At the same time, execs love to paint with a broad brush that everyone working from home is slacking off... while also not sharing any data about how many people are being lazy.
Either your performance management can catch lazy employees or it can't. If it can't, then that's what you should be fixing.
I think there are a lot of reasons, and forced attrition is definitely something they see as a benefit. However, I do genuinely think that a lot of them truly believe that working together in an office, face-to-face, is important. RTO is not just a cold calculation, but also reflective of their moral values towards work.
Whether those values actually lead to a better company is the part that, I feel, continues to lack evidence.
I used to work for a place that had "Focus Weeks". A week where there were to be no meetings, and you could work on whatever was important. Everyone I knew loved it - could accomplish so much more when you are not interrupted every other hour for some marginal-utility status update.
Management...apparently did not enjoy the time. I assume so many of them do nothing but meetings, they were probably bored. The upper leadership, for whom the work is predominantly meetings, is likely not satisfied without maximal people in sight.
This mirrors a lot of what I've suspected. Executives have a survivorship bias of a very work-focused life. It's hard for them to understand why anyone else would choose differently.
This applies to both work location and number of hours per week. It's gotta be hard to understand and accept that lower-level workers have a different view and priorities from your own, especially when all your fellow execs share your own view.
And, as the tweet says, at a certain level you can afford to offset all the negatives of work location / work hours. No commute. Personal chef. All household chores covered. Full time individual childcare. It's a lot easier to come into the office for 50-60 hours per week when you don't have to also spend your time outside the office trying to balance sleep and survival. But, again, that's not what life looks like for an average employee.
> I did exactly what this exec advocated - using hard data and statistics to paint a picture of what these mandates look like from a worker perspective - and was roundly shot down.
Of course they did. If you want to convince a company doing RTO why it’s bad, you need to show the negative impacts to the organization. Everybody seems to approach this from their individual perspective.
> If you want to convince a company doing RTO why it’s bad, you need to show the negative impacts to the organization.
There is a reason these are the same thing that should already be obvious: If you want people to take a job that costs them ~$30,000 more in expenses, you'll have to pay them more. If you split the difference, you both come out $15,000 ahead.
This before you even consider the costs to the company directly. If employees work from home you need less office space etc. That's not just rent but heat, power, security, insurance, internet, furniture, taxes, cleaning, lawyers and permits. That's a ton of money.
I think your reasoning is flawed because there is no fixed RTO cost to every employees commute and physical location (which I am assuming you mean by their expenses).
You could have 2 employees doing the same job, but one (Joe) has a 5 minute walk as their commute and the other (John) has a 50 minute drive in a personal vehicle. If there are enough Joe’s around to fill your roles, the costs associated with the Johns commutes don’t matter to the organization.
Facilities costs are actually pretty minor in the grand scheme of things…especially if your company has other roles that cannot be done remote. Incremental office space costs are minimal.
Your only hope to win the debate is to demonstrate with real productivity data. Perhaps things like demonstrating reduced sick time, turnover rate decreases, etc.
> You could have 2 employees doing the same job, but one (Joe) has a 5 minute walk as their commute and the other (John) has a 50 minute drive in a personal vehicle.
This doesn't mean they have different expenses. John is paying $2500/mo in time and commuting expenses, Joe is paying $2500/mo in additional rent to live in the downtown. Efficient market hypothesis says they're the same and anyway you care about the mean or median rather than rare outliers when operating at scale.
> Facilities costs are actually pretty minor in the grand scheme of things…especially if your company has other roles that cannot be done remote. Incremental office space costs are minimal.
Most offices are just offices. The jobs that can't be done remotely are the likes of data centers or factories, but these are different facilities in different places. If you're e.g. a tech company, your offices in San Francisco or New York contain entirely people who could work from home whereas your data centers might be in Oregon or Virginia.
So the costs are not incremental, they allow you to close entire facilities; and those facilities are the ones with higher costs per unit area; and the incremental costs are not trivial either. Things like rent and utilities scale approximately linearly with square footage or number of employees. Some are even super-linear because larger facilities succumb to bureaucracy, HR drama and combinatorial explosion in risk interactions.
> Your only hope to win the debate is to demonstrate with real productivity data.
I can win the debate this way too.
That two hours a day your employees were wasting in traffic? They're salaried employees, that's 10 hours a week they're not working.
They are still general living expenses. Those don’t go away based on employment or not, at home or not. They could decrease/increase some, but you can’t assume the whole amount is tied to employment only. Besides, if you don’t like your living expenses…quit or move.
> If you're e.g. a tech company…
What if you are not? what if you are a bank, a hospital, a factory, an insurance company, a processing center? You cannot make the assumption that every organization can just close “some” offices and leave others open. What about the HR and morale impact when 75% of your employees cannot work remote, but your SWEs can? Is it worth the office/desk footprint savings for leadership to create an elite group with a special benefits that pisses for every other person at the org? Probably not…
> That two hours a day your employees were wasting in traffic? They're salaried employees, that's 10 hours a week they're not working.
Now you are back to dealing with an individual impact here. If they are a salaried employee, the amount of work required for completion in a given week doesn’t change whether a commute is 10 hours or 10 minutes. That’s time the employee is investing by choosing to live where they live and work for the employer they work for. I have been on a salary for nearly 40 years…my employers have never expected me to work 168 hours a week. The expectation was an average of 40.
> They are still general living expenses. Those don’t go away based on employment or not, at home or not. They could decrease/increase some, but you can’t assume the whole amount is tied to employment only.
That wasn't the assumption. The assumption was that the difference was $2500/mo. Real estate in the heart of the downtown is significantly more expensive.
> Besides, if you don’t like your living expenses…quit or move.
At which point we're back to the efficient market hypothesis. If you live downtown, your rent is $2500/mo higher than if you live an hour away, but if you live an hour away you spend $2500/mo in time and commuting costs to get to the office.
But if you work from home then you live an hour away from the office, never go there and have no commuting expense, so you're ahead by $2500/mo and the company would have to compensate you for refusing to allow that.
> What if you are not?
Then you probably still have the same structure where the facilities that require in-person work are separate from the corporate offices:
> what if you are a bank, a hospital, a factory, an insurance company, a processing center?
A company is not a factory etc., a company has factories, or bank branches, or warehouses, or medical facilities. These facilities are generally already separate facilities from the offices where SWEs and other administrative staff work, because those facilities have different geographic requirements. Bank branches or medical facilities have to be near customers or patients. Warehouses or factories will be in places with cheap real estate or industrial zoning.
Offices have traditionally been in cities.
> What about the HR and morale impact when 75% of your employees cannot work remote, but your SWEs can?
This is a really dim view of people. Nurses and factory workers know perfectly well why they can't work from home. Why would they resent that someone else can when their job doesn't have the same requirements? Do they get mad at park rangers because their job allows them to spend time in the outdoors?
They might even notice that it's to their advantage because it gets 25% of the cars off the road so there isn't so much traffic during their commute, and stops them from being in competition with SWEs for the housing within reasonable distance of where they work.
> If they are a salaried employee, the amount of work required for completion in a given week doesn’t change whether a commute is 10 hours or 10 minutes.
You might expect that bosses would get away with giving you more work when you have more time, or that the quality of any given work might be influenced by how much time someone has available to spend on it. And nobody says you're working 168 hours a week, but a lot of people do more than 40, when they have the time.
> That’s time the employee is investing by choosing to live where they live and work for the employer they work for.
It's time the employee is being cost by being forced to commute into the office, which time would be available for other things in the alternative.
Honestly, you have a really strange way of looking at all this in my opinion. You seem to believe that your employer should compensate you not just for the time you are working for them, but also the time you are not. At no point in my life have I ever seen that expectation from anyone else.
You also seem to have really limited experience with organizations that have in office work. My guess is your career started relatively recently (<5 years). Perhaps all you have known is remote—that would track with the strange perspectives you have posted on this thread.
> You seem to believe that your employer should compensate you not just for the time you are working for them, but also the time you are not.
They have to compensate you for the relative difference in value between working for them and working for someone else.
If another company allows WFH and you don't, and that costs the employee $30,000/year to not have, what do you expect them to do when the employer offering WFH offers the same salary? Or even $10,000 less? And what will you have to do in response?
> They have to compensate you for the relative difference in value between working for them and working for someone else.
No. They only have to offer enough compensation and benefits to attract enough people into the roles they need filled.
> what do you expect them to do when the employer offering WFH offers the same salary?
Does it matter what another company does if the other company can still fill the role without offering WFH? Your whole premise seems to hinge on this concept that a company offering an in office position can’t effectively fill the opportunities they are offering. That’s not the case in 2025 (at least in the US). Specifically with tech jobs every opening whether WFH or in office generates hundreds of applicants. Some people might prefer WFH, others might prefer in office, but if RTO is the trend, WFH opportunities will start decreasing and will fill up fast. My guess is that given the option between unemployment and employment in an office anyone and everyone who needs an income will opt for the latter and will not sit around stubbornly waiting for a WFH opportunity like a petulant child that has to eat their broccoli before they are allowed to get up from the dinner table.
> No. They only have to offer enough compensation and benefits to attract enough people into the roles they need filled.
In the absence of an infinite labor pool, in order to do that they need to outbid the other employers.
> Does it matter what another company does if the other company can still fill the role without offering WFH?
Of course it does, because you have the opportunity to be the other company. You would be able to hire the same person for thousands of dollars less by allowing them to work from home and they would still take the job.
> Your whole premise seems to hinge on this concept that a company offering an in office position can’t effectively fill the opportunities they are offering.
I feel like we've been over this. You can obviously fill the job by paying more, but since the difference in the amount you'd have to pay is more than the value of forcing people to come into the office, why would you throw away money just to have less satisfied employees?
> Specifically with tech jobs every opening whether WFH or in office generates hundreds of applicants.
Applying to job postings on the internet takes a matter of seconds. Have a guess what "hundreds of applicants" implies if the average applicant applies to hundreds of job postings.
Now consider that a lot of the applicants won't be qualified.
> Some people might prefer WFH, others might prefer in office, but if RTO is the trend, WFH opportunities will start decreasing and will fill up fast.
It sounds like you're saying employers offering WFH opportunities will find it even easier to hire at a given level of compensation.
> My guess is that given the option between unemployment and employment in an office anyone and everyone who needs an income will opt for the latter and will not sit around stubbornly waiting for a WFH opportunity like a petulant child that has to eat their broccoli before they are allowed to get up from the dinner table.
Surely this attitude will have no effect on morale or turnover?
I am quite convinced that you probably started your career around or near to 2020, you seem to have a real naïveté around what is actually important to a company and how they calculate value. Especially a company that puts real value on in office work for its employees. I suspect you have probably had limited experience with in office work and automatically assume that everyone was miserable back pre-pandemic about it.
But here is the thing—people adapt. People adapted in 2020 when a good portion of the workforce went remote. There were griping then while people learned to balance home and family distractions with work. There were complications around finding appropriate workspace in their homes but people managed to make it work. If your company RTOs you might have a choice to make: adapt and deal with the commute/rent/whatever challenges with it, or perhaps try and convince your organization’s leadership how wrongheaded and stupid they are for RTO (Good luck…as a former senior leader in a few orgs both public and private…you better work on your argument). If you can’t adapt or convince your leaders of the error of their ways—quit and take your chances to find and compete for those remaining, but shrinking inventory of remote gigs out there.
I say all of this as a remote worker happily riding out the sunset of my career for a few more years in a lovely low stress non-management gig. I definitely don’t want to RTO, but if my company chose that route I know won’t have a good argument to counter because there isn’t one. I know and my leadership know that I can adapt and be just as productive at the office as I am at home…in short order.
> I suspect you have probably had limited experience with in office work and automatically assume that everyone was miserable back pre-pandemic about it.
Fully 91% of IT workers prefer to be fully remote or remote-first with no requirement to go into the office regularly, and it was disproportionately the first one. 6 of the remaining 9% still wanted to be remote first.
Only 1% of people wanted to be fully office-based. That's 3% less than the Lizardman's Constant.
> But here is the thing—people adapt.
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -George Bernard Shaw
I prefer steak, but will eat chicken if that is what is available.
I prefer gin, but will drink vodka when that is what is available.
I prefer to fly first class, but economics often force me into economy.
A preference does not equal entitlement and frankly the only preference that matters in this case is what the employer’s preference is, especially when the workers are willing to compromise their preference where it differs from the employer’s preference.
The employer’s are the ones that hold the little green pieces of paper that you want and need and are willing to trade your labor to get. They will occasionally attach strings to those little green pieces of paper. As long as you or someone is willing to deal with those strings, your preference really only matters to you…at least to them.
> If you want people to take a job that costs them ~$30,000 more in expenses, you'll have to pay them more. If you split the difference, you both come out $15,000 ahead.
I'm not following. How much is the difference? The difference to them is $30,000. But you forgot to specify what the difference to the company is.
The difference to the company is that if you don't force people to take on $30,000 in expenses, you'll be able to find people willing to work for up to $30,000 less in compensation. In addition to the other benefits of expanding the talent pool beyond the local geographic area, which might let you get better people, e.g. because you can hire someone in Boston who wants to stay in Boston, without opening an office there.
Something has gone seriously wrong in your thinking. You appear to be attempting to subtract two unrelated quantities from each other. Let's try this another way:
In scenario A, Jim holds a remote job at Omnicorp.
In scenario B1, nothing changes.
In scenario B2, Jim is transferred into a job with the same responsibilities that is not remote. This raises Jim's expenses by $2,500 a month. It also raises Omnicorp's revenue by $X per month. X is the value you forgot to consider. What is it?
If, for example, it is -$500, then the total cost of transferring Jim is $36,000 per year. If we split that difference evenly between Jim and Omnicorp, Jim will receive a $12,000 raise... but Omnicorp will suffer a net loss of $18,000 per year, so it's hard to see why this would happen or who it helps.
If it's +$1,000, then the total cost of transferring Jim is $18,000 per year. Splitting that difference evenly means Jim gets a $21,000 raise, but again there is no reason this would actually take place, because the company is paying $21,000 a year in order to receive $12,000. Or, viewed another way, the transfer destroys value and you shouldn't expect it to happen.
If X is +$3,000, then the total cost of transferring Jim is -$6,000 per year. At this point the transfer makes sense and it should happen. Splitting the difference evenly means Jim will get a $33,000 raise.
At no point does it make any sense to consider leaving Jim where he is and giving him a $15,000 raise.
> It also raises Omnicorp's revenue by $X per month. X is the value you forgot to consider. What is it?
It is quite possibly a negative number. Remember that forcing Jim to show up to an office requires you to have an office, which is a huge, major expense that could easily overcome the benefits of having Jim in the office instead of at home. But let's continue with your assumption that it's of some actual value to the company:
> If, for example, it is -$500, then the total cost of transferring Jim is $36,000 per year. If we split that difference evenly between Jim and Omnicorp, Jim will receive a $12,000 raise... but Omnicorp will suffer a net loss of $18,000 per year, so it's hard to see why this would happen or who it helps.
This is the part where you're confused.
Suppose that Jim refuses to work from home for less than $8000/mo and refuses to work from the office for less than $10500/mo, because his incremental cost of working from the office is $2500/mo. Meanwhile the company values Jim working from the office at $500/mo. Since $500 is less than $2500, it does not make sense for Jim to work from the office, instead it makes sense for the company to pay Jim somewhere between $8000/mo and $10000/mo to work from home, because any of those numbers make both of them no worse off than paying Jim $10500/mo to work from the office. This does not depend on what Jim is currently being paid or even whether he is currently working from home.
If the value to the company of having Jim work from the office instead of from home is $3000/mo then the company should offer Jim anywhere between $10500/mo and $11000/mo to work from the office, for the same reason. But since $3000/mo is $36,000/year on top of their expenses for maintaining an office, that value to an ordinary company of having Jim work from the office is implausibly high.
What is it that you think I'm confused about? Mostly you haven't said anything that wasn't already included in my prior comment.
However:
> instead it makes sense for the company to pay Jim somewhere between $8000/mo and $10000/mo to work from home, because any of those numbers make both of them no worse off than paying Jim $10500/mo to work from the office.
It can never make sense for the company to pay Jim more than $8,000 / month, because that is the amount he wants. As long as he's willing to work for $8,000 / month, the value of his work to the company can't exceed $8,000 / month.
You might notice that the value $15,000 doesn't occur anywhere in your most recent comment. How do you consider this comment related to your earlier claim that "If you split the difference, you both come out $15,000 ahead"? What difference have you identified that could be split this way?
> It can never make sense for the company to pay Jim more than $8,000 / month, because that is the amount he wants. As long as he's willing to work for $8,000 / month, the value of his work to the company can't exceed $8,000 / month.
The company doesn't know the minimum amount he's willing to work for. They have to guess. If they guess too low, he quits. If they guess too high, they pay more than $8000/mo.
The company also doesn't know exactly how much Jim values being able to work from home, so they have to guess that too. They can reasonably guess that it's in the thousands of dollars per month, but they don't know if it's $1000/mo or $4000/mo.
What they do know is that their cost for having him work from home -- arguably a savings to the company, but perhaps worth $500-$1000 in some cases -- appears to be less than this.
If they guess $1250/mo (i.e. $15,000/year) then they've guessed right in the middle between the start of the range and the actual limit, so each party gets half of the surplus. If the company's costs from allowing WFH are zero then they get to save $15,000/year, and Jim gets to save the $30,000 in commuting expenses in exchange for getting paid $15,000 less, which puts him $15,000 ahead too.
Even if the company's costs are non-zero they're still coming out ahead as long as they're not more than $1250/mo, so if they're $500/mo or $1000/mo and their guess of what he'll take is a reduction of $1250/mo then they'll still want to pay him that much less and let him work from home.
They might also make a better guess and get closer to the actual number of $2500/mo, but then they're running the risk that they overplay their hand and he walks away, and then they don't get the savings of thousands of dollars a year. So who actually gets more of the surplus from letting him work from home is down to salary negotiations, but it's in both of their interests to make it happen.
> There is a reason these are the same thing that should already be obvious: If you want people to take a job that costs them ~$30,000 more in expenses, you'll have to pay them more. If you split the difference, you both come out $15,000 ahead.
Sorry to be blunt, but I think this is incredibly naive given the current market. Since the explosion of remote work I've seen a ton of offshoring to excellent software developers in Latin American and Europe. There is absolutely zero benefit to paying an American salary in those situations because everyone is remote anyway (and there is enough timezone overlap that everyone can work roughly the same hours).
Workers will simply get fired if they don't come in and execs really want RTO, they're not going to get paid more.
> Workers will simply get fired if they don't come in and execs really want RTO, they're not going to get paid more.
If execs really want RTO then people will quit and they'll have to hire new people, pay retraining costs, pay them more because other companies are still offering WFH, lose out on all those lower cost workers in Latin America (or Texas or Virginia) and still be paying millions of dollars for office space their employees don't even want to be in.
> If execs really want RTO then people will quit and they'll have to hire new people
There have been 550k tech layoffs in the last 2 years. Pretty sure there are quite a few folks ready and willing to do a commute to work in an office to get a paycheck again.
The question is not whether they can find someone else to hire. They can always do that for the prevailing market price. The question is, how much more do they have to pay to get someone to take on ~$30,000/year in commuting costs than they would if they didn't require that?
So suppose the employer's benefit from having the employee is $150,000 if they work from the office and $140,000 if they work from home. Meanwhile the employee would accept $130,000 if they had to work from the office or $100,000 if they can work from home.
You're saying, $150,000 is more than $130,000 so the employer can pay them $130,000 to work from the office and everything's fine.
But the difference between $150,000 and $130,000 is less than the difference between $140,000 and $100,000. By quite a lot. So why isn't the employer going to want any of that money?
This is why RTO will end. It was ending before the pandemic. The cost to the organization is money. They subsidize the employees ability to sit in chair and drink water and use the bathroom. This is a very high cost at any organization. The reason given it’s necessary is CEO has vibes that it’s better. This works for a while but in the end it’s real money spent on questionable benefits.
Before the pandemic there was a big push to reduce occupancy costs and get roles that did not need to sit in an office to subsidize their own offices, just like BYOD - but the dollars involved were orders of magnitude better than BYOD. During the pandemic we proved the costs came at the cost of net productivity on average. The reaction we see now is one against a cultural change that is off putting to people who succeeded in a specific emergent reality - the office culture. A 60 year old CEO has trouble using zoom because they didn’t grow up using it. They don’t know how to be effective over a remote relationship because they have developed exceptionally effective in person skills - that’s why they are where they are. They simply can not accept or fathom a world that is different than that. So they invent hand waving bullshit not based on data.
But economics wins based on data sooner or later. It is better share holder value to eliminate occupancy costs aggressive and offload the occupancy per employee to the employee. The company effectively gets free facilities in this scenario. There is no way the marginal per employee value of in person vibes out paces the marginal cost to shelter their bodies during the work day. The vibes thing is managed through adaptation.
Finally there’s this meme the Dimon and Trump and others use of people not working when working remotely. First that’s not true, second if it’s is, that’s a performance issue. Since when did we stop measuring performance ? The in office or not in office simply isn’t a productivity variable but not working and working during the work day is.
RTO is a cultural thing and you’ll never convince the executives of today by any argument conceivable because you’re telling them the sky is green when they know it’s blue. It doesn’t matter that in this case it’s not objective like the color of the sky. It FEELS objectively true.
However the economics will change, and the leadership will age away, and one day; maybe when the kids who graduated college having gotten their degrees online run the shop - we will offload the cost of housing the employee during the day to the employee because it’s what makes the most economic sense and we will adapt around the challenges.
Yeah, I think it’s worth reflecting that most people with families work 80-hour weeks. Richer people can pay others to take on part of that workload so they can do 50 or 60 hours of work for a company and still actually be working less. Which is fine, I guess, until they’re all like “why are you poors always so sluggish and tired and wanting to clock out right at 5 on the dot?”
Nah. This kind of person tends to do more family stuff, and participate in more community events, and do more work.
It’s ok to not be a busy body. I’m not one because it makes me miserable . But these imaginary tradeoffs we invent in our heads are often just justifications.
I'm not following your point. I've got a solid 30 hours of unpaid work a week, and it'd be closer to 40 if I had to commute, and when my kids were younger and I still had a commute it was around 50 hours, all on top of my actual job. I could and, if it weren't wildly financially irresponsible, absolutely would pay to make about 20 hours of that vanish at no harm whatsoever (benefit, actually) to my personal relationships & family, and then I'd have a lot more time and energy for other things. That's just... how clocks work, IDK. This is overwhelmingly the norm for people who can't afford to pay others to do lots of stuff for them.
What you're not differentiating here is between optional and mandatory tasks. If you're paying someone to cook, clean, grocery shop, or provide day to day child care you have time to do optional things, and people mistake that for being more efficient when in reality it's having the luxury to decide what to do with your time.
No adult with jobs and kids gets home and says “huh what will I fill my extra time with”. Everyone is busy. Now it’s up to effort, prioritization, and efficiency
The person who can't afford a cook and maid now needs to full those duties, cooking and cleaning, the person who can doesn't. The food is already made, the house is clean, the laundry is done, the kids are bathed, the fridge is full. They have time to decide what to do with. Sure, they could cook or clean, but that's now their choice. The activity is optional and can be prioritized instead of being mandatory.
There are certain tasks that people need to do every day that take time and, if you can afford to have someone do those tasks, suddenly you have more time you can do other things with.
The people I know who accomplish a lot of things also cook and clean for themselves.
Of course paying someone saves you time.
But the question is whether that’s the key differentiator holding you back from X, Y, and Z. And no it’s not. There are people who do X, Y, and Z and don’t have a maid.
Maybe on some psychological level getting help is the only way you personally will have time (feels true for myself), but you have to recognize there is significant personality and skill difference when it comes to being busy.
> But the question is whether that’s the key differentiator holding you back from X, Y, and Z. And no it’s not. There are people who do X, Y, and Z and don’t have a maid.
As with a lot of things: individually, yes, this is the only useful way to look at it. Statistically? Over a population? No, of course high levels of unpaid obligations keep people from accomplishing things, in the sense that if you ease those up they accomplish more.
More to the point, I didn't make this about how it was "holding people back" so I'm now seeing why you're so resistant to it, since you think that's what I was getting at: no, it's about attitudes from executives who live life on easy mode then complain that their underlings are lazy.
I think his point is that such people exist, and they're on the upper end of some "distribution". The experience you're describing is more of the median experience.
Perhaps he's simply pointing out that with the right set of skills, you (or others) could also move yourself up (down?) the bell curve, and that your position on the curve isn't necessarily fixed. Treating it as such is inherently limiting.
I'm not saying that people can't do X, Y, and Z, there are people who are just that driven, or people who have a spouse that fills in those roles, but it's far easier for people who the necessities of life are optional, and when you're surrounded by people for whom it's all optional, they are going to assume it's optional for everyone and no assume why everyone isn't doing more.
People with enough income have a whole list of things that do not fill their time unless they want them to, that aren't really optional for people without enough money to pay to make them go away.
Laundry, cleaning, cooking, shopping, lawn work, home maintenance, car maintenance, hell even managing your schedule—for an awful lot of executives (among others) much or all of that is optional. They have more freedom with their time because they pay to make a bunch of problems go away (and if they don't, it's a choice). They come home from work and choose what to do—they may still be busy, by choice! But they have far fewer demands on their time. The people who work for them come home from work, work two to four more hours, then, maybe, choose what to do. And you better believe they work weekends, too.
Your comment doesn't make any sense to me. A single kid sucks more time than you have in a regular day. You are sleep deprived, and in survival mode for the first part.
If you have a lot of kids, after a certain age, the older ones can start to help around depending on age. It's how humanity survives in self-sufficient conditions.
For serial kid rearing families there is a plateau in difficulty, and then a steady decline (depending on the personality and health of the kids of course).
> My point is busy people do even more of the things that you think make you busy.
I don't think it makes me busy. It does.
> You think kids are taking up all your time? They have more kids and volunteer at the school, and run a church group, etc.
I'm not counting extremely-optional stuff.
> The clock is secondary because using time efficiently, planning, and classifying which hours you are awake and available are all skills.
Money puts this on extremely-easy mode, because for a huge variety of things "this is a problem that will take much time and attention" becomes "just pay someone to make it go away". I know, because I have enough money that sometimes I can do this (I didn't always, and I didn't grow up that way) and holy god, it makes life so incredibly easy when I can.
No, from my point of view this post is just another executive grift trying to make people feel better about why they do the things they do.
Yes they live different lives, but they know they are different from their average worker, they just don't care about them. Making money and their success come above all.
When they make these decisions it is not because they're out of touch. It is because they actively opposed people below them taking an inch. They know it fucks with them, they know they don't like it. They do it anyway.
As an executive this person is excellent albeit trained at corporate speak. They're trying to gather sympathy for execs and it is all bullshit.
> In a functioning labor market with high mobility for workers they would just quit and find a better place to work.
> They're trying to hide the fact they've monopolized the labor market and they want you to assume this is all normal. It's a much higher level problem.
Your labor market isn't all that special. The truth is that "a functioning market with high mobility" is just a myth. The market is functioning as intended: The ones with power under capitalism are the ones with capital - and they don't wish for things to change. You can try to level the playing field with laws, but that's incompatible with the "small government" folks.
It's the primary market underpinning capitalism. Otherwise it's just feudalism or slavery. So, I'd hope you believe it's special.
> The truth is that "a functioning market with high mobility" is just a myth.
There is absolutely no truth in what you just said. I'd have to ask what set of evidence did you examine to arrive at this conclusion?
> The ones with power under capitalism are the ones with capital
Yes. Wealth and capital give you an _advantage_. However it's not exclusive. It's why we recognize things like intellectual property and performance rights. It turns out there's /tons/ of sources of advantage in competition.
> You can try to level the playing field with laws, but that's incompatible with the "small government" folks.
The size of the government seems to have zero impact on it's willingness to enforce laws that are already on the books. Your thesis is thin and based on inherited cynicism. I cannot take it seriously.
Totally supportive of remote work before I make my comment to be clear.
Calling this “survivorship bias” though is like calling anything in evolution “survivorship bias”.
A person with a seriously work focused life is naturally going to excel and I have no problem with this. Someone that makes sacrifices in their personal life (paying to live in the city, not having children or too many etc) so they can be more available and work more hours may do better than me, even at the same level of skill and intelligence. This only seems fair.
Money can offset a lot of things, but money is still inferior to exactly one good - time.
You can use money to move around time, but you can never buy it. Every second that passes is gone forever, never to be seen again. The recognition of this reality is the difference between those work-focused executives and laypeople.
They definitely are, although that doesn’t justify actions.
Not all, but most. Family members of mine at the VP/EVP level in “enterprise” type companies regularly work 12+ hours on weekdays and ~8 per day on weekends. It’s brutal and their families suffer for it, but it pays exceedingly well.
As another poster put it, it’s survivorship bias. Most people who work that long and consistently end up with a destroyed family life and eventually the collapse of their professional life as well. Those who “make” it by and large keep their family intact because they can afford to make it difficult to leave - or because they’re married to someone of similar lifestyle.
Family members of mine at the VP/EVP level in “enterprise” type companies regularly work 12+ hours on weekdays and ~8 per day on weekends.
What do they do in all those hours?
My only experience with executives is the CEO at a "startup" (it really wasn't) in SF. He had to have his email password reset every week because he couldn't remember it. He was furious that asses weren't in all the seats at 9am, but he knocked off at 3pm on Fridays to go drink with his executive chums. I never saw any sign of leadership, vision, or actual work. Just demands on others.
The boring answer is meetings. Chapter 3 of High Output Management has a great treatment on the topic, and it covers both middle management and the executive level, including a timetable from one of Andy Grove's days. Here is a quote where he summarizes:
> As you can see, in a typical day of mine one can count some twenty-five
separate activities in which I participated, mostly information-gathering and -
giving, but also decision-making and nudging. You can also see that some two
thirds of my time was spent in a meeting of one kind or another. Before you are
horrified by how much time I spend in meetings, answer a question: which of the
activities -- information-gathering, information-giving, decision-making,
nudging, and being a role model—could I have performed outside a meeting?
The answer is practically none. Meetings provide an occasion for managerial
activities.
Family members of mine at the VP/EVP level in “enterprise” type companies regularly work 12+ hours on weekdays and ~8 per day on weekends.
At that level, they’re in the club and guaranteed to advance as long as they don’t make enemies and get kicked out of the club (which is rare, but happens, and usually means they spend a year or so finding another club.) So while some of them do work long hours, they don’t have to. They’ve already been judged to be in the in-crowd and could work 10 hours per week from wherever they want, and they’d still make every promotion.
So why do they work so much, and why do they go to the office? Because most of those guys (a) mutually dislike their families, (b) have psychological disorders, and (c) have office affairs. To psychopaths, 70 hours per week sunk into high-stakes office politics is fun.
> So while some of them do work long hours, they don’t have to.
Or so you say. But it sounds like a rationalization of why that doesn't matter/makes them morally bad people. First it's "they don't actually do any work, lol", then it's "but they totally don't have to, they could skate by on 2 hours a day, they are already pre-selected for success".
But really, it's perfectly fine if you don't care that much and won't go to that length. You don't have to justify that by coming up with narratives that others who do are evil, mentally ill, or hate their families. You can just say "that's not for me".
You are being too generous to that bunch of sociopaths (not snarky, just think for a second what kind of personality gets and thrives up there for decades).
They care about their own profits, which are mostly bonus-based, and prestige. If they think they get any extra by appearing doing first and last thing that could drive up share price (or win some extra points in some meaningless internal battles), they will go for it.
They are mostly pretty bad absent parents with laser focus on themselves and their careers only, and then it shows on kids. But in their mind nobody under them should be granted more.
Sadly, I agree. There is probably an element of "hard worker" survivorship bias at play, but there's also an undeniable profit motive that overrides a lot of those instincts too.
After a certain number of years, handing your kids off to the babysitters so you can work an extra 10 hours a week becomes outright sociopathic neglect. Using your wealth to separate you from the things that actually matter is arguably the peak of corporate disillusionment.
Trying to understand the point of view of companies switching from 3 days to 5 days. Do they see absolutely zero benefit to working from home part of the time?
I can understand -- even if I disagree with -- the idea that fully remote work hurts collaboration. But the hybrid seemed like an easy way to capture the benefits of remote work (focused time, less commute) while still allowing for frequent in person collaboration.
In a lot of modern corporate jobs, how hard you turn the crank of effort is almost completely disconnected from the outcomes that you see.
Beyond a small minimum requirement, turning the crank more only leads to the expectation that you will continue to turn that crank that much. Rewards for going beyond -- money, security, autonomy -- are rarely present and almost never in proportion to how much you turn the crank. Plus, one day the company will decide it no longer needs you to turn the crank anymore, and without so much as a "thank you" you're on your own.
"In a lot of modern corporate jobs, how hard you turn the crank of effort is almost completely disconnected from the outcomes that you see."
100%
I was a hard worker and a high performer for years and didn't see advancement due to politics. Now I have a bad rating, I'm likely to get PIP'd, but I'm simultaneously on the short list for a double promotion. How schizophrenic does your performance management have to be have someone either getting PIP'd or double promoted?
Exactly. If management communicated clear expectations and measured performance accordingly, this would all be resolved, but they encourage living in fear instead. What do they expect as a result?
In a large corporation, I don't think it's possible.
In a small company, can look at revenues and profits, and maybe breakdown by product line, and then create a bonus pool according to how well the company did and let managers decide how to divvy it up based on their evaluation of their reports.
At a very large corporation, how can you trace back credit for overall corporate performance to individuals? If individual contributors own stock in the company or RSUs, how do they know whether their actions are increasing the corporation's value?
I don't think your individual performance as an IC should be measured in anything related to revenue under normal circumstances. As an IC engineer you aren't in control of product. You can give feedback on product decisions but that gets rarely heard. You mostly have control over deliverables that you are asked to produce and that's what you should be measured by. Empowering others around you is another factor that must be incorporated and arguably this is where things get fuzzy but a good manager should be able to tell. Of course it also matters that the company trusts the manager otherwise you end to in gaming metrics land. If your manager cannot be trusted you are off into shitb politics land. Those are the two major failure modes. Shit metric gaming and shit politics. Preventing those two from happening is hard and must come from the top
<< almost completely disconnected from the outcomes that you see.
I will push it a little further, because I suppose I personally am going through a period of disengagement the article is writing about. In the last major project I was a part of, I actually saw the opposite correlation: the more effort I gave, the more messy things were becoming ( sadly, it makes sense; in that project I was finding issues left and right; if I am going above and beyond, a lot will be discovered as broken ). Eventually, it gets to you.
<< Rewards for going beyond -- money, security, autonomy -- are rarely present and almost never in proportion to how much you turn the crank.
This is the other part. I got very little out of this project for pointing out all the issues and trying to somehow resolve them. If anything, I made myself a fair amount of 'enemies', who did not appreciate me holding up the process. Once you realize what is being rewarded ( and it is not doing things well ), you optimize for it.
And can you guess what is the metric that is being rewarded? Closing projects. Not completing them well. Not making it so that they work. No. Closing a lot of them and on time. So what if is done wrong? Fixing it is another project..
I used to think that approach is an exception, but I am starting to think this it is more of a rule now. That anything gets done is nothing short of a miracle.
> Rewards for going beyond -- money, security, autonomy
Yeah, I agree with this, but really it comes down to money. With enough money, the other two won't matter so much. An MBA that can hold labor costs down one year might get a significant bonus, and get the corporate jet to take on vacation to Hawaii.
On the other hand if you're not management and you save the company $6million per year, well, good luck seeing a bonus from that. I'm sure it will go to the MBA's above you, including the private jet vacation to Hawaii.
What GPU offers a good balance between cost and performance for running LLMs locally? I'd like to do more experimenting, and am due for a GPU upgrade from my 1080 anyway, but would like to spend less than $1600...
Inferencing does not require Nvidia GPUs at all, and its almost criminal to be recommending dedicated GPUs with only 12GB of RAM.
Buy a MacMini or MacbookPro with RAM maxed out.
I just bought an M4 mac mini for exactly this use case that has 64GB for ~2k. You can get 128GB on the MBP for ~5k. These will run much larger (and more useful) models.
EDIT: Since the request was for < $1600, you can still get a 32GB mac mini for $1200 or 24GB for $800
> its almost criminal to be recommending dedicated GPUs with only 12GB of RAM.
If you already own a PC, it makes a hell of a lot more sense to spend $900 on a 3090 than it does to spec out a Mac Mini with 24gb of RAM. Plus, the Nvidia setup can scale to as many GPUs as you own which gives you options for upgrading that Apple wouldn't be caught dead offering.
Oh, and native Linux support that doesn't suck balls is a plus. I haven't benchmarked a Mac since the M2 generation, but the figures I can find put the M4 Max's compute somewhere near the desktop 3060 Ti: https://browser.geekbench.com/opencl-benchmarks
A Mac Mini with 24GB is ~$800 at the cheapest configuration. I can respect wanting to do a single part upgrade, but if you're using these LLMs for serious work, the price/perf for inferencing is far in favor of using Macs at the moment.
You can easily use the MacMini as a hub for running the LLM while you do work on your main computer (and it won't eat up your system resources or turn your primary computer into a heater)
I hope that more non-mac PCs come out optimized for high RAM SoC, I'm personally not a huge Apple fan but use them begrudgingly.
Also your $900 quote is a used/refurbished GPU. I've had plenty of GPUs burn out on me in the old days, not sure how it is nowadays, but that's a lot to pay for a used part IMO
if you're doing serious work, performance is more important than getting a good price/perf ratio, and a pair of 3090s is gonna be faster. It depends on your budget,
however as that configuration is a bit more expensive, however.
Whether performance or cost is more important depends on your use case. Some tasks that an LLM can do very well may not need to be done often, or even particularly quickly (as in my case).
e.g. LLM as one step of an ETL-style pipeline
Latency of the response really only matters if that response is user facing and is being actively awaited by the user
> M4 Max's compute somewhere near the desktop 3060 Ti
The only advantage is the M4 Max's ability to have way more VRAM than a 3060 Ti. You won't find many M4 Maxes with just 8 or 16 GB of RAM, and I don't think you can do much except use really small models with a 3060 Ti.
It's a bit of a moot point when CUDA will run 4 3060Tis in parallel, with further options for paging out to system memory. Since most models (particularly bigger/MOE ones) are sparsely decoded, you can get quite a lot of mileage out of multiple PCIe slots fed with enough bandwidth.
There's no doubt in my mind that the PC is the better performer if raw power is your concern. It's far-and-away the better value if you don't need to buy new hardware and only need a GPU. $2,000 of Nvidia GPUs will buy you halfway to an enterprise cluster, $2,000 of Apple hardware will get you a laptop chip with HBM.
You need a lot of space for that, cooling, and a good fuse that won't trip when you turn it on. I would totally just pay the money for an M4 Ultra MacStudio with 128 GB of RAM (or an M4 Max with 64 GB). It is a much cleaner setup, especially if you aren't interested in image generation (which the Macs are not good at yet).
If I could spend $4k on a non-Apple turn key solution that I could reasonably manage in my house, I would totally consider it.
Well, that's your call. If you're the sort of person that's willing to spend $2,000 on a M4 Ultra (which doesn't quite exist yet but we can pretend it does), then I honest to god do not understand why you'd refuse to spend that same money on a Jetson Orin with the same amount of memory in a smaller footprint with better performance and lower power consumption.
Unless you're specifically speccing out a computer for mobile use, the price premium you spend on a Mac isn't for better software or faster hardware. If you can tolerate Linux or Windows, I don't see why you'd even consider Mac hardware for your desktop. In the OP's position, suggesting Apple hardware literally makes no sense. They're not asking for the best hardware that runs MacOS, they're asking for the best hardware for AI.
> If I could spend $4k on a non-Apple turn key solution that I could reasonably manage in my house, I would totally consider it.
You can't pay Apple $4k for a turnkey solution, either. MacOS is borderline useless for headless inference; Vulkan compute and OpenCL are both MIA, package managers break on regular system updates and don't support rollback, LTS support barely exists, most coreutils are outdated and unmaintained, Asahi features things that MacOS doesn't support and vice-versa... you can't fool me into thinking that's a "turn key solution" any day of the week. If your car requires you to pick a package manager after you turn the engine over, then I really feel sorry for you. The state of MacOS for AI inference is truly no better than what Microsoft did with DirectML. By some accounts it's quite a bit worse.
M4 Ultra with enough RAM will cost more than $2000. An M2 Ultra mac studio with 64GB is $3999, and you probably want more RAM than that to run bigger models that the ultra can handle (it is basically 2X as powerful as the Max with more memory bandwidth). An M2 Max with 64GB of RAM, which is more reasonable, will run you $2,499. I have no idea if those prices will hold when the M4 Mac Studious finally come out (M4 Max MBP with 64 GB of ram starts at $3900 ATM).
> You can't pay Apple $4k for a turnkey solution, either.
I've seen/read plenty of success stories of Metal ports of models being used via LM Studio without much configuration/setup/hardware scavenging, so we can just disagree there.
>You need a lot of space for that, cooling, and a good fuse
Or live in europe where any wall-socket can give you closer to 3kW. For crazier setups like charging your EV you can have three-phase plugs with ~22kW to play with. 1m2 of floor-space isn't that substantial either unless you already live in a closet in middle of the most crowded city.
Reasonable? $7,000 for a laptop is pretty up there.
[Edit: OK I see I am adding cost when checking due to choosing a larger SSD drive, so $5,000 is more of a fair bottom price, with 1TB of storage.]
Responding specifically to this very specific claim: "Can get 128GB of ram for a reasonable price."
I'm open to your explanation of how this is reasonable — I mean, you didn't say cheap, to be fair. Maybe 128GB of ram on GPUs would be way more (that's like 6 x 4090s), is what you're saying.
For anyone who wants to reply with other amounts of memory, that's not what I'm talking about here.
But on another point, do you think the ram really buys you the equivalent of GPU memory? Is Apple's melding of CPU/GPU really that good?
I'm not just coming from a point of skepticism, I'm actually kind of hoping to be convinced you're right, so wanting to hear the argument in more detail.
It's reasonable in a "working professional who gets substantial value from" or "building an LLM driven startup project" kind of way.
It's not for the casual user, but for somebody who derives significant value from running it locally.
Personally I use the MacMini as a hub for a project I'm working on as it gives me full control and is simply much cheaper operationally. A one time ~$2000 cost isn't so bad for replacing tasks that a human would have to do. e.g. In my case I'm parsing loosely organized financial documents where structured data isn't available.
I suspect the hardware costs will continue to decline rapidly as they have in the past though, so that $5k for 128GB will likely be $5k for 256GB in a year or two, and so on.
We're almost at the inflection point where really powerful models are able to be inferenced locally for cheap
For a coding setup, should I go with a Mac Mini M4 pro with 64GB of RAM? Or is it better to go with a M4 max (only available for the MBP right now, maybe in the Studio in a few months)? I'm not really interested in the 4090/3090 approach, but it is hard to make a decision on Apple hardware ATM.
I don't see prices falling much in the near term, a Mac Studio M2 Max or Ultra has been keeping its value surprisingly well as of late (mainly because of AI?). Just like 3090s/4090s are holding their value really well also.
It's reasonable when the alternative is 2-4x4090 at $2.2K each (or 2xA6000 at 4.5K each) + server grade hardware to host them. Realistically, the vast majority of people should just buy a subscription or API access if they need to run grotesquely large models. While large LLMs (up to about 200B params) work on an MBP, they aren't super fast, and you do have to be plugged in - they chew through your battery like it's nothing. I know this because I have a 128GB M3 MBP.
How large of a model can you use with your 128GB M3? Anything you can tell would be great to hear. Number of parameters, quantization, which model, etc.
Thanks for the reply. Is that quantized? And what's the bit size of the floating point values in that model (apologies if I'm not asking the question correctly).
OP here, I almost got a decked out Mac studio before I returned it for a Asus ROG as the native Linux support, upgradability & CUDA support is much more important to me.
Meagre VRAM in these Nvidia consumer GPUs is indeed painful but with increasing performance of smaller LLMs & fine tuned models I don't think 12GB, 14GB, 16GB Nvidia GPUs offering much better performance over a Mac can be easily dismissed.
A MacBook Pro has lower peak thermal output but proportionally lower performance. For a given task you’d be dissipating somewhat similar heat, the MacBook Pro would just be spreading it out over a longer period of time.
nVidia GPUs actually have similar efficiency, despite all of Apple’s marketing. The difference is they the nVidia GPUs have a much higher ceiling.
I consider the RTX 4060 Ti as the best entry level GPU for running small models. It has 16GBs of RAM which gives you plenty of space for running large context windows and Tensor Cores which are crucial for inference. For larger models probably multiple RTX 3090s since you can buy them on the cheap on the second hand market.
I don’t have experience with AMD cards so I can’t vouch for them.
If you want to wait until the 5090s come out, you should see a drop in the price of the 30xx and 40xx series. Right now, shopping used, you can get two 3090s or two 4080s in your price range. Conventional wisdom says two 3090s would be better, but this is all highly dependent on what models you want to run. Basically the first requirement is to have enough VRAM to host all of your model on it, and secondarily, the quality of the GPU.
Have a look through Hugging Face to see which models interest you. A rough estimate for the amount of VRAM you need is half the model size plus a couple gigs. So, if using the 70B models interests you, two 4080s wouldn't fit it, but two 3090s would. If you're just interested in the 1B, 3B and 7B models (llama 3B is fantastic), you really don't need much at all. A single 3060 can handle that, and those are not expensive.
I've been running some of the larger models (like Llama 405B) via CPU on a Dell R820. It's got 32 Xeon's (4 chips), and 256 GB RAM. I bought it used for around $400. The memory is NUMA, so it makes sense if the computing is done on local data, not sure if Ollama supports that.
The tokens per second is very slow though, but at least it can execute it.
I think the future will be increasingly more powerful NPU's built into future CPU's. That will need to paired with higher bandwidth memory, maybe HBM, or silicon photonics for off chip memory.
Nvidia for compatibility, and as much VRAM as you can afford. Shouldn't be hard to find a 3090 / Ti in your price range. I have had decent success with a base 3080 but the 10GB really limits the models you can run
A lot of moderate power users are running an undervolted used pair of 3090s on a 1000-1200W psu. 48 GB of vram let's you run 70B models at Q4 with 16k context.
If you use speculative decoding (a small model generates tokens verified by a larger model, I'm not sure on the specifics) you can get past 20 tokens per second it seems. You can also fit 32B models like Qwen/Qwen Coder at Q6 with lots of context this way, with spec decoding, closer to 40+ tks/s.
There's a huge step to I'm capability with 16gb and 24gb, for not to much more. The 4060 has a 16gb version, for example. On the the cheap end, the Intel Arc does too.
Next major step up is 48GB and then hundreds of GB. But a lot of ML models target 16-24gb since that's in the grad student price range.
At the 48GB level, L40S are great cards and very cost effective. If you aren’t aiming for constant uptime on several >70B models at once, they’re for sure the way to go!
Not arguing against 'great', but cost efficiency is questionable. for 10% you can get two used 3090. The good thing about LLMs is they are sequential and should be easily parallelized. Model can be split in several sub-models, by the number of GPUs. Then 2,3,4.. GPUs should improve performance proportionally on big batches, and make it possible to run bigger model on low end hardware.
Yeah, I’m specifically responding to the parent’s comment about the 48GB tier. When you’re looking in that range, it’s usually because you want to pack in as much vram as possible into your rack space, so consumer level cards are off the table. I definitely agree multiple 3090 is the way to go if you aren’t trying to host models for smaller scale enterprise use, which is where 48GB cards shine.
Honestly I think if you just want to do inferencing the 7600xt and rx6800 have 16gb at $300 and $400 on Amazon. It's gonna be my stop gap until whatever. The RX6800 has better memory bandwidth than the 4060ti (think it matches the 4070).
For sure but I think people on the fine tuning/training/stable diffusion side are more concerned with that. They make a big fuss about this and basically talk people out of a perfectly good and well priced 16gb vram card that literally works out of the box with ollama, lmstudio for text inferencing.
Kind of one of the reasons AMD is a sleeper stock for me. If people only knew.
I agree with this as the main factor (over cost) for the falling birth rate. The opportunity cost of having children has never been higher: you give up leisure, hobbies, rest, social life, and income. Whether or not children is worth this cost is a personal thing, but it seems kinda obvious that as the cost increases, fewer will pay it.
> The opportunity cost of having children has never been higher: you give up leisure, hobbies, rest, social life, and income.
Those things are given up because parenting-time is up 20-fold from a few generations ago.
From the 1960s back, kids needed parents a few hours a week.
But we reduced kids' roaming area from many sq mi to just their own property. At the same time, we instituted 24/7 adulting. Most of those hours are filled by parents.
Kids have permanently lost daily hours of peer-driven growth - the ones where complex social interactions occurred naturally. Parents are now left with trying to construct artificial environments (leagues, programs) where maybe some of that can occur.
Those efforts eat time and resources. And they're a poor substitute for the vital environments that kids once had for free.
I spent 20x the time parenting that my mom did. For all of that, my kids had little-to-none of my growth opportunities.
Yeah, also in Northern Europe. Here in Estonia kids as young as 5 years old even go to kindergarten on their own. They take a bus and are just fine. Seems to me the helicopter parenting is mostly a thing in the U.S.
Because in the US parents can get arrested if their children go out alone. It's a failure on their laws.
And of their infrastructure where everyone wants to have their own suburban kingdom with large back yard, swimming pool, garage for two SUVs and workshop.
Americans don't like living in small apartments like Europeans and Asians so this is what they get.
I grew up in the US with parents that had a suburban kingdom, large back yard, swimming pool, garage for three SUVs, and workshop: I walked to, waited for, and rode the bus to kindergarten.
"This is what they get" is false causation, these things have been present for decades. Helicopter parenting, liability for walking around alone, special snowflake treatment are all newly-introduced ideas.
You must be quite young if you had SUVs when you were growing up. They didn't become popular until the late 1990s. They basically didn't exist at all in the 1980s or before; people had station wagons back then.
The shift from roaming to restriction took place over generations and occurred unevenly.
A few generations ago, the trend was that US kids had a broad range of appealing places to roam and were generally free to do so.
Presently the US trend is that kids have few if any appealing places to go. And should they roam anyway, they and their parents risk legal (and increasingly permanent) consequences.
Very true. I see little kids by themselves frequently, on the subways, on their bicycles, etc. It reminds me of when I was growing up in the US decades ago, before helicopter parenting became mandated by law there.
I let my kids roam free here in the US (Columbia, MD), but the reality is that they don't want to because there are no other kids outside to play with.
> I let my kids roam free here in the US (Columbia, MD), but the reality is that they don't want to because there are no other kids outside to play with.
I suspect there are no other kids outside because there are few/no desirable places for kids to congregate - places that are safe from moving cars, enforced property laws and adults with poor judgment.
My neighborhood (Bryant Woods in Columbia, MD) is honestly perfect in this regard. It's filled with walking trails and playgrounds. Lots of green space.
The roads are also twisty & turny. They're difficult to drive fast on.
I can't imagine that nursing's problems are just fundamentally housing. Tracing back rough work schedules, unreasonable administration expectations, and hostile patients to housing costs feels like a stretch.
There seems to be a broad understanding among those in these fields that these jobs just keep getting worse, and so people are quitting. They may be getting worse for different reasons (worse conditions, less satisfaction, declining pay, more qualifications needed, etc etc), but there's a net sense of dissatisfaction. For people new to the job, there's usually an initial shock that the job is so far removed from its mission that there's no personal satisfaction, and they ultimately leave.
Nursing seems like one where a feedback loop could happen. As others quit, your patient burden increases. The higher your patient burden, the more likely you are to make a mistake. Mistakes are often, as far as I understand, held against the nurse, so you could lose your license. At a certain point, the risk becomes too great and you're better off quitting.
Nursing boards are extremely capricious. I'm a doctor, I've heard it too often. Shitty nurses who shirk doing work but do everything required according to protocol are fine. Great nurses who make one tragic and understandable mistake to try to help a patient get their license pulled.
The US needs to adopt one particular British slang that hasn't made it across the pond: jobsworth. As in, that's more that my job's worth. Sitting there and doing nothing gets them left alone; trying to intervene without following a long and detailed protocol gets them screwed.
I protect the nurses that I work with (and they don't work for me, they work for the hospital, and I don't) as best I can if they are doing the right thing. I can't be there all the time. I need to be able to trust them, and they need to be able to trust me.
I was part of a bad patient interaction in the hospital a long, long time ago, when I was a resident. Nothing bad happened, ultimately. But I was harsh to a patient who was being verbally and physically abusive to the nurses. The patient complained a few days later. It was an emergency situation, and we will leave it at that (it didn't happen in the ER). And I was summoned to explain myself some days later. I said that I would not let that patient behave that way toward "my" nurses. And that was the end of it.
I don't think all of them liked me before or even after, but after that, they never bothered me about trivial things because they knew I would defend them and their actions done in good faith and without idiocy.
Medicine and the military are very similar in terms of command structure: doctors and officers issue orders, nurses and NCO's make them happen, and a doctor or officer who defends their nurses or NCO's for doing the right thing in the moment regardless of the rules will find their path much easier.
> Nursing seems like one where a feedback loop could happen. As others quit, your patient burden increases. The higher your patient burden, the more likely you are to make a mistake
Or your burden becomes insufferable and you burn out and quit.
Either your performance management can catch lazy employees or it can't. If it can't, then that's what you should be fixing.