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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.
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
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?
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.
...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.
The article is clearly about tech jobs hence all the references to computers.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
I think that's what IBM was going for. They're going to lose all the high-producing people who liked their flexible work arrangements in the US/Europe, and replace them with people in other countries who are desperate for any chance to have a job. And since they quit voluntarily, there's no negative press.
That's the main problem with agile/cloud when applied to a large organization...the CIO reads a business magazine with a splashy expose on how startups release 20 times a day because their developers are squeezed into a San Francisco office staring at each other across a cafeteria table. Because all the cool startups are doing it, they assume that everyone is wired to work that way. In the real world, very few people are.
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.
We only need two things before most white collar people leave the crowded and expensive cities and move to the countryside
You'll need a third thing: People will have to want to move to the countryside. A lot of people don't.
The reason people are moving to cities right now isn't that they're being forced as much as, that's where the stuff is. There are places to go and things to do. Some people actually like being part of civilization, rather than retreating to a cabin in the middle of nowhere.
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.
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.
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
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...
...gotten fucked doggy style by your turgid lover while on a conference call?
He didn't say there was anyone else there...
.. and on the weekends or from India. Funny how that works.
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.
The article is clearly about tech jobs hence all the references to computers.
On my desk, right now, I have a scope, soldering iron, laptop, desktop, the machinary I write software for and a couple of what can only be called 'safe' munitions. I'm not lugging that lot back and forth daily.
I have a tech job.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
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
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.
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.
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.
Do you need to perform maintenance tasks every day, continuously between 9 and 5? If not, do you still go to the office, and stay there 8 hours?
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
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.
I've noticed a lot of slackers "working from home". Some of them call me and ask me to do their work in the plant because it's their "work from home day".
I've also noticed when I try to email them or call them that they aren't available. I've seen some of them in shopping centers and target practicing at the shooting range when they should be working.
If your job can be done at home, we can move it to India at 1/3 the labor cost if all you do it poke a keyboard.
Those who do hands on work HAVE to get their asses in to the plant, otherwise they're worse than not being around at all.
A lot of people wrongly associate "tech jobs" with software jobs.
There's a whole lot more to "tech" than coding.
Who the hell do you think made the equipment you're coding on?
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.
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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.
Disastrous offshoring actually happens. This means the local workers need to prove that they're worth keeping. Staying out of sight will lower the perception that other coworkers have of you, so you need to work even harder to stay ahead of the game and avoid the outsourcing. If your job is simple and you're doing it from home, then be prepared to defend it against those who can do the same thing for less pay.
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.
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.
Cheap land is not enough to get me to move out to the sticks. My grandparents had a farm and I had the pleasure of spending my summers there as a kid. A 30 minute drive to get to town is not fun, you need to bring a large cooler for groceries or ice cream will melt, food start to spoil. If you want to know why guns are so popular in rural areas it's because there is nothing else to do, I became a good shot out of sheer boredom.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
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.
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.
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.
I make bevel gears for a living, on 1950's vintage equipment. I can't telecommute.
... 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).
If it matters, it's called the night shift.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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
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.
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.