In case your wondering - all this wailing and gnashing of teeth is caused by Yahoo's director saying she wants no more working from home.
Surly the problem is really the failure of architecture urban transportation and economics.
- The open plan office experiment has failed. Time to get over it and think of new ways to house people at work. The big new is programming and other intellectual tasks is not like being a secretary or multi-tasking project manager the same space won't work for them. Time to tell your office manager/ facilities manager the cost per worker per sqr foot is not the only cost.
- Urban transport - people can't get to work in a reasonable time frame time to start getting creative and find paradigm changing urban transport solutions like PRT.
- Economics and transportation - Its no longer serious to think of a worker being where they are because of 'his' work. People live as families. Universities have been ahead of the curve by offering employment to couples rather than individuals. Industry needs to catch up with best practice.
- The reason Google offers in house laundry, is the same reason they should offer in house child creche. Because the urban design got so bad people have to commute to get their laundry done ( and the US culture that you can't run a washing machine in your flat).
- This is an extreme challenge to urban design - how to design a city when families live and work a wide degrees of separation.
Working from home is a symptom with a moderately green solution (I say moderately because if people who don't travel people still heat/cool their flats more).
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