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More Americans Now Work Full-Time From Home Than Walk and Bike To Office Jobs (qz.com)
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.
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.
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.
So true, I actually just interviewed a guy today who had been working from home for over a decade and had his job outsourced to South America, a fairly familiar story.
"they probably don't count illegal immigrants"
They're obviously not at home, so, duh?
"the country is 1/20th of the population."
It's also less than 1/200th of the area.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
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.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Same when working in the office. I was in both situations. :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
The same happens to people who work in an office. Offices for knowledge workers are mostly a way for lazy managers to make sure you're "working," even if that entails watching Youtube cat videos at your desk. OTOH, someone who's been a successful contributor from a home office has a demonstrated ability to self-motivate without physical oversight. If they work best at 3 AM, and like to sleep during the day, why should it matter?
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.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
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.
I stole this Sig
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.
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.
My output when working at home is 1.3, not 0.8.
All you have is some hypothetical bullshit.
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.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
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 seems unlikely. Last time I looked a Chinese engineer with a good enough grasp of spoken and written English wa paid almost as much as an Australian one( who admittedly might fail either or both of those requirements depending on your prejudices).
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.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
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.
You work in a very toxic environment. I have no desire to work there.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
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.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?