Not only just the task of measuring productivity of knowledge workers is extremely difficult if not impossible, but getting any statistic across a wide variety of different factors makes it even more pointless.

In fact, the problem shouldn't be approached from a macro, but microscopic level. Start from the basics.

There's knowledge workers that don't do anything from home. There's knowledge workers that won't achieve anything at the office. There's gargantuan projects like operating systems or databases developed fully remotely and asynchronously. There's projects that barely move without lots of synchronous, meaningful in-person interactions and there's environments like early stage startups that desperately need this kind of situation (albeit I'm sure there's many exceptions).

In professional sports it is very well understood that slightly different formulas work differently for different teams and players. Some needs to be fast and lean to be effective. Some need to put up muscle and weight. Many need both. Some need lots of cardio, some need more skills training. And all of that has to interact and mesh together and face different challenges.

Yet you want to complex systems like business projects/teams built around few statistics? Ignoring the wide variety of factors and humans that will end up there?

I'm not saying that building teams like that is an easy task, sometimes you just need to make work whatever team you're given, and you will have to decide a setup and give the right structure incentives to everyone to make it work.

But even if tomorrow a stat told us that there's proof that statistically remote is better for 60% of the teams (or the opposite) that really won't help much.

The friction we're seeing now is that we're still recovering from a pandemic that forced everyone remote whether it works for them or not. So this idea of remote vs. office being a core strategic decision as a company grows is fairly new. We are all still learning how to navigate the options.

Is it though? My last employer (a FAANG) did publish (questionable) numbers suggesting WFH being more efficient when the lockdowns started. When RTO started they flatly refused to back it up with any numbers whatsoever.

> At the end of the day the decision C-suite have to make when planning projects is not remote vs non-remote and apply blindly rather in forming teams with people that by their own nature or preferences will thrive in the setup that's decided.

I think at the end of the day the C-suite has no idea whether WFH is better or worse. Middle management will come out and blame any lack of progress/productivity on literally anything that's not directly related to their own performance, so WFH is a natural scapegoat for incompetent management.

It’s unfortunate that there’s now very little nuance in American discourse especially, whether that’s in business, politics, economics, or society. Everything is an ideological “cause” worth fighting for, with an inverted bell curve showing lots of people at the extremes, and precious few in the middle.

It doesn’t bode well. I fear America is devolving toward a 1980s Lebanon-style civil war, with everyone fighting against everyone at least at one point or another. The military could step in, but then we’d essentially have martial law which isn’t much better. It may seem silly to bring this up in a thread about remote work, but it’s really a microcosm for how polarized we’ve become.

You can't justify the environmental destruction of working in an office just because you like the aesthetic or it makes you feel better. These are not apples and oranges that can be compared like two sides of an equally unproblematic coin, and it makes me sick that people equivocate and make it seem otherwise.

In my experience these people don't thrive in the office either. For software engineering in particular, these people are not useful employees.

It is not realistic to fire people who don't align with someone's preferred management style.

What the comments also show is that people willingly bring themselves in a situation of 3h of commute and then complain. That's not something you'd ever widely see in Europe imho. 3h is insane. I have

I work VERY remote (my employer is in Austin, I live in Michigan), so public transit isn't really an option for that arrangement, but if I'm honest the only real reason I'm doing it is because of Austin housing prices -- I'd much rather live in an urban core within walking distance of work, but that lifestyle is unimaginably expensive in all the places where jobs exist. Instead, I have an aging 1940s tract home in a city 2k miles from work.

The housing crisis is also a transit crisis. We built most of our homes and businesses around the cheap automobile and infinite petro-energy, with the predictable result that we can barely afford to live near the places we work.

Texas -> Michigan is a very long way. Afaict this trend really got started with covid, where people fled to their home towns, right?

> I'd much rather live in an urban core within walking distance of work The best. I have 14 minutes by tram from door to door.

Office mandates are dumb and it should be left up to individual team leaders.

Unfortunately, it's really difficult to run HR for any company of significant size, that accounts for individual differences.

My personal management style was about treating each employee as an individual, but I was also fortunate to have a small team of high-performing, mature, dedicated professionals. My technique would not work on many of the teams that I see out there, these days.

This isn't an "oh it's 4:30 and I'm not going to start something new", it's "It's 11am, and everyone else is busy, I will play solitaire until my manager explicitly tells me which of the 45 tasks they want me to complete".

If you say "go into room X and fetch the Y to do Z", if Y isn't in the right place they will await further instruction. If challenged, they will say they need training on how to handle the situation, or that it's the managers job to ensure the process is right. If you give them the explicit instruciton to tell you when their task is complete, they will come to you and stand next to you until you give them something else to do.

However, if you give them a task like do X at 9:30 every Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday, it will be done, to spec, every time. People like me will occasionally miss it due to other asks, prioritisation,a perceived lack of value of the task, or an "I-know-that-this-isn't-important" mindset.

Part of management is identifying these behavioural differences, and utilising them effectively.

If you have a full team of people who need explicit instruction, your job will be shuffling tickets around. If you have a full team of people who look for improvements, and are constantly thinking ahead, your job will be trying to reign them in and keep them working on the right things. Neither is good, you want a mix of both.

I think in such cases it might be better to get rid of such staff, for your own sake and theirs.

I had to do something like this. Not every hour, but several times a day was needed to keep this person on track and productive. And no, I did not want to check on an otherwise-functional adult that frequently. Nor did anyone else, but circumstances led to them working on my team.

> I think in such cases it might be better to get rid of such staff, for your own sake and theirs.

Yes, that was the best option and is ultimately what happened. Going through the required HR hoops was just as much effort as micromanaging, which is why no one bothered to do it for several years. It was easier to shuffle them off to another project and tell the lead "they're alright, they just need to work on communication".

It made me a bad manager to not have that in my tool kit. There are a lot of people who just want you to tell them exactly what to do.

It’s a preference to not execute two different skill sets when you lack one of them. That’s stressful.

You might be a good developer, but not great at talking to users and figuring out the priority and the solution and executing on that independently.

Or you might not be good at delivering eloquent speeches. Or whatever. Everyone lacks some skillset which they’d prefer someone more qualified handle for them.

Most companies do this by using a cost of labor index for areas. NYC/SF/Seattle being the highest, and then smaller reductions outside.

Basically you don't want to be in a HCOL (High Cost of Living) remote area with a LCOL (Low cost of Labor)

Or in some specific countries and company cultures...

Not necessarily given the methodology. For example, if remote work allows a worker to do their laundry in parallel where they would be otherwise unable to in an office, their productivity has increased, but the gains would not show up in the study. It observes industry productivity, not work productivity.

If it doesn't improve job productivity then at the level where decisions get made I can think of two really significant points regarding remote work.

A. There might be an opportunity to reduce cost because we don't need to pay for as much office space and whatever other expenses are incurred by the employee's physical presence

B. There might be an opportunity to reduce cost because we could recruit contractors in other countries instead of full-time US employees. (Which in turn is going to undermine labor's bargaining power in the US...)

I personally love remote work and believe in the benefits but I think a lot of people with an employee mindset just don't want to acknowledge the existence of B, they may even downvote me for bringing it up, but I guarantee that is one of the main conversations that will come up in the board room as remote work is normalized. Not "oh hey great, now labor can do laundry on company time!"

B. Language issues, cultural issues, and time zone issues all have negative effects.

C. Or it could mean labour is more productive because it has more free time and is less stressed. There's no pointless commute and some chores can be done in the background. Getting slightly distracted by laundry is far less of a loss to productivity than being constantly distracted by conversations, office noise, pointless meetings, and so on.

Your arguments are all MBA-level arguments, which means they look superficially convincing but they lack systemic insight.

There's plenty of evidence that happier workers are more productive. Treating workers like people instead of machinery has comprehensive business benefits. The only real cost is a reduction in the self-perceived relative status of the C-suite.

Essentially this is an argument about hierarchy and loss of face, and not so much about measurable business costs/benefits.

I keep reading this but have seen no evidence. Are you saying executives are invested in the buildings their companies occupy?

Edit: Acme inc owns Acme Real Estate Co and Acme Operations Co. Operations Co leases from Real Estate Co. There's no funny business, it's just how a business might split its assets and liabilities.

In reality there is an opportunity to hire wider pool of full time applicants in US because now you can offer even 1 day a week in the office instead of 5 or doing 1 day a month.

If I have to consider company that is 2h driving away - one way - and be there 5 days a week, that is a deal breaker.

Doing that once a week is still much more manageable and opens up opportunities for employees and employers as well. Especially if someone can't just move to next big city on a whim but can drive there once a week.

Over the last 2 years, my company has had multiple rounds of layoff with US bearing the brunt of them. All new headcount is in Canada, LATAM and India. India sucks because of timezones and LATAM sucks because of language barriers, but our management loves Canada - cultural compatibility, no language or timezone barriers and Canadian worker is cheaper than even the cheapest US workers. Canada is also opening up its borders big time for "skilled labor", so there will be a downward pressure on wages for a long time.

CS is the running joke, but server management, manual data processing, moderation etc. have been prime candidates for outsourcing for a long time.

The reason one's job is/was not outsourced has I think little to do about whether general remote work was an option or not.

Mom and Pop may have always been well positioned to fully embrace outsourcing, but they tend to just copy what they see big companies do without any thought. Additionally, where they do put in thought, they tend to lean “shop local” and see offshoring as a threat to their entire business.

As for those big companies, truly embracing option B has been difficult as even the C-level are typically themselves just employees, not the controlling ownership, and thus don't want to see their jobs outsourced any more than anyone else. Once the boots on the ground are offshored, you may as well offshore the management of them too. Thus there is a strong incentive for management to keep up onshore appearances and limit offshoring to small doses.

Seems like for a lot of companies it is not the case but I can see that CEO type of guys can haggle really well and they call the shots as mostly it is companies that need them more than they need the company so they can disagree on having shackles.

Can you give an example of a headless company that's running fine?

It would be nice if the rich assholes making these decisions realized that allowing people to take care of life stuff during work hours actually does make them more productive. But it's tough to measure, and impossible to convey to someone who can just afford to pay a person to do their dishes.

My least-favorite genre of C-suite-sort LinkedIn post is the kind that explains how they manage to be CEO of startup X, on the board of another company and a charity, an advisor on some other startup, plus maybe a few other things, and still find time for their kids and for travel and such despite all those "challenges".

Gee. What could be the explanation? It must be that you're just that good.

It can't be that all of those are effectively very-part-time jobs (let me see... hm, Startup X has 40 employees and two of them are your executive assistants...) with very flexible schedules, and that you pay more than some people make all year to make twenty hours a week of chores & maintenance & childcare work just vanish.

No, it must be that you're amazing. You should probably give your advice to some working-class single parents, bet they could use your expertise.

For (B) to become commonplace, a government would be allowing a job function or industry to decline or disappear domestically, as has happened to Western manufacturing. I can't think of many industries and job functions suitable for remote work that a country in 2024 would want to cause the decline of. Western countries in particular have been pushing "critical infrastructure" regulations and supply chain regulations that generally oppose offshoring and domestic decline of a wide range of industries--energy, healthcare, food distribution, etc. For example, a supermarket chain is becoming increasingly restricted from conducting actions such as outsourcing their logistics ICT systems to another country to host and support.

Especially when inflation is eating at their pay packets, most voters prefer the option of "cheaper stuff". The idea of the public taking a long term macroeconomic view is, frankly, laughable. Most politicians can't do this either.

> For example, a supermarket chain is becoming increasingly restricted from conducting actions such as outsourcing their logistics ICT systems to another country to host and support

Umm, I've recently worked with a European retailer where a large part of their ICT is already offshored to India. The only remaining local presence (supervisory) was described to me by an insider as 'just two guys and a laptop'...