More Americans Now Work Full-Time From Home Than Walk and Bike To Office Jobs (qz.com) 73
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quartz: In the United States, the past decade has been marked by booming cities, soaring rents, and a crush of young workers flocking to job-rich downtowns. Although these are heady days for pavement-pounding urbanists, a record 2.6% of American employees now go to their jobs without ever leaving their houses. That's more than walk and bike to work combined. These numbers come from a Quartz analysis of data from the U.S. census and the American Community Survey. The data show that telecommuting has grown faster than any other way of getting to work -- up 159% since 2000. By comparison, the number of Americans who bike to work has grown by 86% over the same period, while the number who drive or carpool has grown by only 12%. We've excluded both part-time and self-employed workers from these and all results. Though managers are the largest group of remote workers, as a percentage of a specific occupation computer programmers are the most over-represented. Nearly 8% of programmers now work from home, following a staggering increase of nearly 400% since 2000.
I have to question how accurate these stats are (Score:2)
Also, It'd be hard to imagine a more irrelevant metric given how few Americans walk/bike to work. I mean, in theory I can bike to work but it's a 70 minute run one way and I'll get to work covered in sweat...
Re:I have to question how accurate these stats are (Score:5, Insightful)
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The comparison only makes sense if the submitter was trying to tie up the story to the pressure on our roads at commute time. Working from home, cycling and walking are alternatives to driving to work.
Makes sense to count transit as well then.
Besides, I'm not certain that biking actually equates less pressure on the roads. Certainly some place like China (or even Amsterdam) once you hit a critical mass you get more capacity simply by the fact that so many tiny vehicles can fit on the road at the same time. But in North America I suspect the extra complexity caused by a bike on the roadway is going to slow things down.
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Besides, I'm not certain that biking actually equates less pressure on the roads.
Actually, thanks to the utopianists running Portland, OR, cyclists have actually put *more* pressure on the roads, by taking perfectly usable road space away from automotive traffic [peopleforbikes.org].
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They're obviously not at home, so, duh?
Re: I have to question how accurate these stats ar (Score:1)
Since roughly 57% of all statistics are made up, you should be suspicious...or maybe I made that statistic up.
Working from home is career suicide (Score:1, Interesting)
You better be the best of the freaking best, because you're one step away from being outsourced to someone else remote who costs 1/8th of what you do.
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Yeah but I like reading the newspaper at Starbucks in the morning, doing my errands during "lunch time", and having my yoga class at 3:30pm right before picking up the kids.
I'm much more productive when I work at home.
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Bonus: you don't even need to buy clothes!
That'll be popular in Starbucks.
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Re:Working from home is career suicide (Score:5, Insightful)
It's obviously position dependent. An autoworker can't work at home, a salesperson who's making customer calls all day - what does "office" really mean? For knowledge workers, it's mostly dependent on their ability to contribute. Technology provides many ways to collaborate without physical presence.
Re: Working from home is career suicide (Score:4, Insightful)
My output when working at home is 1.3, not 0.8.
All you have is some hypothetical bullshit.
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I have to agree.
I work from home approximately 80% of the time, that 80% of the time accounts for about 95% of my work. It's so hard to get good work done at the office with all the distractions around.
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For knowledge workers, it's mostly dependent on their ability to contribute. Technology provides many ways to collaborate without physical presence.
Dude.
If it's remote you, or my in the office lunch buddies... who do you think we are all going to throw under the stacked ranking bus, come peer performance review time?
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You work in a very toxic environment. I have no desire to work there.
Well, I can definitely sympathize with not wanting to work for a company of more than 50 employees in the technology sector, but it kind of is what it is. If you worked an agricultural job, unless you remote control a "robot" tractor (is a waldo/drone really a robot? Since when?), your in every day.
There's a great belief in sympathetic magic in this sector, where if you "Do like Google/Facebook/Twitter/Apple/Microsoft/Amazon/... does, and you will be successful, like Google/Facebook/Twitter/Apple/Microsof
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I've worked in 3 employee companies, and 30.000+ ones, east, west, and midwest. The only stack ranking, ever, occurred only when there were impending "layoffs." And that ranking was alway done by direct management, and not cliquish peers. Shove your business-talk terminology (really, "Nash equilibrium?" Are you a fcking leach of an MBA, unable to produce value on your own?) where it won't see the sun, because it's part of the toxic culture.
I'm not an MBA. I've worked at IBM, Apple, Google, and half a dozen other companies. Only the small ones -- mostly startups -- didn't do stacked ranking.
If your 30,000+ employee companies that don't practice peer review, they must not be Fortune 500 technology companies, because in any technology firm of any size: stacked ranking with peer review" is how it's done.
You may think it's toxic; I prefer to think of it as "a very very large paycheck".
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Yeah, what sibling said.
I get that office culture and politics practically requires face-time, but any environment where they put priority on the Good-Old-Boy network is one in which you do not want to be working. I've turned down job offers before due to the culture sucking (it's fairly easy to spot, even in interviews. If you're not sure, ask - what they don't tell you in return says more than what they do tell you.)
All that said, you can rig-up a hybrid arrangement, where you work from home 3-4 days a we
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Same when working in the office. I was in both situations. :(
Re:Working from home is career suicide (Score:4, Interesting)
I think the fallacy is in thinking that someone who is expendable and can do their work anywhere in the world suddenly becomes more expendable if they do that same work at home vs at the office. I don't think that's the case.
Either the work you do can be done from anywhere (in which case it doesn't matter where you actually do it, home, office, or anywhere else). Or the work you do requires you to sometimes be in a specific location, in which case it doesn't matter where you are the rest of the time.
If your job is at risk of being moved to a foreign country, simply doing the same work at the office instead of at home won't save you.
Re: Working from home is career suicide (Score:1)
I think OPs point is that the job is already setup to be remote. Some jobs have secuity reasons or on site collaboration with hardware that demands local workers. If you're remote, you truly are one small step from being replaced.
The real fallacy is that everyone believes they are amazing and will never get cut, that the business would collapse without them. Everyone is expendable, and even if the replacement isnt as good, if he/she is super cheap a bean counter might pull the trigger.
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Don't think that just because you happen to sit in the office that your job is not "setup to be remote" there isn't that much "setup" involved at most companies any more. If your company has some form of VPN solution, and has heard of teleconference, then it doesn't matter if you're in the office or at home, you're equally vulnerable.
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This, precisely.
If your work can be outsourced, and your contributions aren't sufficient to justify keeping you (versus hiring some warm body in Pune or Hyderabad), then it won't mean shit if you sat in the office for 18 hours a day...
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I think that is an excellent point and I'm surprised it got modded down. I work from home, and I am the best of the best (or at least the third highest paid engineer out of 1000), but yes, at some point it is possible that 'they' could find an English speaking engineer who can do my job effectively and has my experience but would be paid less. If I find her first then I'll be her agent.
But, that person doesn't seem to be likely to come from any of the obvious outsourcing countries.So a factor of 8 on salary
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Its pretty damn hard to walk and bike at the same time. That's some circus stuff right there.
That's why I work from home. God, I am so fat.
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Its pretty damn hard to walk and bike at the same time. That's some circus stuff right there.
That's why I work from home. God, I am so fat.
Perhaps for a little motivation to get in shape (other than round), you might consider hiring someone to follow you around with a tuba?
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Its pretty damn hard to walk and bike at the same time. That's some circus stuff right there.
Now now, don't get thine pantaloons in a twist, my good sir or maam. Have you not heard of this wonderful new invention known as the Dandy Horse? [wikipedia.org] This new contraption indeed allows for one to both walk and bike simultaneously.
Re:More ... (Score:4, Informative)
It's also less than 1/200th of the area.
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That's hardly relevant when you look at the rate of urbanisation in the USA. Americans need to stop using their large amounts of completely unused land as an excuse for why their cities are poorly setup have crumbling infrastructure and low investment.
We're talking about cycling and walking. The dutch don't do that to the next city even though the next major city is only 20km away ... in every direction.
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What determines walkability or bikability is population density. The population density of most populated areas of the United States is very low compared to Europe. On the other hand, if given a choice most people in the United States want their single family detached homes, their modest yards and a little elbow room from their neighbors--which directly implies either a low population density, or desirable housing only being accessible to a very small percentage of the population.
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The population density of most populated areas of the United States is very low compared to Europe.
hahahah no, not at all. The urbanisation rates of USA make their cities far more populated than most of Europe. The only difference is your cities are further apart.
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The population density of most populated areas of the United States is very low compared to Europe
As the other poster said, this is simply untrue. The vast majority of the population of the USA lives in cities with a higher population density than the areas that the majority of Europeans live in. The USA also has a load of empty space that almost no one lives in, which skews averages a lot and is constantly used as an excuse for why US infrastructure is so bad. One of the big problems in the US is the zoning concept that seems to try to ensure that places people live, places people work, and places p
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Yeah, but having big lawns and big houses in the suburbs and ever increasing property values tends to get people moving further and further away.
Americans put up with some ridiculous commute times, although they aren't nearly as crazy as the Japanese. But at least in the US you can spend that time in the comfort of your own space, your car. And not weaving and dodging traffic on a bicycle or stewing in a packed train car.
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I have a big house with huge rooms and high ceilings, with no lawn whatsoever. I couldn't be happier. Lawns are a pain the arse. Walking distance to the bar, starbucks, supermarket, doctor and 5 restaurants, but no lawn. It's 28 houses in one development with dual use zoning for business and residential and it turns out to be the only such development in the entire state. It's either house + lawn or shitty apartment. People don't know what they're missing because they have no opportunity to try something el
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I'm happy sharpening my chainsaw and cleaning my guns, and I'm not interested in starbucks. Each to their own I guess.
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If that's all you do, your chainsaw will get dirty and your guns will get blunt.
Yet The M&M at Yahoo (Score:3)
So major trend and yet the M&M at Yahoo killed it all because it needed to steal ideas from employees to claim them as it's own, really lame, Yahoo reaching back to the last millennium through incompetence. You have to think how pissed off the Yahoo coders must have be, they had it and same lame arse peter principle bitch stole it, no wonder Yahoo crashed into a screaming heap, all those security lapses, very pissed off insider revenge, high level extremely skilled and well coordinated insider revenge (no trail left behind, none). I forgot how much fun working from home was, it was decades ago and to have that taken and they knew exactly why, well, there will be repercussions, bad repercussion pissing off thousands of staff because you are incompetent and need to steal other people's ideas to look good.
Err, what? (Score:2)
More Americans Now Work Full-Time From Home Than Walk and Bike To Office Jobs
How is that significant?
At some point in history there were more computers than waffle irons but I don't remember anyone making a news story out of it...
Makes sense to me. (Score:3)
As someone who used to bike to work, I understand how it is possible more people work at home instead. To be able to walk to work or to bike to work is a luxury driven by being able to live close enough to where you work--and for many jobs that means living in a highly populous urban core or being wealthy enough (or in my case, lucky enough) to live in a home near the downtown corridor where your job is located.
Working at home, on the other hand, is simply a function of having the right job. And I know quite a few people who work at home: I know a couple of people who work for Apple as customer support who work out of their homes, and I know of a bunch of account managers at YP.com who work out of their homes. If your job involves a lot of time talking to people on the phone or chatting over the Internet, it doesn't really matter where you are located so long as you have a phone line and an internet connection.
conclusions colored by perception (Score:3)
Is this really news? I live in an area where it rains pretty much the year round. Biking to work isn't impossible, merely challenging and unpleasant. I wonder if the uptick in biking to work is not because biking has become more popular but because there exists more circumstances (crowded downtown, difficulty with parking) where it's the only practical option.
On the other hand, the only factors keeping us from a huge uptick in working from home are (a) old school company policies, and (b) lack of broadband. And perversely, access to broadband is reportedly *less* likely downtown, (I believe there was a slashdot article on that last year) due to legacy wiring, (low speed dsl only) giving the edge for work-from-homers to the suburbs which are more likely to have cable or fiber. Suburb professionals also being the same class that are looking at a possible hellish auto commute and impractical logistics to bike into downtown, increasing the attraction of WFH.
I'd be interested in seeing the statistics broken out by distance from work, and perhaps split between jobs downtown and jobs in the suburbs. (For instance, the Intel plants -- major tech employer -- in this area are *not* downtown, but quite a bit out west of the city. So biking to work is more practical, but driving to work is more appealing also.)
I dunno, the more I think about it the more complicated the picture gets. I don't think percentage increases in commuting categories for all of America would necessarily lead to valid conclusions.
And incidentally, regarding the old school policies ("If you work from home, you work for someone else, not us") it's amusing how a company with strict rules *against* work from home will happily employ offshore programmers who (for all they know) are balancing an old laptop across their knees in a tin shack. But dammit, the locals they employ had better the hell have butts in cubicle seats first thing every morning.
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What he said. Associates who live down town have to put up with 1.5 Mbps DSL because that's all the infrastructure can handle, and running new infrastructure is a big can of worms. It looked for awhile like public high speed wifi might fill in the gaps, but I've read that there were bureaucratic issues with that as well.
Also, from reports, parts of Sacramento, areas around the SF Bay Area, bedroom communities in New York, pretty much everywhere the phones are still using hundred-year-old wiring and it's t
Than why is BestBuy Rowe on way out (Score:2)
Even BestBuy who poineered Roowe for working at home results only now requires employees to come in. Yahoo no longer allows this and Facebook bans this and so are others. It seems it's on the way out as employers now focus on hours at the desk with face time to watch results and keep an eye seems to be more important in trends recently
Just started working from home (Score:2)
On my prior jobs, I had the ability to work remotely when needed. But I was still expected to show up in an office every work day.
Just started a new job where the company has a large number of people working at home full time who never have to report to an office. It is a very weird experience, mainly because everything is remote, protected by multiple layers of VPNs and VMs and custom applications and so forth. And complicated by the employees who come from all backgrounds and skill. There are grand
If your job let's you telecommute (Score:1)
You're going to be out of a job soon
Er... (Score:2)
That doesn't mean that the home office is booming, it's just that US citizens are lazy sons of bitches.
Not surprised, working from home is great for all (Score:1)
Proof (Score:2)
This is more proof that our cities must build more bike lanes