Work from home is dead, long live work from anywhere
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I work for a company with a few offices, none is less than 500 miles aways from where I live.
I will likely never go back to those office.
But I could not picture myself working "on the road". I did it, it's stressful and leads to less productivity on my side.
Have you try an intense and involve pair programing session from a 'normal' coffee shop? It's frustrating. Noises, and lack of secondary monitors make it so.
Pretty often, I would have a week or two where I work from somewhere else, but I secure the place in advance , the network connection, and try to work it out with my co-workers if it's imply separate timezone. ( yay for daily stand up at 4AM ! )
I did work from a van from a few weeks. I was actually not working, mostly reacting. ( taking meeting, working on tickets as they are assigned to me... but never taking a deep breath and looking at how makes things better on the long run. )
Edit : my english is broken
I really need a home base with reliable internet and a comfortable spot to work. I have never been able to find this at all on the road, and certainly not consistently.
My company gives out 12” little cute Thinkpads to those who want a Windows machine. Those machines without a dock are really good just for checking emails in the airport.
laptop size depends on what kind of work you do. for a support dev or sysadmin, constantly on the move (visiting clients, etc) a small laptop is more productive than lugging around a large heavy piece of equipment.
Last year's equivalent moved to 13" screens, hence X390 (Intel) and X395 (AMD).
The second digit usually corresponds to the first digit of the Intel Processor model no, though I think there's been some exceptions over the last few years (certainly with the T series anyway).
I work from an airport or airport cafe on occasion, but the ergonomics and noise don't make it a comfortable experience for long. And of course you are working on a small laptop screen.
To be properly productive, I need a quiet space, a desk at the proper height, a comfortable chair, and ideally 2 good-sized monitors.
If you have an iPad and MacBook that support it, I highly recommend it. I used it in a library while traveling, and it was a serious improvement in productivity.
Then imagine that your employer would offer you to compensate the coworking space's cost. And maybe the corporate Slack channel would start coordinating colleagues to go to the same cafe / coworking space to improve communication. Etc.
And all this stuff would do nothing to limit one's exposure to viruses and other pathogens; if anything, it would make the situation worse, by mixing people even more.
Work from home (or its equivalent, like a long-term remote resort in a cheaper country) makes sense.
Work from a well-situated, well-stoked office makes sense.
Work form "anywhere" makes way, way less sense; one must be hard-pressed by circumstances to choose it.
I like your analytical approach and you are right: why go to a coworking space when there's not much difference to a real office anyway?
I think the answer for me lies in the flexibility: In a coworking space I can come in or leave at whatever time I want. When I have an unproductive day I can go home at noon and when I feel like working on Saturday I will do so. Offices just have this peer pressure for Mo-Fr 9-6 that you can't evade and coworkers or your manager will raise their brows if you deviate from it. Even in coworking spaces I actually work a very regular schedule, but I just dislike not having the possibility to break out of it.
Nobody cares where you physically are, as long as you do your work and are available for communication. But people do care very much whether you're available for questions / quick to react if something happens, and can produce something by an agreed-upon date.
That is, stopping my work at noon because I can't persuade myself to work would be frowned upon, whether I were in the office or WFH, unless I'd say that I'm not feeling well. (Which is probably a good way to frame it.)
Likely I'm just quite privileged by now; this is the norm around me now, and was the norm for maybe 10 years, but definitely won't be the norm 20 years ago, when I was not a senior enough engineer yet.
It always frustrated me that, prior to this whole shutdown, my workplace had a hard "no work from home" policy. But when I had to travel, they were perfectly fine with me working from my hotel room.
It was always to do with HR's concerns about the policy being used as workaround for taking unpaid leave - not saying it is right, just how it is. When you are travelling personally - you are already on leave HR don't care whether work happens or not ( your manager might). If it was official travel then in HR's mind you are not using the policy for as a paid leave so they don't care.
If a business can't measure its productivity absent the employees in the office, then it's not a real business. Now a business owner might think "Hey, I paid for those hours, so if they aren't working every minute of every work hour, I'm losing money!" That might make sense in a "production heavy" environment, like factory labor, construction, fire fighting, etc., but there is a growing number of businesses that can operate asynchronously, and existing businesses should still consider shifting towards asynchronicity because, as much as it might seem more expensive on the surface, said businesses can already operate at lower base overhead, and even if an employee takes hours off their day to travel, run errands, etc., you're still usually paying them a base salary to get X work done by Y deadline. Being worried about an employee "not working" for part of the day because they work remotely is nonsensical for office type jobs where employees tend to work solitarily.
However measuring outcomes is hard , developing good outcome metrics is such diversified workforces as knowledge economy is not easy and goodhart law make is not easy to solve
Changing countries, or working abroad, can affect numerous things including taxes, employee rights, medical benefits, and ip assignments. Even working from different states can have tax implications.
Other options are sabbaticals, early retirement, whatever. Not many complicating factors other than a house (can rent that out), and our cats.
We generally take 1-2 international vacations per year, so my middle-term dream it to tack on work remote to that. Fly to a country, rent an AirBnB, work remote for a week or two, have my wife join me, then do another couple weeks there as a vacation. So I can double my time away without burning through my PTO in no time flat.
My biggest piece of advice is to "practice" first where you live. Empty your refrigerator and pantry. Work during the day and have the adventure of finding food by only going to ethnic supermarkets that you have never been to before. Go out to only restaurants that you've never been to before. Etc, etc.
On the weekends, travel -- even if only to the next town over. Don't use your car. Take a bus, train or whatever. Stay over night. Go hiking. Talk to the locals, etc, etc. Don't stay home.
If you get good at it and you can maintain your energy it will help you a lot when you travel and work. Before Covid, my wife and I would sometimes hop on a train on a Friday (we live in Japan). I would actually work on the train and then I would finish the day in a hotel. Then we would spend Saturday doing tourist things and come home on the Sunday. That worked pretty well for me. But there is no rest!
Also, if you want to work while traveling somewhere (in a car if your wife is driving, on a bus, train, etc) I recommend taking the day off and trying it before you try to do it on a real work day. It's actually quite difficult and requires some setup to get everything working well (good internet connection, setup of a laptop so you can work in a tight space, bright windows shining on your screen, dealing with batteries, etc, etc).
Oddly, I'm super productive in some weird spaces: the shinkansen (bullet train), MacDonald's, highway bus, hotel room, car (when I'm charging it -- electric car), sitting outside in summer in the shade at a Shinto Shrine. But I am completely unproductive in others: airport, airplane (can't open the laptop fully!), car (when it is moving), the beach (too bright and there is sand everywhere).
when i was using an OLPC XO as my portable travel laptop, i was able to work at a beach just fine.
If you did it for 3 months, I can see it being difficult, but it seems to me a year or two would be enough to get into a new rhythm in your new place. Just like moving anywhere else.
We already go out of town fairly frequently; seems we're away from home at least 1 weekend a month if not 2 or more. During ski season it's quite common for us to go shopping friday night, procure a weekend's worth of groceries, and then live off of those for the weekend.
I wouldn't plan to work on the weekends, it would just be living life, but in a different place, and with the ability to travel when we want to.
The secondary option of working remotely for a week, then vacationing in that 'remote' place for a week, then going home, would involve no work during the second week, and no 'fun' during the first. Other than seeking out new places in the evenings. I've done enough of that when traveling on business already, to know I'm pretty happy with it.
I'm under the impression that if I pay WeWork to be able to work at their tables and drink their coffee, that's tax-deductible and a business expense. But if I buy drinks at a coffee shop to work there, it isn't? [1]
This is something that doesn't make a lot of sense to me, as coffee shops are sort of a classic place for a freelancer to find space away from home to focus better.
[1] https://www.sapling.com/40999/6-surprising-tax-deductions-fo...
I'm in Japan, so my rules are likely different than yours. However, if I'm traveling for work, I can expense the cost of a place to work (including a cafe). In fact, my accountant demands it because if the government doesn't see some expenses when I travel, they start to get suspicious that I didn't travel at all. However, if I travel for my own benefit (even down to the corner coffee shop), then it is a personal expense. I can expense it if it is a monthly cost (and hence a necessary business expense of providing a place to work), but not a one-off case (a personal expense because I'm bored of where I'm working). There is (or was -- I haven't checked recently) a cafe in one of the neighbouring towns to me that rents tables by the month for exactly this reason. It's very affordable, because the tables are hot-swappable and they over-subscribe.
Before Covid-19 I used to go to me mother in law's for a week ever month or so. I used to work in the hot spring. It's quite cheap: about $10 for the whole day. They have tables and chairs and power and a cafe (terrible, though -- one of the only really bad restaurants I've ever found in Japan). Plus I get to soak in the hot spring a couple of times during the day to relax. I bought a month's worth of tickets in the hope that I could convince my accountant to consider it an expense, but he said it was a no go. Still, it's totally worth it (as long as you can manage working in a very chaotic and noisy environment -- I have no problem with that, personally).
https://m.youtube.com/results?search_query=Kei+RV
Without a portable office, WFA is a tough sell.
With it, it`s common sense.
There are a bunch of comments in here about that. And it's true, it's a huge pain in the ass. It's why I always prefer to hire people in states I'm already operating, to say nothing of people outside the US.
But I also see improvements every year. My payroll provider takes care of more of these issues each year, and there are other startups coming up that help you take care of these things as well.
There are companies out there that will deal with everything for you. You pick the person you want and then that company "hires" them and then rents them back out to you, taking a small piece of their salary for their HR services.
If work from everywhere becomes pervasive, I suspect two things will happen. One, a bunch of companies will spring up to streamline the process, and two, the big companies with lobbying powers will lobby for tax code and IP law changes to streamline the process.
There is literally no benefit to a given state, or country, to make it easier for jobs to leave their borders.
If we see a larger push by tech firms to let people work remotely, I personally believe we'll see government intervention in the name of the above. I also believe that, in the face of such a push, tech workers should seriously consider unionizing.
Of course not. But there is benefit for making it easier for people to live within those borders and pay taxes within those borders while working for a foreign company.
What if the states stopped requiring businesses to file taxes on their employee's behalf?
What if the feds set up a system where I just report my employee's tax ID and how much they made to the Feds, and then the Feds share that with the states and each entity just sends a bill to the employee or to the business owner?
What if the feds pass some laws about autofiling of taxes. I just submit my employee's pay and benefits to a national register, maybe send some default amount of money, and everything else is taken care of for me, and they send me a refund if I overpay or send the employee a bill if I underpay?
There are lots of ways to streamline the system without losing tax revenue.
Most of them involve making the government responsible for collecting taxes instead of businesses.
In any case, I'm set now, and my home setup is significantly faster than work-issued laptops. Even with multi monitors, it will be tough going back to a slow setup. Maybe I'll start RDP'ing into my home computer to "work from home" while at the office when everything opens up again.
Maybe I should, as, yeah, my home setup is much much faster than my work laptop.
And I use a laptop with mouse in my home office, no external screen.
My desk is full of exposed boards, cat5 cables going in and out of them, rs232 cables going in and out of them, power supplies, switches, multimeter, oscilloscope, breadboard, jumper wires, sd cards, screwdrivers, pliers, random components, and yes a couple laptops. With a big external screen & keyboard and mouse :) (Oh and yes, papers & pencils too!)
I wouldn't want to read schematics too much on a laptop screen. In fact I'm thinking my 30" screen is kinda small for that.
If you choose to work in NYC as an employer I'm obligated to collect and remit tax there. For individuals or on a one off basis this doesn't get tracked or audited much. If it became systematic it would.
This doesn't even contemplate the complexity if you choose to work from a different country. As an employer if I allow you to change your permanent address to France am I bound to manage your employment under French labor law? IANAL but I believe I am.
What if I knowingly allow you to work from a country where you keep your permanent address in the US and you are on a vacation visa instead of one where work is permitted. As a business am I obligated to report or am I running the risk of penalties from that country too?
Anywhere is really complicated.
It's not specific to France, either. All countries need their tax base (well not just taxation, there's also retirement/joblessness/healthcare contributions, etc...).
I want to travel the United States seeing and living in as many places as possible. Unlike several people posting here I wouldn’t mind working out of coffee shops or with just a laptop.
I see opportunity for adventure while I am still young. I don’t mind the squalor of living out of my car and showering in gyms if it means I get to experience more from life.
What’s the catch? I have no idea what this lifestyle would actually bring. If anyone knows what it is like please share your experiences.
https://www.amazon.com/Walk-Across-America-Peter-Jenkins/dp/...
The company where I work used to be fairly OK with people going off for 6 months at a time and doing a travel work thing. Almost without exception, the person travelling did not do a good job at work at all. I have one colleague who was quite successful at it, but he always worked that way (I don't think he even has a desk at home -- he just works in random places every day). But he also works probably 12 hours a day and at really strange times. So if he can't get good internet access somewhere, or he runs out of batteries, or if he has to move somewhere, he's completely used to it. If you seriously want to do it, I recommend living that lifestyle for a couple of years without traveling so that you get really good at it. Then add the traveling.
Most of the people I know who have done this have really enjoyed the traveling but would not couple it with work again. It's really putting your life in hard mode.
if you'd visit a place for a weekend, stay at least for a week. if you'd visit for a week, stay s month or more.
if it is to experience living in a country, then you can do it while working.
rent an airbnb full apartment, not just a room. make sure it has a fridge, a washing machine, a working desk and internet for weeks at a time. do not bother travelling on weekends to visit tourist places, but rather seek out local places to relax. (whatever helps you relax, may be different from person to person)
the first days when i arrive in a new place is to check out the local shops, figure out where i can buy food, etc.
then try to make friends with locals. and then have them take you to interesting places on weekends.
that way visiting those tourist places becomes a lot more relaxing because you don't have to worry about making the arrangements.
the best way to testdrive this is when going on conferences. arrive a few days early, or stay a few days longer.
This has become like Donald Trump or Tesla. Article after article that adds practically nothing on value because the headline drives clicks. This is just yet another "Now we can do anything because I'm a tech journalist, not someone who has spent 10 seconds thinking about any of the implications of what I'm saying*.
Analytics cause a terrible feedback loop where authors just beat a topic to death with quick keyword-laden opinion articles for clicks. A topic that could use seriously exploration like "Work From Home" often just becomes some sort of meme to exploit.