6 ms·

Summary: "The survey said information technology decision-makers expect permanent remote work to double to 34.4% of their companies’ workforces in 2021, compare

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.

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.