"Superstar Cities Are in Trouble: The past year has offered a glimpse of the nowhere-everywhere future of work, and it isn’t optimistic for big cities." https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/02/remote-work-revolution/617842/ excerpts: The best argument against the remote-work experiment having a durable impact on our lives beyond the pandemic is an appeal to human inertia: For decades, the internet was a thing and remote work wasn’t, and after the pandemic, it’ll just feel like 2019 again. But the impediment to widespread remote work in 2019 and before wasn’t technological. It was social. According to the economist David Autor, remote work suffered from a “telephone problem.” Seven decades after the first telephone was patented in the 1860s, fewer than half of Americans owned one. Behavior dragged behind technology, because most families had no use for a telecom machine as long as none of their friends also owned one. In network theory, this is known as Metcalfe’s Law: The value of a communications network rises exponentially with the number of its users. The same has been true of remote work. In 2018, it was weird and rude to ask a boss to move a meeting to Skype, or to tell a business partner to fire up a Zoom link because you can’t make lunch. The teleconference tech existed, but it was considered an ersatz substitute for the normal course of business. “The most important outcome of the pandemic wasn’t that it taught you how to use Zoom, but rather that it forced everybody else to use Zoom,” Autor told me. "We all leapfrogged over the coordination problem at the exact same time.” Meetings, business lunches, work trips—all these things will still happen in the after world. But nobody will forget the lesson we were all just forced to learn: Telecommunications doesn’t have to be the perfect substitute for in-person meetings, as long as it’s mostly good enough. For the most part, remote work just works. more at the link
Progressive companies and fields where talent is highly sought after were moving to remote work in the late teens anyway. Now that remote work has been forced, office space is condensing to save money. Employers have tools and metrics to monitor productivity, and it's actually showing in most cases that people are overall more productive working from home. It's never going back to 'normal'. Industries that require hands-on work will continue to do so but cut back office space where it isn't needed for actual work.
Saying Remote-Meetings Work is not the same as saying "remote work just works." I don't know how he jumped to that conclusion. Sure, for some occupations like sales staff and software developers (who were already working remotely, a lot), it can work. But to say "Everyone work at home; we have no office space, because it's better and you'll like it" ... I don't know. I'm not so sure that Isolation is Better is the lesson we learned moving forward.
btw: I have a GARM challenge. See if you can use "ersatz" in a GARM post...better yet, a Thread Title.
It's a throwback to 90's culture, like every other @tinman thread. In this case, the impact of Gangsta Rap on our youth.
It increases the chances of you moving out of New York when you can be robbed for buying Tea from China in Chinatown.(first video is in Chinatown NYC)
For the people who work as criminals, it's a great place. Plus you don't need to be on zoom calls or social distance. Eric B for President
related: "Obnoxious New Yorkers who fled to suburbs are driving neighbors nuts" https://nypost.com/2021/02/04/obnox...the-suburbs-are-driving-their-neighbors-nuts/
What's this have to do with videos of violence in New York City and lack of social distancing and zoom calls from criminals?
Article has it backwards—people are lured to superstar cities to LIVE, and employers go where the talents want to be. The reality on the ground of course is that you end up living to work and not working to live, and that’s where the grumbling comes from. Any employer willing to move away from talent merely signals that “business environment” is more important than talent.
Well, I think handwringing goes something like: talent realizes they can live anywhere and something-something-something living in rural environments feels great so all talent leaving cities permanently. Or at least, that's what the narrative has been for the last few months in San Francisco. I think once the restaurants fully open again, the narrative will fizzle, but we'll see. If companies completely embrace remote work... I don't know how to break this to people but... it's going to be really really bad for American workers. Outsourcing becomes even more trivial for cutting labor costs dramatically.
