Airbnb CEO calls the office an 'anachronistic form' and 'from a pre-digital age' | Hacker News Reader

Airbnb CEO calls the office an 'anachronistic form' and 'from a pre-digital age'

businessinsider.com

31 pointsgoplayoutside14 comments

I agree and disagree: certainly I think the idea of a "workplace" where you go for 8 hours to give your time away to your employer is something from a industrial revolution workhouse (although such jobs do necessarily still exist - security guard, factory line worker, but not in software).

On the other hand, I think for many jobs, office dynamics have more than zero value. The ability to meet and collaborate spontaneously (which I think can to a large extent be recreated remotely), but also the fact that some part of many roles is actually some kind of "support" - whether helping peers learn something or secretarial or office help, a lot of it does get lost in remote work.

Overall, I think remote work can be great, but I've personally seen many who see it as an excuse to drop the useful interpersonal interactions and just do "their work", often in less time than would have been budgeted in person. If that's how some employees work best, ok, but I think the workload has to be revisited to account for what time people have available and what they are not doing but being remote. It can't just be a have your cake and eat it too situation.

There is some truth to what you're saying, but why should one not be rewarded for doing things in less time than it would take in office? Is it not a literal advantage?

> Overall, I think remote work can be great, but I've personally seen many who see it as an excuse to drop the useful interpersonal interactions and just do "their work", often in less time than would have been budgeted in person. If that's how some employees work best, ok, but I think the workload has to be revisited to account for what time people have available and what they are not doing but being remote. It can't just be a have your cake and eat it too situation.

I do not understand what you're trying to say with your "have your cake and eat it too". It reads like you frown upon people being more productive when working at homes and thus you somehow think it's a good idea to punish them for it.

You're missing that part where soft contribution is dropped. It's doing less work because the person aren't sharing skills and knowledge with the wider organization. That is valued work.

If there's a strong culture of sharing skills and knowledge, it will exist independent of whether or not it's a remote organization.

Right. Purposeful knowledge sharing isn't really impacted by remote work, only casual and incidental sharing is (eg. the kind of knowledge you pick up from overhearing a conversation or a rant).

Frankly, relying on knowledge sharing being a deliberate practice seems like a good tradeoff if what is lost is the random osmosis facilitated by overhearing highly distracting conversations, which is even less reliable than rumor.

> You're missing that part where soft contribution is dropped.

Is it really, though?

Chatting over Slack can help everyone involved as it cuts down on meetings or even the need to focus synchronously on someone else's issue, and you can create group meetings with a couple of clicks. It's also trivial to setup an internal wiki.

It sounds like you're up selling in-person meetings while completely ignoring how everyone has been working for two years now.

People often dream of being digital nomads. If Airbnb can convince the world to embrace remote work, how many millions (or hundreds of thousands) will work from Airbnb rentals? I agree with the CEO, but not having the world fixed to an office directly and positively affects Airbnb's business.

This carries as much weight for me as the Zoom CEO blogging about how everyone should WFH.

On the idea of being a digital nomad, it's definitely not for everyone. I lived out of hostels and my car for 4 months, and for two months before that, did regular trips further and further from home. I traveled the US, did urban exploration in new and exciting places on a daily basis, and then got an apartment in my hometown. I'm happy to have the experience, and tell stories from my adventures often.

Having lived it, I now know how quickly the diminishing returns of new places can diminish.

I went through a couple of periods of my life where I did a lot of traveling and it does burn out on you - there’s something regenerating about having at least a home base to go back to. For me, usually it takes about 3-4 weeks of nonstop travel to need a break, and one year or so of what I’ll call “ongoing travel” (going someplace for 3-7 days at least once per month) before an extended break feels necessary.

Stressing over WFH is what a leader does when they’ve run out of ideas for real innovation. It exposes how weak and powerless they feel.

Yes, if one is privileged/lucky/unlucky enough to have a quiet space at home. My home is usually filled with a happy din, which doesn't make for good focus, so I appreciate having the office as a "second space" I have the option of using if the house isn't a good place to work on a particular day.

In my experience most remote first companies also offer stipends / subsidies for co-working spaces for this reason. Sometimes you want to be around people or out of the house. It doesn't mean a centralized location though, and we can still be geographically distributed.

Isn't it still better when you can have the second space anywhere you like instead of "the office" which is a fixed location which make take arbitrary commute time?

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