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?

Comments

Re:I have a remote option but go in anyway

[JoeMerchant]

The office can be a good thing, especially if your home is not an ideal "developer" environment. My home is less than perfect for work (wife, kids), but it's still more productive than sitting in my cube. Interruptions by e-mail and chat are so much more manageable than the "Hey, you got a minute?s" that happen all too often in the office. Also, there are times in the office where it would actually be better to fire up remote screen sharing instead of walking back and forth between cubes - when we're remote, things get shared electronically by default, copy-paste of code snippets, etc. can be a whole lot more efficient than listening to someone who doesn't know what they are doing try to explain what they are trying to do...

Re:Hate the office life

[JoeMerchant]

That Bangalore pendulum swings quite a bit... the head count is cheaper, but the net productivity that translates to actual income for the company... that can actually be more expensive to get from another culture on the other side of the world, even if they do all speak English and hold college degrees.

Re:I have a remote option but go in anyway

[AuMatar]

The thing with the "hey you got a minute" is that your productivity is not all that matters. Its the group productivity that does, and the group productivity almost always increases from those, even if yours suffers. Someone coming over to you means they were blocked, and are going form near 0 to near 100 by interrupting you.

Re:I have a remote option but go in anyway

[Calydor]

That is what a group chat window is for.

10:03 Guy A: Guys, I need a second opinion.
10:03 Guy B: Shoot
10:06 Guy A: *insert page long explanation, no one was interrupted while he was typing it*
10:08 Guy C: I know, you just ...

Guy B stopped paying attention to the chat because he was focusing on something else, but Guy C was taking a moment to collect his thoughts anyway. Far more efficient than Guy D (who didn't feature in this little story) being known as the go-to guy for ALL problems, tanking his productivity constantly.

It works better when everyone does it

[swillden]

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