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Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

>Objections to work from home fall apart

Essays from workers like Jen McCown isn't going to work.

What works is to have massively successful businesses that beat the competition because their employees work remotely. Since no multi-billion dollar business has demonstrated that specific cause & effect, the idea doesn't gain traction.

Yes, businesses like Basecamp and Automattic have remote workers but I'm talking about significant business successes on the scale of Google/Apple/SpaceX/etc. If a remote workforce can demonstrate unequivocal superiority, there would be endless case studies about it in Harvard Business Review and every manager would be copying it like the Six Sigma craze a few decades ago.

What the WFH movement needs is evidence of massive business success instead of essays. So far, the real-world evidence just hasn't tipped the scales yet.

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I don't follow your logic.

The vast majority of businesses aren't like Google or Facebook. The vast majority of the nation's GDP isn't created by companies like Google and Facebook. Hundreds of thousands of businesses are the size of Automattic, Basecamp, or smaller. Those businesses employ the the vast majority of workers. Therefore, Basecamp and Automattic are excellent role models.

Unequivocal success does not mean the same thing as Unicorn. A sustainable and profitable business of any size is an unequivocal success.

Just as a side note, I can work from home at Google. I don't do it often, usually only when waiting for a large package to be delivered (new TV, etc) or because of other IRL necessities like people doing works at home or similar. I prefer working in the office with my workstations and my coworkers and environment that keeps me focused, but I have plenty of coworkers that regularly WFH especially on those days (like holiday period) where the office is empty and it'd just be 1 or 2 people banging at the PC, might as well stay home and work from there.

My overall impression that WFH is very frowned upon at Google. Sure, maybe you can use it 2 days a month.

But no thanks, I get to WFH every day. Life is too short to commute.

From what I've seen in my team, it's very subjective. I think it's more of a "you need to have a reason to WFH", it's fine if once in a while you just stay home and work and all that matters is your deliverable, but ideally you should attend to all the meetings you need to and be reachable. If you keep doing WFH every day then yes, that's frowned upon.

I'm honestly neutral on this, I prefer when my coworkers are around me because it's easier for me to interact with them (I noticed I'm a big procrastinator with remote communications, I keep thinking "I'll message them later" or "I'll send the email later", but that's a personal thing), it's easier to have the casual chat that leads to some form of rubber duck debugging or simply just an innocent exchange of opinions that ends up solving a problem/implementing a feature. I honestly don't get that while WFH.

However, some people feel the opposite of me and think they are more productive at home so I'd say leave it to the person to decide and, as the author of the article said, calibrate your employees based on deliverables, not on their presence in the office.

> you need to have a reason to WFH

Personally, I have reasons... I prefer it, I get more done, it cuts out the commute time (which includes a lot more than actual time in the car), it lets me work on things at night when I want to...

Sure, there are negatives too, but there's a heck of a lot of positives, too.

> you should attend to all the meetings you need to and be reachable

Working from home has no real impact on either of those.

> I prefer it, I get more done, it cuts out the commute time (which includes a lot more than actual time in the car), it lets me work on things at night when I want to...

Don't get me wrong, I absolutely agree with you. I don't prefer it but I understand where you are coming from and I think you should be allowed to do so if you find it's better for your productivity.

I find I prefer working from home when writing design docs rather than doing dev work, for design docs I like simply sitting on my couch with my chromebook and be "lazy", whereas if I am developing I prefer a more customized setup with multiple screens and stuff so I have that better at work than at home. Also more coworker interaction.

Whenever I need to write design docs, I simply tell my team I'll be working from home that day and nobody so far has complained.

>Working from home has no real impact on either of those.

Yes and no. I agree with you that it doesn't have a significant impact especially since we usually have people from the other side of the world dialing in the meeting so it's not a huge difference, but I personally think that if everybody is participating in the meeting remotely, it gets harder to talk because there's more chances for talking over each other and the audio/video quality is always impacted by the connection or by the headset quality. So many people have terrible headsets/microphones that really it gets confusing if everyone does so.

But all these are problems that can be simply fixed by providing your employees with the appropriate hardware for it, obviously.

whereas if I am developing I prefer a more customized setup with multiple screens and stuff so I have that better at work than at home.

That may be true at Google, but there are a bunch of supposedly high-tech companies which are happy to give people seriously cruddy workstations. Even though my home setup is actually a 5-year-old monitor on a standing desk I bodged from an off-cut of worktop, it's dramatically nicer than what I have in the main office.

Off-topic: maybe it's time to abandon ship? A company relying on programmers / devops cheaping out on good workstations is a serious red flag.

sometimes it's purely political. The "I as a high rank manager get along just fine with X and Y, why can't everyone else?" mindset lol.

I work for the big G. and I work from home. There's a couple hundred employees that work full time from home, a minuscule amount in comparison to the work force.

I travel to the office every two quarters and I usually get nothing done (meetings, interruptions, etc...)

VC, chat and email makes it possible to do work. Folks saying that they can't, err, "ideate" when they're not together making noise and preventing other people from working just don't know how to use the tools they have.

I do as well. It's very rare, and I've accepted that my career is probably ended at T5 (which is what I'm at). I've had team members promoted to T6 for being individual contributors but I recognize that I've got a very long uphill battle.

Furthermore I have to travel to the office for a week every month and a half or so. That amount of travel sucks, but it's the price I pay for being able to work remotely so I pay it.

How high is t5 for an outsider? Senior engineer without any reports?

T5 is senior software engineer. Some of them have reports, some don't. Some are team leads, some aren't. I'm an "individual contributor" (no reports, not a team lead).

Your syllogism doesn't work. You begin by stating accurately that most companies aren't like Google and Facebook, which is true. Then you implicitly state that Basecamp and Automattic are more representative of most companies, which is patently false in many ways; in the relevant way, it's untrue because most companies do not have remote workers, and most people do not work remotely.

You can't really lead with, "Basecamp and Automattic are closer in size to most companies, and companies of that size employ the most people; therefore they're excellent role models." Size draws a false equivalence, because the remote culture at those two examples depends on far more than size, and they differ from most companies in the same size range.

As for the parent's logic, he is starting from the premise that larger companies have a much stronger signaling effect for business case studies, which in turn prompts changes adopted at other organizations in the same industry regardless of size. I think that's probably a fair premise; it's not necessarily rational, but it's correct that the business practices of large tech companies are reported on, studied and emulated more than smaller companies.

Well, no, I was responding to the claims of the parent comment that stated we need massive businesses to shift to remote work to prove that it's workable. I was only comparing on size, so I think the argument is sound.

As for other factors, of course there are lots of companies and roles for whom remote working won't work, but there are certainly more it would work for than currently allow it - and many of the reasons they don't allow it aren't sensible, which is why I think essays like this that make the argument in favor are useful.

Well, look at it this way. You and I might have our minds changed by insightful essays, but looking at the broader business landscape, which of the following appears more likely to persuade an organization to consider changes?

1) A collection of insightful essays discussing the merits of remote working for amenable cultures, written by people who work at companies that basically only our ingroup is very familiar with; or

2) An academic study explored by Harvard Business Review, which discusses the way remote work at a household name improved productivity in a quantitative way?

There's a herd mentality here. Larger companies impact organizational choices down the size chain. It's very similar to open source software. A large, recognizable company is much more likely to have its open source software adopted by other companies of different sizes. Not necessarily because it's more functional or robust, but very often due to signaling.

As another commenter very adequately put it: if a high-quality engineer can work remotely from a beach-house, they will. And the companies who are adamant in ther on-site policy will be left with the more mediocre engineers.

And I already seen it happen several times in my home country.

Sure, I agree: they're theoretically limiting themselves to mediocre engineers, I guess. But the companies with the greatest potential to effect cultural change in the industry don't really care, because their returns look like this:

https://finance.yahoo.com/chart/AMZN#eyJtdWx0aUNvbG9yTGluZSI...

https://finance.yahoo.com/chart/AAPL#eyJtdWx0aUNvbG9yTGluZSI...

https://finance.yahoo.com/chart/GOOG#eyJtdWx0aUNvbG9yTGluZSI...

Which brings us back to my fundamental premise - companies emulate the business practices of the companies they desire to become (or in the special case of tech, desire to be acquired by). For every company that wants to virtue-signal their remote culture, or be avante garde out of sincere appreciation for the concept, there are many more that don't want to make changes like that without seeing it work at widely recognizable examples. When the companies with the collective lions' share of business signaling power in the industry have returns that look like those, they're not concerned about having mediocre engineers. Privately, they'd probably disagree with you that their engineers are even the competitive advantage.

To reiterate: this is all coming from someone who presently works remotely and enjoys it thoroughly. I just really don't think there are substantive arguments that it should be adopted by companies that don't already have the culture in place.

My turn to agree. :)

I dislike the herd mentality you're describing but I know it's real. And I know that most people are followers -- only when they see something like WFH brings widely recognized benefits from bigger corporations, it's only then when they will follow suit. Sad state of affairs but nothing much can be done.

At the same time, such changes never happen overnight. The returns you're linking to IMO hardly have any meaningful correlation with the on-site vs. WFH work. Engineers must deliver and produce, but the company's bottom line is only partially influenced by the engineers.

> it's untrue because most companies do not have remote workers, and most people do not work remotely

There is work at home and there is remote work. Most companies of any size (more than 1 location), have remote workers. My first job out of college in the late 90s had most of my 'team' spread across the globe in other offices. We got everything done through conference calls and emails. Eventually I stopped going to the office because there was no point. This also was not some super forward thinking tech company, but it was very cost conscious. The cost savings alone led the company down the path of figuring out who could WFH and how to make that work.

The "more than one location" I think is key here.

Considering that we're talking about work outside of a shared office in this context, I don't think this is relevant or a good-faith response to the point at hand. We're not defining "remote" as "more than one location", we're defining it as, "people who don't work in one of the locations."

I think the point the OP is making is that businesses will only adopt WFH when they see other businesses like them do it.

Far from being role models amongst small businesses, businesses like Basecamp, Automattic are seen as outliers if they're really referenced at all. Hell, in some circles even Atlassian is seen as progressive.

Similar in a way to the amount of resistance you see to DevOps style practices / even moving to cloud with lines like "But we're not Amazon/Netflix/Etsy/Soundcloud or one of these modern businesses."

Businesses will be won over by case studies of WFH working with similarly massively conservative cultures.

I am a big proponent of remote work but I think it's harder to manage a remote company. Automattic and Basecamp have excellent people in leadership who have a clear understanding of their company.

A lot of mediocre middleman managers in the typical company aren't capable of setting expectations and evaluating work results.

You need very good workers and leaders in a remote company.

> You need very good workers and leaders in a remote company.

I think that's a point that some people miss. To have remote workers, you need people who can effectively work remotely. It's a learned skill, like any other, and not everyone will be good at it.

Saying "we're only local" or "we're only remote" is a bad idea, you can have both and call it a win on both ends.

"Saying "we're only local" or "we're only remote" is a bad idea, you can have both and call it a win on both ends"

Honestly, I think it needs to be one or the other. Mixing some remote people into an otherwise local team often doesn't work.

A big thing in this thread is "fully remote."

The fact is WFH does not need to be a full time thing for most companies. Just offer it as a benefit-if you want, you can work from home 2 days a week, or WFH if you need to be home to pick up a package or have a doctors appointment.

That alone will make your company much more attractive.

2-3 days per week should be a no-brainer. Especially for developers writing code.

> A lot of mediocre middleman managers in the typical company aren't capable of setting expectations and evaluating work results.

This is one of the key problems. It's not that remote work doesn't work, it's that a bunch of mediocre middle managers only have the "butts in seats" metric to fall back on to answer whether work is getting done.

If a manager is properly tracking progress and managing the pipeline, people working remotely shouldn't be a problem.

So we're gonna cull the "manager" fakers who probably contribute $10,000 to their company's bottom line over a career of 30 years? Sounds like a double win for WFH to me.

>Those businesses employ the the vast majority of workers.

For my own edification, I looked this up.

There are about 125 million full-time employees in the U.S. [0] Of which, there are:

* 35 million Fortune 1000 employees [1]

* 22 million government employees [2]

So, government and the Fortune 1000 account for about 45% of all employment.

I also found a census reckoning [3] (that seems to exclude government altogether) that puts large- and medium-sized enterprises at 65% of all employment (and growing).

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/192361/unadjusted-monthl...

[1] https://www.quora.com/How-many-employees-are-there-in-the-Fo...

[2] http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/terence-p-jeffrey/govern...

[3] https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...

Edited to fix sources.

I think the problem is that lots of companies/managers hire filler. People to run inference or take on the most tedious work. Or just show some semblance of progress. These people need hand holding or constant direction. The worst managers are the ones that don't see this dynamic so everyone gets treated like they need to be micro-managed. I don't think anyone but the unicorns can afford to have a standard where everyone is a rockstar. So companies/managers that can't hire to that standard feel like they can't allow things like WFH because they don't know how or don't want to provide different perks for different people. They know that the ones that do need hand holding will be upset. We already provide disparate compensation in the form of salary but I think the hidden/taboo nature of that makes it more tolerable (at least until it leaks).

Imagine if this strategy was applied to anything outside of business. Let's take the civil rights movement, and argue that the reason why a country isn't ending slavery and then racism and the sexism etc. is because no other country has managed to empirically prove that protecting civil rights is the foundation to national prosperity. And we just utterly dismissed out of hand everybody sitting in and marching and being civilly disobedient in the name of ending injustice.

What the WFH movement needs isn't proof, because you're not going to get proof without first having activists. And if companies like Basecamp and Automattic aren't wildly sucessful, is not evidence against WFH, because clearly WFH is not the sole determinant of business growth and success.

You could make this argument about any benefit, and it would be equally silly. "Blog posts about company provided snacks arent going to move the needle, we need a company that is massively successful because of free snacks before people take notice!"

>You could make this argument about any benefit, and it would be equally silly.

You misunderstand my explanation.

To be clearer, one can argue the "work-from-home" from 2 perspectives:

(1) WFH as a nice employee benefit -- such as ping pong tables, massage chairs, and free food.

(2) WFH as a non-negotiable employer business requirement to be the best most profitable company that crushes the competition. If you don't implement WFH, your business will be extinct.

Regarding (1)... if one only thinks of WFH as part of a "benefits package", the adoption of it will be sporadic and inconsistent among businesses. E.g. "free food" is implemented at Google & Facebook but not at Amazon & Microsoft. Yes, for arbitrary employee benefits, the bar of evidence is much lower (or none) in this case. All of those companies are profitable.

I think a lot of people are more ambitious about WFH and position it as (2). This would be similar to repeated demonstrated evidence of superiority similar to Henry Ford's "assembly line" manufacturing, JIT just-in-time inventory control, software engineering "source revision control", etc. If WFH wants to accumulate respect in this bucket, there needs to be amazing business success that points directly to remote workers as the cause & effect. The author of the essay had some citations promoting the "business productivity" angle which attempts perspective (2) but they are unconvincing for business leaders. In contrast, all 4 companies Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft implement "source code management" and it's an absolute requirement to be productive and competitive.

It would be better if WFH was elevated to the importance of "source code management" than to let it get grouped in with "free food".

Maybe a better example would be health insurance. Health insurance won't directly change productivity, but good luck recruiting skilled people if you dont offer it. Same with WFH in my opinion. A company that offers WFH isnt going to magically become more productive, but it will help to attract top tier talent. I know a lot of people that factor that heavily into their decision making over gimmicks like ping pong tables and free lunches.

I dont see working from home as being a paradigm shifting productivity enhancement but I do see it as something that has been shown to be workable, and companies that refuse to offer it will be at a disadvantage attracting skilled employees that can get that benefit elsewhere.

Silly as it may be, it's how things work. People look for large signs of validation before adopting things they might not agree with or are hesitant to try. Moreso as the stakes (monetary and otherwise) grow larger.

I am a bit confused, isn't this what happened?

But massive business success is only one way for innovations to spread. Many innovations are small, and do spread, by having enough credible positive value, and small enough negative value, for the employer, combined with the right marketing.

Why is this one different and requires that much higher standard of proof ? because i'm not sure that there's much value there, at least today.

So, my first thought was Textbroker. But then I searched and couldn't even find a Wikipedia article profiling them, though I did find this: https://techcrunch.com/2010/10/24/textbroker-raises-multi-mi...

And then it occurred to me that their thousands of writers are not employees. They are 1099 contract positions.

And then I remembered the awful stuff that went down when the Fortune 500 company I worked for created WFH positions for my exact job. It was a big fat nope for me for reasons that boiled down to the company invading my home and trying to control my life in ways I found highly objectionable. And then thing got worse as it went along because they put your quota 30% higher if you worked from home for no real reason. This was literally a figure pulled out of thin air by a person high up in the department.

When they found that people were working 11 hours a day and this was a violation of the law on their end, rather than lower the quota, they just got psycho controlling about how many hours a day you could be logged in. So I guess at that point people needed to log off to go pee in order to preserve the 8 hours a day of work time they were allotted.

This has me thinking that there may be deeper systemic issues with the very concept of a WFH employee than just "Well, it is new and different and weird and it just needs good PR." Perhaps the (apparent) Textbroker model is the actual sane thing: If you want to work from home, you get a contract position and are not classified as an employee.

It sounds more like you just had dysfunctional management, not that the concept is bad.

I am aware they did some really crappy things. Unsurprisingly, the company has shrunk in recent years. I left in part because I was having nightmares that I was on a sinking ship.

None of that precludes the possibility that WFH arrangements may be inherently poorly suited to an employee contract and may be better suited to a freelance type situation.

I thought it was worth tossing the idea out there.

Automattic is absolutely in the top tier of tech companies. I'd put them in the top 10 internet brands in terms of product recognition and impact. They're also a unicorn from a valuation point of view.

I think society is understandably waiting for repeated large scale remote work success before shifting their thinking.

Can we take into account some really big open source projects?

I think that's a great point, but I'd argue that one of the reasons that works well is that the developers are (typically) also the product owners, project managers, etc.

Didn't Google, GitHub, Valve, and some others used to pride themselves that most of the product owners/project managers/etc were also developers?

That's not necessarily something that companies couldn't adopt if it turned out to be a good way to run a remoting-based organization.

What matters for the manager is if the remote employees are bringing the same value and productivity compared to when they were working on-site.

They don't have to prove anything else beyond that.

You're talking about business succeeding because their employees work remote. Sounds like you mean "cofounders", not "employees" however. Employees are often times not directly related to the company's bottom line. Sure if I finish this project on time the company might win over a customer, which is good. But from then on, my employer's income from the customer comes from support, PR, upselling, business negotiations etc. All things I can't even remotely touch while I am in a corporation.

InVision App may not be a Billion dollar company yet, I bet that they are close and they will in 2017-2018 (50 million serie D in 2016). They are an entirely remote company (at least they claim that when doing a demo at work couple weeks ago)

https://www.invisionapp.com/blog/remote-worker-truths/

Hu?

Basecamp and Automattic are basically full remote companies with world wide reach of their products. Automattic is even global marked leader with Wordpress.

What else do you need?

What about IBM? A lot of their workers work remotely.

Not true. The policy was that you could work from home at manager's discretion, but full time work-from-home-employees were sort of rare.

Plus, they are ditching that as we speak.

In the early 2000s IBM asked a lot of people to go full-time WFH so that they could lower their real-estate footprint and consolidate offices.

I guess not anymore. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/05/ibm-t...

How sad lol.

The only way this is even possible is if someone is willing to allow work from home while simultaniusly having a hugely successful business.

Usually when you're on your way to being successful, you hire MBAs to do your people management and those people are the ones suually vehemently opposed to remote work.

Chicken and Egg problem.

> Usually when you're on your way to being successful, you hire MBAs to do your people management ...

Wow. That means that the existing technical staff will be gone in no time. New hirees will have a hard time figuring out how to even just press the "build" button, let alone, add new features. Furthermore, anybody with more than one job offer will never pick the one from an MBA. Therefore, in my impression, the success won't last, because its very reason will have been destroyed.

I think what works is companies losing employees to other companies who have realistic WFH policies.

So, the business success piece doesn't matter. Losing key employees will turn things around quite quickly.

Or it wont, and the business suffers, and maybe eventually fails, maybe eventually doesn't.

Why do companies keep comparing themselves with the big guys? I guess it's why "bigdata" is so popular with all these small firms

github was an example until they changed their policy - no ?

Yup. I'm still sad about that.

Intel not big enough for you?

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