22 ms·

Permanently remote workers seen doubling in 2021 due to pandemic productivity

164 points by rustoo 6y ago

tudorconstantin 6y ago
Summary: "The survey said information technology decision-makers expect permanent remote work to double to 34.4% of their companies’ workforces in 2021, compared with 16.4% before the coronavirus outbreak, a result of positive productivity trends. About 72% of their companies’ total global workforce is currently working remotely, according to the CIOs." Honestly I would expect it to remain at more than 34%. Who would want to go back to daily commutes of >1h? If we're able to do our jobs remotely it would be in our interests as human beings to resist losing 5-10 hours a week commuting.
- quaintdev 6y ago
  While saving money on fuel and avoiding pollution. If you can avoid pollution in India you can literally increase lifespan. The problem here in India, when I brought up "WFH is future", all the experienced manager above 10yrs were not happy with idea. Why? Probably because they are paying EMIs for hefty loans they took for buying flats. People like me who are relatively less experienced don't want to take that risk at all. Moreover I intend to move to my hometown permanently. Needless to say, my ideas don't sit well with managers.
  - carlmr 6y ago
    I think the other issue is that middle managers see that people working from home barely interact with them, which means that their middle man role is visibly unnecessary. A recipe for getting scared.
    - mike503 6y ago
      Agreed. There’s more focus on output and a lot of management simply produces nothing tangible.
    - mkl95 6y ago
      I couldn't agree more. Compared to my previous job at an office, where my manager's role seemed to be to draw developers into pointless arguments he had won beforehand, as a fully remote developer I find myself only interacting with management a couple of times per day on Slack and the odd Zoom call.
    - ozim 6y ago
      But that is about people who don't understand their role as middle management. They should set guidelines and enforce processes so employees that do job think only about working and when they forget about some rules there is management to guide them. This does not have anything to do with meeting with people f2f, one can use tech tools and maintain policies. Of course having coffee with people all day is easier :)
    - netjiro 6y ago
      > middle man role is visibly unnecessary Yep. One way forward is to move "middle" to other leaf node tasks in organisation. I have restructured a bunch of organisations towards globally distributed remote work since early 2000s. Every time: Unless I have strong investors' support I _MUST_ find a way to get the "middle" excited to move away from traditional management and coordination tasks into other things. Often this is back tech or sales where they originated. If you do it right most are happy and you get great improvements in productivity, staff retention, decision making. Do it wrong and you get mired down or sabotaged.
  - roland35 6y ago
    At my company we recently had an incident related to the recent WFH with a subcontractor in India. He was providing his credentials to another contractor who impersonated him, which is something that he probably would not have tried in the office! Although maybe he would have tried it, because the impersonator called into meetings and everyone noticed that he sounded completely different (had much better English) and the work was different (less skilled)! If it was me, I would be checking the sub-sub-contractors work and at a minimum calling into meetings myself ;)
    - vidarh 6y ago
      Well, there was the guy that outsourced his own job to China [1]: "The software developer, in his 40s, is thought to have spent his workdays surfing the web, watching cat videos on YouTube and browsing Reddit and eBay. He reportedly paid just a fifth of his six-figure salary to a company based in Shenyang to do his job." ... "Authentication was no problem. He physically FedExed his RSA [security] token to China so that the third-party contractor could log-in under his credentials during the workday. It would appear that he was working an average nine-to-five work day," he added." [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21043693 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21043693
- bobthepanda 6y ago
  This is great if you have a house with lots of space. Personally as a single young adult I like living in the city with lots of amenities nearby. I would hate being forced to WFH, the same way some hated being forced to go into the office.
  - vladvasiliu 6y ago
    This is an often recurring argument on this subject. For example, I don't care about having a big garden but I don't necessarily enjoy living in a dense city. If I could WFH at least three days a week for the foreseeable future, I would gladly move to a town in the suburbs where I could have a bigger apartment for the price of my studio apartment. I bet a lot of people would do the same. This would lessen the pressure on housing in the city center, so people like you who actually prefer living in the big city for reasons other than work could afford larger apartments. My main reason for living where I do is so that my commute is less than 30 minutes each way. I guess the point is that as the constraint of everyone working in the same place is reduced, there will be less people wanting to live in the city allowing better conditions for those who do.
    - bobthepanda 6y ago
      I mean, permanent remote is also not great (particularly in a context where there are no offices), because for people in my living situation that puts the onus on us to find our "work" zone. I'd rather not spend extra money on more real estate or a WeWork-type membership. I just don't find it very surprising that ~60-70% of people don't particularly like permanent remote, since it's 1. a departure from the norm and 2. people usually build their home-work separation with the commute, and I would say people expressing missing the commute separation at least some of the time represent a majority, if not a plurality, of my direct coworkers. But we are also at a company that let people do partial WFH pre-COVID.
      - iam-TJ 6y ago
        The solution to the home-work separation, which also has potential to improve mental and physical health, is to go for a 20 minute brisk walk at start and end of the work-day.
- Philip-J-Fry 6y ago
  For some people (me included) the office is a very productive environment. Some things I am really interested in can be smashed out at home with no problems. But boring work is a chore unless I'm at the office where I can get my mind to say "you're at work, you're getting paid for this". I can do boring work well at work, whereas at home I wanna do anything just to get it out of my face. Not only that, for some people the commute is 1h each way and for others it's 10 minutes. So some people don't see the issue with going into the office every day. And unless everyone is going to work from home, if you're someone working from home but most other people are in the office then that can stifle your career development for internal promotions. Like it or not, the managers and higher ups will be in the office, it's easier to get to know someone in the office, it's easier to get inside knowledge on what's going on, what projects are happening, etc. I work for a company who has remote developers and none of them are leading anything or have any sort of significant power to influence decisions. They are just man power to get work done, even if that is wrong, that's how it is and I don't see it changing. For as long as this is the case I don't see fully remote working as a viable career choice. I would only do it for a company which is all remote or all software dev is remote.
  - DrAwdeOccarim 6y ago
    Thanks for writing this out as you've really hit the nail on the head. I manage a medium sized team and I can tell you some people are totally cool with just being a worker bee. I wish more of the conversation around WFH focused on how everyone is different, one size fits all rarely works, and if you do want to "get ahead" you'll need to put in face time. Period. Humans are social and want connection. Meritocracies are great in principal, but that's just plainly not how the world works. If you want managerial carrier development and growth, you have to put in the face time.
    - shock 6y ago
      > I wish more of the conversation around WFH focused on how everyone is different, one size fits all rarely works and then > if you do want to "get ahead" you'll need to put in face time. Period. You've just prescribed a one-size-fits-all solution, in the same phrase as saying that it doesn't work. How are you resolving the cognitive dissonance?
- raducu 6y ago
  Because a lot of people, the kind that matter politically, don't like to sit and think of concise messages, actions and implications, in fact, don't like deep thought at all, they just like to interrupt, ask stupid questions without doing any basic research first and like others to see them as appearing busy -- that is wasting the time of people who actually do do deep work. That and socializing, getting away from kids/stressful homes.
- vidarh 6y ago
  I'd expect it to remain at more than 34% too, but people are likely reluctant to make that decision this quickly. I'd expect we'll see the number they predict will keep increasing as more people get confidence it works for them, and as they get better at navigating it.
- rsynnott 6y ago
  > Honestly I would expect it to remain at more than 34%. Who would want to go back to daily commutes of >1h? I think it's quite a personal thing. I can't wait to be back in an office; I really need to be around people. The last eight months has been a miserable experience. Mind you, my commute in the before-times was a 15 minute walk.
panny 6y ago
The article is light on reasons for increased productivity, but according to anecdotes I've heard, it's due partly to even longer working hours at home. Concretely, when salary employees WFH, all hours have become working hours for them. I've read accounts where people are having mental issues due to the dystopic new reality where they are always at work. They end up working around the clock, because they are constantly distracted by family and domestic issues intruding during the work day. To add to their demoralization, no more office perks either. Free coffee, snacks, lunches, after work get togethers, a chance to chat with a cute co-worker, etc are all gone. Decreasing wage is also considered a productivity increase, because same now work for less pay. As people WFH more permanently, there are many receiving salary cuts as they migrate to areas with lower cost of living. The "new normal" seems pretty hellish for some.
- theshrike79 6y ago
  For others it's a hellscape and for others - like me - it's a blessing. I can work in the morning, make some lunch, work a while after lunch. Then the kids come home, I can help with their homework and keep working for a bit more. I can even assist colleagues in different time zones, since my computer is near me at all times. Just a quick chat during my evening (their morning) will speed things up immensely by unblocking their tasks right away. I've even spent parts of the week at the family cabin and at my in-laws. No one cared, my productivity didn't change a bit. But I think I'm privileged since my company only tracks my productivity and are smart enough to not overwork anyone on purpose. And I've had one burnout already, so I can see the symptoms of overworking and relax well before I run into any issues.
  - Maakuth 6y ago
    How are you ever unwinding if you do work around the clock? For me I'm quickly feeling stress symptoms if I start to do work tasks after hours. I have a family too, so in theory it would be great for me too to do family stuff in the middle of the day and then return to work in the evening. But in practice if I do that, work will soon intrude my dreams, my mood worsens and I have less energy.
xwdv 6y ago
Personally I feel the push for the right to work from home without being treated as a second class citizen is more important and will do more for society than policies such as raising the minimum wage.
- theodric 6y ago
  If you can work from home, you are now competing with the entire global labor force for your job. Expect your salary to go down as a result, since you are now much more replaceable.
  - ozim 6y ago
    No, you underestimate issues that come with hiring someone from another country. I am not going to hire an accountant from Vietnam to do my taxes even if I would be able to pay him $1 instead of $100. Accountant from Vietnam is not going to learn US or some EU country tax code if he has customers in Vietnam. In case something goes wrong, like you would have to go to court to settle things, good luck on getting someone from other side of globe to the court and setting things straight. Local regulations, local language plays huge role in a lot of jobs that can be done remotely. But they will be done 'local' remotely so you still compete locally not globally.
    - namanyayg 6y ago
      That's a contrived example; the jobs of most people reading HN can (and will) be outsourced.
      - tester34 6y ago
        Exactly, here I'm - nasty eastern european that's about to take your jobs /s
      - lawnchair_larry 6y ago
        Time zone difference will get in the way of that.
abellerose 6y ago
I personally think remote workers living close enough to meetup if need be is the future. As a programmer this year has been great in regard to work; while working from home. Slack or Zoom for video chats when needed, solves all situations I would've been next to someone in-person and if it wasn't for the pandemic. I don't fear being outsourced as well, since companies still want their employees to be near and I doubt video conference will ever change that desire.
- theshrike79 6y ago
  Outsourcing always brings cultural and time zone issues, they can all be managed but do require extra attention and know-how to work through.
jbjohns 6y ago
Some additional things to consider: 1) Remote work does not necessarily mean WFH. It means work where is most effective for you instead of going to some office. These days there are many different kinds of solutions for having office space if you want/need it. It also becomes more of a commodity that you can simply use when needed (e.g. a final push before release, a workshop preparing for a big new project, etc.). 2) Companies who recognise this and get rid of their local offices may experience a cost advantage because having offices costs more than just the building. There are a lot of utility costs involved, you need people who manage the facilities, etc., etc. 3) If we're really serious about the environment, avoiding people having to commute to work should be a serious goal. Companies tend to talk about reducing how much they fly around but what is the Co2 footprint of flying in total compared to commuting?
- terramex 6y ago
  I think autocorrect changed "WFH" (work from home) to "WTF" in your comment.
  - jbjohns 6y ago
    Ack, thanks. Corrected.
- Shivetya 6y ago
  Outsourcing will definitely increase as management gets more comfortable with not being hands on for the work being done. Once you convince them they don't need their people onsite then its a simple step to not needing their own people at all.
  - jbjohns 6y ago
    In the western European country I live in, everyone was pushing for more and more outsourcing. Initially India but they started using eastern EU countries as well which was cheaper but didn't have e.g. timezone issues. They're mostly pulling back to in-country. There could be a lot of reasons for this, but if the issue is about work quality then I don't see why that changes now. Anyway, fearing getting replaced by outsourcing is like fearing to get replaced by robots. Maybe it will happen in the end but if so, we never could have stopped it anyway. If it's the right direction and we should pursue it.
tboyd47 6y ago
I see either 1 of 2 things happening. Either these large companies will lobby Congress for laws forcing all companies to offer full-time remote, or half these workers are back in the office by 2022.
jscheel 6y ago
We absolutely should not be measuring WFH productivity right now. There are way too many variables to consider at this point. Because it's new for a lot of people, and because of the lockdowns, there seem to be a lot of issues with overwork. I absolutely love WFH, and I've been doing for quite a long time, but I feel pretty confident that we are going to see a bunch of companies claim to go fully WFH, and they backpedal in a year or two. Hopefully not, but if the expectations are wrong, these companies are settings themselves up for failure from the start.
- cableshaft 6y ago
  Just anecdata, but I've been doing full WFH for my company for the past 2.5 years. If anything my productivity has gone down because of the stress of the pandemic, not up because of more hours (which I worked more hours WFH before the pandemic also).
  - Exmoor 6y ago
    I think you can make really strong arguments for productivity both being higher than normal times (due to overwork, less options for non-work activities, etc.) and lower than normal (due to additional childcare responsibilities, overall stress level, etc.). I think both make a good case for the OP's point that the current situation is not indicative of what we'll be able to sustain long-term, both good and bad. Personally, I think the biggest thing my team discovered was how much of our work was actually able to be done remotely. We were all averaging roughly one day a week work from home, but I expect to be more like 2-3 long-term.
WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
My concern is that remoting may be responsible for the unexpected increase in housing prices. Areas that were borderline unaffordable before the pandemic have skyrocketed in the last 6 months. Rents and housing prices both just leaped out of range.
ilaksh 6y ago
The only thing that is truly permanent is change. Things never stop changing. I don't know how many years we will be on this increased remote thing. Hopefully for some time. But imagine a few years from now when there is no pandemic. Say someone creates a futuristic smart city with good density, lots of parks, and 100% autonomous cars. In that situation you may find that working from home becomes uncool. Or another totally different possibility. Virtual and augmented reality become so good that whether you are actually in your home or not does not really determine much about your working situation. It's down to software configuration, such as whether you place your avatar in the shared virtual space or your virtual office.
ribaldev 6y ago
We use task management apps to save us time and give more visibility over the work. However, the app can become so complicated to use by itself, that we may choose to go for very basic note-taking apps to avoid the complexity. I was looking for a minimal, simple and user-friendly app for daily task management, so I developed Renoj. Fast to-do task management in Desktop for ultimate productivity. Website: https://ribal.dev/renoj https://ribal.dev/renoj

164 points by rustoo 6y ago

Summary: "The survey said information technology decision-makers expect permanent remote work to double to 34.4% of their companies’ workforces in 2021, compared with 16.4% before the coronavirus outbreak, a result of positive productivity trends. About 72% of their companies’ total global workforce is currently working remotely, according to the CIOs." Honestly I would expect it to remain at more than 34%. Who would want to go back to daily commutes of >1h? If we're able to do our jobs remotely it would be in our interests as human beings to resist losing 5-10 hours a week commuting.

quaintdev 6y ago
While saving money on fuel and avoiding pollution. If you can avoid pollution in India you can literally increase lifespan. The problem here in India, when I brought up "WFH is future", all the experienced manager above 10yrs were not happy with idea. Why? Probably because they are paying EMIs for hefty loans they took for buying flats. People like me who are relatively less experienced don't want to take that risk at all. Moreover I intend to move to my hometown permanently. Needless to say, my ideas don't sit well with managers.
- carlmr 6y ago
  I think the other issue is that middle managers see that people working from home barely interact with them, which means that their middle man role is visibly unnecessary. A recipe for getting scared.
  - mike503 6y ago
    Agreed. There’s more focus on output and a lot of management simply produces nothing tangible.
  - mkl95 6y ago
    I couldn't agree more. Compared to my previous job at an office, where my manager's role seemed to be to draw developers into pointless arguments he had won beforehand, as a fully remote developer I find myself only interacting with management a couple of times per day on Slack and the odd Zoom call.
  - ozim 6y ago
    But that is about people who don't understand their role as middle management. They should set guidelines and enforce processes so employees that do job think only about working and when they forget about some rules there is management to guide them. This does not have anything to do with meeting with people f2f, one can use tech tools and maintain policies. Of course having coffee with people all day is easier :)
  - netjiro 6y ago
    > middle man role is visibly unnecessary Yep. One way forward is to move "middle" to other leaf node tasks in organisation. I have restructured a bunch of organisations towards globally distributed remote work since early 2000s. Every time: Unless I have strong investors' support I _MUST_ find a way to get the "middle" excited to move away from traditional management and coordination tasks into other things. Often this is back tech or sales where they originated. If you do it right most are happy and you get great improvements in productivity, staff retention, decision making. Do it wrong and you get mired down or sabotaged.
- roland35 6y ago
  At my company we recently had an incident related to the recent WFH with a subcontractor in India. He was providing his credentials to another contractor who impersonated him, which is something that he probably would not have tried in the office! Although maybe he would have tried it, because the impersonator called into meetings and everyone noticed that he sounded completely different (had much better English) and the work was different (less skilled)! If it was me, I would be checking the sub-sub-contractors work and at a minimum calling into meetings myself ;)
  - vidarh 6y ago
    Well, there was the guy that outsourced his own job to China [1]: "The software developer, in his 40s, is thought to have spent his workdays surfing the web, watching cat videos on YouTube and browsing Reddit and eBay. He reportedly paid just a fifth of his six-figure salary to a company based in Shenyang to do his job." ... "Authentication was no problem. He physically FedExed his RSA [security] token to China so that the third-party contractor could log-in under his credentials during the workday. It would appear that he was working an average nine-to-five work day," he added." [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21043693 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21043693
bobthepanda 6y ago
This is great if you have a house with lots of space. Personally as a single young adult I like living in the city with lots of amenities nearby. I would hate being forced to WFH, the same way some hated being forced to go into the office.
- vladvasiliu 6y ago
  This is an often recurring argument on this subject. For example, I don't care about having a big garden but I don't necessarily enjoy living in a dense city. If I could WFH at least three days a week for the foreseeable future, I would gladly move to a town in the suburbs where I could have a bigger apartment for the price of my studio apartment. I bet a lot of people would do the same. This would lessen the pressure on housing in the city center, so people like you who actually prefer living in the big city for reasons other than work could afford larger apartments. My main reason for living where I do is so that my commute is less than 30 minutes each way. I guess the point is that as the constraint of everyone working in the same place is reduced, there will be less people wanting to live in the city allowing better conditions for those who do.
  - bobthepanda 6y ago
    I mean, permanent remote is also not great (particularly in a context where there are no offices), because for people in my living situation that puts the onus on us to find our "work" zone. I'd rather not spend extra money on more real estate or a WeWork-type membership. I just don't find it very surprising that ~60-70% of people don't particularly like permanent remote, since it's 1. a departure from the norm and 2. people usually build their home-work separation with the commute, and I would say people expressing missing the commute separation at least some of the time represent a majority, if not a plurality, of my direct coworkers. But we are also at a company that let people do partial WFH pre-COVID.
    - iam-TJ 6y ago
      The solution to the home-work separation, which also has potential to improve mental and physical health, is to go for a 20 minute brisk walk at start and end of the work-day.
Philip-J-Fry 6y ago
For some people (me included) the office is a very productive environment. Some things I am really interested in can be smashed out at home with no problems. But boring work is a chore unless I'm at the office where I can get my mind to say "you're at work, you're getting paid for this". I can do boring work well at work, whereas at home I wanna do anything just to get it out of my face. Not only that, for some people the commute is 1h each way and for others it's 10 minutes. So some people don't see the issue with going into the office every day. And unless everyone is going to work from home, if you're someone working from home but most other people are in the office then that can stifle your career development for internal promotions. Like it or not, the managers and higher ups will be in the office, it's easier to get to know someone in the office, it's easier to get inside knowledge on what's going on, what projects are happening, etc. I work for a company who has remote developers and none of them are leading anything or have any sort of significant power to influence decisions. They are just man power to get work done, even if that is wrong, that's how it is and I don't see it changing. For as long as this is the case I don't see fully remote working as a viable career choice. I would only do it for a company which is all remote or all software dev is remote.
- DrAwdeOccarim 6y ago
  Thanks for writing this out as you've really hit the nail on the head. I manage a medium sized team and I can tell you some people are totally cool with just being a worker bee. I wish more of the conversation around WFH focused on how everyone is different, one size fits all rarely works, and if you do want to "get ahead" you'll need to put in face time. Period. Humans are social and want connection. Meritocracies are great in principal, but that's just plainly not how the world works. If you want managerial carrier development and growth, you have to put in the face time.
  - shock 6y ago
    > I wish more of the conversation around WFH focused on how everyone is different, one size fits all rarely works and then > if you do want to "get ahead" you'll need to put in face time. Period. You've just prescribed a one-size-fits-all solution, in the same phrase as saying that it doesn't work. How are you resolving the cognitive dissonance?
raducu 6y ago
Because a lot of people, the kind that matter politically, don't like to sit and think of concise messages, actions and implications, in fact, don't like deep thought at all, they just like to interrupt, ask stupid questions without doing any basic research first and like others to see them as appearing busy -- that is wasting the time of people who actually do do deep work. That and socializing, getting away from kids/stressful homes.
vidarh 6y ago
I'd expect it to remain at more than 34% too, but people are likely reluctant to make that decision this quickly. I'd expect we'll see the number they predict will keep increasing as more people get confidence it works for them, and as they get better at navigating it.
rsynnott 6y ago
> Honestly I would expect it to remain at more than 34%. Who would want to go back to daily commutes of >1h? I think it's quite a personal thing. I can't wait to be back in an office; I really need to be around people. The last eight months has been a miserable experience. Mind you, my commute in the before-times was a 15 minute walk.

panny 6y ago

The article is light on reasons for increased productivity, but according to anecdotes I've heard, it's due partly to even longer working hours at home. Concretely, when salary employees WFH, all hours have become working hours for them. I've read accounts where people are having mental issues due to the dystopic new reality where they are always at work. They end up working around the clock, because they are constantly distracted by family and domestic issues intruding during the work day. To add to their demoralization, no more office perks either. Free coffee, snacks, lunches, after work get togethers, a chance to chat with a cute co-worker, etc are all gone. Decreasing wage is also considered a productivity increase, because same now work for less pay. As people WFH more permanently, there are many receiving salary cuts as they migrate to areas with lower cost of living. The "new normal" seems pretty hellish for some.

theshrike79 6y ago
For others it's a hellscape and for others - like me - it's a blessing. I can work in the morning, make some lunch, work a while after lunch. Then the kids come home, I can help with their homework and keep working for a bit more. I can even assist colleagues in different time zones, since my computer is near me at all times. Just a quick chat during my evening (their morning) will speed things up immensely by unblocking their tasks right away. I've even spent parts of the week at the family cabin and at my in-laws. No one cared, my productivity didn't change a bit. But I think I'm privileged since my company only tracks my productivity and are smart enough to not overwork anyone on purpose. And I've had one burnout already, so I can see the symptoms of overworking and relax well before I run into any issues.
- Maakuth 6y ago
  How are you ever unwinding if you do work around the clock? For me I'm quickly feeling stress symptoms if I start to do work tasks after hours. I have a family too, so in theory it would be great for me too to do family stuff in the middle of the day and then return to work in the evening. But in practice if I do that, work will soon intrude my dreams, my mood worsens and I have less energy.

xwdv 6y ago

Personally I feel the push for the right to work from home without being treated as a second class citizen is more important and will do more for society than policies such as raising the minimum wage.

theodric 6y ago
If you can work from home, you are now competing with the entire global labor force for your job. Expect your salary to go down as a result, since you are now much more replaceable.
- ozim 6y ago
  No, you underestimate issues that come with hiring someone from another country. I am not going to hire an accountant from Vietnam to do my taxes even if I would be able to pay him $1 instead of $100. Accountant from Vietnam is not going to learn US or some EU country tax code if he has customers in Vietnam. In case something goes wrong, like you would have to go to court to settle things, good luck on getting someone from other side of globe to the court and setting things straight. Local regulations, local language plays huge role in a lot of jobs that can be done remotely. But they will be done 'local' remotely so you still compete locally not globally.
  - namanyayg 6y ago
    That's a contrived example; the jobs of most people reading HN can (and will) be outsourced.
    - tester34 6y ago
      Exactly, here I'm - nasty eastern european that's about to take your jobs /s
    - lawnchair_larry 6y ago
      Time zone difference will get in the way of that.

abellerose 6y ago

I personally think remote workers living close enough to meetup if need be is the future. As a programmer this year has been great in regard to work; while working from home. Slack or Zoom for video chats when needed, solves all situations I would've been next to someone in-person and if it wasn't for the pandemic. I don't fear being outsourced as well, since companies still want their employees to be near and I doubt video conference will ever change that desire.

theshrike79 6y ago
Outsourcing always brings cultural and time zone issues, they can all be managed but do require extra attention and know-how to work through.

jbjohns 6y ago

Some additional things to consider: 1) Remote work does not necessarily mean WFH. It means work where is most effective for you instead of going to some office. These days there are many different kinds of solutions for having office space if you want/need it. It also becomes more of a commodity that you can simply use when needed (e.g. a final push before release, a workshop preparing for a big new project, etc.). 2) Companies who recognise this and get rid of their local offices may experience a cost advantage because having offices costs more than just the building. There are a lot of utility costs involved, you need people who manage the facilities, etc., etc. 3) If we're really serious about the environment, avoiding people having to commute to work should be a serious goal. Companies tend to talk about reducing how much they fly around but what is the Co2 footprint of flying in total compared to commuting?

terramex 6y ago
I think autocorrect changed "WFH" (work from home) to "WTF" in your comment.
- jbjohns 6y ago
  Ack, thanks. Corrected.
Shivetya 6y ago
Outsourcing will definitely increase as management gets more comfortable with not being hands on for the work being done. Once you convince them they don't need their people onsite then its a simple step to not needing their own people at all.
- jbjohns 6y ago
  In the western European country I live in, everyone was pushing for more and more outsourcing. Initially India but they started using eastern EU countries as well which was cheaper but didn't have e.g. timezone issues. They're mostly pulling back to in-country. There could be a lot of reasons for this, but if the issue is about work quality then I don't see why that changes now. Anyway, fearing getting replaced by outsourcing is like fearing to get replaced by robots. Maybe it will happen in the end but if so, we never could have stopped it anyway. If it's the right direction and we should pursue it.

tboyd47 6y ago

I see either 1 of 2 things happening. Either these large companies will lobby Congress for laws forcing all companies to offer full-time remote, or half these workers are back in the office by 2022.

jscheel 6y ago

We absolutely should not be measuring WFH productivity right now. There are way too many variables to consider at this point. Because it's new for a lot of people, and because of the lockdowns, there seem to be a lot of issues with overwork. I absolutely love WFH, and I've been doing for quite a long time, but I feel pretty confident that we are going to see a bunch of companies claim to go fully WFH, and they backpedal in a year or two. Hopefully not, but if the expectations are wrong, these companies are settings themselves up for failure from the start.

cableshaft 6y ago
Just anecdata, but I've been doing full WFH for my company for the past 2.5 years. If anything my productivity has gone down because of the stress of the pandemic, not up because of more hours (which I worked more hours WFH before the pandemic also).
- Exmoor 6y ago
  I think you can make really strong arguments for productivity both being higher than normal times (due to overwork, less options for non-work activities, etc.) and lower than normal (due to additional childcare responsibilities, overall stress level, etc.). I think both make a good case for the OP's point that the current situation is not indicative of what we'll be able to sustain long-term, both good and bad. Personally, I think the biggest thing my team discovered was how much of our work was actually able to be done remotely. We were all averaging roughly one day a week work from home, but I expect to be more like 2-3 long-term.

WarOnPrivacy 6y ago

My concern is that remoting may be responsible for the unexpected increase in housing prices. Areas that were borderline unaffordable before the pandemic have skyrocketed in the last 6 months. Rents and housing prices both just leaped out of range.

ilaksh 6y ago

The only thing that is truly permanent is change. Things never stop changing. I don't know how many years we will be on this increased remote thing. Hopefully for some time. But imagine a few years from now when there is no pandemic. Say someone creates a futuristic smart city with good density, lots of parks, and 100% autonomous cars. In that situation you may find that working from home becomes uncool. Or another totally different possibility. Virtual and augmented reality become so good that whether you are actually in your home or not does not really determine much about your working situation. It's down to software configuration, such as whether you place your avatar in the shared virtual space or your virtual office.

ribaldev 6y ago

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