I think an AI wrote it. 
Beat me to it. I was going to reply something like
I, no chatGPT, no I,
no ChatGPT, (human pulls out network cable), no I worked long and hard on that one. Glad you enjoyed it.
Seriously, that was all my doing and no AIs were killed in the making of this message. I did muddle and stew a bit to make the parallelism work out and have just the right amount of wrongness evenly distributed throughout. I was kinda proud of myself when it was done. Thank you for noticing.
Target closing 3 Bay Area stores permanently next month
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/target-closing-3-bay-area-stores-permanently-18390163.php
fits the discussion:
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Now, vast tranches of the capital’s once-bustling business districts are gathering dust because of the persistence of remote work more than three years after the pandemic. Jefferies estimates that utilization of the city’s offices has fallen 20% since the end of 2019 as remote and hybrid work has flourished.
According to the investment bank, office vacancies have now reached a “tipping point” beyond which rents typically start to fall, prompting it to downgrade the stock of four big-cap property developers Monday, including British Land and Derwent London.
So is this a trend driven by technology? More and more people have discovered the feasibility of remote work, so in the future people won’t be commuting en masse to downtown office buildings. It’s not a failure of cities; it’s just the reality of 21st century life.
I don’t know how cities get repurposed, but it doesn’t seem like we need to lament this change as much as adapt to it.
The technology has been around for a few years now, and certainly there were a few American workers who were able to remote work, but COVID really showed companies a lot of their employees could work from home and production would not be hurt. In some ways it’s good for companies to. Mine was able to cast a much wider net when recruiting because we could suddenly hire people from out of state. Many of these candidates would have been unwilling to relocate based on what we paid them but they were fine working from where they already lived.
A few years back, I was in a small town here in Arkansas and I was marveling at the price of some of the homes. Not that housing prices here are outrageous compared to other areas of the US, but with my salary I figured I could live like a king compared to some of the locals. But then at the time there’s no way I could have maintained my salary while living in that small town. But that’s changed. I no longer have to live near my home office and can theoretically live anywhere in the state and in many other states besides. I imagine a lot of other people are in a smiliar situation of have more options when it comes to where they reside and work.
Not that there will be a huge exodus out of cities. Cities have a lot of things to offer and I certainly have no plans to move to that small town in Arkansas. But we’re going to see some changes over the course of the next few years. And like with all changes, we’re going to see some areas hurt and other areas gain.
It’s a bit of a hijack, but if an employee whose job and residence is in someplace expensive like San Francisco chooses to move someplace cheaper while doing the same job remotely, does the employer typically cut the salary at the next review cycle? Or does the employee just not get a raise for a while?
There are certainly conversations about adjusting salary to cost of living.
But for the most part, it seems like folks are moving to the suburbs or just a little further out, i.e. many/most want cheaper land but also want access to the big city amenities, so cost of living is less affected than if they really moved out to the boonies. If you might recall, places like West Virginia were offering cash bonuses for people to move there and work remotely. They didn’t get many takers.
That seems like something that has always been common sense in any large city. I got my window smashed in in Chicago when I left my gym bag in the back of my car, which was parked next to my office next to the East Bank Club (which was definitely not my gym; the monthly membership there was probably as much as my rent at the time). This was going on 30 years ago now. All the thief got was a slightly mildewed swimsuit, but it cost me a couple hundred bucks to replace the car window.
Agree with this. So big cities with empty skyscrapers are bemoaning their deserted streets and suppressed retail activity. The suburbs and smaller, 2nd tier cities are doing just fine. People are still spending money on the same things as before the pandemic and wide acceptance of remote work, it’s just happening closer to their homes (excepting maybe public transit).
didn’t google catch some media heat a couple of years ago for doing that? … linking (or starting to link) wages to wider areas where people were living (or starting to live) during the pestilence years.
so 2 peers newly hired would have different salaries, when working out of Palo Alto or out of Kankakee
My company is located in Arkansas, so our situation is a little different, but we don’t change our salaries based on where our employee is located. Someone living in Denver as an IT supervisor is going to be making the same as another supervisor in IT who lives in Little Rock. But we’re a relatively poor state and our salaries are typically much lower than what you’d find for similar positions in New York, San Francisco, or Dallas.
I’ve heard of companies trying to lower salaries of employees who relocated to less expensive areas, but I’m not sure how successful they’ve been. Lowering someone’s salary is just going to piss them off and they’ll likely start looking for another job. And some of the larger firms in places like NY and SF are going to want to attract top candidate and they still need to offer them more than less prestigious firms.
I feel like that article misses another big factor why London office rental, specifically, may be suffering a downturn. Tip of my tongue, starts with “Br”, rhymes with “exit”…
Yeah, people are “remote working” - they’re “remote working” in offices in Brussels and Zurich and Amsterdam and Paris…
Brexit is a factor, but I suspect less of one than post-COVID hybrid working, exacerbated by skyrocketing public transport prices. I don’t mind going into the office but the cost of commuting is a definite deterrent (as is the experience of commuting). And of course it’s cheaper for firms to have staff in a hybrid model as they don’t have to rent as much office space.
London has always had an issue with balancing the amount of office space with demand for it. I have a hard time feeling sympathy for those who keep throwing up huge office buildings and then demand that companies come use them, particularly when what we desperately need is more residential housing.
I don’t doubt that’s the bigger factor, but I found it odd the article didn’t mention Brexit at all.
My former company had a location adjustment in certain cases. If they asked you to relocate to a higher COL, your salary was increased by X% to account for it. If they moved you back, that boost was removed. You weren’t downgraded if you were hired at HCOL city and they elected to move you to the hinterlands later. Rumor was that raises would slow down in these cases, but there was nothing published or official about it. If you decided to relocate to a different facility on your own, the salary changes didn’t automatically apply, although your new location could sweeten the pot if they chose.
Occasionally, business travel would become long term but not permanent. If that location’s laws triggered additional taxes while there, the company boosted your salary temporarily to ensure you had the same take-home pay.
I don’t know if this is common at other companies though.
Here’s a gift link to a NY Times article today about SF’s reputational plunge vs. the reality of living there.
While the city faces disarray in parts of its grim core, he said he’s tried to offer a more complete picture beyond the crime footage that has gone viral on social media and the despair that has been highlighted in regular news reports.
“It’s like going to New York and spending your entire time in Times Square, and your takeaway is, every New Yorker is dressed like Cookie Monster,” Mr. Mathur said. He tells his neighbors that San Francisco as a whole remains stunning and its amenities world-class.
At the company I worked for (large software firm that starts with an A), someone on my team relocated from SF area to Texas. They cut her salary 40% so she quit. I also know EBay will do the same, from my lady friend who worked there; she moved across the state and simply didn’t tell her employer she’d done so, or they would have cut her pay 20%. Location adjustments are quite widespread, especially in tech. Even for totally remote positions.
Youd’a thought that question might have emerged before making the decision to relocate. My company has salary tiers for the same job levels - they vary based on the part of the state where you live. It’s totally transparent and out there, and it makes sense given that the cities (where the offices are) tend to be more expensive than the rural areas (where people may be telecommuting from). No one seems to get sideways about this arrangement.
I wasn’t familiar with the circumstances. I can say that it happened before I became aware through company communications that there were location adjustments of any sort at this firm.