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

Hate the office life

[makotech222]

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.

Re:Hate the office life

[HanzoSpam]

Unfortunately, any job you can do from home can be done more cheaply from Bangalore. Just ask anyone who ever worked for IBM.

Re:Hate the office life

[Dutch Gun]

I've never worked in a dev house that doesn't have some kind of music blasting. Usually electronic, sometimes rock or indie - depends what the boss is into usually.

Damn. Does any other dev besides me actually require silence to be able to work? That's especially true when concentrating on solving difficult problems. I've never actually been in an office where they blast music, and I work in the videogame industry which is notoriously casual, even among software developers. I wouldn't last a week.

Besides which, peoples' taste varies so widely that it seems like you're just inflicting pain on everyone but yourself and the few you also share your musical tastes. To me, it's incredibly rude to assume you have the right to inflict your music on everyone else around you.

Re:Hate the office life

[edtice1559]

More likely they tend to produce what you ask for. India has turned out a lot of people with IT credentials who are not very competent. But so has the US. I remember during the .com era working with a lot of people who made a big salary and weren't contributing very much. There are great people to hire in India. There are terrible people to hire. The difference is that, usually, in the US, we higher employees directly and screen them carefully because we're going to invest in them. In India, US companies say they need ten people and get ten bodies. If they don't work out, you can sever ties at no great loss, so the vetting isn't as good. I work with great people from India who are full-time employees. If you hire a random outsourcing sweat-labor shop, you'll get what you pay for. Of course a guy in India still costs 1/5 what I do, so I can't blame anybody for wanting to get the lower price. Especially if they can do the same work.

I have a remote option but go in anyway

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re: I have a remote option but go in anyway

[JoeMerchant]

Major difference between my home and office working situation: at home, my office door locks, and my family knows to respect my space while I am working. At work, I have a cube, no door, and I am present to serve whoever makes the effort to walk to my cube entrance.

The family is still a distraction, but they're much easier to manage than the drop-in crowd.

Re:I have a remote option but go in anyway

[ProzacPatient]

I work from home and I get what you're saying but I'll tell you that keeping your workspace clean and professional (Having it in its own dedicated room is even better) and sticking to a morning routine like; getting up, having breakfast and getting dressed as though you're on your way to the office, can go a long way to improve your work-at-home ethic.

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.

Re:Streamlined Outsourcing

[Darinbob]

If you are absolutely invaluable then there may be two surprises. One is that you get replaced anyway because upper management is stupid. The other is that you're not as invaluable as you thought. In both cases you have to prove that you're invaluable instead of just assuming it. I thought I was invaluable to a critical project once, but they went and cancelled the project and then downsized...

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