Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Offices are cheaper per person to run and provision than individual dwellings due to the extra density of workers, so this trend depends on the tradeoff between the energy saved by reducing travel and the energy spent heating/cooling/running individual home offices.

On the other hand, many countries are dealing with ageing populations. Self-driving cars will give the elderly and the disabled a level of autonomy that we take for granted. That's my bet on the big win.



But given that the homes exist anyway, from a pure monetary basis the home office ends up winning pretty much every time. (To be sure, not everyone has a home office they'd be comfortable working in full-time.) The issue, one of them anyway, is that F2F communication is a lot more interactive, higher bandwidth, and encourages unstructured interaction. I do a lot of conference calls and other forms of telecommuting but it's still enormously useful to go into the office a good chunk of the time.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: