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Inept posted:I'm not sure at what point it becomes the long run for you, but the pandemic started over 4 years ago. BLS statistics show that remote work is increasing since they started polling for it in Oct. 2022 For posterity, bls posted:
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Apr 5, 2024 20:29
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I think share of hours is the more meaningful metric. Just pulled the data from endpoints of the survey - trending it over time month-by-month would be more interesting. % teleworking some hours - all, over 16 Oct 2022 - 8.1% Feb 2024 - 12.1% % teleworking all hours - all, over 16 Oct 2022 - 9.7% Feb 2024 - 10.9% So more people are doing telework overall, and both the portion doing "Some" telework and "All" telework have increased, but the rate of increase is much higher for "Some" telework. I wonder how this will continue to evolve in the next few years with various RTO mandates.
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Apr 5, 2024 20:54
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:I wonder how this will continue to evolve in the next few years with various RTO mandates. The numbers seem to indicate that the narrative of RTO isn't matching the reality so far. 155 million workers are represented in the data, so a 1.2% increase is an additional ~1.85 million fully remote people in the last 15 months.
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Apr 5, 2024 21:09
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I agree that reality is lagging the hype around RTO, but I think you're out to lunch if you don't think that senior management are going to more aggressively push RTO in the near term and I think the data bears out the beginning of a transformation. Jan 24 numbers included here, for what it's worth % teleworking some hours - all, over 16 Oct 2022 - 8.1% Jan 2024 - 11.8% Feb 2024 - 12.1% % teleworking all hours - all, over 16 Oct 2022 - 9.7% Jan 2024 - 11.1% Feb 2024 - 10.9% Kind of interesting in that it appears that it's mostly a shift from "All" to "Some" between Jan and Feb.
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Apr 5, 2024 21:18
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BLS: management professional related occupations advanced degree holders workers in financial activities Kind of narrow group of workers. These are people likely to be employed by companies that have office space though. Also the same group who can generally walk out the door and get a WFH job without an enormous pay cut Amazon is often quoted as being a big proponent of RTO but also seem to be using it to lay off a lot of workers, and they own a lot of property in downtown Seattle that probably has to be refinanced
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Apr 5, 2024 21:22
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:I agree that reality is lagging the hype around RTO, but I think you're out to lunch if you don't think that senior management are going to more aggressively push RTO in the near term and I think the data bears out the beginning of a transformation. I think it's too soon to say that. There's too much fluctuation month to month. For December 2023, teleworking all hours was 10.5%, November 10%, October 10.1%, September, 10%.
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Apr 5, 2024 21:47
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Inept posted:I think it's too soon to say that. There's too much fluctuation month to month. For December 2023, teleworking all hours was 10.5%, November 10%, October 10.1%, September, 10%. yeah it's pretty noisy for sure
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Apr 5, 2024 21:48
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Hadlock posted:BLS: Yeah, you really have to narrow the data significantly. It's kind of a "no duh" situation to observe that a car mechanic or a barrista can't exactly telework. There are huge swaths of the economy that aren't going to be going remote any time soon. But, to take this back around to the original conversation about commercial office space, the stereotypical white collar worker commuting from the burbs into their cubical to generate TPS reports for 8 hours absolutely can telework, and a lot of those people really got used to it. I don't think 100% remote is going to be the default any time soon, but flexibility and at least a good chunk of the week as WFH will absolutely be something that a large number of workers want and seek out. Like any other workplace perk it's going to be the sort of thing that people in high-demand fields who can easily go find another job are going to be able to demand. Our hypothetical TPS drone might get told by boss to get his rear end back in the office, but the more skilled end of white collar work is absolutely going to trend towards at least part time WFH. Anecdata, but I can absolutely say that generous WFH policies have kept a few people at my current job, and in a few cases it's specifically because of how much money they save on child care. I've got an office buddy who's wife is also about 60% WFH and they just juggle their schedules so that at least one of them is home every day, which means they don't need to pay for diaper-aged day care. He could go somewhere else and make more money, but from where he sits that perk alone is worth deep five figures per year.
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Apr 5, 2024 22:03
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I know quite a few people that work for Amazon in Seattle, it doesn't seem to be the strictest RTO policy that I've heard of around here. It's 3 days a week in the office and 2 from home but those 3 days don't need to be 100% in person, you just need to badge into the office 3 days a week. So you could do a meeting remotely in the morning and then badge in at lunch. Interestingly it's local government jobs (at least in the Seattle area) that seem to have the most WFH opportunities. Pretty much every government job I applied for was like 90-100% WFH.
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Apr 5, 2024 22:05
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I personally don't like to wfh myself because my home office is not as physically comfortable as my work office (better equipment setup in office, and also our office dress code is "casual" so I end up wearing the same clothes I wear when I'm at home cause I'm not a weirdo that sits on the couch naked all day), but also in my experience when I'm collaborating with someone who's wfh that day I honestly feel like less poo poo gets accomplished than if they were in office with me. I guess I'm trying to say that my experience with colleagues wfh is that people slack off way more and I clock out at 4pm on the dot so I can't really wait for you to "get in the zone."
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Apr 5, 2024 22:25
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I definitely slack off more during the WFH workday than I do in the office, but I don't really give a poo poo because people call me at all hours of the night anyway. The moment you want off-hours productivity, you lose all right to complain about my on-hours activities.  One of our poor QA guys is responsible for projects on three continents. The guy, as best I can tell, never sleeps anymore. He's in the office at 8AM, he's still there at 6PM, and I get calls and e-mails from him past 10PM (and sometimes past 1AM) regularly. He should be quitting yesterday.
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Apr 5, 2024 22:30
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Yeah my personal experience is that I wfh when my schedule is light, so i can slack off and gently caress off early. E: I don't project this onto others. I don't really care about my coworkers working from home and slacking off or working in office and spending 1+ hours talking about sports. But I definitely see a dip in poo poo getting done when the people I need to collaborate with are wfh vs in office. Boris Galerkin fucked around with this message at 22:34 on Apr 5, 2024 |
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Apr 5, 2024 22:31
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Mustang posted:Interestingly it's local government jobs (at least in the Seattle area) that seem to have the most WFH opportunities. Pretty much every government job I applied for was like 90-100% WFH. Government jobs have traditionally had better work-life balance than industry jobs, I guess this is just another facet of that. Plus, it's a thing employees want that also reduces their expenses, it's win-win.
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Apr 5, 2024 23:24
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Government jobs have traditionally had better work-life balance than industry jobs, I guess this is just another facet of that. Plus, it's a thing employees want that also reduces their expenses, it's win-win. Government jobs also tend to pay significantly less than their private sector counterparts. QOL stuff is the big thing that they have to offer.
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Apr 6, 2024 00:45
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I've been 100% telework for over 12 years and I'll go back to the office over someone else's dead body I work in software and my colleagues are all over the world and that's one thing that radically affects the picture, whether you actually have people in your local office that you directly work with. When you work for a globalized company that may not be the case: and companies that fully embrace telework can also more easily hire outside the region of their HQ, which saves money, and also obviously in the long run you can save vast amounts on real estate I think the short term trend will fluctuate a lot but in the long term, money is going to be more important than some aging-out executives' fee-fees. Companies that divest their huge expensive corporate offices and hire nationwide/globally for their sit-at-a-desk jobs will have a huge competitive advantage over those that insist on only hiring people in their metro area and making them commute, even for just a couple days a week.
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Apr 6, 2024 01:09
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Return to office would mean I wasted money on all these expensive vitamin D shots.
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Apr 6, 2024 02:05
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WFH can also mean work from anywhere we send you. A lot of folks in my industry go from ship to ship and the expectation is that one will just do all the office work and reporting from anywhere, ship, hotel, place or home.
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Apr 6, 2024 02:28
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Bar Ran Dun posted:WFH can also mean work from anywhere we send you. A lot of folks in my industry go from ship to ship and the expectation is that one will just do all the office work and reporting from anywhere, ship, hotel, place or home. Maybe in your industry, but most places "work from home" and "travel responsibilities" are two different things. If I sign a contract for 60% WFH it's a very loving different thing than if I sign one for 60% travel time. One is a pretty cool perk that I'll take a bit of a salary cut to enjoy. The other is a major loving imposition that I'm going to ask for some pretty crazy compensation to deal with.
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Apr 6, 2024 02:38
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Yeah I don't think anyone is conflating WFH with work travel, that's not what those survey's are about.
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Apr 6, 2024 03:54
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Cyrano4747 posted:One is a pretty cool perk that I'll take a bit of a salary cut to enjoy. The other is a major loving imposition that I'm going to ask for some pretty crazy compensation to deal with. Yeah anything transportation or marine sucks rear end. But generally we do get paid. I’ve moved adjacent into insurance so life sucks much much less than it used to, with only occasionally reminders of how terrible it can be.
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Apr 6, 2024 03:56
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Nobody is or should be conflating travel required and wfh/remote, no matter what industry you're in. They are clearly different things and talking about them as if they were the same makes no sense.
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Apr 6, 2024 04:02
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Boris Galerkin posted:Nobody is or should be conflating travel required and wfh/remote, no matter what industry you're in. They are clearly different things and talking about them as if they were the same makes no sense. The expectation was that one would also be in the office 8-5 M-F on top of all the weekends, travel, and 24/7 on call work. I generally sailed 2-3 ships in the middle of the night a week and usually worked 70-80 hours weekly. The expectations in jobs that are transportation operations related can be absolutely wild.
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Apr 6, 2024 04:39
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Bar Ran Dun posted:The expectation was that one would also be in the office 8-5 M-F on top of all the weekends, travel, and 24/7 on call work. I generally sailed 2-3 ships in the middle of the night a week and usually worked 70-80 hours weekly. Seems like a lot of jobs in supply chain are pretty lovely this way. We would have to be in the office 9-5, and then have meetings with asia from 5-10 or so. The "give" was that you could do those calls from home, lol. Pretty sure my situation at least would be falling in that "teleworking, some hours" category
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Apr 6, 2024 22:28
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CPI due Wednesday https://pro.thestreet.com/market-commentary/the-market-remains-unconcern-about-rates-staying-higher-for-longer quote:April 8, 2024 1. Could not find this blog post/commentary on their website 2. 7.0% seems... High
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Apr 8, 2024 21:25
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Hadlock posted:CPI due Wednesday Yeah, I don't trust a Heritage Foundation ghoul unskewing the unemployment rate in an election year. That sounds a lot more like propaganda trying to convince people that things are worse than they are rather than genuine insight into the state of the economy.
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Apr 8, 2024 21:40
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Who are these millions of people missing from the labor force? Are they arguing we should be including dead people as unemployed?
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Apr 8, 2024 21:52
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the silent majority of unemployed workers
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Apr 8, 2024 21:54
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"The unemployment numbers are fake Fake FAKE" has been an obsession of both partisan hacks and doomer brains for a while now.
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Apr 8, 2024 21:56
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IIRC, it's usually about how to count someone as "actively looking for work" vs "not looking for work" (and therefore not unemployed, as they don't want a job). If you say that people out of work who say they aren't well enough to work, or rather live in their parents basement and sponge off them rather than try and get a job, are actually unemployed. Then you get a higher number of unemployed. How much this actually matters is an exercise to the reader, and usually based on your own views about how much they could be working if [insert political failing here]
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Apr 8, 2024 22:04
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there's a whole series of BLS unemployment metrics including increasingly marginally attached people. the broadest, U6, currently clocks in at 7.3% https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/U6RATE (U3 is the "standard" quoted unemployment rate)
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Apr 8, 2024 22:07
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pmchem posted:there's a whole series of BLS unemployment metrics including increasingly marginally attached people. the broadest, U6, currently clocks in at 7.3% Yeah, you can call U6 the "real" unemployment number, but even in that case it's still sitting a historic lows: 
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Apr 8, 2024 22:13
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SpartanIvy posted:Who are these millions of people missing from the labor force? Are they arguing we should be including dead people as unemployed? I don't have an agenda, but arguably, yes dead people who count in the CDC "expected deaths" table are missing from the labor force; the economy doesn't fully dynamically adjust because there's fewer workers And then yeah a lot of people who should have been retired were still working because [ forgot to retire, forgot to save for retirement, supporting their kids, unplanned illness, etc ] You don't get to count them as unemployed, agree There's also a lot of healthcare workers who aren't full time any more because xyz covid AFAIK all my "long covid" people have returned to normal at this point so not sure how much you can lean on that. A bunch of work people were out last month due to a work trip super spreader but it was "just" the flu
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Apr 8, 2024 22:16
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LanceHunter posted:Yeah, you can call U6 the "real" unemployment number, but even in that case it's still sitting a historic lows: yeah, labor market been super strong the past couple years. that might be shifting but, record deficit spending has kept the machine rolling along
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Apr 8, 2024 22:19
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Hadlock posted:1. Could not find this blog post/commentary on their website Yeah, that’s propaganda. I guarantee they know better, they’re just trying to score political points. There’s an actual statistic that gets at what he’s pretending to care about, prime age empop ratio. (You need to control for age because otherwise “boomers are retiring” starts to look like “holy poo poo everyone is losing their jobs”) https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060 Take a look at the five or ten year chart.
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Apr 8, 2024 22:40
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They always say that there are missing people from the unemployment stat. There's always lots of people who are missing from the workforce and they're never counted. that's always been the case. But if your comparing 3.8% with HOW UNEMPLOYMENT HAS ALWAYS BEEN COUNTED, then you don't adjust it. If you want to say your new metric is 6 or 7%, sure, but that is almost certainly lower by the same margin if you went back and did the same calculation.
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Apr 8, 2024 23:01
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Employment wise, biotech has become a poo poo-show. Tons of scientists loosing their job, possibly leaving the field altogether. Meanwhile the Massachusetts unemployment rate has barely budged. If I go from genetic engineer to Grubhub driver I’m still earning income. But in latter times before McJobs, full time employees were either employed or unemployed with little gray area. I think the feedback loop for the Fed has stopped working altogether. Especially with AI on the horizon to gently caress the average worker, they should be cutting rates. Most of the inflation has been by predatory price fixing anyway, not worker inflation. Currently there are zero CEOs serving time for collusion. Zero. If you want lower inflation, maybe actually enforce some laws? Somehow nation-wide collusion on rental pricing isn’t actually illegal because ‘computers’. Get ready for an actual recession, AND more use of the phrase ‘jobless recovery’.
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Apr 9, 2024 00:51
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Angry rants aside, I am curious about the average worker's take-home pay, and how that compares with inflation. Where would I go to look up those numbers?
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Apr 9, 2024 00:55
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street doc posted:Employment wise, biotech has become a poo poo-show. Tons of scientists loosing their job, possibly leaving the field altogether. Meanwhile the Massachusetts unemployment rate has barely budged. The problem with that kind of thinking is that there will always be some industries in a downturn and some in an upturn. My friends in computer tech jobs have been complaining about the tight job market. Meanwhile over in Aerospace I'm seeing a ton of people who left for tech start ups come back to fill our glut of job openings. If I asked around my workplace a lot of people would assume that unemployment is really closer to 0%. Anecdotes aren't data. U-6 unemployment measures underemployment and there's no reason to think that a measurement intended to capture underemployment won't capture gig work just as well as mcjobs.
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Apr 9, 2024 01:03
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Angry rants aside, I am curious about the average worker's take-home pay, and how that compares with inflation. Where would I go to look up those numbers? It was in front of inflation, lagged, and now if I recall it's in front again but pretty close. This is also consistent with median wage growth too. This is very simplified, but most data tends to agree with the general trends https://www.axios.com/2024/02/05/wages-outpacing-inflation This also suggests that there isn't a a growing number of under-employed people as well.
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Apr 9, 2024 04:40
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Seriously, every time unemployment is released people kramer in with takes about how labor force participation isn't accurately measured and the unemployment measures don't take in to account X Y and Z and like... no, they do. You aren't the first macro genius to think about how to measure unemployment and labor force participation. It's all right here.
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Apr 9, 2024 15:01
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