<story><title>Dreaded commute to the city is keeping offices mostly empty</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/dreaded-commute-to-the-city-is-keeping-offices-mostly-empty-11653989581</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Johnny555</author><text>That&amp;#x27;s one reason for sure, but even if my house was a 10 minute walk from the office, I&amp;#x27;d still rather only go in for meetings. At home I have my own private office with a  nice view. I have a nice set of speakers and can play any music I like. If I want to go for a walk,  I&amp;#x27;m in a quiet suburban neighborhood with hiking trails nearby. The kitchen is always stocked with snacks I like plus freshly prepared healthy lunches (prepared either by myself or my wife). My dog spends most of the day in the office with me.&lt;p&gt;At the &amp;quot;new&amp;quot; office, no one has an assigned desk, so I have to take everything I need with me to my desk and  pack it up at the end of the day. My company is distributed so I spend half the day on zoom meetings with people in other offices... and even with relatively few people in the office it&amp;#x27;s already hard to book a room for a meeting. There&amp;#x27;s enough background noise in the open office that I keep headphones on most of the time while I&amp;#x27;m at my desk. We do get free lunches at the office which is a nice perk, but food is prepared off-site, so menus tend to be designed around food that stands up to this model of food that can be prepared hours ahead of time.&lt;p&gt;My commute is less than 30 minutes (one-way) and is a pretty pleasant drive.... it takes an hour out of my day, but it&amp;#x27;s not the primary reason I don&amp;#x27;t want to go to the office.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>BlargMcLarg</author><text>&amp;gt;There&amp;#x27;s enough background noise in the open office that I keep headphones on most of the time while I&amp;#x27;m at my desk.&lt;p&gt;I still don&amp;#x27;t get how we as a species went &amp;quot;this is fine&amp;quot;. The complete loss of audiovisual privacy is such an immense drain. I&amp;#x27;ll buy the &amp;quot;being close together works better&amp;quot; argument, but I still can&amp;#x27;t grasp how that offsets all the distractions in the modern office.</text></comment>
<story><title>Dreaded commute to the city is keeping offices mostly empty</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/dreaded-commute-to-the-city-is-keeping-offices-mostly-empty-11653989581</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Johnny555</author><text>That&amp;#x27;s one reason for sure, but even if my house was a 10 minute walk from the office, I&amp;#x27;d still rather only go in for meetings. At home I have my own private office with a  nice view. I have a nice set of speakers and can play any music I like. If I want to go for a walk,  I&amp;#x27;m in a quiet suburban neighborhood with hiking trails nearby. The kitchen is always stocked with snacks I like plus freshly prepared healthy lunches (prepared either by myself or my wife). My dog spends most of the day in the office with me.&lt;p&gt;At the &amp;quot;new&amp;quot; office, no one has an assigned desk, so I have to take everything I need with me to my desk and  pack it up at the end of the day. My company is distributed so I spend half the day on zoom meetings with people in other offices... and even with relatively few people in the office it&amp;#x27;s already hard to book a room for a meeting. There&amp;#x27;s enough background noise in the open office that I keep headphones on most of the time while I&amp;#x27;m at my desk. We do get free lunches at the office which is a nice perk, but food is prepared off-site, so menus tend to be designed around food that stands up to this model of food that can be prepared hours ahead of time.&lt;p&gt;My commute is less than 30 minutes (one-way) and is a pretty pleasant drive.... it takes an hour out of my day, but it&amp;#x27;s not the primary reason I don&amp;#x27;t want to go to the office.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>timr</author><text>&amp;gt; My commute is less than 30 minutes (one-way) and is a pretty pleasant drive.... it takes an hour out of my day, but it&amp;#x27;s not the primary reason I don&amp;#x27;t want to go to the office.&lt;p&gt;Focusing on &amp;quot;reasons why I don&amp;#x27;t like the office&amp;quot; is missing the point, IMO. A lot of folks are betting on the long-term results of a short-term dislocation, but ignoring &lt;i&gt;why&lt;/i&gt; things were as they were before the dislocation. It&amp;#x27;s sort of like the commentariat who come up with hot-takes in the aftermath of a natural disaster, and conclude &amp;quot;life will never be the same&amp;quot;...but within a few years life is, almost always, pretty much the same.&lt;p&gt;Yes, there are obvious upsides to working from home, but there are also fundamental reasons that we used to go into the office, and dismissing them all as &lt;i&gt;&amp;quot;the old way of doing it&amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt; is facile. I think, in the &amp;quot;long&amp;quot; run (i.e. the next few years), the same forces that led humans to form cities throughout all of human existence will prevail.&lt;p&gt;Said differently: offices sucked before the pandemic too. The technology existed for remote work before the pandemic, too. Yet even in the most remote-friendly work environments, we went out of our way to make time for in-person communication. There was no sudden shift in technology or quality here. We did some short-term things to deal with a short-term circumstance, and now we&amp;#x27;re seeing the hangover of those choices. But the forces at play are largely unchanged.&lt;p&gt;If I had to wager, I&amp;#x27;d bet that being in the office will be how you get noticed and advance in your career. Making on-site visits will be how you get the sale. Having in-person communication will offer productivity gains over video chat. The incentives to in-person communication will therefore accumulate over time, until we&amp;#x27;re back to where we started.</text></comment>