james rowen

The impetus for this post was a comment from HN user munificent, regarding housing demand. Partial quote:

“When you get rid of those [agriculture and manufacturing] jobs and replace them with information work, you create a feedback loop with no dampening in it. People want to go where the most jobs are, so they move to the cities. Businesses want to open where the most workers are, so they start companies in cities.

The next thing you know, all the small towns are filled with dirt cheap empty houses because there are no jobs. Meanwhile, every metro area is bursting at the seams.”

This trend is taken as an assumption from here.

Basically, what would it look like to enable more people to live in and leverage the existing infrastructure of less urban areas? There exist a number of reasons why “working from home” can be challenging and undesirable for both individuals and companies. There is a lot of value in “the office.” How could we give people more flexibility in where they live, reasonable commute times, connection to their coworkers, and the ability to compartmentalize their work life to a place of business with all the perks?

Enter the remote work center. It has the vibe of a big tech campus building. Food court, supporting stores and services, common areas, etc. But a lot of individual offices that people go into and work for whatever company. Maybe some larger units for small groups that are colocated. Similar to a scaled up coworking space, or, of course, WeWork. But WeWork largely operated in dense city centers and targeted more transient and nomadic tenants. This concept would leverage cheaper infrastructure and QoL outside of urban centers, and target more stable long-term rentals. It could even become something of a cloud for office space, where companies would be able to spin up and down individual units (globally!) to right-size as their needs change.

The setups inside the offices would naturally vary by individual and company, but there might be a baseline tech package designed for this paradigm. The core tension that needs to be addressed is the balance between privacy and immediacy. You don’t want always-on video, but you want someone to be able to stop by your desk, you want low friction for ad-hoc conversations. Personally, I’m not big on VR yet, and I don’t think people are ready to don the headset all day, but I suppose that could be an option (and a fairly easy one).

What I envision is more of a bank of displays, separate from the core workstation. Not as overwhelming as a full-on command center, but enough that you can give a certain number of people (or groups) dedicated physical positions. Multiple cameras in the room that you control (trust will have to be established), so you can easily share different views. And a dedicated hardware control console.

For example, you might press the “Stacy” button, record a short message, and she will see an indicator on the screen dedicated to you in her office (or in some kind of bucketed display if you’re not in her Top 16). She can then choose to view it, and send a response, and/or open a feed, or just leave it and get to it later. If you guys get into an important conversation, you might hit your “Preet” button and try to rope him in, or ping the team so anyone can join. Having this dedicated communication space would help separate this chaos from your “actual work” surfaces, and distribute the one master notification feed into something more manageable and physical.

This would represent a clear value add over the kinds of spaces people have in their homes. It’s now more than just a different space to work in. It’s fairly resistant to economic changes, as it supports a wide range of information work and has a fluid modularity to it, like an apartment building with individual tenants, rather than one company wrestling with leasing an entire building or doing their bespoke buildout. This system would also naturally push back towards offices with doors and away from the dreaded open floorplans.

Tell me what’s wrong with this idea on HN!

• Time zones
  • An invariant of reality that isn’t really made any better or worse, but more apparent as physical colocation becomes less important.
• Evil company policies/abuse
  • Again kind of an invariant. One would hope that the provider would maintain safeguards for the individuals, but at some point they will want to land a contract like Verizon…
• Chicken and egg
  • How do you get people to relocate? You could start by targeting outlying areas that already have a population with a long commute. A lot of places in the Bay Area outside of SF, for example.
  • The capex for the campus should also be significant. There is plenty of existing infrastructure that could be leveraged, but it has to be done right. The experience of working at a “Google-ified” facility is a dramatic boon to quality of life, this would aim to basically commodify that.
• Turnover
  • What happens when someone quits or is fired? Is the company on the hook for a lease? There would have to be a balance between stability and flexibility. A self-serve matching/waiting list type solution could help minimize downtime while allowing flexible terms.