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On Remote Work, Part 2

There we are, 2023. San Francisco downtown looks like an apocalyptic preview of times to come. The over and over again predicted reality hit the city hard.


The past two administrations bet on an unsustainable economic formula, resulting in catastrophic results. The city’s middle class is gone, and with it, the essential parts of the engine that runs a town. If you didn’t buy a house before the mid-nineties (and I am stretching here) or make way more than 100k a year, you can’t afford to live in this town.


Now, the CEOs who rented the city’s hundreds of new office spaces together with the big developers and City Hall incumbents understandably campaign hard to save what’s left of their investments. And they already zeroed in on a culprit. The remote worker.


Bringing back the workforce to the office has been chanted as the solution to San Francisco’s problems. This may temporarily bring some relief, and I understand entirely what’s at stake here. But the truth is that the damage is done. People would instead move to a place where they can have a decent life than keep struggling in this new reality.
Small businesses can’t survive in the city anymore; the middle-class professionals who still live in the city are retired or getting close to retirement age, and the workforce is not renewed simply because policemen, firemen, and hospitality workers can’t afford to live here. And they probably don’t even want to come here anyway.


I wish I knew a way out of this mess, but I know the solution isn’t putting remote workers against the wall and threatening them with mass layoffs. This may keep them from getting stronger at the negotiation table, but it won’t bring back the Silicon Valley utopia.

What I know for sure is that remote work is part of the solution, not the problem.

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On Remote Work, Part 1

This is great to hear (from BBC Worklife):

Leading voices in the tech industry have been backing remote work and the advantages that it brings since fairly early on in the pandemic, however. They cite evidence that working from home can result in increased productivity as well as providing better work-life balance, a wider workforce talent pool for hiring, and greater employee inclusivity and retention.

But there is always people trying to go against the tide, not surprisingly this one, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai. He said this:

Google expects employees to work in-person for at least three days a week after the planned return to offices on 1 September, The New York Times reported. But what it means is that Google employees are required (a.k.a. obligated) to work from the office at least three days a week. We all know what at least implies to those big money guys.

And then there is this:

“It’s an aberration that we are going to correct as quickly as possible.”  Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon said at a Credit Suisse Group AG conference in February.

Not worth commenting; this guy still lives during the Industrial Revolution. His employees are expected to work 80 hours a week—at least.

What is worth to comment is Solomon’s pay package: it is comprised of $2 million in base salary, a $4.65 million cash bonus, and $10.85 million compensation in stock form, which is based on the bank’s performance (CNBC). This is not even decent.

I’ve been working remotely for the last 16 months. My agency fought hard to stay alive during the pandemic. It survived. We were never as united, collaborative, and productive, individually and as a team, as we are right now. I am not being naive, I am experiencing intensively this new reality, and as much as those C-suite guys try to keep things as-is for the obvious reasons, the future is coming. It seems pretty different—and better— for the people who do the actual work.

I am posting this from a cabin in Lake Tahoe, in front of a fireplace.