Is 'Work From Home' Here to Stay After 2023? (usatoday.com) 163
"Remote-work numbers have dwindled over the past few years as employers issue return-to-office mandates," reports USA Today. "But will that continue in 2024?"
The numbers started to slide after spring 2020, when more than 60% of days were worked from home, according to data from WFH Research, a scholarly data collection project. By 2023, that number had dropped to about 25% â' much lower than its peak but still a fivefold increase from 5% in 2019. But work-from-home numbers have held steady throughout most of 2023. And according to remote-work experts, they're expected to rebound in the years to come as companies adjust to work-from-home trends. "Return-to-office died in '23," said Nick Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford University and work-from-home expert. "There's a tombstone with 'RTO' on it...."
Though a number of companies issued return-to-work mandates this year, most are allowing employees to work from home at least part of the week. That makes 2024 the year for employers to figure out the hybrid model. "We're never going to go back to a five-days-in-the-office policy," said Stephan Meier, professor of business at Columbia University. "Some employers are going to force people to come back, but I think over the next year, more and more firms will actually figure out how to manage hybrid well." Thirty-eight percent of companies require full-time in-office work, down from 39% one quarter ago and 49% at the start of the year, according to software firm Scoop Technologies...
[Stanford economics professor] Bloom called remote-work numbers in 2023 "pancake-flat." Yes, large companies like Meta and Zoom made headlines by ordering workers back to the office. But, Bloom said, just as many other companies were quietly reducing office attendance to cut costs.
Bloom thinks holograms and VR devices are possible within five years. "In the long run, the thing that really matters is technology."
One paper estimates that currently 37% of America's jobs can be done entirely at home, according to the article, and ZipRecruiter's chief economist seems to agree, predicting as much as 33% America's work days will eventually be completed from home. "I think the numbers will gradually go up as this becomes more of an accepted norm as future generations grow up with it being so widely available, and as the technology for for doing it gets better."
And the article notes that the ZipRecruiter economist sees another factor fueling the trend. "Reluctant leaders aging out of the workforce will help, too, she said."
Though a number of companies issued return-to-work mandates this year, most are allowing employees to work from home at least part of the week. That makes 2024 the year for employers to figure out the hybrid model. "We're never going to go back to a five-days-in-the-office policy," said Stephan Meier, professor of business at Columbia University. "Some employers are going to force people to come back, but I think over the next year, more and more firms will actually figure out how to manage hybrid well." Thirty-eight percent of companies require full-time in-office work, down from 39% one quarter ago and 49% at the start of the year, according to software firm Scoop Technologies...
[Stanford economics professor] Bloom called remote-work numbers in 2023 "pancake-flat." Yes, large companies like Meta and Zoom made headlines by ordering workers back to the office. But, Bloom said, just as many other companies were quietly reducing office attendance to cut costs.
Bloom thinks holograms and VR devices are possible within five years. "In the long run, the thing that really matters is technology."
One paper estimates that currently 37% of America's jobs can be done entirely at home, according to the article, and ZipRecruiter's chief economist seems to agree, predicting as much as 33% America's work days will eventually be completed from home. "I think the numbers will gradually go up as this becomes more of an accepted norm as future generations grow up with it being so widely available, and as the technology for for doing it gets better."
And the article notes that the ZipRecruiter economist sees another factor fueling the trend. "Reluctant leaders aging out of the workforce will help, too, she said."
It's got my vote (Score:5, Interesting)
and my employer is supporting it because their building is overflowing and they are avoiding the costs of relocating
Re:It's got my vote (Score:5, Informative)
My employer has quietly stopped building anything new or acquiring new property. Officially we're hybrid, but we lost a lot of people after bonuses paid out, I suspect we will eventually adopt a more WFH model.
I suspect we have plenty of people who *have* to work from an office for one reason or another, and I think about 20% of my coworkers would prefer it because their home situation isn't remote friendly. But the rest... we'll all eventaully be full time remote.
Re:It's got my vote (Score:5, Interesting)
My wife worked for company A which allowed people to work from home when it HAD to, but announced it was not going to have a work from home culture.
Wife decided she liked WFH and sought a new job that was 100% remote. She found one, which happened to pay a lot more to boot. Of course company A offered her WFH when she resigned, and she said no.
She is about to quit company B, having accepted a new job with company C that is also 100% remote. Pay is the same, but she anticipates less stress.
Companies B and C originally advertised the jobs as hybrid, but couldn't find any takers.
Remote work will come back (Score:5, Insightful)
Especially for Tech companies . Whats a quick way to slash your budget. Quit paying massive amounts of money for real estate rental + Electricity + all the other costs associated with it. That simple, you can even offer a little less money because people don't have drive into work and it gives them 1-4 hours a day back ( depending on your commute). Once the tooth paste is out of the tube .. Not even Jamie Dimon can put it back in.
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Have you tried job hunting recently? I have. Startups are mostly remote, but just about every established company is looking for hybrid. The momentum is absolutely shifting away from fully remote.
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Have you tried job hunting recently? I have. Startups are mostly remote, but just about every established company is looking for hybrid. The momentum is absolutely shifting away from fully remote.
Hybrid is still a vast improvement over fully in office. Gotta take the wins whenever you can.
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Bah, hybrid usually equals 3 days in the office per week.
Yes. Only a 40% improvement, but still better than zero.
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My division is signing new grads, new hires, and interns with full 5 day in the office contracts. The juniors need an extended period of mentoring, not just on boarding. That is provided by senior devs who are in 2-3 days a week. Some more. The new hires get hybrid once they are out of probation, I assume.
Almost no hires are full 100% remote. The only one I am aware of is a special case.
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A lot of startups are, but that's probably because they never had an office to begin with. Having recently job searched, I found 3 public tech companies hiring fully remote- Square, Shopify, and Pintrest. And at least one of those is now in a hiring freeze.
Interesting new grad/experiences breakdown there. Yeah, I've wondered since the start of the pandemic how the hell you train up new grads. I know if you dropped me in a fully remote environment back when I was 21, I would have failed completely. I d
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Same observation for me. Pre-covid, there were three floors in our office building that was for our company.
Now there's just one. It has basically just stuff you cannot bring home, meaning equipment lab and some secure areas (where you have stuff that is air-gapped), as well as storages for field engineers when they need to grab gear for installations.
Headcount has not decreased at all.
Re: Remote work will come back (Score:2)
You donâ(TM)t âjustâ stop paying rent. The contracts are usually for many years. Sure, you can stop using the building, but that doesnâ(TM)t free you from paying for it.
Commercial Real Estate collapse (Score:5, Insightful)
2024 seems to have a massive collapse of commerical real estate in store due to idiotic building owners thinking that interest rates would never change, and them now trying to renew their loans that they can no longer afford.
Working from where you want however seems to be stable, there hasn't been an increase office attendance in the past 6 months.
So these companies that are fist deep in real estate that keep spouting these nonsense should maybe be more concerned if they will still exist themselves rather than if WFH will still exist. They aren't going to get that toothpaste back in the tube so maybe they better just accept their inevitable bankruptcy and move on.
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Are you going off guy feeling here or have you actually looked at numbers? Because the official numbers for every major US city is showing increasing occupancy rates. Well below pre-pandemic numbers, but well over 2021 and it's been increasing all year. Similar statistics for public transit use- well below pre-pandemic, but increasing especially during rush hours. The return is slowly happening.
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Sure, idiot management demands return to office. So workers return and start sending out resumes the same day. It'll just take a bit for the job hunt and then you'll see occupancy decline again. Soon after, companies that "boast" of high office occupancy will be known to contain mostly deadwood.
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That only works if the remote jobs are still out there. If the companies are moving to hybrid or in office, you can search all you want and not find enough remote jobs to absorb all those people. Having recently done a job search, I found 1 public company that was hiring fully remote. The rest were in office or hybrid. Startups were hiring remote, but that means taking a 6 figure paycut and betting on their stock being worth something some day. Some people will take that, but not many.
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It just requires enough for a gradual exodus.
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I'm basing this on the best data available: Kastle Systems’ Nationwide Back to Work Barometer
This tracks card scans of employees. It has been flat for a long time. While many people may work from office X days a week, there hasn't been growth in people checking into the office anymore.
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Go to the search box on Slashdot and type "commercial real estate". You'll find a new story every couple of weeks about the problems with empty commercial real estate. Mortgages defaulting, companies that rent space going bankrupt, companies not renewing their leases, cities struggling with the empty space, etc.
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You should put all your life savings into commercial real estate mate. It's a great investment. Better be quick doing it too!
Yes (Score:3, Insightful)
"Is 'Work From Home' Here to Stay After 2023?"
Yes. Next article please.
RTO is disproportionately a big company phenomenon (Score:2)
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You're also forgetting the effect of people back in offices in a central business district. Many other businesses in the area benefit from people working in the office, particularly restaurants. With people not being in the office those businesses go under which leads to a loss of tax revenue for the town/city. That loss needs to be made up somewhere which inevitably means cutting back on road repairs and/or services.
This is especially true in cities which have a large government presence. Why do think so
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Re:RTO is disproportionately a big company phenome (Score:4, Insightful)
That's not something that works in real life. Its not that easy to relocate a physical business, it takes time and money. There also needs to be a critical mass of customers. In a business district, you may have 100K+ people within a mile as a possible customer base. If you move that to a single location elsewhere, you've now decreased your customer base by 80% due to lower density, lost most of your delivery business because the distances no longer make sense, have no reputation in the area so no established customers, and are competing with the much cheaper and easier option of eating at home. It's a change that the market can adapt to, but it will take a decade and many, many businesses will fail or close in doing so (a multiple of the normal failure rate).
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In a more mixed area with offices, shops, train & bus stops/stations, public areas, public services, etc., you get a lot more & more consistent "footfall" throughout the day & into the eveni
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That's not something that works in real life. Its not that easy to relocate a physical business, it takes time and money.
True, but eventually, those businesses will close either way, so the decision comes down to whether to shut them down now while they still have enough money to reopen somewhere else or shut them down later, where somebody else will end up opening a different business where the people actually are. At some point, you have to cut your losses and realize that downtown areas in most cities aren't coming back any time soon, and figure out how to relocate to more residential areas. This isn't exactly the first
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How about those businesses that serve the offices relocate to town/city centres or wherever the workers want to eat/go out? Surely, people working from home will be commuting less & therefore have more time to go out & eat/socialise? Or is that not what happens in the USA?
People commute to work which, unless people bring food from home, makes them somewhat of a captive market. They may also have to travel in to eat out but at home they have spouses, kids, pets, hobbies, etc. Whilst they might want to travel in some days (and it might actually take longer to get into the city - it depends very much on local geography) to eat out it's likely to be less often and so restaurants would need to make more per visit which means better food which is harder to deliver. Also, whilst fi
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Re:RTO is disproportionately a big company phenome (Score:4, Insightful)
This is also the result of decades of bad urban zoning with this idea of all highly corporate downtown areas flanked by suburbs and residentials rather than a more mixed approach, which ironically we already know is a much more favorable approach from, well, the largest cities.
Those cities also don't get to tap the extra revenue from the resident because the workers usually don't actually live in that particular city but a town outside it. Combine that with the fact that most suburban districts lose money and end up subsidized by the city they surround and you've created a sort of urban death spiral.
This also exacerbated the problem in the first place since everyone has to commute into the area where people work as opposed to just leaving nearby it and tada, long commutes.
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So a sensible form of protest against this unjustified treatment is to pack your lunch and refuse to go eat at a restaurant.
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...pack your lunch and refuse to go eat at a restaurant.
I've been doing this for 20 years (as have most of my coworkers), and I mentioned that when a boss used it as an argument for RTO. The RTO argument died on the vine at that moment. The only business that saw a revenue drop from me not going into the office was the gas station.
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The fun bit is that the lunch places around my place of work barely saw a drop in revenue from our office since our office sponsors part of the meal and most people are close to the office once a day anyway (various reasons, long story). So we actually meet each other quite often in the takeout line of one of the lunch restaurants.
Re:RTO is disproportionately a big company phenome (Score:5, Insightful)
It's disproportionally a problem for companies owning their property who now have to either get people back into these buildings or explain to their board why they keep empty real estate around.
And the reason for the latter is that a loss is not a loss until you have to realize it. If you buy something for a million and it now costs 10 grand, you don't really have lost any money until you have to sell it.
And every CEO tries to somehow keep the plates spinning now 'til they can finally grab their golden parachute and bail, to make the problem one of their successor. That's the whole deal behind RTO. You can see a very close relationship to whether a corporation owns their offices (or has a still ongoing long-term lease on them) with RTO. Companies that don't have empty offices hanging over their head because they could simply cut that expense miraculously don't need their workers to drag their bodies into a particular location every day.
One has to wonder why.
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I don't know. I see a lot of small shops, typically run by political conservatives, that were all-in on RTO, since 2020.
I mostly like my boss, but (Score:2)
He's one of these people who wants everyone in person - not for any reason he can articulate other than "he's old school" (his exact words). Fortunately, my workplace's policies currently favor hybrid work, and he hasn't started pushing... yet.
If he does start leaning on me to be in the office more, we're going to find out how much he values me as an employee - because my wife has already said she's fine with my retiring early in that situation, and a hybrid schedule is the only way I'm willing to stick aro
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> "he's old school"
Unless he's the owner, his bosses might not like that he can only hire old-school employees.
Creativity happens with flexible minds.
Interesting situation because good managers are often high conscientiousness, low openness.
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You're old school. Ok.
Old school gets sorted out in our modern society. Adapt or perish.
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...not for any reason he can articulate other than "he's old school" (his exact words).
The world will be a better place when he ages out of the workforce.
RTO can GTFO (Score:5, Insightful)
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Agree.
Since I have stage 4 cancer, I automatically qualify for disability. If I was not allowed to WFH 100%, I'd just say fuck it and go on disability.
Clocking in & out? (Score:2)
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Or we could just trust the employees. If employee can work for example just one hour per day and do enough work to look like 8 hour day, what does it matter to the company, they are getting what they are paying for, right? Or if they expect the person to do 8 times more work, they should pay him that much more and then expect enough work for the money.
And if the employee works for 8 hour and does work worth of only 1 hour, does it matter did the report hours correctly or not? You should just fire the person
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The last place I worked went from 100% on-site (which seemed odd to me given the nature of the work) to remote during the pandemic (when I started) and despite repeatedly floating RTO trial balloons, also pushed forever-crunch workloads that would have been a lot less feasible or easy to hide in an in-office environment. People working remotely, on the other hand, were sharing clever tricks to sneak in unpaid overtime so they could keep their jobs.
There were also stories from the before-times of what seemed
Re:Clocking in & out? (Score:4, Insightful)
Your reasoning is deeply flawed. Anybody can just "clock in" and then stare out the window all day or sift the web in an office just as well. So, no, there is no need for that. What is there is that abusive employers and employers that do not trust their employees will have a much harder time retaining employees. Good.
Incidentally, measuring productivity is a lot easier for work-form-home, because you have no meaningless "time of ass-in-chair" metric getting in the way.
fifteen minutes of real, actual, work (Score:2)
"I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work."
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I work in security. Care to inform me how you want to "measure" my work at all, be it in office or in my home office? I do pentesting for a living. I test computer systems for flaws and security shortcomings. Let's say I found only 1 security flaw in this system and my coworker found in his test of another system 10 in the same time. Does it mean I was slacking off? Or does it mean there wasn't any more to be found?
We're testing some systems on an annual base due to compliance rules. In these systems, you h
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I also have a work-issued PC that is running on a non-work related link that gets unfiltered internet
Unfiltered does not mean unmonitored.
It's quite easy in your case, you have a job to do and a deadline by which to do it, does the report get delivered on time? If you start having late reports, reports which are rejected by the QA process or customer complaints then we start taking a closer look at your work.
In terms of quality or slacking off, if you have sufficient scale and recurring jobs you can rotate staff. If your colleagues keep finding new things on the systems you tested last year it's time to gi
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And even that doesn't work. Security work is highly specialized. You can't cover all the bases, so you have to be an expert in something and dabble in the rest. My field is mainframes, fat clients and cloud security. But I'm worse than useless when it comes to mobile phones and their applications.
You want to bet that I find more security holes in a fat client I get to disassemble than my colleague who is an expert in mobile security and vice versa?
And you can't really afford having two experts for every fie
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As a manager of an all-remote team, I know whether my team is working or not. No, I don't know exactly what time they start and stop working (nor do I care), but I can tell when they are being productive. If a manager doesn't know his team well enough to know if they are productive or not, they shouldn't be in management.
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Work from home isn't sustainable (Score:3)
Look, it doesn't matter what you or your boss think or how productive you are. Our infrastructure simply isn't built to support a work-from-home model, it's designed to have a certain number of people commuting into certain cities and then commuting back home to suburbs. Remove that, and cities start to die, but also, towns don't have the infrastructure to support more people in them constantly.
Work from home is going to go away because government is going to make it go away, just wait. Cities need the tax income they make from business offices. They're not going to just allow it to go away. Our cities and towns are designed around people working in offices. Getting rid of that would involve completely rethinking how our society works, and that's just not going to happen.
It doesn't matter if you could work from home or if you're just as productive at home, you're still going to have to go back into the office, because that's just the way our society is built. Cities can survive for a bit without going back to that model, but not indefinitely, and eventually, they have the political power to get everyone back in the office, one way or another.
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because government is going to make it go away
I suppose they'd like to if they could. I'm trying to see the mechanism they'll use to force people into their cars and sit in offices. You haven't offered one. I'll speculate and say "taxes," as in they'll find some way to punish WFH with tax policy.
Here's a political career idea that will likely work: frame the WFH issue as a racial issue. "Privileged" whites are starving our wonderful cites of revenue and "hurting minorities or something." Thus, they must pay taxes from there sub/exburbs that get
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It's easier for nobody but government to adapt to changing situations when it comes to their income. A normal business would have to grin and bear it when their customer's habits change, they may have to shut down for good. Governments can just change their income system.
Just like ours did recently. We used to pay a "TV tax". If you had a TV ready to receive OTA (or cable) TV, you paid that tax. With more and more people not having any OTA/cable reception anymore, and thus not paying the tax, because they'r
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Our infrastructure simply isn't built to support a work-from-home model...
There was a time when our infrastructure didn't support commuting, but we adapted so we wouldn't perish. Now it's time to adapt again or risk perishing.
Times change, and this is one of the few changes that benefit us workers.
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Last I knew, in the US at least, people have the right to live where they want to live, and businesses have the right to locate where they want to locate. If a city were to start cracking down somehow on remote work, guess what! Companies will start to leave the city entirely. There is nothing cities can do to prevent that from happening.
Besides, most cities have a congestion problem, and welcome a breather from the demands of ever-increasing traffic. That tax money comes at a high cost to cities. Houston,
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I work for a large hospital network. We have dozens of facilities located in this city. Please explain how it will relocate those facilities if the city I am in starts taxing WFH practices.
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Obviously, a hospital can't be fully virtual, since doctors often need to physically be where the patients are. But lets say the hospital wants to enable WFH for its administrative functions (which is the most logical). The city decides to enact some kind of tax on WFH for businesses within the city. So the hospital simply creates a subsidiary, headquartered in a "friendlier" city, comprised of remote workers, and contracts with the subsidiary to provide the administrative services. This really isn't that h
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Work from home is going to go away because government is going to make it go away, just wait. Cities need the tax income they make from business offices. They're not going to just allow it to go away. Our cities and towns are designed around people working in offices. Getting rid of that would involve completely rethinking how our society works, and that's just not going to happen.
The world is changing and we shouldn't try to hold it back arbitrarily. It's simply idiotic to drive around burning fossil fuel when you're going to work on a computer anyway.
OTOH, there are a lot of jobs you can't do from home, and a lot of reasons for people to live in cities. Education is one example; remote studying might work at the university level to some extent, but not for everything and not so well at the lower levels. Old prestigious universities have seen half a millennium of societal and tec
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I'm not sure how cities are going to lose tax income. There are so many real estate holding companies that if one business sells, another picks it up, and real estate prices are not dropping. Even with a 100% vacancy rate, real estate in the US is a commodity that a lot of countries use as a solid investment.
Government always gets their taxes, and with how real estate laws are in the US, if one place doesn't pay, another will gladly step in, buy the building and foot the bill.
The trend actually is opposit
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Our cities were already dying before WFH. Retail has been struggling against online and parking costs. Rising property prices made it hard to hire people within commuting distance of the office.
This is the only chance we have to save them, by making them mixed use and much more accessible.
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Our infrastructure simply isn't built to support a work-from-home model, it's designed to have a certain number of people commuting into certain cities and then commuting back home to suburbs. Remove that, and cities start to die, but also, towns don't have the infrastructure to support more people in them constantly.
Infrastructure isn't a fixed thing. It adapts to the changing needs of a city. But in any case your entire premise is broken. Infrastructure is necessary to *move* people. When people don't move you don't need the infrastructure.
We already have systems in place to provide for a population that is in their homes. We have always had this, it has been necessary every afternoon after the work day ends. Power, Heating, Lighting, all of that works. The great American dream house complete with home cooked meal at
Obviously (Score:2)
I have done it before and many other have. The only thing that changed is that a lot more people are now aware it works and a lot of asshole narcissist CEOs and other "managers" do not like their slaves to not be tightly controlled on site, no matter how irrational, wasteful and stupid that is.
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The problem is that the slaves have never in the history of the wage slave had more of a chance to just tell them to fuck off. You want me in the office? Fuck off. The company over there that is hiring gives me 100% WFH and likely even more money.
I don't care for some C-Level's power fantasies. You tighten your grip and all that happens is that I slip through your fingers.
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Yep, same here. I have literally done that. Turns out they rather have me work remotely for them than not have me at all.
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Sounds strangely familiar...
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Well, it is a nice feeling having skills that are _really_ in demand. Although many employers seem to not understand what a market is until you explain it to them.
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Weird, considering most of them have some sort of BA degree.
Which makes me wonder what kind of degree that is... In German, we'd call it a "Baumschuldiplom". Doesn't translate well, though, but it's not really something you should be proud of.
It is for me (Score:2)
My employers closed a couple of offices for good in 2022 and 2023. Work from home or quit. Since I work very remotely (head office in Dallas, me in Canada) work from home is here to stay. We tried a shared packaged office space a few years ago but decided the costs didn't justify the benefits.
The Powers That Be decided this year that it would be a good idea for remote people to be seen in person every now and then, so I spent a few days in Dallas early in December. It was good to interact with the voices
Recruiting is a problem for RTO (Score:2)
I've hired about a dozen developers in the last year. Just about every one comes to us with the requirement that we offer them WFH full time. If we don't agree to it (which we do, despite having several physical offices) they would move on to somebody else that will accommodate. I think a lot of companies that want people to come back, are finding that they can't get the talent they need, unless they relax their policies. This year, our company chose to close its headquarters in Austin to save money, even t
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According to Forbes, the future of remote work looks good, and prospects are increasing, not decreasing. https://www.forbes.com/advisor... [forbes.com]. This is also the trend I am seeing first-hand as I interview developers. You stories in the news about big companies demanding that their employees return to the office, but as the article points out, many other companies are quietly embracing remote work.
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As stated below, this means that the really GOOD people who can do something that only they can do will be able to get WFH, simply because your choice is to take him or keep looking. And that in turn will mean that everyone will want WFH because people like to be considered "good" and want job perks, whether they use them or not.
Having to go to an office will be considered a stigma. You're not good enough to push back against them, you have to bend over and take it, because you're a low level grunt they can
AI? (Score:2)
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What work can people do at home that can't be done by AI?
That's the wrong framing. The question is, "what work can people do that can't be done by AI?" Home vs. office is the wrong dichotomy, as it is completely irrelevant. And the answer is, "the vast majority of it."
AI only shines in those areas where computers have always outperformed humans, and nothing else. That is in fast math and computational logic. AI sucks at everything else.
"At home, not working" may become the bigger trend (Score:2)
Thus I think the question of 2024 will not so much be whether people will be allowed to "work from home", but how much of the jobs that could be done from home are aut
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In a theory, a good AGI can replace people completely, be it the remote system admin, the full stack developer, and so on.
But we are not there yet. Letting AI run the enterprise might mean a glitch in the LLM causes a major security incident, or an outage. When people try using ChatGPT to develop code, it helps by giving them code to debug, but there is a chance that 100% of the code spat out can be worthless.
If businesses could replace 100% of everyone with AI, they already would have, it isn't for lack
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I would definitely prefer restaurants with no human staff.
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Umm... pretty much anything but lowest entry level positions?
AI is not innovative. It's generative. It can create only a derivate of what already has been created. Present a new problem to an AI and it will fail miserably at even finding a way to come up with a solution.
Full 5 day RTO may be dead, but so is Full Remote (Score:2)
The list of mid and large sized companies moving to 2 and 3 day/wk hybrid models is growing by the week. Rush hour traffic is back Tue-Thur and the parking lots are decently full in Ottawa’s high tech park in suburban Kanata. After being empty up until 6 months ago. Full remote is dying for many.
Change is still happening. Federal civil servants are being reeled in after a 2 day mandate was imposed earlier in 2023. It is likely they will move to a 3 day mandate later in 2024.
Here is Toronto’s off
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I think it will highly depend on what either side can force through. It seems to me that employees prefer WFH, employers prefer RTO. In other words, you'll see a lot of entry-level jobs being forced back to office while the top level specialists that are few and far between, hard to get and elusive, will WFH.
This in turn will give working in the office a stigma. Because "good" people can get away with WFH, if you work in an office, it must mean that you're some replaceable goon. And even people who would wa
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Demand all you want. But as long as there are employers willing to grant 100% home office, you will not get anyone. At least not in a market where there is one person capable of doing what 10 companies want done.
You can of course get people to come in 40% of the time. But rest assured that these people will not be happy about it. If they can bail for greener pastures, they will. What you'll be stuck with is the duds that cannot.
Still open office concept (Score:3)
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I'll come work at an open floor hell when the C-suite is sitting there with me.
Eat your own dogfood, bitches!
Nope (Score:2)
If my employer had their way, we'd be in 5 days a week again.
Right now they're telling us to come in 2 days a week, TO START. I think in 2024 they'll make it 3 days. They're getting less than 10% compliance, and executive management is flipping out because no one wants to come in.
What sucks is that prior to the pandemic, I was 100% remote. Now I go in 2 days a week. And if I am sick or take a vacation day, that's to be counted as a WFH day, and not an "in the office" day.
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Time to brush up that old resume and send it around.
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I'm not sure offshoring is the cause but there has definitely been a huge tech industry downturn, and businesses haven't given up on RTO so much as reached a stalemate with the WFH trend resulting in "hybrid" work...for now.
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Erh... would these techs mind working in the EU? It's kinda impossible right now to find qualified personnel.
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Erh... would these techs mind working in the EU? It's kinda impossible right now to find qualified personnel.
I'm sure they'd be glad to work remote for an EU company, from home. I know I would, even with the relatively crazy hours I'd have to work from the US..
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That might limit some options (security won't happen abroad... which in turn also means it's kinda hard to outsource to Bangalore), but in general I see no reason why this can't fly.
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If you can be replaced by somebody offshore, you should be replaced by somebody offshore.
Yes, there are good people in other countries, they just don't work (for long) for the offshoring companies.
The reality is, by the time you add the costs of managing offshore teams, which is a lot higher than managing onshore teams, you end up with a net loss. But offshoring will keep happening because the execs don't look at the total amount of productivity, they look at the average cost per head.
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That was happening well before COVID and WFH. Some of those companies are now re-onshoring now that they have seen how "well" offshoring worked.
Re:The tombstone is having a job in the first plac (Score:4, Interesting)
One thing you are missing is history. There was a big offshoring push a while back. All the big businesses saw it as a great way to replace expensive American workers with cheap foreign labor, and get the same quality out.
It didn't work. There are many reasons why, language and cultural barriers among them. But also the high number of offshoring scam businesses that cropped up. They did things like promise you a team of ten trained software developers, and what you actually got was one competent software developer and ten people that could hardly use a keyboard, filling chairs. The productivity wasn't anywhere near what was expected or needed.
Anyway, the industry largely lost faith and started onshoring work again, though they faced a hard time finding local talent given the high number of people that changed careers after being replaced by a foreign team, which created another demand spike for software development talent.
Offshoring didn't go away completely of course. Businesses still do it. Though at least some of them prefer to own the foreign office themselves, interview and hire the workers themselves, etc. It costs a bit more that way but helps protect against the scams. And it is still not a perfect solution. Good programmers are hard to find in any country, so most businesses look for them wherever they are and try to keep they ones they can get.
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Found the person who is bitter that they didn't choose a profession that can work from home and wants others to suffer like they do.
Yeah I can't think of any way for a jizz mopper to be able to work from home.
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Well, he can do that at home... but I doubt a lot of people would pay him for it.
Re:Solution (Score:4, Insightful)
If I were a person who had to work in the office, I would be absolutely thrilled to have those who don't work from home. And get off my roads and out of my way and reduce my commute time.