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Office Space

Is Going to the Office a Broken Way of Working?

A conversation with Chris Herd, who foresees a future in which most
companies are remote-first.

By Cal Newport

September 27, 2021

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Cubicle constructed from paper slowly crumples into a ball
Illustration by Ben Denzer; Source photograph by Paul Denzer

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Earlier this month, a technology entrepreneur named Chris Herd posted
a thread on Twitter. "I spoke to 10 x Billion $ companies who
canceled return to the office due to the delta variant," he began. "A
few predictions on what else is going to happen." His first salvo was
titled "Office Death," and claimed that "by the time people can
return to the office a lot of companies will no longer have space to
return to." His next prediction was about "City Flight." He stated
that workers would continue to flee cities and would quit if their
employers forced them back into urban offices. The thread continued
with sixteen more tweets.

In 2018, Herd, who is thirty-one, started a financial-technology
company based in northern Scotland. He soon realized the difficulty
of attracting talent to his location, and organized his business to
operate without a physical headquarters. Impressed by the benefits of
his office-free operation, Herd pivoted into a new company,
Firstbase, which supports a remote-work infrastructure. In 2019, he
began tweeting strident objections to office work, with loud claims
about the superiority of alternatives. When the pandemic hit, the
audience interested in these discussions exploded in size. In early
2020, Herd posted a long thread of predictions about remote work's
rise during the next decade, and it hit a nerve in a way that his
earlier tweets had not. His follower count grew from about a thousand
to over forty-five thousand, and his threads became must-reads for
anyone who closely followed these topics. Many commentators have been
discussing the need for a more flexible approach to when and where
work happens in a post-pandemic world. Herd, it turns out, is
proposing something altogether more radical.

[cal_newpor]
Cal Newport is a contributing writer for The New Yorker and an
associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University.
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