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Why Working Remotely Needs To Make a Comeback
silentbrad writes sends this excerpt from a blog post about the history of working from home:
"Remote working has existed for centuries. And now is the perfect time for its comeback. ... Prior to the Industrial Revolution, goods were manufactured by contracting individual craftsmen who worked out of their homes. The merchant would drum up sales, and would coordinate the production with at-home sub-contractors. ... This all changed with the Industrial Revolution: production was centralized in factories and cities. For merchant capitalists, this made sense: it was cheaper and more efficient to produce goods in one place, with machinery. ... We've been in the Information Age for at least 25 years. We've made huge leaps in technology. Many of us would describe ourselves as Knowledge Workers: we don't work in factories, we work at desks in front of glowing screens. We don't make goods with physical materials, but rather things made out of bits. The great thing about bits + the internet is that the materials and means needed for production aren't dependent on location. But here's the funny thing: the way work is organized hasn't changed. Despite all these advances, most of us still work in central offices. Employees leave their computer-equipped homes and drive long distances to work at computer-equipped offices. ... CEOs, like Yahoo's Marissa Mayer and Apple's Steve Jobs, think that a central office fosters more innovation and productivity. I think they're wrong. We're still early in the research, but recent studies seem to dispute their claim. ... Managers have developed centuries worth of habits based on the central workplace. The hallmarks of office work (meetings, cubicle workstations, colocation) need to be seen for what they are: traditions we've kept alive since the Industrial Revolution. We need to question these institutions: are they really more innovative and efficient?"
I certainly feel I'm much more effective in the quiet of my own home vs. the open-plan chaotic environment called "the office".
I would agree with you if not for the growing trend of collaborative spaces in the IT industry. Sitting isolated in a cubicle and only talking to other people in meetings or the water cooler is no better than working from home and Skyping or talking on the phone. But a collaborative space and pair programming do foster innovation and rapid, high-quality software development. The social aspect yields interesting ideas that the individual would not think of on his (or her) own. Pairing (or at least having extra eyes around) tends to yield higher quality both from being able to have someone check for mistakes and the social pressure of not cutting corners when someone else is looking.
If you can do your work from home, it's probable that someone else can do the work from the other side of the planet. For less. So be careful what you wish for.
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
The majority of remote workers are slackers doing just enough to keep their current income and benefits.
The majority of office workers are slackers doing just enough to keep their current income and benefits.
This is an issue that's very important to me, personally.
I've relocated my immediate family far from all of our extended family for a job. It's a great job (Google), but the relocation has imposed some real hardships on us, and I'd very, very much like to be able to move back "home" but keep the job, working remotely. I came to Google from IBM, a company which has gone largely distributed, and I spent the ten years prior to joining Google working from home.
So I have both motivation to convince Google that I can work remotely with great effectiveness and experience to show that I have, in fact, done it. Further, Google has outstanding tools for facilitated distributed work... not only do we use Google Docs and Google+ Hangouts extensively, they're also integrated with each other and with Gmail, and Google Chat, and Google Voice. Plus, of course, all of our source control tools are well-suited to remote work, our code review and systems management interfaces are all either command-line or web-based (either works great remotely). It really is a world-class remote collaboration suite.
However, I've had to grudgingly admit that Google is right in its assertion that distributed work is less efficient, that remote teams move slower and accomplish less than co-located teams. I'm in the Boulder office, but much of my work has reached across site boundaries to include teams in Mountain View, San Francisco, Boston, New York and Zurich. And, as a result, I've ended up spending a lot of time in those cities (I'm in Zurich now) because it is so much more effective to communicate with people in person.
How do I reconcile the conflict? Was I just ineffective at IBM? I mean, there I was e-mailing Office docs and talking on conference calls. That had to have been even worse than at Google, right? No. Remote work can work, and very well, but it requires a massive cultural shift. The technology is there, and has been for a while, but what's lacking is the motivation to be willing to suffer the large cost of essentially re-training your entire company on how to communicate.
IBM made this shift because it was drowning in red ink and Gerstner decided a first step to fixing that problem was to eliminate most of IBM's real estate, and the resulting lack of office space led the company scrambling for solutions. IBM had decades-long task forces focused only on finding and addressing obstacles to remote work. There's no doubt that IBM's productivity did take a big hit during the transition, and it lasted for a long time. But IBM was at the same time fighting its way out from under massive internal bureaucracy, and the improvements from eliminating the bureaucracy papered over the problems caused by retraining. Another source of improvement was the fact that IBM built, at the same time, a whole new -- and very large -- services business, which was inherently distributed.
A key to IBM's success, though, was that almost everyone was pushed out of the office. The people who couldn't be productive working remotely ended up being slid out of the company, many in the course of a few layoffs. If you want to make remote work effective, everyone needs to be comfortable dealing with remote collaborators all the time, and by sending nearly everyone home, IBM achieved that.
Google, on the other hand, is already a highly productive, efficient company, one which doesn't really have massive layers of bureaucracy to clear out. As a result, any widespread transition to remote work would cause the company's performance to take a large hit, and not briefly. 5+ years, I estimate. I think Google could make the transition faster than IBM did, partly due to better tools, mostly due to better people -- not everyone, mind you, there were lots of highly capable IBMers, but there's hardly anyone at Google who is not highly capable. But it would take years and Google's apparent dominance notwithstanding, Google can't afford that.
IBM's market position was built primarily on long-term, solid c
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