8 ms·

None of these tackle the one aspect that trumps everything else in the corporate world. Is this better for the company? Even if the majority of companies see t

by Fordec 6y ago

None of these tackle the one aspect that trumps everything else in the corporate world. Is this better for the company? Even if the majority of companies see things this way, they will return to the office. But those that succeed, survive, thrive or dominate a market will do whatever that makes them successful along the way. It doesn't matter if people like routine if the other guy beats you on revenue, time to market and profitability. The people that win in their market segment are not "most" people. Until it is confirmed that 100% remote, with workers distributed all around the world that can be the best at what they do, or are cheaper or are capable of being trusted to get the job done without someone breathing over their shoulder are worse at competing than the status quo, the jury is still out. Broader society? When has that mattered in the face of disruption? Until the day remote working gets outright banned, this game has yet to fully play out.

briefcomment 6y ago
I think you're pretty much correct. What will stick for any given company is what makes them more money.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
nine_k 6y ago
Unhappy and distressed worker is a less productive worker. Some forms of unhappiness and distress may be applied to increase productivity, like deadlines and fear of being fired. But for most people who can even work from home their needs to concentrate and to communicate are way more important for productivity.
- Fordec 6y ago
  I'd trade 20 minutes extra socializing at my first place with the people I love or my third place with the people of similar interests for an hour of socializing with people talking about a sport I'm not into or their kids. I also find that having to do more stuff over email, messaging and zoom has been great for reigning in an overly narcissistic manipulative coworker because their actions are much more record-able now. I recognize I'm not the norm, but working from home the past year has been amazing for my introverted personality. To imply that the office is a necessity for removing distress is an overly broad brush to paint with that does not apply to everyone.
  - pishpash 6y ago
    That's the problem though. Other than companies founded by introverted nerds, most of the corporate world is led by extroverts who set the norm and it won't be working from home.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - yourapostasy 6y ago
    > ...do more stuff over email, messaging and zoom has been great... WFH forces the kind of auditable accountability upon everyone I've taken for granted as necessary to thrive as a consultant. This popularizes communication modalities into the open long overdue. Use of more granular project tracking has gone up considerably as a coordination point to communicate early and often between teams, purely to reduce meetings only to where exploratory work has to be performed between multiple people/teams. I'm seeing in my clients a lot of the big-talkers-little-execution ("all hat, no cattle") staff members get identified and tracked into more tightly-focused work efforts, leading to less stress upon the staff who usually bear the brunt of picking up the slack. The staff who typically thrive in this environment are highly systematic with their work, take notes instead of relying upon just memory, and effectively coordinate and work with team members in decision-oriented meetings. Management is much more open to spending the necessary time to ramp up automation, simply because the effort leaves behind far more obvious artifacts, as opposed to pre-pandemic, where shockingly many clients still had armies of staff performing everything by hand "because we can't afford DevOps". I still predict however a lot companies and people going back to offices post-pandemic. The socialization aspect is poorly addressed with virtual happy hours, or other tactics put on by really good leadership. We don't have the tech cost down enough yet to pull off the kind of virtual office that can replace that yet. I imagine "yet" as way better than Cisco Telepresence-grade AV (8K tiled video, full phased-array directional two-way video, latency management), floor-to-ceiling scale, in everyone's home office, that can reproduce say, a small open office with a central virtual conference table surrounded by virtual doors to virtual private offices that look into people's home office when their virtual door is open. Our species aren't built for the kind of intensely-close face-to-face contact all day long that is involved when web conferencing with each other over laptop cameras, so current web conferencing solutions cannot substitute for high-touch interactions that many managers and staff crave. Personally, I'm less effective when physically at an office as I can't be as systematic handling the flow of work coming across as a stream of text. A large proportion of workers still vastly prefer speaking than typing, and I end up transcribing a lot of that walk-up verbal interaction myself and then following up in text format anyways, which is a big factor in the efficiency differential.
amw-zero 6y ago
Working together in person has to be 10 times more effective. Major doubt that anyone thinks remote working is actually more effective from the companies perspective. The only argument I ever here is that antisocial people prefer not seeing other people and getting their work done alone.
- almost_usual 6y ago
  Not sure where you came up with this, judging by the number of product announcements on HN in the past year people seem pretty busy.
  - amw-zero 6y ago
    Did anyone have a choice in the matter?
    - almost_usual 6y ago
      Post COVID WFH and flexible in office work weeks are the norm now at least in the Bay Area. I'm sure being in person is 10x more productive for some fields but software engineering is not one of them. If it were we wouldn't have had a year of tech companies performing exceptionally well.
- j4yav 6y ago
  I worked at a highly successful all-remote company (pre-COVID) with over 1500 employees and it was certainly not filled with antisocial or otherwise damaged people, and it was clear we were just as effective there with complete freedom to work on our own schedules and from wherever we wanted.
- toomanybeersies 6y ago
  My productivity probably doubled when I moved to remote working last year. In the morning, I don't need to commute an hour to the office, giving me an extra hour of sleep. My workspace is also superior to what I'd ever get in the office. But the biggest boost in my productivity has come from the lack of distractions when working from home. If I'm trying to focus on something, I can set my status as busy and mute notifications, leaving me to work in peace without interruption.
twelvechairs 6y ago
> Is this better for the company? Yes. Key positives for a company are reduced cost of office space and ability to draw upon a wider, cheaper pool of potential workers and increased employee satisfaction (for some, not everyone prefers working from home). Key negatives are reduced productivity due to lack of supervision, difficulty of face-to-face meetings with clients, difficulty of training younger staff. Its a tradeoff and I think different businesses will fall into different buckets and there will also always be some inertia to change. I do think that the 'new normal' is neither 5 days 9-5 in the office OR complete remote work but something more like a couple of days in the office and a couple at home every week for most staff. But this wil probably be a plurality of the workforce only, with substantial numbers completely remote or close to, and substantial numbers also still in 5 days a week.
- cco 6y ago
  >Key positives for a company are reduced cost of office space and ability to draw upon a wider, cheaper pool of potential workers...[real dollar values] >Key negatives are reduced productivity due to lack of supervision, difficulty of face-to-face meetings with clients, difficulty of training younger staff.[hard to measure] Just throwing this experience of mine out there, when faced with actual dollar figures and hard to measure, vague outcomes, companies that I've worked for have nearly always acted on the dollar figures.
  - kmonsen 6y ago
    Yeah, then why not fire everyone? Reduce salaries to 0, all the work is hard to measure. Or why have we all not been remote for a long time, instead of squeezed into high cost locations? When it comes to their core business companies have a decent belief in what it looks like.
    - Aeolun 6y ago
      > Yeah, then why not fire everyone? That would make the ones doing the firing redundant too. You want as many employees as possible as cheap as possible.
Spooky23 6y ago
I don’t think it is. The high performers work better, but half of the rest workers are doing nothing. I’m aware of people getting canned for stuff like outsourcing themselves, accidentally having sex on an open mic, illegally exporting computers to countries with export controls, etc since COVID. Work at home is great for people with tangible outputs. I don’t want my salesmen fucking around in the office. But many workers with less well defined outputs are going to be harder to manage, and being in the office kept distractions away.
- graphtrader 6y ago
  I would think the fact high performers work better remote though is what will be a competitive advantage for a 100% remote company at some point in the future. I am way more productive remote and it isn't even close. While I do like the social aspect of the office, it is such overkill. To me post-COVID, the whole country is open for business. I want to join a company that values high productive remote workers and sees the massive opportunity this is going to create.
  - oblio 6y ago
    The reality is that for most companies the average performers do most of the work. Even in brilliant environments most of the work is drudge work.
  - 0xB31B1B 6y ago
    Lol, this is exactly the strategy of the business I’m running. We started in March, have a team of 10, and are remote first in our DNA. It’s so much easier to hire that you can build a team of top performers fairly easily and evaluate them based on output.
  - xur17 6y ago
    > I am way more productive remote and it isn't even close. While I do like the social aspect of the office, it is such overkill. I agree with this viewpoint, and (post covid) there are options for replicating at least some of the social aspects of the office.

by Fordec 6y ago

briefcomment 6y ago

I think you're pretty much correct. What will stick for any given company is what makes them more money.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

nine_k 6y ago

Unhappy and distressed worker is a less productive worker. Some forms of unhappiness and distress may be applied to increase productivity, like deadlines and fear of being fired. But for most people who can even work from home their needs to concentrate and to communicate are way more important for productivity.

Fordec 6y ago
I'd trade 20 minutes extra socializing at my first place with the people I love or my third place with the people of similar interests for an hour of socializing with people talking about a sport I'm not into or their kids. I also find that having to do more stuff over email, messaging and zoom has been great for reigning in an overly narcissistic manipulative coworker because their actions are much more record-able now. I recognize I'm not the norm, but working from home the past year has been amazing for my introverted personality. To imply that the office is a necessity for removing distress is an overly broad brush to paint with that does not apply to everyone.
- pishpash 6y ago
  That's the problem though. Other than companies founded by introverted nerds, most of the corporate world is led by extroverts who set the norm and it won't be working from home.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- yourapostasy 6y ago
  > ...do more stuff over email, messaging and zoom has been great... WFH forces the kind of auditable accountability upon everyone I've taken for granted as necessary to thrive as a consultant. This popularizes communication modalities into the open long overdue. Use of more granular project tracking has gone up considerably as a coordination point to communicate early and often between teams, purely to reduce meetings only to where exploratory work has to be performed between multiple people/teams. I'm seeing in my clients a lot of the big-talkers-little-execution ("all hat, no cattle") staff members get identified and tracked into more tightly-focused work efforts, leading to less stress upon the staff who usually bear the brunt of picking up the slack. The staff who typically thrive in this environment are highly systematic with their work, take notes instead of relying upon just memory, and effectively coordinate and work with team members in decision-oriented meetings. Management is much more open to spending the necessary time to ramp up automation, simply because the effort leaves behind far more obvious artifacts, as opposed to pre-pandemic, where shockingly many clients still had armies of staff performing everything by hand "because we can't afford DevOps". I still predict however a lot companies and people going back to offices post-pandemic. The socialization aspect is poorly addressed with virtual happy hours, or other tactics put on by really good leadership. We don't have the tech cost down enough yet to pull off the kind of virtual office that can replace that yet. I imagine "yet" as way better than Cisco Telepresence-grade AV (8K tiled video, full phased-array directional two-way video, latency management), floor-to-ceiling scale, in everyone's home office, that can reproduce say, a small open office with a central virtual conference table surrounded by virtual doors to virtual private offices that look into people's home office when their virtual door is open. Our species aren't built for the kind of intensely-close face-to-face contact all day long that is involved when web conferencing with each other over laptop cameras, so current web conferencing solutions cannot substitute for high-touch interactions that many managers and staff crave. Personally, I'm less effective when physically at an office as I can't be as systematic handling the flow of work coming across as a stream of text. A large proportion of workers still vastly prefer speaking than typing, and I end up transcribing a lot of that walk-up verbal interaction myself and then following up in text format anyways, which is a big factor in the efficiency differential.

amw-zero 6y ago

Working together in person has to be 10 times more effective. Major doubt that anyone thinks remote working is actually more effective from the companies perspective. The only argument I ever here is that antisocial people prefer not seeing other people and getting their work done alone.

almost_usual 6y ago
Not sure where you came up with this, judging by the number of product announcements on HN in the past year people seem pretty busy.
- amw-zero 6y ago
  Did anyone have a choice in the matter?
  - almost_usual 6y ago
    Post COVID WFH and flexible in office work weeks are the norm now at least in the Bay Area. I'm sure being in person is 10x more productive for some fields but software engineering is not one of them. If it were we wouldn't have had a year of tech companies performing exceptionally well.
j4yav 6y ago
I worked at a highly successful all-remote company (pre-COVID) with over 1500 employees and it was certainly not filled with antisocial or otherwise damaged people, and it was clear we were just as effective there with complete freedom to work on our own schedules and from wherever we wanted.
toomanybeersies 6y ago
My productivity probably doubled when I moved to remote working last year. In the morning, I don't need to commute an hour to the office, giving me an extra hour of sleep. My workspace is also superior to what I'd ever get in the office. But the biggest boost in my productivity has come from the lack of distractions when working from home. If I'm trying to focus on something, I can set my status as busy and mute notifications, leaving me to work in peace without interruption.

twelvechairs 6y ago

> Is this better for the company? Yes. Key positives for a company are reduced cost of office space and ability to draw upon a wider, cheaper pool of potential workers and increased employee satisfaction (for some, not everyone prefers working from home). Key negatives are reduced productivity due to lack of supervision, difficulty of face-to-face meetings with clients, difficulty of training younger staff. Its a tradeoff and I think different businesses will fall into different buckets and there will also always be some inertia to change. I do think that the 'new normal' is neither 5 days 9-5 in the office OR complete remote work but something more like a couple of days in the office and a couple at home every week for most staff. But this wil probably be a plurality of the workforce only, with substantial numbers completely remote or close to, and substantial numbers also still in 5 days a week.

cco 6y ago
>Key positives for a company are reduced cost of office space and ability to draw upon a wider, cheaper pool of potential workers...[real dollar values] >Key negatives are reduced productivity due to lack of supervision, difficulty of face-to-face meetings with clients, difficulty of training younger staff.[hard to measure] Just throwing this experience of mine out there, when faced with actual dollar figures and hard to measure, vague outcomes, companies that I've worked for have nearly always acted on the dollar figures.
- kmonsen 6y ago
  Yeah, then why not fire everyone? Reduce salaries to 0, all the work is hard to measure. Or why have we all not been remote for a long time, instead of squeezed into high cost locations? When it comes to their core business companies have a decent belief in what it looks like.
  - Aeolun 6y ago
    > Yeah, then why not fire everyone? That would make the ones doing the firing redundant too. You want as many employees as possible as cheap as possible.

Spooky23 6y ago

I don’t think it is. The high performers work better, but half of the rest workers are doing nothing. I’m aware of people getting canned for stuff like outsourcing themselves, accidentally having sex on an open mic, illegally exporting computers to countries with export controls, etc since COVID. Work at home is great for people with tangible outputs. I don’t want my salesmen fucking around in the office. But many workers with less well defined outputs are going to be harder to manage, and being in the office kept distractions away.

graphtrader 6y ago
I would think the fact high performers work better remote though is what will be a competitive advantage for a 100% remote company at some point in the future. I am way more productive remote and it isn't even close. While I do like the social aspect of the office, it is such overkill. To me post-COVID, the whole country is open for business. I want to join a company that values high productive remote workers and sees the massive opportunity this is going to create.
- oblio 6y ago
  The reality is that for most companies the average performers do most of the work. Even in brilliant environments most of the work is drudge work.
- 0xB31B1B 6y ago
  Lol, this is exactly the strategy of the business I’m running. We started in March, have a team of 10, and are remote first in our DNA. It’s so much easier to hire that you can build a team of top performers fairly easily and evaluate them based on output.
- xur17 6y ago
  > I am way more productive remote and it isn't even close. While I do like the social aspect of the office, it is such overkill. I agree with this viewpoint, and (post covid) there are options for replicating at least some of the social aspects of the office.