How many jobs can be done at home? [pdf]
bfi.uchicago.edu
bfi.uchicago.edu
One important issue IMO is just having a workspace. Software engineers are kinda spoiled in this regard because we make the big bucks. We can afford to retrofit areas of our homes to create good working conditions. We can take our laptops to coffee shops in a pinch.
I recently upgraded my living situation by moving into a much nicer place, but it's smaller so I ditched the "home office" setup I had before. Now with COVID I'm working in my dining room and on my couch. It's so much worse. It might sound silly but I'm putting a lot more wear/tear on my furniture by being around all day.
My take on this is that homes aren't and never were designed for WFH conditions. There are so many details about offices that we take for granted. I found myself having to clean way more often and do way more dishes now that the entire family is stuck in the house together.
Then there's a socialization aspect. Tech has a culture of "as long as you can do the job, it doesn't matter how you behave/dress/interact" -- this thinking is applied along a spectrum, some companies are more extreme than others about it. But a lot of professions like sales/legal/etc rely very heavily on close social interaction. Tech is also unique in this regard IMO.
My SO used an IKEA table for the past four years as a desk for drawing.
My take on it is that people will adjust, and that the most productive environment is the one you're most familiar with. Many professions like sales, legal, and investment banking rely on putting on a professional "front" to make a good first impression. This is much harder to do when you're sitting on a couch at home and have a couple kids screaming in the background. IMHO this is a good thing, because the constant impression-management needed in these professions is a huge distraction from the actual substance of these jobs, and anything that punctures the impression-management bubble and forces people to deal with real human realities is an improvement. Already I'm seeing a big normalization of things like childcare, screaming toddlers, two-parent schedules, breastfeeding, and so on - this can't be shunted off as "woman's work" and relegated to the home anymore, when the home becomes the workplace and both parents generally need to trade off to make it work.
Basically I think our society before coronavirus was broken and coronavirus lockdowns are simply forcing us to deal with the ways in which it was broken. The old society isn't going to last much longer, and it's better to deal with that and build a more resilient, more honest one than to try to preserve the rituals that many industries had developed in 75 years of peace.
The one thing I can't stand for even 2 minutes is the recommended "proper sitting" posture. 90 degrees here and 90 degrees there - impossible!
1. Never mind posturing, it's the posture - I get back and neck pain just thinking of working from a couch or floor :(
2. I like my multiple 27" monitors. Going back to just a single 14" feels like a huge productivity hit.
3. Same thing with proper keyboard + mouse, vs just a touchpad or even the trackpoint.
So I'll agree that there's a lot of posturing and professional front in this and many professions; but even without that, I've always far far preferred my home office to either proper office, or working from living areas.
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The other aspects are more age dependent (though I believe so is the posture / back pain;). It helps to distinguish "working area" and "non-working area", triply so once you have family. There's a million things that I do better at when I'm "in the zone" - ingested the background, focused on the problem at hand. Distractions reset that counter - I love my kid, I love my wife, but there are aspects of my work that don't benefit from their presence :-). This is probably part of why my personal most productive times tended to be late at night when the world has settled down and distractions are at a minimum...
I don’t know how to cope. I can’t take the time off and not work for another month, but I also don’t want to wear my body down and have pain all day every day. I hated working in my office because it’s open space and noisy but I’d love to go now that it’s deserted. I have two large displays there, a mouse, a keyboard.
If you don't have room for a mouse, get a trackball. They're relatively cheap and not having expensive health issues is worth it.
Be inventive in changing up the posture. If you genuinely don't have any other surface (dining room table, kitchen counter etc), switch it up - put laptop on couch and sit on the floor. Sit on couch with laptop on your knees, lie down with laptop on your lap or chest, put the laptop on window sill or fridge or counter or shelf and work standing, etc. NONE of these are ideal, but changing is important.
> 3. Same thing with proper keyboard + mouse, vs just a touchpad or even the trackpoint.
Just curious. Does your company not allow you to bring your work equipment at home?
My point is that I've been remote 50% for years, and remote 100% now, and in either scenario cannot imagine working from couch.
Well I mean, I can, I've done it... it sucked :S
And no multiple monitors?!
How do you track the logic of an async call that sends shit across five different files in this n-tier architecture webapp and see the app update in real time and see what your coworkers are saying???
Also,
>The old society isn't going to last much longer,
I seriously hope you're right. I'm cynical to how sweeping or durable the changes that corona catalyzed will be, but I can hope.
That said, I also disagree with the parent poster. Yes, there are things we take for granted , but with a little thought we can replicate the surroundings at home too.
Of course, if you are productive only when surrounded when people who are always talking, that's a different story. In my office, everyone around me in open cubicles is always on a call with someone. Some personal, some team mates in a different geo. The only time I do real work is when I take WFH
I think this point is much broader and meatier than the rest of the discussion, and will be the defining cultural consensus coming out of this whole mess. The virus seems to have a peculiar way of highlighting our sins in a grimly ironic, almost poetic way.
But that's true of offices as well. Do you think the average administrative assistant is working on Aeron chairs? No, they're working on cheap chairs and cheap desks. In fact, so did I, despite being a developer - I just didn't work at a fancy company. At least at home we have the option of spending a bit more, even if it comes out of our paycheck.
I live in a small place and we're going to buy a folding desk and a chair, it takes almost no space and you can fold it when you're done. It's less than 100 bucks. It's up to you to creat these conditions.
Also not all offices have nice desks, chairs, environment, etc. I use to work in a place without windows.
I wfh and yeah there are times when I will work from the backyard in the summer, or by the pool, or from the living room with the TV on when am super bored. But the majority of the work is done from the home office.
They were, in the past. Houses built for the gentry used to have a room called "the study", a quiet space equipped with bookshelves and a desk. This went out of fashion as most men, and later women, began to go to this newfangled place called "the office" that was outside of their homes.
IMO most American detached homes are large enough for a dedicated working room to be retrofitted in. This may not be possible for small homes and apartments in urban areas, though, as they were designed long after the study became obsolete.
> But a lot of professions like sales/legal/etc rely very heavily on close social interaction.
That culture will be seriously disrupted if Coronavirus isn't under control soon, or if similar outbreaks occur regularly in the future. There's already huge selection pressure against companies that can't be productive in WFH mode. Sooner or later, the ability to switch to WFH on a moment's notice and maintain productivity might be considered a great strength in the eyes of investors and customers alike.
If even 25% of jobs could be made remote, that would be huge. The reduction in automobile traffic, the improved happiness of workers(who want to work remote), as well as parents being around more for their kids, would benefit society overall.
I have been in two companies that went remote, and the bosses don't want to, until they try and realize the convenience.
Could also be that employees, as a whole, are more worried about losing jobs in this environment and are producing more to protect themselves.
However, there is still so much knowledge / creative work that is best done face to face. What I can see happening in my work place is more people might take work at home days. There is no way we will want to keep taking important meetings on Zoom.
But what does suffer are all of the creative processes. Zoom meetings are not the same as real-person meetings. The cadence and flow is off, and it interrupts the creative processes. Maybe that will get better over time, now that we have a whole month to get used to it, but I doubt it.
I'm with you, I look for all of my salaried folks to have the opportunity to take work from home days occasionally. Honestly, I've been pushing that for years, so I'll count it as a win.
My company was ~50% remote across the US and adjoining countries before, and now we’re 100% remote and the transition has been relatively seamless.
Some things that help:
1) Over-communicate. Don’t be afraid to sound stupid or think that your ideas have to be fully baked. Share early and often. Whether that’s a message, a doc, an idea, anything. Blast it out and organic conversations will usually flow from there.
2) Foster a culture of popping open a video chat when there seems to be a misunderstanding after two back-and-forths. This comes from Gitlab’s principles, I forget the actual wording, but the spirit of the principle has helped me numerous times from having long, dragged out conversations through text when a simple 3min video chat will resolve the issue. Integrating your video conference solution with your chat client works wonders here. We have Slack+Zoom so a video chat is a simple text command away.
3) Establish some loose SLAs for communication like “will respond to comments within X period of time.” (Be as detailed as you like.) But let people know when they can expect a response from you generally based upon the medium.
4) With the above, embrace a RFC (request-for-comments) culture where people can give feedback and have organic conversations on anything WIP. And then follow-up with a scheduled 30min meeting to resolve any outstanding ambiguities.
There are probably a few other things I’m forgetting, but the above has served myself and our company so well that I honestly feel more productive working remotely than in an office. The meetings are shorter and more focused, there’s more documentation, and there’s less shoot-the-breeze interruptions.
All the above isn’t to say there isn’t merit to working in an office. There absolutely is! Just that I think it’s normal to have some growing pains when transitioning to remote work, and I hope that people won’t write it off entirely before giving some amount of intentional thought to learning, adapting, and building an equally productive remote workflow.
It starts with an async slack conversation. 90% of conversations go well and end with a shared understanding without much back-and-forth. Done.
For the odd 10% of conversations where you've gone back-and-forth a couple times, you ask the person whether they're available for a videochat. They either say yes, at which point you join a 3-5min videochat, or no they'd prefer to put a time on the calendar.
The above is not an immediate popup video.
First, I think all companies that do a lot of technical calls right now should provide their employees with iPad pro. The drawing feature is just so good that it replaces any whiteboarding.
lol, as if our company's bean counters that bought us the cheapest, crappyest Lenovo laptops they could find are suddenly gonna justify shelling out the cash for iPad Pros for everyone. That's a good one, thanks for the laugh.
My employer has been going this direction for almost 20 years. It started with allowing remote employees before I started 18 years ago. Then a merger with another company 7 years ago forced everybody to adopt good "remote" meeting practices. And since then, people have been a lot more comfortable working remotely, part-time or full-time. If 100% of meetings have at least 1 remote, it's a lot less stressful to be remote yourself.
I am hesitant to draw too many conclusions from this work at home experience because the pandemic is providing so many complicating factors that end up distorting both the benefits and downsides of working from home. Some examples to mind:
* It often is a benefit to get out of a distracting office, but now people are at home being distracted by kids who would otherwise be in school under normal circumstances.
* Work from home allows people the freedom to work form wherever they want. Now we are all stuck at home.
* Every company is being forced to be a remote-first organization so there is no face to face communication happening in the office that someone working from home might miss.
* The pandemic takes a mental toll on everyone. Many of us are probably not as productive right now as we would be otherwise and that has nothing to do with working form home, but will that decreased productivity be blamed on working from home?
I've been working fully remote for 18 months now, and the last few weeks have been unusual and more isolating than normal due to everything being closed. No coffee shops, no library, no working lunches, etc.
I suppose it's a smaller jump for me than most people, so I'm not complaining, but it's definitely a misrepresentation of WFH.
Reduction in pollution, accidents, death, etc.
Increase in restaurants, bars, etc. in your area where you live (as opposed to where you work).
There are countless newspaper articles about how all the animal shelters have had all their dogs adopted out in the last two weeks, for the first time ever. Is it single people wanting a companion while they work from home?
The very early bits were the usual stuff. Kennel training is sad, so I made it a little easier by sleeping on a palette next to the kennel, with my hand through the cage for contact. Two or three nights of that, and I've never had another kennel problem again. Teaching a dog to sit (the right way) takes about 5 minutes if you do it right, and another couple of weeks of periodic reinforcement. Teaching a dog to sit when she's excited you just got home? That takes longer.
I'm rambling, but the point I was trying to get to is that I won't ever get another dog again unless I have at least a couple of months to devote to that initial training. Forming that bond, building those habits, it's made me realize how much of a disservice I've done to every other dog I've ever had that I've gotten and then left to go to work.
For the folks who've adopted new dogs in this, I almost hope that we're self-sequestered for long enough that their dogs get better than what I've historically given mine, but either way, a well trained pup can brighten every day they're around, and I'm happy to see the trend of what I hope is responsible pet adoption.
I recall having to do SF-Asia and even SF-Dallas and SF-Europe calls in my previous job and I was burnt out real quick. Just trying to plan a meeting that wasn't already a recurring scheduled meeting took about 2 days.
[EDIT] Based on the initial responses I changed it from the same time zone being a key aspect to an aspect which makes the transition seamless/smoother.
I think the exact time difference doesn't matter so much as everyone can be at work simultaneously at least 70/80% of the time.
- Impromptu virtual meetings do not need an additional 1-3 hour buffer at the beginning/end of the day to avoid disrupting the majority of people's daily work patterns.
- In person visits can likely be done by driving versus flying. An if flying - a day trip can suffice.
- No timezone/jetlag from a coast-coast red eye.
That is a change at first, but not more of a change than going from a very small company, where everyone talks to everyone and maybe even sits in the same office, to a bigger one where you have to establish processes to ensure information still reaches everyone in the company (if it needs to).
Dealing with Asia and Europe on a regular basis could be challenging. I'm glad I don't need to do that much.
* Atlantic is the one waaaay out on the East Coast of Canada.
(that last is the biggest key really). I'm a software developer and the teams mostly coordinate over code feedback and ticket requests anyway.
I feel like for stuff with UX or stuff that requires significant collaboration that can't be done via git comments, someone needs to take the hit to be up at odd hours for real-time discussion meetings via Zoom/Skype or make other such work-style adaptations.
I've worked through a lot of different fields getting to where I am now - for instance, warehouse inventory and paperwork handling raises the importance of accurate warehouse inventories (and they weren't low before) - but a lot of the paperwork could easily be done remotely these days. (sometimes I miss forklift driving - it was a lot less stressful than programming in many ways, although it required a much more immediate care and caution and physically higher risk) I suspect that crosses a lot of other varieties of work - paperwork could be more offloaded or moved digital, while the key actions still require people, mostly. And someone always has to maintain the infrastructure.
I've done a fair bit of remote contracting from Asia working with team members in the U.S. and Europe and haven't had many issues since we're mostly working independently. Actually I'm currently in Japan/Korea working with NYC - probably the most inconvenient timezone difference (9am-5pm EST -> 10pm-6am Korea), but for my current project it's not really that bad since we're mostly independent and I'm a night owl anyways (also we have developers in Europe and India where the time difference isn't as drastic).
I'm not claiming that timezone is completely irrelevant because it does make a difference, but I think the bigger factor is the individual. I've had more difficulty getting in touch with team members in the same timezone than other team members in opposite timezones. In my experience, corporate culture overvalues the importance of being immediately available (not surprising given their open embrace of open offices and reluctance to adopting remote work) and underestimates the disruption and the productivity of deep, focused, uninterrupted work (eg. see Cal Newport).
We all have our individual work preferences. Regardless of what anyone's individual preferences are, I hope we see a trend towards greater freedom of choice in enabling workers to work how they are most comfortable.
1) worker productivity (does it go up or down for all of these professions)
2) do companies want to pay you as much if you work from home?
3) is it sustainable for large swathes of people vs. small groups of people who self-select to like this work-style
4) will people abuse the system such that it ruins it for everybody else
I can see a far more likely implementation of this would be a mixed case -- "work from home wednesdays" or something like that.. not friday or monday because then basically people would assume there is a certain amount of abuse of people working for 1 hour on Friday then starting their weekend early..
Is there anyone out there with a good argument for why remote workers should be paid less?
Especially interested in hearing from anyone not incentivized by this practice (eg not the CEO or Chief People Officer of an org that practices this)
> will people abuse the system such that it ruins it for everybody else
An inevitable question and likely consequence.
A counter question: are the myriad ways in-office employees game/abuse the system working materially worse than how remote workers might?
supply and demand competition. Anything that makes labor easier increases supply, applying downward pressure on prices.
If I don't care where my team members are, why would I want two when I could have four of the same quality? Sounds attractive, I should think.
Lower expenses from commuting. Perhaps initially somewhat offset by the need for home office equipment/space.
Perhaps I misunderstand you or have overlooked something.
Right now people working in cities with a high cost of living have a large salary to make up for their living costs. When you make a job remote you suddenly increase the pool of possible employees to anyone in the world, including people living in places that may have a lower cost of living. Those people will be happy to work for less.
If you have a remote employee, why pay them 200k to live in SF if you can pay someone in India 50k?
There is more demand for remote jobs, therefore they pay less.
Though not everyone likes that because there is a lot of people who benefit from hourly based pay. They don't do much but they put their hours in.
The second part is also quantifying outcome is hard... Should we pay that guy that fixed the machine in 5 minutes the same as if we would spend a week to fix it ourselves? Maybe we would fix it in one week instead? Should we spend one week trying to fix it and then call that guy ... or we would break the machine so the guy would charge us 5x more? Then you get all companies charging a lot more if someone tries to fix something on their own because they usually mess up.
On the other hand, if the company isn't limited by geographic restrictions, it can find people who may produce an equivalent output and are willing to work for less.
So it is a balance between how in demand your skills are and how competitive the market is for those skills. In my opinion, if a company is in need of an employee and is willing to pay $N for the employee, simply being remote should not reduce that amount. It has advantages for all parties involved (improved employee satisfaction, lower office overhead, etc).
Ultimately it is a negotiation, the the company can try to justify paying you less because of cost of living adjustments unless you can negotiate otherwise. It's in their interest to get your labor for the best price possible.
> I can see a far more likely implementation of this would be a mixed case -- "work from home wednesdays" or something like that.. not friday or monday because then basically people would assume there is a certain amount of abuse of people working for 1 hour on Friday then starting their weekend early..
This is a pretty fake concern in my experience driven by butts-in-seats culture. I'm gonna take hours off and work when I feel like it when working remotely. If that means working 8 hours, sure. If it means I don't do any work on a Tuesday, who cares? All that matters is if I'm delivering what is expected of me (e.g. my spring tickets) and available for communication. If I spend 4 hours a day working & 4 hours studying & playing mahjong online, what's it to you, you know?
(I'd love that if I started working at 7am like some of my coworkers, but when I start at 9:30am, the day feels a little truncated.)
Enlightened employers realize this. It's not super common in the industry yet, but if you can find an employer who doesn't track your productivity by seeing how many meetings you attend and how often you're sitting at your desk alt-tabbing between VS Code and Github to look productive, you've hit the jackpot.
Success should (ideally) be measured by value-add to the company, and dependability of the employee. Not many employers/managers know how to track value-add though. For a non-tech-savvy manager to measure the success of an engineer is difficult. They might look at your code commit and see that you removed 400 lines of code and added 20 and think of this as a "negative" impact because the numbers don't look nice. It's a frustrating aspect of the industry, but possible to work around if you work with decent people.
The relationship I'm describing is actually at-will employment. I have quite a bit of freedom to do whatever I want with my time so long as my employer is still willing to pay me. I have no obligation to operate at my personal 100% unless my employer demands it (in times of need, it can be the case. But that's rare!)
I also did wfh doing call support and now IT/infosec stuff. Night and day!
Team dynamics: not everyone can develop interpersonal relationships well when wfh compared do in person. Imagine being the new guy and have a million questions but your personality forces you to evaluate body language and greetings in person before you are comfortable approaching someone.
Oh, and.. Some people have terrible home situation. I don't mean just kids but sick people to care for, abusive people living with them,loud roommates,etc ....
WFH being the norm would suck,but companies should be much more accomodating these days.
If I were in the business, I'd be re-marketing HMDs as a work from home privacy solution. What makes something mass market is it serves people and solves a problem for them, not something that's just entertaining.
Edit: and someone's already there: https://www.techradar.com/news/the-cheapest-active-vr-headse...
The authors already code 82% of teachers as able to work from home, albeit with difficulty. See the second footnote in the paper.
But they state "To answer these questions, we classify the feasibility of working at home for all occupations and merge this classi cation with occupational employment counts for the United States."
So it looks like they're counting number of workers.
Highly unlikely. The government will abandon social distancing long before tolerating a long-term 50+% unemployment rate.
You will see there is a lot more than can be done from home than people realize. Obviously it doesn't all translate over, there's a lot more machinery now.
But if people had to work from home, people would get creative and there's more that could be done.
Or some of this could simply not be done at all.
> very few jobs in agriculture, hotels and restaurants, or retail
Au contraire, all agriculture work can be done at home when we raise our own food. All teaching can also be done at home and currently is being done so. The basic need of a hotel, a place to sleep, and restauranting, of preparing and serving food, can be done at home. And retail is already done at home, store clerks are largely obsolete. What can't be done at home yet is delivery services and most manufacturing in its current state, but manufacturing probably could be done at home through expanding micromanufacturing. Networks of craftsmen shops running mini production lines can make a lot of things.
I really hope remote work becomes more accepted as an option. It's not even just about individual productivity and happiness, it's better for the environment.
What annoys me on these threads is when I see people say "I don't like WFH, therefore other people shouldn't be able to WFH". There's nothing wrong with preferring to go into the office, but who gives you the right to tell others how they have to work? Everyone should have the freedom to work how they are most comfortable, so long as they can get the work done.
Could you point me to an example of this, because I dont think I've ever seen this. The opposite, however I've seen pretty commonly where since "I like WFH so everyone should WFH".
Well, that was a few years ago, and I guess the market will be flooded now.
Infinite.
That's because the set of possible vocations is only bounded by human imagination. This results in an uncountable set, which would resolve to a value that approaches infinity.
A more insightful question is, "How many of the jobs that people hold today can be done at home?" 34% seems like a reasonable metric.
The paper does not address the underlying assumption: jobs are fixed in number and type and we can only change the location.
In reality, job markets are extremely elastic.
Case in point: millions of jobs in the world exist only because a human worker is slightly cheaper than a machine at a given task.
Also, a computer purchase for an employee isn't usually a frequent occurrence. Maybe once during hire, and once a year to stay up to date (if that).
Computer manufacturers can probably take a break for a couple of months and the tech industry will survive.