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I don't follow your logic. The vast majority of businesses aren't like Google or Facebook. The vast majority of the nation's GDP isn't created by companies lik

• Morgawr 9y ago
  Just as a side note, I can work from home at Google. I don't do it often, usually only when waiting for a large package to be delivered (new TV, etc) or because of other IRL necessities like people doing works at home or similar. I prefer working in the office with my workstations and my coworkers and environment that keeps me focused, but I have plenty of coworkers that regularly WFH especially on those days (like holiday period) where the office is empty and it'd just be 1 or 2 people banging at the PC, might as well stay home and work from there.
  • brianwawok 9y ago
    My overall impression that WFH is very frowned upon at Google. Sure, maybe you can use it 2 days a month. But no thanks, I get to WFH every day. Life is too short to commute.
    • Morgawr 9y ago
      From what I've seen in my team, it's very subjective. I think it's more of a "you need to have a reason to WFH", it's fine if once in a while you just stay home and work and all that matters is your deliverable, but ideally you should attend to all the meetings you need to and be reachable. If you keep doing WFH every day then yes, that's frowned upon. I'm honestly neutral on this, I prefer when my coworkers are around me because it's easier for me to interact with them (I noticed I'm a big procrastinator with remote communications, I keep thinking "I'll message them later" or "I'll send the email later", but that's a personal thing), it's easier to have the casual chat that leads to some form of rubber duck debugging or simply just an innocent exchange of opinions that ends up solving a problem/implementing a feature. I honestly don't get that while WFH. However, some people feel the opposite of me and think they are more productive at home so I'd say leave it to the person to decide and, as the author of the article said, calibrate your employees based on deliverables, not on their presence in the office.
      • RHSeeger 9y ago
        > you need to have a reason to WFH Personally, I have reasons... I prefer it, I get more done, it cuts out the commute time (which includes a lot more than actual time in the car), it lets me work on things at night when I want to... Sure, there are negatives too, but there's a heck of a lot of positives, too. > you should attend to all the meetings you need to and be reachable Working from home has no real impact on either of those.
        • Morgawr 9y ago
          > I prefer it, I get more done, it cuts out the commute time (which includes a lot more than actual time in the car), it lets me work on things at night when I want to... Don't get me wrong, I absolutely agree with you. I don't prefer it but I understand where you are coming from and I think you should be allowed to do so if you find it's better for your productivity. I find I prefer working from home when writing design docs rather than doing dev work, for design docs I like simply sitting on my couch with my chromebook and be "lazy", whereas if I am developing I prefer a more customized setup with multiple screens and stuff so I have that better at work than at home. Also more coworker interaction. Whenever I need to write design docs, I simply tell my team I'll be working from home that day and nobody so far has complained. >Working from home has no real impact on either of those. Yes and no. I agree with you that it doesn't have a significant impact especially since we usually have people from the other side of the world dialing in the meeting so it's not a huge difference, but I personally think that if everybody is participating in the meeting remotely, it gets harder to talk because there's more chances for talking over each other and the audio/video quality is always impacted by the connection or by the headset quality. So many people have terrible headsets/microphones that really it gets confusing if everyone does so. But all these are problems that can be simply fixed by providing your employees with the appropriate hardware for it, obviously.
          • dasmoth 9y ago
            whereas if I am developing I prefer a more customized setup with multiple screens and stuff so I have that better at work than at home. That may be true at Google, but there are a bunch of supposedly high-tech companies which are happy to give people seriously cruddy workstations. Even though my home setup is actually a 5-year-old monitor on a standing desk I bodged from an off-cut of worktop, it's dramatically nicer than what I have in the main office.
    • foobarge 9y ago
      I work for the big G. and I work from home. There's a couple hundred employees that work full time from home, a minuscule amount in comparison to the work force. I travel to the office every two quarters and I usually get nothing done (meetings, interruptions, etc...) VC, chat and email makes it possible to do work. Folks saying that they can't, err, "ideate" when they're not together making noise and preventing other people from working just don't know how to use the tools they have.
      • Blackthorn 9y ago
        I do as well. It's very rare, and I've accepted that my career is probably ended at T5 (which is what I'm at). I've had team members promoted to T6 for being individual contributors but I recognize that I've got a very long uphill battle. Furthermore I have to travel to the office for a week every month and a half or so. That amount of travel sucks, but it's the price I pay for being able to work remotely so I pay it.
        • brianwawok 9y ago
          How high is t5 for an outsider? Senior engineer without any reports?
          • Blackthorn 9y ago
            T5 is senior software engineer. Some of them have reports, some don't. Some are team leads, some aren't. I'm an "individual contributor" (no reports, not a team lead).
• dsacco 9y ago
  Your syllogism doesn't work. You begin by stating accurately that most companies aren't like Google and Facebook, which is true. Then you implicitly state that Basecamp and Automattic are more representative of most companies, which is patently false in many ways; in the relevant way, it's untrue because most companies do not have remote workers, and most people do not work remotely. You can't really lead with, "Basecamp and Automattic are closer in size to most companies, and companies of that size employ the most people; therefore they're excellent role models." Size draws a false equivalence, because the remote culture at those two examples depends on far more than size, and they differ from most companies in the same size range. As for the parent's logic, he is starting from the premise that larger companies have a much stronger signaling effect for business case studies, which in turn prompts changes adopted at other organizations in the same industry regardless of size. I think that's probably a fair premise; it's not necessarily rational, but it's correct that the business practices of large tech companies are reported on, studied and emulated more than smaller companies.
  • Veen 9y ago
    Well, no, I was responding to the claims of the parent comment that stated we need massive businesses to shift to remote work to prove that it's workable. I was only comparing on size, so I think the argument is sound. As for other factors, of course there are lots of companies and roles for whom remote working won't work, but there are certainly more it would work for than currently allow it - and many of the reasons they don't allow it aren't sensible, which is why I think essays like this that make the argument in favor are useful.
    • dsacco 9y ago
      Well, look at it this way. You and I might have our minds changed by insightful essays, but looking at the broader business landscape, which of the following appears more likely to persuade an organization to consider changes? 1) A collection of insightful essays discussing the merits of remote working for amenable cultures, written by people who work at companies that basically only our ingroup is very familiar with; or 2) An academic study explored by Harvard Business Review, which discusses the way remote work at a household name improved productivity in a quantitative way? There's a herd mentality here. Larger companies impact organizational choices down the size chain. It's very similar to open source software. A large, recognizable company is much more likely to have its open source software adopted by other companies of different sizes. Not necessarily because it's more functional or robust, but very often due to signaling.
• kristianc 9y ago
  I think the point the OP is making is that businesses will only adopt WFH when they see other businesses like them do it. Far from being role models amongst small businesses, businesses like Basecamp, Automattic are seen as outliers if they're really referenced at all. Hell, in some circles even Atlassian is seen as progressive. Similar in a way to the amount of resistance you see to DevOps style practices / even moving to cloud with lines like "But we're not Amazon/Netflix/Etsy/Soundcloud or one of these modern businesses." Businesses will be won over by case studies of WFH working with similarly massively conservative cultures.
• maxxxxx 9y ago
  I am a big proponent of remote work but I think it's harder to manage a remote company. Automattic and Basecamp have excellent people in leadership who have a clear understanding of their company. A lot of mediocre middleman managers in the typical company aren't capable of setting expectations and evaluating work results. You need very good workers and leaders in a remote company.
  • RHSeeger 9y ago
    > You need very good workers and leaders in a remote company. I think that's a point that some people miss. To have remote workers, you need people who can effectively work remotely. It's a learned skill, like any other, and not everyone will be good at it. Saying "we're only local" or "we're only remote" is a bad idea, you can have both and call it a win on both ends.
    • maxxxxx 9y ago
      "Saying "we're only local" or "we're only remote" is a bad idea, you can have both and call it a win on both ends" Honestly, I think it needs to be one or the other. Mixing some remote people into an otherwise local team often doesn't work.
      • ntsplnkv2 9y ago
        A big thing in this thread is "fully remote." The fact is WFH does not need to be a full time thing for most companies. Just offer it as a benefit-if you want, you can work from home 2 days a week, or WFH if you need to be home to pick up a package or have a doctors appointment. That alone will make your company much more attractive.
        • maxxxxx 9y ago
          2-3 days per week should be a no-brainer. Especially for developers writing code.
  • GVIrish 9y ago
• dionidium 9y ago
  >Those businesses employ the the vast majority of workers. For my own edification, I looked this up. There are about 125 million full-time employees in the U.S. [0] Of which, there are: * 35 million Fortune 1000 employees [1] * 22 million government employees [2] So, government and the Fortune 1000 account for about 45% of all employment. I also found a census reckoning [3] (that seems to exclude government altogether) that puts large- and medium-sized enterprises at 65% of all employment (and growing). [0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/192361/unadjusted-monthly-number-of-full-time-employees-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/192361/unadjusted-monthl... [1] https://www.quora.com/How-many-employees-are-there-in-the-Fortune-1-000-in-the-US https://www.quora.com/How-many-employees-are-there-in-the-Fo... [2] http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/terence-p-jeffrey/government-workers-now-outnumber-manufacturing-workers-9932000 http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/terence-p-jeffrey/govern... [3] https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2015/econ/g12-susb.pdf https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio... Edited to fix sources.