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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.'"
Gnome: A never ending quest to make unix friendly to people who don't want unix and excruciating for those that do.
If your job can be done from home, it can be done from India, or China, or Mexico.
I don't have anything against job assignments that allow some telecommuting, but 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.
Reminds me of a Dilbert cartoon from a few years back.
The gist was that technology was advanced enough that you could legitimately claim to be productive working from home, yet not sufficiently advanced for your boss to check up on you. We were therefore at a historical point in time where goofing off from home and getting paid was a possibility.
While I don't really like the dress code that is typical of work (thus I love my Intel internship), the office environment isn't replaceable. Even if I like what I am doing for work, distractions at home purely cost the company money. Distractions at work, on the other hand, largely provide to the company. At the very least the distraction is a team effort.
Now maybe it's just because of where I'm working right now but just about the whole day is about work. We're always talking about what we're doing, what we've learned, and what not to do, during any 'distraction'. During lunch I may learn how to get around a problem I am having because I'm communicating with different people than I directly work with.
Anyway I don't think I can explain well without running on about one thing or another; however I am confident that getting even a solid 8 hours of work done at home will be less productive than a half a day or work, and a half of day of distractions at the office. And you'll never get 8 hours of solid work at home without fretting over something.
The great part is that rural communities with substantially lower living costs could end up the biggest beneficiaries. Workers able to take advantage of the trend could finally move out of higher cost areas into these communities. The workers expenses drop, so they could lower their salaries as an incentive for their company to allow it. With new cash from taxes, these communities could dramatically improve their infrastructure (schools, roads, etc) without necessarily having the problems of a metropolis.
The downside is that if I can do my job from home with only occassional face to face work meetings, as soon as the software is available to truely make those f2f visits virtual (and no, none of the current software is truely good enough yet), the competition for my type of work will increase dramatically.
Bring it on. :-)
Commuting is becoming such a problem (re: LA traffic) that it might be faaar more productive for people to work at home than to commute. It'd also be more environmentally friendly.
Especially for people in the tech business.
I guess it depends on the office space. Where I currently work the pointy haired boss is an ex programmer and so isn't too pointy haired. I tend to work a lot more in the office because the way things are set up work. The management stays away as long as we are getting stuff done. :)
I think the point is that different things work for different people and their jobs and also apply differently based on the culture of the company.
I do know that at my previous company I would have gotten tons more work done if I had worked at home, but now, with a change of company, the reverse is true.
East Coast Brewers
With teleworking on the rise, companies need more than ever a secure working environment for their outsourced employees. While doctors have often outsourced dictation typing, this is much less dangerous from a data protection standpoint than if Ford would allow their engineers to work at home.
A primary concern will be preventing hacking, etc. A VPN may be sufficient to transport the data securely between the home-office and the company, but there is no guarantee that it will be safe on the employee's computer. Companies can prevent a lot of attacks by installing a good firewall. But it is virtually impossible to require the tech staff to monitor all offsite installations.
I work mainly in banking, developping custom applications. I'll be the last one that is going to do his job at home. Oh, I damn well could, I only need email my devbox and some kind of access to the backend (over VPN it must be doable). However, no bank is going to do this. At least not in my country where banks are required to have their IT infrastructure in-house. Besides, they are so paranoid about security breaches (understandable) that they probably won't give anyone outside the bank a VPN connection to their network. You might after all steal customer data or so...
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
This trend is merely a return to the past. The entire "going to the office" or "going to the factory" concept rose with the urbanization and industrialization of civilization. Go back more than a couple of hundred years and I'd bet you will find that most people had very little worklife-familylife separation. People lived on the farms that they worked on or you lived above their shop. People worked with their parents, children, and extended family. If their livelihood had a problem in the middle of the night or on the weekend, they dealt with it. That why we have so many surnames that are careers (e.g., Carpenter, Smith, Baker, Farmer, etc.)
It's not the current blurring of work and life that is a fluke, it was the recent past's separation of work and life that was the odd phenomenon.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Worked in an office. Then worked at home for two years. Then went back to the office. Pretty soon we will all go back home. All the same company. I think that it is just whats hot, or what will save money short term. Or what the latest Overlords feel we need to do.
This is no different than watching companies consolidate computer data centres, then ditribute them, over and over. At least that makes us money.
The same could be said for outsourcing, lord knows we have seen that go back and forth too.
Of course, in order to require you to work at home, the company has to subsidize your broadband connection. No telecommuter will have to pay for their home connection -- just like health insurance, right? Part of the package!
But since the company owns your broadband connection, they can assert control over it. Betcha they audit every website you cruise, and betcha they insert a netnanny proxy with a Victorian attitude. Goodbye P2P, goodbye IRC.
When employers become de facto ISPs, with "group rates" from cable companies and telcos -- that'll be the end of cheap broadband for individuals. Again, just like health insurance. If you want real Internet access without strings, you'll pay through the nose. I imagine that most people will accept what they get for "free".
This has been covered in /. so much in the past, one more time can't hurt;
The whole 'working from home' thing is a complete myth. The *ONLY* people who actually get to work from home is CXOs and their buddies. Anyone working at the bottom of the food chain (90% of any company's employees) gets told that they can't work from home.
*EVERY* company I work for *SAY* they want people to work from home, but what they actually mean is that *THE BOSSES* want to work from home, while all the worker bees sit patiently and quietly in their cubicals/open plan offices, working busily, because they can't TRUST worker bees not to slack off when they work from home - hell, the honcho's all slack off, so if everyone in the company worked from home, nothing would get done!
And guess who fills out all the surveys that 'measures' this so-called surge in 'working from home'? You guessed it: The honchos.
I really doubt that I'll ever get the opportunity to work from home in any meaningful capacity in my working life, ever. I don't think with the increase of WiFi or ADSL or Bluetooth or whatever is going to increase the chances of worker bees actually getting to sit at home and work for 90% of their time.
Oh, sure, you can work from home *WHEN YOU ARE SICK*.
Either those statistics are wrong, or america is way behind the times. I don't know of a single person that telecommutes for their job. I would love to do it, but how realistic is it? I'm a mechanical engineer, and my other two co-workers have broadband at home, and most businesses have T-1, so technically with the right software we could eliminate human interaction by using whiteboards, webcams, email, etc. However, it seems like companies are run by CEO's that have grown up in an office envoirnment, and even though it economically makes more sense, it's hard to convince them it's a better way to run a business. It's not just office space we're talking about, it's heating/cooling, lights, power, computer hardware. That all adds up to cost. I mean my computer at home is just sitting around doing nothing while I'm at work.
Face time with your colleagues isn't as essential or common as one might think if an effort is made.
On my current project (I've been on it about 4 years now), I've never even met my boss of around 17 months, only met my last boss twice when we both went to different meetings in the same city at the same time, and never have met most of my coworkers. We aren't even all teleworkers (just me in fact). Working remotely has many of the same problems of teleworking. What difference does it make where I am working if part of my team is in California, part in the MidWest, part in Texas, and part in New York?
That said, contact with colleagues can be maintained, but it takes training and a consistent effort. It means literally calling up your peers and talking with them on a semi-informal basis much like walking over to their cube and chatting. It also takes an effort on everyone's part to communicate better in email or similar methods. Regular conference calls are a must to ensure that everyone is on the same page on the project. There are business training courses available to help train people in teleworking, what preconditions must exist to make it a success and how to cope with it. How to make it work is similar to how to make a remote office situation work where your project team is all over the country.
"I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend unto the death your right to say it." -- Voltaire
I think that the sorts of jobs where this works well are the sorts of jobs that are most likely to be outsourced. If all the communication that you need to do your job is some emailed spec docs and an occasional phone conversation, why couldn't the email be to somebody in India?
I occasionally work from home, but it wouldn't work for me to work from home too much. I spend a lot of time talking to various people around the office - marketing people who have ideas about what they want to see in the software that I'm working on, internal clients who actually use the software, other technical resources on what's in our data and how to use it, etc. It's my communication skills that ensure that my job isn't going to get outsourced - if a job could be outsourced, it isn't something that I'm interested in.
It's also a matter of integrity and discipline. The reality is that not everyone is cut out to be an independent worker. My wife is very diligent and self-disciplined, so she has no problem working from home. Me, I often get distracted, so I would question just how well I would do at home. At least I know that, though.
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
Being in various Internet-related and enabled businesses over the past 10 years, I've lived on the "work from home" cutting edge.
Working from home is something that only 1 in 10 people does well enough to justify the practice. The other 9 out of 10 people are simply not able to focus on work as well as when they're in an office environment.
When people are left to their own devices, they just don't get much done. At home there are too many distractions like TV, the laundry, video games, etc.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
First I would ay that if the boss loses control of people when they remove themselves from his immediate presence, he probably shouldn't be the boss.
:P) and a few partner companies. We could pay for yet another ofice space, but we don't see the purpose.
Second, I agree that working from home does require a work ethic, but I think that, as in the case of the boss radius, this is something that hurts productivity whether or not the employee is at the office. Sure you will get employees that will end up working even les from home, and guess what, they'll get fired.
To the poster way down further who thought working rom home is a myth, I believe that they are simply in denial and only disbelieve because they can't do it so no one else ought to be allowed to either.
I work from home. I save an hour of commute time each day and no longer have to share an office with someone else. I have a home office setup and I still stick to the same sleep schedule. I find the biggest problem is not that I don't work enough, but instead that I often work to much. I am also a manager, so while I can't keep tabs on employees every minute of the day, I do expect them to work. I give them tasks and get daily (or even more often) updates on their progress. We set up source sharing (CVS) and have a VPN. Company cel phones mean we can be reached at our "desks", company laptop mean we can have an impromptu meeting if need be or can travel to a site and take our development/testing tools with us.
I agree that the employee with a poor work ethic would not do well in this type of environment, but I don't hire employee with poor work ethics because they cost me productivity in any environment. I rarely require my own employees to work outside oftheir schedules just because thy have access to their computers and unless we are on a heavy deadline I do my utmost to ensure they are not working on work stuff in their off time.
For the record, I'm a software engineer and designer for a small software development company with only two offices (offices as in groups of offices, not as in two desks
-T
Whee signature.
While most everyone would agree that that there are good and bad points to working at home (working nekkid, or working at odd hours), it is also important to remember the good and bad points to being constrained to an in-office environment
There are distractions everywhere; your self-discipline will see you through them. However, at home, you lack the "social presence" that is found with the in-office environment. If you work out of office, people may see the fruits of your labour, but they could mis-place their admiration of the person. Maybe the team leader will get more attention, since they are in the office, coordinating the work of both local and remote users.
Being in the office means that it's easier to 'toot your own horn' and stand up for your successes. It's not just what you do, but you must 'appear' to do it well. People need to >b>see you succeed (or see you being successful) in order for them to perceive you as a success.
So, remote-work or telecommuting should be balanced with working in the office. You could run the risk of sacrificing long-term job/career goals for the sake of short-term work/task goals.
For many years now I have thought that environmentalists; in fact, every urbanite who has had to deal with traffic jams and sprawl, have been somewhat misguided in their attempts to solve traffic, fuel, and pollution problems, by suggesting expensive solutions involving light-rail, busing, or other forms of mass transit.
Instead, they should be focusing on how businesses can be encouraged to get employees to telecommute.
It's not for everybody, but I'll wager that 20% or more of the nation's work force could probably work just as well out of their homes.
Telecommuters don't pollute, don't waste gas, don't cause traffic jams, don't have traffic accidents. The savings to local governments and individuals could be enormous. Businesses save too because they need less office space and therefore expend less energy heating, cooling, and maintaining that space.
Proverbs 21:19
I was recently working on a team as an ASIC verification engineer. Our ASIC team was dispersed across 4 locations, east-coast and west-coast. Most of the west-coast folks were 'unassigned' meaning they didn't have real offices, most worked from home, or drop-in offices. As a result I had an opportunity to work from home quite a bit.
I found that one day a week was fine, and that I was more productive on that first day, but when it reached 2-3 days for the week, productivity dropped off, and it felt less like a job, and more like unemployment! I missed the interpersonal interaction even if most of it was not with my immediate team.
As far as the team goes -- it was a horrible experience. Tracking people down was a nightmare, meetings became completely useless since everyone was dialed-in (half of the time you couldn't hear anything, the other half you were asleep), communication became heavily dependent on e-mail which caused the response time to be 1-2 days for any issue. If I had to guess, I think our efficiency was dropped by 50-60%. If the cost of more engineers to overcome the inefficiency is less than the cost of real-estate it makes sense, but not if you can't tolerate longer product cycles or more engineering resource.
For a while I thought I could go live somewhere cheap and work remotely, but the question always turned to, "What do I do if I can't work with this company anymore?" How hard would it be to find a job, get trained, and integrate into a new team from a remote location?
I used to be a big fan of telecommuting, but now I would avoid it. I think having the option to work from home is good, say when it snows 4 feet, or you have to wait for the UPS guy or something, but I don't think I would want to be required to work from home.
Just my thoughts.