It’s right about mid-summer, the halfway mark, and we hear more and more about how two of the tech capitals – New York and Silicon Valley – are ‘back.’ We also hear a lot of debate online about when events should be scheduled again where people will meet in person, at an actual venue. September? October? Some have already started, although in many cases, we see that the number of attendees is somewhat, if not greatly diminished, which was not necessarily true when the events were being held online.

 

We also wonder how many startups – and how much new funding – was a result of the new borderless ecosystem.  Do these new friendships/affiliations simply go away when the world goes back to in-person events and meetings? We regularly attend a now-online, formerly in-person event whose attendees span multiple states and several continents due to the lockdowns. As venues reopen and some people return to the tech hubs – not all will – and in-person events, will the online participants be cut off? So long and thanks for all the fish?

 

Tech Workers Who Swore Off the Bay Area Are Coming Back, The New York Times declared, but observed that “There were some prominent industry defections from the Bay Area over the last 18 months. Oracle and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise moved their headquarters to Texas. The software maker Palantir moved its headquarters from Palo Alto to Colorado. Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla, said he was moving to Austin.

 

Also do notice, as did The Times reporter, that the Ministries of Truth, Peace, Love, etc as George  Orwell called them, and in this case, Google, Facebook and Twitter, are taking a larger footprint in the Bay Area, as they did in NYC (1984: Blueprint for the New Normal). Will the two tech hubs devolve into being more or less company towns?

 

Most employees will be required to work just a few days from the office. Which leads us to the fact that In an 8-Hour Day, the Average Worker Is Productive for This Many Hours. It’s three, according to the Inc. piece, which also observed that the eight-hour workday is a left over from the Industrial Age and considering the change in work habits that the lockdown hath wrought, we wonder if the tech industry/knowledge workers will revert to the formerly accepted work week any time soon, or at all.

 

“At Cisco Systems, a tech gear maker that is one of San Jose’s biggest employers, just 23 percent of employees want to return to the office three or more days each week…People have expressed a desire for work flexibility more than a desire to have a different location,” noted The Times.

 

““I don’t think people want to go back full time when they have the sort of job that can work well from home,” (said Apple co-founder Steve) Wozniak, who currently lives in Los Gatos, Calif., (but who recently bought a house in a Denver and would likely live there at least part time).

.“We’ve learned something that you really can’t take back,” Wozniak noted.

 

We certainly have, and we may see hybrid models springing up, on many levels – including when it comes to events. The lockdowns have opened people’s eyes to new possibilities in terms of relationships/ friendships – and work. For every action there is a reaction: that’s basic physics.

Having been forced to work and interact remotely has shifted the mindset – and possibly the landscape. In-office requirements, remote teams and flexible work hours may not be that far off as being the new norm: concepts that were once considered little more than yet have changed the very definition of term remote possibilities. Onward and forward.