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Vermont Wants To Pay Companies To Let Employees Work Remotely (fastcompany.com)
A proposal for an act in the Vermont legislature is actively trying to give grants to small companies to employ remote workers. From a report: Under the terms of S-0094, a $10,000 micro-grant will be given to a business that will "establish or enhance a facility that attracts small companies or remote workers, or both, including generator and maker spaces, co-working spaces, remote work hubs, and innovation spaces, with special emphasis on facilities that promote colocation of nonprofit, for-profit, and government entities."
That is an idea who's time has very much come!
Bravo, Vermont!!!
Thank you for being a friend
Traveled down the road and back again
Your heart is true, you're a pal and a cosmonaut.
And if you threw a party
Invited everyone you ever knew
You would see the biggest gift would be from me
And the card attached would say, thank you for being a friend.
It's a co-working space. Essentially a coffee shop with a conference room, only with more outlets and different (often better) coffee. Also, the people in the coffee shop, er, co-working space pay rent and there's quieter music (and hopefully no frappe machine).
Love visiting Vermont, but the weather is better elsewhere.
Easy. Lets say you have 500 employee company. Suppose those 500 people currently commute into the downtown area. If 50 of your employees live in a remote suburb, where they currently commute 60 minutes each way, building a small satellite office in the suburb would promote remote work and potentially give those 50 employees 90-120 minutes each day.
Yeah, this is not at all what we need. Encouraging small businesses is fine, but it does nothing about the very real problem that so many businesses still expect workers to be physically present most or all of the time. What this will do is pay someone to build a work area designed for a small business, and afterwards, that small business will then require people to work out of that small office, resulting in exactly zero changes to telecommuting behavior/support.
What we need is an actual tax break for businesses that let people telecommute, to the tune of an annual $30,000 per worker credit if an employee works remotely (defined as "anywhere other than in an office with 5 or more people, subject to the additional requirement that the location must be chosen by the employee, without the employer setting any limitations on that location beyond what is reasonable to ensure the protection of trade secrets and employee safety") for at least 48 weeks out of the year, or a $5,000 per worker credit for workers who are remote for at least 50% of work days, available to any business with at least 300 employees.
Those numbers are sort of arbitrary, but I think they're in the right order of magnitude. After all, the per-employee facilities cost in the Bay Area (about $6,000 per year) is clearly not enough to convince businesses to change the way they do things, so it would have to be a lot more than that to force businesses to either adopt telecommuting or explain to their stockholders why they are passing up free money.
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Their options are to either spend $X for the space in downtown or spend ~$X for the space elsewhere, and the only difference is the grant to fund construction, which almost certainly won't cover the construction costs. No business will take advantage of this to let employees work closer to home. If businesses were interested in spreading out, they would have already done so. A few thousand dollars of seed money won't change that equation meaningfully, because a small, one-time grant can't balance out the ongoing pain of having some of your workers in a different location.
Instead, these grants will be used by people who were already going to build small offices. They'll take the free money to do what they were going to do anyway, and the only people who will benefit are the co-working space companies that refurbish the buildings.
And this is why government bureaucrats who have never worked in any business for a day in their lives should not try to come up with creative ways to solve businesses' problems. They'll fall victim to special interests and fail to solve the problem. Every. Time.
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I worked several years at a software company whose 180 or so engineers mostly worked from home. The main office contained a number of high tech conference rooms of varying sizes with the largest one able to hold around 50 people at a time. There were also a few small offices available for those that just needed to get away from home for a few days to concentrate on something. Most teams would meet about once a week in one of the conference rooms.
The conference rooms all had WiFi projectors that we could share from our laptops, high-end teleconference systems, smartboards, and a few computers.
This setup allowed us to have the best of both worlds. We worked about 80-90% at home and the rest at the office. We only drove about one day a week so we saved hugely on vehicle wear and tear also. The office was much smaller than would have been necessary if everyone worked there, so the company saved a lot of overhead which was generously reflected in our salaries and in the overhead rates we charged to the customer.
Co-working spaces just take this concept and make a separate business out of it.
Three meg?! Shhhh! Don't let the "addicted to video" broadband people hear you say that. They still thing anything less than the FCC definition is blasphemy.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
Malls actually would benefit from this. Think of it as a sort of mini-city. In fact the mall in downtown Indianapolis would benefit mostly because of it's great location. The one's on the east side would benefit, but that's mainly because of the expressway. It also has a lot of warehouses left over from the economic downturn that could be converted.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
they had 300 people in Peru over a 3meg circuit. Easily handled with about 30 servers...
VDI with XenDesktop really demands about 100 kbps per user. So really you'd need 10 times that much bandwidth - 3 mb/s, try 30 mb/s!!
Unless of course you ment 3 Megabytes per second (24 mb/s)?
Here is the cynical reason why companies wouldn't opt for that - there is already a mechanism for aggregating 50 people in a suburb all going to the same place - a commuter bus. If the bus has wifi there's a good chance that companies are getting free work out of that 90-120 minutes of commuting time anyway, because bus rides are boring.
So in your world the cost of buildings downtown is the same as in the suburbs? That's an interesting world, and not very similar to the one I live in.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
The error of the physical place which is the state of Vermont paying for companies to DE-LOCALIZE their workforce is that they might succeed... and then why hire someone from Vermont at all?
once the state has bootstrapped by de-localization effort... why hire someone from Vermont at all... you could hire someone from canada or anywhere.
Governments should be very careful when they involve themselves in social engineering ventures. Its very frequently more sophisticated and complex in its ramifications than the C or even D student bureaucrats can handle.
We're getting into the philosopher king territory here when it comes to such things. And the overwhelming majority of dabblers in it are incompetent to the task. Even if intellectually they could handle it they rob themselves of even that chance typically by not taking the issue seriously. We require educations and certifications for people to engineer bridges or tinker around with the health of ONE person in a medical field... but what training or certification is required for government officials to use the power of the state of social engineer?
None.
Imagine a bridge built by a man with no training that took the task not seriously at all... imagine a man performing a surgery with no training that took the task not seriously at all.
That is what happens when the government messes around with these things. Sure, every so often you get a brilliant novice but such are far and few between. The vast majority are Vogons doing stupid destructive Vogon things.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
I understand it - they want to employ more people throughout the state. Smart people do live in remote locations - and the available rural "high-speed" internet options can be few and slow. There are several co-location places in Burlington ('da "big" city) - I know people who rent space. This plan sounds like encouraging a consolidation of resources to a single "office" and providing high-speed from there - rather than running wires to the home. I suppose this could help solve part of the "last mile" problem that Comcast has been trying to sue their way out of (after taking lots of money from the state).
But $400,000 more a year? Around here we're getting tax fatigue in the form of Property "School Equalization Fairness" Tax. We also have income and sales tax. Each year the Property tax has increased because school budgets keep going up. Sure out of ~$4 billion total budget may $400k isn't much. A typical single-family home has a $5,000 property tax bill. McMansions run in the $7,000 range. It's based on home value.
Something needs to be done to grow workers,technology and wages in areas outside the big centers. A least this one is a grant form and not a "soft tax" like the solar industry wanted (they wanted to enact a renewable energy tax on all fossil fuel bills - and send it directly to them as revenue). So -- will $400,000 investment bring in more than that in taxes? Or it doesn't matter because some small company can grow and wages increase for those few people?
Build it and they will come?!
I work remotely so that I can work from home, not so I can commute to an office that happens to be remote from the company's office.
The advantage of working remotely is that you don't have to sit in a fucking open-plan office.
The people in the state legislature are pretty clueless about most things. Our Lt. Gov. is a farmer with a pony tail that almost reaches his ass.
In per-capita spending on our public colleges, we come in dead last. And they wonder why all the kids move away.
I work from home for a company in Virginia. Some of the benefits of working from home is that I can wear pajamas all day and take a short nap in the afternoon if I want. I can't do either of those if I have to drive into town to work from a office that I share with other people who all work for a different company.
This is going to be difficult on our farm... I realize some of you think you're farmers because you iFarm and play other farming games but real farming requires a physical presence for now. Same for our on-farm butcher shop - someone's got to do all those dexterous manual tasks. Possibility for when we have telepresence robots... but then who needs a human at that point. :)
For housing, the prices get a lot cheaper the farther out you go. For commercial real estate, the difference is smaller, because if the market is heavy enough to command high prices, there are businesses ready to snap up the limited commercial real estate quickly, even in the suburbs. (Remember, there tends to be a smaller percentage of commercial real estate in the suburbs; that's what makes it suburbs.) The larger the metro area, the farther out you have to go before the cost difference becomes meaningful.
Also, larger buildings are generally cheaper than smaller ones, which means having four satellite offices can be more expensive than a single, central office, even if the price of land is much lower in the suburbs, because you can build a single building that's 4x as high. Also, smaller offices often require an admin, security guard, etc., all of which disproportionately add to the ongoing operations costs associated with the extra locations.
So if a business wants to be in the city center for prestige, it would take a BIG difference in cost to matter. If they don't, they will likely move their entire operation farther out into the suburbs, rather than host a few employees in multiple locations. Either way, the point remains that the difference in building costs obviously isn't enough to offset the perceived costs of spreading out, or else they would have already spread out, and a $10,000 one-time credit is unlikely to change that equation.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Specific to my understanding of Vermont, there area large number of towns that don’t have high speed (residential) internet. This basically creates an opportunity to stimulate these areas and bolster the local economies. Smart move in my book.
The big name co-working companies are a different animal. Their price structure (at least for private offices) is pretty hard for me to understand the value proposition unless your staffing levels have huge swings.
New Hampshire (Vermont's zero-state-income tax next door neighbor), heartily appreciates this program to encourage VT companies to hire NH employees (still close enough to come in a few times a month for team-building) and to encourage current employees of VT companies who only live in-state because they need to be in the office every day to consider moving a bit East for an instant pay raise.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
If you have users working from home, you can downsize your expensive downtown office and make significant savings that way. The idea isn't to build your own facilities all over the place, its to have shared facilities where people can go to do their remote work which are close to where they live for those who for whatever reason can't work from their home.
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The reason the value of property decreases as you get further out is because workplaces are centralised and people want to minimise the amount of time they waste travelling. If workplaces were more distributed, people would have more freedom to decide where they wanted to live, instead of being forced to choose between cramped and expensive city apartment or long arduous commutes.
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Yes, that's the whole point that people seem to be missing..
They're not advocating that a single company open branch offices all over the place for their staff.
They're advocating remote work, while also promoting shared working spaces where multiple employees from different companies can go and have a decent working environment without having to waste a long time travelling.
Working from home doesn't suit everyone for various reasons... Some people don't have the space (although this is often because of their commute forcing them to have a smaller more expensive place to live), some can't concentrate at home, some like the daily social aspect of meeting colleagues...
I hated travelling 1.5hrs each way per day to a central location, it was a colossal waste of my time and money, but i would happily do a 5-10 minute walk.
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