Technology was meant to herald a new way of working, but that’s not the case

Orwell made some interesting observations in one of his essays in how the increase of technology doesn't lead to greater freedom, but greater scale, bureaucracy, and increased governance at a distance: with the invention of the telegraph, decisions were now made by ministers in whitehall vs english army officers reliant upon a shared belief/culture system and taking the initiative in the field.

That being said, while there is an interesting and at least plausible reason to believe there is some connection between such phenomenon and technology, i think the article is a bit too quick to proclaim that its things like "technology", "emailing" and things that have lead to a lack of empathy in the modern workplace.

On the contrary, i think organisational size and governance lines (which is in some ways connected to technology, admittedly), globalisation, outsourcing, and just the general economic and social realities of the modern workforce lead to a necessary degeneration of trust and respect between workmates and the organisation.

My company, for all its "values", will throw me under the bus to save itself, or for a quick buck. I cannot rely on it to support me into the future: even if it wanted to put money into a pension, i can't rely on that actually remaining solvent. I don't even know if my field/expertise is going to be around for the next 5 years. It is always looking to screw me over, outsource my labour, etc, etc. Its not "too much emails" that does it: its that I know I'm essentially working for a short-term psychopath that couldn't keep its promises to me even if it wanted to (and it doesn't want to).

If you raise people in harsh cutthroat conditions, don't be surprised if empathy falls by the wayside, or expect the lamb to lie down with the lion.

I have managed remote employees for years and while I still think it's a good tool in the box for providing a healthy and happy workplace, as well as recruiting/retaining talent in situations where you couldn't otherwise, I've grown increasingly jaded about the idea of functional, fully-remote organizations.

The trust issue referenced in this article is one element but there are many others:

- Many people don't handle the level of autonomy well, or don't stay motivated in isolation - Harder to engage a remote employee in company culture and values - There is a big difference between remote in the same time zone/country and remote on the other side of the world - Management invariably has less control over a remote employee and less ability to command their immediate attention

I think comparing "remote work" with "not remote work" is a massive oversimplification of the issue that does everyone a disservice. There is the group of remote contractors you've never met, there's the team of fulltime employees that live within a few hours' flight of each other and meet several times a year, there's the guy who works in the office 3 days a week and at home from 2. So what are we really talking about? Generalities are not productive.

The dark spectres hovering over the head of remote work are that remote employees often end up being less productive and less available when you really need them.

For certain types of work and certain types of people these issues are more or less pronounced... this is not a black and white thing. But I am pretty sure we will never see a future where everyone is a fully remote worker.

Am I alone here in actually wanting a place of work with a desk and co-workers.

I worked from home for a year and found it very stressful. There was a lack of human interaction and no clear line between home and work.

My current employer gives me a good balance. I usually spend 3 days in the office and 2 days at home. This is mostly because of the 2 hour commute into London. I'd love to work close to home and visit the office every day.

Looking at some of the comments here (for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12311632) it seems that the new work culture is being based around the approach adopted by a proportion of the population whose need's are different. These people thrive in this environment.

There is an assumption that the way that this group works is the future, and that it is just a matter of time before everybody else follows (See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12311689).

There are others, like myself, who find this way of working to be unpleasant. We would like to continue working the old way, but that doesn't seem to be an option anymore.

I used to enjoy having my own desk. I had a shelf of reference books and my personal belongings were locked away in the draw.

This is no longer allowed. Every job I've had for the last decade has been 'hot desking' and I have to carry everything with me every day.

Is a desk of my own where I can do a little nesting really too much to ask for?

    > And, truth be told, you probably don’t trust most of your colleagues
    > or your boss, either.

From all the places I worked at as an employee or a freelancer in the last twenty years, in the US or in Germany, that was not true for about 2/3rd of them. And the remaining 1/3rd wasn't so much that I didn't trust my colleagues, the whole place was "lost". For example my 2nd job, in a startup with waaayyyyyy too much money and attention for its own good.

Even if I include the time of my apprenticeship in an East German (GDR) chemical factory of several thousand employees, even there the majority of people did a good job at work and were competent.

Even when I extend that to numerous summer jobs in a brewery, sausage factory, chocolate factory and a dozen others (non-food), I rarely had the impression that the sentence I quoted demonstrates.

That a job may be useless - okay, that happens a lot, but I can rarely attribute it to complete incompetence, most of it is much larger forces at work than an individual - even a CEO - can fight. And yes, sometimes people are in over their head, but that happens, so what. In the day to day operations I must have been incredibly lucky that my experiences are overall very positive? Hard to believe.

Since "trust" is the centerpiece of that article I question whether their entire premise is even true.

Work is a spectrum between specific repetitive tasks and the need for deep creative solutions to problems. On one hand we have the need to pull this lever every 36 seconds. on the other, is The Problem. We've all faced The Problem, but perhaps not for work. It's the thing that's at the top of the stack for days, weeks, or months on end. Perhaps solving a Rubik's cube. Perhaps understanding recursion. We've all gone through that phase of not understanding something and thinking about it constantly.

IMHO, the 9-5 is is useful because, in the pull the lever case, the lever gets pulled. More importantly, a substantial fraction of time exposed to The Problem. You have nine hours to kill, odds are good people will spend those hours possibly getting hooked on solving The Problem. There's little chance they'll solve the problem in those hours, but they'll get hooked on The Problem and think about it while washing dishes, in the shower, and sleeping. Once you're hooked, it's tough to get away from it without solving it.

Ultimately, i think anything repetitive will be automated away. But we still need some way to hook people on The Problem. Hours and hours of exposure is probably inefficient, but it's effective.

I've tried the flexible job thing. For the office "butt in the seat" part, I have to concede that it works better for me as it prevents me drifting towards more and more comfort (which at some point translates to less and less productivity). It forces some standards and work ethics giving me that feeling that I am at work. For the flexible hours I think it's best to let everybody to choose their own program, but it should be around six to eight hours because that is the productive interval for the most people (except maybe the low-energy or burnout individuals). It's OK if you want to work less hours to foot the bills and pour the rest of your energy into other (side work) projects, but it would be a waste to get yourself some time out of this creative period to only allow it to be poached in some others' service disguised as social play. This "work" tag on your time is a good thing, for many reasons. Don't hate it.

The word "remote" is so general it's basically useless. We need new common terms to describe the different types, such as:

- Long remote: When someone is offshore or many time zones away (such as India or Eastern Europe).

- TZ remote: Same timezone, but requires airplane flight to meet.

- Local remote: Within driving distance.

Local remote is the best of both worlds and all companies should be doing this. It can be a 3-2 balance (3 days remote, 2 days in office) or 4-1, whatever makes sense for the team and company. Employees get the benefit of remote (flexibility, no commute) and in person meetings (such as designing a new system on a whiteboard). It's sad that so many tech companies (such as Google and FB) don't do this. Considering that it's tech that allows this (with video conferencing, git, slack, etc.), it's ironic that tech companies are so resistant to doing local remote.

TZ remote can work, but it should be only for employees who are already established at the company (spent many years doing local remote). The connections developed during the local remote years will help make TZ remote work. And they can fly to the office a few times during the year to refresh those connections.

Long remote has a lot of issues. The big time zone difference, lack of any history of in-person meetings, and culture differences make it very difficult for this to work.

Nope! This is not a problem brought on by the digital age. It has just become more obvious.

The problem is that popular theories of management are about control. The CEO controls everything. His immediate in-group controls slices. Their in-groups control smaller slices still. If you control nobody, then you are lowest in the primate status structure.

Remote working undermines that, because it removes you from direct control. Managers and execs are in large part unable to usefully evaluate the work of the people under them. (The whole theory of the MBA is that it's a universal management degree, that understanding of a domain is irrelevant.) Which is why we have to spend so much time on control-oriented systems like plans and trackers and reporting. Managers, unable to actually judge the work, fall back on the obvious: physical presence and conformance to ritual.

To fix this, we need an entirely different theory of management, a shift from controlling to supportive. There are plenty of options here (Lean Manufacturing, Servant Leadership, "Teal" organizations, what the Zingerman's businesses are doing, even our pre-MBA business past), but approximately nobody is adopting them because the people with control like having control. And because we have these cultural assumptions that somebody is supposed to be in control.

I have a question regarding the 9-5 working day. Do Americans really work 9-5 and regard this as an 8 hour working day? Or is this a legacy of the old days with paid lunch or such?

I officially work 8.25 hours per day or 8-17 with 45 minutes of lunch, this is roughly the standard working day in Sweden.

This is not the "work world of the future".

What we were promised is 30 maybe even 20 hours of work a week, the location hardly matters.

Instead we get to work even longer hours.

(Edit: The original title is "There's no such thing as flexible work". The title posted here is causing commenters to rail against management.)

The relevant paragraphs:

In other words, the propensity for email, texting and quick-type apps has led us to forget some of our people skills, including distinguishing the nuances of language and meaning, fostering of a feeling of belonging among groups of people, and knowing our bosses and colleagues well enough to have confidence that others will pull their weight. That, in turn, has diminished implicit and earned trust among the people we work with.

Technology has disrupted the workplace – and not always for the better. That lack of trust brings about fear, which goes a long way to explaining why we put in face time, even when we probably don’t need to in order to do our work well. It also can explains why we feel we’ve got to have our “butt in the seat” even if our work could truly be done from the corner café or the back garden.

A big problem, bigger than this even, is that we don't know what a post-industrial economy looks like yet. We don't have all the norms ironed out, and we haven't come to grips with the fact that it'll look different (in basically every way) than an industrial economy. So many of our assumptions are rooted in 19th and 20th century ideas of what day to day work should look like, most of which is based of factory work and routine work. And that's where the 40 hour work week comes from, as well as the 9-5 schedule. Factories have shifts, 9-5 is just the most normal one, 40 hours a week is 1/3 of all weekday hours, it's fairly simple. These norms were designed to fit humans into the system of machinery, to figure out a way they could service the machines 24/7. They've been brought down to reasonable(ish) terms based on decades of work to improve working conditions, but they're still fundamentally norms based on factory work.

Creative work, knowledge work, development, etc, are very much different kinds of work, and they tend to be done in a different way. They don't have the same requirements of factory work (no need for shifts to man machines 24/7 except in a few cases). And they don't take a personal toll the same way. Lots of people fall into the trap of thinking that sitting in an air conditioned office necessarily makes a job easy, even "cushy", compared to physical labor, but that's an archaic notion. The impositions of cognitive labor can be just as severe as physical labor. Stress and bad working conditions in cognitive work can lead to health problems, emotional problems, and shorter lifespans just as easily as physical work can. Stress, psychological abuse, oppression, emotional crisis, all of these things are potentially as life threatening and traumatic as black lung or broken limbs. But whereas we've spent decades and trillions of dollars setting standards for the physical well being of workers in manual labor conditions we have only scratched the surface, with mixed results, when it comes to cognitive well-being.

On the one hand, hours are somewhat tangential to those factors, but on the other hand, when there are conditions which are detrimental to cognitive well-being being the number of hours that must be spent at work often significantly increases the problem. There are many jobs that are tolerable even when they are at 60+ hours a week, and there are other jobs that are intolerable even at 20 hours a week.

I think firms that offer work from home and flexible hours will be able to attract better talent in the coming years, then slowly more will offer it. Eventually people will get smart and start to ask for more money from companies that dont offer these things ("You want me to drive an hour to sit in a box so you can watch me? Sure, that's going to be an extra 20%") once that tipping point is reached things will change.

>> "Our ability to trust each other has not advanced in parallel with the technology we have created"

This is completely false given most employers have way more trust based on using tech to know what they're doing, where they are, etc.

Largest reason that "butts in seats" will go away is in fact due to tech via increasingly "smarter" tech.

My experience is that onsite work is largely driven by more trival concerns such as ego, socializing, etc.

Office space is a huge waste of resources for the major majority of businesses.

Not trusting your employees is simply poor management. There really is no excuse in this day and age to deny remote work to tech workers, other than management is incapable of managing them. When job hunting, I see lack of full time remote positions as a red flag.

This blames digital culture. But the collapse of institutional trust came with the rise of neoliberalism, and convincing people there was no longer any such thing as a job for life. So this set in well before the Internet. It may have furthered it, of course.

I'm currently working 4 hours a day, usually from 10pm until 2am. I'm living in Thailand, so these hours overlap with clients in the US.

I'm still productive, but I'm the only developer working on this project, so I don't think it's ideal. I think I could be about 3x more productive if I was in "startup mode" with a lot of equity. But I don't want to do that for this project, and 4 hours per day suits me very well.

It can be hard to keep saying no, and hold onto my 20 hour weeks. The client keeps talking about bringing me on full-time, and I keep politely declining. But then I've been thinking about saving up to buy an apartment, or a new car, or a vacation to Europe... I might go full-time for a little while to save up for that vacation. But apart from that, I really value my free time.

I spend a lot of my free time working on side projects. But I also really enjoy the freedom to read, or work on filmmaking, music, or other hobbies. Or to go for a walk, sit by a lake, watch TV, or just do nothing at all. I'm also working during the night, so it feels like I have the whole day to do whatever I want.

It's sad that this article only talked about "flexibility", and didn't mention anything about shorter work weeks.

For the most part its pretty much the luck of the draw and I have been pull Aces for many years. Gaining trust is communicating it and backing it up with proof through good work, initiative, and intuitiveness. If those traits are not earning the trust you need then you are likely in a place where it won't matter what you do.

I had a long story written but figured it might reveal too much and give away where I am. I work in a corporate hq, multiple subsidiaries in the same site. The difference in how they are managed is striking, I am in one I describe above. I work more at home than work and most of my on site time is more for me to maintain friendships than anything else.

The difficult part is that by looking at the people in upper management someone coming off the street would mix the two groups up if you told them the stark differences. So its something you either are going to find out from friends who are there or have friends at a location or be willing to spend the time to find out yourself. Just saying, some of the more progressive appearing teams were the most repressive I have ever been around and the so called old school worked up from the field groups were more you earn it you have earned it.

It worked for me. I'm a true digital nomad. I moved out of the US and work whatever hours I want totally remotely. I firmly believe this is the future. Maybe it's taking longer than anticipated but it _is_ happening more and more. Just search "digital nomad" for a taste.

The entire premise of the article seems to be based on the following paragraph and I simply did not understand it:

"In other words, the propensity for email, texting and quick-type apps has led us to forget some of our people skills, including distinguishing the nuances of language and meaning, fostering of a feeling of belonging among groups of people, and knowing our bosses and colleagues well enough to have confidence that others will pull their weight. That, in turn, has diminished implicit and earned trust among the people we work with."

How has has the use of quick-type apps eroded trust exactly? I don't follow this. Can anyone clarify?

Employment isn't just about work output, it's also about availability.

To me this means 'butts in seats' will never disappear, because when you agree to an standard employment contract, you are generally agreeing to be available at the employer's location.

There's a reason it's called human resources. The human is a bit like a tool lying in a toolbox. Even if if the tool is not being used all the time, there is an advantage in keeping it available for when it is needed.

I prefer flexible arrangements to full remote work. Some days one needs face time or in-person collaboration. Some days one needs silence and long stretches of uninterrupted thought for coding.

As technology invades work and automates/assists in most menial tasks, the focus of a job becomes more about improving communication (from increasing productivity earlier).

https://2600hertz.wordpress.com/2016/08/15/the-secret-reason...

I suspect more mentality change is going to be required in the following areas: trust, economic efficiency, value of money, materialism, stigma's, what makes people happy. Or another economic revolution.

I'm absolutely useless if given excessive amounts of freedom. So there's that.