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There is one major requirement for remote work, it’s called deadlines. Give people a paycheck, some requirements, and deadlines and I promise you the work will
by runawaybottle 7y ago
There is one major requirement for remote work, it’s called deadlines. Give people a paycheck, some requirements, and deadlines and I promise you the work will find a way to get done. They can browse Facebook all they want.
- Razengan 7y agoWhat about work that does not have deadlines, but requires constant attention? Like monitoring security cameras, or the status of a medical patient or a nuclear power plant.. These types of work have the added risk of unauthorized people, such as the employee’s kids or friends, snooping in on sensitive information. That might be helped by the employer providing a dedicated computer for remote work, with screen-recording and facial recognition that locks the system if you’re not (the only person) in view. Perhaps having always-on video and voice surveillance on that computer, and announcing that fact, would force employees to create a dedicated distraction-free work environment in their homes.
- exdsq 7y agoThere are ways you can 'force' attention. Things like semi-regular unannounced drills, audits, etc. I agree it's harder, and for things like the status of a medical patient or nuclear power plant the potential damage of someone going to the pub in the afternoon and missing something is far worse than missing a couple items in a sprint, but it is still possible to assess.
- iso947 7y agoWhat stops people just watching cat videos on Facebook in those situations?
- teddyuk 7y agoWhat stops people watching cat videos while walking around and touching their key fob against specific points?
- touisteur 7y agoCan't you walk around a familiar place whilst looking at your phone or reading a book? Been doing this for years on daily commute...
- akamaozu 7y agoYes but as a security guard, or someone monitoring patient vitals, you want them to actually pay attention to details, not reflexively act from memory
- touisteur 7y agoI understood that. I think OP was saying that forcing a path and specific, physical actions, meant the security guard will perform as expected. Which is... kind of not the case?
- Traster 7y agoYou do the same thing that you do in the real world. Have you ever noticed how sometimes security guards will walk around with a little key fob and touch it to a point on the wall? That's because in order to ensure they're doing their required patrols they physically have to log they've been to a point. If you're requiring someone pay attention to a monitor you can do the same thing - for example put a square on the image and require the employee to click it. Obviously though, this requires someone to actually critically think about protocols for ensuring work is done to a standard.
- mjevans 7y agoThe measure becomes the mark. If touching points is all that's required, then that's all that will get done. The neural nets of all employees will eventually become trained to touch the points and not do the actual work you desire. In the case of a security guard the 'real' job is to catalogue all things 'out of place' and then react if necessary.
- sbr464 7y agoOne of the more interesting examples of this is the NYC subway operators pointing at signs to show attention: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9jIsxQNz0M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9jIsxQNz0M
- Razengan 7y agoReminds me of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14011793 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14011793 “Why Japan’s Rail Workers Can’t Stop Pointing at Things”
- C1sc0cat 7y agoSo externalising office costs onto the workers - lovely You might want to think about how this effects the housing market if this take off long term.
- Razengan 7y agoEvery home of the future would/should have an office, with the kitchen evolving into a general in-house factory with 3D printers etc. :) This would have the added benefit of reclaiming the space currently taken up by many office towers, reducing traffic and the associated stress from daily commutes, improving overall health, increasing leisure time, which in turn improves the economy, and so on.
- C1sc0cat 7y agoSo an extra room per home then is going to increase housing costs longer term to the worker long term is what I was getting at.
- andrewzah 7y agoWhy is this companies' faults? What can they really do anwyays besides giving a small budget to situate oneself? All homes - should - begin to have offices anyway as people realize that physically going in to work isn't necessary to be productive.
- blaser-waffle 7y agoWhy do you need an extra room? Laptops can go anywhere, and my living room is empty until ~4pm when my kids get home. I've been remote for going on 5 years now and routinely take my work laptop to the kitchen or living room (though I'll concede I need a quiet room for some calls/tasks that involve PII).
- st1ck 7y agoIf remote work became a norm, I'd expect housing market in large cities to sink dramatically. Why would one move e.g. to New York if their hometown provided same same job opportunities?
- Aperocky 7y agoThose are the jobs that should be automated, and I imagine will be soon.
- exdsq 7y agoExactly, and I'd argue the metrics you need to check that someone working remotely has been efficient is a much better business metric than ass-on-chair time.
- knocte 7y agoDeadlines are the incompetent manager's virtual whip.
- notacoward 7y agoIt doesn't work that way, because most work is at least somewhat collaborative and that means the remote worker is not solely in control of the pace. As a remote worker I can't meet with someone in the office who doesn't respond to my pings. I can't commit my code if reviewers only respond once per day. If people have an across-the-desk conversation without me that invalidates what I just spent a day implementing, I'm screwed - either by losing that work or by having to spend time (and become The Bad Guy) by persuading them back to the right path. The only way around these issues is to multitask more, which we should all know by now creates its own productivity problems. If you think deadlines alone work, you can't have tried it for any but the most trivially separable kinds of work.
- auiya 7y agoWhat you've described are symptoms of an office who doesn't know how how to scale distributed work loads with remote workers. Across-the-desk conversations for instance don't scale to large workforce numbers.
- notacoward 7y agoYes, they are symptoms, but the point is that "just give people deadlines" does nothing to address either the symptoms or the underlying problem. It's facile advice that doesn't lead to actual improvement.