Personally, I don't really buy it. There are trade-offs with remote workers. They are harder to collaborate with, and they generally require more process to manage. On a huge team you might need all that process anyway, but if you only have 5-10 devs in the same office you can operate pretty lean. Stick a couple of them at home 5 days a week, however, and things need to be more actively managed.
Tech workers today are doing alright. We make six-figure salaries, have our health care paid for, and, because we are in demand at them moment, are frequently pampered by our employers. So feel free to leverage that demand to insist on working remotely if that is what you want, but don't treat it as something you are owed out of fairness or suggest that a company is stupid if they don't adopt it. There are many companies and engineering managers who want their employees on site for good reasons, not just to "mind" them, and it is probably for many of the same reasons that startup incubators and accelerators generally require relocation.
Well, housing in areas with tech jobs has gotten really expensive. As in, $500k USD minimum for a decent house. It's insane, and remote work is the easiest solution with the least politics involved.
Basic 2-bedroom condos in the general vicinity of an East Bay BART stop seem to run $700-900k; SF proper with any hope of a short walk or bike ride to downtown, $1.3 - $2 million. There are $500k houses, but they're in Richmond.
I think to be $500k, a condo would have to be far from transit in the East Bay, but such places are mostly single family homes.
You may and I may, but the vast majority of tech workers do not make six-figure salaries. Ironically, you may be insulated from that fact due to limited geographic mobility in terms of professional life.
Commuting has become absolutely insane. Mandating people to sit around in an office for a condsiderable amount of their time regardless of if they produce anything of value is equally insane.
Remote work is a solution to many current societal problems (not the least of which is pollution).
But (as 'eli_gottlieb pointed out) the only people who can do that are those who can afford to relocate to San Francisco or perhaps a few other places, and the initial cost of that is increasing commensurate with demand.
We have, in the tech industry, found a very good way of creating interesting and well-paying jobs that will outlast a lot of the coming automation. We have so many of those jobs, and they keep being created, such that, as you say, workers are in an unusually good negotiating position compared to other industries.
Meanwhile, the housing supply in San Francisco is much closer to fixed; of course if they don't decide to build housing it's very fixed, but even so there's only so much land there. So if the demand for workers continues to be high, the price of housing will continue to increase.
It is a class issue to extend these benefits to people who otherwise couldn't afford the initial investment to relocate to San Francisco in this market and the emergency fund to keep living in San Francisco past unicorn-collapse-of-the-week while looking for new work. If we figure out how to increase supply to keep up with what looks like unquenchable and long-term demand, we'll be solving a major crisis for thousands of small towns that aren't San Francisco.
I don't need remote work for myself; I have the good fortune to be a 10-minute (NYC) subway ride from my tech job. I want remote work for all the people who could be my coworkers.
The answer, as it always has been, is sprawl. We can't sprawl with cars anymore: land is too valuable to park on. So we're bidding with our time: moving to further-out transit stops, walking farther to the stations, tolerating increasing crowding on the trains (losing the ability to work and read). People who nominally make $50+/hour are spending 2, 3 hours a day commuting from their $2500/mo apartments.
I don't mind being a passthrough for the transfer of wealth between tech investors and real estate investors. I am growing increasingly resentful about the hours of my life that I'll never get back, shuttling back and forth from where housing is affordable.
I could technically live close to work, but not with an emergency fund. Maybe with roommates, but that's even worse.
Working remotely should be the default, not the outlier.
If your organisation requires personal presence something in your organisation is broken (management processes, the way people interact, obsolete tools etc.). Fix that instead of patching what's broken by mandating personal presence.
Chances are not only will your employees be happier but you'll also uncover potential for optimisation.
there is no reasoning behind these policies. it's just someone's decision. you'd be surprised at how much business 'logic' is really just arbitrary choices.
the way to fix it is to quit and work for someone/some place that has a sane policy. these social shifts take decades to fully manifest because old rich people don't like changing their way. because they're old, and they're rich. why should they? they're old and rich, remember?
you do you, don't try to fight against what can't be changed.
For thousands of years the majority of work occurred in collocation with other people doing the same work as you. Now we have technology that allows for remote work and there are a lot of companies taking advantage of it.
Over time the default will become remote if the specific job allows it. I imagine at some point beyond the default will become remote regardless of the task.
But you can't expect people to change the entire organizational structure of their business overnight "because Slack!"
So I don't think this is a problem with "old rich people".
but that's just like, my opinion, man.
And while I may be biased by being a decade older, "mid-forties" doesn't seem old for a senior manager.
In any case, unless someone is truly wealthy, you can't say "Oh well they don't care about their job because they are rich", because they need that job, and if they are a poor manager, they'll lose that job.
my point stands, and i'm doubling down on it. go check out the rest of america and the world, and you might see what i mean.
A small to mid sized startup manager is not (usually) rich enough to not need his job or care about job performance.
Sometimes I can work from home if I prepare work in advance to account for it (e.g. collect data from the hardware to enable offline testing), but it's extra overhead.
> If your organisation requires personal presence something in your organisation is broken
Please tell, what's broken in my org?
> Please tell, what's broken in my org?
What I'm getting at with this is that if personal presence is mandatory you should have an actual reason for that. Your organisation obviously does.
The more usual reason for mandatory personal presence unfortunately is "Because it's always been done this way and we like to see butts in seats because we don't trust our employees nor do we know how to manage what they're working on or how to measure their results."
The problem isn't just working from home, it's "how do you give enough developers/testers" access to the equipment when each unit requires such a high upfront cost and ongoing maintenance and physical space, supplies, etc? So even if everyone is working in the lab, it's still a problem.
Our response was to create extremely detailed simulations of every aspect of the behavior. The code ran on our laptops exactly the same way it would on physical hardware. By simply flipping a switch in a config file, the software would either run on real hardware, or start up with simulated hardware.
Of course, we still needed to test on real hardware, but because we were forced to create the simulation to allow enough developers simultaneous access, it also made it easier for us to work from home :-)
I can't really argue with the results, the company is doing exceptionally well. Employees are generally happy (perhaps even excited) to work there, so I disagree that the organization is "broken". We're still a small-ish company, engineering is around 75 people and we all sit in the same area of the office. As we grow, then I imagine that this "in-person" effect (if it exists at all) will diminish
It's completely ridiculous, but you just can't get through to some people, no matter how logical your challenges are. The only reasoning I can see is that our COO is also the VP of Sales (small company), and he values "face time", and "body language", and "reading the room", and some such nonsense that only applies to sales and negotiations, but not production.
There are loads of people who watch Netflix all day at my company, but full time remote isn't offered to everyone.
Why do you categorically say that something is broken if it requires personal presence?
If personal presence is mandatory you'd have a very good reason for it (as in GuiA's case above).
If your main field is hardware related, it's probably necessary.
But a software developer, a sales person, a marketer?
I'm a huge fan of remote work, I've had a full-time remote position previously, I just think sometimes it doesn't work with the culture of a team or business. I don't think that means anything is broken.
Don't you wonder why politicians hold town meetings in person?
Edit: Also, if your org doesn't require personal presence it is vulnerable to some attacks.
Because town meetings are a performance. I prefer a live performance over a canned version, too (such as watching a well-crafted presentation instead of a YouTube recording). There's absolutely nothing against meeting people in person. Those meetings should count however. They should mean quality time (instead of a synonym for "Free doughnuts and countless person-hours wasted.").
> If your organisation requires personal presence something in your organisation is broken (management processes, the way people interact, obsolete tools etc.). Fix that instead of patching what's broken by mandating personal presence.
Maybe I'm not enough of a smartphone-enabled digital native for the 21st century, but there are actually social benefits to seeing and interacting with people in-person. Work is a social activity.
> Chances are not only will your employees be happier but you'll also uncover potential for optimisation.
No, I really doubt it. Maybe it would make a few people happier, but I really doubt it would be general. I've worked remotely with people and they never feel fully-fleshed out vs. the coworkers I regularly interact with in person. It would kinda be nightmarish for my entire workday to be like that.
The "optimization" aspect is probably even more unappealing, and reeks of the kind of narrow and aloof thinking that lead to Soviet continuous production weeks [1], which made it difficult for workers to maintain a social life.
I'm not saying that remote work should be totally banned. I think the flexibility offered by allowing people to do it occasionally is very humane, and perhaps it could help people who have some kind of condition that makes it hard for them to interact directly with others. However, it just doesn't seem wise to have remote work be the default.
[1] http://calendars.wikia.com/wiki/Soviet_revolutionary_calenda...
One interesting consequence though is when both partners in a marriage work from home. In a situation where one or both partners work outside of home, some of the stress that comes with intensely being together all the time is not there. When both partners work from home, though, that can get interesting. I know this because my wife also works from home. I don't think the general populace is quite ready for that yet (you won't see advice for this yet on the self-help section of the bookstore), though it is something that can still be worked out.
Which gets at another problem of remote work: communication that feels effortless in-person becomes something that requires what feels like "harassment" (in your words) to be effective remotely. When I was working on a geographically split team, it felt like two gigabit LANs joined by a dial-up WAN link, since the in-person communication was so much more effective.
Humans have literally spent at least hundreds of thousands of years talking to each other in person. That software has probably had more effort and refinement put into it than Slack, Skype, and Outlook put together.
Humans might have spent at least hundreds of thousands of years talking to each other in person, but only a fraction of that commuting by cars, or even having the notion of jobs, or even the notion of "productivity". Further, the same arguments you made are the same arguments made in any given era.
I do think it is mentally healthier to not be so addicted to technology, to have 1-on-1 personal communications. But generally-speaking, the sense of self-worth, validation, etc. for the vast majority of people at their jobs is suspect. The quality of 1-on-1, personal communication has more to do with what mindfulness meditators call "presence": how much your awareness is in the presence in the here-and-now, and less to do with whether you are intermediating that communication through technology. Much of the social communication tend to be on the superficial side, even without technology.
Being present is either the most difficult thing you will ever do, or the most effortless.
Tangent: Buckminster Fuller once characterized words and language as human's first technology. One that follows the ephemeralization pattern such that it disappeared (we are no longer generally conscious of language as a technology).
Communication is a mental process, transportation is not, so they're not really comparable areas of change. I'm not making some kind of Luddite argument for the way things were. The point I'm getting at is that remote work partisans often have a over-simplified model that misses the benefits of in-person presence. Human beings have a lot of support for communicating with each other in-person, verbally, non-verbally, unintentionally, etc. which often doesn't translate well to remote work scenarios. Many of the social aspects translate even more poorly.
I'm just going to skip the philosophical stuff about worth and meditation because it doesn't really have anything to do with what I was talking about.
Transportation changes the psychology of individuals and the social dynamics. It affects mental processes, so yes, they are comparable.
> The point I'm getting at is that remote work partisans often have a over-simplified model that misses the benefits of in-person presence. Human beings have a lot of support for communicating with each other in-person, verbally, non-verbally, unintentionally, etc. which often doesn't translate well to remote work scenarios.
Fair enough. I agree with that statement, though I still strongly prefer remote work for myself. Some other thoughts:
1. No technology is going to completely replace in-person presence. Rather than trying to work around it, one should be looking for what remote work enables that cannot be done with in-person presence.
2. Philosophical questions about worth has a lot to do with this topic, even if it does not seem like it to you. There is a bias towards in-person work because there is a conflation and confusion on what work is about, and what communication is about.
3. The same with meditation. The ground state in which one can see a lot of narratives and hangups clearly also reveals a lot of weird things underpinning a lot of people's motives for working onsite or working remotely. However, I don't expect this to be convincing to you or anyone else. It is something to be experienced rather than read about.
Thanks for engaging, it's been fun chatting.
It is the same problem we face with remote offices - closer is considerably better unless we figure a way to be omni-visible in a better way. I don't think a good enough solution exists yet. It doesn't help that people associate working from home with laxer schedules / attire / locations etc. which also interferes with the omni-visible thing.
1. Zoom (or Hangouts, or etc., in other words, video)
2. Slack
3. Sometimes email
4. Sometimes phone
We use video and Slack quite a bit.
Both my current full-time job and in my last full-time job with a distributed team, every so often, people are flown in together to meet up, hang out, and build relationships.
So as I mentioned in one of my responses above, remote work is not intended to 100% replace in-person relationships. Video and Slack did not build the same kind of experience I had when I flew into San Francisco and spent some time strolling towards the Golden Gate Bridge park with two of the other team members while talking about life, rather than work. Not everything about building relationships with other people has to do with being productive.
I've found the idea "impromptu hallway conversations" come up so often, I suspect it is a kind of echo-chamber narrative that hasn't really been examined for what it is. Having said that, when I visited my team, the office was hosted in a co-living space. I had a lot of impromptu hallway conversations ... outside of the team with all sorts of people, perspectives, philosophies. But that is not the normal experience people have when working onsite, either.
"General social bonding" isn't always what it is cracked up to be. Most people do not allow themselves sufficient honesty or vulnerability to have real conversations. It's more the case, social interactions often has more to do with people's masks and social selves interacting.
By the same token, I have found that effective use of Slack following the Kanban principle of "Make Work Visible" allows me to communicate in a way that I can't easily do with an on-site presence.
I've also seen co-living/co-working spaces where couples live and work with other family groups within the same building.
However, I also think that the Millennial generation did not generally grow up with this. Remote work also adds a different dimension too, if each partner of the couple are working with different teams remotely, rather than working together, and each partner does not have visibility into what the other partner is doing all day.
Pretty hard to run a repair center for physical items without people physically present to do the work.
I'm an IT contractor. My last contract was at a defence company, so I understand needing to be on their network and it was only 25 minutes away.
The current one is anything from 70 to 90 minutes each way and they have nothing on site, it's all in the cloud. But they insist we turn up in the office. It's utterly ridiculous. I would happily split the difference on travelling and work an extra hour per day (i'm on a day rate) but both parties lose for no reason at all.
FWIW my day is spent on Slack, Github and their cloud provider. I need to see if Gitlab are hiring for devops / sysadmins as they've got the right idea.
Gitlab just posted in the who's hiring thread, so I guess that's a yes :D
Hmm. No one responded self-driving cars as a solution. Maybe with internet connectivity built-in so people can work en route.