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Ask Slashdot: Why Do We Still Commute? (citylab.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Over the last year, many companies have ended their liberal work-from-home policies. Firms like IBM, Honeywell, and Aetna joined a long list of others that have deemed it more profitable to force employees to commute to the city and work in a central office than give them the flexibility to work where they want. It wasn't supposed to be this way. In 1975, when personal computers were little more than glorified calculators for geeks and the Internet was an obscure project being developed by the United States government, Macrae, an influential journalist for The Economist who earned a reputation for clairvoyant prophesies -- including the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of Japan -- made a radical prediction about how information technology would soon transform our lives. Macrae foretold the exact path and timeline that computers would take over the business world and then become a fixture of every American home. But he didn't stop there. The spread of this machine, he argued, would fundamentally change the economics of how most of us work. Once workers could communicate with their colleagues through instant messages and video chat, he reasoned, there would be little coherent purpose to trudge long distances to work side by side in centrally located office spaces.
so he can lord over us
makes him feel special so we all drive an hour to get here
yay
Our dormitories in the company towns are not ready yet. When they are, our commute will be four floors down from our cell to our cubicle.
The broadband connectivity will be awesome. And we'll be able to go outdoors into the courtyard every other Sunday.
IBM? They're pulling people back into work.
http://money.cnn.com/2017/05/19/technology/ibm-work-at-home/index.html
I can't speak for others, but I for one enjoy slowly growing old one day at a time in a small tin box that slowly moves through stop-and-go traffic for hours at a time. All while considering merits of being dead over my current situation.
If I don't commute between the couch and the fridge, how will I eat?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Along with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presenteeism
I work in a company producing IoT, internet of things, devices that use RF.
The reason that I still commute is that I don't have access to RF test equipment or RF chambers at home. The equipment that I need to use to validate my software simply isn't practical to have at home. I suspect that anybody doing software development for the embedded device marketplace faces similar constraints.
We still commute because the Baby Boomer generation is still disproportionately represented in the C level positions. They grew up in an era where you had to physically see a worker to know they were actually working. If you did not see them, then they must be slacking. Even those who are somewhat technologically savvy grew up with that ingrained in how management worked. Even some of the early Gen-Xers, those in their early fifties now, picked up this attitude just because they started working in a time before computers were so pervasive.
I think you will see this change as the later Gen-Xers and millennials begin to take management positions, but with Gen-X likely being the first generation that will not be able to retire (in general) this may be a long time coming
Because the housing infrastructure of Silicon Valley is insufficient to support the Human workforce.
Because it's refreshing to go for a ten minute bike ride in the morning.
Oh, wait, did you mean those poor saps who live in the burbs?
Jeers at the tech industry aside, work worthy of being called such is a local phenomenon that requires your physical presence.
If you can work from home you can be replaced by someone who costs way less to employ because they live somewhere cheaper.
The same reason we have police, supervisors, bosses, sergeants, inspectors, and whatever. To keep the cheaters in line.
We go to an office because (a) you get better team collaboration that way and (b) management frequently, and somtimes with good reason, has doubts about whether a person is really working when not physically present.
I think pervasive, high quality, always-on video conferencing could address both of these problems, but that's not really (inexpensively, easily) available today.
I'm not sure why you're lumping *me* in with *you*, but I'm an HVAC mechanic at a hospital so I'm not sure how you want me to turn the wrenches without being on the premises?
I'm all ears though, Mr. Silicon Valley.
if you are going to have people working from home. I've worked places where working from home did not go well because not everyone had laptops with decent cameras, conference rooms didn't have online meeting technology, we were constantly changing vendors, etc. So basically the company had the right idea but didn't put in all the effort to make it work.
At my current company there is always at least 25% of the people I interact with working from home at any given time. It works however because the company invested heavily to get the set up working technologically. We all have the same laptops with good specs. We use Zoom and all the conference rooms are Zoom enabled so you can basically just press a button and have the meeting online. We also set the expectation that working from home doesn't mean that you can skip meetings or ask that they be rescheduled because you're not in the office.
Task completion metrics don't tell you how many hours a day you put in to achieve the metrics. A manager needs to see you working to tell whether they need 2 people to attain said metrics or 10. If all they have is 1 employee and everything is getting done they probably don't care if you come in to get the stuff done or not but when they have 10 employees it gets trickier. Everything gets done but maybe the team is overstaffed? Only watching the day to day work can tell you if its the former or the later. In my experience in most large enterprises teams are more likely overstaffed than not.
...because, outside of some utopian fantasy, most work still requires either physically being present, or at least collaboration with a number of other people, and no amount of Skype, VR, or what have you can replace the communication bandwidth and efficacy of actually being there.
-Styopa
Working at home is what has kept me at this job when I'd think of looking elsewhere. It's one of the main perks of the gig.
One of the reasons I'm at my current job, my "commute" is about ten feet and pants are optional. Working at home alone does seem to result in a high level of work place sexual harassment however...
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Remote working is ok for a few things but teleconferencing just does not work. No, don't say it does, it doesn't. Can you repeat that? There's too much background noise. Sorry it doesn't work can you dial in on your phone? You're breaking up. Speak louder please. There's a delay on the line which is very disconcerting. Can you share that? Sorry, we can't see it. Someone's moved the ethernet cable. Someone else was using the boardroom with the expensive equipment. It's going to take a few more years to make teleconferencing to feel genuinely natural.
I exclusively telecommuted to a job in another state for a year and a half and set foot in the office once during that period. There were several challenges. First everyone else was in the office which inhibited my ability to navigate political currents. I was cut out of a lot of that political back and forth. I am naturally an introvert, but frankly, the The Oatmeal nails the good, bad and ugly of telecommuting. I basically felt like a hermit and socially isolated. I began to get cabin fever after several months and ultimately decided for my mental health, I needed to start going into the office again. We do still have some telecommuting flexibility at my new job, but it's a once-in-a-while-because-the-plumber-is-coming kind of thing. In short, telecommuting is great and should be part of every employers tool-set, but so should meeting together in an office. It is often more efficient for collaborative tasks just as sequestering yourself at home can be. Blanket bans and usage of exclusively one style of work or the other are short sighted, limiting and ultimately unhealthy. You have to do both every once in a while.
During my time at Big Blue (prior to working from home being acceptable) we tried convincing our manager to let everyone on our team to work from home with the exception of one person rotating through the team to come in and be available for things we couldn't do remotely (swap cables, rack equipment, etc.) We were told by our manager that he could go to his manager and present the idea, but that we had to keep in mind if we were saying that our job could be done from anywhere in the world that it would become obvious to upper management that it could be done from ANYWHERE in the world....
As it happened not long after I left they outsourced almost every job anyway. So kind of surprising they later allowed people to work from home and then reversed it again.
Because sometimes a face-to-face meeting in front of a whiteboard is the best way to do things. Virtual whiteboards, like so many virtual things, are clunky and harder to use. Video conferencing is not so bad but still more inconvenient than when you can all be in the same room.
Once workers could communicate with their colleagues through instant messages and video chat, he reasoned, there would be little coherent purpose to trudge long distances to work side by side in centrally located office spaces.
We only need two things before most white collar people leave the crowded and expensive cities and move to the countryside:
1. The will. The bosses have to allow it. With each passing day more and more people are moving up who don't remember a world without internet and instant communication.
2. Fast rural internet. Wireless (i.e. 5G) is probably how this will happen and Spacex will no doubt play a major role. If not Spacex then some other company will probably do it.
Video conferencing is great, but we're still social animals that interact better when we can shake hands, read body language, share a meal, etc.
The company I work for allows _some_ WFH days, but you can tell they're not happy about it. The only reason they do it is because they're trying to remake themselves as "hip" and "with it" so they can attract Millenials. The company used to have a very liberal work-from-anywhere policy, but it turned out that a very large percentage of people abused it and never showed up to the office.
Management still doesn't believe people can be productive without sitting on top of one another in an open office setting. That's because of "collaboration" and "synergy" but IMO bad managers are still hanging on to the idea that you need to be present during working hours, or they can't trust you to produce on your own. In my case, they get plenty of out-of-hours work from me...just yesterday I left early to attend a school thing and worked on my stuff after everyone went to bed.
Personally, I like a mix. I'm not exactly an extrovert so commuting just to talk to colleagues doesn't have the same effect it would on a hyper-outgoing type-A management or marketing person. But, I can also see how someone who isn't as self-directed would just WFH as an excuse to slack. I think management is stuck in the old days when office work involved getting off the train, walking to your desk in a sea of hundreds of desks, and working on the piles of paperwork in your inbox until your shift was over.
In my case, I actually accept a lower salary so I don't have to commute crazy distances. I live "near" NYC but the train ride to the city is almost 90 minutes and driving is nearly out of the question. I've done it in the past, and will only do it again if I have no choice or really need the extra money.
I have forked for nearly 20 years for a large tech company. The pay is good, but I could make more money if I switched. But I like the company and its tech and the perceived stability of a large organization. Plus, they let me work from anywhere on Earth that has wifi. I generally wind up working 10 hour days. My immediate co-workers are in India, California, and elsewhere.
Then early this year our executive VP had a big "all hands" meeting/videoconf, in which his primary message was that for us to be an "agile, cloud" company, the single most important thing is to have our asses in chairs in the office at least 4 days a week. Moreover, he's actually checking the card reader logs to see who swiped in.
So now I sit on a floor with a bunch of sales reps who have no direct relation to what I do.
Fuck this noise. After 20 years of working my ass off for The Company, creating patented technology for them and solving problems no matter the time of day, I am now actively looking for other work. If I have to drive to the office, I may as well get paid 25% more for it.
Seriously, fuck YOU, you kool-aid drinking PHB's
can lack a bit when you don't have that visual awareness of who you're working with. That's what I've been told by our management. Delivering as a team becomes an abstract concept because that physical presence isn't there to solidify the importance of your work to the team's success. Perhaps our millennial generation will resolve this because it's a more understood concept. I imagine it takes effort for some people to wrap their minds around remote teamwork.
Because actually being in the same room as someone with common interests and working together to solve stuff is rewarding?
I don't much like talking to People but talking to Engineers is good.
Make every day a last day, every hour a last hour, every minute a last minute. Blessed sanity.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Telecommuting is still not ideal. Even with a decent setup like FiOS, Skype, Slack, etc, there is something to be said about physical presence that the current system simply doesn't support.
I personally don't foresee the day of true telecommuting being the norm again until the infrastructure is much more robust and the tools allow for no distinction of presence and telepresence. That includes technologies like Halolens, backbones of all fiber, and redundant cloud services.
Just as an example, look at how horrible many shows TWiT.tv get when someone is trying to Skype in over WiFi from some Google or Facebook event. Sure, they conference is getting hosed, but they're just trying to have a single conversation. I certainly wouldn't want my Fortune 500's... fortune... resting on the, excuse my language, CRAP infrastructure that we have today.
I8-D
We still commute because there are managers who do not know how to measure work in a quantifiable way. In lieu of that, they make people come in to an office so they can "make sure" they are working.
HVAC maintenance IS tech!!!
I think there's several different reasons and not every workplace uses every possible reason for making people come in.
1) No partition cubes are now trendy because pointy haired bosses have seized onto it as the key to greater productivity. My current employer has experimented with that and while some groups of customer service people do now have cubicles like that, at present it looks pretty much dead in the IT parts of the office because it just seems unnecessary and maybe even counterproductive. People who buy into this kind of cubicle situation big time are going to make employees come in.
2) We had posts here that IBM was making people come in mostly to force people to leave the company. They always cut staff to prop up their stock value and making the work environment unpleasant by making distant workers have to deal with horrible commutes again is a way to make people remove themselves voluntarily from IBM.
3) My previous employer to save money made a large number of the employees at our building work from home whether they wanted to or not so they could reduce floor space and then freaked out after doing so and demanded that those employees they forced to work at home come into the office at least one day a week and use the temporary mini cubicles they setup for people who just came in for the day. I can assure you that my previous employer did not know at all what they were doing, so I suspect a lot of the companies making people come in fall into this category too.
Give that (wo)man a medal! Hmm, actually, a gofundme. Really.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
I mostly work from the office, but every other week or so I work from home. I hate the commute (can last anywhere from 30-90 minutes), but I find myself more productive in the office. At home I have to lock myself away so my wife and kids don't constantly interrupt; and at that point, what do I gain by being at home other than avoiding the commute?
...gotten fucked doggy style by your turgid lover while on a conference call?
Anyone read Cory Doctrow's Eastern Standard Tribe? One thing that keeps us going in to offices is that it helps sync our circadian rhythm. I know personally, I struggle with keeping on the same working hours during my times spent freelancing as opposed to a more traditional business. I think offices also allow for more candid conversation today when everything through a PC is stored forever and thus can and does come back to haunt us. Want to play devil's advocate in order to improve the product? it will come back to haunt you during reviews as not a team player now that everything is recorded.
At least in my experience:
1. The IT infrastructure isn't there yet. I regularly deal with large files. Transferring those from home to the work server can take an hour. At work the same file transfer is a question of minutes. And I live in a major city in north america, for those who live in rural locations with limited broadband working at home is not a feasible option.
2. Office politics. My wife tried working from home full time after her maternity leave. Then she got passed for a promotion by a coworker who was at the office and developed a better relationship with the senior managers. Personal relationships matter in the workplace, and for that you need face-to-face interaction.
3. Not all work is done on a computer screen. Most of my work is done on a computer, but as an engineer I often deal with testing of mechanical system components which need to be done on-site. And I imagine for those working in the service sector, which are the majority of jobs in North America, there is no choice. You can't be a waiter from home, for example.
And almost no corporation puts effort into training for it. Every place I have ever worked never once made teaching how to manage people a priority for those they put into management roles. In retail it's doubly fucked because they expect management to do the same jobs as those on the floor on top of everything needed to manage the store.
I don't know if that's the way it's always been or not. Although I do kinda feel like it has been.
If managers were actually allowed and taught how to manage, I'd think they'd be able to tell the good workers from the poor ones. From there it would be reasonable to either manage people into working better or into leaving. But because managers aren't often left to manage their people they don't get to be reasonable about it. It's done by intuition and appearance more than results and effort.
Far better social interaction in an office than at your house. Plus you can actually separate your work from your home. I suppose if the team you work on sucks working from home might make sense, though.
A few reasons:
1. It's not quite as easy to keep trade secrets secret when employee-owned equipment in a residential area is involved. This extends to both the employer's trade secrets and those of its suppliers. Confidentiality is often cited as a reason that video game console makers didn't open up their platforms to individual developers working from home until a couple years ago.
2. Lab or manufacturing equipment may be too expensive for an individual to purchase.
3. Local, state, or federal zoning regulations require certain jobs to be performed in a commercially zoned area. Good luck running (say) a restaurant or a pharmacy out of your home.
4. Local zoning regulations make it difficult for a wired broadband ISP to lay cable or fiber. This has been the case for Seattle proper, where utility installation requires permission from a supermajority of landowners, and absentee landlords and vacant lots count as a no vote.
5. Distractions from other members of the household, such as demands to do housework. "I 'didn't know' you were on the clock. But could you get off the clock for one minute?" which turns into fifteen.
When I was younger I thought being able to work from home was a great perk. Now that I'm 20 years older and work at a place where I can choose to WFH pretty much whenever I want, I realize it's not so great.
I have a lot of distractions at home and I'm single. It's very easy to start wandering around the house, doing laundry, cleaning up the kitchen, petting the cats, watching something on Netflix, etc. When I'm at the office there's a more limited number of things to distract myself with. If the environment starts getting too loud with people talking I just put on my noise-cancelling headphones and zone out.
It's also a lot easier to troubleshoot a problem someone is having when I can just walk over to their desk and watch what they're doing. I suppose video chat would work, but it's a lot more cumbersome. I work for a start-up, so there's a lot of ad-hoc conversations between the different groups and decisions are made quickly. Chat works pretty well, but it's definitely inferior to a face-to-face conversation.
I'm fortunate to live in a large city with a great public transportation system. My current commute involves a 20 minute walk to a train station followed by a 15 minute ride and a two block walk to the office. I watch all of the cars queued up to enter the expressways in the evening and just shake my head. I had a 90 minute commute many years ago and it was a killer. I'd get done with work and then be pissed off that it's going to take me another hour and a half to get home; and I didn't have to drive. There is just no way that I'd ever live somewhere where my only option for a commute was driving. I have family in Sarasota and they have to drive everywhere. No thank you!
I was on a team that had a remote worker - 900 miles away. He never answered the phone. Emails were replied to after a day or so. And he didn't understand how source control worked. Apparently, he was under the impression that he was the only one working on the system and he modified his local copies and then check-out the modules and then just checked-in his versions. He stomped on so much of my code that I got blamed for not doing my job. When I pointed out that it was the remote worker who didn't understand how CVS worked, I was told to deal with it; which was impossible because he was uncommunicative.
I left.
I was told he kept doing it, too. Oh, well. Not my problem.
I know, you can leave a chat window open, I know you can have voice calls and screen sharing and video calls (though that last one has never added anything).
Ultimately, however, casual interaction in person is extremely valuable. A large percentage of things I address are things I overhear that folks wouldn't have thought to ask me about. Or else something that someone is comfortable bringing up face to face, but when I'm not there, they are more afraid of 'wasting my time' because they have no way to judge whether I'm available or not and they don't want to be rude by asking a 'silly question' when I could be overwhelmed with serious stuff.
We are just wired to communicate better face to face sometimes.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Measuring attendance, hours worked, hours in the office is easy.
Measuring productivity is hard.
Previous job, I worked at home because all my time was billed. Measuring productivity was easy.
Current job, I work from work because none of my time is billed. They see me, they say they're validating that I'm working. But none of my output is measured in a meaningful way.
I suspect we still commute because the people who make such decisions can afford to live closer.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
Wife works from home. I go in to the office so she can work in peace.
Anything that keeps attrition high is a good thing. If a job is too good, they'll never want to leave and won't become so stressed, ill, or busy that they do something fireable. An employer runs the risk of an employee becoming indispensable rather than interchangeable, qualifying for a raise or insurance, or even, God forbid it, earning a pension.
More because there IS value in casual communication that just DOESN'T happen over IM, email or phone... When we wander into the break room or just over hear a conversation.
...because, outside of some utopian fantasy, most work still requires either physically being present, or at least collaboration with a number of other people, and no amount of Skype, VR, or what have you can replace the communication bandwidth and efficacy of actually being there.
if you think that your argument has any merit then its very existence as a post to a message board proves it wrong.
Isn't Global Warming a greater existential threat than ISIS? Aren't corporations supposed to be socially responsible these days? Why aren't the usual suspects calling for boycotts and other sanctions against companies that force their workers to have larger carbon footprints than necessary?
Remoting only stands a chance of working well if everybody on the team is working remotely (but I have yet to experience such a job, so I can't confirm).
From experience, having part of the team in the office and part of the team working remotely from home doesn't work because it creates inconsistencies in the distillation of information. To keep everybody on the team looped in on spontaneous group discussions, it needs to all happen electronically, which implies either a) such discussions must be prohibited from occuring orally in the office, or b) somebody must bear the burden of scribing everything or bringing up a video chat for the remote folks. If a) then we might as all work from home because doing so inherently enforces this rule and is more convenient than commuting; this isn't viable, though, because pointy-haired managers freak out when the office is empty. If b), nobody in the office really wants to deal with setting this up all the time because they personally don't get any benefit from it.
It's really annoying to be the guy that has to get up, get dressed, battle traffic, find parking, ..., only to spend your day trying to communicate with remote workers with the constant interruptions of people ringing their doorbell, their dogs barking, their kids blasting the TV, and them putting the conference on hold without telling you because they're simultaneously taking personal phonecalls and hoping you don't notice but then blow their cover when they have no clue about what was discussed over the past 15 mins of the virtual conference that was being held for their benefit in the first place.
Management required us to have a lot of recurring and relatively useless virtual meetings. The remote folks always had their attention split and were multitasking. When I began remoting into meetings from my desk in the office so I could multitask like my remote peers, my manager had a tantrum because it "looked bad" that I wasn't physically in the conference room with him and the other on-site guys. This from the same manager that insisted that our remoting approach was perfectly effective and lossless.
Done? Certainly.
Done right? How much are you willing to spend to bridge wildly different languages, cultures, and work ethics?
Besides, by this point I think it should be obvious that if you work in the information economy your job can be moved overseas without much trouble. Better than manufacturing at least, where your job has *already* moved overseas and can't move back without major investments.
But hey, service jobs are booming, and if you work two of them you can probably live above the poverty line!
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Local servers not connected to the internet due to customer and business sensitive stuff that should never be in the cloud (someone else's server set up God knows where and who has access to it).
I've seen this happen at HP, then again at Xerox. Many large companies starting doing this, particularly once Yahoo started doing it. It's usually combined with revamping the workspace into a "collborative" work environment (you know, the ones where they don't allow any offices or cube walls....one big open space so that everyone can collaborate.....what a load of shit that is).
The REAL reason they force folks back into the new office is:
A) they know people have come to love working from home, and many will not be able to handle a long commute after working from home for years, so they'll quit....which is much cheaper than laying them off (and paying severance) or even firing them (and potentially paying unemployment)
B) those folks who stay can now be squeezed into a smaller footprint because they've removed all the bulky cubes and offices, thus less real estate costs because they've reduced the amount of square footage they're occupying.
This is a finance exercise pure and simple.
Sometimes my fingers have to touch things that aren't a keyboard or a mouse
At work the same file transfer is a question of minutes. And I live in a major city in north america,
yeah you live in an internet backwater, for me it's the opposite, my laptop is hardwired at home and it gets better bandwidth than it does at work when I have to use wifi
maybe you should upgrade to a 56k modem
>>Done? Certainly.
>>Done right? How much are you willing to spend to bridge wildly different languages, cultures, and work ethics?
WHat abut the time zone being 12 hours (or whatever) out of sync with the office???? Work cant be done right with that too.
No, this is not a pointy-haired boss point of view. I'm a professor working in a large international collaboration and while we do have regular phone/video meetings we also arrange to all meet in person a few times a year because being physically present increases both the communication bandwidth but also the ease of communication which means that things get discussed which would not if the only meetings were virtual.
Given that the cost of travel to these meetings means that we have less money for grad students, postdocs and equipment shows that the majority think that there is a clear benefit to these meetings and with the state of modern air travel there is no way you can accuse us of "just liking to take trips" - academic grants all require cheap, economy class travel (and even if they didn't most of us would because every dollar saved is more for people and equipment) so many of us now hate getting on a plane! We use virtual meetings where possible to reduce travel costs and avoid air travel but there are somethings for which you need a physical meeting.
Wait up - back in May IBM reversed their remoting policy and shifted to bringing people back into the office. Did anyone ever get a solid reason why they opted for this route?
http://money.cnn.com/2017/05/1...
https://www.bloomberg.com/view...
.. and on the weekends or from India. Funny how that works.
To make remote work succeed, you need the employee AND his (/her/its) managers to actively communicate, regularly, as well as have discipline to actually work. Contact with colleagues is harder remotely too; you can't just stroll over to someone's desk and talk.
To the extent meetings get to be international and have to be remote, some of this will disappear. However, I think the dynamic of working together might tend to force groups to be local to one another and discourage some of the outsourcing that goes on now. Even were time zones and incomprehensible accents (over low quality audio links some times) not issues, the fact that contacts are fewer than can be seen in one office makes it hard to get work to link together. There is also less of the casual brainstorming that can happen in person. Phone contact is the best approximation, but mail or messaging loses a lot.
With a lot of IT work it's hard to know how long a task should take. If a task takes 12 hours to finish instead of the 4 hours expected it helps to be able to look over someone's shoulder. If you know someone is working you're less likely to have unreasonable expectations. And it works both ways. It took me a while but I finally figured out that it's not to my benefit to work at home. If you want your work to be appreciated you need to be seen.
I do not block ads. I do block third party scripts.
Prescience fail. All those seats aren't going to warm themselves ^_^
Requiem for the American Dream
I dont care what anyones position is regarding is there, or isnt there, any sort of man made effect on global warming, I really dont. But most of these Corporations whine ad nauseam about the impact of global warming and insisting someone do something about it. Yet they put their offices in some of the most densely populated areas which 1-2hr commute times. Then they kill telecommuting and put that many more cars on the road, often idling, for 1-2hrs. Fuck them. They should be called out for the 2faced sacks shit that they are. Piss or get off the pot. If you want to stick everyone in an office for face time, move to some fucking town in the midwest with a population under 200k people. Otherwise, let them telecommute so you can continue to hang out at overpriced dinner parties where you tell your fellow hypocrites what a great human being you are.
Granted I work in a factory, but we've seen everything. People playing on their phones in the bathroom for 30 or more minutes. People literally sleeping on the job. People who only come in for 2 or 3 of their scheduled days per week, and when questioned about it say, "well, I just don't need more than 2 or 3 days of income per week to live." Yes, most of that is unskilled labour, but not all of it. There are many skilled and technical employees who really need nearly constant supervision to be productive. The problem is that they don't realize it, so they complain if someone else gets to work from home or unsupervised. Companies feel they deal with enough BS from employees, so their easy fix is to make a policy and ban work-from-home.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
Too many distractions at home? Offices are WORSE.
Also, poe's law.
I've been on highly-distributed teams (no two people co-located), and on teams with one or two far-flung elements, and everything in between. Working from home can work very well, if the team is focused and actively maintains contact, even on days when they don't feel like it, even when things aren't going well. But many workers simply don't work that way, in which case working from home can become a way to hide things and avoid things. Same can happen in an office environment, it's just a little harder at the margins.
Also, the team has to be committed to working from home, you can't just wave a wand on it, they need to be actively on top of broadly communicating things. Otherwise you end up with "in" groups and people get cut out of the loop and everyone gets upset. Again, that can totally happen in an office environment, too, but in my experience it's SO much easier to happen accidentally in a mixed group. Sometimes something will get ironed out over lunch or a quick bull session, and nobody thinks to send the minutes to the offsite people. If that happens too often, the offsite people will find themselves routinely behind the curve, finding out about decisions after they're already being implemented, which can really chip away at their morale.
Lastly, it's really really hard to successfully add new people to a team who work from home. Basically, they need good referrals from trusted sources, and the team needs to really focus on integrating the new person.
Just to be really really clear - I'm not saying work-from-home cannot work or anything like that. I did it for a decade before getting a "real" job, and I quite enjoyed it, it really worked for me. But there were significant downsides, some of which I didn't realize until I had the opportunity to work with similarly-qualified networks of co-located people. I'd be very nervous about joining a group which was trying to set ambitious goals and also having most members working from home.
Telecommuting works for those with the work ethic and maturity to actually get work done from home. Most people are likely to do just the bare minimum to keep from getting fired. Despite the same job if they're sitting in an office, the same people will be more productive than they would be working from the kitchen table. Since firms want as much productivity for as low a cost, why pay someone the same for less productivity to work from home?
In my experience telecommuting is a privilege extended to those in the workplace that have shown they can perform. I've also seen those who couldn't and ruin such a policy for everyone else.
Walking around the office and chatting with co-workers is one skill that's really difficult to outsource.
I stole this Sig
Until employees begin to insist on the ability to work from home, employers are probably not going to ubiquitously offer the option. I've worked roughly 90% from home for about two years, but as a rather extroverted/social person, I honestly preferred working in an office. Working from home won't be an absolute requirement the next time I'm searching for a job. As for discussions about productivity -- I personally think it's a total wash. For types of work that require sustained focus -- I find working from home to be clearly superior. No distracting conversations because a friend walked past on their way to the coffee pot. Nobody prairie-dogging their head over the cubicle wall to ask a question. On the flip side, any work that requires access to specialized equipment requires a special trip, potentially requiring airplane tickets. One of the other commenters mentioned difficulty working with large files... I certainly share that issue, but can usually work around the problem with some creative use of remote servers.
1. As early as the early nineties, I read that companies that already had heavy experience with telecommuting wanted their employees in the office at least one or two days a week, not just for face-to-face meetings, but for water-cooler conversations that turned out to be critically important. You just do *not* have that kind of random connection conversation otherwise.
2. Is your company going to pay rent for the room you use as an office, as well as the utilities? If not, why should *you* pay for *their* office space?
3. Do you *really* want to be in the house, not out with other people, that much?
4. When I'm at work, I'm working. When I'm not, I'm not.
5. Sorry, but there are a lot of folks who *can't* do their work at home. I mean, just off the top of my head, should all employees with computer issues have to commute to the desktop support person's home?
And yes, most of the time, I do use public transit.
Partly because of tradition, partly because management lags behind technology. The ability to see someone physically is very
convenient and perceived as beneficial for certain job positions -- like supervisor positions, facilities managers, salespeople
who need to meet customers in person, AND partly because the productivity of certain important jobs depends on face-to-face contact,
so those in those positions ASSUME it is the best way for all of their colleagues, even when their jobs differ.
untalented control freak management needs to control actual talent, and make it appear in person that they are competent.
Remember you can't kiss ass as well remotely if you are unskilled. all the ass lickers would be unemployed with no talent working from home
It's because management types are all-too-often paper-shufflers, bean-counters, and others with OCD tendencies, who do not know how to do the work themselves, all they're good at is micro-managing people, and their OCD tendencies mean they constantly feel like they're going to pee their pants if they can't physically see their direct reports (See what I did there? We're not 'people', we're just these objects called 'direct reports'. May as well call us 'work units' and stamp numbers on our foreheads) furiously slaving away. Doesn't matter to them at all if your own job entails shuffling papers around, or spending half the day on the phone in 'meetings', where nobody can see you anyway, they want to watch over you while you do it, because they're absolutely sure that somehow you're getting the work done without actually working, somehow.
And a lot of other FOSS software is written by geographically separated teams. It seems to work out pretty well (systemd not withstanding).
These sorts of jobs attract different sorts of people, motivated by different things. No office politics, very 'flat' organizations, mostly meritocracies. Are they better, worse or just different? I suppose you'd have to judge by the kinds and quality of the products that they produce. To the outside world, they might look good. But to someone who's ambition is to be in middle management, an organization with no middle management isn't very inviting. To unions, there is no workplace to organize. The more stakeholders in the project, them more the definition of 'optimum' changes.
Have gnu, will travel.
If you can work from home, you can be replaced by cheaper workers. Just remember that.
Because not every employee can have $500K worth of lab and test equipment in their garage.
I have 7 kids, 5 dogs, a wife, and a house that is in a constant state of chaos. I have an office because there is no way I can get any work done in that environment.
I know there are exceptions, but i know a lot of people that I work with that dont work that damn hard when they are in the office surrounded by bosses and co-workers, and they damn sure would do even less work if they had the chance to slack off at home.
That doesnt cover everyone, of course. Some people would work great at home without being friggin interrupted all the time. My department has a decent rule: one WFH day a week allowed if you manager is ok with it. I dont take advantage of it that often, maybe once a month, but the guy on my team with a 2 hour commute takes a day every week.
I once worked for a company at which the managers knew who the bad apples were. HR wouldn't let them be fired for years until a sufficient file of warnings and causes was established so the company couldn't be sued. Most large company problems are the fault of HR.
Why has my team been forced from using a productive Agile process into a waterfall method?
Because, a certain QA manager wants control. She wants to be the "gatekeeper" who gets to "sign off" on if the customer gets to see the product. In the same way, going to the office gives certain managers control.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Cognizant can ship them over here with the bulk visas they acquire every year. Your company can buy three Indians and have butts-in-seats for less than what they're paying you. Don't kid yourself...
In his song "Mission Statement". As long as we have management who literally talk all day within the bounds of the following lyrics corporate America will remain a work from cubicle hell, get the rich boy club richer, establishment.
We must all efficiently
Operationalize our strategies
Invest in world-class technology
And leverage our core competencies
In order to holistically administrate
Exceptional synergy
We'll set a brand trajectory
Using management's philosophy
Advance our market share vis-à-vis
Our proven methodology
With strong commitment to quality
Effectively enhancing corporate synergy
Transitioning our company
By awareness of functionality
Promoting viability
Providing our supply chain with diversity (versity, ooooh)
We will distill our identity
Through client-centric solutions and synergy (oooooh oooh oooh)
(ahhhhhh)
WebEx, GotoMeeting, TeamViewer, Zoom, Google Hangouts, Slack... We have probably all used them...twice or more. The Conference Audio Mixer, clumsy shared whiteboard (with pointers) and on and on. The compressed audio makes it tougher to hear people while the noise reduction algorithm clips off what I'm saying. On phonecalls, I'm missing 3/4 of what the person is saying or doing because of missed visual cues, faster in-person responses, and the muting management. That and it is tough to see everything in the conference. Why do major CEOs have tech unveilings with a crowd? What's so important at the LVCC that I can't see online? Answer, we want to connect. Social media exists to disconnect our humanity from each other. Collaboration tech can pull us together for short stints, but hi5ing the camera isn't fullfilling our propriospective sense (look it up). That is why collab tools work and don't work. We look connected but don't feel it. That's why people fly 8000 miles to our office, why I drive 300 miles every April to Vegas, and why people commute to work. Just so we can actually connect.
Once workers could communicate with their colleagues through instant messages and video chat, he reasoned, there would be little coherent purpose to trudge long distances to work side by side in centrally located office spaces.
It is a relatively rare job that can effectively and economically conduct all it's communication through IM and video chat. For example I am a manager at a manufacturing company. Our employees do not sit in front of computers writing code all day. If I worked from home I would effectively have near zero communication with my staff because they are busy making products. While I could do some engineering from home, a large chunk of my job would be impossible to do off site. Good luck telecommuting to a hospital or a restaurant or a retail store or fitness center.
There are some cases where telecommuting works great. There are many more where it simply doesn't work at all or doesn't work well. Even jobs that are compatible with telecommuting (like writing code) often find considerable added value in being co-located in the same building. A lot of people lose significant productivity when they aren't in an office and there is a surprising amount of administrative burden to managing a remote team.
People were never commuting because they needed to work with others. You could have had small teams of people working anywhere long before computers. People worked with others in an office because a boss needed to control those people, to ensure that they would do as they were told.
Whether that's because employees are dumb and just don't understand the risks involved at the boss's level, or because the boss doesn't understand how to manage employees effectively, is, quite frankly, irrelevant.
Telecommuting, by necessity, destroys a big chunk of supervision. That's enough on its own. Add to that the reality that your home-office is likely not a dedicated and distraction-free atmosphere, and that you likely don't spend enough on your home office for it to be as effective as it could be, and you've got a debate to last for decades.
But there's always been a very easy way to telecommute. Build your own team, and be a contractor. As a contractor, that supervision isn't present at all. It isn't even desired by the boss/client. And then you get to take-on all of the risks that a contractor takes every day.
For the record, that's what I did. And then I also built-out my home office into a distraction-free, dedicated environment. It wasn't cheap.
For jobs that are largely task work oriented.. sorry you gotta be where the task is..
For other jobs, we still commute because managers are bad.
The company pays for air conditioning for the office but not for my home...
Good enough reason for me.
Helps that the office is just 10 minutes away.
With Scrum and XP now being mainstream, developers are no longer allowed to work from home. Agile mandates the dev team sitting next to each other, in an open office, so they can constantly collaborate.
One reason people need to come to work is so that they can communicate better. Communicating by email or voice-link or even video-link is not as effective as direct, face to face interaction. Real work gets done when you can ask the other person to hold a scope probe while you create the conditions that demonstrate the problem you are trying to solve. That points out the other reason. Some development work actually requires a team to interact continuously. On many projects, no one person has all of the skills required to do the job. The work gets done faster and better when you get the required people together.
I work remotely, but I think most of the reasons have been given above, why this is not so common: 1) Many (Most?) people are incapable of working remotely, without slacking off.
2) Even if you don't slack off, it's harder to demonstrate value, remotely. You have to be much more active about calling attention to the work you are doing, as your boss can't just drop by your desk and see you working.
3) Remoting technology, especially in the Windows world, is still not great if you need a full, remote Windows session, over the internets. It is painfully slow and hard to configure to by multi-monitor in a reasonable fashion.
4) Lots of employees have crappy internet, which makes them highly unproductive.
5) Corporate inertia against change.
Add all that up, and it's hard to make the case for full remote work. There are certain workers in certain locations which could easily make the hop, but then companies are worried about getting sued by offering those users, special privileges of working remotely, so they play it safe and force everyone to show up.
If there's a meeting and someone isn't present, you can usually find them pretty easily when they're at the office. Forgetfulness, distraction, short notice, emergency, whatever---you have fairly reliable access to the people you want.
Teleworking is a bit more complicated. If there are physical documents, specimens, or diagrams, you're going to have limited contributions from the teleworkers.
Tech plays a role too. In an office meeting, you only need one working PC to display videos, designs, documents, etc. That is easy to arrange ahead of time or correct on the fly when you're in a office building full of equipment. With teleworkers, you lose out if everything is not working perfectly for everyone.
And finally, communication. Conferences are always more tedious than meetings---whether phone or video is worse probably comes down to individual preference, but they're both awful once you have more than 2-3 participants. Lost inflection, missing visual cues, and limitations on having brief "side conversations". Plus, there is always the guy with the magical drifting microphone that fluctuates in volume for no apparent reason.
People often cite "teamwork" and "collaboration", which are vague and unsatisfying answers. But underneath those labels, there are some definite shortcomings that are almost impossible to address.
---
According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
It sounds really stupid for most tech types. But dressing nicely usually makes you more productive. Prepping yourself for a work day and feeling good about how you look makes you more confident. It's not just suit and tie shit. The shower, the shave, the coffee, the drive. It's all prepping you for the work to come. And you're ready for it.
Pretty sure my commute is about the same as it has been for years.
If it snows, I can just walk or bike home, it's only a couple of miles.
In fact, if the weather is nice, I like to just walk along the Burke-Gilman bike trail, or maybe run, stop at Ivar's for a nice salmon bisque, maybe swing through Gas Works Park, and enjoy the sunset from Solstice Hill where people fly kites.
Don't you live where you work?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I work two days a week from home as a software engineer and find that both work environments are important. I tend do do my deep-thinking work at home while I collaborate while on site. Until we have true telepresence I do not believe the collaboration is as effective remotely as we get in person. There are too many adhoc overheard conversations that lead to fruitful ideas. On the other hand these overheard conversations can also be distracting if you are trying to get some focus work done. Having to wrap my ears in headphones was never a pleasant solution to that problem.
I live outside the city and setting my laptop up on our deck and able to look at the rural view can be very helpful for freeing the mind for idea generation.
In other words, there is value to both environments IF THEY ARE USE APPROPRIATELY. The "lack of trust" reason for working on-site is inheritantly counterproductive because trust ends up working both ways and engagement ultimately is decreased.
Because management feels threatened that their jobs might go away. Telecommuters are often happier and more productive making managers kind of redundant - they probably are anyway - but we cannot have that. Managers who are active sociopaths get frustrated because they cannot play people off of each other and, just for kicks, make people miserable. I have had my share of this type.
If a Company hires telecommuters, they do not need to provide High Cost office Space.
The employee does not need to put wear and tear on his car every day.
This means less pollution, less "global Warming".
Could attract employees to Corp in age where tech Workers are Hard to Find?
It should be a WIN Win for every one.
I would be willing to work for 15-20% less to do development from Home, Instead of a Cube farm because of the Above. I think others would be as well.
Could this Savings be enough to Give development Corps the edge they need to be competitive in this competitive world?
When you are "working from home", it is way to easy to be distracted by either the kids, pets, something on tv/radio/internet. Most humans do not have the structure to put everything aside, and put in "a full eight hours". Whereas, at an office, it is less likely that you will be distracted, and, in theory, able to be more productive.
All bosses think teletransport is a reality, and that you appear and disappear from the workplace they have created without any cost from your side. They do not care if you spend 1 minute in small villages or 2 hours in large cities.
I'm pulling remote telework agreements left and right. I've instituted a policy disallowing remote agreements for ANYONE who is a manager of other people and more.
In theory remote work is just what we need. We have access to the best people, regardless of their location. Recruiting is easier, since they don't have to move and cost us less, because we don't have to pay moving expenses. We save on office space, which is already far too scarce, and we reduce traffic for those of us who do come in to the office. So, why quit?
1. Technology.
We have rooms that cost thousands and should support remote workers. Instead, they are complicated, require maintenance, several minutes to set up while everyone else sits around waiting to get the meeting started and, despite having more bandwidth that we can use (really!), voice is often garbled and hard to understand. Our Internet is great, theirs isn't and not everyone has access to good connectivity. The experience is challenging from start to finish. Additionally, when we have meetings with partners at their locations, they are even less prepared to deal with remote worker and so the experience can be even more challenging.
2. Reliability.
Most of the time the quality and quantity of work diminishes. Whatever their environment, it does not appear to be as conducive to work as our meager office space.
If you need to speak with someone urgently, you can catch them in their office or IM them at home. Strangely IM usually takes longer to get a response.
3. Connections and Relationships
Interacting with colleagues, water cooler discussions, even lunch is where we establish connections and can come up with great ideas. Chance meetings often yield opportunities for new partnerships or simply help keep us informed. Remote workers miss out on these interactions and tend to be much less connected.
Before you tell me how all of these things are fixable with the right technology, right application, right people, please understand that I have long been a huge proponent of remote working. Even now some of my best people are remote and they will continue to be so because they are my best and very effective, though we would prefer that even they were here. I have a pretty good idea of how things "could" be. I also have a lot of experience with how things are.
I wish it were different, but given the companies that feel the same way, this isn't an isolated experience.
You make me miss the NAMBLA trolls.
I think a lot of the themes here are very relevant for folks in engineering roles, particularly individual contributors. If you don't have distracting young kids, being at home is often a more productive environment, at least for your own individual task completion.
When considering other roles or responsibilities that are more driven by human interaction, I've found having everyone in the office has a surprisingly powerful effect. When your whole workforce is remote and distributed vs in a shared environment, it's also easy to underestimate the value of face time and incidental connections. I'd assert it's a lot harder to get to know a new company only via slack, vs in-office.
There are other factors as well. A remote-heavy company may make fewer investments in the office environment, or have an office in a crappy, boring suburb.
I took my current job knowing that they had an in-office culture, and substantial investments in a beautiful downtown office to go with it. But I also knew I could work remotely when there was bad weather, a doctor appointment, etc. A bit of flexibility was a necessity, but overall I'm committed to being available in-office.
Of course your milage may vary, but I think there are still reasons that not 100% of companies are 100% remote.
I prefer managing people at a more personal level, I just do not feel it works as effectively when I am some guy on the end of a bit-pipe.
Once VR becomes as good as AR (actual reality), I might change my mind.
Of course my team members are welcome to work remotely, but those who do tend to produce less and at a lower quality. Granted that could be my fault...
enough said.
At home I use Wifi to my router. That brings it down from 50mbs to 5 mbs. And then I get ping of 116ms
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Maybe those genius people here constantly complaining about how bad management is should instead ask themselves "why am I stuck in a dead end developer role complaining about management".
Take the initiative and stop whining about things you think you could do so much better but choose not to.
Once you reach your 40's you will wish you did, because at that point remaining a developer will be worthless no matter how highly you rate yourself now.
I work from home. The company I work for is US based but they have no office, and I live in New Zealand. It seems to work fine for the 60 staff so far, is probably the most productive team I've ever worked with.
I've worked on and off from home for 6 years, mostly on. While I do occasionally miss the social side, being available to my family is more important. We go to lunch as a family often, I take walks, work from the local cafe, and if I feel a mental block I do some gardening.
Commutes are killers, especially if you need to use a car. I don't think people really weight up the cost of these commutes to their health and wallet.
I've been working from home for a small company for over 10 years now, and I can guarantee my boss has been getting a lot more hours out of me than he would if I had to go through what would amount to a 1-hour drive (each way) each day.
The moment I'm forced to go back to an office is the moment I'm going back to being a 9 to 5 (and not a minute more) employee.
This isn't cut-and-dried.
If it really were just as good to interact with people by telephone, web video, and slack channels we should be very happy to forego in-person contact and hold all our interactions electronically. Knowing someone in-person, face to face is way different from knowing someone digitally. Some kinds of activities benefit from the greater trust, understanding, empathy, and collaboration that come from sitting across the table. These activities benefit from more in-person time. On the other hand, highly transactional activities - easily measured, requiring low collaboration or where collaborative interactions are clearly defined, are a great choice for telework.
In my last job as a sysad, before I semi-retired (I'll rejoin the work force sooner or later), all of our equipment was co-located in a few hosting facilities around the country, so we were never really physically in front of a box, anyway. Our conversations were almost always in chat, even though we sat in cubicles right next to each other and could hear each other laughing at our jokes and insults. There were times we stood up and actually talked with each other, but it was by far the exception. Phone calls? I got 0 calls on my desk phone in the three years I worked in that group. As for management's perspective of our productivity, it's pretty obvious when a disk runs low or a host isn't operating and someone's slacking on the job. Quick to spot, quick to fix. The only times when those types of things happened was when there was a near-catastrophic breakdown in our team's communication; it was a rare occurrence. For the most part, I drove in to work just because it was expected. But if I saw three flakes of snow on the road, I'd work remotely, and my boss wouldn't really care.
Seriously - I work for one of thw world's largest companies which was a leader in the 2000's in retiring locations and investing in remote work - and it all wored, and works. However, with the advent of the housing crisis in the mid-2000's after the dot-com bust, the delayed reaction was ... Marissa Mayer. And, reasoned my non-tech company, if the tech GIANT Yahoo was slashing the "out-of-control gravy train that was telecommute" .. then, by golly, so should they. Today, after nearly a decade of "doing more with less" and losing, without as much as a single care, their greatest minds to inferior employers, they are buying buildings .... spending billions (I mean it) on brick and mortar ... and putting "butts in seats". It's so bad that unless talent will move to a major strategic location, they'll simply find someone else.
At home I setup an office, open the door at about 6 am, lunch @ 11, close the door around 4 or 5 pm. No long commute to get me worked up, no context switching if I don't want it. F2F requirements are a thing of the 80s/90s...anyone who says different is either in the 80s/90s, or has no capacity to use the plethora of technology at their disposal.
I make bevel gears for a living, on 1950's vintage equipment. I can't telecommute.
1. Like it or not, most people are lazy. We are all convinced that we are honest, responsible, efficient, etc but we notice all the slackers around us. Sadly, most people when told they can work from home with little oversight will begin to wast time surfing the web, getting snacks from the kitchen, fetching the snail mail, looking in on the kids, watering a plant they keep forgetting, etc. They might be in their home office more hours, but those hours can become very unproductive and it can be very hard to fairly meter this from a remote location since reduced progress on a project could just as easily be domestic distractions or simply a tough problem. We are all certain WE are great telecommuters, but the truth is that most are not without some sort of added monitoring or incentive.
2. Managers tend to be a very insecure lot already where they are often accountable for progress by their team but do not have their hands directly in the work. When they are isolated from that team and then they are face-to-face with their superiors who are asking them questions to which they have insufficient answers - - - well the situation becomes too uncomfortable. They want and may even emotionally need their teams to be physically present. Having the full team present is also the only way many managers can imagine to handle conflicts between team members. To fully-enable telecommuting, we probably need to fully re-engineer the training of people seeking MBA degrees to properly equip them both psychologically and intellectually and even then it just might be the case that the sort of people who go into management are the very sort who cannot be equipped to manage telecommuters.
I prefer not to simply because I'm less efficient there. Admitted my work is somewhat unusual and involves hardware but even if it didn't that little extra bit of latency to the machines makes a difference to productivity - as does the reduction in bandwidth compared to work. It's useful when I have need to be free of distractions but most of my job is handling distractions (trouble shooting) so there's not that much of a gain overall.
I don't rate the "everyone can communicate more effectively" argument very highly, the big companies that did this are split across geographies so communication is painful anyway. They'd have achieved far more real productivity by forbidding the mid level managers from splitting projects across sites, that's a far bigger productivity killer than the drop from people working from home.
Admitted the Yahoo/HP/IBM work remotely/be here or be gone were both fairly blatant attempts to save money. In the first case by reducing office space, the second to cut head count without actually firing people. Even without that as motivation I doubt the work from home thing was a net gain for the company.
... Because of my multiple disabilities like speech and hearing impediments, unable to drive, etc. I loved it as a Cisco contractor for 1.5 years.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Once mobile storage capacity peaks past the microwave innovations we shall have a new tech based omniscience among the work place that will purge the bottlenecks.
If it matters, it's called the night shift.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
HP killed the remote worker over a decade ago, or should I say the workers did. Productivity was down due to employees being lazy. Now with a throw back to the 40s, no cube walls open office. This way your co workers can spy on you and rat you out to management. The rat gets praise, and the slacker is kicked to the curb or pip'd (the slow termination process). It all has to do with the value output of the employee, it has nothing to do with oligarch mentality. You must support sustainable growth for the stock holders... they are your boss. I just hope I never get my hands on the turd ball that made open office spaces the new norm, the sound of jail does scare me a bit.
Life is in a state of dynamic equilibrium, it both blows and sucks
I know that the idea of living in 'jams and sitting at a desk at home next to the fridge sound great, but the reason you should commute is to stay alive. Getting out of the house may be the most single important decision you can make every day. I've done both, and have experienced the difference.
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
The simple reason: collaboration operates best face-to-face, and the need and complexity for high fidelity, high value collaboration is highest when you are solving problems that are hard and this especially involves high technology at the leading edge of technology adoption.
You can get by with substandard collaboration when you are working with a mature technology in a market environment this is mostly static and unchanging. The reason is simple: you can make assumptions about what reality is and then the low fidelity nature of remote (internet) communication can safely rely on those assumptions.
When you are solving problems that have never been solved before and/or when the market environment is changing radically, then the assumptions are constantly changing and you must "update" what reality has become as it changes daily if not hourly. For that you need face-to-face communication to ever hope to keep up or assure success. Otherwise, with delayed and quickly wrong assumptions, your actions and plans become exactly the wrong plans just as quickly and thus becomes wasteful and counterproductive to the mission you were hired for.
Between the US reaching the "End of Empire" and technology changing so fast, the environment is on the "rapid change" side of reality. If you are working with a 20-year-old technology, then you may OK being remote but if you are trying to solve some new problem, then you must be in maximum collaborative problem solving mode and being remote WILL put your team at a disadvantage compared to a team that is NOT operating remotely. If that means the difference between organization success or failure, then operating remote is a bad idea.
TL;DR
Remote works best if you are solving problems for a static market environment and those problems were solved as technology 20-40 years ago
Office-centric works best if you are solving problems for a dynamic market environment and those problems have never been solved before.
http://abcnews.go.com/Business...
I've seen guys get caught doing crap like this. One woman I know was a PM for 3 different government agencies and was charging them all at the same time for the same hours worked. She got caught, however somehow because IMHO she was black and a woman didn't go to jail. They just made her quit two jobs and show up for one of them. I think she should have gone to jail for fraud.
I have guys working remotely for me. I have to watch them like a hawk or they cheat on me too. Crap like 3 or 4 hour lunch brakes. Can't get in touch with them, work goes way down. I have two that I don't have to watch. One is an Ex-air force/Navy guy, the other is an old black woman that is ex Army. The young people are the toughest. They always think they are way smarter than they are and can pull crap.
If we could solve that problem we could eliminate commutes I think. There is really no reason why I have to go in anymore. I VPN in, my laptop has a dock so I get 3 screens, there's even a video camera. It's a Dell ultra with 16 gig of memory and ssd drive. Unfortunately it runs Windows. However I simply use it to fire up a remote desktop to a real machine - a Linux host.
I know some people at IBM. My understanding is they were losing a lot of productivity because of people working at home and goofing off. Probably not an official position.
We still commute because the world is designed for extroverts by extroverts who require close proximity to others when they fill the air with useless platitudes. Unfortunately, in the workplace, extroverts rule. They fast track anyone who also fills the air with similar platitudes and stupidity to obtain a management position while the introverts invent the services and tools of the modern world that are misused or ignored by extroverts.
A new reason that has crept up is the Internet at work is truly "unlimited" unlike at home where the "unlimited" Internet service has a 1TB monthly limit.
You just might be the pointy-haired boss because studies show that productivity actually *increases* for those working from home.
Two points. 1) Citation please. Show me your evidence. I'm sure in some cases productivity does improve and in others it does not. I've seen both first hand. I've never seen any studies that prove widespread productivity increases due to working from home. 2) You COMPLETELY missed my point which is that most jobs CANNOT be done from home. Construction, restaurants, retail, manufacturing, warehousing, police, teaching, government, freight delivery, most medicine, and countless other jobs literally cannot be done from home. It is a small minority of work that can practically be done from home productively. Believe it or not there are jobs other than writing code in the world and they have different requirements to be productive.
And I went even further - I've sold my car and now I commute by bus. So every day I have something over 2 hours that I can spend either sleeping, reading, listening to music, watching videos or browsing on my tablet, without being disturbed by my boss, colleagues, wife or kids.