4 ms·

This is only tangentially related to your post, but why does corporate America have such an aversion to telecommuting? I was by far the most productive employe

This is only tangentially related to your post, but why does corporate America have such an aversion to telecommuting? I was by far the most productive employee in my group at the large bank I worked for previously. I outproduced others, even while taking the hardest problems -- and we had a pretty good metrics systems, so I wasn't just gaming it. But when I asked if I could work from home when I'd decided to move, the answer was an emphatic, "No." So, they'd rather lose their most-productive employee who also would've been far more productive at home and then have to hire a probably-inferior replacement? Makes no sense at all, yet so many companies are like this.

abalashov 18y ago
It would appear that they simply don't understand how to manage someone who isn't physically at the office, so they can't just walk over to your cube every five seconds and dickishly ask for a "status update." I _am_ accounting for the absence of physical contact. My employees will have a desk VoIP phone connected to the company PBX, email, IM, and all the other stuff that is used for internal communication in companies where a bunch of folks are sat in offices and cubes but hardly ever bother to walk over to each other's positions as it is not really part of the workflow protocol. And these are employees, not subcontractors. I will manage them. I just won't be standing over their shoulder. I don't see why that's such an impossibly lofty goal.
- anthonyrubin 18y ago
  More than likely they don't understand how to manage someone at all.
rms 18y ago
If they let you work at home they would need to let everyone work at home. The house of cards comes tumbling down.
- moe 18y ago
  Why? Is there some sort of law for that? I was the only guy working from home during the last 3 years on my former job. Last time I checed their house of cards is still up.
  - abalashov 18y ago
    It's not a law thing; it's just that others would start demanding it more aggressively. You can say no and keep the house of cards up, but it's just adding tension to the employer-employee relationship with all the other staff.
    - moe 18y ago
      I'd say if teleworking puts a strain on your employee-relationship then you have bigger problems. Why do some people have bigger offices than others? Why do some people have no offices at all? I have yet to see a company that truly treats all employees equal. That would be the only setting where I'd agree with your concern.
      - abalashov 18y ago
        Yeah, but there is a qualitative difference in the ideological implications of office size/placement vs. fundamentally not having to come in and be stuck somewhere for 8 hours a day. I don't know that the difference has a name, but it's a difference.
        moe 18y ago
        Imho it's not really qualitative but merely a quantitive difference: Jealousity. "Why does he have a big office when I'm in this sucky cubicle?", "Why can he work from home while I have to drive to work?". I had a simple response to anybody who asked why I'm so rarely seen and why they don't get that privilege: As soon as you put in 50+ hours a week like I do and get up at 4am at least once every week to clean up the mess that you deployed... That was my story, others may be different.
allenbrunson 18y ago
my experience is that the management in big companies isn't nearly as interested in productivity as you would hope. they're a lot more concerned about accountability, not screwing up, not doing things that could be held against them, etc. so i'd say it's more likely a case of valuing a different set of things.
- quoderat 18y ago
  You're probably right. This is the same bank that would email around escrow account information. These accounts sometimes had $295 million dollars in them, and they emailed this info with complete account information, wire instructions and routing numbers. No encryption. Regular e-mail. Oh, the temptation. But anyway, I am not sure what they valued. It certainly wasn't security or productivity.
  - gaius 18y ago
    Many years ago a company I worked for IPO'd and we all got stock options. Our broker's preferred means of communication was AOL Instant Messenger. As in, hi, I'm XXX and I'd like to place a limit order, and they would do it. Insane!
CalmQuiet 18y ago
My wife just got approved to telecommute - after much initial UNenthusiasm from company owner. Between times the owner had to see how it worked on a small scale with another employee, and my wife did a lot to boost her own credibility as an effective and trustworthy employee. Innovations, especially those that seem to threaten owner/manager control seem often to evoke paranoid responses. Sometimes they have to be broken down gradually with positive experience over time. Good luck to the OP!
mechanical_fish 18y ago
why does corporate America have such an aversion to telecommuting? It's a limitation of the OS that is built into humans. This is what you get when you try to build a global economic system out of bright, talkative monkeys like me. It turns out that -- amazingly! -- this can be done, but we find it much easier if we employ hacks that leverage the features of our underlying monkey OS. And -- even more amazingly! -- it turns out that we can go even farther: Using our most advanced mental and physical tools, we can do a pretty good emulation of disembodied brains sitting in the nth dimension. But the abstraction leaks. Especially when we have to interact with other people who haven't been fully schooled in the art of communicating with ghosts. If dolphins ran the world, corporate boardrooms would be full of water. But monkeys run the world, so: - Businesses are run as hierarchies, because the monkey OS is designed to manage bands of around ten or fifteen individuals. Beyond that, it operates in terms of alliances ("this platoon is allied with that platoon") and rivalries ("our platoon is doing its job, but that one isn't"; "our platoon is falling behind and will be targeted for cutbacks, so work hard and watch your back"; "let's all get together with Platoon Three to kick Platoon Four's obnoxious butt"). - Your status in the business world is judged based on the size of the conference room that you need to hold a physical gathering of your team members, and on the size of the contiguous physical territory that your team occupies and patrols on a daily basis. If you sit alone at your desk with the speakerphone on and claim to be conducting a meeting with fifteen colleagues, people will subconsciously think of you as a psychotic, or (at best) as a spooky witch doctor who channels the spirit world. - There's a tendency to defer to people with grey hair, and/or people with lots of followers or lots of stuff that has taken time to accumulate, like corner offices or expensive desks. - Talk is cheap. Many people will say they're your ally, but when a fight arrives they will not be there, or they'll discover some really interesting thing going on atop a nearby tree, or they'll hang back and not really fight very hard. You need to motivate them by really befriending them -- talking about their kids or their pets or their hobbies, bringing them little gifts. And by physically surrounding them with other friendly allies, such that they cannot easily flee without losing face. And by keeping them close enough to be able to slap them upside the head when they seem to be shirking. - To really convince someone -- to really communicate at the highest level -- you need to be standing close enough that you could, in theory, pick fleas off of them. Unfortunately, though humans are becoming better and better at understanding all this stuff and transcending it when necessary [1], we're never going to completely eliminate these tendencies. Unless the lizards rise up, overthrow us, and take back the planet. At which point they will have complaints of their own. ("Dear Gator News: How come companies always insist on holding meetings on rocks in the bright sunlight? I'm much more productive in my moonlit office, where I can sit on my dual 27-inch space heaters.") --- [1] Such as: When trying to write software, which is an act so unnatural to us monkeys that only some of us can do it at all, and many of us are doing it wrong. And it requires all kinds of mental tricks and energy and focus just to manage that much.

abalashov 18y ago

It would appear that they simply don't understand how to manage someone who isn't physically at the office, so they can't just walk over to your cube every five seconds and dickishly ask for a "status update." I _am_ accounting for the absence of physical contact. My employees will have a desk VoIP phone connected to the company PBX, email, IM, and all the other stuff that is used for internal communication in companies where a bunch of folks are sat in offices and cubes but hardly ever bother to walk over to each other's positions as it is not really part of the workflow protocol. And these are employees, not subcontractors. I will manage them. I just won't be standing over their shoulder. I don't see why that's such an impossibly lofty goal.

anthonyrubin 18y ago
More than likely they don't understand how to manage someone at all.

rms 18y ago

If they let you work at home they would need to let everyone work at home. The house of cards comes tumbling down.

moe 18y ago
Why? Is there some sort of law for that? I was the only guy working from home during the last 3 years on my former job. Last time I checed their house of cards is still up.
- abalashov 18y ago
  It's not a law thing; it's just that others would start demanding it more aggressively. You can say no and keep the house of cards up, but it's just adding tension to the employer-employee relationship with all the other staff.
  - moe 18y ago
    I'd say if teleworking puts a strain on your employee-relationship then you have bigger problems. Why do some people have bigger offices than others? Why do some people have no offices at all? I have yet to see a company that truly treats all employees equal. That would be the only setting where I'd agree with your concern.
    - abalashov 18y ago
      Yeah, but there is a qualitative difference in the ideological implications of office size/placement vs. fundamentally not having to come in and be stuck somewhere for 8 hours a day. I don't know that the difference has a name, but it's a difference.
      - moe 18y ago
        Imho it's not really qualitative but merely a quantitive difference: Jealousity. "Why does he have a big office when I'm in this sucky cubicle?", "Why can he work from home while I have to drive to work?". I had a simple response to anybody who asked why I'm so rarely seen and why they don't get that privilege: As soon as you put in 50+ hours a week like I do and get up at 4am at least once every week to clean up the mess that you deployed... That was my story, others may be different.

allenbrunson 18y ago

my experience is that the management in big companies isn't nearly as interested in productivity as you would hope. they're a lot more concerned about accountability, not screwing up, not doing things that could be held against them, etc. so i'd say it's more likely a case of valuing a different set of things.

quoderat 18y ago
You're probably right. This is the same bank that would email around escrow account information. These accounts sometimes had $295 million dollars in them, and they emailed this info with complete account information, wire instructions and routing numbers. No encryption. Regular e-mail. Oh, the temptation. But anyway, I am not sure what they valued. It certainly wasn't security or productivity.
- gaius 18y ago
  Many years ago a company I worked for IPO'd and we all got stock options. Our broker's preferred means of communication was AOL Instant Messenger. As in, hi, I'm XXX and I'd like to place a limit order, and they would do it. Insane!

CalmQuiet 18y ago

My wife just got approved to telecommute - after much initial UNenthusiasm from company owner. Between times the owner had to see how it worked on a small scale with another employee, and my wife did a lot to boost her own credibility as an effective and trustworthy employee. Innovations, especially those that seem to threaten owner/manager control seem often to evoke paranoid responses. Sometimes they have to be broken down gradually with positive experience over time. Good luck to the OP!

mechanical_fish 18y ago

why does corporate America have such an aversion to telecommuting? It's a limitation of the OS that is built into humans. This is what you get when you try to build a global economic system out of bright, talkative monkeys like me. It turns out that -- amazingly! -- this can be done, but we find it much easier if we employ hacks that leverage the features of our underlying monkey OS. And -- even more amazingly! -- it turns out that we can go even farther: Using our most advanced mental and physical tools, we can do a pretty good emulation of disembodied brains sitting in the nth dimension. But the abstraction leaks. Especially when we have to interact with other people who haven't been fully schooled in the art of communicating with ghosts. If dolphins ran the world, corporate boardrooms would be full of water. But monkeys run the world, so: - Businesses are run as hierarchies, because the monkey OS is designed to manage bands of around ten or fifteen individuals. Beyond that, it operates in terms of alliances ("this platoon is allied with that platoon") and rivalries ("our platoon is doing its job, but that one isn't"; "our platoon is falling behind and will be targeted for cutbacks, so work hard and watch your back"; "let's all get together with Platoon Three to kick Platoon Four's obnoxious butt"). - Your status in the business world is judged based on the size of the conference room that you need to hold a physical gathering of your team members, and on the size of the contiguous physical territory that your team occupies and patrols on a daily basis. If you sit alone at your desk with the speakerphone on and claim to be conducting a meeting with fifteen colleagues, people will subconsciously think of you as a psychotic, or (at best) as a spooky witch doctor who channels the spirit world. - There's a tendency to defer to people with grey hair, and/or people with lots of followers or lots of stuff that has taken time to accumulate, like corner offices or expensive desks. - Talk is cheap. Many people will say they're your ally, but when a fight arrives they will not be there, or they'll discover some really interesting thing going on atop a nearby tree, or they'll hang back and not really fight very hard. You need to motivate them by really befriending them -- talking about their kids or their pets or their hobbies, bringing them little gifts. And by physically surrounding them with other friendly allies, such that they cannot easily flee without losing face. And by keeping them close enough to be able to slap them upside the head when they seem to be shirking. - To really convince someone -- to really communicate at the highest level -- you need to be standing close enough that you could, in theory, pick fleas off of them. Unfortunately, though humans are becoming better and better at understanding all this stuff and transcending it when necessary [1], we're never going to completely eliminate these tendencies. Unless the lizards rise up, overthrow us, and take back the planet. At which point they will have complaints of their own. ("Dear Gator News: How come companies always insist on holding meetings on rocks in the bright sunlight? I'm much more productive in my moonlit office, where I can sit on my dual 27-inch space heaters.") --- [1] Such as: When trying to write software, which is an act so unnatural to us monkeys that only some of us can do it at all, and many of us are doing it wrong. And it requires all kinds of mental tricks and energy and focus just to manage that much.