8 ms·

What's Lost When Most People Work from Home

28 points by bootload 11y ago

Mithaldu 11y ago
What's lost? The completely pointless, wasteful and inhumane ritual commonly called "commute". Yes, the company suffers a little. The humans who make up the company however gain considerably. A person who puts the well-being of a company above that of the humans comprising it is one who has lost some of their own humanity.
- Retric 11y ago
  >Yes, the company suffers a little. Teleworker friendly companies attract better workers from a much wider area, remote workers are more productive, the company is more flexible in terms of growth, and has lower overhead. Yet, incompetent management needs a new fad to seem like there doing something which is why company cycle back and forth though this issue. PS: On top of all that it makes it harder for lazy employees to seem like there working. Those long hours posting on Facebook pretending to slave for bosses who just cares about the appearance of work stop being so useful.
- hugh4 11y ago
  Personally I'd find it incredibly lonely to work from home. Of course I have a five minute commute. If your commute is terrible, arrange your life better.
  - Mithaldu 11y ago
    > Personally I'd find it incredibly lonely to work from home. Honest question: Why? Please be detailed. I could explain all the things that keep my home work from feeling lonely, but it'll be easier for me to stick to things relevant to you if i know exactly what is on your mind. > Of course I have a five minute commute. Five minutes from exactly where to where? Living room sofa in normal clothes to office desk with computer switched on and work software running? The exit of your apartment complex to the external door of your office building? I'm sure you're being a little ... optimistic about your timing there. > Of course I have a five minute commute. You're suggesting people move from a place where they may be near the things they enjoy in their life, to work. That is not an improvement, that just shifts the pain from one end to the other.
  - S_A_P 11y ago
    This sort of comment is naive at best and rubbish at worst. Try raising 5 kids in a city like Houston Texas and having a 5 minute commute. Let's see how that plays out. In no particular order you need to: get a job 5 minutes away. have your spouse do the same. hope that your company never moves or you never lose your job. purchase/rent a house large enough for 7 in a nice part of town in the part of town that meets the above parameters. Hope that the school zoned to said house is of good quality or find a private school that is also close by. Turn down offers for advancement in the name of organizing your life better. Uproot the kids and spouse when any of the above conditions cannot be met.
    - hugh4 11y ago
      In Houston, houses are cheap enough that your spouse shouldn't have to work.
  - ryandrake 11y ago
    I feel the same way. I'd go crazy if I worked from home. The distractions are much worse at home (wife, baby, dog), and I'd basically have to force myself to go out and get non-family human contact. Plus, most of my job involves meeting with people, and that tends to be more effective and efficient face-to-face. My productivity would probably be close to zero at home. And my commute is 2+ hours each way. I would not trade it for working from home.
    - Mithaldu 11y ago
      Sorry to say, but you're part off-topic and part naive. If your work explicitly involves meeting with people, then of course you can't easily remote that. That's the off-topic bit. On the other hand, it is quite naive to claim that establishing an office in your living space, where you may only be disturbed for important things (hey how does not getting disturbed actually work out in your office?), is somehow a worse deal than throwing away an 8th of your week on commute. ( (2.125) / (24*7) )
      - ryandrake 11y ago
        The article is about what people lose when they work from home, and I was pointing out a few critical things I would lose if I worked from home. Feel free to disagree with me, but my response was not even close to being off-topic. Anecdotal, sure.
        Mithaldu 11y ago
        > Plus, most of my job involves meeting with people, and that tends to be more effective and efficient face-to-face. That is only barely remotable, if at all. Bringing that up in a conversation about fulltime remote working is off-topic. It's as if you'd written "i work on a construction site, and let me tell you, moving those metal beams is hard via my ipad".
  - kangman 11y ago
    if you life in a high priced market that arrangement could be difficult to make.
- area51org 11y ago
  I don't think anything is lost at all. Organizational habits are important here: if you don't have a good set of communication tools and people who know how to use them, you may very well think that you're missing something. Hallways conversations—at least in my own experience—rarely or never amount to much. But if I do get a sudden brainstorm, and I can jump onto a quick google hangout or otherwise run it by someone, then I haven't lost anything. Physical presence is a distraction; good communication is what's important.
joesmo 11y ago
I still don't see what exactly is lost. Something concrete and detectable. Yes, people who go into the office don't have others to hang out with. That's not a loss. The article's really stretching the idea of loss.
rdl 11y ago
So much horrible stuff is lost, too. Commute, distraction, ambient paranoia and discomfort, resentment, etc. The bullshit where someone comes in with the flu and everyone else gets sick, progressively, over the next month. And the huge things: inclusive workforce (people with kids/sick relatives, mobility or other disabilities, etc. -- this will predominantly hurt women). Visa problems largely eliminated. Global talent pool. You could make up for the positives by having scheduled in-person sessions with your team (if you live genuinely remotely, do it for a week or two at a time, or longer; if you live in the same metro, do "in-person Wednesdays". A pathologically bad environment is an open plan with a bunch of disparate teams in the same space. Coworking spaces across several (potentially competing!) companies are the worst, but in a larger company, having relatively separate teams in the same space is almost as bad. Open plan is pretty much a personal instapass. If it's not worth spending +$1k/mo per employee on office space (even in the worst markets, it's +100sf/mo, which is about $500-700/mo), the employees are probably not contributing much value. Being in an environment where people are making $3-5mm in value is key. Don't be a junior callcenter employee (even those are moving remote, for cost saving reasons). Exceptions for temporary onsite engagements with clients, or something crazy like "we're on a warship" or "enroute to Mars", or <10 people in a single office during early days of a startup, but volitional shitty open plan is just insane. (Unfortunately this basically rules out the majority of Silicon Valley companies these days.) I do agree that corner offices as status for useless mid-level managers are ALSO bad, but the correct solution is offices for all, or at least anyone who wants them, some kind of dynamic environment, etc. It's entirely reasonable to have ICs in offices and managers in open areas. Anytime someone complains about recruiting/hiring/retention in a company with work-in-office, open plan, one or two high cost locations, it's hard to not bring this up. A few companies at a time can get away with it, but not everyone. It would be an easy way for companies to differentiate themselves in hiring; if even 25% of workers would rather have a private office, you would get first pick of those employees.
- qq66 11y ago
  Open plan offices are not always about cost. Microsoft has famously had private offices forever, but many younger employees have indicated that they would prefer semi-shared space. I agree that the "football field" plan has no redeeming qualities.
chasing 11y ago
Is there a link to the actual study this article is referring to? Because this write up is almost pointlessly vague. The author seems more interested in repeating the coffee shop joke than getting into the meat of the study.
JBReefer 11y ago
100% virtual companies, especially 100% virtual consulting companies, can end up with incompetent people who "hide" successfully for years, and make the culture worse. They also miss out on that subtle competition that makes you better: "Oh yeah, well I do this which lets me build with one button" etc. The small stuff really matters, it's why I left my last job.
- RussianCow 11y ago
  > 100% virtual companies, especially 100% virtual consulting companies, can end up with incompetent people who "hide" successfully for years, and make the culture worse. How is that any different than non-remote companies?
  - JBReefer 11y ago
    Because they stay out of the limelight, and quite literally, no one sees how incompetent they are. I know its possible to do the same at colocated organizations, but I've only seen it at very, very large companies where no one gives a shit anyway.
    - RussianCow 11y ago
      That seems like a problem with management more than with remote work. If expectations are set and managed correctly, of course people will notice if you're not actually doing your part. I don't see how that has anything to do with where someone works.
- eschutte2 11y ago
  I've seen a lot more incompetence among on-site employees. Which makes sense, because management is automatically suspicious of anyone working remotely (it's still seen as some kind of privilege that they often resent), so remote workers have to survive much greater scrutiny of their work. It's true that the serendipitous in-person contact has benefits that are hard to account for, though.
huckyaus 11y ago
The study in question is here, if anyone is interested: http://amd.aom.org/content/early/2015/10/07/amd.2014.0016.full.pdf http://amd.aom.org/content/early/2015/10/07/amd.2014.0016.fu... In a qualitative study of a Fortune 100 company on the forefront of allowing offsite work, we examine how the prevalence of offsite working arrangements influences perceptions of the onsite office as well as decisions regarding where one works.
Nicholas_C 11y ago
I will probably get downvoted for stating an opinion contrary to the HN groupthink but I would not work from home for a few reasons: 1. Facetime/Relationship building - If you're seen more and have better relationships, on average, you will get tapped for better jobs/projects more often than people who are in another state/country. If you are the only remote worker on your team then you are at a serious disadvantage relative to your non-remote team members who see your boss every day. 2. Ease of communication - Working from home, for me, is frustrating because when I want to walk over to someone and ask them a question or set up a physical meeting ASAP I can't. Phone calls and e-mails are great but there really is nothing like a physical meeting when it comes to hashing out problems on a white board or building a working relationship. This is also a negative because it can be very distracting to have people able to contact you any time you're at the office, but for me it is a net gain. 3. I love people. I love working with them and getting to know them and having conversations with my coworkers. This is very easy to do when you are collocated. For me, working at home is lonely. 4. Knowledge synergies - This almost falls under number 2. It is really nice to bounce ideas off people without having to stare at a chat screen waiting for a response. I really enjoy when my coworkers ask me a question and a discussion ensues between all of us about the best way to do things. This is easier than waiting for someone to type a response or getting everyone on the phone. Many of these things are possible to do over slack or meeting up once a week but it really does not beat being in the office every day. Perhaps I am very career oriented but just #1 is enough for me to not want to work from home.
- RussianCow 11y ago
  > Working from home, for me, is frustrating because when I want to walk over to someone and ask them a question or set up a physical meeting ASAP I can't. As someone who gets interrupted several times a day by this at the office, I don't miss it one bit when I work remotely. Being able to defer responding to a question by a minute or two so that I can finish my train of thought is one of my favorite things about working remotely. At the office, the cost of me trying to recover my thoughts afterwards is much greater than those two minutes my colleague would have waited for a response. > If you are the only remote worker on your team then you are at a serious disadvantage relative to your non-remote team members who see your boss every day. That seems like a problem with company culture much more than with working remotely.
bonestamp2 11y ago
Since 2007, I've worked at home most of the time... only commuting across the country to go into the office about 8 days/year. I've gone through a lot of personal changes through that time as it relates to working remotely. The company and my colleagues have too. At first, we felt disconnected. But now, I think we actually talk more. The hallway chat has shifted to skype calls, usually talking about random things before or after discussions about something else. In fact, I think the hallway chat is even more honest and productive now because we don't have to worry about who else is listening. Almost everybody is more productive, happier and less stressed.
tchock23 11y ago
This is based off of a study of one company. I don't see how that was even published initially as a viable study, never mind making it to an article in The Atlantic. Does anyone have real research on this?
newman314 11y ago
I work from home most of the time now or travel for client work. What I miss the most is the efficiency to be gained from having everyone focused on a certain set of problems while in the same room. I find that even a day or two of such time makes a huge difference compared to the meet once a week which greatly extends the turnaround time of issue resolution. I think having some of each with the flexibility to choose would most likely be ideal.
pixelmonkey 11y ago
“If the office is going to become a collection of employees not working together, it essentially becomes no different than a coffee shop.” The horror! You mean the office might degenerate into a quiet work environment where people focus on getting things done? How will these companies possibly recover? Especially while all the employees of their competitors are escaping their noisy, interruptive offices to get work done... at a nearby coffee shop! What might happen if these offices started offering perks of the best coffee shops, like actually good coffee, fast wifi, and comfy chairs? How could they possibly survive the revolts from their staff, not to mention the decline in productivity?!
bunderbunder 11y ago
Over the past 5 or 6 years I've gone from working from home a couple days a week to working from home 100% of the time to working remotely on a distributed team and, most recently, to working from an open plan office every day. And I have to grudgingly admit something: The people who are trying to dial back on the working from home have a point. I maintain that I absolutely work harder and am less distracted when I'm working from home, and by a pretty darn appreciable margin at that. If we're only considering me in isolation then my opinion on the subject has not wavered. But over the past few years I've come to see the forest for the trees a bit more, and I'm realizing that while all the individual components of a distributed team might be higher-performing, the overall system wasn't running very efficiently. A lot of time was lost to redundant efforts, efforts at cross purposes with each other, stuff like that. I'm not prepared to throw the baby out with the bathwater - I still think there is a place for working from home and working remotely. But I'm also prepared to concede that it's not all kittens and lollipops, and that there are valid reasons why a company might decide that co-location better suits its needs. Full disclosure: I still ended up leaving my job over it. Among other reasons (none of which were really about the office itself), that daily commute would have eventually ground my sanity into nothingness.
- Mithaldu 11y ago
  I've observed the same issue of remote teams being not very efficient at times. However this is almost always the result of sub-optimal team management, for example things like using only a bug tracker, or using a bug tracker software for both that purpose AND for task planning. In other words: Yes, it may become an issue, but is easily solved by using the right tools and policies.
  - unabst 11y ago
    Any tools you can recommend?
    - Mithaldu 11y ago
      Depends entirely on what you're doing. However the most important part is this. Depending on your company needs you need at least one or more of these, and they should not be coopted to serve in place of any of their others: - customer support solution (to talk to people external to the company) - task tracker (plans the future of when which tasks will be started/done) - bug tracker (keeps history of problems and their solutions) - group chat (to address the whole company, or task groups in it at once (IRC + friends), as well as brainstorm on things) Which exact softwares are best for these depends on your needs and budget. Important is that you deliberate well, choose on quality and don't mix things. Important is also that you make clear that using those is mandatory. People side-stepping the task/bug tracker and resorting to emails/phone calls is toxic. People not having the group chat installed as well.
tpiha 11y ago
I strongly disagree with this article and these are my arguments: - it's not true that people are isolated when working remotely, you're more then well connected over the Internet - it shouldn't all be about the high productivity at all places all the time, sometimes life and work should be about people and family and friends too - once again extroverts are trying to enforce their point of view on introverts, why not let people choose if statistics are showing that the productivity still stays the same or even gets better?
paul9290 11y ago
I love working from home because.... 1. In an office full of fellow developers who I become friendly with I start to recruit them for my startup. Mostly my bosses(lol) which that never works out very well and I end up having to find another gig. 2. No traffic!!! 3. Work and get stuff done anytime of the day or night. 4. Work from anywhere there's an Internet connection. 5. No high school. ..bs office politics. Judged by your work only! 6. Wake up, roll over and start working...did I mention not having to deal with traffic?
chmaynard 11y ago
One way to address the crisis of climate change is to wean ourselves off of non-essential commuting as soon as possible. Obviously, many jobs require workers to be present at a job site. For so-called knowledge workers, however, online collaboration tools are making remote work very practical. There is no reason why a software developer can't work from home and still participate on a project team. It just requires a little imagination.

28 points by bootload 11y ago

What's lost? The completely pointless, wasteful and inhumane ritual commonly called "commute". Yes, the company suffers a little. The humans who make up the company however gain considerably. A person who puts the well-being of a company above that of the humans comprising it is one who has lost some of their own humanity.

Retric 11y ago
>Yes, the company suffers a little. Teleworker friendly companies attract better workers from a much wider area, remote workers are more productive, the company is more flexible in terms of growth, and has lower overhead. Yet, incompetent management needs a new fad to seem like there doing something which is why company cycle back and forth though this issue. PS: On top of all that it makes it harder for lazy employees to seem like there working. Those long hours posting on Facebook pretending to slave for bosses who just cares about the appearance of work stop being so useful.
hugh4 11y ago
Personally I'd find it incredibly lonely to work from home. Of course I have a five minute commute. If your commute is terrible, arrange your life better.
- Mithaldu 11y ago
  > Personally I'd find it incredibly lonely to work from home. Honest question: Why? Please be detailed. I could explain all the things that keep my home work from feeling lonely, but it'll be easier for me to stick to things relevant to you if i know exactly what is on your mind. > Of course I have a five minute commute. Five minutes from exactly where to where? Living room sofa in normal clothes to office desk with computer switched on and work software running? The exit of your apartment complex to the external door of your office building? I'm sure you're being a little ... optimistic about your timing there. > Of course I have a five minute commute. You're suggesting people move from a place where they may be near the things they enjoy in their life, to work. That is not an improvement, that just shifts the pain from one end to the other.
- S_A_P 11y ago
  This sort of comment is naive at best and rubbish at worst. Try raising 5 kids in a city like Houston Texas and having a 5 minute commute. Let's see how that plays out. In no particular order you need to: get a job 5 minutes away. have your spouse do the same. hope that your company never moves or you never lose your job. purchase/rent a house large enough for 7 in a nice part of town in the part of town that meets the above parameters. Hope that the school zoned to said house is of good quality or find a private school that is also close by. Turn down offers for advancement in the name of organizing your life better. Uproot the kids and spouse when any of the above conditions cannot be met.
  - hugh4 11y ago
    In Houston, houses are cheap enough that your spouse shouldn't have to work.
- ryandrake 11y ago
  I feel the same way. I'd go crazy if I worked from home. The distractions are much worse at home (wife, baby, dog), and I'd basically have to force myself to go out and get non-family human contact. Plus, most of my job involves meeting with people, and that tends to be more effective and efficient face-to-face. My productivity would probably be close to zero at home. And my commute is 2+ hours each way. I would not trade it for working from home.
  - Mithaldu 11y ago
    Sorry to say, but you're part off-topic and part naive. If your work explicitly involves meeting with people, then of course you can't easily remote that. That's the off-topic bit. On the other hand, it is quite naive to claim that establishing an office in your living space, where you may only be disturbed for important things (hey how does not getting disturbed actually work out in your office?), is somehow a worse deal than throwing away an 8th of your week on commute. ( (2.125) / (24*7) )
    - ryandrake 11y ago
      The article is about what people lose when they work from home, and I was pointing out a few critical things I would lose if I worked from home. Feel free to disagree with me, but my response was not even close to being off-topic. Anecdotal, sure.
      - Mithaldu 11y ago
        > Plus, most of my job involves meeting with people, and that tends to be more effective and efficient face-to-face. That is only barely remotable, if at all. Bringing that up in a conversation about fulltime remote working is off-topic. It's as if you'd written "i work on a construction site, and let me tell you, moving those metal beams is hard via my ipad".
- kangman 11y ago
  if you life in a high priced market that arrangement could be difficult to make.
area51org 11y ago
I don't think anything is lost at all. Organizational habits are important here: if you don't have a good set of communication tools and people who know how to use them, you may very well think that you're missing something. Hallways conversations—at least in my own experience—rarely or never amount to much. But if I do get a sudden brainstorm, and I can jump onto a quick google hangout or otherwise run it by someone, then I haven't lost anything. Physical presence is a distraction; good communication is what's important.

joesmo 11y ago

I still don't see what exactly is lost. Something concrete and detectable. Yes, people who go into the office don't have others to hang out with. That's not a loss. The article's really stretching the idea of loss.

rdl 11y ago

So much horrible stuff is lost, too. Commute, distraction, ambient paranoia and discomfort, resentment, etc. The bullshit where someone comes in with the flu and everyone else gets sick, progressively, over the next month. And the huge things: inclusive workforce (people with kids/sick relatives, mobility or other disabilities, etc. -- this will predominantly hurt women). Visa problems largely eliminated. Global talent pool. You could make up for the positives by having scheduled in-person sessions with your team (if you live genuinely remotely, do it for a week or two at a time, or longer; if you live in the same metro, do "in-person Wednesdays". A pathologically bad environment is an open plan with a bunch of disparate teams in the same space. Coworking spaces across several (potentially competing!) companies are the worst, but in a larger company, having relatively separate teams in the same space is almost as bad. Open plan is pretty much a personal instapass. If it's not worth spending +$1k/mo per employee on office space (even in the worst markets, it's +100sf/mo, which is about $500-700/mo), the employees are probably not contributing much value. Being in an environment where people are making $3-5mm in value is key. Don't be a junior callcenter employee (even those are moving remote, for cost saving reasons). Exceptions for temporary onsite engagements with clients, or something crazy like "we're on a warship" or "enroute to Mars", or <10 people in a single office during early days of a startup, but volitional shitty open plan is just insane. (Unfortunately this basically rules out the majority of Silicon Valley companies these days.) I do agree that corner offices as status for useless mid-level managers are ALSO bad, but the correct solution is offices for all, or at least anyone who wants them, some kind of dynamic environment, etc. It's entirely reasonable to have ICs in offices and managers in open areas. Anytime someone complains about recruiting/hiring/retention in a company with work-in-office, open plan, one or two high cost locations, it's hard to not bring this up. A few companies at a time can get away with it, but not everyone. It would be an easy way for companies to differentiate themselves in hiring; if even 25% of workers would rather have a private office, you would get first pick of those employees.

qq66 11y ago
Open plan offices are not always about cost. Microsoft has famously had private offices forever, but many younger employees have indicated that they would prefer semi-shared space. I agree that the "football field" plan has no redeeming qualities.

chasing 11y ago

Is there a link to the actual study this article is referring to? Because this write up is almost pointlessly vague. The author seems more interested in repeating the coffee shop joke than getting into the meat of the study.

JBReefer 11y ago

100% virtual companies, especially 100% virtual consulting companies, can end up with incompetent people who "hide" successfully for years, and make the culture worse. They also miss out on that subtle competition that makes you better: "Oh yeah, well I do this which lets me build with one button" etc. The small stuff really matters, it's why I left my last job.

RussianCow 11y ago
> 100% virtual companies, especially 100% virtual consulting companies, can end up with incompetent people who "hide" successfully for years, and make the culture worse. How is that any different than non-remote companies?
- JBReefer 11y ago
  Because they stay out of the limelight, and quite literally, no one sees how incompetent they are. I know its possible to do the same at colocated organizations, but I've only seen it at very, very large companies where no one gives a shit anyway.
  - RussianCow 11y ago
    That seems like a problem with management more than with remote work. If expectations are set and managed correctly, of course people will notice if you're not actually doing your part. I don't see how that has anything to do with where someone works.
eschutte2 11y ago
I've seen a lot more incompetence among on-site employees. Which makes sense, because management is automatically suspicious of anyone working remotely (it's still seen as some kind of privilege that they often resent), so remote workers have to survive much greater scrutiny of their work. It's true that the serendipitous in-person contact has benefits that are hard to account for, though.

huckyaus 11y ago

The study in question is here, if anyone is interested: http://amd.aom.org/content/early/2015/10/07/amd.2014.0016.full.pdf http://amd.aom.org/content/early/2015/10/07/amd.2014.0016.fu... In a qualitative study of a Fortune 100 company on the forefront of allowing offsite work, we examine how the prevalence of offsite working arrangements influences perceptions of the onsite office as well as decisions regarding where one works.

Nicholas_C 11y ago

I will probably get downvoted for stating an opinion contrary to the HN groupthink but I would not work from home for a few reasons: 1. Facetime/Relationship building - If you're seen more and have better relationships, on average, you will get tapped for better jobs/projects more often than people who are in another state/country. If you are the only remote worker on your team then you are at a serious disadvantage relative to your non-remote team members who see your boss every day. 2. Ease of communication - Working from home, for me, is frustrating because when I want to walk over to someone and ask them a question or set up a physical meeting ASAP I can't. Phone calls and e-mails are great but there really is nothing like a physical meeting when it comes to hashing out problems on a white board or building a working relationship. This is also a negative because it can be very distracting to have people able to contact you any time you're at the office, but for me it is a net gain. 3. I love people. I love working with them and getting to know them and having conversations with my coworkers. This is very easy to do when you are collocated. For me, working at home is lonely. 4. Knowledge synergies - This almost falls under number 2. It is really nice to bounce ideas off people without having to stare at a chat screen waiting for a response. I really enjoy when my coworkers ask me a question and a discussion ensues between all of us about the best way to do things. This is easier than waiting for someone to type a response or getting everyone on the phone. Many of these things are possible to do over slack or meeting up once a week but it really does not beat being in the office every day. Perhaps I am very career oriented but just #1 is enough for me to not want to work from home.

RussianCow 11y ago
> Working from home, for me, is frustrating because when I want to walk over to someone and ask them a question or set up a physical meeting ASAP I can't. As someone who gets interrupted several times a day by this at the office, I don't miss it one bit when I work remotely. Being able to defer responding to a question by a minute or two so that I can finish my train of thought is one of my favorite things about working remotely. At the office, the cost of me trying to recover my thoughts afterwards is much greater than those two minutes my colleague would have waited for a response. > If you are the only remote worker on your team then you are at a serious disadvantage relative to your non-remote team members who see your boss every day. That seems like a problem with company culture much more than with working remotely.

bonestamp2 11y ago

Since 2007, I've worked at home most of the time... only commuting across the country to go into the office about 8 days/year. I've gone through a lot of personal changes through that time as it relates to working remotely. The company and my colleagues have too. At first, we felt disconnected. But now, I think we actually talk more. The hallway chat has shifted to skype calls, usually talking about random things before or after discussions about something else. In fact, I think the hallway chat is even more honest and productive now because we don't have to worry about who else is listening. Almost everybody is more productive, happier and less stressed.

tchock23 11y ago

This is based off of a study of one company. I don't see how that was even published initially as a viable study, never mind making it to an article in The Atlantic. Does anyone have real research on this?

newman314 11y ago

I work from home most of the time now or travel for client work. What I miss the most is the efficiency to be gained from having everyone focused on a certain set of problems while in the same room. I find that even a day or two of such time makes a huge difference compared to the meet once a week which greatly extends the turnaround time of issue resolution. I think having some of each with the flexibility to choose would most likely be ideal.

pixelmonkey 11y ago

“If the office is going to become a collection of employees not working together, it essentially becomes no different than a coffee shop.” The horror! You mean the office might degenerate into a quiet work environment where people focus on getting things done? How will these companies possibly recover? Especially while all the employees of their competitors are escaping their noisy, interruptive offices to get work done... at a nearby coffee shop! What might happen if these offices started offering perks of the best coffee shops, like actually good coffee, fast wifi, and comfy chairs? How could they possibly survive the revolts from their staff, not to mention the decline in productivity?!

bunderbunder 11y ago

Over the past 5 or 6 years I've gone from working from home a couple days a week to working from home 100% of the time to working remotely on a distributed team and, most recently, to working from an open plan office every day. And I have to grudgingly admit something: The people who are trying to dial back on the working from home have a point. I maintain that I absolutely work harder and am less distracted when I'm working from home, and by a pretty darn appreciable margin at that. If we're only considering me in isolation then my opinion on the subject has not wavered. But over the past few years I've come to see the forest for the trees a bit more, and I'm realizing that while all the individual components of a distributed team might be higher-performing, the overall system wasn't running very efficiently. A lot of time was lost to redundant efforts, efforts at cross purposes with each other, stuff like that. I'm not prepared to throw the baby out with the bathwater - I still think there is a place for working from home and working remotely. But I'm also prepared to concede that it's not all kittens and lollipops, and that there are valid reasons why a company might decide that co-location better suits its needs. Full disclosure: I still ended up leaving my job over it. Among other reasons (none of which were really about the office itself), that daily commute would have eventually ground my sanity into nothingness.

Mithaldu 11y ago
I've observed the same issue of remote teams being not very efficient at times. However this is almost always the result of sub-optimal team management, for example things like using only a bug tracker, or using a bug tracker software for both that purpose AND for task planning. In other words: Yes, it may become an issue, but is easily solved by using the right tools and policies.
- unabst 11y ago
  Any tools you can recommend?
  - Mithaldu 11y ago
    Depends entirely on what you're doing. However the most important part is this. Depending on your company needs you need at least one or more of these, and they should not be coopted to serve in place of any of their others: - customer support solution (to talk to people external to the company) - task tracker (plans the future of when which tasks will be started/done) - bug tracker (keeps history of problems and their solutions) - group chat (to address the whole company, or task groups in it at once (IRC + friends), as well as brainstorm on things) Which exact softwares are best for these depends on your needs and budget. Important is that you deliberate well, choose on quality and don't mix things. Important is also that you make clear that using those is mandatory. People side-stepping the task/bug tracker and resorting to emails/phone calls is toxic. People not having the group chat installed as well.

tpiha 11y ago

I strongly disagree with this article and these are my arguments: - it's not true that people are isolated when working remotely, you're more then well connected over the Internet - it shouldn't all be about the high productivity at all places all the time, sometimes life and work should be about people and family and friends too - once again extroverts are trying to enforce their point of view on introverts, why not let people choose if statistics are showing that the productivity still stays the same or even gets better?

paul9290 11y ago

I love working from home because.... 1. In an office full of fellow developers who I become friendly with I start to recruit them for my startup. Mostly my bosses(lol) which that never works out very well and I end up having to find another gig. 2. No traffic!!! 3. Work and get stuff done anytime of the day or night. 4. Work from anywhere there's an Internet connection. 5. No high school. ..bs office politics. Judged by your work only! 6. Wake up, roll over and start working...did I mention not having to deal with traffic?

chmaynard 11y ago

One way to address the crisis of climate change is to wean ourselves off of non-essential commuting as soon as possible. Obviously, many jobs require workers to be present at a job site. For so-called knowledge workers, however, online collaboration tools are making remote work very practical. There is no reason why a software developer can't work from home and still participate on a project team. It just requires a little imagination.