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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.
Have we really come to the point where we discuss WSJ articles? I have seen proof that they create fake news.
PlanetVulkan.com
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.
"Engineering, leadership, R&D, sales and customer support -- those are roles that don't lend themselves very well to remote work."
There's little point leaders being in the office if the people they are meant to be leading work from home...
I find remote working useless for what I do, which is mainly getting people to talk to each other. It's far easier when people are all in the office to make them sit down and talk it out.
Developer productivity is tricky. Some devs really do struggle with open plan offices (although many don't). The problem is that what is efficient in terms of correctly working code tends to be inefficient in terms of code that was worth writing in the first place. Most waste in software comes from writing functionality that no-one actually wanted. Avoiding that requires a fair bit of communication.
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and a few more companies who have decided that remote working is evil and they need to see everyone in the office every day just to make sure they are not slacking.
And in other news,
Buggy whip makers have reported an increase in orders from IT companies.
My last employer decided that people had to be in the office 5 days a week. That office was a 2hr journey each way. The writing was on the wall. I took early retirement. 6 months later all those left were laid off and the whole IT department offshored to India. Things did not go well and I was asked to go back. I might have said yes but the 'thou shalt not work from home' edict was still in force. I said nope.
Engineering ... those are roles that don't lend themselves very well to remote work.
Ha ... what a laugh. I do plenty of engineering from home and it works out just fine.
Now I don't do all my engineering from home, in fact I'm in the office more than half the time. Ideally I'd like to bring that down to 2-3 days max a week, but for now it's 3.5 days in the office per week. There are times when you need to get several people together to discuss things, and it's always easier if you're at the same table and waving your arms at the same whiteboard. And there are also a lot of conversations you end up having in passing that just wouldn't happen if you were at home. (Of course this goes either way ... some of the conversations are worth having, either for you or the other party, while others are a waste of time.)
So, like most things in life ... you've gotta get the balance right.
I'm sick and tired of these hip, "ironic" sigs. This is an actual, honest-to-goodness no-nonsense sig!
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.
Where I work, the only person who gets to work remotely is the CEO (who is also the sole owner).
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."
*Indian accent* : hello you have been reaching Dell customer support. How may I be helping you today?
Customer : Can I talk to an American?
*Indian accent* : No. Thanking you very much and please come again.
Bonus points if you just forgo the audio can get customers to just type into a chat box. You can replace your entire customer support division with Amazon's Mechanical Turk.
Engineering, leadership, R&D, sales and customer support -- those are roles that don't lend themselves very well to remote work.
I really don't understand why ANY of the above requires more than a maximum of one day a week at the office. Engineering and R&D? I'll grant those for hardware work, where physical presence is the only way for multiple people to work on the same platform / prototype at the same time. But for software engineering and R&D, e-conferences and Git can take care of most of the requirements. Sure, sometimes there's no substitute for sweating it out together in a conference room with a whiteboard and someone taking notes - but if that's needed more than one day a week on the average, then you're doing it wrong. Leadership? What is that anyway, other than an HR talking point and a spurious justification for PHB's? In my experience it's seldom more than that. But if you must, do it remotely. If it really requires the 'charisma factor', (which is the only thing a physical presence adds to the process), one day a week should be more than enough. If not,then the process and/or the cast of characters needs to be tweaked. And FFS, why do sales and support staff need to be in the office more than once a MONTH? Most of the sales guys will get together in the evenings anyway to drink and measure their dicks, and the support staff can get the mutual support they need from their co-workers electronically.
In some sense I suppose I'm being sarcastic, because I DO understand that there is a dimension to work relationships that requires direct contact as a reminder that "we're a team", with all the complexities that implies. But corporations have gutted their workplaces of much of their humanity anyway, with cube farms, draconian policies, "right-sizing", and flavour-of-the-month management-speak bullshit. Given that, I suspect it's often both more humane and more productive to have people working at home.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Smaller companies designed for a large percentage of their critical employees being offsite can work great. This also has the advantage of being very contractor friendly...however, expectations have to be set and in person meetings should be used when possible to build better teamwork. This system works better for older employees.
On the other hand, I've seen that the bigger the business, the more difficult it is to sustain a telecommuting culture. At the very least, you end up with a system where those who are onsite tend to slowly be promoted and replace those who are offsite. Employees that are junior and needing mentoring also benefit more from being onsite. And, unless management really pushes a telecommuting culture, or has a firm policy that every works x% onsite/y% offsite - being offsite is just too risky for long term career growth of senior staff.
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.
I've worked from home for over 12 years. As far as my productivity goes I am much more productive than when I had get up early to get ready for work, fight an hour of traffic, chit chat with various people throughout the day and deal with BS meetings that had little to do with my actual job, then fight traffic for an hour to get home. WFH allows me to start work almost as soon as I get up and work until suppertime. Of course I can take little breaks to do various chores but my work time is solid work time, hardly any interruptions. In fact I have had to train myself to take breaks and walk around so I can focus my eyes on something not right in front of my face. Besides, most of my team is in India so why would I need to be in an office to work with them. We use slack and google hangouts to communicate and for meetings and for the most part that works fine. I don't think I could go back to working in an office, especially not the way the office is now (open plan).
Ha ... what a laugh. I do plenty of engineering from home and it works out just fine.
That depends strongly on the sort of engineering you do. I do most of the engineering work at my company (a manufacturing company) and about the only thing I could do remotely would be some documentation writing like work instructions and emailing. It's not that I don't want to be able to work from home sometimes but it just isn't practical most of the time. I need to communicate with my co-workers quite a lot (numerous times daily in most cases) and only a handful are reliably sitting at a desk with a phone or email handy. The engineering I do is mostly process engineering so I need to be able to see the products flowing through the plant and I cannot really do that effectively from home.
Just my situation of course but I'm hardly unique.
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).
The WSJ is a reliably right wing media source. It's not a far-right loony bin like Brietbart or even Fox News - they have better editorial control than that - but they definitely have a political leaning. I consider them about as far as you can go on a right wing perspective without completely sacrificing rational thought. I consider them sort of the right wing equivalent of the New York Times. Useful sometimes but shouldn't be your only source of info.
As for doing their own research, you are wrong in the sense that it is hard and perhaps more importantly it is expensive. If it wasn't hard and expensive then what would be the point of paying WSJ journalists to do the leg work? That doesn't excuse them not doing it but it is actually hard to do well. You are right of course that for the WSJ to remain worthy of being read they need to actually do their own research and retain some semblance of journalistic integrity. In some cases they have definitely failed in that regard.
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
OK, I will say it. The folks on the other end of the phone or Lync are voices. I have no idea what the ethnic makeup of my team is, and I do not care. As long as they do what is needed for my job, all good. I can guess, but why bother?
WFH is true meritocracy.
BTW, I am older white male, which is going to mean less as the years go by.
Even when it is possible to work remotely, even though lots of people are more productive in remote work, there will be enough people who slack off, game the system by calling at 5PM or sending emails at 10PM to create the "impression" of working hard, and bring bad name to all remote workers. It is the job of the managers to really cull out the slackers and reward the productive ones. But managers are not upto this hard job. They get paid to do this, this judgement is what justifies their leadership position and higher salary. But sadly, they usually do not have the guts or the temperament to say, "Asok gets to work remotely, because he works, We brought you in because you did not, and if you are not productive on site too, you are going to be fired" in a polite, diplomatic terms. They take the easy way out, banning remoting for all workers.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
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 say that as if it is an opinion. It's a fact for most people, myself included. Most people are not IT workers and even fewer are software developers. Working remotely can work just fine for IT work in many circumstances. You cannot generalize that however.
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?
You are assuming they would spend the time they currently spend commuting doing additional work for the company. Generally not true in the majority of cases. If they are paid hourly (around 60% of workers are) then you would have to pay them for that extra time worked. The commuting is done on their own time and on their own dime. The point of all that commuting is to facilitate the work that needs to be done, most of which cannot be done effectively (or managed effectively) remotely for most industries.
Then you go into the office just to be distracted all the time...
No, I go into the office because I literally cannot do my job outside of it. My job involves more than writing code or working quietly on a computer all day. I don't mean to minimize the importance of writing code - just pointing out that most people do other things for a living. Whatever distractions the office brings are more than outweighed by the productivity gains. Plus I have worked from home in the past and personally I find working at home FAR more distracting than working in my office.
I started periodically working from home when our company launched a pilot telecommuting program back around '99. I found that, at the time, as a coder and small team lead, that we were actually being more productive on our work from home days, every Monday. We didn't have the frequent interruptions that we had in the cubicle farm at work, and we were able to communicate as much or little as we needed. It's certainly not for everyone, especially if you have pets, kids, a spouse, or other distractions at home. We did get some pushback from a few idiot managers who felt that they couldn't keep an eye on us. I told one of them that if he wasn't able to track our work, then he should be fired for incompetence. We all had milestones, and as long as we were on schedule, then that's how you track the work. As far as the summary claiming it's not for engineering, I'll call BS, at least for software development. Now, as a manager, I still work from home periodically whenever I need uninterrupted focus time...proposals, metrics, etc., and we all dial in for conference calls.
Just another day in Paradise
Any GitLab employees here? Would be interested to know your experience working for a 100% remote company.
Tell that to my six figure salary while I work out of my home office and produce copious amounts of work when I'm not travelling around for meetings with clients. Ass. You'll figure things out a bit more once you grow up and move out of your Mother's basement.
For the last 15 years, I worked from home and wouldn't have it any other way. It didn't matter where my bosses were, so was able to work for people in Singapore, UK, Australia, California and Georgia, USA. My team was all over the globe. The company could hire the best people for the job, not only those near an office. The team members had weekly teleconferences to stay in touch, used email and chat a lot and occasionally met in person. The meeting part is important. Just seeing your peers once and having a chance to share a meal or a drink with them, is sufficient to work better with them between visits. When I visit a customer in their cubicled office, I get a shudder, thankful for what I discarded years ago. Working from home is a great gig if you can find one that works for you. .
Where I work, several employees do work from home because we have remote logins set up for everybody with a computer by default. We disabled this once and had people complain they were no longer able to do little things like respond to emails from home. While my employer tried to make the case for separating work and home life, remote login was enabled again to appease the employees and has remained enabled since. If you ask those employees, they would say they work from home. If you asked my employer, they would say they don't ask anyone to work from home. My suspicion is many of these people that "work from home" have never actually been asked to work from home and are just taking advantage of things like emails syncing to their phone or being accessible via the web. This might still technically be considered working from home, but it isn't the same as your employer requiring you to work from home.
How many times have you seen that guy or gal staying way later than is necessary - simply to impress someone else?
I've been in that environment and it sucks - it especially sucks when your manager is one of those types.
The ultimate yardstick of productivity is getting shit done on-time with good levels of quality. Nothing else matters.
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.
I'm a senior software engineer. I work from home because I'd otherwise have a 20 hour commute! The small company I work with has trouble finding qualified people where they are - and few will relocate to go there - so remote working was a necessity...and we embrace that.
When I worked in an open office - (which I hated) we still chatted over Skype and email. I still chat over Skype and email. Technical communications don't suffer too much - but a really good replacement for a whiteboard (with audio and text chat) would really be wonderful. Random connections in the break room are missing - but because all tech discussions go via engineering Skype sessions, we are all able to see all conversations and everything is archived - which is actually vastly better than face-to-face. My productivity is definitely way up.
On the plus side, I can have lunch with my wife every day - and that 15 second commute gives me back an entire hour out of every day. It's as if my life were 10% longer.
My wife wanted to spend a week visiting her family - and I didn't particularly want to take vacation time off work to do it - so plan A was for her to go alone...but then it struck us..."Work from home" is really "Work from anywhere" - so we tossed my computer and a couple of monitors into the back of the car drove - during the day, I could still work - during the evenings and over the weekend, I could put in an appearance. Win/win! This is suddenly a very liberating thing!
We did a bit of rearranging at home - so I have an office, with a door I can shut and a desk that can be as cluttered or as clean as I like. We installed a coffee machine and a soda fridge and a snack/office-supply closet...so there are less temptations to take random breaks or for people at home to interrupt me. When I'm "at work" people know not to interrupt me.
I wasn't sure how I would like this - but I'd say that it's turning out OK.
www.sjbaker.org
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.
Exactly... The typical business districts in major cities are expensive, both to locate your office there and to live within reasonable commuting distance... Plus the time spent commuting is utterly wasted and provides no benefit to anyone.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Good point. I wonder if he'll be able to do the needful!
The biggest benefit that I found in working at home was how it effectively shortened my work day.
I saved between 1 and 2 hours per day by not commuting and having the option of stopping for just a few minutes to have lunch was also a big time saver.
My days went from 10-11 to 8-8.5 hours.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
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.
I've done 100% of my work from home for the last 14 years, and many of the devs on my team work from home as well. It's not for everyone, and you have to have good active communication skills. For me, going to the office means getting on an airplane. I love it, and I guarantee that the company gets at least 25% more work out of me this way.
It's not for everyone. The lack of social interaction is a killer for some people, and obviously some jobs can't be done remotely. When it does work it can be a big win for both employee and employer. Any company that rejects working from home as a matter of policy is being stupid, IMO.
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 occasionally work remotely, as do most of my co-workers, but we only had one full-time remote worker. She had been working in the office but moved across the country, and we wanted to keep her. It worked perfectly well, though the general preference here is to come into the office. It helps that most of us have short commutes. Snow and things like that trigger remote working from the people with the longer commutes.
Go back to 1969. Nothing will be lost. They refused you back then also.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Assumes facts not in evidence.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
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.
Depends on what you mean by "work from home". I work for a company that does maintenance, machining, and manufacturing on large rotating machinery. Many of our machinists and welding technicians rarely or never come into the shop. They travel to the job site, do their work, and spend the rest of their time at home. All the VPs work from home or the road, and I personally don't have a real need to be in the office every day. We do have manufacturing, supply, and maintenance depots where people have to go into work every day, but we have about 70 employees and about 40% work in a state in which we don't have a facility.
It may be somewhat peculiar to our work (very large machines) but the end users of these machines seem to be going more in a direction of being light on staff and bringing in contractors to do all the maintenance. The maintenance still needs to be done, so the net result is more people traveling between states to work on specific jobs, and staying at home when they aren't working. That counts as "working from home" in my book, since the employee can live wherever they choose to.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
After spending an hour in traffic doing nothing useful besides listening to the radio and polluting the environment, I'm currently sitting at my desk in my "collaborative" open office at 8:45 AM on a Monday morning listening to two coworkers shout a conversation at each other, fumbling for my headphones so I can drown them out with loud enough music that I can focus on what I'm actually paid to do. But thankfully, I'm not being lazy or unproductive.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
The whole point of the economy is to increase productivity. And eliminating commute time, miles put on a commute vehicle, parking spaces for commute vehicles, renting office space for staff, etc. is a huge productivity increase that's just ripe for picking. The only thing stopping it has been paranoia that telecommuting workers were less productive than workers who came into the office. As the difficult problem of how to maintain productivity while working from home gets solved, white collar jobs will increasingly become telecommuting jobs.
My team collaborates on a minute by minute basis. The Skype equivalent is an open, continuous Skype for Business Call. Background noises and all.
For me to work at home 100% I would also lose the drop-in abilities of related teams, and face-to-face with several at once. For some of us, actual real-time collaboration is enhanced by a physical presence.
My Mexico, India, Philippines, England, New York, Florida, and Australian teams wouldn't know the difference. True.
I would also have to bar the door, reschedule a call around piano lessons, and suffer through the intersection rebuild that prevents left turns to the better Starbucks, OR start doing cold brew at home. And a better chair, third monitor, and even faster Internet service. It would save me an 80 mile round-trip commute 4 days a week, and yes, the money is that good. And I would lose 2 hours of alone time, audio books, and salesman tan.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
I don't see many folks mention how they are subsidizing the company's infrastructure costs through power/utility usage and real estate. I understand some portion of that can be written off on taxes, but it's a non-trivial amount especially if as someone mentioned one builds on a dedicated addition or structure. What is the difference in cost to the employee of working from home?
12:50 - press return.
Seems to me you consider a six-figure salary the baseline.
Do not, under any circumstances, wake from your dream. It's working for you. Only you. Don't crash this for the rest of us, ok.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
That's not a remote worker problem, that's a socially-inept prima-donna problem. Plenty of those that work in offices, too.
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
And kindly, if at all.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
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.
Currently you are correct about there being wide swaths of the workforce who can't work remotely even if they wanted to. Eventually though, we'll have remotely controlled surrogate robots that we can control from home to do any physical task that we can currently do ourselves. These machines will be stronger, faster, tireless, and have better reflexes than us. It will be a boon for the disabled and those who do dangerous work, but also a slippery slope as there will be the potential for us all to become shut-ins.
The Bruce Willis movie Surrogates dealt with this theme. Although it's science fiction now, sometime in the next few decades the technology will be there, and it won't be so fictitious.
That assumes that the person managing the team was also the one who picked the team. Its a lot harder when someone is handed a team they didnt have a hand in hiring to manage with people that need constant supervision, and there is no way to get them off of their team because doing so also is a black mark against the manager that does it.
I guess I would have to disagree with Dell's chief human resources officer. Leadership roles are no more or less difficult for telecommuting. To think otherwise just seems bizarre. So if you lead or manage a team that is entirely telecommute, what benefit comes from having leads or managers or directors (et cetera) work from an office? They still have to use the phone or IM or email or videoconference to reach the people they are leading.
As for customer support, is there really any better position to have work remotely? These are people who sit in front of a computer and on the telephone for the entirety of their shift. What possible benefit is there to having them in the office? Engineering can also be done very easily remotely, that's what I do for a living and all of my peers at this fortune 100 firm also work remotely. R&D, well there is some value in having physical access to laboratory equipment. Obviously sales can be done remotely. Even the salesman who must meet with customers in person would glean no value from having to go to an office before he flew out to the prospective customer's office or called them on the phone.
It sounds to me like the Dell chief HR officer is out of touch.
As with every single 'work remote' article and discussion since it became feasible the answer to whether or not a person/department/job function can effectively work remote is "it depends".
It depends on how much the person has to interact with people in their local office. It depends on what kind of work they're doing. It depends on whether or not they have the ability to work remote without distractions. It depends on if the person can be depended upon to do the work. It depends on corporate culture. It simply depends.
I'm the only person from my team in my location. The rest are in another time zone. Could I work remote? Probably with the right equipment. Will I get to work remote? Probably a couple of days a week if I want. Do I want to work remote? Depends on the expectations and schedule.
Some companies will allow it. Some won't. It depends.
My experience (in software shops) is everyone wants to work from home, except the bosses--who inexplicity link sitting at your desk with productivity. Until management changes how they manage, the debate will never be settled--regardless of how much data shows working from home is good.
I've always said English was my second language. Had Romeo and Juliet been written in C, I might have understood it.
Preach brother!
Same situation here. I start my workday when most people are still jumping into their cars (and depending on weather, scraping off the ice, etc) or heading to the airport to do that long-ass journey - and why? So both of them can grab a "floating cubical" so they can get to a SCRUM meeting and "collaborate"?
About the only gripe I could possibly have is that I typically produce MORE work than my in-office counterparts on a salary - as I don't have a commute, endless interruptions and the siren call of the after work happy hour.
The benefits to my employers (and me) are far too numerous to count. I have a better on-site virtualized data center I've built myself, with three internet supplies (business broadband cable, DSL and a cellular modem), battery backed power supplies, onsite generator and a GSA-approved safe - and a security system better than most commercial facilities.
Above all though? I have the luxury of having contemporary bosses that know they can delegate a "goal" to me and not feel the need to delegate "tasks" - and they know I'll get my stuff done - on time, and the client will be all smiles and rainbows. If I need help from someone I can always use this thing they call a "telephone" (let alone chats and webcams). Dodge my calls more than once and you (and your boss) get followup emails that I am trying to reach you - so that "hunting you down" bullshit stays to a minimum. Just because I am working from home in no way means I cannot be proactive.
Best lesson I learned by working remotely - over-communicate on just about everything. Want to know where I am at on something at any given time? Hit my Phacility website where I keep all my work notes and track issues.
I've found that at least for some of the jobs I've done - management mostly needed people they could watch because they were the dying breed of 50's management - "I don't know you're working when I cannot see you" micromanagers. I've converted more than a few managers to my way of thinking. When they realize the money they save on travel fees means they get a LOT more work completed for those dollars? Their desire to see my face in a cubical drops to nil.
Never have a philosophy which supports a lack of courage
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.
The benefits of working remotely don't have much to do with productivity. Although for some fields, the barrier between you and co-workers could produce that effect. It's mainly an economic choice for two reasons:
1) The cost of office space is reduced
2) You are not limited geographically to where you can hire talent from. Neither the company nor the employee has to be concerned with the commute as a factor for employment
It's a WIN/WIN. Any company that thinks otherwise has distorted thinking.
We'll make great pets
The value of being able to talk to people without scheduling a meeting is non-zero.
Let me re-phrase that for you, the ability for YOU to be able to interrupt other people from doing their work to get something you need is valuable to you. However, there is a loss in the other person's productivity. That's why we schedule meetings remote or on-site.
And, yes, some people will slack when working unsupervised, whether it's from home or behind an office door.
Yes, slackers will always find a way to slack regardless of the circumstances. For example, how many 100% remote employees are slacking reading slashdot and responding to this article? :P
We'll make great pets
Tell that to my six figure salary while I work out of my home office and produce copious amounts of work when I'm not travelling around for meetings with clients. Ass. You'll figure things out a bit more once you grow up and move out of your Mother's basement.
But they can be so much more productive when they have someone else to cook for them and do their laundry. :P
We'll make great pets
Many of our machinists and welding technicians rarely or never come into the shop. They travel to the job site, do their work, and spend the rest of their time at home.
If you are going to say someone works from home that means they actually do work they get paid for while in their own residence. What you are describing are essentially contractors that travel to a job site to do their work. Just because they don't work in the same place every day doesn't mean they work from home.
It's not usual for executives and management to be able to do some of their work outside the office. This does not describe anywhere close to half the work force in the vast majority of companies.
Currently you are correct about there being wide swaths of the workforce who can't work remotely even if they wanted to. Eventually though, we'll have remotely controlled surrogate robots that we can control from home to do any physical task that we can currently do ourselves.
What color is the sky on your planet? What you describe will not happen within the lifetime of anyone reading this if it ever happens at all. Even presuming the technical issues are resolvable within the next century (unlikely) the economics of it are very unlikely to be feasible. Do you have the vaguest comprehension of how expensive robots like what you describe would be? You really think a worker in a minimum wage job is going to be able to afford such a device? I think you have a very fanciful notion of what the future will look like. Put down the Wall-E DVD and step away.
The Bruce Willis movie Surrogates dealt with this theme. Although it's science fiction now, sometime in the next few decades the technology will be there, and it won't be so fictitious.
So you saw it in a sci-fi movie and decided it was inevitable? Here's a top tip for you. Most sci-fi is light on the science and heavy on the fiction. Just because someone can dream of an idea doesn't mean it will actually come to pass.
If your job doesn't ever involve having to be physically present to do a physical task then I don't see the problem; a programmer, web designer, paperwork-shuffler, etc, doesn't need to be physically present. I, on the other hand, are working with hardware all day long, and I can't do that from home, so I have to be physically present in the lab in order to work. The value of an employee should be measured first by whether they get everything done they're supposed to get done, then by the quality of the aforementioned tasks, not by something as useless as 'do they arrive early and stay late' and similar. These things are holdovers from earlier times when someone not physically showing up for work meant an entire team of people would be hamstrung because of it (i.e. physical labor jobs). If your job is something not requiring you to be there to use your body to physically move things, then even if you're part of a team, you're still contributing to the team effort and doing your part for whatever project you're assigned to whether you're in an office or in your pajamas at home sitting in front of a keyboard.
Many of you are proponents of the whole 'UBI' concept. If your current job is capable of becoming work-from-home, would you feel better about having to work? You might still have to be available nine-to-five, but no commute, no having to get dressed in going-to-work clothes if you don't want to, no shoes on your feet if you don't want to, no co-workers to deal with even if you don't want to deal with them, nobody looking over your shoulder at random times.. bonus points if your work doesn't require you to keep 'bankers hours', allowing you to set your own schedule.
Datum: in the *early* nineties, large companies that already had a lot of experience with telecommuting wanted people in the office at least 1-2 days a week, not just for meetings, but for the water cooler conversations that turn out to be REALLY important. And no, you don't get those with texting, since we're talking about multiple people and conversations.
Datum: let's say, just for grins, that you actually live with a family. Now convince them NOT to bother you while you're working. Or your roommates....
And this is, from the companies' PoV, that you've got your own device, and we don't have to pay for anything, not even office space.
How am I supposed to sexually harass the girls from the typing pool now if work is from home?
Maybe you should try focusing instead on actually selling radio ads, Herb.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
If you're not making at least six figures in the software biz, you're either new, or going it wrong.
Really, I found the biggest benefit being not having to wear pants. You don't realize how much time you waste dealing with pants until you stop wearing them all together.
You are still on the first level.
The US has an inexorable trend toward laziness and unproductivity. It's like the US is turning into the EU...
Bullshit. Corporations are making record profits. Profits are directly correlated with "productivity". Back up the claim with evidence.
We'll make great pets
Oh... My.. God...
For others, not so much. For example, I work from home except for face-to-face meetings. Boils down to around 80% work from home. Will get a bit less in the near future, since I will be mentoring a new addition to our team and that requires some direct personal interaction. The advantages are that I am much more productive, since I do not get constantly interrupted, I work on my own infrastructure and I have a pleasant environment. But I do plan all of my work-time myself anyways (I am a very senior Technology and IT Security consultant), time-accounting is fully in my hands and I am simply trusted to do it right and I am fully self-motivated.
For people that are self-motivated and want to do a good job, this not only works well, it is much more productive. For all others, I am not sure. It may still be better to have them work remotely, because at least this cuts down on them decreasing the productivity of others. But then, getting rid of them may be even better.
What I see here is a long-term shift from workplaces targeted at the average person (who are usually not really self-motivated) to the, say, 30% of the workforce that will make a serious attempt to do a good job, regardless of circumstances. These you can let work however they prefer and for knowledge-workers that will mostly be from home. The rest decreases in value all the time, due to automation (weak "AI"), optimization and off-shoring. Long therm, I expect that only these 30% will have a job and that would be pretty nice for them, because finally the others will stop standing in their way. It will also be plenty to keep the economy going, as long as the others get some reasonable share of the wealth to be able to buy things.
Bottom line is that there basically is no choice. Force the cream of your staff to work on-site, and you will lose more and more of them and eventually that will kill your enterprise. Only a minority will prefer to work on-site for obvious reasons. At the same time, when you let go of the outdated idea that presence enforces productivity, you can save a lot of money. In fact, I see that large customers reduce their office space and they could not even fit in the full staff anymore if all were present at the same time.
We are in a massive transformation of work (again) and the outcome will be interesting.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
It removes some of the impetus towards offshoring and automation.
And for a side benefit, it lowers gasoline usage which puts downward pressure on gasoline prices.
And on car usage too extending the life of automobiles.
And on mass transit usage, reducing overcrowding and pushing off the need for expensive upgrades.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I don't think I've ever interrupted anyone in an office that was even remotely concerned about their productivity. More often then not it requires me to break through a conversation about football or last weekend's events so I can continue with my productivity.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Or living in the other 99% of the world that isn't a tech hot spot.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Let me re-phrase that for you, the ability for YOU to be able to interrupt other people from doing their work to get something you need is valuable to you. However, there is a loss in the other person's productivity. That's why we schedule meetings remote or on-site.
When I have a customer or a VP present, I damn well want to interrupt what you're doing to get needed information now and not have to schedule a meeting. Breaking your productivity is expected.
Remember, it is easier to replace you with someone willing to play ball than it is to replace customers.
The value of being able to talk to people without scheduling a meeting is non-zero.
Let me re-phrase that for you, the ability for YOU to be able to interrupt other people from doing their work to get something you need is valuable to you. However, there is a loss in the other person's productivity. That's why we schedule meetings remote or on-site.
There's a middle ground. Use an ignorable electronic mechanism to query whether the person you'd like to talk to is interruptible. If so, wander over to their desk and proceed to talk; much lower overhead than scheduling a meeting, finding a room, et cetera. When I worked in an office I routinely used instant messaging to ask a co-worker sitting right next to me if they were available. I'd send "IRQ", and they would reply with "NAK", "ACK" or even just ignore me (implied NAK, I suppose).
I now work remotely full time, and while I love the freedom and flexibility that provides me, I often wish that ad hoc discussions were easier. I even have a video conferencing unit in my home office, and another in the area of the office where my colleagues sit, but that's still not as good as being there.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Is this a reference to Diotima? I was hoping people weren't reading the Symposium anymore.
I've been doing embedded Linux and Android development remotely for years now. Both I and my clients have been very happy with the arrangement. The secret is to stay on top of communication, use tools like email, skype, and the usual web based collaboration suites (i.e. JIRA, Confluence, etc) so your boss/client has confidence you are top of things. Be up front about challenges that might delay deliveries. It is better to under-promise and over-deliver than the other way around. Also, the flexibility is great, but keep a log of your time to make sure work doesn't bleed into personal time too much (or personal into work).
If you have a client or boss that is reluctant, offer to do it on a trial basis. I often start new consulting projects by going on site for the first week or two while things ramp up, go off site for most of the work, then come back during key integration phases, so a hybrid arrangement is also an option.
Thad Phetteplace
The Bolachek Journals
I was certainly not referring to platonic love, and those readings had long been forgotten =)
The main rule for looking for a job and hiring. Is to make sure there is a fit. Your horror company could be someones dream job. Granted normal unprofessional aspects tend to make sure the company doesn't last for too long.
But if you get bad feelings about the place, you don't need to take the job.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I don't think I've ever interrupted anyone in an office that was even remotely concerned about their productivity.
That's because of psychological egoism and narcissism. You can't put yourself in the other person's shoes and you are concerned about you, therefore you can't accurately assess the other person's state. I'm surprised you would admit this in public because it just makes you look like a tool. But then again most narcissists are suffering from the Dunning Kruger effect so I guess it's not surprising. Carry on, you're quite humorous. :)
We'll make great pets
When I have a customer or a VP present, I damn well want to interrupt what you're doing to get needed information now and not have to schedule a meeting. Breaking your productivity is expected. Remember, it is easier to replace you with someone willing to play ball than it is to replace customers.
If your company is so on fire that you can't wait a half a day or a day to talk about something, your company has major dysfunctional issues. It's apparent you don't have a background in Six Sigma LEAN, so it's not surprising that you wouldn't understand. But I'm sure your home grown (NIHS, not invented here syndrome) methodology is far superior to any other known to work in practice methodology. Keep telling yourself that. Burn that money. :)
We'll make great pets
I'm a tool for assuming a person having an active conversation about football actually cares about the work they are doing at that point? O-k....
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
There's a middle ground. Use an ignorable electronic mechanism to query whether the person you'd like to talk to is interruptible. If so, wander over to their desk and proceed to talk; much lower overhead than scheduling a meeting, finding a room, et cetera. When I worked in an office I routinely used instant messaging to ask a co-worker sitting right next to me if they were available. I'd send "IRQ", and they would reply with "NAK", "ACK" or even just ignore me (implied NAK, I suppose).
Absolutely agree, but that only works for a 1-on-1 conversation and it doesn't matter whether you're physically present in the office or not. Also, you don't have to physically schedule a conference room, at my work we all have conference bridges. There are relatively cheap VOIP services that offer this. A conference could be everyone jumping on a conference line at a specified time. As with everything, every situation is different and the most appropriate choice must be made based on the context. Assuming that everything should be done one way or the other ALL the time disregarding the context is black and white thinking.
We'll make great pets
Try noise cancelling headphones: it beats going deaf.
But yeah, how wasting time on a commute to sit in a noisy, work-unfriendly environment with regular interruptions (meetings) to puff up management's sense of importance is meant to be more productive than working from home beyond me.
... I loved it as a Cisco contractor for 1.5 years/18 months. Before that, I couldn't do that with Symantec even though I requested for almost 13 years I was there. It was also far and tiring due to L.A. commutes even at later hours. I also have disabilities so I can't drive. :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Personally, when I work from home, I also have a tendency to fall asleep, to watch television or to open the fridge that I do not have when I work from office. And I suspect many of my colleagues working from home do, too, but they won't admit it.
Sure, but how productive are people in the office? I've seen studies showing people typically spend less than 40% of their time doing anything productive in offices. They surf the web, zone out, they're exhausted from the commuting, they hang out and chit-chat with other employees, etc., plus all the interruptions from the open-plan work spaces.
Interesting combination of genetic fallacy and ad hominem-- especially interesting since you attacked their ability to think rationally while thinking irrationally yourself!
Exactly where do you think I was irrational? Brietbart and Fox News ARE right wing and they are not as a routine matter even remotely interested in actual facts. If they aren't interested in facts then they are irrational ("looney") as far as being a source of actual news. The are perfectly rational as businesses or as (vile) propaganda machines but they utterly fail as reasonable sources of information and/or opinions. Listen to most of the talking heads for either organization and tell me with a straight face that they are engaging in any sort of credible and honest journalism and I'll call you a liar.
And if you are going to quote fallacies at me, get them right. There is no genetic fallacy in my statement. I made no argument that because a story came from those sources it was de-facto false. Sometimes they actually do report factual news. I'm simply pointing out that as a general proposition Fox News and Brietbart are at best unreliable sources of objective news which is completely true. Furthermore an ad-hominem attack attacks the individual instead of their argument. Since in many cases Fox News and Brietbart present clearly and demonstrably false information to further an ideological position (and to make money doing so) there is no argument to rebut. They are simply knowingly telling lies and I'm calling them out on it.
In which cases, specifically?
Quite a few. You'd have a hard time naming a news source that hasn't failed to maintain journalistic standards from time to time. WSJ is no exception though as a general proposition they are better than most. I've read more than a few articles from the WSJ that were preposterous and poorly researched nonsense. I'm quite confident you could read any given edition of their paper and find a few yourself.
He might be taking a break so he can go into the next 2 hours of concentrated work . By sabotaging his break it means you have reduced the efficiency of his next 2 hours.
**Life is too short to be serious**
I work from home on Thursdays, one of the worst commuting days in the San Francisco bay area, including Tuesdays and Wednesdays I love it and would consider leaving my current employer if their WFH policy changed.
UK resident here - much as I like wfh, I have to wonder whether these figures in the US are more a symptom of a move towards casual labour and zero-hour contracts. If I didn't see my employer occasionally I would worry about being binned at the first sign of a downturn - employers generally look after people better if they are part of the group, and that is hard to achieve remotely.
That is one great benefit of having a workforce work from their homes.
When you need to shrink, you just tell them they need to come into the office every day to increase productivity. When enough quit, change the policy, and not retrenchments need be paid.
I'm pretty sure "most of the USA west coast" is more than 1%, but yeah, if you're outside the developed western nations that would be true, however one would also probably enjoy a low cost of living that would make the 'six figures' thing meaningless.
That wasn't envy. I'm not doing six figures, but between me and my wife we are well off. You mistake that for envy?
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
And this is why I don't work in an office.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Any employer who really embraces telework soon realizes that the employees could just as easily be in Bangalore.
COE
You live in a bubble. Many jobs have tight topical work. You are not in this position so this concept is completely beyond what could possibly exist right? I'm guessing you are a very young person. And probably a Bernie supporter. Very tragic.
Wrong on every claim here. Not surprising with your superiority complex. Ignorance is Bliss I suppose. Enjoy your fantasy world in your mind.
We'll make great pets
I work on a remote island in the Caribbean, Middle Caicos, via the Internet. There are only about 100 people on this island, no stores or distractions. I go fishing in my backyard almost everyday before work. I'm sitting on my laptop on the porch with the ocean in the background during work. And at the end of the day I go fishing again, or lobster hunting once the season re-opens, or just take a nice float in the ocean with a beer. If you can work remote, I highly suggest making the jump to really be remote. I couldn't be happier.
Absolutely agree, but that only works for a 1-on-1 conversation and it doesn't matter whether you're physically present in the office or not.
The IM doesn't... but the discussion that follows does.
Also, you don't have to physically schedule a conference room, at my work we all have conference bridges.
Teleconferences are nothing like a face to face conversation. Video conferences (what we use) are slightly better, but still not the same.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Yay !!
Data centers require humans to perform maintenance task every day... I don't see IT jobs going "remote" anytime soon.