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Can you tell what the reason behind that policy is? Whenever I hear something like this I like to challenge it by the following: Working remotely should be the

Can you tell what the reason behind that policy is? Whenever I hear something like this I like to challenge it by the following: Working remotely should be the default, not the outlier. If your organisation requires personal presence something in your organisation is broken (management processes, the way people interact, obsolete tools etc.). Fix that instead of patching what's broken by mandating personal presence. Chances are not only will your employees be happier but you'll also uncover potential for optimisation.

beachstartup 10y ago
> Can you tell what the reason behind that policy is? there is no reasoning behind these policies. it's just someone's decision. you'd be surprised at how much business 'logic' is really just arbitrary choices. the way to fix it is to quit and work for someone/some place that has a sane policy. these social shifts take decades to fully manifest because old rich people don't like changing their way. because they're old, and they're rich. why should they? they're old and rich, remember? you do you, don't try to fight against what can't be changed.
- pc86 10y ago
  I was with you until you turned it into some weird nonsense about class and age for no reason. For thousands of years the majority of work occurred in collocation with other people doing the same work as you. Now we have technology that allows for remote work and there are a lot of companies taking advantage of it. Over time the default will become remote if the specific job allows it. I imagine at some point beyond the default will become remote regardless of the task. But you can't expect people to change the entire organizational structure of their business overnight "because Slack!"
- Johnny555 10y ago
  The manager at my company that keeps this "no full-time telecommute" policy is in his mid-40's. And he's not rich. Well compensated, yes, but not 20 million dollar home in Atherton and a Tesla rich, more like "drives a BMW 4 series from his Peninsula Condo", but he's certainly not rich enough to not need to work. So I don't think this is a problem with "old rich people".
  - beachstartup 10y ago
    i'd bet that isn't his policy, he's just the mouthpiece. but that's just like, my opinion, man.
    - Johnny555 10y ago
      He put the policy in place when he was hired (before then it was a more loose "come to the office if/when you want to", which worked for a 20 person company, but doesn't work so well with a 50 or 100 person company), along with more regular working hours (flex hours are fine but everyone is generally expected to be in the office between 10am - 3pm to allow meetings to be scheduled)
      - beachstartup 10y ago
        by old and rich i mean exactly what you described -- a person who works as a manager, is middle aged, and makes a healthy six figure salary. that's "rich" to most people. the ceo in a 20M mansion certainly qualifies also.
        Johnny555 10y ago
        A 6 figure salary in the Bay Area is not what most people would call "rich", in some areas you can qualify for subsidized housing with a 6 figure salary and a family of 4. And while I may be biased by being a decade older, "mid-forties" doesn't seem old for a senior manager. In any case, unless someone is truly wealthy, you can't say "Oh well they don't care about their job because they are rich", because they need that job, and if they are a poor manager, they'll lose that job.
        beachstartup 10y ago
        i'm from california and have lived in the bay. i'm not a podunk who doesn't know what a california salary looks like. we live in a wealth bubble, meaning even your 'lowly' six figure manager is still a rich guy to most people. my point stands, and i'm doubling down on it. go check out the rest of america and the world, and you might see what i mean.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 10y ago
  The really old thing is thinking that you have somehow escaped the human predicament when you really haven't. It's a time honored tradition repeated by fools in each generation.
GuiA 10y ago
My organization requires personal presence because we work on prototype hardware that costs several hundreds of thousands/millions of dollars to make, so we can't just make one for each of us and bring it home. (And even if we could, these things require regular fixing, and if I'm in Japan and the girl who knows how to resolder a certain component in Chile, that's not very practical) Sometimes I can work from home if I prepare work in advance to account for it (e.g. collect data from the hardware to enable offline testing), but it's extra overhead. > If your organisation requires personal presence something in your organisation is broken Please tell, what's broken in my org?
- robalfonso 10y ago
  You clearly don't have site to site mass materializers (ie star trek transporters) then you could just move it to your location when you need it. Get on the ball!
- BjoernKW 10y ago
  > > If your organisation requires personal presence something in your organisation is broken > Please tell, what's broken in my org? What I'm getting at with this is that if personal presence is mandatory you should have an actual reason for that. Your organisation obviously does. The more usual reason for mandatory personal presence unfortunately is "Because it's always been done this way and we like to see butts in seats because we don't trust our employees nor do we know how to manage what they're working on or how to measure their results."
  - solipsism 10y ago
    Maybe you should avoid making wild, nuance-free pronouncements then.
- HeyLaughingBoy 10y ago
  Every situation is obviously different, but I've been there. Our equipment had a build cost of just under $100k when were at the pre-production stages. The problem isn't just working from home, it's "how do you give enough developers/testers" access to the equipment when each unit requires such a high upfront cost and ongoing maintenance and physical space, supplies, etc? So even if everyone is working in the lab, it's still a problem. Our response was to create extremely detailed simulations of every aspect of the behavior. The code ran on our laptops exactly the same way it would on physical hardware. By simply flipping a switch in a config file, the software would either run on real hardware, or start up with simulated hardware. Of course, we still needed to test on real hardware, but because we were forced to create the simulation to allow enough developers simultaneous access, it also made it easier for us to work from home :-)
Johnny555 10y ago
It's because the engineering manager thinks that in-person collaboration works better than a remote team. I can't really argue with the results, the company is doing exceptionally well. Employees are generally happy (perhaps even excited) to work there, so I disagree that the organization is "broken". We're still a small-ish company, engineering is around 75 people and we all sit in the same area of the office. As we grow, then I imagine that this "in-person" effect (if it exists at all) will diminish
stronglikedan 10y ago
The reasoning behind our COO's no(low)-remote policy is that he cannot tell if someone is simply punching in and then watching TV. Meanwhile, he is oblivious to the dozens of in-house workers who are punching in and chatting, doing things on their phone, anything but their work, etc. I have one employee who was grandfathered in, since he's been working remotely since before the COO's random policy decision, and he's the most productive worker I have. It's completely ridiculous, but you just can't get through to some people, no matter how logical your challenges are. The only reasoning I can see is that our COO is also the VP of Sales (small company), and he values "face time", and "body language", and "reading the room", and some such nonsense that only applies to sales and negotiations, but not production.
- kzisme 10y ago
  Yeah I feel it depends on the company you work for. It seems most companies are "butt's in chairs" and just want you there... There are loads of people who watch Netflix all day at my company, but full time remote isn't offered to everyone.
cakoose 10y ago
I'm not against remote work, but one thing I notice is that it's more efficient to hash out ideas with someone in person. Why do you categorically say that something is broken if it requires personal presence?
- edoceo 10y ago
  Hour long video chat helps, always on chat. Then another video chat with whiteboard
- BjoernKW 10y ago
  In order to challenge to status quo, which is "Personal presence required in all cases, all the time. Period.". If personal presence is mandatory you'd have a very good reason for it (as in GuiA's case above).
- k__ 10y ago
  Depends greatly on the job, I think. If your main field is hardware related, it's probably necessary. But a software developer, a sales person, a marketer?
  - jXCw1N0jtH3 10y ago
    I'm in marketing and working remotely is kind of a pain in the ass, to be honest. I typically want to have in-person chats with product managers, developers, etc. about something or other on more or less on a daily basis. I'm a huge fan of remote work, I've had a full-time remote position previously, I just think sometimes it doesn't work with the culture of a team or business. I don't think that means anything is broken.
0xdeadbeefbabe 10y ago
> If your organisation requires personal presence something in your organisation is broken Don't you wonder why politicians hold town meetings in person? Edit: Also, if your org doesn't require personal presence it is vulnerable to some attacks.
- BjoernKW 10y ago
  > Don't you wonder why politicians hold town meetings in person? Because town meetings are a performance. I prefer a live performance over a canned version, too (such as watching a well-crafted presentation instead of a YouTube recording). There's absolutely nothing against meeting people in person. Those meetings should count however. They should mean quality time (instead of a synonym for "Free doughnuts and countless person-hours wasted.").
DashRattlesnake 10y ago
> Working remotely should be the default, not the outlier. > If your organisation requires personal presence something in your organisation is broken (management processes, the way people interact, obsolete tools etc.). Fix that instead of patching what's broken by mandating personal presence. Maybe I'm not enough of a smartphone-enabled digital native for the 21st century, but there are actually social benefits to seeing and interacting with people in-person. Work is a social activity. > Chances are not only will your employees be happier but you'll also uncover potential for optimisation. No, I really doubt it. Maybe it would make a few people happier, but I really doubt it would be general. I've worked remotely with people and they never feel fully-fleshed out vs. the coworkers I regularly interact with in person. It would kinda be nightmarish for my entire workday to be like that. The "optimization" aspect is probably even more unappealing, and reeks of the kind of narrow and aloof thinking that lead to Soviet continuous production weeks [1], which made it difficult for workers to maintain a social life. I'm not saying that remote work should be totally banned. I think the flexibility offered by allowing people to do it occasionally is very humane, and perhaps it could help people who have some kind of condition that makes it hard for them to interact directly with others. However, it just doesn't seem wise to have remote work be the default. [1] http://calendars.wikia.com/wiki/Soviet_revolutionary_calendar http://calendars.wikia.com/wiki/Soviet_revolutionary_calenda...
- hosh 10y ago
  I strongly prefer remote over in-person. There are pros and cons to either. One of the interesting things that comes up in remote is confronting the conflation people have between work and a job. Work and a job are not the same thing. A lot of people conflate the two and rely on external things to enforce a work ethic and self-discipline, but a lot of that structure is no longer there when working remote. If anything, your internal motivation and drive has to be strong. Related is that, when working on a distributed team as a remote worker, what feels like over-communicating to the point of harassment is probably the right amount of communication. One interesting consequence though is when both partners in a marriage work from home. In a situation where one or both partners work outside of home, some of the stress that comes with intensely being together all the time is not there. When both partners work from home, though, that can get interesting. I know this because my wife also works from home. I don't think the general populace is quite ready for that yet (you won't see advice for this yet on the self-help section of the bookstore), though it is something that can still be worked out.
lightedman 10y ago
"If your organisation requires personal presence something in your organisation is broken" Pretty hard to run a repair center for physical items without people physically present to do the work.

beachstartup 10y ago

> Can you tell what the reason behind that policy is? there is no reasoning behind these policies. it's just someone's decision. you'd be surprised at how much business 'logic' is really just arbitrary choices. the way to fix it is to quit and work for someone/some place that has a sane policy. these social shifts take decades to fully manifest because old rich people don't like changing their way. because they're old, and they're rich. why should they? they're old and rich, remember? you do you, don't try to fight against what can't be changed.

pc86 10y ago
I was with you until you turned it into some weird nonsense about class and age for no reason. For thousands of years the majority of work occurred in collocation with other people doing the same work as you. Now we have technology that allows for remote work and there are a lot of companies taking advantage of it. Over time the default will become remote if the specific job allows it. I imagine at some point beyond the default will become remote regardless of the task. But you can't expect people to change the entire organizational structure of their business overnight "because Slack!"
Johnny555 10y ago
The manager at my company that keeps this "no full-time telecommute" policy is in his mid-40's. And he's not rich. Well compensated, yes, but not 20 million dollar home in Atherton and a Tesla rich, more like "drives a BMW 4 series from his Peninsula Condo", but he's certainly not rich enough to not need to work. So I don't think this is a problem with "old rich people".
- beachstartup 10y ago
  i'd bet that isn't his policy, he's just the mouthpiece. but that's just like, my opinion, man.
  - Johnny555 10y ago
    He put the policy in place when he was hired (before then it was a more loose "come to the office if/when you want to", which worked for a 20 person company, but doesn't work so well with a 50 or 100 person company), along with more regular working hours (flex hours are fine but everyone is generally expected to be in the office between 10am - 3pm to allow meetings to be scheduled)
    - beachstartup 10y ago
      by old and rich i mean exactly what you described -- a person who works as a manager, is middle aged, and makes a healthy six figure salary. that's "rich" to most people. the ceo in a 20M mansion certainly qualifies also.
      - Johnny555 10y ago
        A 6 figure salary in the Bay Area is not what most people would call "rich", in some areas you can qualify for subsidized housing with a 6 figure salary and a family of 4. And while I may be biased by being a decade older, "mid-forties" doesn't seem old for a senior manager. In any case, unless someone is truly wealthy, you can't say "Oh well they don't care about their job because they are rich", because they need that job, and if they are a poor manager, they'll lose that job.
        beachstartup 10y ago
        i'm from california and have lived in the bay. i'm not a podunk who doesn't know what a california salary looks like. we live in a wealth bubble, meaning even your 'lowly' six figure manager is still a rich guy to most people. my point stands, and i'm doubling down on it. go check out the rest of america and the world, and you might see what i mean.
0xdeadbeefbabe 10y ago
The really old thing is thinking that you have somehow escaped the human predicament when you really haven't. It's a time honored tradition repeated by fools in each generation.

GuiA 10y ago

My organization requires personal presence because we work on prototype hardware that costs several hundreds of thousands/millions of dollars to make, so we can't just make one for each of us and bring it home. (And even if we could, these things require regular fixing, and if I'm in Japan and the girl who knows how to resolder a certain component in Chile, that's not very practical) Sometimes I can work from home if I prepare work in advance to account for it (e.g. collect data from the hardware to enable offline testing), but it's extra overhead. > If your organisation requires personal presence something in your organisation is broken Please tell, what's broken in my org?

robalfonso 10y ago
You clearly don't have site to site mass materializers (ie star trek transporters) then you could just move it to your location when you need it. Get on the ball!
BjoernKW 10y ago
> > If your organisation requires personal presence something in your organisation is broken > Please tell, what's broken in my org? What I'm getting at with this is that if personal presence is mandatory you should have an actual reason for that. Your organisation obviously does. The more usual reason for mandatory personal presence unfortunately is "Because it's always been done this way and we like to see butts in seats because we don't trust our employees nor do we know how to manage what they're working on or how to measure their results."
- solipsism 10y ago
  Maybe you should avoid making wild, nuance-free pronouncements then.
HeyLaughingBoy 10y ago
Every situation is obviously different, but I've been there. Our equipment had a build cost of just under $100k when were at the pre-production stages. The problem isn't just working from home, it's "how do you give enough developers/testers" access to the equipment when each unit requires such a high upfront cost and ongoing maintenance and physical space, supplies, etc? So even if everyone is working in the lab, it's still a problem. Our response was to create extremely detailed simulations of every aspect of the behavior. The code ran on our laptops exactly the same way it would on physical hardware. By simply flipping a switch in a config file, the software would either run on real hardware, or start up with simulated hardware. Of course, we still needed to test on real hardware, but because we were forced to create the simulation to allow enough developers simultaneous access, it also made it easier for us to work from home :-)

Johnny555 10y ago

It's because the engineering manager thinks that in-person collaboration works better than a remote team. I can't really argue with the results, the company is doing exceptionally well. Employees are generally happy (perhaps even excited) to work there, so I disagree that the organization is "broken". We're still a small-ish company, engineering is around 75 people and we all sit in the same area of the office. As we grow, then I imagine that this "in-person" effect (if it exists at all) will diminish

stronglikedan 10y ago

The reasoning behind our COO's no(low)-remote policy is that he cannot tell if someone is simply punching in and then watching TV. Meanwhile, he is oblivious to the dozens of in-house workers who are punching in and chatting, doing things on their phone, anything but their work, etc. I have one employee who was grandfathered in, since he's been working remotely since before the COO's random policy decision, and he's the most productive worker I have. It's completely ridiculous, but you just can't get through to some people, no matter how logical your challenges are. The only reasoning I can see is that our COO is also the VP of Sales (small company), and he values "face time", and "body language", and "reading the room", and some such nonsense that only applies to sales and negotiations, but not production.

kzisme 10y ago
Yeah I feel it depends on the company you work for. It seems most companies are "butt's in chairs" and just want you there... There are loads of people who watch Netflix all day at my company, but full time remote isn't offered to everyone.

cakoose 10y ago

I'm not against remote work, but one thing I notice is that it's more efficient to hash out ideas with someone in person. Why do you categorically say that something is broken if it requires personal presence?

edoceo 10y ago
Hour long video chat helps, always on chat. Then another video chat with whiteboard
BjoernKW 10y ago
In order to challenge to status quo, which is "Personal presence required in all cases, all the time. Period.". If personal presence is mandatory you'd have a very good reason for it (as in GuiA's case above).
k__ 10y ago
Depends greatly on the job, I think. If your main field is hardware related, it's probably necessary. But a software developer, a sales person, a marketer?
- jXCw1N0jtH3 10y ago
  I'm in marketing and working remotely is kind of a pain in the ass, to be honest. I typically want to have in-person chats with product managers, developers, etc. about something or other on more or less on a daily basis. I'm a huge fan of remote work, I've had a full-time remote position previously, I just think sometimes it doesn't work with the culture of a team or business. I don't think that means anything is broken.

0xdeadbeefbabe 10y ago

> If your organisation requires personal presence something in your organisation is broken Don't you wonder why politicians hold town meetings in person? Edit: Also, if your org doesn't require personal presence it is vulnerable to some attacks.

BjoernKW 10y ago
> Don't you wonder why politicians hold town meetings in person? Because town meetings are a performance. I prefer a live performance over a canned version, too (such as watching a well-crafted presentation instead of a YouTube recording). There's absolutely nothing against meeting people in person. Those meetings should count however. They should mean quality time (instead of a synonym for "Free doughnuts and countless person-hours wasted.").

DashRattlesnake 10y ago

> Working remotely should be the default, not the outlier. > If your organisation requires personal presence something in your organisation is broken (management processes, the way people interact, obsolete tools etc.). Fix that instead of patching what's broken by mandating personal presence. Maybe I'm not enough of a smartphone-enabled digital native for the 21st century, but there are actually social benefits to seeing and interacting with people in-person. Work is a social activity. > Chances are not only will your employees be happier but you'll also uncover potential for optimisation. No, I really doubt it. Maybe it would make a few people happier, but I really doubt it would be general. I've worked remotely with people and they never feel fully-fleshed out vs. the coworkers I regularly interact with in person. It would kinda be nightmarish for my entire workday to be like that. The "optimization" aspect is probably even more unappealing, and reeks of the kind of narrow and aloof thinking that lead to Soviet continuous production weeks [1], which made it difficult for workers to maintain a social life. I'm not saying that remote work should be totally banned. I think the flexibility offered by allowing people to do it occasionally is very humane, and perhaps it could help people who have some kind of condition that makes it hard for them to interact directly with others. However, it just doesn't seem wise to have remote work be the default. [1] http://calendars.wikia.com/wiki/Soviet_revolutionary_calendar http://calendars.wikia.com/wiki/Soviet_revolutionary_calenda...

hosh 10y ago
I strongly prefer remote over in-person. There are pros and cons to either. One of the interesting things that comes up in remote is confronting the conflation people have between work and a job. Work and a job are not the same thing. A lot of people conflate the two and rely on external things to enforce a work ethic and self-discipline, but a lot of that structure is no longer there when working remote. If anything, your internal motivation and drive has to be strong. Related is that, when working on a distributed team as a remote worker, what feels like over-communicating to the point of harassment is probably the right amount of communication. One interesting consequence though is when both partners in a marriage work from home. In a situation where one or both partners work outside of home, some of the stress that comes with intensely being together all the time is not there. When both partners work from home, though, that can get interesting. I know this because my wife also works from home. I don't think the general populace is quite ready for that yet (you won't see advice for this yet on the self-help section of the bookstore), though it is something that can still be worked out.

lightedman 10y ago

"If your organisation requires personal presence something in your organisation is broken" Pretty hard to run a repair center for physical items without people physically present to do the work.