4 ms·

You Can’t Go Home Again

15 points by cyunker 16y ago

dabent 16y ago
"Management is cocking the pistol for workers they don’t like then allowing the next layoff to pull the trigger." Management is always doing that.
beoba 16y ago
The title reminded me of this article, which doesn't really have anything to do with the OP but I felt like sharing: http://www.economist.com/node/15108690?story_id=15108690 http://www.economist.com/node/15108690?story_id=15108690 "The funny thing is, with the passage of time, something does happen to long-term foreigners which makes them more like real exiles, and they do not like it at all. The homeland which they left behind changes. The culture, the politics and their old friends all change, die, forget them. They come to feel that they are foreigners even when visiting “home”."
- ojbyrne 16y ago
  As someone who moved to their first foreign country at 6, the second at 14, and a couple more later in life, the neat thing is that you discover a new homeland, or at least your own people - expatriates.
iwwr 16y ago
I wonder if it would work to lay several always-on high definition cameras and project their outputs onto large screens in both locations. Call it "immersive telecommuting". Useful for virtual/distributed offices and the always-on, HD nature makes interaction, as well as supervision unavoidable.
- ojbyrne 16y ago
  I think the key is for _everyone_ to work at home. If you have an office, and some people work there and others don't, eventually the people in the office will find it easier to work with the people nearby, and will marginalize the people who aren't.
  - iwwr 16y ago
    One of the problems could be that remote work is not immersive enough.
tmcneal 16y ago
I don't agree with the author's argument. Here's one excerpt: "In this case efficiency often means that oxymoron bureaucrafic efficiency. When something was needed fast at IBM they used to be able to fill out the paperwork and hand carry it to the group, eventually finding someone who could handle the problem on the spot. Now all requests go into a big queue in the sky and nobody knows who will handle it, or from what country." 1) I'm pretty sure a multi-national corporation with 400,000 employees considers hand-carrying paperwork to be an operational deficiency. This is the 21st century, why create an unnecessary paper-trail when your company builds products to specifically handle this type of use-case? 2) Is the author talking about some sort of routine process (Level 1 Support needs to escalate the issue to someone in L2) or some sort of special case (A client is experience a major outage and we need to find an expert who can fix it)? If it's the former, then this should be a documented repeatable process that is done many times a day, and thus why would it matter if the L1 and L2 are in different buildings/countries/whatever.. If it's the latter, then the chances of the right expert working in the same building as person seeking her out is going to be pretty low. Telecommuting does come into play in either of these scenarios. 3) The author seems to be correlating telecommuting with increased bureaucracy. I'd argue that reducing telecommuting will not decrease bureaucracy; it will still take 4-6 approvals to make that purchase, and the tools to expedite the approval process (contacting the right people directly, escalating to managers) will still be the same.

15 points by cyunker 16y ago

"Management is cocking the pistol for workers they don’t like then allowing the next layoff to pull the trigger." Management is always doing that.

beoba 16y ago

The title reminded me of this article, which doesn't really have anything to do with the OP but I felt like sharing: http://www.economist.com/node/15108690?story_id=15108690 http://www.economist.com/node/15108690?story_id=15108690 "The funny thing is, with the passage of time, something does happen to long-term foreigners which makes them more like real exiles, and they do not like it at all. The homeland which they left behind changes. The culture, the politics and their old friends all change, die, forget them. They come to feel that they are foreigners even when visiting “home”."

ojbyrne 16y ago
As someone who moved to their first foreign country at 6, the second at 14, and a couple more later in life, the neat thing is that you discover a new homeland, or at least your own people - expatriates.

iwwr 16y ago

I wonder if it would work to lay several always-on high definition cameras and project their outputs onto large screens in both locations. Call it "immersive telecommuting". Useful for virtual/distributed offices and the always-on, HD nature makes interaction, as well as supervision unavoidable.

ojbyrne 16y ago
I think the key is for _everyone_ to work at home. If you have an office, and some people work there and others don't, eventually the people in the office will find it easier to work with the people nearby, and will marginalize the people who aren't.
- iwwr 16y ago
  One of the problems could be that remote work is not immersive enough.

tmcneal 16y ago

I don't agree with the author's argument. Here's one excerpt: "In this case efficiency often means that oxymoron bureaucrafic efficiency. When something was needed fast at IBM they used to be able to fill out the paperwork and hand carry it to the group, eventually finding someone who could handle the problem on the spot. Now all requests go into a big queue in the sky and nobody knows who will handle it, or from what country." 1) I'm pretty sure a multi-national corporation with 400,000 employees considers hand-carrying paperwork to be an operational deficiency. This is the 21st century, why create an unnecessary paper-trail when your company builds products to specifically handle this type of use-case? 2) Is the author talking about some sort of routine process (Level 1 Support needs to escalate the issue to someone in L2) or some sort of special case (A client is experience a major outage and we need to find an expert who can fix it)? If it's the former, then this should be a documented repeatable process that is done many times a day, and thus why would it matter if the L1 and L2 are in different buildings/countries/whatever.. If it's the latter, then the chances of the right expert working in the same building as person seeking her out is going to be pretty low. Telecommuting does come into play in either of these scenarios. 3) The author seems to be correlating telecommuting with increased bureaucracy. I'd argue that reducing telecommuting will not decrease bureaucracy; it will still take 4-6 approvals to make that purchase, and the tools to expedite the approval process (contacting the right people directly, escalating to managers) will still be the same.