Remote work involves a hell of a lot of flying in my experience... How many car journeys do I have to have saved to pay for one flight to the office every now and again?
The problem IMO is that too little work is truly remote. If the rest of your team is colocated somewhere else then you'll have to travel. If your team is spread all over but still relies on face to face meetings (e.g. planning sessions, "all hands" announcements, hackathons) then you'll still have to travel. If your job/role involves dealing with customers who aren't even slightly remote-friendly, you'll have to travel. If you're in or adjacent to academe, you'll have to travel to conferences. Most of these exceptions are not necessary. Unfortunately, most people and companies don't even try to avoid them. They just do what they've done, and the not-really-remote workers have to fly in.
I really think we should be working to change this - conferences are huge wastes of resources IMHO. I usually see a handful of inspiring talks, which could just as easily have been delivered as webinars (which would also allow asynchronous viewing, involving a wider potential audience).
Then again, I'm antisocial and terrible at "networking", so those aspects of conferences don't really appeal to me.
And, really, the "hallway track" is the value of going to conferences. For the most part, if someone just goes to a conference to sit in breakout sessions, they're probably better off just watching video of the sessions (if they were filmed) or a webinar version of the content.
Virtual events are fine, as are watching videos. (In fact, for bigger events, I'll often watch the keynotes from my hotel room rather than packing myself into a room with 10,000 of my closest friends so I can watch the distant speaker projected on the screen.)
But it's a small subset of the experience of attending live.
When people make arguments like "taxes should be higher" or "air travel should be more expensive", they almost always mean "for other people".
People need to eat their own cooking or they instantly lose all credibility, even when the facts are on their side.
Also, it’s really hard to live in the modern world without using fossil fuel-based comforts. You can criticize air travel and still travel to a climate conference. It doesn’t make climate change any less real. You can maybe argue that people are hypocrites, but so what? The ice caps don’t give a shit. And maybe that meeting of scientists in-person is what it takes to fix a really big global problem. Flying to Asia every year for a vacation definitely won’t do that, though.
Every Hollywood actor demanding we take action on climate change while flying around in a private jet weakens the argument for real action on climate change. It makes the issue look like a vanity cause even though it's not.
You see the same thing on taxes. You've got guys like Bernie Sanders out there demanding we all pay more taxes while he himself has a very low rate of charitable giving by most standards. He could also opt to voluntarily pay more taxes right now. Of course he doesn't, which again undercuts any broader point he may have.
Human beings are hardwired to be turned off by hypocrisy.
It could be viewed as an investment in future lower emissions, the same way spending money on R&D today can improve profits in the future.
Even voluntary and cooperative solutions would benefit from the type of coordination an in-person conference affords.
Are you sure about that? I'm curious about your numbers. This is 12 round-trip flights across the US a year, right? And I assume they're always on full flights (peak efficiency)?
From [1] (2013; maybe it's more efficient now), that's 2-3 tons of CO₂ per round-trip—so in your case, let's average and say about 25 tons/year.
The EPA [2] says "A typical passenger vehicle emits about 4.6 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year."
That means your flying (1 person) is costing 543% as much as driving (1 car)? It's unfortunately not apples-to-apples, so I'm curious what your calculation was.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/27/sunday-review/the-biggest...
[2] https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-t...
The other estimates I've seen put flights as worse than cars, but not that bad.
I guess this is better (365% vs. 543%), but still looking much worse than driving?
https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-t...
Look at the third answer down. The figures I cited earlier were based on about half that mileage per year, so that comes out to 2.3t. Lots of unit confusion here, but I think those both end up being metric tons and the daily commute is already worse than monthly air travel. Maybe that's all wrong, but the point I'm trying to focus on is that the need for regular long-distance travel severely erodes the environmental value of letting people work from home.
2.3t per year, not per month, though.
- Using 261 gal gas/year (which 21.5 gal/month, or e.g. driving 2 × 15 mi/day at 41 mi/gal)
- 1 gal gas = 8.9kg CO₂ (resulting in 2.3 tons of CO₂/year)
In your case that's 15.6 tCO₂/year for flying, vs. 2.3 tCO₂/year for driving.
So, yeah... your flying footprint is 678% more than driving. i.e. you need to fly to work less often than once every 7 months in order for it to beat driving the route you had in mind.
Sorry for the bad news :( but yes, you're very much correct that this makes it even harder for remote work to be good, if you have to fly even twice a year.
Well, he's working a continent away from his office. There are still infinite possibilities for remote work without having to travel 2500 miles for those occasional visits.
In the case of gasoline powered cars, I believe they just put out CO2, the other components are pretty negligible. So you can directly compare the warming equivalent of planes to the pure CO2 of cars, it's a reasonable comparison.
It's worth double checking that last thing, it's been a minute since I looked at the numbers, but I'm about 85% sure of it.
"Aircraft engine emissions are roughly composed of about 70 percent CO2, a little less than 30 percent H2O, and less than 1 percent each of NOx, CO, SOx, VOC, particulates, and other trace components including HAPs." [1]
For gasoline the ratio seems to be 51% CO2, 47% H2O, and 0.9% nitrogen oxides, and 1.3% other stuff (excludes nitrogen). [2]
Water vapor isn't considered to be relevant when calculating CO2 equivalents so we can ignore that. [3]
But I'm not sure how much the difference in NOx contribution is... given ground level emissions aren't the same as high-altitude and such.
On the face of it it seems unlikely to me that the non-CO2 components would tip things in the other direction, but I'd definitely welcome better numbers...
[1] https://www.faa.gov/regulations_policies/policy_guidance/env...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exhaust_gas#Spark-ignition_and...
[3] https://climatechangeconnection.org/emissions/co2-equivalent...
That seems excessive. I work remote and only have to fly in once or twice a year for a few days at a time, maybe a week.
Do you have an idea of why they don't go all the way and let you WFH on the same basis as I do?
I could go on much longer. ;) The point is that accommodating remote workers requires significant cultural change, and people in mostly-colocated groups resist it. It's much easier for all-remote teams, somewhere in between for teams that are still mostly colocated but have already been "broken in" by someone like me. My last company was much better at this, though worse in other ways. Since there are only about five teams worldwide doing storage at the scale we are, and I want to keep doing that, it's a the "price of admission" and overall I think it's worthwhile. But it's still unnecessary and I'm still sad that it's not improving faster - for myself and others in similar situations.
This, in spades. Thanks for taking the time to explain in more detail.
I've worked full time remote for over 10 years for different companies and never had to fly that much. I've always flown once or maybe twice a year at most. I think this is more the norm, at least for software engineering and operations.
> The problem IMO is that too little work is truly remote.
You follow this with some specific examples, most of which would require travel even if you were in an office. I don't agree on those you list as requiring face-to-face meetings, they are all fully capable of being done remotely. IMO the only ones that require you on site are one where you physically interact with things/people.
They certainly are, as long as others cooperate. Good for you if you've never been on a team where people resist and sabotage any such effort. I don't see any particular reason to believe your shorter experience is more representative than my longer one.
I had assumed I had the longer experience as most people I've discussed it with have only worked a few years remotely and you didn't specify.
I've only worked one job that was part-time remote where people weren't cooperative with it. But that was mostly the results of one manager who was generally bad, so I didn't take it as remote specific. The other 3 companies where I worked full time remote were all good experiences w/ no one sabotaging things. Solving the issue with one place with the bad manager was pretty simple though... I just found a new job where it wasn't an issue.
Anymore I only apply to places that are either fully remote or advertise themselves as remote friendly with a remote-first culture and it hasn't been an issue.
I don't think that 's true in general though. Is that even remote work? There are now hundreds of companies who only meet for yearly retreats. and these are optional.
By teaching, do you mean workshops/classes? We generally mentor people, but never actually tried teaching. But do most developers in your company teach?
Mentoring people, yes. For very difficult topics that's definitely easier in person. Everyone teaches to some degree yeah. How do you level people up without teaching them?
I never tried to teach, or have been taught, something like a course (even a mini-course) in anything in the workplace. But then again I don't believe most developers are qualified to do that (I don't mean "credentialed").
I've been working remotely for 5 years and have never once seen the faces of my co-workers. We don't do video chats. We don't do in person visits. We do everything by voice and text.
I wouldn't even consider myself the "most remote of the remote workers." We still do daily standups and quarterly all hands meetings.
Did you do your interview by text chat?
All depends on the type of work, the team setup and the company culture.
The other thing I see is a lot of remote workers moving to very sparsely populated areas that are cheap to live in, but where they end up driving 40 minutes for groceries.
There are lots of great benefits to remote work, but environmentalism (in most cases) is not one of them.
Certainly some people I work with, whether developers or other roles, are traveling all the time. But it's not everyone.
It depends on the culture of the workplace. We are able to get plenty done with conference calls and email.
I can't speak for the management and executives above the director, though. They might do a decent amount of travel. But there's about 200 employees that aren't doing any travel at all for work, and only a handful of people in management above them.
And from what I hear, it sounds like a lot of the other departments in the corporation don't do a whole lot of travel either.
I've worked for a virtual company -- no offices anywhere, everyone works at home -- for 12 years. The developers almost NEVER travel.
The owner and I used to be on the road quite a bit (just like most software firms) -- say, through 2010 -- but then it seemed like all our clients and prospects kinda had the penny drop: they didn't NEED US on site to do implementations. GoToMeeting or Skype or WebEx or whatever was entirely sufficient, and saved a shitton of money too.
I haven't visited a client site in over 3 years. I see my boss at 2 conferences a year. HE makes a few more trips -- partner conferences, a few sales trips -- but nothing like what it was in 07-10.
This is something companies could incrementally adopt with existing employees.
My only real gripe is that teleconferencing for meetings just doesn't work that well, because I find it hard to hear people that are not very close to the microphone, and background noise from the open-plan office in which the non-remote team works is very disruptive at times.
Well, and that sometimes remote workers are sort-of-not-quite second-class citizens, probably because we aren't in the office for people to see every day.
I've worked remote 15+ years and that much flying is abnormal in my experience. Some places do quarterly, but I found that rare too. A lot of them do an annual retreat, but it's often optional. Or sometimes we would do a mini-meetup at a developer conference.
It also depends on the position. Most of the flying was for brainstorming sessions in the leadership / project team, but most of the team didn't need to be involved in those.
I will also say I've always interviewed over either phone or google hangouts and I've never had to meet in-person before the offer. I've sometimes gone years without meeting the people I work with in-person.
So it's basically like driving a little less than the flight distance.
If you commute 10km each way every working day, you'll move nearly 3,000km on a year.