6 ms·
Right, I understand your point completely, my wife is fully remote, and we are both pretty burrowed in where we live, so it would take some doing to get us to m
by zarkov99 7y ago
Right, I understand your point completely, my wife is fully remote, and we are both pretty burrowed in where we live, so it would take some doing to get us to move. It seems to me though that all this talk about greater productivity is self-serving nonsense. Remote work is a loss for the employer, all else being equal, though it might very well be worth it at least in this market.
- b_t_s 7y agoYea, I'm not sold on the productivity thing either, at least not on an individual contributor level when everything is going perfectly. But high turnover and/or low headcount in the senior engineering ranks can really send your team/company productivity right down the drain. And with a little investment in tooling and process, having a third of the team on video rather than in the room is a fairly modest inconvenience. And I'm sure better than half of slack messages at my company are between people sitting in the same room.
- thirdsun 7y agoI disagree about the self-serving nonsense part. Sure, it requires a certain degree of discipline and self organization, but whenever I work at home on side projects, even if they aren't particularly enjoyable, I'm freuqently surprised by how much faster I seem to work if I'm not interrupted by chatty co-workers, ringing telephones and other minor annoyances that are quite significant in their sum. Don't get me wrong, all these things have their time and place, but asynchronious communication allows me to deal with them when I feel like it, which is a major advantage for me.
- zarkov99 7y agoSure, but do you just do more work or do you do the same work in less time (and use the extra the time for work balance) ? In my experience most people will just do the later.
- thirdsun 7y agoIsn't either case a win?
- b_t_s 7y agoI think this depends a lot on the company and your personal ability to tune out noise. Also whether your company uses slack heavily. Office or remote I find 99% of my interruptions are from slack, but they're semi-async and mostly ignorable if I'm heads down on something.
- thirdsun 7y agoThe difference is that I can ignore or mute Slack for a while, which doesn't work as well with people physically visiting your desk.