Commuting Kills
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I live in Baltimore now, and before that in Wilmington, and I'm astonished that more companies don't have offices in those cities. Both cities have a lot less traffic than D.C. and Philadelphia, respectively, and are well-served by rail. I'd imagine there would be a lot of talented people who would sign up at offices in those cities so long as they weren't backoffice locations and they could still do frontline work.
In our organization, the value-add is forcing everyone to be on the same work schedule, promulgating organizational culture, giving managers an idea of peoples' workload so they can load-balance, and meeting the need of people to socialize. We cross-staff on a per-matter basis, and we'll generally conduct inter-team communication over email and phone whether even when the team is within a few doors of each other. Email is efficient and asynchronous. We get together in person at milestone events, where, e.g., the whole team will fly in and take over a conference room for a day or two to prepare for a big upcoming event.
If you think the value-add of offices is facilitating informal, day-to-day inter-team communication, than obviously having people in different offices makes reorganization harder. And admittedly, its been years since I was on a software team. That said, even at that time, I found people dropping by my cube, instead of emailing, to ask a question about an API I restructured to be annoying rather than productive. It's PIO instead of DMA--a waste of clock cycles.
YMMV.
Right, which I think is a calculation people need to take seriously. There are real benefits and trade-offs on either side and articles arguing that one is uniformly better than the other always come across as terribly misguided to me.
The physical and social environment that a social animal like a human spends the majority of their waking day in has a profound impact on almost every aspect of their lives. We should be thoughtful about how we arrange it.
There also is a definite benefit to letting less-skilled developers interrupt the more skilled. Skilled developers without interruption kind of become data silos. They're extremely productive, but they could have a multiplicative effect on others' productivity that is wasted.
Even if most interruptions are useless, it's still worth it for the times when a senior dev stops a junior dev from wasting a week puzzling over a stack trace or implementing something useless.
To rephrase, think if WeWork closed their doors to non-WeWork employees, and let their employees work from any WeWork, or from home.
Very apparent how bad it was when DuPont of all companies even moved out of the downtown area.
http://www.newsweek.com/2014/12/19/wilmington-delaware-murde...
I've heard that Austin TX is a good city for CS people - high paying jobs, low(ish) cost of living.
I think for large companies this is an excellent alternative and solves the problem where employees can't telecommute because of sensitive IP or security clearance.
What.
This sentiment is exactly what's wrong with trying to push for more remote work. I don't think we have the tools, either technical or managerial, to build fully-remote companies that are as effective as in-person companies. There are niches where this is true, but they're not particularly fun places to work: call centers come to mind. Companies are living, breathing, organic organizations.
The fundamental assumption that I'd challenge is that productivity towards a goal is what's hold back most organizations (or divisions / teams). I think productivity can be a bottleneck, but most of what makes companies successful is doing the right thing, not the most things. (Otherwise, startups could never compete.) As of 2015, I don't believe we have ways to get everybody in a company aligned in ways to make that happen. One of the most powerful ways of getting people working on the right things is to have them hang out with each other. Sitting next to each other, getting coffee with each other, BSing with each other before / after meetings, etc. There's a lot of unstructured communication that's simply lost, even with tools like Slack.
If that direction is there, then you can start to complain about things like lost productivity and commutes. But if there's isn't a strong sense of direction and consensus on where we're going, it doesn't matter how fast everybody is running.
(FWIW, I put my money where my mouth is on this one. I did a 3.5 hour daily commute for 2.5 years, in spite of an office 5 minutes away, because it made things better for me team.)
There are blatant examples to the contrary: Just look at most large organizations. Getting people to work on the right things isn't a matter of spending time together, it's a matter of company culture! In a company that's constrained by processes and pointless bureaucracy for bureaucracy's sake hardly anything ever will get done, much less so the right things.
Long commutes are not a sustainable way of living and working. If we don't have the tools for making remote work a realistic option for most companies we simply need better tools.
I do think that remote work requires some culture and managerial changes as well but the success of many popular open source projects with remote teams shows that it certainly is possible.
Except, it doesn't, because achieving productivity usually requires remote workers to be able to collaborate effectively, and whether they can or not varies wildly.
The author doesn't seem to get this - if remote workers were so amazing, and had been so amazing in practice, companies would use them more.
Companies do not want the expense of real estate, amenities, etc
Maybe the author should stop to wonder about "hmmm, i'm clearly not the only one to think of this idea, maybe this hasn't happened because there aren't a lot of huge success stories".
So you could change that first sentence to read:
"Brain power and productivity arrive instantly where they’re needed with zero transmission cost [to the employee]"
Employee, company and community aren't mutually exclusive. Reducing commuting cost for employee makes for someone who's happier, healthier and has more time available which benefits company and community.
I'd say only considering cost-to-company is less effective and a narrow way to measure how well your work environment and policies are doing.
"if remote workers were so amazing, and had been so amazing in practice, companies would use them more..."
An argument that can be used against any innovation with a legacy alternative.
A nice idea in theory but it doesn't hold up in practice. In fact the entire premise of startups is that large companies are run incredibly inefficiently and get stuck in local optima.
Managers typically stick to known practices and rarely experiment unless they are forced to or there are clear personal benefits. It is very difficult to move against entrenched corporate culture and pretty much nobody does it "for the company".
This kind of thinking forgets the fact that the standard office arrangement has been the same since long before modern technologies became the standard way of communicating and planning.
We're dealing with a huge legacy of "how it's been done" that is slow to change, despite the fact that I talk to my colleagues by chat and e-mail the vast majority of the time and reliable voice, video, and collab techs are now widely available.
Add to this the fact that the remote office has been shown to work for companies that start out that way and work towards that ethos (e.g. Basecamp, others).
Telecommuting is to work what VR sex is to sex. Will some people be content with VR sex only? I'm sure some people will. A majority of them? Not so sure.
However, I am not sure the analysis method used in this article is really the way to look at this issue. The fact that lots of people spend 15 minutes sitting on their rear is not a serious problem, despite the fact that you can multiply that 15 minutes by millions of people to get a large number.
The problem is that some people have very long commutes. 30 minutes or more is a problem. An hour or more is a serious problem. 90 minutes or more is, for most jobs, ridiculous.
Actually, I see rather more good news than bad news in the referenced statistics. According to the source ([1], see the table on page 2) only 2.3% of Americans have a one-way commute of 90 or more minutes. Only 7.5% have an hour or more. But 33.5% -- more than a third -- have 30 minutes or more; that is troubling.
By the way, the statistics in the source[1] strike me as a little suspect. In particular, the big bump at "30 to 34 minutes" suggests that a lot of people were thinking, "Oh, about 30 minutes." That kind of estimation is not mentioned among the possible sources of error. Someone was not thinking clearly enough when that Census Bureau report was written.
I live 4 miles from midtown Manhattan. That's about a 30 minute bus ride during rush hour. An hour commute is probably the average commute from the suburbs to NYC.
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/new-yorkers-havelongest-...
This includes people commuting from Brooklyn and Queens, which is most likely less than 10 miles to work.
90 minutes in, 2 hours coming home most days. Only saving grace is that I'm not driving for most of it.
Not to compete, but a 2013 study found bike commuters to happiest. Walkers were #2. :)
http://www.outsideonline.com/1795631/study-bike-commuters-ar...
I decided to use the time to read books as a new years resolution. Having at least 2h a day, 5 days a week to read books has made me fly through books faster than any other time in my life. I've already read 21 books since January and I actually look forward to my reading time now! I think if I had this time at home I would not be using it so peacefully/productively, I'd probably waste it on Netflix.
That said, 70m each way is more than I need. I think 30m each way would be the ideal balance of forced mind-clearing and reasonable work-life balance.
I have yet to meet anyone who has communized by bike in my city (Vancouver BC) for more than a few years without a major altercation with a motorvehicle. It might be healthy, but it is also physically dangerous.
Also, fortunately, few people live in such extreme climates as us.
http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/04/18/get-rich-with-bike... - some of the benefits of bicycling.
It's awesome if you're in a car though.
The reservation suffers from a serious housing shortage never mind not being a member of the local tribe, and eastern ND has a lot of families of folks working in western ND, so housing is a bit hard to find.
1) 2 hours in crappy, why the heck didn't I go home sooner weather
And I think that average belies the large number of people in tech working in dense cities like San Francisco or Seattle where the commute is much worse... We're talking 1-2 hours/day in the Seattle area if you have to cross the bridges.
Commuting is truly costly for time, health, and lifestyle in ways that neither the employers nor the employees usually account for. It's a serious externality that I wish we had a better mechanism for capturing, since people more or less take it for granted that they'll be locked in their cars for a large part of their day.
I think that's a weak analogy. I think a better one is that you have a core that's off the motherboard but starts up fast. Sure, there's no wake up time, but your communication with the chip is limited by the bus.
We work together to communicate. Being physically remote, even with email, chat, phone, VC, etc. is still lower bandwidth that physical presence. You can certainly make remote work successful, but I think you're lying to yourself if you don't acknowledge that being together in space matters.
This article really isn't an argument for remote work any more than it is an argument for living closer to work.