6 ms·

Ahhh, the old "ideas during casual talking" trope. In all my years I've never seen anything of significance come out of people talking over lunch - for most com

Ahhh, the old "ideas during casual talking" trope. In all my years I've never seen anything of significance come out of people talking over lunch - for most companies, the concept of unexpected collaboration based on overhearing something in the office just isn't true and is mostly not required. I'm sure that sometimes unexpected collaboration may happen that might have a small tangible benefit to a company but I can guarantee you that most companies do not need this and the benefits of a work from home culture on the whole city and America's general mental health will be better than whatever new feature you cooked up over your company provided lunch. imagine the problems working from home would solve: housing costs, high density living, pollution, no commute time, improved communities, improved family life. The odd piece of collaboration that may come out of lunch chat is really not worth the pain that our cities and resident workers are going through. Can't afford a decent sized house? Probably because everyone wants to be close to work so you're priced out. You'll feel the pain when you get married and want kids; very long commute or sub-standard living conditions, great choice... Like you said, I'm sure small things will be missed but employees having a great standard of living is likely going to do the company more good than not. I do admit that we would need a cultural shift for this to really work though.

eva1984 10y ago
I did have that experience myself. Me and colleague are talking about, back in last November, Paris attack thing. And we are working in the media sector, he just mentioned that we could use the user behavior stream to detect whether something big happens. Now it becomes a viral item detector, also providing real time metrics to other services. It might not be significant, but it did evolve into something useful.
notmything 10y ago
In response to your response (which I cannot reply to)- that's just one example. I did say that it may benefit some companies some of the time but I highly doubt that it's worthwhile enough to be a driver for EVERYONE to work from a central location in every company. That one time when something awesome happened at the office just doesn't outweigh the need to cut pollution, solve the housing crises and have better family lives. America is experiencing its worst mental health and depression crisis ever, I would not be surprised if working conditions were a massive factor. Companies should not live and die by water cooler conversations (and mostly don't).
- eva1984 10y ago
  You are talking the conversation far too extreme. No one is forcing EVERYONE to work every day onsite. No one is forcing you to give up your life, or pick a side in work vs home... Merely, I just state remote has its drawbacks. There is a tradeoff. If remote is so superior, then everybody should already be doing it. For me, what OP suggests feels like a myth, just too good to be true, by ignoring the potential frustration.
  - notmything 10y ago
    It's a serious issue. Just because you don't see it working that does not mean it cannot work. How else are we to solve the living standards issues? We can't all be 24 year olds forever!
  - tmptmp 10y ago
    >> If remote is so superior, then everybody should already be doing it. I guess, you are missing here something very important. Onsite-work got entrenched in the society because of the earlier industrial revolution, which mainly involved working at factories on machines producing tangible things. There the concept of remote work, even for the higher-ups, was not even thinkable much. This onsite-work trend, unfortunately, got carried forward in the knowledge industry too. What your parent is saying has a very large potential and his/her point is very important in this regard. The modern industry should give a serious try to remote working, it solves many, many problems of the modern day capitalism. It's good for both the workers and the employers and for the society as well.
    - electricEmu 10y ago
      "It's good for both the workers and employers" It's good for_some_ workers. I find the increased housing costs to accommodate an additional office a net drain. The lack of work/life separation does nothing good for my stress. As for nothing happening during lunch: my cohorts frequently grab a bite and pair on non-critical, but job enhancing, functionality. This type of interaction with others in the same problem space doesn't happen when you're lone wolfing it at home. Work from home is great for some but it's not everyone's answer.
rodgerd 10y ago
> In all my years I've never seen anything of significance come out of people talking over lunch That's nice, but probably trying to generalise your personal experience to everyone as though it were an immutable law isn't a good one. I've certainly had the opposite experience.
dave2000 10y ago
"Ahhh, the old "ideas during casual talking" trope. In all my years I've never seen anything of significance come out of people talking over lunch - for most companies, the concept of unexpected collaboration based on overhearing something in the office just isn't true and is mostly not required." I've done a lot of - perhaps even most - learning from talking to people who are better than me, whether it's over lunch, a drink, or during work. You can't disentangle casual chats and official meetings; in most companies you're not going to be allowed to just book an hour or two of meetings to discuss random stuff in the hope you'll learn something you might be able to apply to this project.
- notmything 10y ago
  Hence needing a cultural change - we can get the same effect remotely if we actually try. When I was a fresh grad, I also learnt a tremendous amount from the people around me; I don't doubt our ability to get the same effect remotely. The issues we have with everyone wanting to live in massive urban areas (near work) are not less important then you needing to figure out how to learn from home, that's the type of self centred thinking that gives us high density housing, pollution, unaffordable housing, long commutes, strained family lives, broken communities and mental health issues (also known as commuting / working from a central office).
  - rm999 10y ago
    >high density housing, pollution Low density housing and sprawl are actually worse for the environment btw. You have a clear bias against urban living. That's your opinion and that's totally ok, but the cultural trend is definitely back towards higher density urban living. I'm a fan of periodic, 1-2 days a week remote work. But I don't like working on fully remote teams, and I've worked with managers who are very experienced and enthusiastic about it. Yes, remote working CAN improve quality of life, but it harms collaboration and communication and shifts a lot of burden onto the managers. This isn't cultural, it's simply what happens when you put people further apart. To be clear, I dream of a day where collaboration remotely works really well. I'd like to live in a smaller city one day where I don't always have to worry about finding a job.
petra 10y ago
Personally , i don't think the big silicon valley companies are interested in a great solution for the remote work problem(or in remote work in general) - or else we would have seen large r&d investments from them on that subject. And i wouldn't be surprised most VC investors don't care for that either.
- notmything 10y ago
  You are correct - there is no push from anyone significant on this - this is one of the few things I think the Government should intervene in, heavily incentivised a work from home culture to the point where we can get rid of central business districts (in their current form) in every major city. Other than very long term costs savings (and nobody thinks really long term), there's no money to be made from a big cultural shift that makes workers lives better.
- zeemonkee3 10y ago
  The big silicon valley companies don't need to care. They have deep pockets, and queues of kids round the block willing to work and live in cubicles for a chance to work with them joining every year. The VCs don't care either, they want to keep their startups on a tight leash from Sand Hill Road. For a bootstrapped startup that isn't tied to a Sand Hill VC, remote working is a viable option that gives them access to talent they wouldn't otherwise have.
imgabe 10y ago
Many of those problems could also be solved by adjusting zoning laws to increase density. Suburbs have a lot of problems aside from just commute times that can be solved by working from home. The maintenance costs associated with the spread-out infrastructure required to support everyone having their own personal 1/4 acre of land cannot be supported by the tax base available in such a low density population. Most US cities could be much denser than they are with a higher quality of life and lower pollution if people could be located within walking distance of most of the places they need to go.
- vitd 10y ago
  I'm not sure why you think commute times are only a problem in the suburbs. My wife and I are looking to buy a house and we can't afford anything near the office, which is in the middle of a large metropolitan area (the 2nd largest in the nation). If we buy further out, where we can afford, I'll have a very long commute, 100% of which will be within the city.
  - imgabe 10y ago
    I never said long commute times are only a problem in the suburbs. If you're staying within the city proper and still have a "very long commute" (which to me is 1+ hours, I'm not sure what the means to you) it sounds like the city is still insufficiently dense. In my experience, the vast majority of people with long commutes are commuting from suburbs/exurbs into a city center. I'm sure there are some cities that are so spread out that one could have a long commute while still staying within the city limits, but that would imply that there are people even further out with even longer commutes from the suburbs.
    - notmything 10y ago
      The problem would vanish if we moved from city living to small town living. We only have city living because everyone needs to get to their office which created high density housing near the city centre and urban sprawl everywhere else; both of those things would not be a problem if we moved away from city living and focussed on smaller towns instead; that way we could still have services centralised to a local community that works for everyone rather than having millions of people in one place which cause extreme mental distress for many people (see the mental health crisis). I commute through the city, if one person crashes their car it impacts thousands of people getting home on time to see their kids before bedtime, how is that a nice way to live?
KKKKkkkk1 10y ago
In my experience, the American workforce is managed in a tight hierarchy, and management would not be happy to see their workers seeking out outside collaborations and coming up with ideas born out of random conversations. If any of those things happen to you, I would imagine you are more likely than not to get in trouble. Another issue is that most Americans work from cubicle farms where conversations and unstructured meetings are actively discouraged. This is probably related to the previous point.
- mwfunk 10y ago
  What country do you work in that's not America? I want to move there. OTOH, if you work in America, what country are you referring to that's not like this, and why aren't you working there?
theinternetman 10y ago
> Ahhh, the old "ideas during casual talking" trope. In all my years I've never seen anything of significance come out of people talking over lunch Depends on your job really, roles where creativity is required this sort of interaction is essential.
- notmything 10y ago
  No it's not - there are very few companies that live and die by this - it;s not in any job spec I've ever seen and even if this is true for some companies, I never claimed this would work for all companies. You have cherry picked one thing from my overall argument.

eva1984 10y ago

I did have that experience myself. Me and colleague are talking about, back in last November, Paris attack thing. And we are working in the media sector, he just mentioned that we could use the user behavior stream to detect whether something big happens. Now it becomes a viral item detector, also providing real time metrics to other services. It might not be significant, but it did evolve into something useful.

notmything 10y ago

In response to your response (which I cannot reply to)- that's just one example. I did say that it may benefit some companies some of the time but I highly doubt that it's worthwhile enough to be a driver for EVERYONE to work from a central location in every company. That one time when something awesome happened at the office just doesn't outweigh the need to cut pollution, solve the housing crises and have better family lives. America is experiencing its worst mental health and depression crisis ever, I would not be surprised if working conditions were a massive factor. Companies should not live and die by water cooler conversations (and mostly don't).

eva1984 10y ago
You are talking the conversation far too extreme. No one is forcing EVERYONE to work every day onsite. No one is forcing you to give up your life, or pick a side in work vs home... Merely, I just state remote has its drawbacks. There is a tradeoff. If remote is so superior, then everybody should already be doing it. For me, what OP suggests feels like a myth, just too good to be true, by ignoring the potential frustration.
- notmything 10y ago
  It's a serious issue. Just because you don't see it working that does not mean it cannot work. How else are we to solve the living standards issues? We can't all be 24 year olds forever!
- tmptmp 10y ago
  >> If remote is so superior, then everybody should already be doing it. I guess, you are missing here something very important. Onsite-work got entrenched in the society because of the earlier industrial revolution, which mainly involved working at factories on machines producing tangible things. There the concept of remote work, even for the higher-ups, was not even thinkable much. This onsite-work trend, unfortunately, got carried forward in the knowledge industry too. What your parent is saying has a very large potential and his/her point is very important in this regard. The modern industry should give a serious try to remote working, it solves many, many problems of the modern day capitalism. It's good for both the workers and the employers and for the society as well.
  - electricEmu 10y ago
    "It's good for both the workers and employers" It's good for_some_ workers. I find the increased housing costs to accommodate an additional office a net drain. The lack of work/life separation does nothing good for my stress. As for nothing happening during lunch: my cohorts frequently grab a bite and pair on non-critical, but job enhancing, functionality. This type of interaction with others in the same problem space doesn't happen when you're lone wolfing it at home. Work from home is great for some but it's not everyone's answer.

rodgerd 10y ago

> In all my years I've never seen anything of significance come out of people talking over lunch That's nice, but probably trying to generalise your personal experience to everyone as though it were an immutable law isn't a good one. I've certainly had the opposite experience.

dave2000 10y ago

"Ahhh, the old "ideas during casual talking" trope. In all my years I've never seen anything of significance come out of people talking over lunch - for most companies, the concept of unexpected collaboration based on overhearing something in the office just isn't true and is mostly not required." I've done a lot of - perhaps even most - learning from talking to people who are better than me, whether it's over lunch, a drink, or during work. You can't disentangle casual chats and official meetings; in most companies you're not going to be allowed to just book an hour or two of meetings to discuss random stuff in the hope you'll learn something you might be able to apply to this project.

notmything 10y ago
Hence needing a cultural change - we can get the same effect remotely if we actually try. When I was a fresh grad, I also learnt a tremendous amount from the people around me; I don't doubt our ability to get the same effect remotely. The issues we have with everyone wanting to live in massive urban areas (near work) are not less important then you needing to figure out how to learn from home, that's the type of self centred thinking that gives us high density housing, pollution, unaffordable housing, long commutes, strained family lives, broken communities and mental health issues (also known as commuting / working from a central office).
- rm999 10y ago
  >high density housing, pollution Low density housing and sprawl are actually worse for the environment btw. You have a clear bias against urban living. That's your opinion and that's totally ok, but the cultural trend is definitely back towards higher density urban living. I'm a fan of periodic, 1-2 days a week remote work. But I don't like working on fully remote teams, and I've worked with managers who are very experienced and enthusiastic about it. Yes, remote working CAN improve quality of life, but it harms collaboration and communication and shifts a lot of burden onto the managers. This isn't cultural, it's simply what happens when you put people further apart. To be clear, I dream of a day where collaboration remotely works really well. I'd like to live in a smaller city one day where I don't always have to worry about finding a job.

petra 10y ago

Personally , i don't think the big silicon valley companies are interested in a great solution for the remote work problem(or in remote work in general) - or else we would have seen large r&d investments from them on that subject. And i wouldn't be surprised most VC investors don't care for that either.

notmything 10y ago
You are correct - there is no push from anyone significant on this - this is one of the few things I think the Government should intervene in, heavily incentivised a work from home culture to the point where we can get rid of central business districts (in their current form) in every major city. Other than very long term costs savings (and nobody thinks really long term), there's no money to be made from a big cultural shift that makes workers lives better.
zeemonkee3 10y ago
The big silicon valley companies don't need to care. They have deep pockets, and queues of kids round the block willing to work and live in cubicles for a chance to work with them joining every year. The VCs don't care either, they want to keep their startups on a tight leash from Sand Hill Road. For a bootstrapped startup that isn't tied to a Sand Hill VC, remote working is a viable option that gives them access to talent they wouldn't otherwise have.

imgabe 10y ago

Many of those problems could also be solved by adjusting zoning laws to increase density. Suburbs have a lot of problems aside from just commute times that can be solved by working from home. The maintenance costs associated with the spread-out infrastructure required to support everyone having their own personal 1/4 acre of land cannot be supported by the tax base available in such a low density population. Most US cities could be much denser than they are with a higher quality of life and lower pollution if people could be located within walking distance of most of the places they need to go.

vitd 10y ago
I'm not sure why you think commute times are only a problem in the suburbs. My wife and I are looking to buy a house and we can't afford anything near the office, which is in the middle of a large metropolitan area (the 2nd largest in the nation). If we buy further out, where we can afford, I'll have a very long commute, 100% of which will be within the city.
- imgabe 10y ago
  I never said long commute times are only a problem in the suburbs. If you're staying within the city proper and still have a "very long commute" (which to me is 1+ hours, I'm not sure what the means to you) it sounds like the city is still insufficiently dense. In my experience, the vast majority of people with long commutes are commuting from suburbs/exurbs into a city center. I'm sure there are some cities that are so spread out that one could have a long commute while still staying within the city limits, but that would imply that there are people even further out with even longer commutes from the suburbs.
  - notmything 10y ago
    The problem would vanish if we moved from city living to small town living. We only have city living because everyone needs to get to their office which created high density housing near the city centre and urban sprawl everywhere else; both of those things would not be a problem if we moved away from city living and focussed on smaller towns instead; that way we could still have services centralised to a local community that works for everyone rather than having millions of people in one place which cause extreme mental distress for many people (see the mental health crisis). I commute through the city, if one person crashes their car it impacts thousands of people getting home on time to see their kids before bedtime, how is that a nice way to live?

KKKKkkkk1 10y ago

In my experience, the American workforce is managed in a tight hierarchy, and management would not be happy to see their workers seeking out outside collaborations and coming up with ideas born out of random conversations. If any of those things happen to you, I would imagine you are more likely than not to get in trouble. Another issue is that most Americans work from cubicle farms where conversations and unstructured meetings are actively discouraged. This is probably related to the previous point.

mwfunk 10y ago
What country do you work in that's not America? I want to move there. OTOH, if you work in America, what country are you referring to that's not like this, and why aren't you working there?

theinternetman 10y ago

> Ahhh, the old "ideas during casual talking" trope. In all my years I've never seen anything of significance come out of people talking over lunch Depends on your job really, roles where creativity is required this sort of interaction is essential.

notmything 10y ago
No it's not - there are very few companies that live and die by this - it;s not in any job spec I've ever seen and even if this is true for some companies, I never claimed this would work for all companies. You have cherry picked one thing from my overall argument.