In the post pandemic future of work, nine out of 10 organizations will be combining remote and on-site working, according to a new McKinsey survey of 100 executives across industries and geographies. According to the Wall Street Journal, technical and engineering employees applicants are insisting on being able to work from home part of the time. “It’s become really sort of a requirement if you’re looking for top talent,” according to a software executive.
One consequence of the pandemic is that our businesses created a lot of what I call “remote capital,” meaning the ability to handle work remotely. The most obvious example is the use of Zoom. But managers had to learn to deal with remote work forces, and workers had to learn how to get things done and learn things when not in the office.
I understand the argument that young people need mentoring and networking, and the office is better for that. I understand the phenomenon of “Zoom fatigue.” And I think that the generally bad reviews given to remote K-12 education tell us something the disadvantages of not being together in person–although some of what it may tell us is that giving parents a window into the classroom exposes them to some disappointing realities of K-12 pedagogy.
But I think that the winning businesses will be those that can creatively deal with the challenges posed by remote work, as opposed to those that try to force as many employees into the office as much as possible. The more effectively you can use remote workers, the less you will have to pay a premium to get people to work for you, since the vast majority of workers prefer not to have to go to the office five days a week. And, of course, you save on office rent.
I think that within a few years we will see more remote work than during the pandemic. I would bet on remote capital.
Since most of the value of K-12 is babysitting/socialization, not learning, it makes sense that it was a disaster. With the closer to K rather than 12 being the worst (some high school students seemed to do okay, but elementary school was a total disaster).
Personally, the pandemic convinced me to send my kids to private school, which did not close during the pandemic (and in the case of the school we are considering, has defied government mask orders).
As for remote work, even office cultures that value in person seem to be moving towards hybrid. My friend at Amazon says that while higher ups originally wanted five days in office again, backlash led to a 3/2 model with 4 full weeks of at home allowed per year. And if you can get someone above a certain level to sign off on it, anyone can be 100% remote.
I think a big winner is going to be the exurbs. If you’re only in the office 2-3 days a week, it becomes possible to have an hour commute.
Other big winners may be remote but attractive cities. Apparently, Boise, Idaho has had its home prices increase 46% in one year. BTW, I don’t think ZONING is the cause.
“Since most of the value of K-12 is babysitting/socialization, not learning”
Wow – you seem to be overstating here quite a bit.
E.g. our 2nd grade daughter knows her multiplication tables up through the 12s. That seems like enduring knowledge vs. babysitting.
In other news, why pay the private school double tax if the primary purpose of k-12 is socialization and babysitting? Looks like you might have some logical consistency issues to work on.
I suspect that your daughter could have learned her multiplication tables on her own, from her parents, or from a school teacher working for a school that spent 1/3 to 1/2 what your local public school does per student while not indoctrinating and humiliating her.
Our local public schools were closed for much of the pandemic, so no babysitting. Now open, they require a mask and social distancing regimen that I can only describe as like going to school in a wierd gulag.
In terms of what they are taught, in addition to their multiplication tables they are taught they don’t have a gender, they should hate their parents and race, and they should be perverts. The local library has comic books about 4th graders having sex with grown men and the required reading for high school students is about a teenager who gets beaten and imprisoned by her boyfriend.
This is a far cry from my apolitical and mostly mediocre but normal public schooling in the 80s and 90s. The Null Hypothesis might justify sending my kids to that kind of school to save the money, but not these dystopian prison camps.
Quality (cost?) of education having no measurable benefit has been heavily covered on this blog. https://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/clarification-the-null-hypothesis/
Scott Alexander also recently wrote a summary of education research and the results were as expected.
So you’ve got 4 options then:
1) public schools
2) private schools (pay that double tax)
3) home school (not cost free obviously)
4) osmosis (in some form. The hope and pray approach).
I’m going with 1) provided that all of the riff raff gets eliminated via high real estate prices. See Arnold’s nostalgic commentary on St. Louis public schools from a few days ago for further info on that. I guess looking people in they eyes is some kind of big deal?
Good luck. What I’ve seen over the last year convinces me that #1 doesn’t pass the cost/benefit calculation anymore.
It’s not about the riff raff anymore, the affluent school districts are politically and culturally the craziest.
@asdf
While you *may* have more parental control going the private school route, you kinda don’t have any guarantees on the curriculum. You still need to quiz your kids daily on what they are learning.
Keep me posted!
We are making good progress and posting Ws down here in the public schools in our district. Teacher just got reprimanded for teaching Kendi lite to 4th graders. (ignore the MSM spin as per the usual).
https://www.dallasnews.com/news/2021/10/06/southlake-pac-backed-carroll-trustees-did-not-recuse-themselves-from-teacher-discipline-vote/
I wish you the best of luck down in deep red Texas.
In my neck of the woods a county that went 60/36 Trump whose school board voted 4-1 against masks ended up having its ruling overturned by the state health board. Also it has the exact same DEI program as everywhere else in the state despite the school board voting against it.
We feel pretty good about the school we choose for them. It’s parent run and no nonsense. It has resisted all state mandates and education fads.
A few personal observations on this:
– I’m currently reading Caplan’s The case against education. If I remember correctly, engineering majors are just 6% of all university graduates in the US. I doubt the figure for engineers as a proportion of the workforce in any country is much higher than that.
– “It’s become really sort of a requirement if you’re looking for top talent”. “Top talent” is a small fraction of that small fraction. As a manager I’m not going to offer 100% remote to average engineers, it’s not worth the hassle. But of course I’m going to offer remote (maybe not 100% but close) to the ones on the right end of the productivity distribution. If engineer A produces 1X and engineer B produces 10X, then I cannot risk losing engineer B and having to look for a replacement just because his remote productivity goes down to 9X or even 8X. But I can (relatively) easily replace engineer A.
– “according to a software executive”. A lot of engineering work has to be done
on-site.
– As a software manager a lot of my work consists of what I would describe as “being a nanny to a bunch of supposedly grown-up engineers”. Working remotely makes that (very large) part of my work much more difficult. In fact it forces me to work 100% at the office so that some of my engineers can work remotely some of the time. More remote work for them means less flexibility for me to the point were even taking vacations becomes difficult. If 100% remote becomes the norm, then I’ll quit. I’m more technically competent than most of them, and I’d rather take a mildly lower salary and work 100% remote myself. Let somebody else be a nanny.
Kotkin ends his piece saying “A more dispersed economy is not only better for people’s lives, but suggests a new hope for our battered democracy.” If by “a new hope,” he means “even more safe seats in ridiculously gerrymandered districts” he is probably right. The exurbs were at one time politically competitive areas. Flooding them with urbanites will only add to the immense power of the urbanite voting bloc and hasten the US’s metamorphosis into North Korea v.2.0.
In a similar article published in Tablet, Kotkin writes: “exurbs recorded a 37% rise in net migration last year. Bloomberg City Lab found that 84% of movers from the top 50 cities stayed within the same metropolitan areas; the big metros are not dying so much as dispersing. Mostly located in counties within two hours commute time of a major urban core, exurbs are ideal for employees who work only one day per week or a few days per month in the office.” https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/great-office-refusal-joel-kotkin
Kotkin ends the Tablet piece on a similarly hopeful but more specific note, writing:
“The pandemic has ruined plenty, but it has also handed us an opportunity to redesign work and community, creating new possibilities for millions of Americans and providing a boon for young families. If we take advantage of it, we could finally begin to restore the future prospects for our increasingly diverse metropolitan populace, liberating them from overcrowded and unaffordable housing, debilitating commutes, and obligations to big capital.”
If it only were so.
Spreading Thunbergites into the countryside will likely not dilute their influence but only increase the number of jurisdictions in which solar panels and other costly features are made mandatory for new housing construction. And the accelerating pace of the nearing extinction of integrity in the US electoral system throws doubt over any hopeful prospects: 8 states now have done away with secret ballots in favor of mail-in systems with no discernible voting fraud deterrents. It may be a great opportunity as Kotkin posits but it’s only circling the toilet about to vanish as so many other pro-growth, pro-human flourishing opportunities have in past.
“I think that within a few years we will see more remote work than during the pandemic.”
Especially considering the advances coming in augmented reality for 2024 to 2029.
I think you will be right about the trend, but that it will turn into a disaster.
I suspect American workers are shooting themselves in the foot here. American workers charge a large premium for being physically located in the US, and it’s not in their best interest to teach employers that location doesn’t matter. If your job can be done from home, it can be done from Mexico for half the cost.
I think you are missing out on the socialization aspect of work, and how that just doesn’t happen with remote work. Maybe not such a big deal for older workers with families and established social networks, but for younger workers being able to go into the office and socialize with other younger workers is a feature.
If I were to bet, I’d say that many places will go to 4/1 or 3/2 office/home working, but I doubt many people will go to full on 100% work from home. Some definitely will, like my wife who has worked from home full time for ~8 years now, but people are going to miss people and want to be around coworkers they like.
That’s what coworking spaces are supposedly for, ie you create your own self-selected “office” when you want to get out of the house.
If anything, you are being far too timid in your prediction: remote work is going to kill the corporation itself. Ride-hailing apps like Lyft, Didi, and Uber didn’t lead to the same taxicab companies, only now with an app: they greatly broadened the market to many more part-time drivers, who are mostly private contractors without an “employer,” and killed off the taxicab companies.
Similarly, remote work won’t be just the same companies, only working from home a couple days a week now, it will kill off these companies, and good riddance.