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Work No Longer a Place but an Activity
r.future writes "A story that I found over on MobileBeta that talks about how now technology such as broadband, and WiFi are becoming more and more common place. People can (and I believe may one day be required) to work at home. Here's a small clip from the story: 'According to a recent AT&T survey conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), 80% of companies worldwide expect to have employees who telework by 2005, up from 54% in 2003. The International Telework Association & Council (ITAC) recently reported the number of home-based teleworkers in the US grew 63.2% between 1999 and 2003.'"
Do they mean "moving jobs offshore telework" or "americans on call 24 hours a day" telework?
Either way it sounds hellish to me. I like my days off too much.
Most sales, marketing, executive and other customer facing jobs have been like this for years. Also, things like "hoteling" of office space predicted this a long time ago.
Commercial square footage is expensive, and employees who want window offices instead of internal cubes are more likely to get them in their own homes.
But good luck getting that home-office tax deduction...
It seems to me that innovations I have seen in the academic world 15-20 years ago are coming to the "real world" everyday : use of computers to predict lot of stuff, doing your own wordprocessing, the Internet and e-mail, working from home with modems..This justifies giving money to apparently useless research.
Google passes Turing test : see my journal
Teleworking will happen when there's enough communications infrastructure in place to have a high definition, or at least good quality, video feed to the employee at home. Until this can happen it will be too difficult to get things done outside of a personal working environment.
Really though, the kick for all of this will be gasoline prices 2-4x what they are now. It's insane to spend the amount of time most people do commuting, it's a huge loss of productivity overall. There is a culture of mistrust that won't change until it absolutely has to.
You can always (try) to work for yourself, too..
..don't panic
What is drastically needed is a portable and secure linux distribution for these people. IT departments can't control what goes on with personal home PCs and it would be nice to leverage that existing hardware. So what ends up happening is that a laptop is supplied for these people and then there is an additional level of complexity for the telecommuter.
If a Knoppix-like, bootable linux distro came with a robust VPN client, antivirus, etc... I could see a big market. Heck, I'm even afraid to simply check things like my bank account from PCs that aren't my own, anymore. If I could carry a secured, bootable OS, then I'd be a little happier.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
I'm in the odd sitution of working in my office (100 miles away from where I live), telecommuting from a sattelite office (15 miles away), or working from my house as my needs permit.
Curiously, I'm most productive at home, then at the sattelite office, and least productive in my actual office. I figure that's because people won't normally bother me while at home, but in my main office I have quite a bit of time eaten up by the pointy-haired bosses.
Considering that all that many of us need to work is 'net and phone, both of which are increasingly wireless, why should we be stuck in our dark little cubes all day?
The article is about working outside the office, not just from home. I, for one, find Wi-Fi convenient when I want to get out of the house and work in the local coffee house or pub.
demi
- rent
- electricity
- property tax
If all of the people in an internet comapny were forced to work at home then companies like google would save 10-15% a year. Google for example has over 1900 staff and huge open facilities to accomondate them, that is a large cost, that in the future many companies won;t be able to bear, especially startup companies.I have to agree that it is certainly becoming easier to work remotely. When I moved to North Carolina in January, my previous job kept me on board. I can easily VPN to them, authenticate to the network and get all of my shared drives, and, because we use Cisco's IP Phone, have a local Tampa number in Charlotte, NC that I answer with my computer. Except for the fact that my cubicle is empty down there, you would have no idea I was even gone.
In my present position we use as many tools as possible to facilitate being able to work from home if so desired (like Source OffSite, our bugtracker on a public facing address, etc), but the best part is that there is no requirement we work from home. If I come up with an idea on how to solve some issue at 11pm at night, I can hop on, check out the code and make the changes.
The hardest part for me about working from home is (as another poster mentioned) the distractions. We just moved into a house where I was able to grab a bedroom and turn it into an office, so at least I can close the door if need be, but if you have a hard time seperating yourself out from that, working at home is only going to make things more difficult for you.
Random Musings
maybe not. You are forgetting that first off, a boss has no control over someone working from home. Productivity, already hurt by internet access at every workstation, will fall, especially when Montel is on.
You also have many jobs where being at home is not an advantage, like if you have to meet clients. I work in a homebuilding company and we have customers coming in daily to view options, do financing, and the to close on the home. All things that need a central office.
Finally, there is the issue of security. Do you really want your Accounting or other information being passed over the internet? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know about VPNs and IPSec, but that doesn't make it secure, just harder to crack.
There are some areas that can, and will, move to a more decentralized model. IT in general can work well this way many times (net admin, coding, etc), but don't think that it will work for all other sectors of the economy.
Was that night on the marge of Lake LaBarge I cremated Sam McGee...
if you think your job can be both safe, and something you can do from home, you need to find a different line of work.
No. You just need aome unique skill or knowledge which cannot be picked up on tbe street corner. Certainly, if you think of yourself as a "warm body" programmer - "Have emacs, will travel (virtually)", then you can be replaced by another such - and it doesn't matter if they are in India or down the street. Wherever you may be, you need to build up skills and knowledge. Work out what distinguishes you from the next cubicle and (provided it is good, of course), polish it.
This is something self-employed people and small traders have had to live with for ever. It is now moving into the previously sheltered world of software. It is not thst the world is suddenly being nasty to geeks - it is that geeks have had it unfairly easy for thirty years, and the real world has finally woken up to the easy ride we have been getting.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
I work from home roughly 1/2 the time, and drive in to the office the other half. It is *ideal*. When home, I get fewer interrupts, can multitask (e.g. catch up on email during phone conferences where my input is needed for only a portion of the meeting), and generally am about 1.5X more productive. Plus, coding with my music up and the dog curled at my feet makes for a happy me. OTOH when I do go in, I maintain social/personal relationships, get enough of the hallway chats and facetime w folks to preserve my "presence" in the workplace, and feel somewhat more connected to the office per se. I wouldn't want it any other way. /anecdote
My boss (tech director) feels the same way about my schedule, and everyone's happy.
La via sola al paradiso incommincia nel inferno
There is a downside to this, though. When programmers hear their company allowing telecommuting, they think of working in their pajamas during normal working hours. Companies often have something completely different in mind...
Companies view telecommuting not as working from home instead of coming to work, but rather, as working from home in addition to coming to work. There are firms which expect their employees not only to work a full 8 hour day at the office, but log on and work from home after office hours. Because the employee isn't at the employer's "place of business", the employer believes they owe the employee no additional compensation for those extra hours.
And unfortunately, employees who convince their employer they need not be physically present to do their job find their jobs outsourced to other countries. Thus, telecommuting can never completely replace the office for the average American worker.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
My wife and I recently relocated to another state because I took a new job, and the company she works for let her keep her position but work from our new house. I know that's not that common yet, but with the availability of technologies like broadband, scanners, VPN, conference calls, and NetMeeting, her job experience really isn't that different from what it was when she was "in the office". The only real change is the lack of face-to-face social contact. Only time will tell the impact of that.
And as to how much work does she get done from home? Somehow, she manages to get her all of her "company" work done, gets a chance to rest, and even does the laundry. Boy, am I lucky or what?!?
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
Perhaps I'm way off base here, but my impression is that the jobs being outsourced are more rote jobs, like data entry, or basic coding. I don't see a lot of R&D or software engineers being replaced with offshore counterparts--though there are cutbacks in these areas simply because of hard financial times. So it seems like if what we are left with is a notion of jobs that generate some form of intellectual capital--I don't be raw code, but more in the line of innovation and higher-level stuff--these are the jobs requiring intellectual interaction, but not physical presence. So I don't think your point necessarily holds true.
I work from home a few days each week, and questions, when they occur, are only an IM, email, or phone call away. It's the same thing as being there. Once you cross a certain level of understanding, the need to have problems and questions answered drops considerably.
The office has become more about socializing with peers, giving hands on help to QA / marketing / etc, and having good design discussions. After that, it's all negative for the company. The constant interruptions (phone calls, drop in visits, etc) for things better answered by email are the big productivity loss.
Being forced to take the time to write an email forces a better explanation of the issue than the most typical drop in visiter has actually formulated. It actually makes work more productive in many (but not all) circumstances).
One of the basic rules of outsourcing is you don't outsource your mission critical work. If you do, then why does the company exist at all instead of the outsource firm doing it directly without the overhead of the other company?
Also, some jobs are just fundamentally a bad idea to outsource because of the issues with continuity and corporate security. Examples of this include your internal corporate security department.
There is also little difference between teleworking from a different office and teleworking from home. As someone who has telecommuted for the past seven years, I started not because of some proclaimed convienience factor, but because my official office had no one I worked with in the same building. A couple years later, I didn't work with anyone within a few hundred miles. Yet being on the corporate network and a corporate employee (instead of an outsourced contractor) makes my job far easier for me. Our outsource sites are constantly fighting a lot of issues of network access, management structure, etc. that I just don't have to deal with.
"I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend unto the death your right to say it." -- Voltaire
Let me clarify what I mean.
#1 - If your job is only partially telecommuting - requiring your presence for customer meetings, or other in-shop collaboration, that's not easily outsourced. So, I agree with this point already.
#2 - Some people feel that research and high-level functions cannot be done outside of the walls of the great USA. They're wrong! There are countless numbers of highly intelligent engineers and other high-level positions outside of the United States. Not only do they speak English, but they also fluently speak German, Japanese, Korean, Hindi, etc... And they're willing to do the same work (or MORE WORK!) for less money.
Telecommuting is a double-edged sword, and that's the point I was trying to bring up here. Be careful what you wish for, because you might just get it. The only way to continue to protect American jobs is ensure that American education is better than the rest of the world, keeping our children and our collegiates worth more than someone from another country.
If we don't do that, then indeed manual labor will be the only thing left for us, and even that will be outsourced if we continue to allow overseas factories to outperform the Union-run shops in the good ole USA.
i never understand why some people are happy to work at home, it blurs the distinction between your time and the company's time to the extent where there may no longer be a distinction.
because your boss cannot suddently appear in your cubicle while you're <insert your favorite non-productive habit>.
I tend to be significantly more productive at home, even though one of the machines I use is also the one with all my games on it (so I don't even need to turn on a ps2) and it has a DSL connection.
The reason is simple - my home boxes are set up exactly how I want them: I have all the software I need set up exactly how I want it, I have my shelves of books (which tend to be more up to date than the ones in the office), I have local mirrors of any online documentation I use, I built my desk myself to have everything in the right place and there's a 5 foot by 5 foot window to the left of me looking out over trees and grass. At the office my view is through a couple of 1 foot wide windows onto an open concrete-paved area with more offices on the far side. I'm just far more productive when I have everything at my fingertips and I'm comfortable..
I am a product manager responsible for a web application. Our office is seriously OUT OF ROOM and rather than rent office space across the street, I volunteered to work from home. I thought this would be great, but in practice, it has not been.
.. and stay for two or three hours. Weekends are just another work day too.
I find it too distracting to be both at home and at work 24 hours a day. It allows me to pop out of bed and be at work which is GREAT and I can recieve a FedEx package or run an errand no problem, but I am also able to just pop in the office after dinner
But there are other issues that make me less productive. Though I try to stay focused, small things like unloading the dishwasher yield to larger things like mowing the yard. And when my wife is at home, it is even more distracting because I don't get to spend much time with her.
Then...there's Slashdot!
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
"the only jobs safe from outsourcing are manual labor and customer service type jobs that require a physical presence"
Well, yes. You can't outsource plumbing, burgers made in China still have to be prepared locally, and it's not yet practical to ship diesel equipment to India for maintenance.
Everything else can be learned. And many, many people in "disadvantaged" countries who have nothing else to their name or credit, do have all their marbles and are eager to learn everything they can in the interest of making themselves better off.
"jobs [that] require innovation, cultural familiarity, etc" are not safe.
hmm... I've seen a lot of posts where ppl have expressed their fears (or beliefs, whichever way you look at them) of telework jobs being outsource-able (did i just invent a new term?!), or being distracted with other toys/gadgets at home or about having to bear the cost of broadband connectivity at home, etc.
..what almost half a century now? Havent we all called up customer service/specialists at some point for a problem resolution (and in most cases, the specialists walk us through something we are stuck at) - isn't that same in a lot respect as teleworking, except with teleworking you are remote all day?
All genuine FUD, I admit. But if one steps back and examines these fears in light of where technology is leading us to, it seems to be a natural progression. Haven't we used telephone for
1. I believe, over time as broadband becomes cheaper and faster, a high-speed connection at home will be one of the perks of the job.
2. Companies will have "special" days when the employees will come in and mingle with each other and enjoy a "normal" interaction
3. It's a fallacy that telework=outsource-able job. Accept it. How many dbas, network security admins, architecture specialists have you seen outsourced? On the other hand, how many have you called up and asked advise from and had to pay for (your company, if not you)?. The big myth with outsourcing that refuses to go away is that all jobs will be outsourced. Do you see business planners, analysts being outsourced? As someone else pointed out, low-level, production jobs mostly of rote are being outsourced. For now. Outsourcing industry/concept will change as well. I'm sure more and other jobs shall be outsourced too, but at the same time, the cost of getting these jobs done outsourced will increase as well and finally a balance will be reached.
4. Finally, just as we have had to acclimatize ourselves to other new technologies, we shall have to get used to working at home. I think it's yet another step towards being more organized and focused = not just as individuals, but as a society as well.
http://efil.blogspot.com/
And there lies the main problem.
Many if not most bosses will never willingly tolerate a daytime work at home situation of any time. If you're not under their eyes/thumb, in their gut they don't feel you're working. If company policy allows work at home anyway, don't expect good career results at your company no matter what wonders you accomplish.
(Don't forget politics: I speak from bitter experience when I had to "disappear" for six weeks to write a "save the company" software system. If you're not there to play politics at even a low level, in many workplaces you'll find your position undermined.)
Otherwise in most if not practically all situations, if you aren't working in a consulting model (however you get paid) where you've first sold your out of the office services, you can arrange a work at home site only after you've spent considerable time (half a year or more) at the office establishing your relationships and proving your worth. Then it becomes an option, but still somewhat dangerous. (Once a small company made it easy by moving to a more expensive building and not having an office for me... ^_^.
Best of all is to become indispensable, have that deeply recognized, and then have it forced, as above, or say your spouse gets a job in another area. Faced with the prospect of losing your high quality and/or indispensable work a lot of companies will do most anything to keep your services (this happened with my brother's wife).
Final note is that in my experience if you're building something big enough to require a close knit team it's really hard to make it work if you all aren't physically close. One study a long time ago said the most effective collaboration requires people to be either 30 feet or one flight of stairs from each other.
Yeah, good luck.
From the article:
"The US Bureau of Labor Statistics reports there were 138.5m employed Americans in March 2004; eMarketer estimates that 19.2% of these Americans, 26.6m, worked at home in their primary job once a month."
Whoop dee friggin doo. I'd hardly call that progress. I first heard of this concept as a Comp Sci student in the early 70's. There shouldn't even BE and office for me to go to by now. "once a month"? that sounds like sick leave to me. What they are saying is that when you call in sick, automation workers are expected to sign on anyway and try and get something done rather than stay in bed like they should be doing.
My only extensive work-at-home period was when I was a truly independent consultant. My major contract at the time could all be done remotely. Even so, the customer needled me about showing up more often even though there was no place to sit and work available when I showed up. So twice a week I'd make the two hour drive, socialize with the staff and waste their time too, and make sure that the PHBs saw me doing it. Then in the middle of the day I'd drive back home and sign on to actually work.
Sounds like the best way to not have to drive to the office these days is to get your job in India.
Hmm I wonder... how much work I'd actually get done at home.
Much Much more. I have worked from home for many years and I can tell you it makes you very productive. No stupid meetings to attend, no boss behind your back asking you to "move that button 3 pixels to the left", no chatting at the water cooler, no employees asking for desktop support. Just productive work. I realize some people are not that trustworthy, but I believe that managers who trust their people in telecommuting will get the most out of them 99% of the time.
Posted AC for your protection
There's also the issue of insurance. Insurance becomes a lot more expensive if the company allows employees to work from home as it is not a company-controlled environment that they can make safe. It can end up being a choice between working at work or giving up your insurance.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Errrrrm, actually, no. They can "randomly" decide to audit you every year and make your life completely fucking miserable for multiple months on end, every year. I've seen this happen, to my parents to be exact, and it's not pretty.
A better plan is to figure out what the averages for your industry are on things like meal expenses, travel expenses, etc. etc. and claim just slightly above average, no matter what your actual accounts show. That way you're much less likely to trigger an audit at all, and if you do end up getting audited, getting the discrepancies to result in just a reassessment instead of massive fines is going to be far more likely, assuming you have the basic skill for dealing with government of being able to lie with a straight face about the dog eating your receipts and so forth.
Working from home is a lonely lonely thing. Western society is already turning into a personal-space fortress, this just makes it worse. You also end up working extreme hours; its hard to separate work from home, and you end up just getting stuck doing work-shit well into what should be personal time.
I've been working from home for most of the last 4 years and its a big relief finally having an office to work from, even if my office-mates aren't my work-mates. Sure working from home is convenient, at times, but the majority of people still need a structured social environment to meet people and being social beings, this is all so very very important to help with becoming a happy human-worm-person.
_
\\/ are accustomed' - First Lensman