Why I work remotely has nothing to do with productivity
m.signalvnoise.com
m.signalvnoise.com
If I had 10 dollars for every set of stock options that I've been granted I'd be a hundred-aire by now.
I've lost count of the number of times I've been told, that if I just work really hard right now, I'll be able to retire soon.
Every time I read an article about some employees making big bucks off their stock options or six figures off an iPhone app, I see that for what it is: propaganda designed to make sure we keep feeding our young bodies into the machine.
That machine will grind you up and spit you out like hamburger on the other side.
Life is short as I said, and it seems to go faster the further along you are.
Work as little as you can, and if you must work, try to work for yourself.
There was eventually an acquisition, and I made a nice sum, but I never planned on them being worth anything. It was my first startup; how are so many convinced that these things are some sort of golden ticket? Where does that narrative come from?
I think the issue is that overly optimistic companies (and probably some unscrupulous ones) estimate the likelihood of such an outcome to be greater than it is. But that doesn't mean that's never true (like it sounds like you found out).
I nodded to a lot of your points (although I have personally done well by 1 of the 3 companies to offer me options), but I've never had a boss actively try to push me like that. It's always been encouragement or constructive criticism, but never (potentially) false promises. That just strikes me as so wrong.
I _have_ been told this, multiple times at startups, from people who probably sincerely believed it.
Luckily, I never agreed to a pay cut in favour of options.
I can see the highway coming from the Sydney harbour bridge from my office window - it's alway congested, it takes a huge amount of time to get to and from work.
I guarantee most of the people burning fuel, creating congestion and stopping themselves (and everyone else) from getting home to their families on time have jobs that could easily be done from home.
The argument that unexpected collaboration happens when people are forced to go to the office is a joke and certainly not worth protecting when you consider all the other negative effects of commuting and working in a central location:
- Rising house prices
- Sprawling high density housing resulting in more people living in smaller areas creating a massive strain on infrastructure and massive reduced living standards
- Commuting for hours per day which affects family life
- Creating pollution hot spots
- Burning large amounts of oil and petrol
A truck spilt several tons of dirt onto the Sydney harbour bridge last week, this caused hours of delays for thousands of people trying to get home. Why should one truck accident hold thousands of people to ransom? How many people missed their kids bed time because of that?
Most companies even being amenable to change based on me bumping into someone from a different department is a laughable idea. We need a massive culture shift in the way we approach most office work. It's an absolute scandal.
That said, in my experience there are some things that are just done better face to face. Not many, but some.
* meetings where you want to sketch something out--I haven't found a digital solution for sketching say, architecture diagrams, that works as well as a whiteboard.
* the chance to meet and interact with someone outside of your team/department by happenstance, say at a FAC. Of course, you can go onto different slack channels, but I think the interaction wouldn't be as fluid.
* one on ones. While I guess a hangout might give you some of the face to face time, video conferencing isn't as high bandwidth as face to face conversation, including all the nuances of pauses, body language, etc.
I think there might be others, and I bet they all have the component of physicality that can't be delivered digitally. (Yet? Maybe VR will deliver it.)
I'm not a fan of required in office work, but see the tremendous value in it on occasion.
Edit: formatting
We can still make face to face work, I just don't believe everybody has to commute everyday - it's all about balance - we just need a culture shift.
Agreed!
Bandwidth.
No NBN and what you have is copper by default, maybe cable then a sat connection. This is the price paid for poor leadership. NBN should be thought of as the rail of the 21st century. Instead we get a few main lines, some branch lines, everyone else gets donkey carts. [0]
[0] Aus, Melbourne perspective.
I agree, NBN has been turned into a joke, however, I would be surprised if most people around Sydney and its suburbs don't have access to fast enough broadband to use email and other online services they require - but yes, bad internet infrastructure would prove to be an issue and would need to be addressed.
(I say this as someone happily working from home in the East)
However, I do anticipate that a culture shift to working from home will require higher bandwidth as more services move to the cloud and as workers start to require video conferencing.
Are there good internet providers? If so, which ones should I look for at an Airbnb I will stay at?
Are there any job sites / directories specifically for finding remote-work jobs?
As a fellow Aussie I'd love to work remotely, but I don't necessarily want to work for an overseas company, for example.
Even the better tech companies (e.g. Atlassian) aren't keen on WFH.
We seriously need to move away from tech companies only setting up base in Sydney and Melbourne and in turn, killing other cities and making us all live in ridiculously overpriced apartments so we don't have to commute for hours per day.
I would love to live in a more rural area one day but this is just never going to happen while I work in tech.
As sad as it is, I think it is significantly easier to find a US or Europe based company to work for from Sydney than an Australian based company.
All the friends I have that work remote are doing so for US based companies (GitHub, Docker and me at Discourse)
Sydney based companies in usually will only offer you a day or two from home and even that is often pushing it.
You got it, the reason people are required to work from a central office is that current managers are simply not able to manage remote teams.
Here's an article explaining it : http://read.reddy.today/read/3/remote-teams-are-the-future-b...
I consider it to be a form of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_violence
I'm fully in favor of the freedom for everyone to work from home, but I think there are unique upsides to being in the office, too. Incidental contact with people from other departments (e.g. "Connie from accounts payable") is one of them, as this can give you a unique perspective on your organization and can spur new ideas/reveal new avenues for improvement you would've never encountered had you been sequestered away in "deliberate contact only" mode at home.
The idea of relying on chance encounters to drive innovation within an organization is insane.
Sometimes the value of such encounters is simply that you understand the daily trials and tribulations of another department better and can use that information to better communicate with them.
I step away from my desk to eat lunch when I'm in the office to explicitly take a breather from work.
Haven't you ever had a moment that your work was so interesting that you wanted to share it with someone else in your 'non-work' time?
I would say: talk about what interests you. Don't focus too much on 'appropriate' timing.
More often than not, there's nothing so interesting happening with work that I want to talk about it. Before I was self-employed, I frequently hated how going to lunch with work mates meant having to spend time talking about work. It felt like lunch was just another meeting, instead of a break from work. I'd much rather have more meaningful and personal conversation—like, about books, art, traveling, relationships, whatever. Something that elevates us out of our role as workers and focused on our non-working selves. Conversation that helps increase our knowledge and understanding of each other. To be sure, that could mean work-related topics come up. But it gets seriously boring to talk with people who only want to talk shop.
No.
> talk about what interests you.
I have far more interests than work. Work is what I do to pursue those interests.
Lunch and the end of the day are hard lines between work and non-work specifically to keep my head clear and to not suddenly become the job.
Also, trying to get three or more people to agree on a time and place for lunch is less fun than herding cats.
I built a lunch voting website for our Friday company lunch for this very reason. We would spend up to an hour hashing it out on Slack each week, now everyone puts in their votes and it either picks a random one, or if there's a majority it picks that. No more arguments, although there's significantly more horse trading!
Say one day you figure out that the format of a report Connie gets isn't optimal, but you could do a quick change (1/2 day of work), that means she'll save an hour a month. That's easy to work out the economic benefits of the off chance meeting. But what you can't easily work out is how much time your employees have to waste to get there.
I'd like to add that we now have the tools to make remote working not only on par but better than in-office work:
- Chat systems (Spark, Slack, HipChat…) provide the kind of informal communication that offices are good for, but with major improvements: asynchronous by default (though the conversation can easily escalate to become synchronous) and topic-oriented. Even when I was in-office, our team actually preferred chat-based conversation in many cases.
- Tele-presence (video call) provide the face-to-face communication complete with visual emotional cues that one would get in the office. Use it for structured meetings, or use it as an informal background video feed.
- Location independence helps the team be geographically dispered. You can then build a team that is spread out and takes advantage of time differences (useful in devops).
Just last week, my wife had a work-related conference out of town and instead of being apart for a whole week, I just worked from the hotel with no change of routine. After the work was done, we got to enjoy the area. Bonus: our child came along.
The one caveat is all this is predicated on reliable network connections, epecially for the telepresence part. However, homes have the option of reliable network access, and for crappy wifi at hotels or coffee shops, it's always possible to tether or fallback to text-only chat.
Why not dongle? Because within buildings some areas the 4g signal is much better than others. So keeping router in one place and working from multiple places within the same building has been awesome.
* more time with family
* smaller food costs (don't eat out as much)
* smaller clothing budget -- not dressing up
* complete control over my environment (lighting, wall color, music, etc)
* fewer interruptions (even with 5 kids in the house)
* almost no sick days...like I'm not going to work when I have a bad cold? I go stir crazy.
* 1 am eureka moments happen more naturally.
* I can justify my increased home internet bandwidth
- no routine that gets you going
- less time with your friends and colleagues
- less team lunches/nice dinners
- getting dressed can help you mentally make the switch to start your workday and can translate into higher productivity
- you have to spent money for office equipment
- more interruptions (you are at home, surely you can do x)
- you have more sick days, since kids are bags of disease
- no eureka moments after water cooler chats
- extra cost
PS I'm a fan of remote work
It's happened to me, and I found that I needed to:
- Have a routine, or else one day blends too seamlessly into the other - Always go out with my friends on the weekend - Make good food (Blue Apron was a huge help in this respect) - Get dressed & do it well to make the context switch to being at work - Set it you up so if i'm at work, I only do work things and not other chores
As for the rest, happily I don't yet have to worry about kids and my only office equipment has always been my computer.
I would say "more interruptions" too, but the office has its own interruptions (someone walks by your desk and starts chatting), which may be even more than home.
And after work, I have plenty of friends that I don't spend all day working with. I'd rather get supper with a friend I haven't seen in a while, rather than spending more time with the people I already spent the day with. Lunch? It's really great to break up the work day by taking my dogs for a walk.
And I do totally agree about coworkers becoming friends. Most of the people I consider my closest friends are either old classmates or old coworkers.
I generally do remote contract work, but currently have a local gig for 1-2 days/week. There are undoubtedly more interruptions at the office, but fewer temptations (e.g. turning off the clock and having a nap). I dramatically prefer the home office environment though, most of all the fact that I can work with my own flow. If I'm feeling foggy after lunch, I'll totally have a nap and work a little in the evening to make it up. Or work a 16 hour day and sleep in tomorrow. Or whatever works best that day.
- no routine that gets you going
Well, you still shower in the morning, right? And eat breakfast? With the commute time eliminated, you could add the gym to the morning routine, if there's one you can walk to in a few minutes, or failing that, some bodyweight exercise or yoga videos. The only time I'd see this as a downside would be if you bike to work, but you could just go bike for that amount of time if you want, just ending up at home.
- less time with your friends and colleagues
Seems like this should be "more time with your friends, less time with your colleagues"? Unless your friends happen to live near where you work and you can meet up easier afterwards. Very situational.
- less team lunches/nice dinners
I guess on the lunches, but you shouldn't be having dinner with your colleagues anyways, since you shouldn't be at work at dinner time. Also, working remotely allows you to make more nice dinners, because you can take 5 minutes to do some minor prep that requires the ingredients to rest afterwards - allow dough to rise, marinate things, etc.
If the company is spending money on nice dinners, I would prefer to receive the cost as additional salary - that applies to beer fridges and ping-pong tables as well, is this a frat house or a serious engineering company?
- getting dressed can help you mentally make the switch to start your workday and can translate into higher productivity
Well, you can still do that if you want to. I usually dress better on weekends because the office is kept at what seems to be 80°, so it's impossible to wear my sport jackets or sweaters in the winter <_<
- you have to spent money for office equipment
Much less than the commuting costs anyways, assuming you already have the computer and you're just using a little paper for sketching. They probably provide a computer anyways, so you're just looking at paper and pens?
- you have more sick days, since kids are bags of disease
Well, that only applies to people with children.
- no eureka moments after water cooler chats
I find it much more likely that someone else's chat will destroy my flow, although that problem is fixed by providing private offices with doors that close.
However, I work on a team where I am solely responsible for my piece of software, so YMMV in larger teams with more direct code collaboration.
(I used to work remotely. I don't anymore. When I leave this job, that will hopefully flip back!)
> but you shouldn't be having dinner with your colleagues anyways, since you shouldn't be at work at dinner time.
You've never become friends with any of your co-workers? I mean I've worked places where we've gone out for dinner on our own dime after work simply because we enjoy spending time with each other.
I get the best of both worlds. I still get the important social effects of working in an office space, but I do it on my terms and without the long commute.
For the usual day in day out coding, I think that this should be the future of workplaces. People who work together have little need to be in the same physical location these days.
But I think part of the problem is that giant office space is psychologically useful when you're bringing in potential clients for business (or judging how successful of a company you are). The managers want an office full of busy worker bees so they can show off their workspace to clients and the world.
Even small startups are guilty of this, although usually they want to show their workplace off as being cool and having fun things like game consoles, ping pong tables, and bean bag chairs.
Basically we need a different way for managers to show off. Maybe they can just create some giant park with amazing sculptures as they grow to show off how impressive they are. Maybe have a single conference room in the center of a hedge maze for when those important clients come visit the office.
I couldn't help laughing imagining this one. Thanks for that.
"Over there are the computers connecting our 2,000 strong workforce around the world. Over here is a sculpture I made of them out of GI Joe's and Lego's. It took nearly 7 hours of an 8 hour workday for several months straight to build this. Next year, I'm going to re-do it in Minecraft and display it on a wall-sized TV in the lobby."
"Wow. That's really impressive productivity you people have over here. We'll buy your mainframe. Or was it a cloud? Bah, send us the invoice to our new Gmail account as the Yahoo Mail one you have on file was deleted after Microsoft's acquisition of it."
My gf works from home too (and self-employeed) and does exactly this to get started. It can make the context-switch much more evident, and creates a larger mental barrier between work and not-work time.
Ironically a lot of startups seem to be office focused, but if there's less than 8 people in the company, don't get an office. You don't need the expense and hassle of an office.
When you need to meet face to face to hash things out, you can go to someones house, or you can go to somewhere like Panera Bread which often has meeting rooms you can just use.
This has the benefit of making those meetings more focused, since the effort to have a meeting is higher than in an office.
I'm continually amazed by the companies that have a daily meeting wasting engineers time (never been to a good standup) and how attached they are to this-- it seem to be very management driven, much like the "need" for na office: "IF I can't see them and waste 30 minutes of their time each day, how will I know they are working?"
Apparently looking at issue tracking systems doesn't work for bosses.
I'm glad my boss knows how to use our bug tracker and read the emails that it and our source control system generates...
He, and I guess “I” by extension, would argue that you’re working to enjoy those little moments in life you’ll never get back—the ones you’re supposed to savor. If you’re in that headspace, working from home is one of modern society’s greatest advances.
I've been thinking quite a bit over the years that this isn't how raising a family should be. I remember growing up and when my dad got home, work was over. Fat chance now with sms, slack, email, etc - you're never off work anymore.
One one hand, I love tech and it's how our family survives. On the other hand, we're completely disconnected from our planet and appreciation of generations before. We are modern and life is fast paced, but for what reason?
I keep the discussions going in my head and let the glaring issue just kinda dissolve as we go thru another day. That issue is (for me) that this probably isn't how - as a society - we should be living nor should we be valuing the things we do. :-/
Interruptions suck and you don't need to embrace them. You can perfectly have a dedicated time for your family as well as dedicated time for your job. It's all about planning and ensuring that people around you understand your schedule.
You can still have 1 hour allocated time with your son during the day and you can be present, that doesn't mean your son needs to interrupt you 5 random times within 3 hours. If you know when he comes home from school, by all means allocate that fixed 30 minutes or whatever to him, perfect.
There is pretty much no difference between allocating random time frames to people you love vs. allocating fixed times to people you love.
We all know from experiments, various sources and for many from personal experiences interruptions do hurt productivity, induce stress and generally bad.
Also, you can turn this around. Instead of being interrupted between your tasks (out of zone moments) just make rounds at the house, talk to your wife, enjoy a snack, take 15 minutes break. Then go back to hacking with a clear, recharged head.
So why sacrifice your focus/productivity when you don't have to?
Work-life balance and harmony is enabled by remote work. I don't have kids, but many of my colleagues do, and they really appreciate the flexibility.
I don't think all roles can work perfectly remotely, but software engineering certainly can. Github (any day but today :)), Trello, Flowdock/Slack/IRC, AWS, GHangout, GDocs -- these are the tools you would use anyway in a good company. And you can trade the money spent on offices for plane tickets to do team retreats and hackathons from time to time.
But I understand as a family man what you're saying. If I could do remote work I'd probably be in Tamarindo or similar (which I'd like to do one day.) Until then, bacon is pretty awesome.
Where do you work, if you don't mind me asking?
Without going into detail, we ended up in a high-needs situation with one of our teenage kids a couple of years ago. Fortunately I have a very good relationship with the company I work with, so was able to switch from partially remote to 100% remote, and as things shook out, ended up part-time (3 days a week).
Some days I’ve been unable to start work until 10 or 11, or I’ve had to go down to the school three times, or quite frankly I’ve had days of just being too emotionally drained and upset to be able to work as well as I would like. So have certainly had some late working nights to compensate. Measure based on what I expect to have completed more so than total hours worked, and carefully curate the todo list with my manager regularly.
My wife works in customer service, so she has nowhere near the flexibility in scheduling that I have, so it has worked out the best for the situation we’ve been in.
Never could have happened if we were both office-bound. One of us would have had to stop working for a couple of years.
(Addendum: Some of the above sounds quite dire, and it has been at times, but we are well into recovering and approaching a more “normal-needs” situation.)
I worked for a lot of companies for the past 15 years, but this is the first time I find it hard to change my job - because working remotely is amazing.
I wish more companies were open to letting people telecommute. I had office based position offers that paid twice what I make but I am never trading that for the ability to get out of the room and hug my daughter. And the productivity argument is still there, it is just not the sole reason why remote rocks.
One of my other favorites: Work is very stressful sometimes, so I go out to a different room and punch my training bag a few times. Instant stress relief - try doing that in the office!
P.S. If you are reading this and are considering hiring for a remote position, drop me a line, I am a sysadmin with a fair bit of coding and extensive networking (Cisco) and teaching/mentoring background, living in central Europe, and I grok programming and web development.
I may be biased since I'm a founder of a 100% distributed company, but I feel the value of working from home every.single.day and I know my employees do too. Midday naps and gym visits, not feeling bad wandering out of the office for a break, getting to be just as productive when at home. No commute.
The modern office is a scam and a relic from the fifties and we are only now able to break free from its chains.
People in the office that don't seem to really work, but seem to think their only job is trying to find things they can make you work on, so they look like they're managing someone. I already have a boss, tasks and get everything done with stalwart dedication and personal pride. That type of middle-manager intervention is much harder when you're not in a cube. Or just annoyances like spending time looking at your screen when walking by.
I get just as much done as I used to in the office, save the environment, less stressed (just as much over my work but less with those office lice), and now never really want to work another office job again.
Driving stress is real and avoiding that is a health benefit, not to mention my sweet standing desk with treadmill underneath where I've lost 40lbs using while working during the day. I'm less likely to get horribly sick and drain the company's insurance plan. I spent years on a 24/7 pager that went off all the time, and worked from 9AM-3:30AM in offices in downtown Chicago many days/nights. I've done some harm to my health sticking out bad jobs and situations to build a resume. I'm very thankful for my current situation.
While someday I'd like to land a Django gig, I hope when my wife and I have children I'm still working from home. I don't want to die having missed out on the things this author mentioned. And definitely not my wife, I'll go back into an office if it means a big enough pay raise so she can quit her job as a teacher not miss those moments.
I have found a lot of people don't communicate enough when working remotely though. So you have to remind people to get in Slack/Skype/Hangouts/phone. Also a video or voice chat is higher bandwidth so it is good to do that at least once a week or more often depending on tight the collaboration is.
But considering that most office jobs can actually be done over the internet now, the highway congestion, the logistical/military implications of maintaining the massive imbalance of fossil fuel distribution largely to support the commuting in oversize vehicles, global warming, etc., it surprises me that we even allow so much commuting to continue. Seems unethical.