> "hybrid" return to office policies where employees have to live within 100 miles of the office and be able to come in 1 day a week or 1 day a month depending on team.
This is where I suspect a lot of places are going to end up in the medium term. I'm not back to the office in the first place, and I'm aware that I have a nice office and moderate commute, but I still want some wfh time, as well as some time seeing my colleagues. A balance.
The problem is that in a hyper-optimizing environment balance is something to be eliminated.
The problem is that the req to live within 100mi doesn’t allow workers to fully engage in location arbitrage in the way the workers would like.
I think most people want a better work/life balance, which is what all this ultimately represents. I imagine the eventual long term settle is somewhere more in the “wfh, but with team gatherings for a few days once a month” in a lot of industries.
I think you nailed it, but an added wrinkle is that I’ve seen a lot of people (myself included) have worse work/life balance with wfh. When there’s no separation between you and “the office” it’s very easy to just never stop working. The number of night time emails and after hours meetings I’ve gotten skyrocketed after everyone started working from home, and it’s a similar situation across my broader friends & coworkers cohort.
That's a personal problem for you to solve by setting boundaries, honestly. I doubt those late emails will ever not be a thing, I've worked at a lot of places in things other than software and it never ends, regardless of working from home or office.
There is one exception to your location arbitrage: those who want a hobby farm. if you need to go to the office every day your hobby farm will be close to the city. If you only go in once a week a 1.5 hour drive doesn't sound so bad and you can move farther out meaning more land for the same number of people who want a horse or whatever.
This is only a tiny subset of people though, and is more the exception that proves the rule.
If you're in a major metro like the bay area, 1.5 hours still doesn't get you far enough to afford anything like enough land for a hobby farm on anything short of a FANNG salary.
You need a FANNG salary to afford most hobby farms even if the land was free. It is possible to make a good living farming a hobby farm sized lot, but most hobby farms are not managed to do that (most are about horses which are a large money sink)
Sure it does. 1.5 hours gets you to Stockton or Gilroy or Modesto of Fairfield and lots of other more open places where you can get a few acres at a decent price.
Based on a quick look at Zillow, 5 acres (undeveloped, no house) goes for nearly a million dollars. We have fundamentally different ideas of what constitutes a "decent price" if that qualifies for you. I'm 6 hours drive from the my office in Mountain View now, and I'm looking at a similarly undeveloped plot that's 250 acres and worth somewhere between $200k and $300k.
A house can be built on that lot for $150k (though most will probably spend more like 200k), a barn for another 100k. Still cheaper than a similar house right in SF.
There are cities other than than the west coast as well. 5 acres 1.5 hours from Minneapolis will be 300k with a house.
This is where I suspect a lot of places are going to end up in the medium term. I'm not back to the office in the first place, and I'm aware that I have a nice office and moderate commute, but I still want some wfh time, as well as some time seeing my colleagues. A balance.
The problem is that in a hyper-optimizing environment balance is something to be eliminated.