We Can't Let People Work from Home Because | Hacker News Reader

We Can't Let People Work from Home Because

blog.davidtate.org

34 pointssixteenth17 comments

TL;DR - If you ask me to work in your office, you are an idiot. Give me a break. Somehow this kind of condescending, flippant, and blanket stance always comes loudest and most frequently from people who just want to work from home themselves. Almost everyone else seems to understand there is some nuance to the issue.

(At my company we work remotely 95% of the time so I'm not in the opposite camp either, just saying it isn't black and white and this guy's tone is super rude)

I work from home, as well have consulted for many companies on the road, and agree with you.

I personally, will never work in an office regularly, but there is a tremendous amount of variation within companies on their stances on even a consultant working in an office, or remotely.

You'd think that because they have to pay me gobs of money to fly me on site, they'd be far less interested that I was onsite. This is wrong.

For one month, they'd spend maybe, 2000 a week to have me onsite, then adding in my actual costs.

Seems ridiculous, but most companies preferred that arrangement. The more tech savy the company was, the less they were interested in me being in an office.

> But we can’t let our people not see each other, they won’t communicate well.

I disagree with this point. Yes, people can communicate effectively from afar, but can they communicate as well as they could if they were sat in a room? I don't think so.

So you get open space. Then we put on headphones because it's noisy. Then we communicate via IM because it's easier and less disturbing. Then you have a bunch of people sitting next to each other communicating over IM.

In my personal experience, there is no difference between a team of people working remotely vs. a team of people sitting in the same open space.

My boss and I sit in adjacent cubicles and we often use IM for that exact reason.

There are differences between working in an office all together and working remotely, and there are definite benefits to being in person, no matter what anyone says, but I've worked off-site for roughly half my career, and I am able to be very effective doing so.

The only downside I've found is from being off-site is that I miss being around people more, so when I was working off-site, I started doing a lot more volunteer stuff that became a little more of a burden when I started back in the office with the concomitant loss of 1.5-2 hours a day or so in free time.

In general, I prefer to work in an office, but my company is moving to the dreaded "open office" plan in about a month, and it's already caused me a lot of stress because I have a hard enough time blocking out distractions in a cubicle. I'm not looking forward to seeing what it's going to be like, but I fully expect to be exercising whatever options are available for working off-site.

That's also my only nitpick on the article's list. Interpretation of messages from coworkers happens in an emotional context, and if you don't refresh that context every now and then (weekly?), strange things happen. Like, people start arguing because minor nitpicks expressed without any malice are interpreted as "you suck, shame on you for making that mistake" - or vice versa.

You can get around this by hiring level headed people. High maintenance people will cause trouble if you are in an office daily or remote. No difference.

Or have a daily standup over a video medium (hangouts, Skype, etc) with a general BS, err, watercooler, discussion before and after.

A standing video conference room that's always open for impromptu discussions helps as well.

Being in a room full of people is annoying and distracting, and tends to make me shove headphones in my ears. This happens to everyone else in the room, too, which means most of the communication is done via Hipchat or Slack anyway.

I agree that being in a room full of chatting people is annoying; that's just a poor work environment full stop.

In my opinion, communication between a few like-minded people around a whiteboard, large screen or projector is an easier process than orchestrating it in a chat tool or conference tool. Don't get me wrong, both work well and are better than nothing, but it's just 'easier' to do it 'IRL'

I don't think ones better than the other per say. It's just different.

I've been in meetings in a room full of people knowing that absolutely no one wants to be there, and no one really knows what they're doing there.

I've been online talking one to one with someone and completely not understood what they were talking about.

Both have pros and cons and the appropriate medium can be chosen based on the situation that's needed.

I'd argue it's a very rare event that a lot of people really need to be in a room together to communicate; when they do a lot more pre-room preparation needs happen than I normally see. ;)

seems like mix of both home and office work could work well --- work at home at the tasks that are most productive in a home environment and come into the office to collaborate on problems together and do things that can't be done as well at home.

I would like to see more work from home 2-3 days a week and 2-3 days in the office type of arrangement.

I like this idea too.

There is a rational excuse for every bad decision in history.

When the arguments for certain practices that are highly consequential become obvious, simple, predictable, perhaps even tautological, I usually take it as a sign that the whole thing is likely unfounded.

You'd think some company would measure how productive their engineers are in "open office" or strictly on-prem working environments and resolve the matter firmly rather than blindly following the prevailing wives tales, but as far as I'm aware just about every aspect of "management" is not up for consideration.

(Just don't let them catch on to the fact that finding someone's name in Slack is actually pretty easy and that getting things down in writing is always a better idea than relying on people's verbal memory for critical transfer of information, and that the less an engineer is distracted and the more comfortable he is the better he will perform)

Get some processes going and you're all set for remote work.

Problem is, most smaller companies don't have processes, because they have some management that doesn't know the tiniest bit about management.

Throw a few people in an office, they will see each other on a daily basis and maybe talk about business and things will go okay. This is was most managers think is management. This doesn't scale, even if you have everyone working in one office.

I think as a society we are collectively losing the ability to manage people. It seems management breaks down into two groups... really good technical people who were promoted, but don't necessarily know anything about or have the skills for management, and "professional" managers who might have an MBA or other similar training, but often don't know jack about what they are actually managing. Both are less than optimal.

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