I don't understand the push for remote work.

I have been a part of remote teams for over 11 years of my career (16 yrs). I have worked from home more days than I can count. It has enough drawbacks that I'd avoid it at any given opportunity. Here are a few reasons:

- You are not part of the hallway conversations / decision changes / fly by meetings / face-memory / kitchen run ins and every other benefit of having people together. When your level is senior enough, these are very much a deciding factor in whether your last 6 months of work is going to be thrown out or kept relevant.

- Video conferencing is terrible. If you notice a pattern, the conversation is DOMINATED by the side with most power. I have seen very senior engineers (including myself I suppose) have trouble corralling a meeting / participating in a discussion that's going back and forth animatedly when there are other senior folk in one room. When you are junior, there is a high possibility your chances to speak are just perfunctory because almost all relevant points have been made already.

- Yes I have heard and tried the notions of ensuring meeting etiquette. I have also been part of these meetings where there is someone (or everyone) trying to police how the meeting is run (let everyone speak, juniors go first, go in a circle ...). Those have been considerably less productive to put it mildly. (Remember - I am the one who is remote).

- There are always mic-hogs who don't make a ton of points - most of the efficient places weed these out real quick. In a different rant - I hate optimizing for the bad actors that penalize the good actors heavily. Anyway - in this case you are left with few folks with real talking points not being able to convey the whole nuance.

- Essentially this leads to you doing extra work in ensuring at least some folks on the other side are on the same page before the meeting to ensure your points are considered.

So yes - in short remote is bad IMO. Video conferencing pretty much doesn't work since it doesn't capture the full presence and energy of folks. This is going to sound metaphysical, but my real presence is a million times better representation of the full me than my text/video :). It may work when everyone is remote with an individual screen - the usual situations I am in is where there are 2 or 3 conference rooms with people.

I saw 'San Francisco' and rolled my eyes. This is the dumbest idea I have seen in a while.

What if someone runs you over trying to back into a spot? What if something falls from the sky (besides rain)? Or someone runs off with your equipment because your weren't looking? Or even, its a busy day and someone didn't reserve a parking spot.

Putting your workers at risk because you're trying to save some dough is highly irresponsible.

If you're a techie, young with no family, and you want good culture, good climate, good outdoors, and good job prospects...the valley is hard to beat.

Yes I know about droughts, we can debate all day if the culture is good or terrible, all these tech people are ruining the parks, yadayadayada. Point still stands, the san fran area has a unique and sought after position.

And to address your point about gold mine of people, not every company does the whole remote thing. I mean I agree remote shouldn't be hard but it's a legitimate position to prefer onsite employees.

He may have taken it too literally... but he does have a point. Everyone doesn't _need_ to live in SF.

> proving two points: one about the high cost of coworking spaces in an already unaffordable city, and another about how the space currently dedicated to on-street parking in cramped cities like San Francisco could be put to better and more human-centric use.

You can reduce your cost of living/co-working by moving out of the city.

I can't imaging wanting to deal with fumes, electricity, weather, traffic dangers just to stay in the city by converting parking spots to more "human-centric" areas.

Ironically, the pictures of one of the #wepark offices in the article was literally directly in front of empty commercial real estate for lease. What does this stunt prove, aside from being slightly silly? Should all the buildings be expanded by ~6',and the sidewalk moved directly adjacent to the road? Because even if personal automobiles are entirely eliminated, roads will still be necessary for access. As a tounge-in-cheek protest against high prices it works, but I think the grandparent is making a more salient point than the wepark group. If your job can be done from a temporary office environment (and many of the people interviewed already worked from their homes) then a far better solution to expensive real estate is to move, especially if you are already working remotely.

How much space can actually be reclaimed from on-street parking in a feasible manner? Likely not enough to make a significant difference in the price of real-estate.

Yeah I did catch on, but my read was that the conclusion of this stunt could drive thinking in a few directions.

One of the more popular directions would be to push for more building, and/or better transit options.

My recommendation was to push for more rational / sanity in the labor market choices: right now, it seems like it’s blasphemous to consider _NOT_ living in SF.

Rather than trying to push for enormous change at all levels, you can just say “nah there are better choices for me to live.”

There are a lot of very talented people in places like Seattle and Boston, too, and yet the VCs and companies out in SF/SV are stuck in their little bubble.

Although SV culture seems to think otherwise, there are lots of very talented people across the rest of the nation as well. I've found them everywhere that I've worked.

That doesn't really seem to be working -- people are coming but are doubling and tripling (and quadrupling) up in housing that wasn't meant to accommodate them.

Of course, that's nothing new - I rented a large closet (literally a closet) when I first moved to SF over 2 decades ago. Eventually I got promoted to the formal dining room (which unfortunately was the walkway from the bedrooms to the livingroom, but still beat living in a closet!)

I'm pretty sure the comment you're replying to was sarcastic.

The best part of co-working spaces is that the cost scales completely linearly without signing multi-year leases and deposits and all the other logistics of having an office.

What confusese is that anytime the open-office concept is mentioned it seems that nearly nobody is in favor of it, yet that is the model employed by most coworking spaces. I can't imagine trying to actually be productive in most of those environments.

Major props for the Snow Crash approach!

Every warehouse/storage unit I've ever leased has included terms that specifically prohibited doing that, though. You might be able to get away with it for a while, but you should always be prepared to be evicted.

I haven't ever seem a storage unit with plumbing before...

Probably about as legal as setting up office in a street-side parking space...

I did this (in an RV) for a few years in my younger days, when starting my first business. It worked very, very well for me and came with the added benefit that I could move my office any time I wanted to be in a place that was more convenient or enjoyable.

I think the motive of this group is to organise people to the streets with bare minimum costs, sounds more like an agenda to show that it's possible than to be a practical working space.