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I think any answer to this question will be speculative and opinionated. People have their experience and they have their preferences. The interpretation of one
by netcan 11y ago
I think any answer to this question will be speculative and opinionated. People have their experience and they have their preferences. The interpretation of one is based on the other. It's like the open plan vs offices debate that springs up on HN every so often. Mostly what we have is personal preferences justified with "facts." In reality I don't think we have that kind of understanding of what makes people work well. Reality is complicated with short term and long term effects, feedback effects and adaption.
Those qualifications aside, I think (A) coding is uniquely well suited to remote work and (B) transitioning to remote work as a major way of working is a long cultural transition that companies will need to grow around. They'll only do that if it's advantageous enough and the process could take a generation.
Coding is well suited to remote work because it can be parceled effectively with clear responsibilities and deliverables. It's like journalism in that sense. If you need to produce 2 articles a week and the articles are the output of your work, then it's easy for everyone to understand that you did in fact contribute two articles and form an opinion of their quality.
The parts that are hard about remote working is structuring a culture that is able to cooperate without physical presence. Physical presence is a key feature of how we interact. Online discussions are different to face-t-face discussions. People travel international at great expense and inconvenience in order to do business face to face. It's subtle buts adds up to a lot.
Maybe we are getting better at remote communication and collaboration. Maybe the ways we work can adapt to the environment of remote working. But, it's a cultural shift.
Remote work is strange in the same way that remote parenting, remote dating or remote friendship is. At the end of the day, the relationship that will come out of a remote marriage will not be the same as a regular marriage. That may be OK for remote working. I am sure that some companies are making it their advantage, but it's not a simple matter.
TLDR: If a company that exists in a building today decided to transition over two years to a company where people work from home, the company would probably fail. The transition is hard.
- VLM 11y ago"Remote work is strange in the same way that" Don't forget non-strange remote business relationships like remote retail (buy from amazon), remote entertainment (Hollywood movie not a stage show or play, or recorded music not a live band), or remote manufacturing (imported from China not the now abandoned factory down the road), or remote software (believe it or not, companies used to write their own OS 50 years ago instead of buying a microsoft/apple product) or remote senior management (for a long time, its pretty unusual for most megacorporation employees to work at the same office as their CEO, even if they work at the same office as their boss). With increased specialization on a very long term all business has trended toward ever more remote "business interaction"... the only part that's new, is the very long term trend is starting to finally impact the lowest organizational levels of white collar general office labor. Another hidden assumption is that physical presence or um, excessive face to face communication is necessarily a productive useful activity, combined with a heavy dose of "its popular and/or traditional therefore that means its inherently better" and/or "cultural shift is bad or unnecessary". I'm unconvinced that "mind work" is best done with enormous amounts of interpersonal coordination. That means the architecture is a poor match. By analogy its possible for a very bad general contractor to try to make the painter, plumber, electrican, and carpenter all work at the same time in the same corner of a little closet, and maybe, by heroic levels of effort and incredible professionalism and cooperation it can somehow be accomplished, but its a kind of dumb non-profitable goal. Also if you design for scalability you've just lost the game when you tightly coupled, what do you intend to do next year when "it" goes viral and the database is a department of 50 people on the other side of the country, not one dude at a conference table with the other one dude departments?
- smil 11y agoExcellent comment.
- netcan 11y agoI think you're misunderstanding me. I'm not saying that remote work is impossible, or undesrable. I'm saying that it is a big change. Big changes take time. Time for the culture to change and time for the structure of organizations to change. If the advantages are big enough, that change can happen forcefully and quickly. Online commerce is not a bad analogy. Barnes & Noble didn't become Amazon, Amazon did. IE, the advantages of online commerce where big enough to invent a new kind of company to do it. Remote working might be a bigger challenge than that on the kind of scale proponents seem to hope for. Maybe we will see large companies go all, part or mostly remote. I don't really know. It's clear that remote collaboration can work (plenty of examples), but whether or not it works with existing structures is hard to know. Face to face interaction between people is different from remote interaction in ways that are fairly fundamental to how we worked. Communication & collaboration is really our speciality as a species, and we have a lot of inbuilt faculties to help. Some need physical presence. I think the internet is full of examples of remote communication failing in ways it wouldn't have in person. We may even be demonstrating this now.