We're Shutting the Offices and Going Virtual: An Experiment | Hacker News Reader

We're Shutting the Offices and Going Virtual: An Experiment

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36 pointsmchafkin15 comments

I don't think a month is nearly enough time to form any judgements. From personal experience, it takes about a year to really learn how to work out of an office.

Multiply this by an entire office and they're in for a world of hurt. To really successfully pull this off, they'd need a couple of fascists who already knew how to work remotely, people would need to defer to them, and they'd need a serious transition period to get used to all the tools they'll need (ie: work a day or two per week remotely).

The biggest problem they have, though, is one of measuring success. They don't really say what a successful experiment's going to look like. It's easy enough to measure writer output (quantity, not necessarily quantity), but most other facets of the business aren't quite as measurable. Even the success of writers is ultimately determined by the number of eyeballs on their stories. It's awfully hard to measure that stuff with any kind of reliability over the course of a month.

The best possible tool we've found for this is IRC. I assume Campfire would work reasonably well, but it's awfully simple to find bots that speak IRC and do useful things.

These are great suggestions--and good points about the limitations. Thanks! Do you think IRC is superior to other IM clients? A lot of folks in the offices have never used IM before--and may be more comfortable with something like AIM or GChat.

Well, for our purposes a group based chat is much, much nicer. Especially with logs. People drop to IM at times (or private messages in IRC), but we seem to get more out of the virtual watercooler/mass meeting room. The one on one stuff generally works better through email, where it's less transient and people can easily reference it later.

If you have people who haven't touched IM before, you should definitely checkout Campfire. One mass "company" room can get crazy so you can always fragment it off into a couple of area specific chats alongside the primary.

+1 to group chat over IM for company use.

Skype has excellent group-chat, that's what we use. Much easier to adopt than IRC for non-tech types, and it's free which is a bonus.

(I didn't even know Skype had a chat feature, let alone group-chat, until I got to my current job.)

I call BS; $10 says they won't exist by summer. Initiatives like this are usually announced when it's time to cut costs. While a virtual office can be a wonderful thing, it imposes significant problems too: how are you going to train new hires? existing issues can perhaps be handled by teleconferencing, but do you really want to have brainstorming sessions and involved discussions about future strategy via IM (or whatever)? How do you keep your contributors from thinking to themselves 'I'm practically freelance anyway' or handle the work-life balance issues?

I'm not saying it can't work - I've been an enthusiast and advocate for telecommuting ever since I got a modem. But it's not a panacea, and it doesn't work in every employment context. Color me very skeptical.

The traditional way companies like DuPont have trimmed their workforce is to close a factory and move it 60-100 miles away to a new one. Those who are tied down will heavily weight the cost of commuting vs finding a new job (in a good economy - in a poor economy, commute becomes less of a factor).

"I call BS; $10 says they won't exist by summer. Initiatives like this are usually announced when it's time to cut costs."

Statements like "...we’ve decided to conduct a little experiment..." and "For the next month, anyway." don't really make me think they're doing this for practical reasons.

Yes, it's only going to last a month.

To clarify: This is not a cost-cutting measure--and it wasn't introduced by managers. (I, humble writer that I am, proposed it.) It's a month-long editorial experiment that I will be writing about in the April issue of Inc. magazine. But yes, we will have to face all of these issues you describe. Hopefully that's what will make the story interesting. Would love to hear your thoughts on what you think will be the pain points. (I'm at mchafkin at Inc dot com).

Well, in that case I have to eat my words, and wish you luck with it - I'm afraid I'm so skeptical of management-speak that I read your Inc. article as a CYA. I'll shoot you a brief email during the afternoon, and apologize for my skepticism.

I wonder if that is like cheating in a sense? I would think it's easier to work with people remotely who you have built relationships with. You understand them, you have seen how they operate in person and gain insights beyond what is spoken/written and have a certain common culture. I work with outsourcing/offshoring and now work remotely with a partner who used to be local. I don't think it would work if we hadn't spent all the face-to-face time first.

Hasn't ArsTechnica operated in such a fashion for it's entire history?

Sure. But the experiment is about taking a company culture that is built on face to face contact (and moving around a bunch of printed pages) and taking it virtual. Should be interesting to see what happens.

Yes we do. I don't know that we could go from office to remote like this with any amount of success, though.

Also, as an anecdote, I think many of us would prefer to have an office we could go to one or two days per week.

Interesting experiment, but I wish they had a feed just for these stories, as I don't want to pick through all the Inc stuff.

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