Remote Work Report
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I personally cannot work from home. COVID has made it worse as kids are home BUT even if I had the whole house to myself, I just cannot work from home. I NEED a dedicated office outside my house (yes I already have an office room in my house). Reason is simple. I don't have the discipline to work from home. I get distracted too easily. So I m not a good candidate for WFH. Do I want the flexibility when needed ? Of course. But do I WANT to work from home all the time ? Hell no.
I would say the future of work is not just remote. The future of work is "employers allowing more flexibility in work location" but as an employer myself, I am personally not in favor of 100% remote. That's me I know but sorry, not everyone is cut out for remote work.
Could this office be remote? If so, you've missed the difference between remote work and working from home. I work remote and have an office 5 minutes away in town. I share it with others, but before that I had a personal office in town. Both versions are better for focus than being at home.
This is a common phenomenom, though I don't know a name for it. You seem to be finding justifications for your preference (in this case, to work at a company office), but my experience think there is some other real reason. What is it?
I would note that working closely with co-workers can be achieved with text, voice, video, and shared whiteboards/screens. It is probably less efficient, but are you going in to work because you truly can't afford that loss of efficiency? Do you have an quantitative estimate of those losses, and a quantitative estimate of other efficiency gains/losses due to working remote? Do they take into account that it takes a while to readjust? If not, you just have a preference, and it doesn't need to be justified or defended.
People _can_ have multiple deal-breakers, multiple reasons for not liking something, when you try to ask why, they usually give you _one_ of those reasons, instead of writing an essay with multiple bullet-points on why they don't like it. This is most likely just in the interest of saving time, and not to hide or avoid the _real_ reason. Also, sometimes, people take position by an intuitive feeling, hard to put into words, an understanding built by absorbing evidence and confirming hypotheses in the background over a long period of time. This, probably, is especially prone to confirmation bias if one's not careful.
> I would note that working closely with co-workers can be achieved with text, voice, video, and shared whiteboards/screens. It is probably less efficient, but are you going in to work because you truly can't afford that loss of efficiency?
For many people, this is about maintaining a healthy psychological state, for which, social interactions _are_ essential. It is _not_ about measuring efficiency. Productivity is hard to quantitatively measure in a lot of contexts, but it is easy to notice when your mental state is deteriorating in loneliness. Also, in general, worse mental state will likely mean lower performance.
Communication using video and audio and text can get you far, but for some reason it is not a substitute for the subtleties of face-to-face interaction. The communication bandwidth is just not there, a real life office is just much more immersive. Not to mention that online interactions tend to be more limited in duration. You'd be around people for an hour, and alone for seven. While in an office, you're around people _the whole time_.
> you just have a preference
Yes this is true. People are different, and prefer different environments. People vary in background, temperament, responsibilities. Some are more extroverted, some prefer longer periods of alone time. Some are mentally stable and resilient, some tend to easily spiral into depression. And some jobs just lend themselves better to remote work. Between an active extroverted salesman, and an easy-going introverted software developer, you know who's more likely to prefer working remotely.
> and it doesn't need to be justified or defended.
but we can try anyway :P
This is a challenge at the moment, as those who do work outside of their homes have been forced back into them due to travel restrictions (which is what most of the suddenly-remote workforce is also managing).
I'm mostly going to write this next bit in case it resonates with someone else, because reading your message made me feel validated, and I'd love to pay it forward :)
Back when I used to work in an office, even one day WFH would make me start to feel unhinged from my normal office reality. I'd come in, expecting people to be mad at me or disappointed in me for some minor thing -- or having something I'd felt frustrated with that I now needed to resolve -- all things that never happened when I'd work in-person. But when I'd come in on the day after, no one would ever be mad or disappointed with me as I'd thought they were, and if I asked, they'd say there was absolutely nothing to worry about.
It's something about my propensity for cycling on async communication when I can't get realtime feedback -- I'm so proud of my soft skills in-person, and I'm very tuned and empathic, but working remote... I freeze up, or misread signals or just feel apprehensive and make myself frustrated in seeking clarity, to the point of being a pain for myself or others.
Also, I'm much more accountable to myself when people are walking around me, and interrupting my distractions. Every mild "disruption" (even just a person passing through the room behind me) actually gives me a chance to recalibrate and refocus on my desired task.
That said, I can really relate to the challenge of keeping personal and professional separate when working from home... I keep thinking of setting up a separate room or taking a laptop outside but it is painful giving up comfortable the multi-monitor setup on my main workstation.
Well, not for you, of course. I'm quite happy working remotely and being productive in that favour.
Is it perhaps possible that this was parent's point? That this is not something to which one answer fits all people?
It seems large groups from both sides are unwilling to meet in the middle.
And that's for good reason, really. The reality is that in-office workers have an inherent advantage when it comes to activities that require interaction between people, such as promotions or work assignments. People who want to work remotely are going to want everyone to work remote so that they aren't disadvantaged when it comes to those things, but then we are left with the problem of one group forcing their way of working on the other group.
I don't think those two things are an inherent advantage, rather, it's the reality of managers that don't understand how to remote work.
If "work assignments" require in-person communication, it seems like something is severely broken with your work assignment system and/or process. For software development, to me, that is basically tickets, kanban/scrum/whatever, and the regular communication that takes place to discuss. This communication doesn't need to be "in-person" to work, which brings me to the next point: meetings.
Having remote people exposes many problems with meetings. One is having too many meetings, ad-hoc meetings, or agenda-less meetings. These are problems in-person too, but they're not as directly noticeable.
The other meeting problem comes more from how the meetings take place. The most remote-friendly orgs have a rule like "one person remote, everyone remote" which basically means everyone does the meeting with a webcam and headset, even if they're in the office. At a minimum, meeting rooms need good audio/video (as in: no PSTN speakerphones, and no laptop mics or webcams allowed), and all meeting invites are always sent with an online meeting URL, at a minimum the day before.
There can be inherit advantage in being in-person both for ad-hoc technical discussions and building personal relationships, but if those are job advantages I think it's also a management failure. Ad-hoc technical discussions should quickly be moved online and inclusive of remote people, and that's something a manager should be constantly encouraging/enforcing. It should also without saying that a manager that favors employees for promotions with whom they have better personal relationships isn't doing their job properly (and note this isn't directly a "remote worker" problem).
Ah, really great point. Hadn't considered that
I think I'm a bit old school. My outlook can be summed up like this: If you like your job, and you want to keep your job, you'll do what your boss asks unless it's illegal or immoral.
So if my boss told me I had to work in an office, I'd weight that against the "if you want to keep your job" portion of the above, and decide if that's for me. If not, I quit and go find something where WFH is an option. If so, I go work in the office. Most likely I'd work in the office until I found something else or management realized that they were losing employees and changed the policy (I suppose in that way we can "force" the business to conform to our whims).
Perhaps that's a privileged point of view, or makes me a drone. But my life isn't work; I work to live, not live to work, so minor inconveniences at work don't derail my life; it's just a job, something I do to afford more important things.
For the record, I've worked from home for the last 9 years, and I have coworkers who had a really tough time adapting to WFH; they had to weigh if the trouble to change was worth it for them. Some felt it wasn't worth the trouble and left, many found it was and stayed.
My last org had a really bad wfh policy, inconsistently enforced across teams. I ended up leaving over it (mostly). There are a lot of things that won't get done because I'm not around to do them, and they'll lose a good bit of money over it. Seems like a weird hill for them to die on, but they did so. I wish they hadn't.
As an employee your primary obligation is not to your boss, but to the owners of the company.
If your boss is ordering you to do something that is detrimental to the company, you should fix the situation. But not necessarily follow the orders of your boss.
This is a very common misconception, imo.
They’re usually looking to discount your salary by 30-50% by some arbitrary cost of living factor.
You bring the same value - whether that’s delivered from New York City or Des Moines Iowa.
The real downside was that I had minimal mobility because most of the tech world is still in the dark ages of management by proximity. Doing a job search in the startup world in the age of Covid, I assumed that there would be an explosion of WFH jobs, but most are not.
The even crazier notion is this - you shouldn’t have to concede anything. If they landed a dev in SF, they’d be willing to pay them the appropriate SF comp.
It’s in their budget. Press harder. Money gives you options, even if you’re not a big spender, it’s security. Why not you?
Demand more.
I've been on the hiring side - if you want a very senior engineer and want to vet them properly, there's nothing fast about the process.
You have access to a million senior engineers but who cares if you only have two engineers on your side that are qualified enough to interview them and those engineers are still expected to ship code, do code reviews, alongside doing interviews?
If you can deliver a fantastic interview where you code on demand, talk architecture tradeoffs intelligently, the leverage still belongs to you as the engineer.
Regardless of the number of candidates.
In my experience, less than 1/4 of the organisations and projects I help go remote / distributed do it for cost reasons. Most do it for brain power and efficiency. It's easier to recruit globally, especially when you're looking for very good people. We have strong data that asynchronous transparent communication increases efficiency, agency, autonomy, and decreases both the rate and cost of mistakes. It also drastically reduces the necessity of coordination management.
I wonder if anyone has tried moving to NYC/SF for a year and then moving back to lower cost of living. Would these remote-only companies really give you a paycut?
However: In the long term if employees stay with the company long term, salaries tend to get bumped up to approximately the same. So you might get started lower, but your yearly pay bump will be higher.
What??? Only in SV could a company get away with saying it’s “healthy” to not pay people their value. Usually, golden handcuffs refer to retirement and other benefits, not base compensation.
Team members in low-wage regions being in golden handcuffs and sticking around because of the compensation even when they are unhappy.
A concentration of team members in low-wage regions, since it is a better deal for them, while we want a geographically diverse team.
Honestly, the whole thing is just a huge rationalization. They could just have said "we adjust for location because we can".
The value you bring may be the same, but if you commoditize yourself it's possible your employer will agree. Then react accordingly. Remember, nobody wants a shovel. They want a hole.
Sell your value, not your price.
You go ahead and keep holding out for your extra 30-50%. I'm very happy to fill that spot. It's not like they pay Des Moines employees $3/hour. Six figures goes a long way out here on the lake.
But don't kid yourself - your ability to be thrifty isn't a virtue in this context. You steal experiences from yourself, your family, and you jeopardize your health and safety by not demanding appropriate compensation for the value you bring.
I don't know you, but you're probably a great engineer. And if they can pay some guy on the coast a fantastic salary, then they can find a way to pay you the same fantastic salary.
There are people who can do what I can do who get paid $250,000/year. There are people who can do what I can do who can't find a job because they are holding out for $250,000/year. I'm ok making $50/month less and getting the pick of the litter.
This is called capitalism. I'm a big fan.
> They’re usually looking to discount your salary by 30-50% by some arbitrary cost of living factor.
Discount off of what? The local max in SF?
Google Does this now. Are you angry that Google isn't paying employees the same in SF and India?
Remote IS a benefit. Lack of commute. Full control over workspace. In true remote "full control" over your schedule (lunch with friends. Time shifting work at a whim. More integrated lifestyle.)
Like I said 6 months ago, please attack "physical" company comp with the same vigor as remote company comp.
(I work at GitLab, these views are my own, etc etc etc and I'm still tired of this naive hot take.)
Yes, yes I am. If Jeff Dean moves to India are his commits suddenly worth 10% of what they were when in the Bay Area?
There are high performing employees - regardless of where they contribute from that bring a ton of value.
No, but his options have probably changed and negotiating positions have probably shifted. Have you considered that others may view compensation as a negotiation?
It sounds like you're operating from some variant of the labor theory of value and treating this approach as a moral imperative. If value is realized, compensation should be according to value, and nothing else should matter. Is that an accurate summary of your position?
If that's accurate, might I suggest that this position is something an entrepreneur is ideally positioned to use to their advantage? Surely the world is full of excellent software engineers who would jump at the chance to be paid according to their value.
A-level players will try and get compensation what they think they deserve by negotiating discreetly. However most of the CRUD peddlers who are not in tech hubs remain aware they are not going to get Silicon valley salaries while living in some remote Indian town.
Push back on the employer. You bring value regardless of location. They desperately need your services. If you make the cut, you have the leverage in the negotiation.
Quit being “Midwest nice” and you will probably get much more than you thought.
And yes, I'd criticize my current employer too if they'd try to cut my salary for moving.
Here’s a question I had on GitLab’s policy:
Let’s say I move to SF for a few months starting out at GitLab. I then move back to a lower cost of living area, for family reasons. Is the paycut immediate, or is there some room for negotiation? Surely very few people are going to be happy have a loss of pay.
Take the $25K cut and buy a house with a pool.
If your cost of living goes down 25% and your standard of living goes up 25%, wouldn't it be silly of you to be unhappy about a 20% loss of pay?
As you can read here, talk to people ops about the plan and get approval.
This could actually be a great startup idea - virtual "hacker houses" located in expensive cities that people can use as virtual home bases. We will take 5% of your tier-1 income to handle all your paperwork so you can be free to live where ever you want.
I’m also in Germany and working remote full time since ~1 year, I’m interested in your experience if you’re willing to share.
As for the argument of changes to "productivity". For starters very few of us work in roles where productivity is a directly measurable thing. Sure you can argue about commits, lines of code, ship times, but those are all nowhere near as measurable as "widgets-per-hour". On top of this we all know that a huge portion of roles out there are arguably not productive at all (and if they are it's very hard to measure). And again, when in the history of work has declining worker productivity been solved by improving conditions for the worker? If you company goes remote and you don't work as well that way, do you think your boss is going to go "oh! I'd better talk to leadership about getting those offices again!"?
The entire reason offices still exist is because of culture. For years every SV startup I knew said they needed an office in SF because the "VCs like to see that". There has been a lot of inertia towards offices.
Now that Covid19 has broken that assumption for a bit, I think we'll see a rapid shift to remote teams because it quickly becomes clear that offices are a liability. Anecdotally I already know one start up that can no longer afford their office and so are breaking their lease with no sense of what they'll do next (so remote is the default), and a well established, very traditional office culture firm that is already stating that everyone being in the office full time will not be the norm coming out of this.
A risk. But it doesn't take much to get people on the right path.
1) trust your staff, give them autonomy and agency.
2) asynchronous transparent communication for discussions and decisions.
3) remove friction: few small tools for communication and collaboration, good audio, forum, wiki, git, etc. Services: shopping, childcare, etc.
And a bunch of smaller tricks. But trust, transparency, asynchronous coordination are the major points.
I've helped "rush" groups to full remote with less than 10h "training" during the last few months now that it suddenly became important to a lot of people. More time would have been great, but even a small bit can help a lot.
If you have experience of remote / distributed work, help out and teach others now that they really need it.
I wish. My experience is that companies advertise "Remote work possible" as some sort of job perk, and use it as justification to actually pay you a lower salary.
Neither way is more superior than the other, and both should be accepted as just preferences and not forced one way or another.
There is a lot of talk about remote work and COVID-19 and for me remote work in the age of COVID-19 ... it has been terrible. Mostly because I have kids, and my wife and I are both trying to work remote, and attend to the kids schooling ... it's a terrible combination for getting anything done on a 'regular' schedule.
I suspect people's remote work during COVID-19 experiences are pretty wide ranging.
Less to do with home and more to do with everything outside of work impacting work.
More here: https://twitter.com/shanselman/status/1252040170783641600?s=...
But COVID-remote work has been way different. I've been a full remote worker for 3 years usually working out of coffee shops, and I'm much less productive now because a) I have to work from home, and b) it's generally harder to stay focused during a global pandemic. And I'm not even a parent.
I do hope those who are working remote for the first time don't associate remote work with a bad work life now.
This is interesting as it runs counter to the opinion you hear a lot that is in the vein of live and let live/give people a choice/different people have different preferences. I do think there's some truth to it. While I don't really have trouble under normal circumstances as someone who is mostly remote with a bunch of people in a conference room on a call, it is a little nicer with everyone individually on the video call. [ADDED: But the company is about 50% remote so there are often people from a variety of locations on a call even if some are in a conference room.]
I think it's certainly true, if only a few people are remote, that can be challenging.
I think partly remote will always, without an exception, create a significant information asymmetry that will result in non-remote workers becoming the leaders in the company. (plug, sorry:) I have written a small post about migrating to remote: https://blog.patientsknowbest.com/2020/04/01/51-basic-rules-... - even in _theory_ you could fully embrace remote workers if some others see each other in person regularly, the latter group won't, can't and likely, shouldn't stop exchanging information in ways that 1) are more efficient 2) excludes remote workers.
One of the main issues is "oral tradition". Information is shared from dev to dev during coffee breaks, and everyone is supposed to somehow know it. The solution is to work as if everyone is working remotely, and in that case that means putting information into writing, either by communicating through archived and searchable channels (ie Slack) or writing docs.
Additionally, a lot of companies were pushed into that almost over night without preparing for it. No experience with it, no tooling in place, no processes, etc. Maybe a lot of them experienced some loss in productivity due to that and will just conclude that remove work really isn't for them, it sucks.
The 2 things I really hope for: * people experiencing a personal boost in productivity and better quality of life (mostly due to not having to commute) will be vocal about not going back to the "old ways" * companies claiming that "proper work/collaboration can only happen in the office" will finally change their tune and end the hypocrisy. When forced to do it, they somehow found a way. Maybe it's time to final end this charade. Especially in tech, the work that can only happen in an office is so marginal.
As a full time remote worker, I've also felt that having everyone else is great. In every case I've work with a colocated team, they end up snubbing you in weird ways.
This snubbing is just a cultural thing. There's no technical reason remote workers should feel left out if working with another team.
I've found that most colocated team members rarely write well, and often do not track, or even follow up on complex team decisions. When everyone is remote, it often forces some better communication. Frequently, the teams have to "double up" on the media used to communicate, which almost always requires some written communication.
Now that everyone's remote in quarantine, I've heard complaints from the colocators about "having to overcommunicate". But really, it's just learning to communicate well.
This metric of "how many all-remote workers want everyone else to be remote", really seems like a great test for "how well does your company communicate?"
I do wonder if the exceptional circumstances of the current sudden shift to remote (lack of other human contact, unplanned setups at home) will cause a backlash against remote work.
Right now, many people are still getting used to working from home, and many I suspect consider this to be a temporary measure, which has prevented them from getting settled. In a real switch to remote work, you would be properly invested in setting up a long-term productive environment. The beauty of remote work is you would have the agency to experiment and find what habits and schedules makes you the most productive, without the added constraints of the office. This process would probably take several months, and for a while you would miss the structure of the office, but I think it has the possibility to increase your productivity and quality of life.
For me, remote work does not mean that I work alone, it just means I work with a group of other remote workers that I consider to be close friends. I think it has the potential to increase quality social interactions while working, not decrease. In a society where more people are working remotely, I think the ability to forge relationships outside of work will only increase.
-- those who feel they have to evangelize remote work so that there will be more/better paid remote positions for them and
-- those who really hate the current situation (who doesn't) and are worried that not coming into the office will be normalized and many of their co-workers will stop coming in as a result
<raises hand>, in the context of this report. 100% WFH fine with me. Not being able to go just buy local stuff when I want I'm not so keen on, but that's not what this is about.
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sometimes the reasons don't make sense to me even though people say they do.
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I saw a study that said 40% of SF Bay Area jobs could be remote. If all major metros went remote, this would put a dent in our CO2 output.
Advantages of offices, face-to-face interaction, etc. just doesn't matter. Climate change is an existential threat according to the experts, so we should actually take it seriously and modify our society accordingly.
They do mention it being a great leg up on hiring competition, so there's that too.
While anecdotal, most companies seem to have approached the current state of affairs as a mild inconvenience that will be gone soon, and aren't looking to keep remote work an option going forward, even though it's working out well, which is a shame.
We currently have org/dev planning meetings every other day (Monday, Wednesday, Friday 10:30am PDT, which is 3:30am my time until sometimes 6am) which I'm up for, but I can't maintain that every day as it gets too much (I wake up around midday Sydney time).
The key to making big timezone differences work is to make communication as asynchronous as possible and where that can't be done make it as humane as possible. Clearly these meetings can be scheduled in times where both sides should naturally be awake. I work from Iceland with people on the East and West Coast so about the same time difference and I'm mostly in meetings in the early evening although nothing so epicly long. Your colleagues could be doing the same. We also alternate so some are early morning for them and afternoon for me.
For people getting blocked it really depends on what it is but for the most part I do as you do and park what I'm working on and get on with something else. If it's something simple that can be fixed with a bit of back and forth I'd try pre-empting these issues (e.g. are you just being used as a really expensive form of live documentation).
My team had 2 remote people who were treated like that for a few months, but they quickly realized it wasn't fair or sustainable and pushed back. So our team-wide meetings got bumped to 9am, and we got good at making decisions that they cared about while they were online. Or we queued up things for them to respond to the following day. It's not as easy as being able to tap someone on the shoulder, but nothing is right now with everyone WFH. Everybody needs to grow up and treat each other with a bit more respect. (/rant but not really)
If only one member of a team is in a vastly different time zone I haven't seen it work myself unfortunately. Not that it's absolutely impossible just that you're always going to be the guy out of sync with the team due to the small amount of overlap to work with anyone else. No amount of async communication will ever fix that the majority of the time anyone wants to ask you a simple question they'll have to wait until tomorrow (which for simple questions means they'll just spend time to try to figure it out themselves instead of ask you) and vice versa. Where I've seen vastly different time zones be successful is when the group is more evenly distributed and it turns into rolling pockets of collaboration rather than a stark handoff at the fray of the working day for each party. It doesn't so much matter if a particular time zone has most of the people just that for most of your work day it's possible for you to interact live with a few others the team and vice versa.
If the above doesn't seem possible you'll either have to find the unicorn answer which is going to be very specific to what your team does (e.g. maybe is there a role which takes almost exactly 1 FTE that doesn't actually need to be in the team as much as produce deliverables for them or maybe by sheer rare chance your group is willing and actually functions well with a majority of communication being async), find a way to come to terms with a 3rd shift job, or find a new position that matches your needs better.
APAC? it's tough. They're on a lot of late night calls though we make do as we have to. (And again, tend to have fairly early AM meetings ET (or late afternoon/evening) if Asia needs to participate.) I'm not in engineering but my guess is that there's a lot less real-time collaboration than with engineering offices/remotes in the US and Europe. One standing meeting I'm in, we alternative between late in the (business) day and early in the (business) day ET.
It's a challenge for suddenly-remote companies which aren't used to working this way, especially if all work communication isn't funneled through a tool that is designed for async workflows. The benefit of a remote organization which was designed as remote is people opt-in to those workflows.
Much has been said about transitioning from colocated to remote, but remote teams would struggle as well if suddenly forced into the office. It's worth recognizing that part of the challenge is the sudden shift in environment, regardless of origin and destination.
The super power you mention has elements of truth to it. Some people naturally prefer to work this way, while others prefer sync. It is tougher on those who prefer sync to suddenly need to work async.
I can see your pain being alone in a distant time zone and honestly the only advice I could give would be to try and agree on time slots that work for both parties.
It's really around building a healthy culture of working from home, and not encouraging multiple disruptions during the day, and actively doing so, thinking that it unites teams. We wrote a basic guideline [2].
[2] https://standups.io/blog/a-basic-guideline-for-async-communi...
My experience has been, that some people really like to call you directly and expect you to take their call, without creating a meeting or asking you if/when you have time. Others (still) have problems with muting/unmuting themselves or realizing that everybody can hear their environment. And I think when you're accustomed to never or very rarely working from home, there are a lot of things you have to do differently, so the learning or adaption curve is kinda steep at the beginning.
In the long term, I suspect there may be a greater inclination towards remote work, not as much as this report suggests, but overall work at office is here to stay.
I need to go outside and have a physical seperation between work and home.
I've been working remotely for a few years now so a bit biased. But I would say that the COVID situation with regards to remote work has shown how many benefits there would be for the wider society if more people worked from home more often:
* Less traffic
* Less noise pollution
* Less air pollution
* Less stress
* More energy for things outside of work
All these would increase the quality of life for a large part of the population, decrease the number of avoidable lifestyle diseases and deaths, and would help cut the global carbon emissions too.
COVID is not an ideal situation to start your work from home experience but I do hope that some people will find it valuable enough to make more lasting changes after the crisis is behind us.
All of these tools are needed wether the team is physically on the same geo location or spread out. What changed now is that its much harder to justify not having them anymore.
Longer term this whole experience will likely be a step-change in what “office work” looks like moving forward and that probably means a lot less commercial office space needed.
I wouldn't want to work 100% from home either.
Hardest part is client interaction, video conferencing not the same as face to face but its clear now that not all client meetings need to be face to face once people are proficient with the technology and the technology gets better which it will.
Curious on what people think about home working and VR... Will the tech help? Anyone experimenting with VR in this context?
If we imagine that a large percentage of the population doing work that can be done from home is doing so, there will be less traffic on the roads, more time for people to go down to their local coffee shop or restaurant to grab a bite, more real estate for non-WFH companies to rent (possibly with lower costs), or even office buildings that could be converted into habitation (and thus allowing the people whose work has physical components to live closer and lessen their commutes).
Not to mention pollution, quality of life, and a healthier society. Sure, it's not a monumental impact at a global level, but I'd count it as a positive change for the most part.