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WSJ: There's An 'Inexorable' Trend Towards Working Remotely (foxbusiness.com)
The Wall Street Journal reports that the trend towards remote working "is inexorable" in America's labor force, with 43% of workers now doing at least some of their work from home (up from 39% in 2012), and 20% now working entirely from home (up from 15%). An anonymous reader writes:
Besides lowering an employer's rent, telecommuting also makes employees happier, which helps with both recruiting and retention according to the Journal. Automattic, maker of WordPress, is able to have an almost entirely remote workforce of 558 employees spread across more than 50 countries. But it depends on getting the right set of tools. Automattic uses Slack for conversations, Zoom for videoconferences, "and its own internal system of threaded conversations for documenting everyone's work and for major decisions." One of the company's "happiness engineers" even says online communicaton has created "radical transparency," since it's possible to read and search through internal communcations. Just remember that not every job can work remotely, according to Dell's chief human resources officer. "Engineering, leadership, R&D, sales and customer support -- those are roles that don't lend themselves very well to remote work."
It'd be interesting to hear the experiences of Slashdot's readers. Anyone want to share their own experiences with working remotely -- or of working with remote co-workers?
It'd be interesting to hear the experiences of Slashdot's readers. Anyone want to share their own experiences with working remotely -- or of working with remote co-workers?
I know some people think that going into the office helps productivity or something through face-to-face communication, but I haven't had that experience at all as a developer. You're sitting there in the huge amounts of traffic congestion, thinking what the heck is the point in all these people moving from A to B when they could be working from home? Then you go into the office just to be distracted all the time (to different degrees, depending on how badly designed the office is - the open-plan office is the worst).
From now on I'm really trying to demand a majority of time home working from any new job up front, if I can get it.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
credibility, that is.
several years of anti-net neutrality articles and opinion pieces, including ones written by paid shills of the telecom industry. (don't believe me, do your own research, it's not hard).
would you expect anything less from news corp aka fox, the owners of this 'news' paper?
find a difference source, regardless of the topic or article. news corp properties are nothing but half truths, fake news and poorly or completely unsourced articles.
I've telecommuted for the past 14 years or so doing sysadmin, dev, and app support. It works for me because I have built an excellent report with my leadership team (they trust I will get my work done). My team communicates with Skype business mostly in group chats. However, we're all open for quick VoIP and screen sharing calls if needed to better address the subject. It is important to "over communicate" when you are the sole remote team member. Out of sight and mind will render good work fruitless (we all know shit work gains attention). I also ensure to include personal or friendly phone conversations with my team on topics unrelated to work so that we are more personally invested.
Having a couple young children, I built a detached office in my back yard with a standing rule - do not bother me unless someone is near death or beyond. Otherwise, call.
It does get lonely at times, but being able to eliminate Southern California commuting so that I can be a part of my children's lives is well worth the solitude.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the trend towards remote working "is inexorable" in America's labor force, with 43% of workers now doing at least some of their work from home...
In select industries among white collar workers perhaps but as a general proposition? I don't buy it. It's trivial to name entire industries where it isn't even possible to do much in the way of useful work from home even if you wanted to. Restaurant work, many types of nursing, manufacturing assembly work, maintenance, machining, retail sales, most farming, mining, foundry workers, drivers, etc. The list goes on and on and almost certainly accounts for well over half the work force. Unless they are talking about trivial stuff like answering emails etc from home the 43% statistic doesn't pass the smell test. I guarantee you that 43% of Walmart workers are not working from home.
Remote working is a hugely useful thing and fits a lot of IT work nicely but it doesn't generalize to every job. Speaking for my job, aside from answering the occasional email I couldn't possibly do my job at home. (I'm the GM of a small manufacturing company) We have two people in our company that can usefully work away from the office some of the time - our sales and purchasing managers - and even they have to be in the office a good chuck of time. We might be able to expand that to select IT and accounting functions as we get larger and maybe certain bits of engineering but that won't cover anywhere near even half of 43% of our work force. Everyone else is pretty much as useless as tits on a bull away from the office, myself included. That's pretty typical of manufacturing companies.
Using time and resources to make employees who could just as well work from home come sit in an office is the very opposite of productive.
Working from home, for those who can, is often more efficient. I handle most meetings via skype anyway, so whether I'm sitting home or at the office as I'm taking part in those makes no difference.
Shorter work weeks and more paid holiday with a higher GDP than the US currently has? How's that a bad thing, exactly?
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
Well lets put it this way. I travel an hour to my office where I sit at my desk and program for servers that are miles away from me, over a network connection that is about the same speed as my home connection. Being that my department is separated from other units, most of the communication is via phone or email. My managers are usually gone for the day because they are booked with meetings off site.
Our HR department is testing work from home (2 days a year) and I don't take it, because my productivity is measured, while at the office I can goof off all day, and get rewarded for a wonderful job for being able to answer some silly basic questions.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Being a right leaning news source. Doesn't automatically discredit it. I actually like getting a balance to the news just as long as it is thoughtful, and not propaganda.
Agreed. The problem is that FAR too much of the right wing media is nothing but fear mongering propaganda. The left has their versions too to be sure but the folks on the right have made an art form (and a ton of money) out of scaring conservative mostly-white voters. Fox News doesn't even pretend to have journalistic integrity. They simply spout whatever right wing talking points will keep their demographic of viewers glued to their channel. If this requires some talking face to shamelessly spout obvious and evidence free lies then they do that without even a hint of irony.
The WSJ generally manages to retain some semblance of journalistic integrity. Doesn't mean they are always correct or above reproach but they have a solid track record of mostly rational discourse and doing actual research to determine real facts. This differs sharply from companies like Fox News and Brietbart which have no discernible regard for truth unless it supports their existing ideology.
Plus the time spent commuting is utterly wasted and provides no benefit to anyone.
Ericsson in Sweden used to have commuter trains with laptop friendly tables, network connectivity and printers, allowing workers to do paid work while commuting.
Personally, I see the value in both offsite work and onsite work. The value of being able to talk to people without scheduling a meeting is non-zero. The ability to show someone something, and judge by their facial expressions whether they understand it or not is even higher. A remote desktop session is quite inferior to two people being in the same room.
And, yes, some people will slack when working unsupervised, whether it's from home or behind an office door. But I don't think the solution to that is increased supervision, but changing out the employees.
I don't care what anyone says about email/chat/video conferencing/etc... none of that replaces the productivity you get when a you can stand, face to face, with other workers in front of a whiteboard. I've had to work with lots of employess that always work from home and it's terrible. I have no problem with folks doing it on a semi-regular basis but 100% or nearly 100% working from home is bad for productivity. Part of your job description, especially as an engineer/developer, is getting interrupted and assisting others. The folks that disagree are almost always young, inexperienced, and immature.