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Are Remote Offices Becoming The New Normal? (backchannel.com)
"As companies tighten their purse strings, they're spreading out their hires -- this year, and for years to come," reports Backchannel, citing interviews with executives and other workplace analysts. mirandakatz writes:
Once a cost-cutting strategy, remote offices are becoming the new normal: from GitHub to Mozilla and Wordpress, more and more companies are eschewing the physical office in favor of systems that allow employees to live out their wanderlust. As workplaces increasingly go remote, they're adopting tools to keep employees connected and socially fulfilled -- as Mozilla Chief of Staff David Slater tells Backchannel, "The wiki becomes the water cooler."
The article describes budget-conscious startups realizing they can cut their overhead and choose from talent located anywhere in the world. And one group of analysts calculated that the number of telecommuting workers doubled between 2005 and 2014, reporting that now "75% of employees who work from home earn over $65,000 per year, putting them in the upper 80th percentile of all employees, home or office-based." Are Slashdot's readers seeing a surge in telecommuting? And does anybody have any good stories about the digital nomad lifestyle?
The article describes budget-conscious startups realizing they can cut their overhead and choose from talent located anywhere in the world. And one group of analysts calculated that the number of telecommuting workers doubled between 2005 and 2014, reporting that now "75% of employees who work from home earn over $65,000 per year, putting them in the upper 80th percentile of all employees, home or office-based." Are Slashdot's readers seeing a surge in telecommuting? And does anybody have any good stories about the digital nomad lifestyle?
Software dev here. Going to the office is worst part of the job. Dressing in uncomfortable clothes, sitting in a freezing office, while classic rock blasts on repeat over the speakers. Always looking for a remote job so i don't have to deal with that shit any more.
I get things done quicker leaving the distractions of my home and going to a dedicated work environment.
I also prefer in person collaboration, problems get resolved much quicker.
Of course, it helps that my job is only a 5 min drive away, I like the people there, and there's plenty of free food/drinks.
hopefully it will help reducing the pollution due to the millions of people driving to work...
Proper managers can manage this. It makes sense, it's about time.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Instead of hitting the road for an intense two weeks of "time off" - we've taken a couple of 3-4 week summer vacations where we travel (off work) for a week, settle down somewhere not-home and I work remote for a week or two, then travel a bit more as time off. The office doesn't "lose me" for two weeks straight, and the family gets a longer trip, even if they do have to "share me" with work in the middle of it.
There's definite value in "face-to-face time" - especially with people who don't know how to work remote. But, for big corporations, employees who know how to work remotely are more effective at inter-site (cross country, and around the world) collaboration, working with consultants, and using modern collaboration tools - even with the face-to-face crowd.
Just remember, if you can telecommute to your job than anyone can...
Yeah I don't think I can ever go back to going into an office everyday. Or really even going back to have a regular job rather than just doing contract software development.
The only thing that would make things better is an actual decent single payer healthcare system like every other civilized country. Yeah for profit healthcare insurance tied to the vagaries of your employment situation, genius!
It's for the managers who don't even want to bother walking around anymore. Makes it easier to do layoffs and lie about it, and preempt teams bailing when the office rumors start to circulate. They let you pay the rent, heat, insurance, coffee, phone and ISP bills and feel free to call you at all hours so you have a hard time taking a reasonable lunchtime, or going out to buy groceries. Heaven help you if you have wife and kids at home that want your time too.
I'm a sys admin & programmer so really I can work from anywhere in the world. But my employer is stuck in their old business practices. Everyone has to be in the office Monday to Friday, weekly staff meetings where we sit around and justify our existence, etc. Bleh.
As I write this, I am in an apartment my wife and I rented in Rome for a month. I put in a few hours every day.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
My wife and I both have lucrative remote IT jobs, and spent our time hopping from sublet to sublet around the country and in Mexico. Not possible with an office job.
This is great, if your job involves inter-site skills. But you can't split the employees up this way. If you say that half the employees from San Francisco are allowed to work from home or a remote office, and the other half are required to head down to San Jose every morning, it can be bad for morale. Now you could split it up into job types or duties. But even then there will be one or two trouble cases that you can't trust to work from home and still get stuff done, and morale doesn't stay up if you say "everyone but Jack and Jill can work from home".
We just were talking about this, my daughter is going to grow up thinking it's weird other kid's Dad's don't stay home working on their computers and smoking pot. ;)
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You must be a new article here? Or am I just making excuses for the decline of Slashdot?
Anyway, no funny or insightful posts yet, and not even any mentions that I could find of the important issues, especially the negative sides of those issues.
For some people it's a good thing, but in my case it's much harder to stay focused on work when I'm at home. Lack of high-bandwidth contact with my coworkers is also a major problem. Security problems, too, both for the physical security of corporate documents and equipment and the communications security as the information travels over public and often poorly secured networks.
Compromise solution wasn't mentioned, with smaller offices that are also remote from the companies main sites. Hard to use such offices effectively, and still a barrier to team gatherings.
I did find a few mentions of the big plus for the companies. Not the costs, but actually the increased ease of disposing of unneeded and less connected human resources.
By the way, most of this has become theoretical to me, sadly.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
I just prefer to work for a company that offers unlimited vacation and allows me to take extended time off, more than once a year.
We usually do 3 weeks in July and I take off another 4-5 weeks of time off throughout the rest of the year.
Modern, forward-thinking companies have been moving this way as of late in order to attract and retain top talent. I'm kinda surprised it's not talked about more here on ./ considering the audience.
I'm on the job market now, haven't seen more remote jobs than I did previously. If anything the pendulum is moving away from full time remote. And I don't blame them for it- I've done the remote thing, I was nowhere near as effective. I've seen other go remote, they always lost efficiency. Those hallway meeting, brainstorming sessions, co-working sessions, easy quick meetings where you can scribble on paper/whiteboards and read body language- they're all important. So is the chit chat and socialization- people are social animals. Teams work better together if they know and like one another. Remote just does not work as well. For someone to be worth it at 100% remote they really need to be a genius in their field.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
The OP has to be a freshly minted new graduate. Only they are so optimistic about the world. Any true Vet understands that your company is usually ran by moron MBAs who think no more than a quarter ahead. Since logic is not a requirement, Anyone can be outsourced.
"Liberalism is a very noble idea, currently controlled by some very bad people. Be sure you do not get the two confused.
At least one company CEO doesn't agree.
First they let you work from home, then they fire you by email. There's less chance of an incident if you never visit the workplace in the first place.
passes every day near my place. These are people driving in private cars to the offices to switch on a computer and connect to a network.
They could do it perfectly well from private offices at home without spending two ours of driving and without destroying the environment. But the problem is that the current cast of business leaders does not understand technology well.
Even at the highest levels we see a complete technological ignorance. For example, John Podesta could just turn on two factor authentication on his Gmail account, and we would not have to hear all this stink about his leaked emails. It is free, and it takes five minutes to turn it on.
In my opinion it should be a law that office employees must work at least two days per week from home. And let companies to think how to organize it well. It would be also a task for architects, for furniture constructors, software developers how to incorporate effective private offices into our dwellings.
I live in SE Asia and work remotely for a UK company. There are lots of pluses and minuses. Certainly my cost of living is lower than working in the London. I was spending £5,000 per year commuting and £12,000 per year renting a small town house with a garden. Now I spend the equivalent of £3,000 per year on rent and the room that furnishes my office is a business expense. My wife's family lives nearby and this is a great relief for her as well. The weather is much, much better and I am free to organise my day as I please since I am a full work day shifted in time zones. If I feel like enjoying some of that good weather, I can work in the evening and my co-workers are even happier than if I worked during the day.
On the down side is that nobody sees you work. You can say anything you want about how things should be, but if nobody actually sees you do anything, there are bound to be people who underestimate your contribution. "I could have done that in half the time" feelings can lead to "Are they really working a full day?". Nobody sees any problems you have. Your computer could be on fire and it means nothing to anyone. Also, working with such an extreme time shift means that you will get no help on problems. You need to be super confident in your own abilities. Finally, it's really, really to over-work. You put in a full day and then the rest of the team is just starting. It's common to think, "I'll just help out for an hour or two" and end up working until 2am. Then the next day is hosed, so you end up working late all week. Finally, sometimes you just need to be available during some core hours. This leads you to have a pretty poor social life, since nobody else you know will be working such bizarre hours.
I admit that I love working this way, but there are times I would kill to be in the office. If you do not work for a fully remote team, I *highly* recommend negotiating some kind of sponsored travel back to the main office a few times a year. It's pretty hard to justify the cost unless it is baked into your compensation.
And speaking of compensation, keep in mind that currency rates don't stay the same forever. Every once in a while a country goes berzerk, pulls a Brexit and you are staring at having your salary cut in half for a while. Prepare for it.
Outsourcing is great, says everyone in this discussion. It must be that time of night when all the long-term unemployed displaced workers, who were laid off by outsourcing, are still asleep. Or maybe the long-term unemployed discouraged workers have given up and stopped reading /. entirely because they know by now that IT work is not for westerners anymore. Wake up, jobless folk, and unleash your anger and disappointment!
We're hard-working Americans here. Entitled Euro snowflakes can GTFO.
I worked for years as a programmer, and I agree that working in an isolated environment is more conducive to efficiency of the particular task. That said, it's just a task. To create and invent, you need other people around.
Just an anecdotal point: in my last large engineering firm, I went to another engineer's office almost daily and we would go back and forth about dozens of ideas. Only one tenth of them would be implemented, only one half of those would be shown to management, and only one third of those would make it into the product. Easily 60 ideas for each one that makes it into a product. That is how creating happens.
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
but soon I realized that if I want to earn more I need to work for myself. I started my own project - it didn't went well, but after that I became a freelancer. now I work for different people and companies around the world.
here in Poland we've got another shitty government. but now I'm independent person. my feature doesn't depend on decisions of stupid peoples. everything depends on me, I'm free.
how unfortunate for your daddy to put you through that
On my last job (Drupal back-end developer) I worked 4 days from home, and 1 day at the office where planned all meetings and customer contacts. Traffic to the office was 1 hour instead of 30 minutes without traffic jams. Working at home is perfect for receiving the stuff you and your neighbors bought over the internet, or start early in your pyjamas and spend your lunchtime in the sun in your garden. But it can be lonely, I live alone in a small village where nothing happens.
In my new job (also web developer) it's 5 days at the office, but very close, only 13 minutes by car and 30 minutes by bicycle. As I also need to learn the new development framework I interact a lot with my colleagues, and the threshold asking an opinion on something you made or a solution you have in mind is very low. I also enjoy the lively discussions at lunch.
I think the team atmosphere can be reproduced quite a lot with tools like Slack if you already know the colleagues in person. That's why completely remote (at home or in India) is not as efficient as full-time office or part-time office. Avoiding the worst traffic days while still seeing your colleagues is the best compromise.
how about you find some more real world examples other than stagnate dot com crap, and "startups"
there's plenty of offices that do other things than shuffle documents around all day
I work for an asshole too!
Proper managers? Like Linus?
*the ultimate "work at home".
Hah, no. "Unlimited time off" is code for "you have no contracted amount of time off that you're allowed to take off, so we can make you feel guilty about taking any amount of time off at all, while making it much harder to track how much time you really are taking".
I've worked remotely for most the last 20 years, in two different companies, Google and IBM. The two experiences have been very different.
My current employer is Google, and I've been working from home full time, 500 miles from the nearest office, for the last three years. Google has great tools for remote work, including an excellent video conferencing system (Google Video Conferencing (GVC), essentially an enterprise version of Google Hangouts) that is deployed in all conference rooms, with good cameras, microphones and screens. I have a dedicated GVC unit in my home office, a Chromebox connected to a touchscreen, so it's trivial for me to be remotely added to all meetings. Also, Google runs on e-mail, all documents are in Google Docs with its great collaboration/sharing features, and a great deal of informal communication occurs over Hangouts chat. For software engineers like me, a tremendous amount of communication also occurs via the bug tracker and in the code review tools.
So... it would seem that it would be easy to work remotely at Google. It's not. The tools are great, and in fact a lot of people I work with don't even realize that I'm remote because Googlers rarely meet the people they interact with only occasionally. But the company philosophy is that co-locating all of your employees is the best way for them to be productive and maximizes opportunistic interactions that spark creative ideas, so there are very, very few people who work remotely like I do. I recently came across a shared spreadsheet where NetOps tracks all of the people who, like me, have VPN systems configured for access to the engineering VLAN. There are 14 of us, out of ~25,000 engineers.
Because there are so few people working remotely, most Googlers simply don’t give any thought to how to manage their interactions with someone they never see in person. The people I work with only occasionally are no problem; everyone expects those interactions to be electronic anyway. The people I work with closely are no problem; they adapt. But it’s a challenge to keep my presence and concerns visible to those who fall in between. My approach is to try to overcommunicate via email, etc., and to travel to Mountain View regularly (roughly one week out of six) and make sure I get face time with everyone while I’m there. It works, but it’s definitely less efficient and I regularly find that I miss out on important bits of information that everyone else knows.
For perhaps 10 of my 15 years with IBM I worked from home full time. The tools weren’t nearly as good as what I have today at Google. We did use chat a lot (Lotus SameTime), and email was a communications staple, but we didn’t have good document collaboration tools (we emailed MS Office docs, mostly), issue tracking or code review systems. We did a lot of teleconferences.
But working remotely for IBM was at least an order of magnitude easier than working remotely for Google. Why? Because everyone I worked with was also working from home. Everyone understood that if you needed to communicate something, you had to put it in an email, you couldn’t rely on chance meetings at the micro kitchen or in the halls. Everyone expected that during meetings they could expect random house noises, dogs barking, kids playing, whatever. Not that my colleagues at Google ever complain -- or, I’m sure, would ever even think to complain -- but I can’t help but recognize that when random interruptions occur they’re always coming from me and that therefore it’s my job to minimize them.
While working remotely at IBM, I rarely traveled to see other employees (actually, I think it would have been good to do it a little bit more). I really only met the other IBMers I worked with when we attended meetings at customer sites... but even most of our customer meetings were via teleconference.
Another difference was that at IBM it was expected that people might have slow-ish Internet connections. At Google
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
I have been working from home for several years now. I love the flexibility. So long as the work gets done, it doesn't really matter when during the day I am productive, so if I'm having a slow morning I can log in late and work late. If I get a flash of creativity over lunch I can dive into work. If I need to run errands in the middle of the afternoon, I can. I can't imagine going back to an office after working from home, it would be so restrictive and distracting.
I haven't needed to use an alarm clock in years, I eat when I'm hungry rather than when the clock says I should. I go to sleep when I'm tired and work when I'm energetic. This makes me happier, more productive and I'm sleeping better than I ever have before. Some days it is a bit of a struggle to stay motivated, but on the whole I'm more productive now than when I worked in a cubicle.
I work in government IT where most of my coworkers work from home because there is limited space onsite at the facility. I'm a contractor with an assigned space at the facility. Although I have the ability to telecommute, I love commuting on the express bus because I can read The Wall Street Journal in the morning and ebooks in the afternoon, giving me an hour each way to separate my home life from my professional life.
But, for REAL system design and implementation, it's the professional interaction and collaboration that is the source of novel ideas, and the casual walker-by who intrudes with a few relevant facts that change the entire narrative. These have no comparable form in "discussion groups," because you have to make a specific effort to join a conversation, which eliminates the "casual listener" that sparks a radical rethink. That's why it's called "group think."
Many programmers like the solitude of doing their work alone, and when I'm writing code, I shut the door for just that reason. But the number of times in my career when I've overhead some dialog in the hallway (well, I do have go to the "can," once in a while) and injected a diametrically opposed viewpoint and made a difference in the outcome convinces me that there is a reason to work together in the same space.
Ultimately, we need both: Solitude, and Bullpen. Either extreme as a sole choice is a losing end game for careers and for ideas.
My employer is going to start remote working (from home) 3 days a week next year.
What I don't get is what is in it for them? We will still have cubes, and have to be on site for 2 days a week (M/F) at least so they save nothing really on space/utilities etc.. about all they will save is probably on free coffee costs and plumbing.
They say they are doing it to be more competitive because younger employees expect this in comparison to other employers.
Call me paranoid but I can't help wondering what is in it for them?
-- Given enough time and money, Microsoft will eventualy invent UNIX.
In the end, everything is bad for morale, or productivity, or both. In my management capacities, I at least try to steer the ship away from courses that are bad for both.
I prefer unlimited vacation also, but I need to pay my mortgage with US dollars...
I live and work in Minnesota. The last two places I've worked have been this way.
Posting as AC since I have never actually registered on /.
I have telecommuted for 16 years now. I am a support tech for specialized accounting software and my current employer actually came to me and offered this option since I lived an hour away from his office. The reason he did this was because in my part of the country it is very difficult to find someone who understands the special needs of construction accounting, knows how double entry accounting works, and is very comfortable with computer software.
If you have the knowledge necessary for your job, the only other thing you need to make telecommuting successful is to have a good work ethic. A big part of my job is taking calls/emails from clients and providing them help on a timely basis; if you aren't at your phone or desk you can't do that.
I love my boss. We talk or email frequently through the day to keep each other updated on what is happening with our client base. I don't make huge bucks, but I do make a very nice salary compared to what a lot of locals earn. And my life is easy with no commute to start and end the day. This gives me more time to live my life.
Technology has made it possible for some of us to improve our work situation dramatically. I used to manage a construction office and let me tell you, that is not an easy job at all. The stress level was unbelievable. Sure, there is still stress in my current job but it does not even compare to what I was suffering previously. I would not do anything to risk what I have now, and that is the key to making telecommuting work well.
The health issues of eating crap food often found near office locations and drinking out of a Keurig, the traffic snarls and their toll on time and energy and air quality, the need to focus on work without the bellowing of the frat-boy sales associates the next cubicle over really did it for me. I manage my own workspace to my own particular needs, and it makes an enormous difference. I took a pay cut to do it, but I don't self-medicate with remedies and expensive splurges. Work isn't disrupted if I need to work on a project out in the country. Life is far simpler and more flexible.
In order to pull this off, I needed to choose a wireless hotspot, I needed to adapt my systems so that updates made a minimal impact on my capped connections. Significant impressions from this - Windows 10 can die in a fire, Fedora 25 tweaked repository configurations and delta RPMs is rocking this crucial aspect of remote work. I got really good at making, backing up, and syncing virtual machines between my desktop, my work-issued laptop, my beater travel laptop, because when I'm remote my own competency to make a fully secured work-ready platform on time is far superior to any results of bugging the home office.
are created equal... NOT
The main problem is in fact not all works are created equal. If you are working in a job that doesn't need a lot of coordination or communication, or doesn't have a team, then working remotely will work.
Think back in high school or something, you get a task, a project or a homework. When you finished it, you just present it or hand it in. There is no coordination, communication or team required. Jobs that are like that can work remotely without too much problem.
But if the task is a group project, that's where it gets tricky. If your team is large and you are only a small part of all the work, then remotely will be very difficult. Just like the age when you were just an assistant, you're just a small part of something big and due to the work you preform you need the coordination and communication. However if your team is small and you are responsible for close to half of the team's responsibility, you can more or less work remotely because you don't need to coordinate and communicate as much AND you do need more time to focus and get work done.
Dev works range a lot before the small group to large group project, which makes the remote office potential varies.
The other factors for remote office work or doesn't work due to distraction, those are just personal prefers. If you have discipline to get the job done, you'll either control yourself to minimize the distraction by buying ear plugs/noise cancelling headphone, getting laptops/portable devices or working elsewhere like a coffee place.
I just ended my 1.5 years/18 months contract work with Cisco. There are many people who work remotely from homes like me. It was very different from what I had done with my previous (employer/job)s. It was very nice with flexibilities, no commuting at all, etc. Everything was done online. It also helps me since I am an online type since I have multiple disabilities. I would love to do it again.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I have been working from home as a "consultant" for a number of years, and there are some things to consider.
Dress for work, at least in your mind. Your subconsious is going to think you are sick or something. Do what you can to make yourself feel like you are "working", it will help your focus.
An old saying: "If you work from home you can never leave work." Not totally true, but an effect that can influence your feelings.
Others in the office may feel like you are a "ghost" that doesn't exist. Talking more, in social terms, can help this.
"Out of the loop." You can miss information that you need. Get on the distribution lists, and urge people to use them.
And the other things that others mentioned above, it is not all a vacation. ;-)
I told your mother not to raise you in the whorehouse but she wasn't allowed to work remotely and she couldn't afford a babysitter.