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In my experience, remote work is like a work tax you have to pay, and you have to weigh the tradeoffs. If you have a completely remote team, you're paying at l

In my experience, remote work is like a work tax you have to pay, and you have to weigh the tradeoffs. If you have a completely remote team, you're paying at least something in productivity, because training people to be open to hop on a VC or chat at a moment's notice and documenting everything through email or a shared document is not trivial, especially when you're not used to doing things that way, and the costs are not zero. Or you could do everything asynchronously to deal with time zones, but then you're introducing an inevitable lag based on overlap of working hours. For a healthy, functioning organization, it might be worth it. However, if your team is already dysfunctional, having remote workers exacerbates the problem. (I have first hand experience)

pg_is_a_butt 9y ago
awww... look at the ancient office manager grasping to keep their job. sad.
collyw 9y ago
You have to factor the fact that offices are very distracting and full of interruptions. I personally feel that i get close to double the work done when I work from home.
- odonnellryan 9y ago
  Homes can be distracting, too! Working alone isn't "natural" for a lot of people, I feel.
  - Cymen 9y ago
    Some people start a family and working from home dramatically lowers the hassle, they still get things done yet get to see their kids. It just depends on the situation and the person. For some people it's great, for some okay, for some horrible. Luckily, there are a wide range of employment options so you can chose employment that fits your needs/desires.
- jimmywanger 9y ago
  > I personally feel that i get close to double the work done when I work from home. Well, it doesn't matter if you get twice the work done, if it doesn't advance the team twice as much. If you're working completely independently, sure, work from home. Contractors have far more leeway than salaried employees in that regard. If you're working remotely but as an integral part of the team, it doesn't matter as much that you're individually getting twice the amount of work done, if it doesn't dovetail with team objectives. Without constant communication, which is facilitated by in-person interactions and communication, the team might actually be working forwards more slowly. It doesn't matter if you're coding two features instead of one in the same amount of time, if the two features never hit production and the one feature does.
GordonS 9y ago
On the other hand, working in an office is a sort of work tax too - commuting to and from the office is wasted time that could have been spent sleeping or with family. It has a financial cost attached for the employee too. Many office environments are noisy too, which doesn't always make them the best place for productivity. In an ideal world, employers would allow employees to choose themselves, and for commuting-distance, remote employees to 'hot desk' when they want.
- jimmywanger 9y ago
  Organizations are generally well acquainted with that sort of "work tax", and the results are fairly well characterized and understood and can be worked around. (Move closer to employees, open a branch office, promote off-peak working hours, transit subsidies). Remote work is a very recent phenomenon and as such, runs into a completely different set of problems that haven't been as thoroughly solved as a co-located working environment. It's like picking PostGres/Mysql over Cassandra/Mongo. Sure, both have problems, but the traditional SQL solutions are stable and the problems have known workarounds. With NoSQL solutions, you might be one of the first people who are doing that particular use case, and you'll have to pioneer your own solution, at the expense of the company's business plan/profit.
- danpalmer 9y ago
  > In an ideal world, employers would allow employees to choose themselves But it's not that simple, because the "remote tax" is paid by everyone, not just by those who decide to work remotely.
  - GordonS 9y ago
    I think it works for some companies, not so much for others. At the company I work for, we're spread around a few countries and are well used to working this way. But despite the benefits, not everyone chooses to work from home - not everyone has a home environment conducive to remote work, and some simply don't like it. We've got decent comms tools, and honestly, the 'remote work tax' is very seldom an issue.
  - 9y ago
majani 9y ago
That's a very lopsided view. Offices also come with their own hangups. It's a matter of weighing the pros and cons and then deciding. Also, to be fair, sometimes there are a lot of imaginary cons that people think will happen when they go remote, but in reality, they don't happen. So it's also worth for companies to try both and see(though this might be a stretch, I admit).
lostcolony 9y ago
Out of curiosity, was that remote workers while having an onsite presence? Or fully remote? I ask because from what I've seen, the partially remote situations have generally been more dysfunctional than fully remote. When it's one person who missed the conversation, it just makes their life miserable; when it's everyone else, it makes -your- (the person with the info's) life miserable, and that leads to better communication processes and documentation.
rubicon33 9y ago
- ...training people to be open to hop on a VC or chat at a moment's notice and documenting everything through email or a shared document is not trivial, especially when you're not used to doing things that way, and the costs are not zero. How is that any different that in office? In my experience, in office communication is often MORE difficult to document. Remote communication often happens via email, or text, and can naturally document in an informal way. Technical documents are no harder, or easier, to 'train' employees to create when working remotely or in office. - Or you could do everything asynchronously to deal with time zones, but then you're introducing an inevitable lag based on overlap of working hours. This is really more a problem with dispersing your team, than it is with remote working. You can have a remote work company with everyone in the same time zone. Remote work carries with it a certain number of risks to be sure. But it's not nearly as risky as I feel like people make it out to be.
- jimmywanger 9y ago
  > In my experience, in office communication is often MORE difficult to document. Exactly, because if everybody is colocated, you can pick up on subtle social cues and figure out what's important and what people are working on just based on what people are talking about. If you spend that much face time with people, unless you're completely socially stunted, you don't have to document things because people "just get it". > Remote work carries with it a certain number of risks to be sure. But it's not nearly as risky as I feel like people make it out to be. There are tradeoffs to everything, and I think on this board, things have swung too far to the other side. Remote work is not an absolute panacea, and carries with it costs. Just like NoSQL is not the end-all be-all of datastores, remote work isn't the right solution for many teams.
  - tetraodonpuffer 9y ago
    > you don't have to document things because people "just get it". and then a year later when you have to figure out why something was done a certain way what do you do? or when some of the people that "were there" have left and nobody else remembers? If all the discussions are written, there is no risk of forgetting anything: even working in an office I always send an email after a meeting or random chat to the person involved to document what we talked about, what was decided and why. I might also cc other people that should be kept in the loop, which is also something you cannot do if you just talk.

pg_is_a_butt 9y ago

awww... look at the ancient office manager grasping to keep their job. sad.

collyw 9y ago

You have to factor the fact that offices are very distracting and full of interruptions. I personally feel that i get close to double the work done when I work from home.

odonnellryan 9y ago
Homes can be distracting, too! Working alone isn't "natural" for a lot of people, I feel.
- Cymen 9y ago
  Some people start a family and working from home dramatically lowers the hassle, they still get things done yet get to see their kids. It just depends on the situation and the person. For some people it's great, for some okay, for some horrible. Luckily, there are a wide range of employment options so you can chose employment that fits your needs/desires.
jimmywanger 9y ago
> I personally feel that i get close to double the work done when I work from home. Well, it doesn't matter if you get twice the work done, if it doesn't advance the team twice as much. If you're working completely independently, sure, work from home. Contractors have far more leeway than salaried employees in that regard. If you're working remotely but as an integral part of the team, it doesn't matter as much that you're individually getting twice the amount of work done, if it doesn't dovetail with team objectives. Without constant communication, which is facilitated by in-person interactions and communication, the team might actually be working forwards more slowly. It doesn't matter if you're coding two features instead of one in the same amount of time, if the two features never hit production and the one feature does.

GordonS 9y ago

On the other hand, working in an office is a sort of work tax too - commuting to and from the office is wasted time that could have been spent sleeping or with family. It has a financial cost attached for the employee too. Many office environments are noisy too, which doesn't always make them the best place for productivity. In an ideal world, employers would allow employees to choose themselves, and for commuting-distance, remote employees to 'hot desk' when they want.

jimmywanger 9y ago
Organizations are generally well acquainted with that sort of "work tax", and the results are fairly well characterized and understood and can be worked around. (Move closer to employees, open a branch office, promote off-peak working hours, transit subsidies). Remote work is a very recent phenomenon and as such, runs into a completely different set of problems that haven't been as thoroughly solved as a co-located working environment. It's like picking PostGres/Mysql over Cassandra/Mongo. Sure, both have problems, but the traditional SQL solutions are stable and the problems have known workarounds. With NoSQL solutions, you might be one of the first people who are doing that particular use case, and you'll have to pioneer your own solution, at the expense of the company's business plan/profit.
danpalmer 9y ago
> In an ideal world, employers would allow employees to choose themselves But it's not that simple, because the "remote tax" is paid by everyone, not just by those who decide to work remotely.
- GordonS 9y ago
  I think it works for some companies, not so much for others. At the company I work for, we're spread around a few countries and are well used to working this way. But despite the benefits, not everyone chooses to work from home - not everyone has a home environment conducive to remote work, and some simply don't like it. We've got decent comms tools, and honestly, the 'remote work tax' is very seldom an issue.
- 9y ago

majani 9y ago

That's a very lopsided view. Offices also come with their own hangups. It's a matter of weighing the pros and cons and then deciding. Also, to be fair, sometimes there are a lot of imaginary cons that people think will happen when they go remote, but in reality, they don't happen. So it's also worth for companies to try both and see(though this might be a stretch, I admit).

lostcolony 9y ago

Out of curiosity, was that remote workers while having an onsite presence? Or fully remote? I ask because from what I've seen, the partially remote situations have generally been more dysfunctional than fully remote. When it's one person who missed the conversation, it just makes their life miserable; when it's everyone else, it makes -your- (the person with the info's) life miserable, and that leads to better communication processes and documentation.

rubicon33 9y ago

- ...training people to be open to hop on a VC or chat at a moment's notice and documenting everything through email or a shared document is not trivial, especially when you're not used to doing things that way, and the costs are not zero. How is that any different that in office? In my experience, in office communication is often MORE difficult to document. Remote communication often happens via email, or text, and can naturally document in an informal way. Technical documents are no harder, or easier, to 'train' employees to create when working remotely or in office. - Or you could do everything asynchronously to deal with time zones, but then you're introducing an inevitable lag based on overlap of working hours. This is really more a problem with dispersing your team, than it is with remote working. You can have a remote work company with everyone in the same time zone. Remote work carries with it a certain number of risks to be sure. But it's not nearly as risky as I feel like people make it out to be.

jimmywanger 9y ago
> In my experience, in office communication is often MORE difficult to document. Exactly, because if everybody is colocated, you can pick up on subtle social cues and figure out what's important and what people are working on just based on what people are talking about. If you spend that much face time with people, unless you're completely socially stunted, you don't have to document things because people "just get it". > Remote work carries with it a certain number of risks to be sure. But it's not nearly as risky as I feel like people make it out to be. There are tradeoffs to everything, and I think on this board, things have swung too far to the other side. Remote work is not an absolute panacea, and carries with it costs. Just like NoSQL is not the end-all be-all of datastores, remote work isn't the right solution for many teams.
- tetraodonpuffer 9y ago
  > you don't have to document things because people "just get it". and then a year later when you have to figure out why something was done a certain way what do you do? or when some of the people that "were there" have left and nobody else remembers? If all the discussions are written, there is no risk of forgetting anything: even working in an office I always send an email after a meeting or random chat to the person involved to document what we talked about, what was decided and why. I might also cc other people that should be kept in the loop, which is also something you cannot do if you just talk.