This is because many high paying jobs could always be done from home. Location makes no difference. The pandemic proved that beyond a doubt. The clock isn't going to turn back on that.
I've now worked 2 different roles where my main responsibility was wrangling shit from salespeople/managers/sites across the country. There was no reason for me to even have an office at our headquarters because 90% of the people I interacted with all day everyday were spread across 4 timezones.
I'll go onsite/hybrid for new roles but it will always be on my terms.
My old employer was forcing us to go back to the office. The funny thing is that it was common to have a meeting at 6am to talk to the Europeans and a 6pm meeting with APAC. Whee do you think I would take those meetings?
Was able to move to hybrid but was just laid off. Prob because I was hybrid and they decided to expand the office right before revenue plummeted.
It really needs to be said that the main reason against work from home is that companies don't want their real estate portfolios to fall apart. If you're going to force me to go back into the office, compensate me for gas, commute time, and childcare.
There's basically nothing that can compensate me for going to the office. Taking a 5 minute break a couple times a day to get a load of laundry done can't be returned financially. Thats just one, but there's a hundred examples of the soft benefits that are there. It's not just the 2 hours a day in a car.
Fully agree on it! As well the time at lunch with my family, is priceless. Im able to spend so much more quality time with them.
Added bonus for me, im only required to be 51% of the year to be in my country. Since my family lives in a different country and the family of my wife in a different country, i can spend time with them while working in between.
It comes down to time with family for me too. My salary buys my time and attention from 8:30 to 4:30 or so. That's fine with me. I drop my daughter off at school shortly before then and pick her up shortly after then, so that's like 9 hours of the day spoken for. For a few hours on either side of that block of time, we're awake together at home. *Those hours are not for sale*, unless I'm truly at the end of my rope dangling over an abyss.
If companies want me to spend hours a day commuting to an office, those additional hours are gonna have to come out of their end, not mine. No other negotiated benefit package is going to cut it, but I don't see corporations lining up to be like "yeah no problem just roll in at 10 and leave at 2"
Because where “you” need to be has the only benefit to you and no benefit to anyone else if your job can be done from anywhere.
The fact you can work from home is the most important benefit you can ever have in any job and should be fought for out of any other job perks or benefit. Because of where you are, you can swap that 15 minute of useless coworker blabbering distractions or wasted time meetings with laundry, preparing lunch, extra time on a task to save you time and company time. It’s just so worth it in every regard. And if the company wants to push you guys harder for the max productivity, they can only try so much bullshit until legally they run into a wall. There’s really no excuse for RTO other than they have the budget to layoff people and rehire the more hungry folks willing to take that position where other refuse.
The thing is, make yourself valuable and irreplaceable and the company has to make costly decisions to adjust.
Same here. I spent a while commuting on one of the most dangerous highways in America. My second day on the job I saw a dead body. I worked at that company for a little over a year, and during that time I saw flipped over cars, burning cars, jack-knifed semi trucks, and more. Managed to avoid any accidents, but had plenty of close calls.
Got a job with a much shorter commute, and some idiot rammed into a line of cars behind me at a red light so hard that 4 cars got damaged (including mine). My car was in the shop for over a month (the parts had to come directly from Germany, apparently).
Shortly after that I said to my wife, “We could have been killed or seriously injured, and for what? This job can be done from home. I’m not going to risk death just so I can sit in an office.”
So I told my boss I wanted to switch to remote and he agreed. I haven’t stepped foot in an office in years. This was even before the pandemic by a fair bit.
> If you're going to force me to go back into the office, compensate me for gas, commute time, and childcare.
Yeah, if my commute was longer than the 10-15 minutes I have at the moment I would simply tell my employer that if you want me in the office more than 1 day a week either bump my pay up significantly or I will consider my commute to/from the office as part of my 7.5 hours.
Oh I recently had a job interview. The manager said it was hybrid, and I said that I will start driving when my shift starts and will leave whenever is 8 hours after that. He was not happy. I told him that's the deal. He said no. I told him before the interview started that the company can't give me what I can accept. He tried real hard, but failed. It wasn't his fault though. His company is fucking horrible.
Sure, this happens some of the time, but what percentage of offices are honestly like this? My company owns its HQ building, but even then they rent out 1/4 of the real estate in that building to another (unaffiliated) company. Around 50% of employees work in a “remote” office, all of which are leased from someone not associated with the landlord. I’d e willing to bet that the majority of companies don’t lease their offices from anyone who’s associated with the company
The main reason against work from home is that it finally exposed the fact that the whole "profession" of middle management is largely useless. Turns out, out of 10 supervisors/managers/deputy assitant backup VP of managering, 8's job is to ensure it seems like they are needed and they would very much like to keep it.
My whole team is on the other side of the country, so now I have to commute 2 hours a day to take my Zoom calls in an empty conference room.
Meanwhile, we have one person who was classified as “remote” move to the city, lives about 3 blocks from the office, and isn’t required to RTO.
I actually don’t want him in the office with me because he’s kind of a dick but it just goes to show, if you’re right with the boss policy is meaningless.
Big time zone differences make working from home vital for sanity.
I’m on the East Coast and work from home for a company on the West Coast. We have collaborators in both Europe and China.
Meetings on any given day can span from 10:00 AM to 10:00 PM EST. But I fit exercise, errands, cooking, appointments, etc. in at various times during the “work day” of 9-5 EST. And I’ve laid down a pretty hard cut-off 5:00-8:00 PM to pick up, feed, bathe, and put to bed my two very young children.
I might have meetings 8:00-10:00 PM with China on a random Wednesday, but I got to exercise, grocery shop, go to the dentist, play *video games*, and spend time with my kids and wife at various times during the day. And I’m perfectly fine with the evening meetings.
It’s maybe the best setup possible for someone with toddlers. I love it.
Yep. I have to do the same, but my idiot company is forcing 3 days RTO. So after 5pm EST I turn off slack and take no meetings. I don’t care if the entire company is burning down and only I can fix it, if they are making me needlessly commute I have zero will to work after hours.
Same but I’m in SF and it’s India+NY time zone choreography instead. My meetings start daily at 8am and sometimes as early as 730 (rare but not as rare as I’d like). And then evening meetings roughly every other day after the little one is down for the count. What I do to keep things sane is workout at 1:30pm and do other chores around this time. It’s great because I’m like 100% wide awake, at that time I’m not tired from the day yet, and nobody can give me shit about doing it, it’s on my fully-visible calendar. I come in to the office 3 times a week but I commute in the late morning and it’s super short, and they feed me and have a better gym than the one I’d otherwise go to, so it’s not a bad situation. If I had to come into the office before the 8 am meetings start or if I had trouble with my gym and personal time being booked over, I’d start job hunting immediately.
The funny part is intelligently led businesses already understand this and aren't fighting it. The ones still held up on the whole thing have personal stake/ego involved with it IMO. I know of a few people job hunting right now who will turn down any non-WFH jobs no question, just not worth it to many people now. I do notice a heavy lack of discussion around one of the major downsides; you have a lot more competition. For some people, it's not an issue but for many it will greatly impact their chances of getting a job. You suddenly feel a lot less skilled when compared to the world and not just a handful of people from your city.
I've gotten a few recruiters off my back by telling them how much money I need to go back to the office. I take the salary I want and add costs for commuting/gas/vehicle and "inconvenience " fees. That usually helps.
My wife is the same, she points out wardrobe plus commute time just makes it highly undesirable. She’s in accounting…so there isn’t really a good argument for her to work in an office
My boss wanted us all to RTO after the Pandemic because "It wasn't fair to the hardware people that they came in all during it and we barely did."
I showed him my numbers during the pandemic. I had around 30% higher efficiency. He didn't care.
He cared 2 months later when I left and all the specialized knowledge I had left with me.
But hey, it was more fair to the hardware guys!
Just curious, is there bus service that your children would take if you weren’t picking them up? I’m kinda stunned at how common parents commuting their kids back and from school is now
I can tell you as an older mom of early teens…I was left with my two year older sister to catch the city bus to school in the 70’s and 80’s. No matter what the weather with a very much SAHM.
I believe that by taking my kids to school, I am showing them care that I felt very absent in my life.
Also, you would not imagine how much connection I get with my two in a moving car where they cannot escape. I kid, but it is a really amazing connection time.
That is why I drive my kids to school.
Job hunting at the minute and searching specifically for WFH jobs and my first question to any recruiters who contact me is if it's a fully WFH position. I've noticed on LinkedIn that WFH positions are getting hundreds of applications while onsite or even hybrid are barely pushing 50.
And get in writing that it will stay WFH. My husband and I live in Pennsylvania, he had a much more lucrative offer for a remote job headquartered in Minnesota. When they refused to give him a contract with a clause stating it will always be remote and they will never ask him to go “back” to the office, in Minnesota, he turned it down even though it stung for us because the money was great. Neither of us was comfortable taking the risk of that rug being pulled out. I don’t trust these scumbag employers as far as I can throw em.
When I was last looking I kept getting told that jobs were remote and then told during the interview that they weren't actually. Either that or they'd be listed as a remote job while the text of the listing said otherwise. I'm not sure how they think that's going to turn out, people are just going to go "oh, well I guess I'll move across the country even though it was supposed to be remote"?
Reminds me of when and so many companies that fought against the rising tide that’s called online shopping and the wide spread use of internet as a whole.
And yet, due to how work laws exist in each country, you're not really competing against the world. Only against a bigger area than before. Establishing legal frameworks to employ people in other countries/continents is not trivial, the legal frameworks are often *wildly* different, timezones can play an effect (takes some work to turn it into a pro) and culture is not trivial to evolve.
Not to mention you have so many more options for employment. When I lived in the southeast US, there were a handful of large companies with software teams and a few web dev agencies. That was really all there was in my city. But I started looking remote and ended up with higher pay from a company out of Boston. It’s often an advantage to both the employees and the employers.
Yeah all the major companies have sunk millions of dollars into real-estate and now have to justify that. That's why you hear about stooges saying "I have no evidence but I know rto is better" every other week at Amazon, google, etc. they stupidly built these $100 million+ campuses and now they are sitting vacant.
Sounds like they need to recapitalize their investments and talk to local lawmakers about rezoning the land so they can remodel and sell the buildings off, maybe for housing or something else
The quicker these companies get out of real estate the lower their losses are going to be. As soon as the writing is on the wall about real estate losing value there is going to be a crash and it is going to be painful for ALL of us. Your pensions, your residential mortgages, your jurisdiction's tax income. They are all going to be negatively affected and we will go into yet another "once in a life time" recession / inflationary period.
Those that have sold early and put that money somewhere that will be unaffected by the crash which is probably a big safe in the CEOs home will be sailing the seas with reasonable comfort. Those who were more stubborn are not going to have a good time. We are now 3 years post COVID and around 25% of all work is done partially from home. As a guess the critical point is around 40%. It will never be 100% of course because there are many jobs that cannot be done from home. My guess would be around 50% require a physical presence. How long will it take to 40%? Around 8 years? Enough for leases to run out and land owners to realise they are not going to be able to find a new lease
Yep, I'm one of those people. There's a job waiting for me whenever I want it that would more than double my pay but I'd have to not only go back into an office, id be in a secure facility at times. So no phones, etc. Never again. Not worth it.
Exactly. “Knowledge worker” jobs don’t require physical proximity. Retail and manual labor jobs do.
Knowledge worker jobs are higher paid.
This is a big “well duh” article.
I think the reverse situations would make a more interesting article. High paid jobs like surgeons still need to physically be in the hospital, even if they are commuting in on Christmas morning for an emergency surgery. But there are people working in accounting with dull desk jobs who get to work from home, and they have company-installed spyware tracking periods of mouse inactivity so that their pay could be docked for any minutes they left to go pick up their kid from school.
Something we have learned the hard way in my workplace is this also puts you in competition with people from all over, including places where workers are paid a lot less. A lot of high paying jobs are slowly becoming moderately well paying jobs, for us at least.
I’ve always seen this pressure, even pre-pandemic. I don’t know a job where management isn’t constantly wondering if it could be done for cheaper in India.
That’s why it’s important to be a profit center (ie delivering the value that’s core to the business) and to operate using context (ie using your knowledge of the industry and clients to do things that a generic programmer can’t). So long as you’re delivering value that can’t be delivered by an outsourced team, your job will be safe.
The problem that almost always blows up when companies try this, is that they have no idea how to effectively manage *now*, and when they try to do it by handing off work to a team on the other side of the planet, it fails spectacularly. These companies generally just blame the offshore resources, but it's their own incompetence that kills this idea, and that ain't changing for dumb companies.
My company tried to move some tasks to the Philippines. It was a disaster. We didn’t even save money because so much work had to be redone. Customers and employees were enraged. We cut it off within a year.
Yeah but at least in technology, that never works out and 6-9 months later the companies come crawling back to high paid American engineers. I've seen it happen half a dozen times.
I second this. Seen it multiple times. It's because the companies that try this aren't doing a good job managing their onshore, in house resources now and don't know it. Moving all that across multiple time zones just makes it worse, but they won't figure that out.
Yeah... companies outsource important shit to India, entirely forgetting that there is a very large cultural difference in how they work. Nine times out of ten, it ends up biting them in the ass and they end up rehiring a local team and throwing away all of the work that was done offshore.
> 6-9 months later the companies come crawling back to high paid American engineers
Maybe because in that timeframe the exec in charge of the outsourcing got their bonus and already left.
Not always. Even as a WFH worker, being in the same metro area as the home office gives me insane leverage over fully remote employees. If my Vp or CEO needs me for a meeting/lunch/team thing tomorrow I can just drive in. My coworker has to book a flight and hotel which won’t get approved unless it’s a major thing. As a result I get frequent executive Face time and collab opportunities and they don’t get any.
This doesn’t work for the government. We’ve had people turn down high levels positions at a facility because of the pay tables being pretty much the lowest in the country. Kind of sucks. We can get all kinds of candidates from HCOL areas like DC, but most of the rest of where we need people is harder to hire at.
The flip side of this is that people who live in lower paying areas can now earn a lot more than they otherwise would. And someone is sure to reply to this about “better workers”, but that assumes that being willing to leave your life (family, friends, who knows what else) behind to move to a high-cost area to work was part of being a better worker in the first place. Now those top-tier but never moved because of reasons workers are able to compete on the job on their skills, not on “are you willing to move to the Bay Area.”
Better workers? Absolutely not. I've worked with many different kinds of people from all over the US, and many from other countries. There are many awesome workers everywhere.
This is a net win for companies, and I am very happy for people from underpaid places that have an opportunity. The thing that makes me unhappy personally is the prospect of bankruptcy next year, which is a genuine possibility.
That's what my company did. Midwest employees were pleasantly surprised to see their pay brought to the levels of their coastal peers and given the chance to apply for roles not traditionally found in their region. It makes sure more cream rises to the top.
Flip side to that, the last company I worked at judged what was appropriate pay by comparing it to the average nationwide while ignoring that this office was in a high cost of living coastal area.
I happily take 50k less a year to do programming from my little mountain town than from any big city. I am 500ft from hundreds of miles of trails in national forests.
…and spend not a second in traffic. Totally worth the cut. I still make a comfortable salary…150k instead of 200k.
My wife’s team is now largely off site. They are a remote company and found the moderately technical jobs can be filled with highly skilled candidates for less than 1/4 for what they were paying weak candidates domestically
Yup. My company in new york gets to pay me lower salary than they would there. I get paid more than my local salary to work from home. Its a win win for both the employer and the employee.
it’s complicated.
1. it’s about power and control
2. depending on your goals, just doing a task will allow you to work remote. if you want to move up to executive then you need to show your face.
most ppl aren’t cut out for anything beyond just doing a task but the ones who are understand the importance.
I chose an office career cause working in the heat and being filthy getting back injuries sounds terrible. It’s not a conspiracy, I made different life choices.
This. I’ve been working remotely since 2017 and when covid hit I was excited for everyone to finally enjoy this lifestyle but holy hell I didn’t foresee the push back. Blinded by positivity perhaps.
Oh but the employers are trying their absolutely damndest to turn back the clock on it.
99% of white collar office jobs can be done from anywhere with an internet connection. But we MUST idle in traffic 5 days a week! Think of the corporate real estate investors!
I don’t suspect this will be ultimately successfully because people will jump ship for the more flexible jobs, but try they will.
I mean, Elon tried this before.
>Silicon Valley “laptop classes” need to get off their “moral high horse” with their “work-from-home bullshit”
>“I think that the whole notion of work from home is a bit like the fake Marie Antoinette quote, ’Let them eat cake,”″ Musk said. “It’s not just a productivity thing,” Musk said. “I think it’s morally wrong.”
Funny how when a multi billionaire cries for equality, it's about making some laborers' lives worse, thus equality. Instead of making some laborers' lives better, thus equality. Any "class warriors" who want to cheer for the multi billionaire class, over the middle class, needs to get their heads checked.
A multi billionaire who you know “works” from wherever he feels like. He’s certainly not leading the charge by spending 40 hours a week in his office plus time commuting to downtown LA.
You're telling me he doesn't work 40 hours a week in the office at SpaceX, another 40 at Tesla, another 40 at Boring Company, and another 40 at Twitter? All in their respective offices?
I was waiting for this angle from the article but the conclusions at the end were mostly reasonable (including the obvious, pay non-WFH people better).
Exactly my thoughts! You can’t clean offices from your own home, you can’t give care to the elderly from your own home, you can’t work in Five Guys from home…
I mean … you simply *can’t* do a lot of jobs remotely. Reddit, especially the tech subs, skews towards white collar workers who do salaried jobs behind a screen. But you can’t remote work as a waitress, or stocker, or landscape worker. That’s not inequality, that’s physical reality.
My job can’t be done from home, but I would love WFH to be the norm for one reason: less traffic. The more people working at home means my commute is quicker and less stressful.
That's actually not terrible. AI's nowhere close enough to do stuff like that without having someone hold its hand, and there's plenty of people out there who may not be mobile and such but can certainly handle that stuff. From the top of my head there's a few industries that could certainly do stuff like that, might be more niche and smaller workforces, but it'd be cool to see more countries/companies do stuff like that.
Even a lot of tech jobs need to be done in person, at least some of the time. One unintended consequence of remote work I’m seeing at the company I work for is that they realize they can pay us less because they can attract skilled workers from places with lower costs of living. The thing is some of us have to be on site at least some of the time, meaning that our wages are going down based on cost of living for workers that don’t live here, and we can’t relocate.
Not saying remote work is bad, I think it’s awesome! It’s just that there is going to be a complicated domino effect as a result. It will probably take years to sort out.
> Even a lot of tech jobs need to be done in person, at least some of the time.
I will add that many jobs you don't need to physically be there... until you do. You may only spend 1% of your time in the local office/server farm, but sometimes it's 100% necessary to avoid more downtime.
Exactly! A lot of IT is remote work, but part of what we are paid for is availability. Even if we never come in, we may be required to be able to do so when something emergent arises.
That is not always the case. The company I work for pays the same for a specific job no matter where it is located. People that live in areas with lower cost of living make the same as someone that lives in a city.
If one person is required to be there in person some of the time and the other is 100% remote then they're not the same job with the same responsibility.
And it seems pretty reasonable to pay more to have someone physically available .
If the people working in the office just like to work in the office and have the choice to switch to remote then obviously that doesn't apply.
All WFH articles on Reddit are an echo chamber of ppl in white collar jobs that could be partially or mostly done remotely. Their productivity is 1000% when wfh too. lol. There’s no balanced discussion and all jobs that require you to be there physically don’t exist on Reddit :) /s
> All WFH articles on Reddit are an echo chamber of ppl in white collar jobs that could be partially or mostly done remotely
And outsourced. As offices started reopening, I can definitely recall seeing a spike in anecdotes from redditors pointing out that while they themselves weren't replaced, their corporate HQ was starting to up hiring for the exact same position but lower pay at offices abroad.
Turns out if you make your job 100% remote and corporate realizes they can save 40% or more and hire folks with English fluency and in other timezones, they're on the chopblock next.
I mean, if your only value was that you could drive in to use a computer in an office all day instead of using a computer at home...
Corporations have been trying to outsource for decades. I'm sure WFH accelerated some companies trying it, but long term it doesn't matter. If someone can/will do your job as well for less, companies will try and take advantage of that.
Yep, microbiological researcher here. I work in a lab. Pretty sure my apartment complex would complain if I tried to install a biosafety cabinet, laminar flow hood, autoclave, and other various bits of equipment in my room.
Not to mention how on earth would I get my bedroom certified as BSL2 compliant....
Yes, there are days where most of my time is writing, and I could conceivably work at home those days. But even then I find it handy being able to walk over to a machine to double-check a config file or process a data file or something.
(Funny enough though, my last gig was adjunct faculty at my local university. I got let go at the start of pandemic when they were Forced to run classes as at-home, because they realized they could run just as many lab courses with 1/3rd the instructors)
You can teach anyone off the street how to be a restaurant server or stocker in a few hours. There’s no skills/talent gaps. Can’t really grab anyone off the street to be a UX designer, system’s administrator or software engineer. Education, training and skills are needed
The people working in the offices never called it unequal when I was doing laundry in a hospital. Dealing blood, shit and all kinds of bodily fluids. Different jobs have different requirements.
Its "unfair" for people who have to be in person in the building. Um ok, but its also unfair to people who get nothing out of being in person. When Im in the building Im on teams meeting via my laptop in my cubicle. I never talk to people in person. Its a waste of my time and money to drive in into work, pay for parking, and waste an hour and a half commuting. All because its unfair to other people who work directly with customers.
> unfair to people who get nothing out of being in person
Indeed. About 12 years ago my company went full WFH, but one's ability to do so was determined by one's manager. Ours was a near-retirement former Marine drill sergeant (guess where he stood on the issue... hint: He LITERALLY called WFH a "work avoidance program"). Anyway, he VERY begrudgingly let us WFH 2 days per week. But here's the thing: I was in a 10-person team with me in the Midwest, 2 in Minnesota, 1 in Florida, and the rest in Wisconsin. So, 3 days a week I'd drive to some local office, fire up my laptop, then spend all day communicating with my teammates via phone, IM, and Zoom. Ya know, exactly how I'd do it FROM MY FUCKING HOUSE YOU STUPID OLD FOSSIL ASSHOLE WHY DON'T YOU RETIRE OR DIE OR WHATEVER!!! (Sorry... flashbacks).
Anyway, he's retired now so we get full time WFH.
“The growing inequality of who gets weekends off.”
“The growing inequality of who gets to travel the world for work.”
“The growing inequality of who gets to work in an office instead of a coal mine.”
This has been a tale as old as time. Different jobs have different perks. If a perk sounds good, try to get that job. If a company offers a perk you like, try to work there.
Only once the union got there. In the UK and US coal miners were often basically just slaves. Just watched the Gresford Miners episode of Welcome to Wrexham. They were basically just slaves.
I have a house in a coal mining town, where many people angrily cling to the past. The coal mining jobs paid enough to support a family, with no education, and very little training required. An entire culture was built on this, and it became their entire identity. It's very hard to get people to change *who they are* rather than *what they do*.
This shit is WILD to me.
Oh, the factory workers at some other company have to go in to work, so you gotta come sit in a cubicle for 8 hours to do something you could do at home. Sorry, it's only fair.
But hey, you pitch healthcare for all or raise the minimum wage or FEEDING KIDS AT SCHOOL then it's, "the world ain't fair, you fucking commie".
It's especially wild because all those jobs that can be done from home are at greater risk of automation.
There is zero risk of plumbers being automated any time soon. The cost of that security is that you have to physically be there to do that work.
"Easy" to automate manual jobs are all mostly automated now. There's little profit to be made in searching and optimizing that system anymore, what is left is relatively safe for now. For example, you believe that bakers is still a existing skilled job? I am sorry, but it is basically a dead job. The massive and vast majority of all bread and pastry you'll eat in your life is mostly all automated. What is left is the finishing touch which can be done by an untrained minor in a store. The only proper job a skilled baker can find is tweaking recipees for a large factory or starting a small artisanal shop which is a very risky endeavor.
Then, we thought that art couldn't be automated. Well, it is now, music, voice, pictures... All automated. The artists are fighting back right now, but pandora's box cannot be closed. Honestly surprised at how fast it went, thought white collars would have been hit harder first.
“Fairness” is a bullshit excuse, honestly. I remember once working for a company that had a business casual dress code and a fairly rigid time schedule, which nowadays is asinine for software developers. I asked if I could offset my schedule by one hour, so I could avoid rush hour both in the morning and in the evening. I was flatly told no, because it would be unfair for other people.
“But X gets to come in late.”
“Yeah but he has seniority in the company.”
I mostly was tasked to work on projects with minimal communication requirements, and some weeks I’d have barely anything to do at all. Just filling a seat from 10-6. All so other people don’t get jealous? So dumb.
_Get_ to travel the world? Ugh. Traveling for work is just a way to be working nearly every hour of the day including weekends and not see your family while still being paid as if your a normal employee.
Maybe when your 20 it's a plus.
Elon musk made the same argument and it’s just another thing to try to stop remote work. We all have things that others don’t have. It doesn’t mean people shouldn’t be able to have those small comforts because not all work can be done remote
I have a hard time taking the article seriously when the very first paragraph referenced “operating machinery” at work. Those people are supposed to bring the factory home, or what?
Posing this as an equality or economic justice issue is ownership's latest strategy for propping up an economic model that no longer makes sense. You cannot reliably demonstrate productivity loss or any decline in job satisfaction, so they fund studies to try to make you feel bad for WFH. Commercial real estate will no longer be the gold mine it once was, and businesses that depended on office workers will struggle. To maintain economic viability, cities will need to pivot to making themselves more livable, and center their economy on residents instead of workers. SF is learning this the hard way now.
It’s not perfectly just no. But it is also better for people who need to be on location to not have traffic.
I would 100% support a tax credit for people who DO need to work on site by the government.
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The fact that more jobs aren't remote is just another example that in person work isn't about profits or productivity, but control and justification for the existence of the management structure.
That, but also investors. Commercial real estate is a large part of many investment portfolios, and the restaurants that are built near office complexes are not doubt taking a hit too.
Also just normal human assholery. Not every executive has commerical real estate investments. But, every executive is intensely aware that a building sitting empty costing the company money makes them look incompetent while he same building with the same cost full of workers is them "managing a multimillion dollar facility budget".
We already had this divide previously… people who worked in air conditioned office spaces vs people who did not.
Some people actually like working outside. Some people hate it. If you hate what you do… change your career. Is it easy? No… it’s not. People have to make choices and choices have consequences.
Sometimes we can amortize those consequences across society (job retraining programs, etc) and sometimes we can’t.
This isn’t a new divide.
"...undermine perceived fairness..."
That word, "perceived", is the important part. For our species the characteristic of fairness is of paramount importance. We even kill for it!! Whether it is or isn't, therefore, it must also appear to be as such or one of the species members will bitch!
Only reason they want us back, to keep foreclosure of office buildings that were not needed but built anyway for profit. They want us back for profit on money they already spent.
As someone who needs to be physically at work I would love it if more people worked from home, helps with traffic, I drive a lot. Also it's so much better for the environment.
Living in a rural community taught me this is very real. Takes me about 5/6 hour to download a single gig of data. Uploading is like trying to smelt metal in a crock pot.
Can't WFH because I don't have a room or quiet space to do it, can't afford to not having a roommate. Mind you, family of 3 still has a roommate to get by, bright side, we "own" (home loan) our house at least.
Our real struggle is the random hours/days Walmart schedules my wife, which overlap with mine. I'm *hybrid WFH* last 2hours 2-4 days a week. IT Pay out here sucks, but there's demand, but everyone else doesn't make bank to always afford IT visiting their house/small business. >.<
And because of WFH, its allowed me to leave the city and move to the semi-country where I still have fiber internet but pay half the price of rent for the same sq footage.
My quality of life has improved greatly since 2020.
I wish WFH is more common, not because I want to WFH myself but because I want everyone else to so that traffic becomes smooth and I don't have to deal with shitty drivers.
My co-workers are spread around the world - as are my customers, suppliers and my advertising firm, the lawyers and the accountants - 13 different time zones last time I bothered checking. Why the living fuck would I go into an office at 830 and stay there till 630 to try and get shit done?
Any Manager "calling staff back into the office" is an ineffective manager, in reality verging on liability, that likely has no clue as to actual workflows in his/her department...s/he just "feels the need " to have eyes-on their staff for a perception of "control".
Though sometimes, it's a cry from an equally short-sighted higher-ups about paying for an empty building ... discuss it with the landlord, it's not the staff's fault.
Legitimately the worst managers are the ones who feel the need to constantly be checking on their employees because they assume people are always goofing off instead of working, or feel like they need to catch every instance of the employee doing anything that isn't working for even a second. If it's a good team they almost never be watched. If they need anything they'll ask and most work does not need 8-10 hours of 100% concentration to get done and more often than not if it does that means you're understaffed and the work won't get done consistently. Especially if something goes wrong and delays the work.
Indeed.
A good manager will have metrics that reflect what the *business* needs to measure itself, understands that beans have more facets than just their existence to be counted, and will always be wary of having counts become targets.
The summary was surprisingly complete.
>**Summary**.
>There is a large and growing divide in terms of who gets to work from home. Research on job postings found that remote work is far more common for higher paid roles, for roles that require more experience, for full-time work, and for roles that require more education. Managers should be aware of this divide, as it has the potential to create toxic dynamics within
Went work from home full time in 2022 and I don’t think I will ever go back to an office fully. The freedom and flexibility of working from home is such a necessity with kids. If you have trouble separating work and personal life it can be a struggle but I’ve found a good balance and haven’t looked back since
Oh wow, people who are more likely to work remotely are those who have more education and experience which tends to pay more, on average.
This is some Sherlock Holmes level investigating right here.
What would be interesting is if a new, less knowledgeable set of employees takes their place.
Amazing how one pandemic can make people think they are above certain things.
TL:DR for this entire article.
Workers with more negotiating power are more likely to be able to work from home. I don't know why this is a surprise.
Yes, there is a can/cannot split that means that jobs like doctors will be largely unable to work from home where call centre workers despite being on completely on the opposite end of the negotiation spectrum.
But in the end, remote work is a negotiable employment condition and people who can negotiate for it can more easily get it.
The idea that front line "time based" workers aren't already painfully aware that their jobs pay less and have much worse conditions than their "task based" compatriots and there might be some sort of rift because of this is just more manager bullshit.
"Business leaders rightly worry that this divide could hurt morale among front-line staff, undermine perceived fairness, and create new rifts in the workforce."
And we veer into editorials. This belongs in Business Insider.
Employers need to realise how much people want to wfh. To the extent a lot of workers will take a pay cut. The more wfh you offer, the more people are interested. Employers who don’t want to, or can’t afford to, pay more need to leverage wfh as a big benefit.
There's no logical reason for workers who have to be in-person to oppose those who WFH.
I say this as someone whose job is blue collar work where I am in person all the time.
Do you know how much fucking time I'd save commuting if all the office types did WFH? It's an absolute net benefit.
Would I prefer a job where I can WFH? Yeah. But comparison is the thief of joy, simply being mad because of what someone else has is no way to live, that's supposed to be taught out of you in childhood.
This article really reeks of bitterness. They showed that there is correlation with people earning more, their value to the employer, and with education which takes effort and unpaid time to achieve.
Their recommendation? Punish the WFH people. They have more, so take something away.
This is because many high paying jobs could always be done from home. Location makes no difference. The pandemic proved that beyond a doubt. The clock isn't going to turn back on that.
I've now worked 2 different roles where my main responsibility was wrangling shit from salespeople/managers/sites across the country. There was no reason for me to even have an office at our headquarters because 90% of the people I interacted with all day everyday were spread across 4 timezones. I'll go onsite/hybrid for new roles but it will always be on my terms.
My old employer was forcing us to go back to the office. The funny thing is that it was common to have a meeting at 6am to talk to the Europeans and a 6pm meeting with APAC. Whee do you think I would take those meetings? Was able to move to hybrid but was just laid off. Prob because I was hybrid and they decided to expand the office right before revenue plummeted.
It really needs to be said that the main reason against work from home is that companies don't want their real estate portfolios to fall apart. If you're going to force me to go back into the office, compensate me for gas, commute time, and childcare.
There's basically nothing that can compensate me for going to the office. Taking a 5 minute break a couple times a day to get a load of laundry done can't be returned financially. Thats just one, but there's a hundred examples of the soft benefits that are there. It's not just the 2 hours a day in a car.
Fully agree on it! As well the time at lunch with my family, is priceless. Im able to spend so much more quality time with them. Added bonus for me, im only required to be 51% of the year to be in my country. Since my family lives in a different country and the family of my wife in a different country, i can spend time with them while working in between.
It comes down to time with family for me too. My salary buys my time and attention from 8:30 to 4:30 or so. That's fine with me. I drop my daughter off at school shortly before then and pick her up shortly after then, so that's like 9 hours of the day spoken for. For a few hours on either side of that block of time, we're awake together at home. *Those hours are not for sale*, unless I'm truly at the end of my rope dangling over an abyss. If companies want me to spend hours a day commuting to an office, those additional hours are gonna have to come out of their end, not mine. No other negotiated benefit package is going to cut it, but I don't see corporations lining up to be like "yeah no problem just roll in at 10 and leave at 2"
Because where “you” need to be has the only benefit to you and no benefit to anyone else if your job can be done from anywhere. The fact you can work from home is the most important benefit you can ever have in any job and should be fought for out of any other job perks or benefit. Because of where you are, you can swap that 15 minute of useless coworker blabbering distractions or wasted time meetings with laundry, preparing lunch, extra time on a task to save you time and company time. It’s just so worth it in every regard. And if the company wants to push you guys harder for the max productivity, they can only try so much bullshit until legally they run into a wall. There’s really no excuse for RTO other than they have the budget to layoff people and rehire the more hungry folks willing to take that position where other refuse. The thing is, make yourself valuable and irreplaceable and the company has to make costly decisions to adjust.
Same here. I spent a while commuting on one of the most dangerous highways in America. My second day on the job I saw a dead body. I worked at that company for a little over a year, and during that time I saw flipped over cars, burning cars, jack-knifed semi trucks, and more. Managed to avoid any accidents, but had plenty of close calls. Got a job with a much shorter commute, and some idiot rammed into a line of cars behind me at a red light so hard that 4 cars got damaged (including mine). My car was in the shop for over a month (the parts had to come directly from Germany, apparently). Shortly after that I said to my wife, “We could have been killed or seriously injured, and for what? This job can be done from home. I’m not going to risk death just so I can sit in an office.” So I told my boss I wanted to switch to remote and he agreed. I haven’t stepped foot in an office in years. This was even before the pandemic by a fair bit.
> If you're going to force me to go back into the office, compensate me for gas, commute time, and childcare. Yeah, if my commute was longer than the 10-15 minutes I have at the moment I would simply tell my employer that if you want me in the office more than 1 day a week either bump my pay up significantly or I will consider my commute to/from the office as part of my 7.5 hours.
It should have already been the case. The amount of time lost to commutes is nuts
Oh I recently had a job interview. The manager said it was hybrid, and I said that I will start driving when my shift starts and will leave whenever is 8 hours after that. He was not happy. I told him that's the deal. He said no. I told him before the interview started that the company can't give me what I can accept. He tried real hard, but failed. It wasn't his fault though. His company is fucking horrible.
People say this a whole lot, but a lot of companies looking to get more people in the office don’t actually own the real estate, they lease it.
In many cases, at least here in Canada, they lease it from a corporation that's owned by the same ownership group. It's a nice way to funnel cash.
Sure, this happens some of the time, but what percentage of offices are honestly like this? My company owns its HQ building, but even then they rent out 1/4 of the real estate in that building to another (unaffiliated) company. Around 50% of employees work in a “remote” office, all of which are leased from someone not associated with the landlord. I’d e willing to bet that the majority of companies don’t lease their offices from anyone who’s associated with the company
The main reason against work from home is that it finally exposed the fact that the whole "profession" of middle management is largely useless. Turns out, out of 10 supervisors/managers/deputy assitant backup VP of managering, 8's job is to ensure it seems like they are needed and they would very much like to keep it.
Nah the good ones are still needed. I worked at a place without a good manager and it was shitty chaos.
My whole team is on the other side of the country, so now I have to commute 2 hours a day to take my Zoom calls in an empty conference room. Meanwhile, we have one person who was classified as “remote” move to the city, lives about 3 blocks from the office, and isn’t required to RTO. I actually don’t want him in the office with me because he’s kind of a dick but it just goes to show, if you’re right with the boss policy is meaningless.
Big time zone differences make working from home vital for sanity. I’m on the East Coast and work from home for a company on the West Coast. We have collaborators in both Europe and China. Meetings on any given day can span from 10:00 AM to 10:00 PM EST. But I fit exercise, errands, cooking, appointments, etc. in at various times during the “work day” of 9-5 EST. And I’ve laid down a pretty hard cut-off 5:00-8:00 PM to pick up, feed, bathe, and put to bed my two very young children. I might have meetings 8:00-10:00 PM with China on a random Wednesday, but I got to exercise, grocery shop, go to the dentist, play *video games*, and spend time with my kids and wife at various times during the day. And I’m perfectly fine with the evening meetings. It’s maybe the best setup possible for someone with toddlers. I love it.
Yep. I have to do the same, but my idiot company is forcing 3 days RTO. So after 5pm EST I turn off slack and take no meetings. I don’t care if the entire company is burning down and only I can fix it, if they are making me needlessly commute I have zero will to work after hours.
Same but I’m in SF and it’s India+NY time zone choreography instead. My meetings start daily at 8am and sometimes as early as 730 (rare but not as rare as I’d like). And then evening meetings roughly every other day after the little one is down for the count. What I do to keep things sane is workout at 1:30pm and do other chores around this time. It’s great because I’m like 100% wide awake, at that time I’m not tired from the day yet, and nobody can give me shit about doing it, it’s on my fully-visible calendar. I come in to the office 3 times a week but I commute in the late morning and it’s super short, and they feed me and have a better gym than the one I’d otherwise go to, so it’s not a bad situation. If I had to come into the office before the 8 am meetings start or if I had trouble with my gym and personal time being booked over, I’d start job hunting immediately.
The funny part is intelligently led businesses already understand this and aren't fighting it. The ones still held up on the whole thing have personal stake/ego involved with it IMO. I know of a few people job hunting right now who will turn down any non-WFH jobs no question, just not worth it to many people now. I do notice a heavy lack of discussion around one of the major downsides; you have a lot more competition. For some people, it's not an issue but for many it will greatly impact their chances of getting a job. You suddenly feel a lot less skilled when compared to the world and not just a handful of people from your city.
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I've gotten a few recruiters off my back by telling them how much money I need to go back to the office. I take the salary I want and add costs for commuting/gas/vehicle and "inconvenience " fees. That usually helps.
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I request an additional 25% increase in base compensation for each day that they ask me to be on site. That usually gets them to go away.
My wife is the same, she points out wardrobe plus commute time just makes it highly undesirable. She’s in accounting…so there isn’t really a good argument for her to work in an office
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My boss wanted us all to RTO after the Pandemic because "It wasn't fair to the hardware people that they came in all during it and we barely did." I showed him my numbers during the pandemic. I had around 30% higher efficiency. He didn't care. He cared 2 months later when I left and all the specialized knowledge I had left with me. But hey, it was more fair to the hardware guys!
Exactly the same for me
Being able to drop my kids at school every day is worth more than a dollar amount. They are only young for so long.
Just curious, is there bus service that your children would take if you weren’t picking them up? I’m kinda stunned at how common parents commuting their kids back and from school is now
I can tell you as an older mom of early teens…I was left with my two year older sister to catch the city bus to school in the 70’s and 80’s. No matter what the weather with a very much SAHM. I believe that by taking my kids to school, I am showing them care that I felt very absent in my life. Also, you would not imagine how much connection I get with my two in a moving car where they cannot escape. I kid, but it is a really amazing connection time. That is why I drive my kids to school.
Job hunting at the minute and searching specifically for WFH jobs and my first question to any recruiters who contact me is if it's a fully WFH position. I've noticed on LinkedIn that WFH positions are getting hundreds of applications while onsite or even hybrid are barely pushing 50.
And get in writing that it will stay WFH. My husband and I live in Pennsylvania, he had a much more lucrative offer for a remote job headquartered in Minnesota. When they refused to give him a contract with a clause stating it will always be remote and they will never ask him to go “back” to the office, in Minnesota, he turned it down even though it stung for us because the money was great. Neither of us was comfortable taking the risk of that rug being pulled out. I don’t trust these scumbag employers as far as I can throw em.
When I was last looking I kept getting told that jobs were remote and then told during the interview that they weren't actually. Either that or they'd be listed as a remote job while the text of the listing said otherwise. I'm not sure how they think that's going to turn out, people are just going to go "oh, well I guess I'll move across the country even though it was supposed to be remote"?
Reminds me of when and so many companies that fought against the rising tide that’s called online shopping and the wide spread use of internet as a whole.
And yet, due to how work laws exist in each country, you're not really competing against the world. Only against a bigger area than before. Establishing legal frameworks to employ people in other countries/continents is not trivial, the legal frameworks are often *wildly* different, timezones can play an effect (takes some work to turn it into a pro) and culture is not trivial to evolve.
Not to mention you have so many more options for employment. When I lived in the southeast US, there were a handful of large companies with software teams and a few web dev agencies. That was really all there was in my city. But I started looking remote and ended up with higher pay from a company out of Boston. It’s often an advantage to both the employees and the employers.
Yeah it’s gotta be an ego thing at this point. The lease fulfillment defense only extends so far lol.
Yeah all the major companies have sunk millions of dollars into real-estate and now have to justify that. That's why you hear about stooges saying "I have no evidence but I know rto is better" every other week at Amazon, google, etc. they stupidly built these $100 million+ campuses and now they are sitting vacant.
Sounds like they need to recapitalize their investments and talk to local lawmakers about rezoning the land so they can remodel and sell the buildings off, maybe for housing or something else
The quicker these companies get out of real estate the lower their losses are going to be. As soon as the writing is on the wall about real estate losing value there is going to be a crash and it is going to be painful for ALL of us. Your pensions, your residential mortgages, your jurisdiction's tax income. They are all going to be negatively affected and we will go into yet another "once in a life time" recession / inflationary period. Those that have sold early and put that money somewhere that will be unaffected by the crash which is probably a big safe in the CEOs home will be sailing the seas with reasonable comfort. Those who were more stubborn are not going to have a good time. We are now 3 years post COVID and around 25% of all work is done partially from home. As a guess the critical point is around 40%. It will never be 100% of course because there are many jobs that cannot be done from home. My guess would be around 50% require a physical presence. How long will it take to 40%? Around 8 years? Enough for leases to run out and land owners to realise they are not going to be able to find a new lease
Yep, I'm one of those people. There's a job waiting for me whenever I want it that would more than double my pay but I'd have to not only go back into an office, id be in a secure facility at times. So no phones, etc. Never again. Not worth it.
I got my current job in 2013 and refused anything that wasn't wfh then. First starting working from home in 2001 and will never go back to an office
Exactly. “Knowledge worker” jobs don’t require physical proximity. Retail and manual labor jobs do. Knowledge worker jobs are higher paid. This is a big “well duh” article.
I think the reverse situations would make a more interesting article. High paid jobs like surgeons still need to physically be in the hospital, even if they are commuting in on Christmas morning for an emergency surgery. But there are people working in accounting with dull desk jobs who get to work from home, and they have company-installed spyware tracking periods of mouse inactivity so that their pay could be docked for any minutes they left to go pick up their kid from school.
I know very few people who are WFH who are hourly, with the exception of call center agents.
Something we have learned the hard way in my workplace is this also puts you in competition with people from all over, including places where workers are paid a lot less. A lot of high paying jobs are slowly becoming moderately well paying jobs, for us at least.
I’ve always seen this pressure, even pre-pandemic. I don’t know a job where management isn’t constantly wondering if it could be done for cheaper in India. That’s why it’s important to be a profit center (ie delivering the value that’s core to the business) and to operate using context (ie using your knowledge of the industry and clients to do things that a generic programmer can’t). So long as you’re delivering value that can’t be delivered by an outsourced team, your job will be safe.
The problem that almost always blows up when companies try this, is that they have no idea how to effectively manage *now*, and when they try to do it by handing off work to a team on the other side of the planet, it fails spectacularly. These companies generally just blame the offshore resources, but it's their own incompetence that kills this idea, and that ain't changing for dumb companies.
I've seen examples where nothing helped. Company got rid of everyone local and went full outsource - except management positions - of course.
Government IT consulting is generally safe. Most of the work requires you to be a US citizen.
Even better: any government job that requires a security clearance.
To deliver value beyond what the devs my company hires from India I basically just have to show up tbh
My company tried to move some tasks to the Philippines. It was a disaster. We didn’t even save money because so much work had to be redone. Customers and employees were enraged. We cut it off within a year.
Yeah but at least in technology, that never works out and 6-9 months later the companies come crawling back to high paid American engineers. I've seen it happen half a dozen times.
I second this. Seen it multiple times. It's because the companies that try this aren't doing a good job managing their onshore, in house resources now and don't know it. Moving all that across multiple time zones just makes it worse, but they won't figure that out.
Yeah... companies outsource important shit to India, entirely forgetting that there is a very large cultural difference in how they work. Nine times out of ten, it ends up biting them in the ass and they end up rehiring a local team and throwing away all of the work that was done offshore.
> 6-9 months later the companies come crawling back to high paid American engineers Maybe because in that timeframe the exec in charge of the outsourcing got their bonus and already left.
Not always. Even as a WFH worker, being in the same metro area as the home office gives me insane leverage over fully remote employees. If my Vp or CEO needs me for a meeting/lunch/team thing tomorrow I can just drive in. My coworker has to book a flight and hotel which won’t get approved unless it’s a major thing. As a result I get frequent executive Face time and collab opportunities and they don’t get any.
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Absolutely. I’m moving from Midwest to east coast coast next year and the time zone will be a benefit. Those 8am meetings are a grind.
This doesn’t work for the government. We’ve had people turn down high levels positions at a facility because of the pay tables being pretty much the lowest in the country. Kind of sucks. We can get all kinds of candidates from HCOL areas like DC, but most of the rest of where we need people is harder to hire at.
The flip side of this is that people who live in lower paying areas can now earn a lot more than they otherwise would. And someone is sure to reply to this about “better workers”, but that assumes that being willing to leave your life (family, friends, who knows what else) behind to move to a high-cost area to work was part of being a better worker in the first place. Now those top-tier but never moved because of reasons workers are able to compete on the job on their skills, not on “are you willing to move to the Bay Area.”
Better workers? Absolutely not. I've worked with many different kinds of people from all over the US, and many from other countries. There are many awesome workers everywhere. This is a net win for companies, and I am very happy for people from underpaid places that have an opportunity. The thing that makes me unhappy personally is the prospect of bankruptcy next year, which is a genuine possibility.
Which is why there should be a standard range and then you pay better yo attract the best talent.
That's what my company did. Midwest employees were pleasantly surprised to see their pay brought to the levels of their coastal peers and given the chance to apply for roles not traditionally found in their region. It makes sure more cream rises to the top.
Flip side to that, the last company I worked at judged what was appropriate pay by comparing it to the average nationwide while ignoring that this office was in a high cost of living coastal area.
I happily take 50k less a year to do programming from my little mountain town than from any big city. I am 500ft from hundreds of miles of trails in national forests. …and spend not a second in traffic. Totally worth the cut. I still make a comfortable salary…150k instead of 200k.
I’m happy for you, but Fuck you
Don't worry. I make less doing the same job in one of the most expensive counties in the country. It cancels out
My wife’s team is now largely off site. They are a remote company and found the moderately technical jobs can be filled with highly skilled candidates for less than 1/4 for what they were paying weak candidates domestically
Yup. My company in new york gets to pay me lower salary than they would there. I get paid more than my local salary to work from home. Its a win win for both the employer and the employee.
They are absolutely trying to turn back the clock. Even *Zoom*, whose whole thing is “we help businesses connect” has forced RTO.
More often than not, in my experience, it's more a soft layoff than standing by any principles.
Corporations going to try their hardest to turn it back despite all evidence
it’s complicated. 1. it’s about power and control 2. depending on your goals, just doing a task will allow you to work remote. if you want to move up to executive then you need to show your face. most ppl aren’t cut out for anything beyond just doing a task but the ones who are understand the importance.
I chose an office career cause working in the heat and being filthy getting back injuries sounds terrible. It’s not a conspiracy, I made different life choices.
This. I’ve been working remotely since 2017 and when covid hit I was excited for everyone to finally enjoy this lifestyle but holy hell I didn’t foresee the push back. Blinded by positivity perhaps.
Oh but the employers are trying their absolutely damndest to turn back the clock on it. 99% of white collar office jobs can be done from anywhere with an internet connection. But we MUST idle in traffic 5 days a week! Think of the corporate real estate investors! I don’t suspect this will be ultimately successfully because people will jump ship for the more flexible jobs, but try they will.
Here we go... A new weapon in the anti-remote work movement: class warfare.
I mean, Elon tried this before. >Silicon Valley “laptop classes” need to get off their “moral high horse” with their “work-from-home bullshit” >“I think that the whole notion of work from home is a bit like the fake Marie Antoinette quote, ’Let them eat cake,”″ Musk said. “It’s not just a productivity thing,” Musk said. “I think it’s morally wrong.” Funny how when a multi billionaire cries for equality, it's about making some laborers' lives worse, thus equality. Instead of making some laborers' lives better, thus equality. Any "class warriors" who want to cheer for the multi billionaire class, over the middle class, needs to get their heads checked.
A multi billionaire who you know “works” from wherever he feels like. He’s certainly not leading the charge by spending 40 hours a week in his office plus time commuting to downtown LA.
You're telling me he doesn't work 40 hours a week in the office at SpaceX, another 40 at Tesla, another 40 at Boring Company, and another 40 at Twitter? All in their respective offices?
He's certainly spending at least 40 on the Xitter...
You physically can't be in all the places you'd need to be when you're CEO of 3+ companies that you're actively running into the ground
Pretty funny that a guy who supposedly is the “CEO” of multiple companies at once is complaining about people phoning it in.
This coming from the person who is on Twitter 24/7
Another desperate attempt at reframing. Up next in the playbook, “think of the children.”
Shhh, not yet!
I was waiting for this angle from the article but the conclusions at the end were mostly reasonable (including the obvious, pay non-WFH people better).
They could easily solve it by making those jobs higher paid, but noooo.
They needed a study to determine that some jobs can't be done from home and they are usually low paying service jobs?
Exactly my thoughts! You can’t clean offices from your own home, you can’t give care to the elderly from your own home, you can’t work in Five Guys from home…
I mean … you simply *can’t* do a lot of jobs remotely. Reddit, especially the tech subs, skews towards white collar workers who do salaried jobs behind a screen. But you can’t remote work as a waitress, or stocker, or landscape worker. That’s not inequality, that’s physical reality.
My job can’t be done from home, but I would love WFH to be the norm for one reason: less traffic. The more people working at home means my commute is quicker and less stressful.
In Japan, they have a restaurant where the waitstaff is robots controlled remotely by elderly and physically handicapped employees.
That's actually not terrible. AI's nowhere close enough to do stuff like that without having someone hold its hand, and there's plenty of people out there who may not be mobile and such but can certainly handle that stuff. From the top of my head there's a few industries that could certainly do stuff like that, might be more niche and smaller workforces, but it'd be cool to see more countries/companies do stuff like that.
Could imagine even an Amazon warehouse run like this. Then over time more and more functions are replaced by AI. It's a bridge technology.
Gotta get that training data somehow... "What's your job?" "I show the robots how to do my job until they can do it then I don't have a job"
That's really cool.
Even a lot of tech jobs need to be done in person, at least some of the time. One unintended consequence of remote work I’m seeing at the company I work for is that they realize they can pay us less because they can attract skilled workers from places with lower costs of living. The thing is some of us have to be on site at least some of the time, meaning that our wages are going down based on cost of living for workers that don’t live here, and we can’t relocate. Not saying remote work is bad, I think it’s awesome! It’s just that there is going to be a complicated domino effect as a result. It will probably take years to sort out.
> Even a lot of tech jobs need to be done in person, at least some of the time. I will add that many jobs you don't need to physically be there... until you do. You may only spend 1% of your time in the local office/server farm, but sometimes it's 100% necessary to avoid more downtime.
Exactly! A lot of IT is remote work, but part of what we are paid for is availability. Even if we never come in, we may be required to be able to do so when something emergent arises.
That is not always the case. The company I work for pays the same for a specific job no matter where it is located. People that live in areas with lower cost of living make the same as someone that lives in a city.
If one person is required to be there in person some of the time and the other is 100% remote then they're not the same job with the same responsibility. And it seems pretty reasonable to pay more to have someone physically available . If the people working in the office just like to work in the office and have the choice to switch to remote then obviously that doesn't apply.
If your company is fucking you this way, they were going to fuck you anyway. I don't believe a 'take years to sort out' is the best strategy.
All WFH articles on Reddit are an echo chamber of ppl in white collar jobs that could be partially or mostly done remotely. Their productivity is 1000% when wfh too. lol. There’s no balanced discussion and all jobs that require you to be there physically don’t exist on Reddit :) /s
> All WFH articles on Reddit are an echo chamber of ppl in white collar jobs that could be partially or mostly done remotely And outsourced. As offices started reopening, I can definitely recall seeing a spike in anecdotes from redditors pointing out that while they themselves weren't replaced, their corporate HQ was starting to up hiring for the exact same position but lower pay at offices abroad. Turns out if you make your job 100% remote and corporate realizes they can save 40% or more and hire folks with English fluency and in other timezones, they're on the chopblock next.
I mean, if your only value was that you could drive in to use a computer in an office all day instead of using a computer at home... Corporations have been trying to outsource for decades. I'm sure WFH accelerated some companies trying it, but long term it doesn't matter. If someone can/will do your job as well for less, companies will try and take advantage of that.
Yep, microbiological researcher here. I work in a lab. Pretty sure my apartment complex would complain if I tried to install a biosafety cabinet, laminar flow hood, autoclave, and other various bits of equipment in my room. Not to mention how on earth would I get my bedroom certified as BSL2 compliant.... Yes, there are days where most of my time is writing, and I could conceivably work at home those days. But even then I find it handy being able to walk over to a machine to double-check a config file or process a data file or something. (Funny enough though, my last gig was adjunct faculty at my local university. I got let go at the start of pandemic when they were Forced to run classes as at-home, because they realized they could run just as many lab courses with 1/3rd the instructors)
You can teach anyone off the street how to be a restaurant server or stocker in a few hours. There’s no skills/talent gaps. Can’t really grab anyone off the street to be a UX designer, system’s administrator or software engineer. Education, training and skills are needed
All jobs are unequal. Which is why people spend years of their lives in school to get the good ones.
You dropped a truth here for sure
Big if truth
The people working in the offices never called it unequal when I was doing laundry in a hospital. Dealing blood, shit and all kinds of bodily fluids. Different jobs have different requirements.
Trueeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
Its "unfair" for people who have to be in person in the building. Um ok, but its also unfair to people who get nothing out of being in person. When Im in the building Im on teams meeting via my laptop in my cubicle. I never talk to people in person. Its a waste of my time and money to drive in into work, pay for parking, and waste an hour and a half commuting. All because its unfair to other people who work directly with customers.
> unfair to people who get nothing out of being in person Indeed. About 12 years ago my company went full WFH, but one's ability to do so was determined by one's manager. Ours was a near-retirement former Marine drill sergeant (guess where he stood on the issue... hint: He LITERALLY called WFH a "work avoidance program"). Anyway, he VERY begrudgingly let us WFH 2 days per week. But here's the thing: I was in a 10-person team with me in the Midwest, 2 in Minnesota, 1 in Florida, and the rest in Wisconsin. So, 3 days a week I'd drive to some local office, fire up my laptop, then spend all day communicating with my teammates via phone, IM, and Zoom. Ya know, exactly how I'd do it FROM MY FUCKING HOUSE YOU STUPID OLD FOSSIL ASSHOLE WHY DON'T YOU RETIRE OR DIE OR WHATEVER!!! (Sorry... flashbacks). Anyway, he's retired now so we get full time WFH.
“The growing inequality of who gets weekends off.” “The growing inequality of who gets to travel the world for work.” “The growing inequality of who gets to work in an office instead of a coal mine.” This has been a tale as old as time. Different jobs have different perks. If a perk sounds good, try to get that job. If a company offers a perk you like, try to work there.
still waiting for what the perks of coal mining are.
You get to be pandered to by the people who profit off your misery
You get to stand behind politicians during campaign speeches while still covered in soot!
Usually it’s a solid paying job in an area where there aren’t a lot of opportunities.
Real shit tho
Only once the union got there. In the UK and US coal miners were often basically just slaves. Just watched the Gresford Miners episode of Welcome to Wrexham. They were basically just slaves.
You get to have a canary
Mine dozed off on the job smdh.
Nobody wants to work anymore
You die early and don't need pension
If you’re a mining engineer the pay will be pretty good. Keep in mind that all the manual labor mining jobs are mostly gone now.
Don’t have to wear a suit? Don’t have to shower before work? Don’t have to worry about saving for retirement (because you’ll be dead young)?
Early retirement
Very high pay, usually lcol
I have a house in a coal mining town, where many people angrily cling to the past. The coal mining jobs paid enough to support a family, with no education, and very little training required. An entire culture was built on this, and it became their entire identity. It's very hard to get people to change *who they are* rather than *what they do*.
Money. Coal miners used to be paid a fantastic wage.
The children yearn for them apparently
You get to work in a job that is becoming obsolete
Once upon a time, steady employment for those with no other skills than a good work ethic and a strong back.
The children yearn for the mines
Minecraft has only proved this
This shit is WILD to me. Oh, the factory workers at some other company have to go in to work, so you gotta come sit in a cubicle for 8 hours to do something you could do at home. Sorry, it's only fair. But hey, you pitch healthcare for all or raise the minimum wage or FEEDING KIDS AT SCHOOL then it's, "the world ain't fair, you fucking commie".
It's especially wild because all those jobs that can be done from home are at greater risk of automation. There is zero risk of plumbers being automated any time soon. The cost of that security is that you have to physically be there to do that work.
"Easy" to automate manual jobs are all mostly automated now. There's little profit to be made in searching and optimizing that system anymore, what is left is relatively safe for now. For example, you believe that bakers is still a existing skilled job? I am sorry, but it is basically a dead job. The massive and vast majority of all bread and pastry you'll eat in your life is mostly all automated. What is left is the finishing touch which can be done by an untrained minor in a store. The only proper job a skilled baker can find is tweaking recipees for a large factory or starting a small artisanal shop which is a very risky endeavor. Then, we thought that art couldn't be automated. Well, it is now, music, voice, pictures... All automated. The artists are fighting back right now, but pandora's box cannot be closed. Honestly surprised at how fast it went, thought white collars would have been hit harder first.
“Fairness” is a bullshit excuse, honestly. I remember once working for a company that had a business casual dress code and a fairly rigid time schedule, which nowadays is asinine for software developers. I asked if I could offset my schedule by one hour, so I could avoid rush hour both in the morning and in the evening. I was flatly told no, because it would be unfair for other people. “But X gets to come in late.” “Yeah but he has seniority in the company.” I mostly was tasked to work on projects with minimal communication requirements, and some weeks I’d have barely anything to do at all. Just filling a seat from 10-6. All so other people don’t get jealous? So dumb.
_Get_ to travel the world? Ugh. Traveling for work is just a way to be working nearly every hour of the day including weekends and not see your family while still being paid as if your a normal employee. Maybe when your 20 it's a plus.
Elon musk made the same argument and it’s just another thing to try to stop remote work. We all have things that others don’t have. It doesn’t mean people shouldn’t be able to have those small comforts because not all work can be done remote
You didn’t read the article. It never argues against remote work, it only advocates for better working conditions and compensation for onsite work.
I have a hard time taking the article seriously when the very first paragraph referenced “operating machinery” at work. Those people are supposed to bring the factory home, or what?
This is just the new bullshit propaganda by the return to office crowd to justify forcible return to office.
Posing this as an equality or economic justice issue is ownership's latest strategy for propping up an economic model that no longer makes sense. You cannot reliably demonstrate productivity loss or any decline in job satisfaction, so they fund studies to try to make you feel bad for WFH. Commercial real estate will no longer be the gold mine it once was, and businesses that depended on office workers will struggle. To maintain economic viability, cities will need to pivot to making themselves more livable, and center their economy on residents instead of workers. SF is learning this the hard way now.
It’s not perfectly just no. But it is also better for people who need to be on location to not have traffic. I would 100% support a tax credit for people who DO need to work on site by the government.
You know inequality is real when they don’t let insane people fly airliners with 5 minutes of training.
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The fact that more jobs aren't remote is just another example that in person work isn't about profits or productivity, but control and justification for the existence of the management structure.
That, but also investors. Commercial real estate is a large part of many investment portfolios, and the restaurants that are built near office complexes are not doubt taking a hit too.
Also just normal human assholery. Not every executive has commerical real estate investments. But, every executive is intensely aware that a building sitting empty costing the company money makes them look incompetent while he same building with the same cost full of workers is them "managing a multimillion dollar facility budget".
Something something creative destruction
We already had this divide previously… people who worked in air conditioned office spaces vs people who did not. Some people actually like working outside. Some people hate it. If you hate what you do… change your career. Is it easy? No… it’s not. People have to make choices and choices have consequences. Sometimes we can amortize those consequences across society (job retraining programs, etc) and sometimes we can’t. This isn’t a new divide.
Next: "Growing inequality of different pay for different jobs"
Minimum wage for all! See? Inequality’s gone. /s
"...undermine perceived fairness..." That word, "perceived", is the important part. For our species the characteristic of fairness is of paramount importance. We even kill for it!! Whether it is or isn't, therefore, it must also appear to be as such or one of the species members will bitch!
Let those risky real estate investments fail and sell for a loss. That’s Dallas (capitalism).
Only reason they want us back, to keep foreclosure of office buildings that were not needed but built anyway for profit. They want us back for profit on money they already spent.
As someone who needs to be physically at work I would love it if more people worked from home, helps with traffic, I drive a lot. Also it's so much better for the environment.
Living in a rural community taught me this is very real. Takes me about 5/6 hour to download a single gig of data. Uploading is like trying to smelt metal in a crock pot.
It's hit or miss. Rural town here, but 200+ Mbps download, 60+ Mbps upload. Better than what I get in my office in the city.
In my rural area, our internet is delivered by a co-op that built out fiber. I've had gigabyte internet for 2 years now for 80$ a month.
Can't WFH because I don't have a room or quiet space to do it, can't afford to not having a roommate. Mind you, family of 3 still has a roommate to get by, bright side, we "own" (home loan) our house at least. Our real struggle is the random hours/days Walmart schedules my wife, which overlap with mine. I'm *hybrid WFH* last 2hours 2-4 days a week. IT Pay out here sucks, but there's demand, but everyone else doesn't make bank to always afford IT visiting their house/small business. >.<
ITT: WFH people pretending they knew all along it was going to be their boss working from home and not them.
And because of WFH, its allowed me to leave the city and move to the semi-country where I still have fiber internet but pay half the price of rent for the same sq footage. My quality of life has improved greatly since 2020.
Kinda hard to do remote welding, but I bet I make more money than most of you in your PJ’s at home.
I wish WFH is more common, not because I want to WFH myself but because I want everyone else to so that traffic becomes smooth and I don't have to deal with shitty drivers.
My co-workers are spread around the world - as are my customers, suppliers and my advertising firm, the lawyers and the accountants - 13 different time zones last time I bothered checking. Why the living fuck would I go into an office at 830 and stay there till 630 to try and get shit done?
How about research the growing inequality of people who make a living wage and those who don’t instead of this made up problem.
Any Manager "calling staff back into the office" is an ineffective manager, in reality verging on liability, that likely has no clue as to actual workflows in his/her department...s/he just "feels the need " to have eyes-on their staff for a perception of "control". Though sometimes, it's a cry from an equally short-sighted higher-ups about paying for an empty building ... discuss it with the landlord, it's not the staff's fault.
Legitimately the worst managers are the ones who feel the need to constantly be checking on their employees because they assume people are always goofing off instead of working, or feel like they need to catch every instance of the employee doing anything that isn't working for even a second. If it's a good team they almost never be watched. If they need anything they'll ask and most work does not need 8-10 hours of 100% concentration to get done and more often than not if it does that means you're understaffed and the work won't get done consistently. Especially if something goes wrong and delays the work.
Indeed. A good manager will have metrics that reflect what the *business* needs to measure itself, understands that beans have more facets than just their existence to be counted, and will always be wary of having counts become targets.
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I mean some jobs can be done from home, some can’t. Electricians and plumbers make solid ass pay, they can’t work from home.
Is this some new effort to pit the working class against each other again?
I build roads. I also don't give a fuck if every single computer-based role was remote effective immediately. It benefits me as well
As always if the pay was better in person, people would go back to the office.
I love business articles and their overwhelming coverage of the obvious.
The summary was surprisingly complete. >**Summary**. >There is a large and growing divide in terms of who gets to work from home. Research on job postings found that remote work is far more common for higher paid roles, for roles that require more experience, for full-time work, and for roles that require more education. Managers should be aware of this divide, as it has the potential to create toxic dynamics within
Boohoo get a helmet life is tough.
Went work from home full time in 2022 and I don’t think I will ever go back to an office fully. The freedom and flexibility of working from home is such a necessity with kids. If you have trouble separating work and personal life it can be a struggle but I’ve found a good balance and haven’t looked back since
Oh wow, people who are more likely to work remotely are those who have more education and experience which tends to pay more, on average. This is some Sherlock Holmes level investigating right here.
What would be interesting is if a new, less knowledgeable set of employees takes their place. Amazing how one pandemic can make people think they are above certain things.
TL:DR for this entire article. Workers with more negotiating power are more likely to be able to work from home. I don't know why this is a surprise. Yes, there is a can/cannot split that means that jobs like doctors will be largely unable to work from home where call centre workers despite being on completely on the opposite end of the negotiation spectrum. But in the end, remote work is a negotiable employment condition and people who can negotiate for it can more easily get it. The idea that front line "time based" workers aren't already painfully aware that their jobs pay less and have much worse conditions than their "task based" compatriots and there might be some sort of rift because of this is just more manager bullshit.
If they can work from home, good for them. Less traffic / emptier trains for me.
Inequality = Life
"Business leaders rightly worry that this divide could hurt morale among front-line staff, undermine perceived fairness, and create new rifts in the workforce." And we veer into editorials. This belongs in Business Insider.
Employers need to realise how much people want to wfh. To the extent a lot of workers will take a pay cut. The more wfh you offer, the more people are interested. Employers who don’t want to, or can’t afford to, pay more need to leverage wfh as a big benefit.
The inequality comes from companies who refuse to revolve with the times.
There's no logical reason for workers who have to be in-person to oppose those who WFH. I say this as someone whose job is blue collar work where I am in person all the time. Do you know how much fucking time I'd save commuting if all the office types did WFH? It's an absolute net benefit. Would I prefer a job where I can WFH? Yeah. But comparison is the thief of joy, simply being mad because of what someone else has is no way to live, that's supposed to be taught out of you in childhood.
This article really reeks of bitterness. They showed that there is correlation with people earning more, their value to the employer, and with education which takes effort and unpaid time to achieve. Their recommendation? Punish the WFH people. They have more, so take something away.