Remote work is killing big offices. Cities must change to survive
[Ed. note: While we take some time to rest up over the holidays and prepare for next year, we are re-publishing our top ten posts for the year. Please enjoy our favorite work this year and we’ll see you in 2023.]
I
I was born in Manhattan and lived much of my life in the Big Apple. I went to school on the Bowery and worked in office complexes that sat adjacent to storied destinations like Wall Street, Times Square, and Madison Square Park. I met sources for lunch and attended concerts and conferences that moved my career forward. But like many knowledge workers, in the wake of the pandemic, I’ve moved away from the concrete jungle and relocated to a small, rural town a few hours north of NYC.
I’m not alone. Recent data indicates that only 8% of office employees who worked in NYC pre-pandemic are back to the office five days a week. This creates a financial crisis for major urban areas. Fully 25% of NYC’s tax base each year has historically been derived from commercial real estate, anchored by offices in Wall Street and Midtown and the plethora of restaurants and stores and sidewalk vendors that cater to the millions of people who used to flow every day to and from the city’s commercial corridors. Big cities, in other words, aren’t what they used to be. But that leaves open a door to what cities might become.
New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams, addressed the need for change in a recent speech. “It’s imperative that our economic leaders sit down and say what our business centers and districts are going to look like,” Adams said. “Do we change the zoning? Do we allow these new workforce housing that’s coming together outside, because there’s new ways people are doing business?”
There is something revolutionary in there. Working every day in the world of software developers and knowledge management, I think we’re at a tipping point that will change not just where we work—home or office—and how we work—remote, async—but the nature of our cities, our towns, and with them, our civilization. From London to São Paulo, from Boston to Berlin, there is an opportunity for the metropolis to emerge as something different, something equally essential, but perhaps more equitable, affordable, and humane. To get this transformation right, we can learn from the world of open-source software.
II
What drove us to work in offices in the first place? For most of its history, the physical workplace served essential, utilitarian functions. DJ Huppatz and Agustin Chevez explain that “the office” began as a place where peace and solitude would allow for concentration and where important and rare works on paper could be safely stored:
“The origins of the modern office lie with large-scale organizations such as governments, trading companies and religious orders that required written records or documentation. Medieval monks, for example, worked in quiet spaces designed specifically for sedentary activities such as copying and studying manuscripts. As depicted in Botticelli’s St Augustine in His Cell, these early ‘workstations’ comprised a desk, chair and storage shelves.”
Technology played a pivotal role in the development of the office. Computers once required entire floors—hell, entire buildings—to house their processing power. They shrunk over time, but offices still provided a venue for workers to access hardware that was unaffordable or impractical for use at home. Huppatz and Chevez point to 1964, when IBM introduced a magnetic-card recording device into a Selectric typewriter, as a tipping point. From there, the functionality and convenience of a small army of devices—copy machines, fax machines, server racks—gave employees good reasons to work from an office.
Even when code could be written at home on a PC, working from home as a programmer wasn’t necessarily practical. When I spoke with Paul Ford and Sara Chipps about their early careers in the 1990s, they recalled sitting in an office where versions of a software project were passed around on a physical disk. Essential backups of key files and data? Sometimes it was a few hard drives in a briefcase that you carried home at night.
As a journalist, I worked for many years in fancy offices that served an essential function: a hub for physical work—collaborating on a newspaper or magazine printed on ACTUAL paper—and a place to access a company-owned PC where my work lived on local storage that wasn’t backed up to any cloud.
By 2015, however, I was acutely aware of the many hours a day I spent commuting and how unnecessary the commute was to completing my work—how, in fact, it often made completing my work harder. By that time, my work happened almost entirely in chat, emails, and online documents. Most desks still had a landline, but they sat unused, a relic of a different era of newsroom.
I felt at the time that seeing people in person, especially my bosses, was key to advancing my career. I was told explicitly by my manager that I was expected at the office at least three days a week. Yet there were many days when I would arrive at the office and hear no chatter around the coffee machine, see no inspiring collaboration happening around a drawing board. Each worker, even in an open office plan without cubicles, was living completely in their own world: headphones on, multiple tabs open to Google Docs, Slack, Email, Spotify, Twitter, YouTube, and a dozen others. We sat or stood, our attention fixed on the screen, office banter happening in private messages and across Twitter canoes, not in the break room.
For software developers, the advances of the last decade, especially the advent of cloud computing and version control, meant that asynchronous contribution to a code base was just as practical from home as the office. Pre-pandemic, however, the majority of large tech companies invested heavily in real estate and dictated that employees spend at least several days a week in the office. The transformative shock of our recent quarantines and the rapidly growing success of companies founded around open-source projects, however, is finally catalyzing a change away from this archaic approach.
III
The pandemic exposed an unspoken truth. People were not less productive working from home; in fact, many got more work done. What gives? Well, subtract an hour of commute each way. Subtract another hour spent walking to grab coffee, snacks, and lunch. Remove an hour here or there for all the collaboration that happened around the ping pong table or Xbox. Take out the stand-ups, check-ins, and meetings spent on chit-chat and vague ideas which, ya know, could have been an email.
Why did so many companies, including supposedly forward-thinking tech companies, insist on a heavy investment in office and real estate even as most office work moved to portable devices tied to the cloud? And why are so many of the most valuable tech companies in the world still battling to get workers back into the office now?
As Huppatz and Chevez write, the office acts as a “visible statement of prestige and power.” Companies that have invested heavily in fancy office parks want them bustling with employee activity when clients, partners, or journalists come to visit. Another imperative for management, usually left unsaid, is that the office allows them to implement monitoring, surveillance, and control. The pair write:
Various management theories also had a profound impact on the office. As Gideon Haigh put it in The Office: A Hardworking History, the office was “an activity long before it was a place”.
Work was shaped by social and cultural expectations even before the modern office existed. Monasteries, for example, introduced timekeeping that imposed strict discipline on monks’ daily routines.
Later, modern theorists understood the office as a factory-like environment. Inspired by Frank Gilbreth’s time-motion studies of bricklayers and Fredrick Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management, William Henry Leffingwell’s 1917 book, Scientific Office Management, depicted work as a series of tasks that could be rationalized, standardized and scientifically calculated into an efficient production regime. Even his concessions to the office environment, such as flowers, were intended to increase productivity.
For obvious reasons, physical products in development and proprietary technology need to be safeguarded. Work on these projects might require an office or workspace separate from the home. But the vast majority of code can now be written safely and securely from home. The tension between employees and organizations boils down to management’s fear that over time remote workers will be less productive and predictable. Given what we’ve seen during the pandemic, however, the onus is on leaders to show that working from home is less productive before insisting that working from an office is somehow superior.
Think about the value created by products like Linux and Python, Bitcoin and Ethereum, GoLang and React. Sure, people sat in rooms over the years and worked together to drive these projects forward. But it wasn’t the frisson of IRL interactions that turned them into the global juggernauts they are today. Quite the opposite: it was the ease with which anyone around the world could contribute to the project without needing any special permission.
Tech companies have become the most valuable organizations on earth, and the folks who write code at these companies command, on average, the highest salaries of any profession. I won’t try and predict what the future will hold, but I think it’s safe to say that coders are capable of building incredibly impactful and profitable tools, platforms, and business models without leaving the comfort of their pajamas. Increasingly, workers in finance, entertainment, education, and other industries are finding ways to do the same.
We have an opportunity for a radical rethinking of the office—and the city beyond.
IV
Before we go on, I want to offer an aside to make one thing clear. I’m not denigrating work that doesn’t involve code or that can’t be done remotely. The pandemic reminded us of another important truth—that our society can’t function without farmers and doctors, truckers and teachers. While a lot of ink has been spilled on the future of work, the majority of Americans, and most people around the world, can’t actually do their jobs remotely. This being Stack Overflow, however, where we serve a community of developers and technologists, it makes sense to focus on the option of remote work and what the expansion of that kind of work might mean for our society. I’ll also acknowledge that I’m an American and the perspective here is centered on the US. To the degree that it’s similar or different from the experience in other locales, I would love to hear from readers with more knowledge and experience than me.
So, back to the issue at hand. The question we should be exploring is not how we can force people back into offices to save the old model of a city, but what cities can become now that so many workers who once had to congregate there to make an impact have the option to work remotely. What would a reimagined urban center look like for these professions?
We know, from decades of research, that urbanization tends to exacerbate income inequality. In countries like the United States, a decades-long trend also saw manufacturing move away from smaller cities towards international hubs, leaving hundreds of mid-sized cities and their surrounding suburbs struggling with urban blight and rising poverty, which grew fastest in suburban areas during the period following the Financial Crisis of 2008.
For areas outside the biggest metropolitan areas, hybrid work has been a huge boon. Take Troy, NY, a city of 50,000 close to my new home in the Hudson Valley. As The Globe and Mail reported:
For years, these small legacy cities – gutted by a loss in manufacturing, pockmarked by abandoned industrial spaces, and hampered by a dwindling population – have struggled to make a sustained economic recovery. Yet the tides may finally be shifting. The rapid expansion of hybrid and remote workplaces during the pandemic, along with a climate crisis that has underscored the vulnerability of our bigger cities and laid bare the necessity for community resilience, has suddenly made places like Troy ripe for adaptation in the 21st century.
The well-established concept of “rewilding” urges societies to return lands back to their natural state, rebalancing environments where plants and animals were shunted aside in favor of human civilization. Hybrid and remote work provide us an opportunity for a re-widening, a dispersal of human capital that unwinds some of the concentration to urban areas we’ve seen over the last century, restoring a better balance.
Imagine a world in which massive office districts of major cities are remade to attract residents with remote or hybrid jobs who choose their home based not on its proximity to their corporate office, but what it offers in terms of great schools, hospitals, arts, entertainment, parks, waterfront, and community. Giant office buildings could offer flexible work space that can be rented short- or long-term by individuals or organizations.
Converting office districts to live-work zones would offer a much needed influx of new residential space, helping to combat the rising cost of homes and rentals. Citizens who do work essential to the livelihood of a community, such as teachers, healthcare providers, and service workers are provided with tax breaks, as needed, to ensure they can afford to live alongside those whose work can be done fully remotely.
Knowledge workers like me, who move out of the city, make urban spaces more affordable for essential workers who staff hospitals and restaurants. Meanwhile, small towns and cities that were hollowed out by deindustrialization over the last 30 years get an influx of new residents to support their tax base. Again, the majority of jobs don’t allow for remote work, but a great deal of wealth is concentrated among the jobs that do. Empowering or even encouraging those workers to live wherever they want could have a positive impact on the affordability of cities and the economic health of rural communities.
Forward-thinking cities can still focus on attracting top-tier workers in areas like finance, technology, and law, but they will do so by making themselves wonderful places to work, live, and play, not by insisting on the primacy of an antiquated 9-to-5 office culture.
The lesson I take from the open-source revolution and the last two decades of software development is that the platforms and tools with the least friction tend to win out. A “butts-in-seats” mentality that demands a regular commute on a rigid schedule creates a ton of unnecessary friction—in our jobs and in our lives. The city of the future, I hope, will be a place where anyone can safely and securely contribute their ideas or apply their skills. Make the permissionless innovation of open source the bedrock ideology of the next generation of urban centers, and we can start to build a new metropolis better-suited to our post-industrial age of information.
Tags: cities, remote work
#/media/File:Sandro_Botticelli_050.jpg){kind=link}
#/media/File:Sandro_Botticelli_-_St_Augustin_dans_son_cabinet_de_travail.jpg){kind=link}
69 Comments
I appreciate the points you made about restoring balance – “Hybrid and remote work provide us an opportunity for a re-widening, a dispersal of human capital that unwinds some of the concentration to urban areas we’ve seen over the last century, restoring a better balance.”
And “Empowering or even encouraging those workers to live wherever they want could have a positive impact on the affordability of cities and the economic health of rural communities.”
Here at AWS, my Cloud Security team has been working remote and will continue to work remote. If you want to hear a little bit more about that, feel free to contact me at cmarsell@amazon.com
Rural communities don’t want tech geeks moving in they cause skyrocketing real estate and push people that have lived their forever out..and then they expect all the local community to serve them.
It’s the suburbs that are getting hurt by WFH. It takes far less effort to convert a midtown building to residential with workspace than single use office parks or shopping malls to desirable places to live. In spite of all that’s written I don’t see a mass move to smaller cities. While they like your money they do not like escalated housing and food costs. And many people didn’t just come to a city for economic opportunity but also because they like to be with other people
Dispersed tech geeks don’t raise real estate prices because they can be paid less. My mortgage for 3Br/2Ba on an acre is $240 a month. I’d accept $65K for permanent 100% remote on a team using Scrum. To maintain the same standard of living in San Francisco would require seven figures, and I’d be half as productive. Remote is an economic and environmental win for all sides.
The problem is companies not embracing proven methodologies. It’s still an uphill battle to get companies to adopt Scrum, which was introduced by that name in 1986, based on ideas that were kicked around in the 1970s. Scrum is a proven win-win; anything else is backwards and incompetent. Remote is also a proven win-win; anything else is backwards and incompetent.
My personal experience hasn’t been like this. The local school was declining in size for decades and local business didn’t have a lot of year-round consumers.
Yes, everyone here is concerned with how to sustain and increase the amount of affordable housing. But they also appreciate new community members who are respectful.
Speaking from a rural peninsula, I am an advocate for ordinances that, first recognize businesses in a home as a part of the economic spectrum, and see the value of such to affordable housing, BUT you are envisioning that the high pay that your profession earns makes housing less affordable for others. I am not sure why that has to be, but that is another issue, what I do not like is that you are suggesting that those working in services that your industry might need should have housing subsidized by the government. This is an awful idea as subsidized housing usually means that the government controls the occupant’s life and living, limiting upward mobility. Furthermore, it suggests that those in a servant class to the developer class should receive subsidies but not those in other occupations that do not specifically serve the interests of the developer class. That is turning government subsidies upside down and instead of subsidizing the big tech companies we subsidize the servant class. How about, if the servant class charges the remote working class what amounts to a living wage by the standards of the community as impacted by the developer class? If the government subsidizes the class that serves the interests of the developer class, then it is subsidizing the developed class by proxy while applying government restrictions and requirements only to the proxy, not to the developer class. Very upstairs downstairs way of doing things.
I prefer hybrid work pattern. It gives me the opportunity to enter the office some days, physically relate with colleagues, work from the office and it also grants me the opportunity to work from the comfort of my house. Some works require good level of concentration. Working from home most times grants me the opportunity.
I think the one thing you failed to think about is the shift of highly paid remote workers to lower cost states and communities. They have more money to buy real estate and drive up the cost of buying a home for all those lower paid residents. So much of the housing price crisis we are having is because of remote work. More people wanting larger homes to work in and less supply outside the city. It’s a hard squeeze for people in lower income suburbs or lower income metro areas, even. We have to solve the housing supply and price issue before so many can simply live and work anywhere.
You make a good point, but would you agree the solution is to find ways to support the building of more affordable housing, not to limit where people can and can’t live or bid on homes?
“More affordable housing” is a pat answer to displacement: simple, appealing, and wrong. Within a city, residents displaced by gentrification have more options about where to live. Within a small town, displaced residents have few other options save a long commute from neighboring towns the Californicators haven’t yet taken over, or a downgrade to trailer park life. And if you think “deplorable” longtime small town dwellers are angry now, that’s nothing compared to how they will take being told to give up the family property and move into government-issue rabbit warrens because only urban hipster transplants can now afford the acre+ lots.
Hi Ben, I enjoy hearing from you on the podcast btw. SO podcast is one of the few that I auto download.
I have lived in the Colorado mountains my whole life, and come from 100 years of Colorado natives. Having watched what is happening in this part of the world for the last 35 years, I can defend the theory that supporting affordable housing is good on paper, but quickly becomes very difficult to impossible in practice. There are a number of factors that play into this, but we’ve seen 3 that are the most prominent.
The first is pricing. To have housing defined as “affordable” you have to define an upper boundary on sales or rental pricing. The only way to do so in a way that incentivizes builders to actually build is to price to where they can make a profit in building, mandate affordability for a certain percentage of building permits, or to subsidize the construction costs. We’ve seen them all tried and not have panned out. Allowing builders to set prices for profit, even slim profit, means that pricing to the end user will be higher than the average worker can afford in most cases. Then, if there is enough demand for construction, no builders want to take on the project, so affordable housing stalls. Mandating affordability through building permits means all the non-affordable permits get scooped up, and then what is left just… sits. Nobody will touch it because they don’t want to build to lose money. Affordable housing stalls. Subsidizing works to stimulate builders to build, but then comes the issue of where to get funding. Local taxes impact locals, so politics get involved and legislation gets no traction. Targeted taxation makes the people paying the taxes mad, and they tend to push back harder than the people pushing forward. So what we’ve seen is the only subsidized affordable housing going on is spotty and short lived. Again, affordable housing stalls.
The second is location. Almost by definition, areas that are in need of the affordable housing are gentrifying, are gentrifying because something is attracting people to the location. This means that the locations that are prime targets to get the workers close to the people in need of services, are also the most valuable to sell to the highest bidder. So the locations that are slated for affordable housing are usually less than ideal and / or much farther away. Longer commutes and poor living conditions don’t make sense as an alternative.
The third is localized inflation. More people in an area means more demand for good and services, which means more demand for workers, leading to higher wages as employers compete. This in turn leads to higher prices, which starts to squeeze those same workers out of the markets they are serving.
In my view, people won’t solve their problems or gain happiness with bigger houses and more stuff. I think the solution lies less in spot treating issues and more in a systemic approach to understanding what brings people joy, and implementing that everywhere. A huge house in the mountains is a vanity purchase, unless you have a very specific reason for doing so. But if the upper class and luxury housing was replaced in favor sensible housing options, there is a possibility that supply could meet demand.
In the case of our communities, the massive influx of remote workers means local businesses can’t keep up with demand. Garage door broken? 2 months before someone can even look at it. Break your leg on a hike? Search and rescue might have to do triage and leave you in the woods in favor of someone else due to staffing issues. The list goes on. Meanwhile longtime locals like myself are leaving so fast that it’s now shocking to people in public when I tell them I’m from “here”.
I would encourage conversation way from “Why there”? and more toward “Why not here?” regardless of where people are, and start to address issues locally before jumping ship and adding to displacement somewhere else.
I sympathize with the argument that housing in many places is no longer affordable for people who have lived in the area for many generations. I’m sure that the solution to the problem is complex and will require deep, sustained effort. I tend to agree with your point that creating local laws and subsidies to encourage the construction of affordable housing and discourage the construction of new luxury housing is one good approach.
Speaking from a rural peninsula, I am an advocate for ordinances that, first recognize businesses in a home as a part of the economic spectrum, and see the value of such to affordable housing, BUT you are envisioning that the high pay that your profession earns makes housing less affordable for others. I am not sure why that has to be, but that is another issue, what I do not like is that you are suggesting that those working in services that your industry might need should have housing subsidized by the government. This is an awful idea as subsidized housing usually means that the government controls the occupant’s life and living, limiting upward mobility. Furthermore, it suggests that those in a servant class to the developer class should receive subsidies but not those in other occupations that do not specifically serve the interests of the developer class. That is turning government subsidies upside down and instead of subsidizing the big tech companies, we subsidize the servant class. How about, if the servant class charges the remote working class what amounts to a living wage by the standards of the community as impacted by the developer class? If the government subsidizes the class that serves the interests of the developer class, then it is subsidizing the developed class by proxy while applying government restrictions and requirements only to the proxy, not to the developer class. Very upstairs downstairs way of doing things.
The idea of subsidizing teacher’s housing is a particularly good example because school costs, including teachers, are a municipal cost paid by property taxes. Let us assume that a glass that makes the highest pay, owns and does not rent its housing- so where is the government subsidy for teachers’ housing supposed to come from- the municipality, state, or federal government? If the municipality pays its teachers enough to afford housing, it is paid for by the property-owning class that needs the teacher’s services. That is fair– the class that is driving up the cost of housing pays the teachers enough to afford housing. That is what “earning a living” used to include! To subsidize teacher’s housing is to imply that th teacher has not earned it- it’s just charity. Why hasn’t the teacher earned enough to afford housing? Why has the tech developer earned more than enough?
First of all your expectations of productivity is going to change very soon. You will find also that what can be done remotely can be done in Bangladeshi apartment by a team of 1000. So you’ll end up where manufacturing went. So don’t get too proud and excited. No worker has the right to demand, first of all we destroyed the concept of unionism. But for some certain reason the working from home crowd all of a sudden are United under this cause. Well I’ll refer you back to Bangladeshi apartment. They want you to think along these terms, because it’s playing straight into their hands. There will be no working from home and you’ll be back in the office very soon. Enjoy your permanent holiday on the farm with no income.
No disrespect meant, but that sounds like a jealous reply. Go empower yourself with some skills, release your potential, and you’ll be thinking differently. I used to be a blue collar worker up to midlife age, where I realised there was some future far different than being a slave to the office or workplace. Remote working yields more results, is far better for the environment, and I am far happier now, and more productive as a cloud engineer..
The gang of thousands in Bangladesh will cause more damage to your company then you can possibly imagine. One of my clients spent a million and a half dollars and ended up with useless software. A team of three people from us and Europe have rewritten the Bangladesh software and made it more reliable and functional for a fraction of the cost.
Recasting the old saying, there’s nothing so expensive as an Indian developer.
Well, this mass exodus to India/Pakistan/Bangladesh has been predicted (and tried!) before, about 15 years ago. It turns out that being on the other side of the world can be made to work, but is harder than people think. Not to mention exacerbating communication problems that are already difficult when everyone speaks the same language (Well, do we engineers ever really speak the same language as managers and sales people?)
Although I wouldn’t necessarily agree with your characterization of the situation, I would agree with the outcome. I work for a company that switched to working from home during Covid. The employees loved it and asked to make it permanent and the CEO was on board. It was considered a great win when the company we preform contracted work for agreed.
Fast forward a few months and its easy to see why they agreed. We were the guinea pigs to show how effective work from home could be. Another company was bought in to handle some of the work. I noticed the names were all Indian and I said to myself they will have them takeover the work at some point. Well we just got told over our Zoom meeting that we no longer have the contract and our jobs end in August. I can’t say I blame them. They had to put processes in place to work from home and so that means anywhere in the world, not just from home in our cushy suburbs. I have to say I’m not bitter but it is a warning as others have said. If your job can be preformed from home, it can be preformed by anyone anywhere in the world.
I feel like this is going to be a case of balancing wealth across the whole world, rather than a single country. So, countries where people can afford to work far cheaper are going to get the upper hand for a while going forward, until it starts to even out.
I closely resemble with the analogy of work with open source software. I am from India and my native place is 100 km from New Delhi, the capital city where I work. It seems the big cities were getting exploded before the lock down. I used to feel so many big villas in the smaller towns lying vacant because people were forced to move to small condominimums of big cities which are so called work centre’s. I hope this movement will bring some balance. I appreciate the way you have brought this need forward Eric.
Cheers!
Job recuirment
Thanks – I’ll shoot you an email and we can discuss.
Great article…this almost erases the memory of the atrocious hit piece that fortune magazine did on remote work…they claimed that the savings in fuel will not offset the cost of electricity and internet!?!!! 🤣
I laughed put loud at that ridiculous piece of drivel
They may have invested in New York downtown real estate too much themselves.
I’m not a member of the tech workforce, but my company is based in NYC and another location in metro Detroit. Our customer support —heck all divisions, were able to go remote rather seamlessly thanks to the forethought of our CEO. We were hybrid and then the day they world closed we rocked on and grew. Our staff doubled, we took on many new clients, healthy profits followed. I now work with co-workers from all over the US. Its worked! Sometimes l drive by our old office. It seems like a relic of another age. The suburb its in has too much unleased office property. I’m for more green spaces everywhere. Convert the monoliths to housing and make all the surroundings beautiful…..Cities will be fine as long as we repurpose what we can.
Rewild! Love this idea.
Around here there are some empty malls that really need to be reimagined as something new.
Good cities are an abomination anyways and only serve the corporate overlords. Make way for community gardens and more housing , who needs more stripmalls and corporate offices. Cities were also built to serve cars not people, the sooner they become an actual community space the better, all they serve right now is the bygone industrial revolution era that isn’t coming back and shouldn’t
You’re not going to have more green spaces until the tax code above all incentivizes redevelopment of defunct properties/brownfields, and favors greenfields over new development. As long as it’s more expensive to hold onto the greenfield than to develop it, property taxes will push owners into development.
Some people will never be back in an office. Employers should acknowledge it and update the way they operate. WFH is not always about having to commute or see their kids more, there is still a pandemic out there. you can all tell yourself it’s over but it isn’t safe to be in any office. if you get left disabled with long covid, no employer will care to help, that’s for sure. I dont see why employees should help companies paying their rent.
Agreed. And it isn’t fair for those bay area landlords to get rich so easily just by sitting on the right land!
Well argued and well articulated. I think one big benefit from the structural change in cities will be the reduction of pollution and improvement of life quality. Historically people have moved to cities making them costly, overpopulated and polluted. With the impending water level crisis waiting to hit cities to rising sea water level engulfing sea facing cities, it’s time to use the positives of remote, hybrid work to be properly explored from the angle of town planning. I dare to say I dream of Hubs spread across countries with VR and other immersive tech enabling distance work to not lack the physical proximity and the social cues we get from in person interactions which is what I feel the management of large organisations mostly made up of people in their late 40s or 50s are highlighting as the down side of remote work. They fear remote work will not inspire loyalty as well. I fail to understand why for the newer generation should follow the polluting, socially alienated city life that our predecessors chose.
What you mean is back when mining towns flourished like in the past. Is the same think will happen with your tech roles. All the office spaces will be turned into apartments with two rooms. All office workers will share a communal kitchen & bathroom as happens in units. Guess what once you came to the office space for free to get paid. You’ll be paying the Land Lord 1/2 income to work their now. This is your future embrace it. Laziness will catch you real quickly and guess what all the workers that still have to go to work such as panel beaters, mechanics, electricians, forklift operators and the rest will be compensated for driving to work. Not just fuel but time spent. So enjoy your holiday and guess what no sick leave, no annual leave & no long service leave either. Working remotely means no need for these.
None of this will happen.
Interesting. I had not considered pollution. Does density naturally mean more pollution or a greater carbon footprint per resident?
My old home in a city was a row house, so it required way less energy to heat. My new home is worse in this regard. On the other hand, my property is large enough for a large solar panel system, and I have a garage, so I can switch from a gas car to a plug-in hybrid.
Cities are generally considered more environmentally friendly than urban sprawl and the suburbs. I realize this may seem a bit paradoxical, but if you think about it, it makes sense. For example look at NYC. Most people do not own a car and take the subway or walk. Large buildings house large numbers of people in relatively small spaces, which could allow for more green space outside the city center.
Affordability in certain cities is nonexistent however, and expansion is inevitable. I agree using existing housing from smaller communities is a win win scenario. We have even seen some communities pay remote workers to move into their cities.
No one believe WFH is for all jobs we know some jobs require in person. However, with fewer of us working in the office it lessens demand for gas, cars, and clothing to name a few. This in turn helps with inflation for those who do need these items.
As for other locales – I can give a small comment from Ukraine, western city Lviv. American cities are built with an idea of downtown=offices & suburbs=living area. I don’t know whether it applies to all the US cities (I’ve never been there), but aerial views of many of them seem to support this. European cities are often much older and downtowns are often historical. And same goes for Lviv, which I’m from. And while it is true, that there is lots of traffic to the downtown in the mornings and vice versa in the evening, this tendency is not that strong as in US. Since cities are often old, there is no place for office buildings in a downtown and they are built elsewhere. And downtowns are very alive even when there are no office buildings. Therefore, in my opinion, ability to work from home does not really change European cities as much as it may do for US.
WFH is not good for health. It adversely affects physical fitness. No work-life balance. No social interaction.
Not good for the society as well since it impacts future of second line of dependent business.
Getting to a gym was hard for me. I didn’t have the energy to drive home from work and then drive to a gym.
Since I started working from home I’ve gradually acquired exercise equipment, mostly used. I can work for 15 minutes during lunch and ride an exercise bike for 30 minutes in the evening.
I sleep more.
I also eat better. I’m not grabbing unhealthy snacks from the break room or eating catered lunches.
My pets are around me. That’s good for blood pressure.
Everyone’s circumstances are different, but WFH has been the greatest thing for my health in years. I’m in the best shape of my life. I haven’t been sick in years.
A blanket statement that WFH is not good for health makes as little sense as a blanket statement that it is good for health.
You’re right, I took for granted all the walking around and mini social interactions, and anxiety kept me inside. But I’ve changed my habits since then. I’m on a hybrid schedule now so on office days I’ve decided to take the train instead of driving and it feels GREAT. I’ve jam-packed my weekends with physical activity. I still need more winter exercise though – exercising indoors isn’t fun for me, it’s just a chore.
We shouldn’t have to go back to the office. We’ve proven that workers can be productive at home, and, with the rising cost of gas, it makes more sense.
I suppose it depends on where and how you live. I find that without my hour-each-way commute I’m spending that extra time outside working in my yard & garden. Work-life balance is fairly easily achieved by physically separating my work area (so that I “go to work”), and the office is far from the only place for social interaction.
I can go around and swing a power bag whenever I like at home, but not at the office, instead of sitting hours on end under pressure. I can make a grunt or aargh when I get a frustrated at home much easier than I was at office. I can go out an take a stroll in nature easily when I am at home, without wasting too much time. I can get the best food from my own fridge instead of horrible vending machines at home. I can avoid corporate toilets used recklessly unhygenically by employees relieving their frustration of working in the office. All of these less healthy?
Work life balance is just an issue of not setting proper boundaries between work and life. If you like continuous hours then make dedicated space, time and rituals for work. For example, I never work while sitting on bed, and sit on a solid wooden chair. There are plenty of courses on deep work to teach you how to do improve productivity healthily while WFH.
As for social interaction, I now get more time for genuine social interaction and community time that I like instead of the fake social time that I had at office.
A lot of things we had done were never good for society in the first place (burning unnecessary fuel everyday?), so, so many things get cancelled out, and it’s best to think how to serve the society with the new realities and realizations we have in place now.
I will never return to an office. I get more done now and even being told so. I’m off all the stress meds and feel amazing! 25 years IT Engineering. To bad for the city and my local businesses love the money being spent here local. Also if you really want a green energy planet well keeping millions of cars off the street is a good start.
Something wrong with you boy to be on stress meds
Great article. I know the references from grad work. You aren’t related to Karl Popper are you?
I can trace my family back to Eastern Europe and Hungary. Besides that, not sure if there is any direct relation.
What’s ‘wrong’ was going to the office, in other words, the office was the disease. The ‘cure’ was WFH, not those meds as demonstrated. Strange how health and disease is perceived relative to your ability to work in a corporate office.
Glad you’re feeling so well!
I always felt going to and getting back from work was wasteful. However, that meant 2 hours of reading a day in public transport. Bucharest is a more homogeneous city, where offices, restaurants, parks and living apartments can be found in the same place. In theory, anyone could be able to work physically around home. Yet offices, especially tech ones, started amassing in particular areas and I lived on the other side. I felt that was a drag.
And then I visited the U.S. and I was shocked. People worked in one place, lived in another and had fun yet elsewhere. To get from one place to the other you needed a car, as they were separated by tens of kilometers. Public transport was… discouraged. Uber was my only solution, as I don’t drive, and thus I’ve learned a lot about the culture and history of completely different countries.
Bottom line, there is a big difference between cities, countries and cultures. I can see someone unable to imagine anything else but commuting to work in their own car, because there was never an alternative in their life. I would rather be homeless than do that.
Tech workers moving out to rural areas won’t cause prices to rise because (1) they’re moving out of houses nearer the city, to total housing demand is unchanged, (2) we need fewer and smaller office buildings in the cities.
Cities have outlived their usefulness. We just don’t need cities anymore. They’re just a source of problems – crime, pollution. Commuting is not just polluting, it’s a complete waste of resources (not least the commuters’ time).
I really like the idea of turning the huge glass skyscrapers used as offices into residential homes with a small room used as a workspace for those of us who can do jobs remotely. I am from Poland, I used to work as a teacher of English as a foreign language. In the major city I live in, I wasted anything between 2-4 hours each day to commute to the classes I conducted. I ditched the job after 10 years when the pandemic began and began working full time remotely as a freelance translator. It was then that I realized how much time was wasted on commute, and during “gap hours” sometimes occurring between classes. Almost 2 years ago I started working in IT, fully remotely and my life has changed immensely for the better. It feels like each day has more hours, I have built the workspace I always dreamed of in the comforts of my home. I find myself very productive and little to no time is wasted. It is important, however, to have well established comms with the entire team both for the projects to proceed smoothly and to develop a level of camaraderie. I have better connection with my friends from remote work than I had as a teacher with other teachers. I love it, and I would love to see the reshaping of space in cities to have more residential places, green areas and entertainment services. I think we could do it and it would be better both for humanity as well as the planet.
It’s a great thing. Ideally, we’ll convert those large office buildings to housing, which will drive the overall price of housing down (or it should anyway).
Wholeheartedly agree on the sentiments here (especially as someone who has also recently moved back to the Hudson valley from a much more expensive East Coast city!)
> Think about the value created by products like Linux and Python, Bitcoin and Ethereum, GoLang and React.
Well, 4 out of 6 ain’t bad. But no value has been created by Bitcoin and Ethereum; cryptocurrency is demonstrably a negative-sum game and always will be. (If someone were to create something that was *not* a negative-sum game, it would not be recognizable as cryptocurrency by our current understanding.)
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/05/why-this-computer-scientist-says-all-cryptocurrency-should-die-in-a-fire
Yeah remote work is not the problem. The problems is business’s insistence on keeping old, antiquated work philosophies and their failure to adapt to a changing workforce and changing technologies. Gone are the days of separating work and personal life. People want work-life balance. They want to be able to work AND shuffle their kids to and from school. Businesses have consistently pushed back on these ideas because of power struggles and outdated assumptions made about workers and productivity. It’s a shame that it took a global pandemic to shift the narrative away from business needs and to workforce needs. Businesses need to be more adaptive if they want to survive and now they’re facing huge financial issues around long-term real estate costs that they no longer need. Historically leadership has not been good at listening to its workforce and acting in a workforce friendly manor. They’re losing control and they don’t like it. It’s really ironic as businesses are always looking for ways to stay ahead of the curve within their own industries.
I think there is an invisible elephant in this room.
Many concerns are given, and with good cause, about the rising cost of housing when highly paid employees move off the cities to more rural places.
It would seem, that this is a god-given fact, but well, it is not. It is a cause of not regulating the real-estate business.
If there were simple top price levels for living spaces, that are regulated by the local administration in order to balance the established and the newcomers, then aw, the real-estate agents would not be able to buy their next porsche, but everyone else would profit.
Alas, as this is an abomination upon keynes, it will propably not happen, but gernerally thinking, this would (and in my opinion should) be a regulative tool to make the world a better place for the future.
“The lesson I take from the open-source revolution and the last two decades of software development is that the platforms and tools with the least friction tend to win out. A “butts-in-seats” mentality that demands a regular commute on a rigid schedule creates a ton of unnecessary friction—in our jobs and in our lives. The city of the future, I hope, will be a place where anyone can safely and securely contribute their ideas or apply their skills. Make the permissionless innovation of open source the bedrock ideology of the next generation of urban centers, and we can start to build a new metropolis better-suited to our post-industrial age of information.”
This is so true, and I’m glad to see someone else say it. Open source shows how easily things work when anyone can just chime in with what they can. I recently visited a self-contained [for the most part] community where there is no money involved save some managing costs, and everyone lives like a very big family, and I was inspired at how well it worked. When someone is sick, they jsut take the day off and pass it to someone else. They rotate the work so you’re never doing the same thing all the time. Even a visitor like me could chime in the tasks and help out. They have time for leisure and just chatting and having fun.
While it had its limitations, I hope we go towards a future where we will “open source” far more things. Imagine if instead of everyone owning their own tool for everything, their own specialized items, we had more shared or rental items? Rental vehicles is already going in this direction. It would also save so many resources when instead of every single person wanting to own their own items, you’d just have less of them, shared among many people [let’s face it, most of the time, you’re not gonna be using that lawnmower or for some, not even their cars or such]
Maybe we can keep on progressing towards balance and technology is there to make the process far easier.
Socialization; close contact with other people? Different daily experiences? You can not substitute physical interaction between people with cables and signals alone. The interaction of people in the real world can not be monitored and controlled and is anarchic. Democracy has a little anarchy at its core. Don’t loose that.
The way of the future.
yep! this is why as a founder in nyc i refuse to allow fully remote and insist on at least 3 to 4 days in the office. I also vocally encourage fellow founders, entrepreneurs, executives and managers to do the same, for a variety of reasons (not just that it’s effecting urban economies). luckily, one good trend from the economic downturn is that management is gaining more leverage when it comes to reversing at least the fully remote aspect. i think we’re probably stuck with some level of hybrid system for the foreseeable future, which actually isn’t bad as more flexibility overall is good, but the ultimate question will be how much flexibility in that hybrid system exists? i think we’re starting to tilt back more towards more office time and less remote time, which will be good for urban economies and company culture ultimately.
This is so true, and I’m glad to see someone else say it. Open source shows how easily things work when anyone can just chime in with what they can. I recently visited a self-contained [for the most part] community where there is no money involved save some managing costs, and everyone lives like a very big family, and I was inspired at how well it worked. When someone is sick, they jsut take the day off and pass it to someone else. They rotate the work so you’re never doing the same thing all the time. Even a visitor like me could chime in the tasks and help out. They have time for leisure and just chatting and having fun.
victims of gentrification can move to the cities now. prices will drop eventually. all will fix itself .
When I hear of professionals moving hours away, my concern always comes back to “what if things change?”
What if said professional loses their job? What if all the ads and opportunities require you to be in the office several days a week? What if you can’t move up the ladder unless you can provide in-person face time?
I agree cities need to rethink offices vs residential, but I always wonder if we’re going to see a mess of professionals who moved, got downsized, and now are trying to sell and move so they can find work.
There are other reasons remote workers have fled metropolitan cities that go beyond the commute and the daily waste of valuable time. Before metropolitan cities can attract people they need to fix their many problems. There are no utopian large cities. All these problems were ignored due to the benefits of living in a large city which evaporated seemingly overnight when the pandemic shut down everything. Now the problems have only grown exponentially.
1. Crime (unsafe streets, subways, etc.)
2. Quality of Life Issues (filth, stench, drug addled mentally ill homeless)
3. Small cramped extremely expensive apartments
4. Outrageously high tax rate
5. Cost of living is orders of magnitude higher in large cities
6. Shopping daily for food because hauling groceries to the 22nd floor is no fun
7. Schools are horrible and dangerous
8. Learned how to cook and make excellent coffee at home
9. Entertainment, night-life, eateries, etc. were all shut down or closed for good
For families, it was square footage with everyone stuck at home. Sometimes it was about moving closer to family. The suburbs and even the rural countryside offers a level of peace and quiet that is impossible in metropolitan cities.
Things have rapidly shifted and it will may decades before cities can adapt. Some may collapse as badly as Detroit which at its peak was one of the largest most wonderful cities in America. Lack of tax income from residents, commuting workers, and tourists is going to be catastrophic. Most all corporations who filled those towers of concrete, steel and glass have either left the city or downsized their square footage considerably. Most of the street level retail businesses are gone. Corporate Real Estate prices have not yet dropped. Regulation of businesses is quite insane in NYC. Things are so much cheaper and simpler in alternative locations. Many New Yorkers are not native New Yorkers. They haven’t lived their whole lives in the city. Many of them left and are not returning.
I’ve never really looked at the problem from this point of view, that’s an interesting angle. Well, it’s probably impossible to get rid of offices completely, there always will be jobs that require them. Or they could be used in a different way. Cities have always gone through lots of changes. Even the automatization of production and moving it to other countries – lots of factories were closed, yet cities survived. Remote work has lots of advantages and most likely will stay with us, so it’s probably best to just embrace it. This article describes some of the most important advantages of remote work: https://kanbantool.com/blog/unsure-about-remote-workers-well-theyre-here-to-stay. Decide for yourself if it’s worth changes that might possibly happen in the cities 🙂
These high rise buildings could very well fall into ruin. And future generations will look upon them and wonder why they were put up in the first place. A monument to mankind’s vanity.
“….And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains.”
– Ozymandias / Shelley
I think culture has again changed now companies are hiring in-house resources and giving less preference to remote work. The ability to work remotely is frequently viewed as a reward for employees, and many businesses include it in their benefits package. Nevertheless, because remote workers are less productive than in-house workers, I think office culture will endure for a very long time.
The pandemic has shown me that there are tasks that don’t really have to be done in an office building. What’s more, with reduced income, working from home is more efficient in terms of transportation costs (time and money) and eating out.