Workplace flexibility is the way to win the war for talent
venturebeat.com
venturebeat.com
If I just maximize for cash earned, I need to compensate for other things. I want to maximize free time and minimize commute. I have errands to run and things to do. Having flexible work, with a work from home option is worth more to me than making more money. Otherwise, I need to spend more on an apartment close to the office. A more expensive car can make a commute more bearable. I value peace and quiet, and city living is at odds with this. Reconciling all this while working a 9-5 at a central office in the city costs a lot of money.
I currently work at 15Five, where "Embrace Freedom & Flexibility" is one of our core values. We actually are active in living this and our other core values. You can feel the effect directly. I have spent a lot of time thinking about this, and arrived at the same conclusion as this article.
There's also something to be said about attention and creativity in most coding/tech jobs. I could sit at my desk all day writing marginally efficient code, or I could take a 1-hour break to do something else, come back and write really exceptional code, but most work cultures frown on doing this regularly.
If you're full (or mostly) remote, you can regulate this yourself
But after preaching it for a decade, I realized that working for yourself implies to develop a certain skill set and embrace another set of constraints many people don't wish for them-self. There is a lot of comfort in being an employee.
PS: It's often the case where people get a little warning and end up finding a job before they get laid off. From the companies perspective the trade off is a little more chaos up front for significant savings on unemployment insurance.
...except the 10k part.
Every time I've went on unemployment, it was waaaay less than 10k - if I managed to get 1000 bucks a month it was a miracle. Last time I did it (years ago) I let the money sit in the bank at Chase because I had lost track of the debit card they (unemployment) sent me. Until at a certain point they had to close out the account. This was years later, and I had (mostly) forgotten all about it. I had to go down to the bank and prove who I was to withdraw it.
So - why did I let it sit? Didn't I need it? Well - no, not really. I applied because I could; I was laid off my previous job, so I thought "hey, why not, I earned it, right?". So I applied. Kept my notes and log and such. But before I got the confirmation and debit card, I had a new job. Before that, I just used my savings (actually, I don't even think I had to dip into that - I had more than enough to cover things in my checking, after the severance pay).
When I finally did withdraw the money, it was something like $400 or so for a couple of weeks.
10k over 6 months? Right...
The high is 430 * 52 / 2 = 11,180 and the low is 430 * 52 / 2 = 1,300. But, again before taxes.
When I look back at my earlier career it was quite volatile compared to doing my own thing.
However, one significant risk is losing out on promotions and status if you ever want to return to the corporate world. Seniority is often measured in "time in seat" and taking 10 years off to build your own business can make it harder to jump right back in at a level you'd expect.
The other risk is the stress of uncertainty. At a corporate gig you get a paycheck every two weeks like clockwork. The moment that pattern ends, panic ensues and the company is gone. When you work for yourself you have to be responsible for ensuring the paycheck is there. Quite often freelance work can be feast or famine. You may get a bigger payday than you ever expected one month but prepare because the next month might not bring in a dime.
That's provided you'd actually ever want to return to the corporate world. Measures like "time in seat" make me wonder why given other options anyone would ever want to work in such an environment in the first place.
> Quite often freelance work can be feast or famine.
That certainly can be a challenge but there are approaches to alleviate that problem. It's mostly a matter of getting (and staying) organised and regularly keeping in touch with both existing clients and potential new ones.
Which country is that? I've only ever heard of monthly salaries for professionals.
Note that Z can be less than 1.
When you're running your own firm (even one person), you are in charge of catching billable work, doing the billable work, billing the work, filing the taxes, etc, etc. If you add anyone else, the non-billable efforts get even bigger. I ran my own firm for ~7 years and had a team of 8 at one point. Hunting the next project just got exhausting and I never got to build things.
If you work for another firm - consultancy or product - the vast majority is handed off to other people who are probably better at (or at least focused on) many of those things. Yes, you make less money but you're "paying" to have all those things done for you.
But there's no guarantee on any of the intangibles. And whenever they need to save a buck, or even in ways that aren't fully appreciated, the good-workplace stuff can erode. After spending a while in this industry, I'd say places are more alike than different, and total compensation is a reasonable thing to maximize for.
There is no single right answer to that question so you need to figure it out for yourself.
Some of the answers require you to work 80+ hours a week (at a good job) while living in a tent so you can save every penny - when you finally retire at 68 you will just barely have enough money to enjoy the last 5 years of your life spending all the money you saved over the years.
Some answers you save 50% of your income until you retire at 40 to live the life you choose.
Some answers you save 10% until 65 working a 40 hour a week job.
The first allows you have an expensive hobby (sail the world in a very nice yacht). The second means you have to enjoy not buying anything. The last is a reasonable compromise for most of us.
At my current company we state it as "you're all adults, and that's how we treat you." We have hired some people who needed more structure and they had to move on. There is no judgement on people who left, not every position is right for every person.
Take google catering your lunch every day and night. It might be costing google 25 U$S per meal to provide that to the employees. Would the employee, not having that option, spend 25 U$S a meal? No way. But do employees choose or prefer companies that cater lunch?
Lets say google can offer an employee a double offer: either full benefits and salary of X, or NO benefits and salary of Y. What is your Y?
In general I would always think that most people will take Y, precisely because most of the benefits are very costly. Y could be 30%.
Now, there is a difference in taxes: that extra Y will get taxed at 30%, while googles benefit cost might even have tax deductions. So the gap between X and Y is blurred by rules that applied differently.
If company benefits were not only deductible, but expenditure there were considered part of wages and taxed at that rate, they would quickly diminsh if not dissapear.
It sounds like a great perk but in Canada* in-kind benefits, including meals, are considered part of your salary, and are subject to income tax.
I'm not sure how that plays out with daily catered meals; am I deemed to have received the benefit even if I eat out or bring leftovers? I could be paying taxes on food I haven't eaten. Probably not cheap food either.
I'd prefer being paid in cash, and having the option to buy meal vouchers. That's true of most benefits - cash is always more flexible.
There's also what it says about the culture: we offer free breakfast because we expect you to be at the office before your usual breakfast time. We offer free lunch because we don't expect you to have enough time to go out for lunch, or to pack a lunch the night before.
*For federal income tax. YMMV on provincial tax.
https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/forms-publi...
Things usually start turning south when managers just simply demand speed. Or eagerness. Or dedication. Or other bullshit which has no relevance regarding any specific task.
These are the cases which brilliantly show the lack of management skills. These are the kind of little men who demand you to be at the office all time. You can call them control freaks, or micro-management fetishists. It doesn't matter. These people just show one thing with their behaviour: that they don't trust their subordinates.
If you want input into your work and the feeling that you are actually doing the right thing you need to have the context around your goals. Your physical presence in the offices lets you take part in "water cooler" and "hallway" conversations with various people.
Yes you can do some of that via email, forums, and the like. However the human factor of your presence changes the tone of the conversation. It isn't just you either, the other person(s) involved.
When you have a short, critical, task that needs to be done fast, then staying home without a phone or email is the best way to get it done fast. However for anything else communication is an important part of your job and physical presence aids that.
That isn't to say remote work cannot - it does. However there are real disadvantages to it that need to be considered.
And you are basically trying to put words in my mouth. I didn't say a word that I will do what I am told without concern. That's only your implication.
Correct me if I am wrong, but you imply that because requirements are usually unclear: that means that clear goals are undesirable. Does that sound logical to you? Because to me that's a big no-no. I only saw people pushing this kind of mentality who like to fish in troubled waters and enjoy the mess to take advantage of it for their own sake (i.e. climbing corporate ladders).
And let me highlight one thing: if I am supposed to clear things up and organize my work, than what is my manager supposed to do? In this world that you imagined there is no role for a manager IMO. And that would be pretty much fine with me. It's just far from reality.
I won't subscribe to the idea that the office is a rainbow colored fairytale. I am coming from the exact opposite direction of thinking.
That is not to say that it cannot be done remotely. In fact, in most large tech organizations, the highest autonomy positions will almost certainly entail a lot of remote collaboration (with customers, sales, suppliers, support, remote engineering teams, etc.). However, the more autonomy one is granted, the more context one needs to make the correct decisions. Context requires access to high-signal information sources (i.e. relationships with the right people). Being in the office is a good way to discover those information sources.
You also have to make yourself highly visible. You can certainly do that while being remote, but there is more conscious effort involved.
[0] https://rkoutnik.com/2016/04/21/implementers-solvers-and-fin...
Can't speak for GP, but my view is the latter can't be accomplished without some direct, in person interaction today. The future, with more robust collaboration tools, may be different.
The mess you are talking about is fact. Maybe this is because managment sucks, but it's still a fact. Goals & requirements are unclear. This is a fact almost everywhere. Very few people (definitely programmers) have very clear requirements and goals to work against.
So, I agree with you that having clear goals and requirements is a path to virtual workplaces. But, I think this is a troublesome route. Clarity is elusive. If it wasn't elusive, all the outsourcing efforts of 10 years ago would have been more successful.
Computers are against us on this. If something is very clearly defined, it is a candidate for automation, outsourcing and such. The stuff we're left with is the poorly defined mess. That's why we have so much of it.
My implication is not that you do what you are told without concern. My implication is that remote workers in general lack critical knowledge of that should shape what their concerns are. Knowledge that you only can get by keeping in touch with lots of different people. (example, last week I was talking to an engineer who had to stay late because a bunch of others subtly broke the build system - In 10 minutes I had a solution so nobody would have to touch that part again. As the build system maintainer I have the knowledge to do that, while most people don't really understand the big picture. If I was remote I never would have learned of this issue)
Yes clear goals are undesirable because requirements are unclear. As others have pointed out, your value has a human is ability to make sense of unclear requirements. Once you make sense of the requirements you automate them. You are not a factory worker doing the same thing over an over again on an assembly line.
The office is not all rainbows - far from it. However there are real advantages to them that cannot be ignored.
You should have been involved officially when the issue happened. What if you never had that conversation. Luck shouldn't play a part.
Communication is the key piece and easy access to face to face can hide a lack of process. Remote or in person you should have gotten an alert.
First of all, the guy doing the manual process didn't even realize that it was easy to automate. So he never would have invoke the processes.
Even ignoring the above, the official process is by nature too heavy. It would cost over hundred man-hours by the time the proposal is written, put before a committee, acted on, the proper story wrote, and someone assigned to the write the code. In the mean time 6 months have passed and the first guy thus spent another 2 hours doing it manually. That is 100 hours on a manual process that ultimately costs the company 4 hours a year over the expected 15 year life of this project - the math does not work out. Oh, and the committee includes marketing who don't really care about engineering tools (they should not!), so the end result would be the process remains manual because the final decision is this isn't worth doing - and it isn't worth the time it would take to make them understand why they should do it.
There is a reason for official processes. There is a reason companies give trusted people authority to ignore them for trivial things.
Agree 100%, the less you act like a cog in a machine the less people will treat you like one. Lots of developers seem to want to log in to a system every day and just have a list of tasks they have to complete without any real collaboration or divergent thought and have their salary calculated by % of task completion.
In my experience the people who collaborate in the office and try to push things further are the ones easily granted autonomy and no longer have to answer to micromanagement. Managers can see the difference between a box ticker and the breakouts that are actually making a difference at the company, once you achieve that then you'll notice people stop questioning what time you turn up to the office if at all.
If you're an employee you are a "code monkey" to one degree or another. If you do not need clear goals, Work for yourself.
You don't need dozens of people above you telling you what to do and extracting part of your paycheck if you can figure it out and execute it on your own.
Each level of the chain requires understanding of what the business needs. I need to make autonomous decisions every day that ultimately the CEO stands behind. The composite of all the good decisions (enough better be good) results in the success of my company and the CEO will take credit for it. However all the CEO says to me is "we will be the global leader in [the generic area my project is in]" in an all company meeting. Every step down the chain has just been filling in details.
Most of the interview processes in tech are geared towards hiring for this exact role. There's some ego stroking involved, but for the most part the sorts of "code trivia" questions candidates jump through are basically "can you implement this algorithm or data structure" correctly. They don't actually test problem solving ability.
So it seems to me for he kinds of trivial work most of us in the industry are doing your objection is a bit immaterial.
Some of us are engaged in more complex work, and I agree 100% with you about that. Remote doesn't quite cut it most of the time for that sort of thing.
A nice backlog of tasks that need done along with high level goals we'd like to achieve (but no solid tasking to make happen) is a beautiful thing. Unfortunately, it isn't free and takes effort. Which is a large part of what a manager should help with.
I find that in-person discussions about said topics is more counter-productive than productive since in-person meetings sometimes inadvertently suggests you have a fixed time-frame within which to come to a conclusion. And the "debatable" topics generally aren't going to be acted on immediately. There needs to be coordination and planning when you all come to a conclusion that a particular strategy is going to be the way forward, and a lot of times assumes you're probably going to break backward compatibility so it won't be released until a major version bump.
It also sounds like you haven't experienced a fully remote team working. You don't miss out on the physical presence because it is not there to miss and people make up for that absence in other ways. All the water-cooler/hallway conversations are then there, online, in the chat rooms or what not.
Yeah, this is so true.
I think the task with an clear process to do it have an clear goal. But other than that, tasks that's very vague such as design an API, design schema to efficient some kind of certain query usually requires a bit of art, and we learn from the mistake/success of last similar project to improve this one.
Arguably, I need talented individuals forming good teams to clarify the goals and to have direct input to the roadmap. Reducing people to implementors may not be great for morale, motivation and engagement. Some people want their input to be more than their code, and rightly so.
At the extreme end of that statement, you might even say that if goals and tasks are welll enough defined, post-work-AI-automation-Jeremy-Corbyn. :)
For most jobs, tasks and goals are not clearly defined. That's why managing and being managed is hard.
It's a 200 pay cut per day.
However factoring in expenses in fuel and parking and car wear, and the 10 hours of time lost commuting per week. I'm counter-intuitively better off by the equivalent 200 per day.
Reason being my time spent NOT commuting is invested in my bootstrapped startup. If I had to commute, I was essentially earning money by sitting in traffic rather than coding, which had to be spent to an offshore developer while I'm in a car instead of at my machine. So that including expenses in commuting will erode my net income. Not to mention the stress and health and mental performance impact commuting does to you. Sitting in traffic, cognitively processing the driving, finding a car park, walking ten minutes from a car park to premises.
My motivation and energy is sapped by the time I'm in the office. And more so by the time I get home.
Prior to this I was doing the commute to make sure the boss sees me gig for a year and compared to now, the difference in performance I notice is remarkable.
If you've gotten back two hours a day, that's a massive quality of life improvement!
If you're going to be talking about "HR issues" out in the open, you can only say certain things. Things people like. The "skeptics of completely virtual organizations" or opponents of flextime, increased holidays, work-life balance, on-site childcare, employee empowerment, higher pay.... they can't exactly blog about it and get an applause. But clearly, they still set the agenda.
I want those things like everyone else does. I'm also pretty sympathetic to a lot of the arguments that they are good for business. But, we can't have a discussion when only one side speaks. I am somewhat skeptical about an existing large company virtualizing itself without major teething issues. I know very little about these thing, so who cares..
Anyway, where's the CEO blog on "why I make everyone work 9-5." or "never allow anyone to work from home." I know you're out there. Speak your piece!
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/hard-thing-software-developme...
Here's Marissa Meyer doing exactly that [1]:
To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side. That is why it is critical that we are all present in our offices. Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings. Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together.
[1] http://allthingsd.com/20130222/physically-together-heres-the...
[2] https://www.fastcompany.com/3020930/yahoo-says-that-killing-...
"I'm a petty control freak who needs to constantly supervise his subordinates in order to feel valuable."
Well, good for you sir!
The only arguments against remote work I keep hearing are the quite hazy "Face time is better." and "Water cooler talk is valuable." ones. Nobody making those arguments seems to be willing to substantiate them, though:
Why exactly is face time better? If it is certainly it should be sufficient to just occasionally have people talk face to face, shouldn't it? Then why have everyone in the same office every time, all the time?
If creative, serendipitous talk only happens around the proverbial water cooler you might have a deeper problem with the communication flows in your organisation. Perhaps information silos are your real problem in that case.
I think that reluctance towards remote work often points to more fundamental issues within an organisation.
"I require my workers to be in the office because if I don't constantly ride them, they will be on Facebook/Reddit/etc. all the time instead of working.
This is due to hiring second-string developers that I can pay less than self-motivated superstars.
I have consciously made this decision because I can extract more useful work for less money out of a larger team of underpaid developers than I can from a happy, higher-paid, but much smaller team."
Obviously this business model depends on the market, product, etc. but regardless of all of that, NO one in this scenario consciously wants to confront this, because it just makes everyone feel depressed.
For example, Google's project continuous consolidation efforts lead to decreased viability of remote work (even from the different office), and to increased on-site monoculture and luck of project options. This, of course, is fighting the tide since the talent is increasingly less open to changing physical locations and, given current market, can opt out to work elsewhere.
That said, my personal experience at Google has been flexible. Most people I interact with work from their home office most of the time with large schedule overlap with their colleagues. But people do shift their schedules as life needs and occasionally work from other offices for up to a couple weeks a year.
A good boss isn't a benefit that can be awarded or revoked by the company. Sometimes money isn't enough to induce employees to remain in a bad environment or leave a good environment for a bad one, but normally a decent manager is expected and taken for granted, and if salaries are "bounded" below market that employer is dead meat.
That being said, a bad office environment is definitely a turn off, and at this point in my career free lunch and the ilk isn't that much of a perk anymore. I want reasonable hours, decent vacation and health-insurance, and a big income.
Just don't drag me into the office just because that's your personal preference. I will be miserable and looking for a new job.
Yet I work remotely. I work remotely because I felt like moving to a sunny, cheap place where I get to live like a king and I just rent a desk at a co-working office where a couple of my friends work too. It's lovely, all the nice things about being in an office and all the nice things about working remotely.
I've got a flexible work schedule, "working from home" can mean many things for me:
-Work from home in the morning, then stop in the office in the afternoon (my commute is short).
-Work from a coffee shop, beach, etc.
-Meet up friends for the day while we do parallel-work.
-Head out of town for a 3-4 day weekend and work remotely for a couple days without having to use any vacation.
Also worth noting, my co-workers with kids get even more value out of this flexibility than me!
One area that could be worked on is dealing with “difficult” people. At the moment most managers are not really incentivised to hire for performance, but they are certainly incentivised at a personal level to hire people who do as they are told and don’t make waves. Most managers would prefer a 0.1x person who was pleasant to manage than a 10x person who made their life difficult.
You could blame the 10X dev. But it's fair to say that there isn't much talk about how to quantify those kinds of concerns.
It's not that hard to see that your codebase is a mess.
Even if you have no ability to judge the codebase and systems yourself, extreme case, spin that super-productive person up on an independent side project for a few weeks or months and see how the rest of the team grapples with things.
There are a lot of parts of management that aren't hard, but are annoying and potentially unpleasant - if you realize this dev is much less valuable to the long term health of your systems than you thought, that could lead to difficult decisions and a tricky mentoring situation - so they get ignored because managers are either too lazy, "too nice," or just too oblivious.
> Measuring performance is not hard.
Measuring performance of humans is an intrinsically subjective process when you're dealing with knowledge work or anything more sophisticated than a brutal piece-work assembly line.
There is nothing wrong with subjective measures provided what is being measured is performance and not something else. Assuming a manager is not totally clueless they are able to subjectively measure performance just as well as the rest of the team. Everyone on a team knows who is pulling their weight and who is being being pulled along.
There are course edge cases where some people go unrecognised or other get the credit, but in the main most people know who is contributing and who is not. The real problem is that actual performance is rarely even subjectively measured.
It's a misguided preconception that managers are more skilled than their subordinates. I am still have to see happening this in real life.
OTOH what I usually see happening is that managers assign more challenging tasks to specific people based on their prejudice and assumptions then they evaluate those very same people as top performers, while other team members don't even have the chance to perform well (because of the lack of tasks). :D
As a Manager, I am not measuring your performance based on your skill, but on the tangible output of solutions that provide value to the business that you produce.
Your skills and knowledge are your own tools that you can use to produce such output in less time or with better quality.
If I'm accountable to (recognized) business value, something is deeply wrong. The whole reason we have you is to shoulder that responsibility, and to insulate developers so that we're only accountable for/thinking about architecture and implementation. If I have to do the job of both engineering manager and engineer, I'll find somewhere to pay me both compensation packages (i.e. consulting), or (more likely) somewhere I can do just one.
As an aside, even if all your projects are successful, comparing ICs on business value created only tells you who you gave the most impactful projects to. Sometimes your best engineers are stuck doing unsexy, low-impact but necessary maintenance. They create no business value, but prevent existing business value from being destroyed by bit-rot. Sometimes your weakest engineers get a low-hanging-fruit project that's impossible to screw up and immensely valuable to the business. That does not make them ready to take a larger role in more difficult problems, which is typically what a high performance rating entails.
> ...managers exist to set me in a direction and then free me from the political wrangling necessary to deliver (recognized) business value...
Nevertheless, it demonstrates that measuring performance is a complex activity.
Are you wanting to only ever work for people who have a superset of your knowledge? Who know everything you do (for evaluation purposes) but probably also even more? That sounds miserable.
I consider it part of my job to produce results that demonstrate my skill to my manager. I don't want to be micromanaged, and the most effective way I've found to get independence of method is by demonstrating quality of results.
Measuring performance is incredibly hard in a team environment. People are not machines or cogs, and many skills that make a great functioning team are soft in nature.
> Most managers would prefer a 0.1x person who was pleasant to manage than a 10x person who made their life difficult.
If the 10x person can't get along with their team or manager, then they are probably not a 10x person. Every day I'm surprised that people still thinking writing code is the hard part of software development. For most software development, writing code is the easy part.
And please stop with all this "war" talk. We know that the US is at war with everyone. You cannot even go to a basketball or football game to be reminded of the constant war. But stop it.
There is a chain shoe repair company in the UK that hires ex-prisoners, they give the impression it is altruistic but it seems to make good business sense to me.
http://femalebreadwinners.com/women-economists-are-cheaper-t...
(Just to be clear, I don't think it's right to pay women less for the same work. I'm just pointing out an example of an employer using the moneyball approach.)
I don't like strict schedules, where you have to just sit through the required number of hours, or show up at some specific time for no reason (i.e. it does not affect other people). Don't force people to sit in a crammed open space office, all day every day, no matter the weather and other factors, because 'collaboration' or whatever. Commuting to the office when it is -20C definitely sucks. If someone wants to setup their ideal working environment at home - perfect, win win. Most of the time it doesn't even cost much.
Sure, making it work requires some effort from both parties. But it's too often ruled out for no reason (or some BS reason).
I made this switch and that's one of the best things that happened to my quality of life.
So our other flexibility method is time. Most developers work 6 hours per day and that works.
I am full time remote, and the hours per day I can work range between a couple of hours and a dozen. So long as the work is done and the clients are happy, that's what matters. The main thing is self-discipline, having the self-discipline to get the work done and to provide top quality work. You have the flexibility to choose your best working space, working hours, and working style, so go and produce your best work.
We absolutely have a hurdle with convincing most companies that output = output and that remote work is ok. Companies still put an unreasonable amount of value on butt-in-seat, 9-5 work.
Why? How can we get hiring managers and companies past this?
We try to convince with logic. We show what companies spend on hiring their own devs (20K+ hiring cost, 10-20K/mo salary). Startups tend to go hire-crazy after raising, but it's rare that they need to go 0 to 1 with full-time, local hiring. Going remote can save them a ton (on hourly and on not paying a salary for someone to twiddle their thumbs or show up before a boss does).
Our "easy way out" is to find companies who are already remote friendly. I remain convinced that this is a cultural hurdle we'll get over, but I'd be a liar if I told you I had timing perfectly predicted.
Money.
Also, nobody wants to hire junior remote people, so if you go to MIT it's either 160k at Google or 40k remote. Maybe after 4 years at Google someone'll be willing to pay you 50% of what you make there, but you don't really want to move away after being in a place for 4 years to get a remote job and be completely depended on your employer.
I'm from Eastern Europe and I tried to get a remote job before emigrating. I applied to dozens of places and could only get an interview at one company that was paying about 25k because Eastern Europe is cheap anyway. Was rejected for lack of experience. Got a job in Western Europe for 4x more.
In addition, the are many many interesting things to work on at Google and smart people to learn from, whereas the few remote jobs that exist are mostly making CRUD is the web framework du jour.
tl;dr There is almost no market for remote devs.
Not saying that's everyone; there probably are some who are doing what you suggest. They're just not the majority.
The true cost of commuting: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/10/06/the-true-cost-of-c...
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/07/22/the-talent-myth
- Skills and abilities.
- Availability.
In workplaces where facetime is valued, they are maximizing availability.
Sometimes this can be legitimate, since you do have to collaborate with others and be available to answer questions etc.
However in my experience those workplaces which are obsessed with availability tend to be disorganized firefighting organizations that operate in an in 'all hands on deck' style.
I really like being around (most of) my coworkers and would probably feel left out if I worked from home all the time. That's why I really like the flexibility to work from any location at any time. If only I could convince the bosses that me not being in my desk, or answering chat/email questions right away, was the best way for me to work I would be happy. Hmmm... now I know what to ask in my next job interview. :)
Now, that might be a BS excuse on their part, but in many cases I know it's not.
There are many many benefits to being a remote company, but it does take a particular kind of person to make it work. The best people for remote tend to be older and more highly skilled in my experience.
[0] Is the open office layout dead? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15060623
I quit working because I couldn't get paid more than $300K working for someone else despite the fact that I make my employers way way more than that. I quit to do my own startup and made a ton of money. I'm now retired way too young. I'd love to go back to work because I like having a big impact on people's lives but now I'd need at least $500K to break even on taxes if I moved back to the US and no one is paying that for me.