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Offices Are Useful for Soft Work, Not Hard Work
- mikewarot 5y agoGone is office with "just one quick question" which was a lie, always a lie. Good riddance! Hello productivity.
- commandlinefan 5y agoIf that's true, then offshoring, or even satellite offices, are a hindrance to "proper" working relationships. I think it's very striking that the same corporations who didn't blink an eye at geographically distributing teams of people (so long as they were each physically located in an office that wasn't their home) are suddenly clutching their pearls at full remote work.
- saimiam 5y agoBut the point of “soft” work is for physical proximity to encourage bonding. Having offices in different cities creates hubs of people who like each other because loosely, they’ve become friends due to daily exposure to each other. This is not possible/harder to achieve in remote-only setups. At least that’s how I read the article. This, therefore means that outsourcing and remote offices aren’t antithetical to what the return-to-office crew wants to achieve.
- htrp 5y agoThere's a reason why you have to be at HQ to advance your career.
- peakaboo 5y agoConsulting is a career, and an excellent one at that. No political bullshit at all.
- whateveracct 5y agoI just don't do soft work anymore ever since going remote years ago. Now that soft work time is my own again. Hasn't seemed to hurt me a bit career-wise either - at least measured against my goals.
- htrp 5y agoCulturally, the habit of having casual conversations over remote platforms is what was missing from "soft work" being performed remotely. In the article, they perform an inversion experiment, "What if we all started off working remotely"? but they don't expand the logical conclusion of how companies would innovate if those weak link conversations don't happen.