Sure, these guys might go into the office but they do so from their pied-a-terre / 3rd home / whatever within a 5 minute chauffeured drive. They do this while maintaining a nearby suburban/exurban estate and maybe a lake/beach/ski houses where they spend the majority of their actual hours.

I was listening to a podcast and they observed that US commuters might have had a boiled frog scenario where you slowly just get used to having a worse & worse commute as you age.. and COVID snapped everyone out of it cold turkey. Now attempting to go back to it is revolting for many.

He couldn't articulate a specific, valid complaint like "I was out at a client lunch and they were goofing off" or "I was on a vacation day while they were supposed to be working".

He was just mad that underlings had the same flexibility that he, as CEO, had always had. This being the same CEO who jets around DJing on the side for fun and has connections to do so at pretty high levels. So even the "cool CEO" is in fact, NOT cool.

It's like getting mad at all the other idiots on the road making traffic, lol. What do you think you are?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_M._Solomon

In fact, almost his entire track history was during COVID.. in a time that the company he runs has had some headline-grabbing losses in their consumer division.

So I think its fair to say he should focus on his own productivity here first.

The scene is notorious for it. It's really not hard to find vids of DJs dancing, pointing, posing, and poking uselessly at a mixer which is obviously just there for the look.

A "live set" typically involves the performer playing synths and programming the drums live. There are no record players, no pre-recorded tracks, everything is played live on the fly. Example: https://youtu.be/cVFzblT5VPE?t=4177 (a daytime one so you can see the gear)

With a "DJ set", the DJ is playing two or more tracks, beatmatching them and mixing them together, transitioning from one track to the next. This still takes a lot of skill. If you see two or more turntables or media players and a mixer in the middle, that's a DJ set. Often the DJ brings their tracks to the venue loaded on a USB stick and plugs it into the media player. Just because there's a USB stick present doesn't mean the DJ set was pre-recorded. Example: https://youtu.be/Ubyd98XV5C0?t=1018

I've never seen him perform but a DJ set ranges from people who just hit the play button and follow a recipe (e.g. Paris Hilton) to very technical mixing (e.g. Maceo Plex). A live set is substantially more challenging (and why few do it) but would be strong support he's not having his released tracks ghost produced.

Either way, good for him in my opinion. I also like mixing as a creative outlet but am terrible at it. If I was worth 9 figures I'd probably get a ghost producer to help me out and enjoy the experience of DJing.

David Solomon only really pitches himself as a hobbyist anyway so I don't think there's anything misleading/shameful about it if he is in fact just getting everything ghost produced and doing a 'lite' mixing DJ set live. There are plenty of full-time "professional" DJs who do the same thing.

If anyone wants some house music to chill to: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7s7In5PLSY_Z1aUMHb2wyw

“His Spotify profile has 550,000 monthly listeners with his debut single garnering 8 million listens.”

It varies but this list is showing several people at close to 1$/year per monthly listener. https://www.internetdj.com/top-djs

The CEO was upset others were allowed to perform as if they were of the same class.

It’s always class when one boils it down, imho.

But the obvious complaint was what are these slobs doing in my summer resort town, dining in the same establishment as me!! Rather than stuck in downtown Manhattan in the August heat. Or - the least they could do is go to Coney Island / Jones Beach / Jersey Shore or something eating some hotdogs.

I have run into this at a peer level though. I've negotiated WFH and extra vacation and have learned to keep it in the down low. They get mad at me, but I'm not the one that is their boss and I couldn't care less if they WFH.

I haven't taken a month-long vacation for a while but when I did a few times in a long-ago role, there were definitely people who were at least a bit incredulous that I could get off with doing so.

Yes it is a thing. It starts when you get promoted to a more senior role. The thing is, nothing much changed inside or outside, so many people feel they need to make a point. They start to dress differently, behave differently, introduce distance - to make sure others understand who is in the "superior" position.

I noticed thin in insecure types or those who need some confirmation of their value. But there are many people who are exact opposites, especially in the younger generation. They understand that being a manager doesn't mean giving orders but supporting your team in their work. It's so much easier for everybody.

That's basically my point.

Probably the worst scenario of business owners you can work for.

OTOH, a good small company can be really good. Decisions get made quickly, you know most of the people and can talk with them, much less BS, and more of a sense of purpose in what you're doing there rather than being a cog. I worked in one a few years back and loved it. They are tough to find, though, as a real 'small company' is different than a startup in that they're a bit less crazy in terms of growth.

Or, to put that another way: if the CEO can't use "come eat with me at $place" as a way to say to investors and other CEOs that he's "one of them" and can be let in on the backchannel conversations, then why is he even eating there? It's expensive and the service is awful! He'd much rather not! Now he needs to find a new place to use to signal that!

In Middle Ages, this separation was based on ownership of land and societal structure which soon started being formalised in (both religious and secular) laws. Today, money has the same purpose (being a measure and store of wealth).

If the answer is no then it's 100% a class thing

Musk buying Twitter was the best thing to happen to the work culture of Tesla employees.

The CEO and analyst are both upper class, just different levels of power and seniority.

That CEO is just a power-tripping asshole.

The reason they're used more is because there is a very clear distinction between groups even at high levels of wealth due to the need to socially signal. This is what causes CEOs to flip out that an analyst is trying to casually talk to them at a non-work event as if they are equals.

This is class dynamics in action, it's not all about the working class vs upper class, but how these different classes interact internally and externally.

But feeling like you have better opinions or thought deeper about subjects than others or that you know "how it really is", or that you're a better driver or whatever are other common ways. Whatever you feel like you are good at, or have a lot of, you will be tempted to feel superior about.

Fighting these thoughts is virtuous in my opinion. Pretending that only X type of people do it (rich or whatever) is not virtuous in my opinion.

Upper vs working the most important divide (IMHO), but not the only one.

It’s that weird in-between, where one still needs to earn a living and make even more money for someone else.

A 25M / year CEO is far past "earning a living" and really only works because they want to.

Social class is not just about your current salary, although 200k soon after graduation isn't exactly 'average'...

Some might even say that walking up to the CEO like that indicates upper class self-assurance...

In the office setting the CEO would never been seen anywhere near the same floor that such junior people are working or eating, never having the opportunity to introduce themselves. One bank famously had a special CEO elevator so the guy could seamlessly get from the garage to his high-rise executive suite without bumping into a single soul.

I recently found myself out to dinner a table over from a C-suite exec at my company. I did not introduce myself because I'm a socially damaged introvert.

It's a pretty easy bet that the kid was a major extrovert on the other hand, more than some assumption they must already be upper class.

You'd be surprised about the class mobility on Wall St vs other industries. When I graduated, Google famously did not even recruit from anything other than a small handful of schools and screened out a pretty high GPA minimum like 3.75 or so. Meanwhile every bank came to my college and I had like 5 offers. A good number of my coworkers spent some time at community college, had parents without college degrees, are first gen immigrants, etc.

Outside of glad-handing networking roles that lean on peoples connections like in IB, "already rich" is the exception rather than the rule. Bear was famous for saying they didn't hire MBAs, but instead PSDs — poor, smart and had a deep desire to be rich

The meritocrats are the ones that work the jobs where they actually have to make money and profits. Nepos are shunted to roles where that isn’t as direct.

Upwards mobility my ass.

In the modern economy, capital owners are reliant on a class of non-fungible white collar workers that bring their own human capital. The two groups have myriad common interests. Those interests are in many cases in opposition to those of ordinary workers who lack human capital and are fungible and easily replaced.

They’re proles by the definition of how they earn their labor. If the pool of labor expands beyond the available roles, those high salaries would crash down.

Were we to push that to the extreme, the only upper-class at Goldman Sachs would be retirees, either as direct shareholders or as beneficiaries of some pension fund. Even if they were lower middle-class Americans living in an old aging house they can’t afford to fix.

That would be the Value Extraction definition of Class.

Others would argue that class is more diffuse, and that one’s class depends more on their family's history, where they went to school, and who they know, than on how much they have. Which is a valid point.

That would be a Social Capital definition of Class.

I doubt however that anyone would consider a street-sweeping former Emperor (eg Piyin), or some penniless heir to some old industry dynasty as still belonging to any sort of upper-class.

Meaning the actual definition actually is some fluid mix of the two. That and probably some other definitions I’m not even aware of.

> In the modern economy, capital owners are reliant on a class of non-fungible white collar workers that bring their own human capital.

It’s nothing modern. Capital owners always have, since the first scribe, and probably before that (see Japan’s former hordes of perpetually desk-bound samurai).

Still, let’s entertain the argument. I’ll use, and I’m truly sorry for that, a tired analogy.

In the modern world, many people are reliant on many different types of usually non-fungible pets and somewhat fungible, depending on who you ask, animals, for many different purposes. Some of which bring their own highly sought-after hard-earned skills.

Let’s limit ourselves to the oh so tired dog analogy.

A person and their dog have myriad common interests. Those interests are, in many cases, in opposition to those of many other people and animals. Even more so when said dog is considered a family member, serves as a guard dog, as a shepherd dog, or is specialised in drugs detection.

Does that make them equal? Does that change anything to the fact that one is extracting value from the other, and often only pays them back in dog food, usually made from our food industry’s literal scraps and refuse?

So yes, I agree with you: there’s no simple and definitely no simplistic definition of class.

I am still convinced however that, in the specific and limited context of the comment I was replying to, the one I used was good enough.

By your value-extraction definition, Sundar Pichai isn’t upper class. He doesn’t make money from his ownership of the capital—he owns a negligible share of Alphabet. Instead, he helps the shareholders extract more value from Alphabet and is compensated for that work. A definition that excludes CEOs from the upper class isn’t a very workable one.

I think a more useful definition recognizes that, in between shareholders and the workers is a class of people who help the shareholders extract more value from the enterprise, and therefore has interests closely aligned with those of the shareholders. For example in a company like Uber, that’s what the programmers are doing. They’re not creating value, they’re building systems to extract more value from the drivers.

Another way to look at it is that there’s a large class of people whose jobs wouldn’t be nearly as well compensated without monopolistic capitalism. $500,000/year Facebook engineers only exist because Facebook as an enterprise throws off enormous amounts of cash. If you look at more social-democratic societies, the biggest difference isn’t at the very top. Sweden and Norway have more billionaires per capita than the United States. Instead, the biggest difference is in the professional class. Swedish engineers (and bankers and lawyers and other professionals) make a fraction of what their American counterparts make. And that’s because Sweden has far fewer of these insanely high margin businesses.

And yet they are both animals, often get treated as less than most people, the shepherd dog only gets the proverbial scraps. Precisely the analogy’s entire point. I’m Glad I didn’t have to spell it out.

> A definition that excludes CEOs from the upper class isn’t a very workable one.

Absolutely. Hence the "Were we to push that to the extreme", followed by a ridiculous application of the definition.

> Another way to look at it is that there’s a large class of people whose jobs wouldn’t be nearly as well compensated without monopolistic capitalism.

And thus we can differentiate those of these people who are part of the upper class from those who aren’t by wether they get an actual share of the value they produce, or merely scraps. Wether they are compensated as equals, or as useful tools.

Interesting bit about Sweden and Norway. I didn’t know that.

Yes, but focusing on those factors gives you an incomplete understanding of the dog’s place on the farm. At the end of the, day the dog is helping the farmer extract value from the sheep. Indeed, the dog’s very specialized skills wouldn’t have much value outside the context of the farming enterprise. That means the dog’s interests are much more aligned with the farmer’s than the sheep. His unique role, and relatively comfortable position, wouldn’t exist outside the value-extractive context of the farm.

> And thus we can differentiate those of these people who are part of the upper class from those who aren’t by wether they get an actual share of the value they produce, or merely scraps. Wether they are compensated as equals, or as useful tools

Facebook engineers building the infrastructure the company uses to extract monopolistic profits from consumers are receiving a share of the value. The actual value creation ultimately comes from someone making shoes in a factory in China, which sells them to Nike, which uses Facebook advertising and branding to sell them to consumers for far more than they’re worth. Yes, he’s a “useful tool” for the shareholders, but so are the senior executives (besides Zuck). Their ability to command $500,000 salaries or $1 million salaries, or $10 million salaries doesn’t exist outside the context of these enormous monopolistic profits.

You’re getting hung up on “equality” but being in the same class doesn’t mean you’re equal. In a feudal society, knights may be quite lowly compared to a high ranking landowner. They’re “useful tools.” But I’m not talking about equality of rank, I’m talking about interests and incentives. On that front, the knights have fundamentally different interests and incentives than the serfs. Whatever resentment they might have toward higher ranking nobility, they still reap the benefits of the feudal structure. The my would be much worse off outside that structure.

Which, to me, reflects a huge gap in power and freedom.

One decides what the other does. One can decide how much the other will earn. One can decide wether or not the other will still have a job tomorrow. The other needs a job if they want to have a roof over their head and food on the table in six months.

Which is why I still don’t find your definition satisfactory. Sure alignment of interests matters, but to me it’s not enough.

It’s been an insightful discussion, and I’ve truly enjoyed it, but I’m afraid we won’t be able to reach a conclusion we can both agree on.

or to use an older one: petit bourgeoisie

Class is defined by one's relationship to the means of production (e.g. whether you work in a factory, or own the factory where people work)

The big push into consumer finance has been a complete multi-billion loss making debacle under his leadership.

Class can be more fine-grained than just lower/working-middle-upper

People commonly talk about “upper middle class” vs “lower middle class”, and then I suppose there are even some people in between the two (middle middle class?)

Well, in the same way there is surely lower upper class and upper upper class, and maybe even more levels than that. A person on an annual salary of US$25 million is undeniably upper class but still far beneath the centibillionaire class.

There’s also no clear boundary between upper middle and lower upper. You may think someone on US$250K is “upper class” but they probably only think of themselves as “upper middle class”, and personally I would think the same. In my own head, to really be upper class, your annual income has to be (consistently) measured in millions, not hundreds of thousands.

The huge class divides are not between retail workers, tradesmen and software developers, the divide is between C-suite executives / old money, and... everyone else who has to work for a living.

As a tech worker, I have far more in common lifestyle-wise with a schoolteacher than I do with the SVP of Engineering in my own company.

In the US, working class tends to mean people in food service, retail sales, low-skill manual labor, people relying on gig work, and some very low-level white-collar workers like secretaries. Upper class are basically the very few people for whom work is optional. F500 CEOs, SVPs, billionaire investors, and so on. Their existing wealth grows at a rate that can sustain their and their family's standard of living indefinitely.

The rest is middle class, a very wide range from schoolteachers, to skilled tradesmen, to engineers, to university professors, to small business owners, to doctors and so on.

My point is that people are nit-picking when they say things like "Oh, but doctors are upper middle class and teachers are lower middle class and engineers are lower upper middle class and on and on and on. Distinction without a meaningful difference.

I think traditional concepts of social class count for a lot less in the UK of 2023 than they did in the UK of 1973. But wealth counts for just as much, even more.

Were Rishi Sunak's parents "upper class"? And yet, he'd surely be a far more valuable social connection to have than Baron Forgettable who happens to be the King's fifth cousin. And I think that will remain true even when his prime ministership is over.

Who is more upper class, a relatively impoverished Prince of the Holy Roman Empire or a billionaire by marriage and luck? Managers like the mentioned bank CEO, or someone who can rent them a house in the Hamptons because they have lived there for generations? An intellectual who has never really worked, or a wealthy rapper who didn't finish high school?

I think Western society has been undergoing a transition between two different class systems. (Marxists would surely connect this with the economic transitions from feudalism to mercantilism to early capitalism to late capitalism.)

In the mediaeval class system, class was determined by social status which was predominantly inherited, and money alone was not enough to move from the bottom to the top. A person born poor might acquire great wealth, but they would still be locked out of the nobility/aristocracy, unless the monarch deigned to ennoble them. An impoverished baron socially outranked the far wealthier merchant who was born into poverty and worked/lucked their way out of it.

In the late capitalist class system–all that really matters is your net worth. Everything else is secondary. Who cares who your parents were or where you come from once you have a billion dollars to your name – and if a billionaire is excluded socially, it is very likely due to something about their individual behaviour (see e.g Kanye–although I suppose he's an ex-billionaire now), rather than their family background in itself.

The transition between the two systems has been ongoing; it still hasn't completely finished, but we've moved a lot closer to the late capitalist system, and a lot further away from the mediaeval system, than we were 50 or 100 years ago. I don't think the transition proceeds at the same rate in every country either – I think the UK retains more of the old class system than most other places (although even in the UK it is a lot weaker than it used to be); it also arguably retains some strength in the northeastern US, although not to the same extent as the UK.

My point is that different people look up (or down) to different people by different criteria: "net worth" interests competitive capitalist adventurers, "who your parents were or where you come from" remains a high priority when someone is wealthy enough for their lifestyle.

I certainly find it plausible that if A and B are of roughly similar wealth, but A was born into wealth whereas B lucked/worked/married into it, A might see that as a reason to look down on B.

However, I suspect if A was born into $100 million and B lucked/worked/etc into $100 billion, then all else being equal, I doubt A would look down on B in the same way. I expect they'd more likely view B with envy, as a potential business opportunity for themselves, as a friendship which might give them access to things they themselves can't afford, than as a social inferior. When the gap in wealth becomes big enough, it tends to drown out all the other factors.

The queen bee who owns a share of the hive, decides how many bees to hire/fire, where they work, when they work, what % of the honey to share with the worker bees, etc.. now thats a different class.

Team managers/trainers do not meet most of those criteria. At most the GM meets the majority of them. Only the team owner would meet all the criteria.

It’s rare that those businesses scale to the point of where your role is purely abstract management layers removed from the front line workforce.

Amazon was once a small business. It's possible to grow that hive but the vast majority get exterminated.

These two classes have largely contradictory interests. People who own companies want to cut their costs, and therefore they want to lower wages, give lower benefits, less time off, and so on. Workers want the exact opposite of that.

People such as CEOs constitute a labour aristocracy where their interests largely align with the interests of large capitalists and they own some capital of their own.

If capital gains hand someone 300k a year, they aren't quite workers, but they aren't playing the same game as someone who is still playing the accumulation game. It's the best trick the late 20th century played: Defined contribution workers are all also capitalists, just like everyone relying on an ever more valuable house.

An actual capitalist makes a living by using their capital as the primary vehicle to create further wealth for themselves and to sustain their lifestyle.

Again, the key distinction is in terms of class interests. What sort of social policies would be of interest to each type of individual is the question.

It is in part. A person on a US$20 million a year salary obviously isn’t working class or even middle class-they might truthfully say they are of “working/middle class background” (if their parents were of more modest means)

Whereas, their 10 year old kid whose annual income and assets are roughly $0 is also upper class-because their parents are. Now, if they grow up and their parents end up disowning them and they end up living on the streets homeless-then they won’t be upper class any more. But if that doesn’t happen, then they are-because even if they aren’t filthy rich yet, very likely they’ll eventually inherit a huge amount of money from their parents (assuming they don’t already have some kind of “you’ll never have to work a day in your life” trust fund set up for them). They could live their whole life in the upper class without ever getting a salary at all

They may never work a day because they don’t need to - they are upper or “bourg.” for sure.

If the analyst lives in NYC and makes $250k they aren't living large. If they went to an Ivy League school and have to pay for it they really aren't living large. Regardless, the story makes the CEO look silly.

Have you ever heard the term "1% of the 1%"?

I'd bet anything this young person is used to having his family name make him welcome at any table he wishes to join, even in the Hamptons. He's on the well-worn path through a brief stint as a junior analyst before he's running some bank or hedge fund somewhere and the CEO of GS hesitates to approach his table.

This isn't the action of someone either boldly or naively misunderstanding his place. This is the action of someone who has grown up knowing his place is wherever he wishes it to be.

When someone acts as entitled to be where they are and do what they do as that junior analyst to that CEO, it's because their life experience so far has told them, consistently, that they have every right to. It even mentions that he points out his other associates.

He's acting like he's meeting someone who's, at best, an equal, because from his perspective, he is.

Do people really think the "middle class" is dead? I feel middle class is an apt descriptor for someone who is living comfortably but also still needs to work to maintain their lifestyle.

That's like saying all junior-level employees MUST carry a book on top of their heads all the time, and only C-Level executives get to skip that. If you give someone flexibility, you are not taking anything away from other people, so not giving it is only an unnecessary punishment for junior level employees.

Many of these things are about rite of passage, and people who have gone thru the rites want others to not skip.

It can also be about a power-dynamic, where flexibility isnt given because imposed inflexibility is a power lever.

After you've been there a while, learned more and are more effective at your job, you're more likely to get the benefit of the doubt but even that has limits.

Why are we pretending like this is all weird? New or junior employees need a lot of handholding to ramp up and it's inappropriate that they just get the same consideration when compared to someone that's been there longer than the analyst has been alive. Have you guys ever worked a normal job before?

I've had co-workers in these situations for a long time. In theory there is no difference. But then...

- suddenly you can barely hear someone on a conference call because they are on a 4G-tether on a beach,

- or because there are tons of bar sounds in the background on a call

- or you have a production issue but cant get the person to screen-share because they are on low-bandwidth

I even had individuals who would block their entire calendar on WFH days and only take meetings on in-office days.

The problem is with those who abuse privileges, not with those who are honest.

Who cares if employee works at the beach?

You need to provide value not appearance of value.

I'm sure there are cases there it doesnt matter, but I was mentioning cases where teams need to work with each other and are paid to work with each other. I specifically mentioned Production Support. How can production support meetings "wait until they are back at the office?" From my standpoint, it doesnt matter where they are (home or office) but if they have no connectivity and cannot jump into troubleshooting meetings during business hours, i'm not sure how this works for numerous situations.

Through my career, i've been on the hot-seat as live applications have gone down. Imagine a DB is down or a pipeline is broken, and my DBA co-worker says "sure, lets take it up on Monday when I'm back". Note, I have no admin rights to the DB.

I had a k8s cluster run out of disk space. I had no admin rights to fix this. If the k8s admin decided he could take the meeting a day or days later, it would be a total disaster.

We're assuming you even read the article.

It clearly says "how the underling walked up at a restaurant, introduced himself and pointed to associates with him"

i.e. it was more than 1 person. Maybe they are doing face-to-face training? Are you saying that's ineffective?

> New or junior employees need a lot of handholding to ramp up

That's exactly what's happening. Why are you assuming it's not?

And of the CEO - was he meeting a client, the board, or simply out to lunch by himself or with family/friends/etc. The article is silent on this topic.

Lmao. I'm no where near C-Suite but I've also never worked as hard as I did as an intern/junior engineer. Moving up often means working less hard.

> I don't really see any other way around it apart from a dehumanizing process to treat everyone exactly the same regardless of capabilities

This post is about WFH, not treating everyone the same regardless of capabilities. Those are such different things that I'm convinced you must be arguing in bad faith.

Executives have not been promoted into their jobs since the 50s.

Exactly. I've been working 100% from home since 2017 (3 years before covid). I'd rather take a 50% paycut than go back to the office.

Don't get me wrong. I did enjoy my life when I lived 15 min walk /5 min on a bike, from my job in a city. Before I got that job and I had to commute for 20 min I enjoyed it too.

But WFH beats that by a mile. I can live wherever I want (where cost of living is a lot cheaper than central London). I can just go down to my kitchen and make myself proper food any time (although I still miss certain of my favourite restaurants). And most importantly, I get a lot more time to myself and I'm much more effective at my work.

There is no chance in hell people like me will "go back to the office". Furthermore, companies that recognised the benefits early are reaping the benefits. Even just one. Having an order of magnitude larger talent pool by not limiting themselves to people from one place.

In today's marker that is characterised by permanent skilled labour shortage I can't imagine stupidest way to shoot ones company in the foot than trying to force people to "get back to the office".

People should stop saying this. Otherwise it will soon be the standard to take a serious paycut for WFH. .

In my latest performance review, my manager actually told he and other managers were being forced to ask the question "Do you consider WFH as part of your compensation" by HR/upper management to all his reports (including me).

I'm convinced this is in preparation to either lower salaries, or artificially lowering them by giving lower raises/bonuses to those who work from home since they are starting to call people back to office who aren't remote by title. Most people are back up to 3-days a week, even though 90% of them are very unhappy. I'm fully remote hence why he asked me this question and anyone else who is designated full remote.

Remote work was always an excuse to pay less, much to my chagrin. The fact is that as remote work became more popular, with the increase in positions, pay has actually increased. I'm not surprised that more people are seeing pushback on in the office vs remote compensation as this has been the standard play for years.

I find it doubly frustrating since remote employees are less of a cost sink due to less office space and all the costs that come with it. Remote employees are the most efficient type of employees from that perspective and so it always felt like such a flimsy excuse.

My suggestion is push back on any perceived pay gap between in office and remote work. The work done is at parity (if not more so due to efficiencies of remote work) and so there is no valid excuse to pay less.

My company has spent the last 8 months trying to explain why they want us back in the office for hybrid work. At first it was, "mentoring young staff." And lately it is, "It doesn't look great to potential clients when they visit an office and the office is empty." This new argument sounds like a BD edge case.

It seems to entirely be senior leaders and senior empty nesters pushing for this, while everyone else is not in favor.

Although most people don't work in San Francisco with inflated salaries so I'd still rather not make this the norm.

Previously I was priced out of the housing market, renting a small basement suite.

Now I own a large detached home, and thanks to the rental suite, spending less each month than I did before.

And this is all before you consider the equity myself and my tenant have paid down, or even any home appreciation. It's effectively doubled my TC since I moved.

Aside from saving them rent on the office space, you should be able to expense several office-supply things that they would have provided previously. Office chair and desk, internet bill (pro-rated by usage), maybe printer ink.

Let's not get carried away. Back then you were paying for your own transportation costs and your commute time. Which is more valuable? Commuting to work every day to enjoy free office supplies and coffee, or WFH but paying for your own chair and desk?

I'd take the latter any day of the week as the chair & desk is a one time cost anyway and lasts 10+ years.

meanwhile, i bought a standing desk and it's mine, and it'll go to my next house and next job.

they can drop ship me a laptop and docking station, and if they wanna be nice throw me a couple hundred as a "office stiped", which would be way cheaper than buying business grade furniture.

I dunno, 7 is a lot of numbers. Work for 5 years, and be close to retirement. Definitely have my house/car and even a few luxury projects paid off in that time. I could work part time/contracts and let the rest of the money gather interest.

But I suppose you're basing this on reality, not a true ultimatum.

on the Dir level? fine, different story, and being present to have official off the record chats may be required.

Just today I'm seeing stories about how the UPS truck drivers have managed to negotiate themselves pay and benefits up to $170,000/year. Would you rather make $150,000 a year at your desk at home, or $170,000/year schlepping packages for UPS?

If your answer is "$150K," you're taking a pay cut for a better work environment. Does that make you a sucker? No? Well, that's what WFH is about. If you have to leave your current job and find another one to make it happen, it could make sense as long as your paycheck and future prospects aren't too badly hurt. (And assuming you want to WFH, of course, which many people will not.)

Would be nice to see some level of turnabout for everyone that banded together to weather the storm, though.

That’s not populist at all. It’s just another example of the white collar class enjoying the benefits of technology and globalization while everyone else gets left behind: https://www.epi.org/blog/wage-inequality-continued-to-increa....

Before the pandemic, I already made a lot more money (as a lawyer) than my middle class neighbors. Now I also get to work from home three days a week, and get a lot more quality time with my kids, while they have to go to work every day because their jobs aren’t knowledge work.

Obviously, management versus other white collar workers is one class dividing line that exists. But work from home is a good example if the fact that on many important dimensions, such as work conditions and generational mobility,[1] those groups are in the same class.

[1] CEOs are obviously richer than say accountants of engineers. But in the US, CEOs largely come from the class of these white collar professionals. In that sense, they’re in the same class as most other societies understand the concept.

There's a lot more to it than that.

WFH has been a godsend for a millions of people who work full-time, but are also poor.

I drove for Uber for a while when I was between jobs. The majority of the people I carted around were people who thought Uber was a godsend because they were too poor to save for a car, and Uber allowed them to have a job that didn't involve manual or skilled labor they couldn't perform. People like call center operators, and medical coders (which is not the same thing as computer coding), and other jobs that aren't suitable for machines, and often done in a cube farm.

The pandemic sent all those people into WFH, and many of their companies found that the price of equipping their people with a laptop and headset was cheaper than paying rent on cubical space.

Now those working poor can put the expense of Uber into saving for a car, or buying clothes for their children, or any of the assorted other things that people need every day.

For millions of people, WFH is a helping hand out of poverty.

Working from home means a parent can be home when their kids are home, available if they need to be picked up from school, and can just generally be more present for their kids. This is all especially helpful for single parents. They can't not work but day care costs keep the family destitute unless that parent makes very good money.

That said, some COVID era stats showed 50% of working population doing at least 1 day remote.. and 50% is pretty much right in the middle of middle class and fairly populist-ish?

Something like 30%+ are still remote/hybrid today in 2023, so this isn't precisely an elite-only thing ..

With all due respect - so what? This seems like crab in a bucket mentality, just because some of us crabs managed to climb to the top of the bucket, we deserve to be pulled down because of some warped view of fairness? We should actually be trying to pull the rest of them out with us.

The wages versus capital distinction overlooks the nature of modern businesses, where ownership is diffuse, and businesses are run by a vast class of skilled professionals. For example, Tim Cook owns just 0.02% of Apple stock, but he runs the company. Many executives below him have tremendous power. Individual engineers can have a major impact on the direction of the whole business. Most importantly, the executive roles are typically filled from that same class of people.

These people aren’t Steve Jobs in terms of their ownership interest in the company, but they’re not Apple Store workers either. Their self interest is fundamentally more aligned with those of the capitalists than with the interests of labor.

They may have some policy disagreements—but even those are often theoretical. How many professionals who favor universal healthcare are in the 45% of employed Americans who are “very satisfied” with their own health insurance? https://www.pacificresearch.org/americans-are-overwhelmingly.... But fundamentally, they benefit from the highly financialized, globalized economy. Their human capital mostly insulates them from labor competition, and they reap the benefits of cheap foreign products and cheap services provided by non-unionized workers.

There’s no benefit to making everyone go to the office/job just because some people cannot do their jobs without that.

So if I can jockey my keyboard while sitting in my chair at home instead of taking the subway to do it while sitting in my employer's, that's a tiny bit more space for the guy who actually needs to go somewhere and work in person.

For a little while. Until the bus company decides not enough people are riding anf the 1/15 minutes bus becomes the 1/hour bus :/

Each step is just a small increment worse. But when you go from remote back to the worst level, it's jarring.

Objectively, transit has also gotten worse in some cities (NYC, DC) since COVID and still not recovered. So we are also returning to something worse than where we left it!

I found this to be a depressing quality of life trajectory my coworkers were on when I worked in NYC. It was fun in my 20s without kids, but after that, it seems miserable.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/09/22/met...

NYC they are running fewer trains so even if overall ridership is down, the trains are as crowded or more crowded than ever. Further in NYC due to homeless/migrant population growth falling through the cracks, the subway ends up being the shelter of last resort. Finally violent crime on the subway increased substantially over covid, and while down is still not at 2019 levels. So while waiting longer for a train, you are more likely to be dealing with a general sense of crime/disorder/etc.

https://gothamist.com/news/lirr-riders-still-miffed-over-jam...

https://nypost.com/2023/03/06/hell-on-wheels-bklyn-shuttles-...

However - I think some of the CEO class defenders shouldn't delude themselves as to why these people have 5 homes. It is not because they take a paltry 15 days paid time off per year in which they use those homes. They have the flexibility to dictate their schedule, and they use that flexibility to be where they want, when they want.

At one fund I worked they Dual-HQd NYC & Miami (plus they all keep a Greenwich footprint) so that some of the execs could sleep outside NY State for statutory 183 days/year and avoid NYS/NYC 10-15% income tax on high earners. Plus they maintained their country homes outside the city.

If you make $5M/year, the 2nd/3rd/4th home start to pay for themselves with those economics.

Sleep in Greenwich Friday to Tuesday. Monday work from CT office. Blade to midtown office Tuesday AM. Sleep in your condo Tuesday/Wednesday and then back to Greenwich Thursday night to work remote Friday. Next thing you know you're in Manhattan for a paltry 2 nights/week, maybe not even every week if you go do a Miami 2 weeks/month, or for majority of winter, etc.

There were always times I needed to be present in person and I never scoffed at those. What I found recently, is employers are trying to shift from one extreme (fully remote) to the other. I hope we land back in the middle because I'm happiest when no one tells me what to do. I want to be treated like an adult and measured on merit and performance, not physical attendance.

A large company can probably do that with smaller offices or with setting up the coworking spaces themselves and renting the spaces left without occupants.

The commute is not bad when they are localized due to the team members having worked together in the past.

We'll see what happens in 20 years. But my money is on a resurgence of the rural village and a lot of empty office towers.

Most of our C-Suite doesn't live near an office. Or, to be specific WE MOVED HQ to where they wanted to live.

We have other VPs and whatnot who live not near an office, or have winter/summer homes they go back and forth from.

Meanwhile our mandatory "3 days a week in the office" starts September.

The guys who get to choose the office locations happen to choose ones that are good for the locations of their home(s). Also, a reminder that C-suite guys that have multiple homes do in fact actually use those multiple homes.

How do they do so? They have flexibility!

This is a key part of the discussion.

Pre-covid, I spent ~90 minutes one way to get to the office (this included a transfer from train to subway + 10 minute walk) and used to do it every day. At the time, I thought nothing of it since it was time to read/write code/watch a movie etc.

Now, I find it hard to imagine I spent ~3 hours/day commuting but part of me also misses the time to myself but it's balanced out by seeing the kids more etc.

One remote work hater I really like to listen to is Scott Galloway, that keeps on harping that remote work is horrible but doesn't even live in the same country where he's running his business anymore. Flexibility for me but not for thee.

You never have to move to the exurbs though :)

While I do agree with your overall premise, having had offices at multiple roles over my career, it is a major improvement over cubicles and open office.

Having a space to work in complete, uninterrupted quiet is wonderful. The simple social signal of the door being opened or close implying availability to chat works great to balancing heads down time and chat with colleagues time. Have a white board of your own that you can stare at throughout the course of a project, that evolves with discussions has not be replicated yet either remote or in a shared space.

You can also get pretty wild with customizing an office for comfort. I used to know many people that brought their own lighting in, completely solving the problem of constant overhead fluorescence. And brewing your coffee the way you like it in your own space in the afternoon is very refreshing.

Even given all that I'm sure many people would still prefer remote work (I would at this point), but I can image a fairly large number of people that would be very interested in a set up like this. It also mean your home is completely work free again.

In my time at Apple I had a real office with a real door for about half of my time. Of that only about half was an office I didn't have to share with someone else. The lone offices were the most productive I ever was while working there. I could close the door and go unbothered for hours. I turned off the lights and had my own lamp that was much more comfortable.

Sharing an office with coworkers wasn't bad on its face but it's difficult to focus if the other person is talking with someone else. It's all manageable but objectively worse than a single office. The open floor plan at Apple Park was just fucking horrible. Constant distractions all day. Sure you could collaborate but when trying to actually get work done it was in spite of a hundred visual and audible distractions. I'm sure I distracted others inadvertently as well.

A giant spaceship of a campus and they couldn't manage to give everyone a private space. Just the stupidest design for a building.

I actually enjoyed going to that office because it was very quiet and I didn't have a proper workspace at home. My commute was ~30mins with a motorcycle. Yes, sometimes the A/C or the lighting must be compromised with other coworkers, but that's still okay if you get to socialize in exchange.

The major aspect was obviously noise. But I also felt dignified in that office. It was not status like C-Suite offices, just feeling a nice environment instead of being crammed in a chicken coop.

At my current job, there's something ironic about that. The people who never come back to the office despite being allowed to are also the people who live the closest to the office. (We have a big office that allows people to come back but is totally optional. Hotel desks for the entire office basically.) I asked one of them why he doesn't come in and he told me, "The reason I moved so close to the office in the first place is so I can minimize my commute. Now that I don't have to, why would I do the commute at all?"

I think some people are just completely dead set against commuting or even working from an office. Another coworker told me, "Do you know how great this is? I can do my laundry in between meetings."

From my experience, my employer's current situation is probably the most accommodating policy. If you want to work in an office, you can. If you don't, you don't have to. I do have coworkers who are actually suffering a bit from lack of interaction with other people but I think those people are starting to trickle back into the office for no other reason than for the socialization and interaction.

Since I live close to it, I never even though about doing this. And of course, the people that live the furthest away get the most value out of it. So, yeah, it's probably a very strong correlation, and not only for negative reasons.

So your office is crappy?

Similar story for my office. It's very close, but the facilities people made it terrible to work from. Why go in when I would get half as much work done?

In mine I have music playing, I have a guitar for when I need to stop thinking about a problem, I have a bookshelf of books I love, I have a plant I care for, I have my own whiteboard, I have artwork, I have a balance board, and (fortunately) I have an amazing view. When I need a break, I can close my door to read, watch something, call a friend, or take a nap.

Now I don’t find myself watching videos, napping, or playing guitar all that often, but I don’t when I’m working from home either.

>> In mine I have music playing, I have a guitar for when I need to stop thinking about a problem

I had a chessboard in my office at one time. It was basically a decoration, I think it was a secret santa gift or something, and it was never used until another guy and I started playing once every other week or so, at lunch.

One day, over lunch, we were playing a game (and eating at the same table), and something $PRODUCTION crashed. Someone came into ask about the problem, we stopped what we were doing, and fixed it.

Sometime after that, something else crashed, and then it became, "All they are doing in there is playing chess, no wonder x isn't working!".

I took the chessboard home.

But at home I have side projects or learning projects. I get the 3 hours back and can spread them throughout the day. One hour in the morning, another one when I'm bored or tired of the job etc. If I go to the office it's nothing but a rather unappealing job domain and nothing else. Too tired in the evening to learn anything anymore, too stressed and still sleepy in the morning as well.

So fuck the office, they'd have to pay me 50% more to compensate for the time lost in transit and I would still not take it.

That said, five minutes means one could come home for lunch.

But anyway, five minute walk to work is highly unlikely; a lot of people (most? citation needed?) have a commute to work, either driving or public transit. I'd rather have a nice private office or small team room than a big open and loud office space.

Long time ago I used to rent a room in a shared house 5 min walk from work. My housemates were all cool people, but working on a laptop sitting next to the bed I slept in every night would e far worse for me than just going to the office. But this was decades ago. I can understand why someone in such position would prefer an office.

But if you can have a house, and you're mid/senior in your role there is nothing better than wfh.

Also I've recently noticed a disturbing trend. Companies advertising 100% remote work, then you go through the whole recruitment process and at the very end they tell you. BTW, it's not 100% wfh. You gotta come to the office 1 day per month (sometimes even 1 per week). Anyone looking for real wfh job should be aware of such tricks to nip them in the bud early on.

This would have been much more uncomfortable in a smaller 2BR apartment and almost unmanageable in any space smaller than that.

Given my space, my WFH desk is much crappier and smaller than my personal one, but still so much better than losing my life commuting.

He used it to his advantage to show his face in the office, but rarely ever put in a full day. So sure he might show up on reports as being a 2-3x/week attender while others were doing 0-1, but many of those were morning-only, afternoon-only, or drop-ins for an in-person meeting of importance. Plus the occasional Friday solitude getaway to the empty office.

To his credit he really put no RTO pressure on us relative to his management chain.

I really don’t get when people defend WFH as a Holy Grail and complain that are catalogued as lazy or freeloaders, only to become fierce critics and cataloging anyone who prefers going to the office as boot-lickers or mediocre middle-management (not your post SteveBK123, but a common attitude across this type of thread)

Everyone has different circumstances, different jobs, and our minds work differently. Let’s live and let live.

I.e., when the two of you are finally home alone and awake, because school is in session.

I suspect for some marriages, WFH has been a real blessing.

It's much easier for some to have a complete separation of work and home spaces. Also a change of scenery in the morning and getting to move a bit before starting to work is nice.

If you work 5 mins from your home you can just walk there for lunch. No need to bag a lunch, no?

At home I'm either working or not working. I don't have to wear my public face. Wearing a public face is, if not tiring, at least irritating, like a mild itch you're not allowed to scratch, even though you could, but you shouldn't.

Didn't mind working in the office, it was nice enough, coworkers are all friendly.

But having to live anywhere near my office in a high COL area means I was priced out of affording even a 500 square foot apartment. Going remote meant that same salary bought me a newly built detached 6 bedroom house.

I didn't mind the office, I minded being a poor renter instead of upper middle class. Office inconveniences pale in comparison.

WFH for 2012-2023 here.

With our first home purchase in 2018 being on the smaller size, and the introduction of our first child to the family in 2021, I started keeping an eye on nearby options.

In March of 2023, a perfect little spot opened up that could support me and another employee in the same town. Pitched it to our small company, and now I have a dedicated office that is a 4 minute walk away.

Cannot stress enough how impactful those few minutes are (or more, if I need to decompress more than normal) are for separation of concern between home life and work, especially with young children in the picture.

Still get to enjoy lunch with stay-at-home wife and kiddo almost everyday.

It also shares property with a great pizzeria and one of the best taproom/bottleshops in town, which is a great perk beyond my waistline and liver... looking forward to taking the new bike to the nearby bike trail when it isn't 110° everyday.

been remote since 2015. absolutely agree with this, even though I'm still remote. the only way I'd go back to the office is if it's close to that experience -- a 5-10 min walk away.

living close to a coffee shops, gyms, and other amenities meant that I did a "morning commute" to get coffee most mornings -- more expensive than petrol, but still cheaper overall compared to driving. multiple choices, so could hit the local as well as chain shops.

a gym and grocery store being nearby also meant that I could so an "evening commute" and workout, snag groceries, run errands, etc.

having young kids makes it great too... most of the time. it's nice to be able to walk upstairs and play with the wee one.

Clean desk policy, no take-home printouts, clear whiteboards with confidencial information, etc…

I had a WFH employee who once burn himself at home while making coffee with his own coffee pot, and sue the company as he claimed was a job-related accident. We had to settle and pay him, or have Unions making a big fuzz.

There are all sort of people in the workplace, and policies try to accommodate not only CEO whims, but also to manage a crowd full of many different types of people.

Having worked DoD in the past, I can completely echo that it would be quite a challenge to explore something like this for many organizations.

> I had a WFH employee who once burn himself at home while making coffee with his own coffee pot, and sue the company as he claimed was a job-related accident. We had to settle and pay him, or have Unions making a big fuzz.

"This is why we can't have nice things," personified.