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Working From Home 'A Permanent Shift', New US Data Suggests (msn.com) 149

Posted by EditorDavid from the avoiding-offices dept.
An anonymous reader shared this report from the Washington Post: Working from home appears to be here to stay, especially for women and college-educated workers, according to economic data released Thursday that revealed how Americans spent their time in 2022. The data, from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), suggests that the pandemic changes that upended the workplace, family life and social interactions continue to have a lasting effect on life in the United States.

Many white-collar workers who hunkered down at home during pandemic shutdowns have returned to the office, but extraordinarily high numbers have not. For many, remote work appears to be a new normal... Working from home "is a permanent shift," said Julia Pollak, chief economist at ZipRecruiter. "We're now seeing many companies start as remote-first companies." The new data is a "continuation of what we've been seeing" in the American workforce, she said...

The annual survey by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau asks thousands of Americans how they spent the past 24 hours of their lives across different categories of activities. Results from 2019 through 2021 showed that the pandemic dramatically shifted how much time people spend working at home. The new data suggests those changes persisted through 2022, even as much of life returned to normal as more people got vaccinated and boosted against the coronavirus, and case counts fell...

There is a clear benefit to remote work for employees, Pollak said. Working from home saves time and money on commuting, and many employees want the flexibility to work from anywhere, to better support their parents or children. She said remote work also is "part of the reason for this huge spike in new business formation. It has lowered the barriers to starting a business."
The 2022 figures show 34% of workers over the age of 15 still said they were working at home — and 54% of workers with a workers with a bachelor's degree or higher. (Meanwhile, workers without a high school diploma "were even less likely to work from home in 2022 than they were before the pandemic.")

The Post also reports another interesting finding in the data. "Americans ages 20 to 24 are the only group that spent more time socializing than before the pandemic. Teenagers, and adults ages 55 to 64, reported an overall decline in time spent socializing since before the pandemic."
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Working From Home 'A Permanent Shift', New US Data Suggests More

Working From Home 'A Permanent Shift', New US Data Suggests

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  • People just quit (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Saturday June 24, 2023 @10:12PM (#63629924)
    when forced RTO was attempted entire teams or companies just said "fine, I quit". Employees keep getting told there's unlimited jobs out there. It's a lie so that Congress will give them more H1-Bs, but it means people think, rightly or wrongly, that its safe to quit.

    So companies are forced to back down because everyone who works for them got together and did the same thing. You know what that's called? Solidarity.

    It's like a Union without the Union. Now imagine how much better our lives would be if we had actual Unions?

    • I was with you until you made the comment about H1Bs. No, the shortage of programmers is very real. Earlier this year, I had no trouble finding a remote job. Since then, I've been hiring US programmers, and find that the competition is stiff.

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by rsilvergun ( 571051 )
        Train people. Programming isn't hard. You'll have to spend six months paying someone to learn. Of course after that they'll be valuable commodities that you'll be afraid to lose instead of disposable cogs you could discard when it's convenient....

        While I'm at it try hiring some people in their 40s and 50s. Again you're going to have to train them because nobody's been hiring them. But I'm old and I do it and there's a ton of us who can do good work but can't compete with cheap overseas labor. I can't com

        • Re:People just quit (Score:5, Insightful)

          by dcollins ( 135727 ) on Sunday June 25, 2023 @03:03AM (#63630278) Homepage

          Programming isn't hard.

          psst... our community college 2-year CS major has a 5% success rate

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by bn-7bc ( 909819 )
            Are the lecturers any good? Are most of the students actually interested in cs oe did most of them choose it because they'd herd somewhere that " cs is the easy-ish way to an ok starting income"? I'm asking these somewhat flippant questions because a low passing rate might indicate way more than the difficulty of the courses. While cs is hard5% is a rather liw passing rate don't you think, there might be other factors involved, but I'm no expert, what is the avarage cs passing rate in the US

          • Re:People just quit (Score:4, Informative)

            by mrfaithful ( 1212510 ) on Sunday June 25, 2023 @06:49AM (#63630454)

            Not surprised. CS isn't programming and people tend to find that out after enrolling. I had to drop out of CS in the first year for financial reasons and I applied for programming jobs just for the hell of it, assuming they'd file my CV in the bin. I heard several different versions of "CS guys are not very useful." If the course doesn't appeal to programmers and the people doing the hiring don't want them, I'm surprised 5% stay the course.

            Perhaps it's just because I grew up in a poorer area, but my experience of hiring people with degrees in general has been that they came from well to do middle-class backgrounds and loafed in university instead of getting a job. The people with talent tended to gravitate to employment rather than finish their education. I don't like that this has been my experience, I'm not sitting here smug that us drop-outs are "superior", I've just not been proven wrong yet.

            • the 1% would pay for you to go to college. There were *massive* state & federal subsidies going direct to Public Universities and they passed those savings directly onto students keeping tuition low. Nobody talks about it because the 1% wanted to keep the money from those subsidies once they didn't need you.

              The H1-B program means they don't need you. They don't need to let you go to college. To give you a decent life. They've got all the labor they want trained for free in another country. So they n

              • Get angry at the [snip] politicians that sold you out.

                There, fixed that for you. Don't get so caught up with political identity that you are unable to see that both major parties are heavily paid by special interest groups, neither one (as a whole) gives a single rat's ass about you and me (or anyone else without deep pockets), and both sell us out on a regular basis.

                As far as H1B's go, however, Trump tried more than any other president to eliminate that scourge. He issued several executive orders to that end, and made it official policy in his administration,

                • I don't like them but they're representing who voted for them. At the end of the day we are a democracy and if people would stop falling for propaganda and letting their buttons get pushed by a moral panics and culture wars money in politics wouldn't be an issue.

                  Voters need to show up for primaries and they need to do a little bit of googling for the candidates instead of paying attention to political advertisements or worse voting based on name recognition alone. The reason Ron DeSantis is doing all th
          • I said train people. I worked with a ton of boomers trained to be programmers who wrote the vast majority of the software you use every day back in the 80s. Huge swath of the country still run on mainframe hardware that a guy with 6 months of training programmed. And there's a ton of old vb6 apps those guys wrote stolen active use.

            For 90% of programming you can get somebody ready to go in about 6 months. They're not going to be geniuses but they'll be at least moderately productive and in a year they'll

          • psst... our community college 2-year CS major has a 5% success rate

            He said it wasn't hard, which it isn't. However, that success rate has more to do with the overabundance of people majoring in it having to compete for jobs after graduation.

        • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward

          Programming isn't hard.

          It depends entirely on the type of programming, and varies along a wide scale from very easy to so hard that only a select few in the world can do it.

          Please be more careful with the generalizations.

        • After 6 months, you get somebody worse than chatGPT that gets poached.

        • Re:People just quit (Score:4, Informative)

          by Tony Isaac ( 1301187 ) on Sunday June 25, 2023 @10:21PM (#63632280) Homepage

          Sure, if you're writing data entry screens or building reports, programming isn't hard. When you have to scale to support millions of concurrent users, things get a little more challenging.

          It's like road building. Any redneck on a road grader can "build a road" by carving a dirt path through a field. But if you need a 10-lane freeway, you need a whole different kind of person.

          By the way, my company pays competitive salaries for senior talent. We have no problem with developers in their 50s, if they know their stuff. I'm 56 myself. We also only occasionally ask for overtime, and we welcome remote workers. In other words, you know nothing about what "we" want.

    • "Employees keep getting told there's unlimited jobs out there. It's a lie so that Congress will give them more H1-Bs, but it means people think, rightly or wrongly, that its safe to quit. "

      Mmm, you think it's the Deep State organizing this, or is is the Papists or the Weltjudentum?

      Your conspiracy theories need some focus.

    • You're an evil communist Russian/Chinese troll who's here to brainwash us into thinking stuff like workers' rights, human rights, solidarity & dignity won't bring about despotic totalitarian control & enslave us all to socialism!

      That's why we need disorganised, incompetent government with plenty of polarisation & in-fighting, prioritise guns over healthcare, & to persistently feed everyone the idea that this is what freedom should look like.
    • There's no risk in quitting... a new job can be had in a matter of weeks, and THEN you quit.

    • How do we change this?

      Step 1 to my mind is to fix the data. Count people working, looking for jobs, AND have given up. That last group is ignored today when talking employment.

      I don't work in HR or government or economics so I don't know the systemic issues. Just what I keep hearing isn't true or helpful.

  • Yes, it's a permanent shift (Score:5, Informative)

    by JustAnotherOldGuy ( 4145623 ) on Saturday June 24, 2023 @10:55PM (#63629994) Journal

    Yes, it's a permanent shift and some companies have embraced it.

    My company just merged with a much larger company and they also like the remote worker paradigm.

    It takes a financial load off them and has numerous other benefits that employers salivate over (fewer sick days and almost zero workplace violence, just to name a couple).

    I'm happy to pay a little more in my electric bill in exchange for the benefits of working remotely, it comes out way in my favor no matter how I look at it.

    I've posted this before but it bears repeating:

    I like sleeping in an extra hour every day.
    I like not having to commute.
    I like the flexibility to relax during the day while still working.
    I like not having to bring food to work or paying inflated prices at local eateries.
    I like not having co-workers sharing their germs with me.
    I like the ability to do stuff around the house, make the bed, do laundry, etc while I'm "in" a meeting.
    I like being able to take a short nap or get some downtime as my schedule permits.
    I like being able to be home as soon as my day is done.
    I like not having to drive next to crazies in the snow and rain.
    I like not grinding my way through traffic.
    I like not risking my car to the driving skills of the bozo next to me.
    I like not having to pay for gas and all the other expenses that come with a daily commute.
    I like not waiting at stoplights or navigating detours due to road construction.
    I like not paying thousand of dollars every year to be allowed to park my car while I'm in an office.

    What could an office possibly offer me that I'd actually prefer compared to that? Free pizza once a week? A foozball table? Free snacks?

    So yeah, it's a permanent shift. There's no going back. What all these cities will do with excess real estate and buildings is for them to figure out but the trend lines are clear, remote work IS a thing now, period, end of story.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by keltor ( 99721 ) *
      100% and I've been doing it full time for 10 years. I simply cannot imagine going back to the office. The worst part is during the pandemic, I had to redo the office so my wife could use it too ... and now she works on the couch instead. :)

    • We have a slack channel at work so we can tell each other if we're going to be out of the office. Mostly it's people going to appointments or saying they're sick, but it is also people saying they didn't sleep well and they need a nap, or they're going for a walk/ride/run/whatever. And the other day one guy said that he was going to be out for an hour to take his kid to a music festival down the street.

      We love working from home because we can finally live our lives and not just live to work. We shouldn't have to retire to enjoy life.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sjames ( 1099 )

        It's those partial day things that really make the difference. Even if you have something that will absorb 100% of your attention for an hour or two, that still leaves plenty of the day to work unless it would get burned up by commuting to the office and the extra energy drain of fighting traffic. And especially if the something happens in the middle of the day. When your work 'commute' is a 30 second walk across the room, no big deal. But if it would mean doing 2 full commutes in one day, hello personal da

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by bn-7bc ( 909819 )
        as long as the work time is made up for later, and delays no one else, I don't see any reason why anyone would have a problem with that, seams perfectly leit to me

      • Re: Yes, it's a permanent shift (Score:5, Interesting)

        by JustAnotherOldGuy ( 4145623 ) on Sunday June 25, 2023 @11:13AM (#63630848) Journal

        We have a slack channel at work so we can tell each other if we're going to be out of the office.

        Exactly. It's common to have a channel to let people know you'll be out for a bit. My team uses it all the time for stuff like that.

        We love working from home because we can finally live our lives and not just live to work. We shouldn't have to retire to enjoy life.

        THIS ^^^^ This is the meat of it right there. I want to live my life and have work interfere with it as little as possible.

        • I wouldn't go that far, but just like the employee is the necessary evil to make a product for the employer, the job is the necessary evil for the employee to get money.

          • I wouldn't go that far, but just like the employee is the necessary evil to make a product for the employer, the job is the necessary evil for the employee to get money.

            I get it. I do my job and I do it well. But it's not my life, it's just what I do to make money.

            My life is my life, and to put it bluntly, I don't want my job impinging on my life anymore than it has to. Remote work brings me closer to that condition.

    • What could an office possibly offer me that I'd actually prefer compared to that? Free pizza once a week? A foozball table? Free snacks?

      Yep, that's the big question.

      I like my coworkers, but not enough to make physically hanging out with them every day worth the long list of cons.

      • This right there.

        If I want to hang out with my coworkers after work, I ask them if they'd be interested to spend an evening or a weekend on some activity.

        You might notice that this doesn't require them to be coworkers. That's something you can do with something we call "friends". Coworkers may or may not be friends. Friends may or may not be coworkers. These two groups can have various levels of overlap, but you will notice that it doesn't really matter.

        Because hanging out with someone depends on whether I

    • Yes, it's a permanent shift and some companies have embraced it.

      Someone needs to relearn the meaning of the word 'permanent'. Sure, reading a dictionary will literally kill you, but it is strongly encouraged.

      (I know what really happened here, but stop using words to mean more than the intended meaning. You should have used terminology like 'long-term', or 'appears to be the case for quite some time'.)

      • Someone needs to relearn the meaning of the word 'permanent'.

        Someone needs to learn the meaning of the word 'pedant'.

        Sure, reading a dictionary will literally kill you, but it is strongly encouraged.

        Sure, not being a pedant will literally kill you, but then people might even like you. (Unlikely, but still...)

        (I know what really happened here, but stop using words to mean more than the intended meaning. You should have used terminology like 'long-term', or 'appears to be the case for quite some time'.)

        Thanks, Captain Obvious! Or should we call you 'Captain Pedant' from now on?

  • Slacking from home (Score:5, Funny)

    by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Saturday June 24, 2023 @11:21PM (#63630036)

    Slacking from home sucks, it's much better to do it in the office where you can trade slack ideas with fellow slackers. However, WFH allows me to do important things like periodically correct you idiots on slashdot. I really feel like I am making a difference here. I think in the last election, given the fact that I had a few +3 Insightful comments on here I personally may have helped Biden increase his margin of victory by 2 to 3 votes. It would be 6 if I myself had voted instead of deal with an obvious troll.

    • *4

    • However, WFH allows me to do important things like periodically correct you idiots on slashdot.

      I've been able to troll^Wparticipate on Slashdot just as effectively from the office as I can from home. You need to work on developing those valuable life skills, son.

  • To force out enough people who couldn't or wouldn't so they "wouldn't have to layoff as many" to keep corporate profits in the excessive windfall territory.

    It was also a chance to cut perks and impose misery on those who stayed, to accept worse treatment.

    Workers should balk or quit.

    • This is pure and undiluted stupidity. Never ever get people to quit if you want to lower your workforce levels. Never. It's the worst way to get rid of workers. By some margin and then some.

      So you create an undesirable work condition that your workers dislike. You also deal with an economy where talented and highly skilled workers are in short supply, not only because the boomer generation is retiring in large numbers with far fewer people filling those spots. Hell, I'm old and even my inbox is overflowing

  • interesting (Score:3)

    by bloodhawk ( 813939 ) on Sunday June 25, 2023 @02:40AM (#63630254)
    What I am finding interesting is that despite everyone claiming they are more efficient/productive at home nearly every org and government department I work with has seen a massive decline in productivity with people working from home to the point nearly all of them have demanded full or partial return to office.

    • Re:interesting (Score:5, Insightful)

      by sjames ( 1099 ) on Sunday June 25, 2023 @04:26AM (#63630362) Homepage Journal

      Given the stats posted all over the damn place that say the opposite, I have to suspect you're either being served cool-aid or you're the one serving it.

      • sure it is completely anecdotal, but I can only go by what I I see. One gov department the procurement processing time has blown out by nearly 100% and infrastructure deployment time has risen by nearly 20%, They have since started to phase back in work from office much to the protest of staff but it seems to be fixing the issue.

        • Have you ever entertained the idea that your remote working tools and/or administration of them sucks?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by sjames ( 1099 )

          So it's likely to be highly specific to crazily micro-managed environments. I suspect if you kept trying, once the micro-management abated somewhat, productivity and morale would be way up.

          Have a look at Amdahl's law. It's normally applied to parallel computing but when the bureaucracy and micro-management is heavy, it applies to people too.

          An analysis of Brooks' law is also relevant here.

          • quite the opposite, they were extremely loose/relaxed on management. However that is now changing given their productivity findings.

  • But better late than never. Time alone will prove just how much total physical illness and natural resource wasting this will eliminate, but I think it will be a lot more than most people really expect.

  • You'd think the savings of pushing the cost of providing office space off on employees would be enough to have kicked off this trend with or without the pandemic.

    • You have to understand that a lot of large corporations (along with their C-Levels) have pretty heavy investments in the real estates they use, as well as some of the real estates around the premises that house restaurants and cafes. They now have a huge problem at their hand if those investments suddenly bad, stockholders will want their heads and their own money is going down the tubes as well.

      That's the main force behind this RTO push. When you look closely, you'll find that it's mostly the large corpora

  • There's only one reason bosses fight this. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Eunomion ( 8640039 ) on Sunday June 25, 2023 @02:19PM (#63631290)
    Going in gives them perks like company cars, flights, hotels, business lunches, etc. If almost everyone can just click a button and be in a meeting, that goes away.

    • Well, there's that, but there is more.

      Large companies often own their offices. Worse, C-Levels often have investments in the real estate around the office, renting them out to restaurants and the like. Now those CEOs not only have shareholders breathing down their necks for the plummeting real estate values of those offices, they also have to deal with their own investments failing because those restaurants close down due to a lack of customers.

      Also, middle managers often know they're useless. And if they c

      • Exactly. Employers and upper-level don't just leech of people's work, they leech off their very presence. Now that people are gaining back control of that part of their work, the VIPs are whining that their jobs aren't as easy anymore, even if overall productivity stays the same or increases.

        • It's not even that their jobs are any harder, they whine that we don't prop up their investment anymore.

          I couldn't give less of a shit about their investment.

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