Everyone knows the benefits of working from home, but there are downsides as well. Fixable downsides, but they exist nonetheless -- it is easy to become a hermit. Easy to over-work. Hard to draw the line between your work time and your personal time. Easy to get siloed into your current job, while not keeping up with the rest of the company and enabling career growth. Easy to let poor communication habits turn into real problems. And when your entire company works from home, as mine did, you develop a culture of acting like there is no better choice, and the benefits of your personal flexibility at home outweigh any problems at work... causing people to not fight very hard to fix problems, and to stay in those jobs longer than they should because of how comfortable the working situation is.

Now, all of those things can be handled if you have personal discipline, good co-workers, and great leadership. But not all teams can truly claim those qualities. So I feel both working environments have their good and bad sides, and the choice of which situation to pursue is a question that needs to be answered with some solid contextual information about the team, the culture, and your personality to know which one is truly best for any specific individual at any specific job.

Not just that, but there's also the other side: Easy to procrastinate, easy to give false reports which then leads to regular overwork in the days just before a hard deadline.

I know these issues from remote workers I worked with, but also know this personally while working on my Diploma theses.

While we are at it: Working on Diploma/Master thesis is in many ways very similar to remote work: One works mostly from home, maybe in the library but even there mostly alone, i.e. not in an office, meeting one's mentor at most once per week. I met with other students which were in the same situation - just to get into a group feeling. That worked quite well, even though we had no overlaps in our topics and hence not much to talk about.

The situation is a bit different if you write your PhD thesis, as that usually means you have a job at the university during that time, and at least have an office and collegues.

This isn't a remote problem. I see this _all_ the time with people at work now and I don't work remotely.

This is more of a personal issue -- some people do it consistently, others don't. I never had that problem working remotely, and I don't pretend to be somewhere else in my regular reports in the office either.

One solution that usually works for me is to get a standing workstation and use it. Not one of those fancy ones that go up and down. Just one that is permanently up, like the Ikea standing desk hack. For a break, you can move and sit somewhere else. Standing takes a lot more energy, so, it is my belief, that you focus better because if you are standing and goofing off, you are wasting precious energy. There are times where you don't have the energy to stand but need to work - so just sit. Standing and sitting is not a either/or thing. You don't have to be faithful to your standup desk, go slouch in a couch for a break.

The biggest difference between standing and sitting is that walking away from your workstation is friction-free. You just move your feet.

Then what's the point of not getting a table that can go up and down?

That doesn't seem a problem unique to remote work. It's more about when tangible outputs are required from you.

This is so, so true for me. I used to work in a place which had an office, but you wouldn't be expected to be there most of the time, just come in at least once a week, maybe for meetings, etc.

I used to procrastinate and report progress to my manager when there was much less. But since the work was deadline-based, I'd just grind through the weekend with little sleep and catch up with what I've reported. I've never missed a deadline, but I'm still feeling bad about doing it that way and misleading them.

Just to be clear, this was a long time ago, when I was just starting my professional career, and didn't yet have stronger ethics.

(Throwaway for obvious reasons, the employer I worked for at the time browse HN)

Working from home for three years now as a software project contributor, this is my biggest problem. I always get my shit done, but it gets majorly stressful since daily family life goes on the same regardless of my self-inflicted work crunches. Pretty sure the tradeoffs are still worth it, though.

Being the IT guy, I have to be in the office a lot of the time, but having 1 or 2 days to focus on projects at home and have no walk-up interruptions is very helpful.

Besides, if I really don't want to work, it doesn't matter if I'm home or at the office. I am a champion at slacking in the office. I can stealthily alt-tab like a motherfucker, and I see you coming long before you can see my screen.

However I must confess that the downsides of working from the office majority outweighs the other.

I can no longer focus. I am constantly pulled into meetings. I have 120 minutes of commute everyday.

When I get home I am too tired and can no longer spend quality time with my partner like I did when I was working from home. And above all my sleeping schedule has to fit the 9-5 schedule and it is very hard to adjust.

I also have to deal with the heavy Canadian storms during winter.

In the future I'm choosing remote work at a heartbeat and might even consider a salary cut to get it.

YMMV.

I think this is often an environment and culture problem. When I'm setting something up, I work hard to create spaces that minimize noise and distractions. And I think it's important to limit meetings, because they'll definitely expand to fill all time available. But most places don't bother with either of these, throwing people into noisy open offices and having a "meetings first" culture.

> I have 120 minutes of commute everyday. [...] When I get home I am too tired

This is the true killer for me. 15-30 minutes each way by foot, bike, or public transit? A pleasant part of my day, a useful demarcation between work and home. But an hour each way in a car and I begin to despair for my life.

In addition we have some of the harshest winters with freeing black ice falling from sky :)

If this behavior changes solely because you start working remotely it may not necessarily be to your advantage. Yes, in the short term you may maintain the ability to focus. However, in the long term you may find yourself being excluded and and diminished within the organization. These meetings, etc. don't stop when you work remotely, only those attending them do.

On the flip side, when your entire company works from offices, you develop a culture of acting like there is no better choice, and the resistance to change outweighs its obsoletence, causing people to not fight very hard to evolve the workplace, and to accept offices longer than they should.

The commute? 10 minutes on the bicycle. There's a song by Tripod about the distances between home, work and shops being your triangle of hapiness. Not that serious, but it has some substance of truth https://3pod.bandcamp.com/track/triangle-of-happiness

Since the purpose of going to the office is not to do actual work being able to work from home has not removed the need for the office.

  The vast majority of time spent by office employees is socializing and non-productive ritual work.

Source: https://www.vouchercloud.com/blog/office-worker-productivity...

The last time I worked in an office, I got most of my work done in the morning or after 6pm when no one was in the office.

1) I get out of the house and I just seem to focus much more there at the office.

2) I feel like a normal human going to an office and talking to others. (Maybe I don't always talk to others, but I can if I want.)

3) When I want to be lazy and just stay home, I just do.

4) Co-working space or cafe is just a 2-15 minute walk away. No commute in a car.

I worked from home full time for about 3 years then moved to a job that had about 1.5 hour commute each way. One of the reasons I took the job was the fact that I did feel like a hermit. I then started to resent the commute. I'm lucky that I have been able to work out a deal with my current employer where I work from home 2 days a week and come in to the office 3 days a week. This gives me a nice break from the commute but I also don't end up feeling like a hermit.

> if you have personal discipline, good co-workers, and great leadership

I agree this is true, and have seen a couple of high-functioning distributed teams. But a question for me: if we have those things, do we want to spend them on working from home? Personally, I'd rather have a modest commute and spend our discipline and leadership points on solving a problem in the world.

Working from home can make a manager feel less control. It takes a different type of leadership. But requires less leadership points.

I also think the sexual assaults thing is a terrible red herring. Remote teams still should get together regularly, and abusers will happily abuse then. For that matter, abusers are perfectly capable of being abusive remotely. (Exhibit A: the internet.)

While it's debatable whether remote works for businesses that can work remotely, it imposes costs on the rest of us, especially those who can't do their jobs over an Internet connection, and those costs should be paid by those who willingly incur them, not whoever they can push them off to.

On the other hand, employees would have an incentive to try to stretch out their commute as much as possible, to get extra pay for time "not working". I don't know how rampant that would be. I like to think most people hate commuting enough that it wouldn't be worth it to make an extra $20 sitting in traffic when you could just be home faster, but who knows.

I don't know. I worry that would immediately become a major form of discrimination -- it would inherently put anyone who was poor/middle-class or anyone with any sort of family/children at a huge employment disadvantage. Large companies would only ever hire already-hyper-wealthy individuals for their main positions (since they are the only people who are ever allowed to live in dense urban places). I'm imagining employers in Seattle saying "We like this guy, but he doesn't live in Pioneer Square where our office is, so that will be a pain, we should pass on him"

Many people already have to deal with that discrimination somewhat in terms of employers only being in major cities. Having that hyper-charged down to just major cities wealthiest neighborhoods seems like an even worse situation.

Obviously enough economic incentive exists to convince people to spend the time and effort to commute, but if city centers were more affordable to live in, many fewer would choose to live so far away from work. Myself included.

I agree, and would personally do the same too if possible. But I've watched us artificially inflate property values for literally my entire life. Even in my tiny US Midwest city in the middle of nowhere, city center prices have never been remotely affordable.

We should take it for granted that it's too expensive to live in US/CA/AUS/NZ cities -- because that's the honest truth. That's been the current state for decades, and there's very little chance that any major city center ever becomes affordable again in our lifetimes.

Obviously, we should still try to fix this. I fully support trying. But every facet of our society is wholly dedicated to preventing city centers from ever becoming affordable. Affordable city centers just are not likely to happen. We should not assume regular people live in a situation that doesn't exist, and likely never will.

Also, you have to remember, in places like the bay area, you can't just pick up and move closer to work. People have enormous incentives to never move: Proposition 13 means you get 5 times lower property taxes by staying put. Not to mention the enormous imbalance between housing and jobs. All the jobs are on the peninnsula and all the housing is in the east bay. All these problems would just be amplified.

I think we're miss-stating the problem. The problem isn't that employers are forcing us to commute long distances with poor company placement. The problem is, we as employees don't have enough power to choose/demand where we want to work. There's simply too much labor supply and too little demand. So, if a worker demands to work remotely, the company can just say: we'll fire this guy and hire one of the countless others willing to commute 2 hours or more.

Just to prove my point: Here in the bay area, companies still place themselves on the penninsula where there's a 4 to 1 ratio of jobs to residential places to live. By that math, they shouldn't be able to hire anyone. And yet, they're having absolutely no problem filling positions, because workers are extremely desperate for money. So desperate, they're willing commute 2 hours or pay 60% of their paycheck to live closer. These are all symptoms of labor oversupply and too little labor demand.

As an employer, I'm indifferent between paying someone $50/hour for an 8-hour work day, or $40/hr for an 8-hour workday plus 2 hours of paid commuting.

I think it's more likely that the interview process would just have another step to suss out how much commuting time I'd be paying you for, and then figuring out how to divide up your day rate of $400 (higher in reality, of course) across the buckets. So Laura Long Commute gets $40/hr * 10 hrs/day and Sally Short Commute gets $50/hr * 8 hours/day.

You'd have to be careful about that. Employers might end up, in data, showing a negative impact against some protected class (married people, certain races) if they weigh hiring or compensation decisions based on proximity to the office.

It's my understanding that current jurisprudence doesn't require proof of intention to discriminate, just evidence of disparate impact. Single and married people live in different neighborhoods. Different races do as well, depending on the city. Non-heterosexual people tend to cluster in certain neighborhoods, too, for that matter. If a class action suit can show that married people are paid 10% less than single people for equivalent roles, it could be problematic.

Regarding the second point: Employees always have an incentive to try to stretch out their tasks, so employers already know how to minimize that behavior. If employers paid for commuting, commuting would be managed like other tasks.

They already do. I'll take a lower salary from a company that doesn't make me commute.

This is a severe misunderstanding of the economics of the situation. Employees know that they're going to be spending time commuting, and they take that into account when they decide whether to take a job. In more academic terms-- that information is already informing the labor supply curve of which each individual is a part, and thus the market is already incorporating the information in the wages.

If you've ever taken microeconomics 101 then they'll probably have explained how it doesn't matter which side of the market, buyer or seller, pays a tax on business. The tax is incorporated into the price one way or another, whether it's the buyer or the seller that has to actually pony up the physical cash, and the actual tax burden of the two sides has nothing to do with who does that. The same principle applies to commuting, which is after all just a tax that the workers have to pay to the void when they have to wastefully sit around in their car.

- Covering the cost of a FastPass

- Deciding where to locate a new office based on where employees live

- Offering a company shuttle from a train station

- "Google Bus" and other similar initiatives

- Offering a potential employee a higher salary because of their long commute time

These things happen all the time, and all bring a portion of the commute cost into the company.

BTW I've never heard of a company moving for its employees' benefit, unless by "employees" you mean "senior management & board members".

If you have a job, you're selling your labor. The commute is part of what you have to do to get your goods to market. Are you, as a purchaser of bananas, "pushing off the costs of transport" on to the seller? That seems silly considering the transporter prices that into the bananas, just like workers can price in longer commutes. Don't accept less money to travel further each day.

I think a fairer deal would be if commute time counted against the typical 8 hours of work. That way everybody's interests would align around having short commute times.

Also, not all of the commute cost is the fault of the employer. For example, my commute is a lot shorter than many of my coworkers, because I place more importance on a short commute than a cheaper, bigger house further away. My coworkers value having a bigger house more, so they live where the housing is cheaper but the commute longer.

How would your price this in? Would the people who commute further get to work shorter hours, just because I chose to sacrifice for a closer commute?

I prefer an alternative approach: a telecommuting incentive tax credit. Telecommuters themselves get a tax credit and companies also get a tax credit.

That would be the fastest way to spur more remote friendly workplaces. Then the environment, congestion, commute stress, etc will all be reduced. The "cost" of the credit would be more than offset by reduced road maintenance costs, lower pollution, fewer accidents, etc.

Unless you're dealing with customers directly, or making a physical product, there's no reason that offices in their conventional form should exist.

If a congestion tax worked, the overall burden would go down, because businesses would work harder to locate offices near where employees are (or want to be). And they'd also likely get more active in things like housing and transit policy, because it would be to their direct financial benefit to make sure that development was more balanced.

My career has suffered because I have never wanted the stress of a long commute nor could I afford the real estate prices and city problems involved with being closer in. It's a bunch of diminishing returns every direction I look, so my solution was to just find work that was less desirable but at least manageable in the context of my whole life situation. I contend that people who don't do that eventually suffer mental breakdowns, but have no evidence to back up that claim other than conjecture.

As it stands, my current commute is still bad, but I bet it's only 10% as bad as the hell most people around here go through. I've decided that working for a living is just generally bad for health, but a necessary evil, of course. I probably sound like a whiner, but I am truly interested in the commuting problem because I work for a company that heavily promotes cycling to work and ride sharing. Unfortunately, the infrastructure between my home and my work location precludes safe cycling along much of the route so I don't do it, but a lot of employees do. Instead, I stupidly get up at 5:45am, get out the door by 6:30am or so, creep along on a stupid, dark bridge with lots of other stupid people, then arrive to work around 7am or so, depending on the breaks. At least the drive home isn't as bad as long as I'm on the road by 3:15pm or so.

I do get the occasional work from home day, but our team is highly collaborative, so I'm at a disadvantage if I'm not at the office. In previous roles I had more autonomy and could thus make a better go of remote work. I worry that 100% remote roles make you a non-entity in your organization and thus dispensable.

Being remote might contribute to, or increase the risk of, not being effective, but it's not the most proximate cause.

I'm on the job market now and the most feedback I get are from jobs that would be 45 min - 1 hr minimum (in the same city). I've done it before, it's terrible for my health and mental state.

Moving closer isn't an option because it's even more expensive than the already expensive area I live in now and the salaries won't compensate to offset that.

Too bad just paying poor people not to use the bridge isn't politically correct.

It would be a heck of a lot more efficient than combining a bunch of disincentives that affect the lower classes.

Why does nobody ever try free public transportation? Paying the poor brings a lot of practical issues, but at a minimum you can make them not pay for taking the long route.

Because someone has to pay for it.

There are plenty of examples that show that working remotely without daily face-to-face interaction can work very well.

What's markedly different about environments that successfully adopted remote work are aspects like:

- a lack of cargo cult work organisation and office politics

- an atmosphere of trust rather than petty control freaks who need to constantly keep an eye on their subordinates in order to know they're still 'working'

- adapting to different forms of communication

When people say that they can't communicate as well with someone who isn't in the same room that doesn't necessarily mean that a remote setup doesn't work. It could simply mean they're just lazy and not willing to adjust to a different kind of work environment.

Working remotely requires the participants to be much more communicative because in such a setting communication for the most part doesn't just happen serendipitously, you have to work to make it happen.

It could also mean they actually have sufficient social skills that they're able to make full use of the higher bandwidth available face-to-face, and aren't willing to suffer thru the markedly inferior communications that are all that's possible over the 'net.

To be frank, people using IM to communicate with me disrupt my flow a lot more. They start a thread/conversation/request, and then are slow to respond, or disappear. You can't do that face to face.

Face to face (or even telephone) forces people to prepare. Rarely do I see people work that way with IM. People tend to realize that they are interrupting someone if it's a face to face. In my experience, many (most?) workers don't view IM as a significant interruption to the other party. So they feel much more free in using it.

Conversely, I’ve seen plenty of “mandatory meetings” in remote work as well. Neither paradigm seems particularly advantageous.

Good managers ask when they actually need something and they expect those working for them to accommodate such requests immediately. That is why, after all, they are managers.

2. Good managers set direction and exist to acquire resources for the team and eliminate barriers out of the way of the team when they are headed in that direction. Their role is not to interrupt the team so that they can answer a question from upper management.

3. Most of half of urgent manager requests are due to lack of planning either on their part or on their manager's part. They knew they needed this information a few days ago, but felt "it's OK to interrupt the team when I really need it".

4. Most of the other half are due to their inability to push back.

5. There will be times when the managers do need information urgently. It is then their responsibility to accept the hit in productivity that it incurs.

I've worked with both good and bad managers. The good ones have these qualities.

That's why they are managers and not low level developers. Developer does not like it? Well, a developer can migrate to writing less code and caring more about business related stuff. It is not like those who can write serializer cannot figure if a certain fire drill is required based on the amount of $$ coming in from a customer who is affected by a bug/wants something.

You missed the part where the manager has to evaluate and push back if needed. If their primary role is merely to do what their bosses tell them to, then they are not doing any managing.

99% of the companies can replace 75% of the managers with supervisors ( foreman in constructions/manufacturing ) and get a better result. Most of the "teams" inside organizations dont need managers - they need supervisors as organization does not need to have mini fiefdoms.

You are missing the point of what a manager is.

Good managers know how to ship products by knowing how to manage knowledge workers and removing friction in the communication inside and outside the team.

>Not having to immediately stop everything im doing allows me to stay in flow state.

So is it OK in remote work for me to turn off IM for 2-4 hours to remain in flow state? If not, then there will be no flow state for me.

Yes. Having managed remote teams and being a remote dev, it's all about response time. If someone slacks you, the response should be as quick as if it were verbal in the office. If it takes 2 hours to get a response out of someone - then they are not participating correctly on a remote team. The team should work in a way they can all be online at the same time so communication can flow freely. If someone is interrupting you and you need concentration just explain it to them - like you would in the office.

Immediate responses is a remote team. Day long responses is contract work. Week long responses is open source projects and government work.

Two-minute responses on Slack absolutely is a model that can work, and perhaps it's the easiest transition for people who've been working in a "teamy"/open-plan on-site setup. But I'm also convinced that it's not the only viable setup.

Likewise, if everyone knows that due to people's different time zones, schedules, etc. that 24hrs is a typical response window via email, there should be no complaints if responses aren't received more immediately.

While this can work for some people, such "interruptible anytime" mentality may not be good for many workers. For example, when I am most productive I need to minimize, and ideally eliminate, disruptions. Such periods are short (2 hours at most for me), but I could do 90% of day's technical work in those 2 hours. If someone wants something, unless it is a blocker for a large team, I will put it away and get back to it later.

This has nothing to do with being remote or local, this is just the mode at which I am productive. I try to treat folks who work for me the same way: we can still meet daily in the morning I try to give them enough structure so I do not need to preempt them every hour. Things happen, there are failed systems that need to be fixed now and other fire drills, but I find most people in technology development more productive when on an async comm channel. I am.

Maybe I am just old and you youngsters do not need to do it this way :)

It takes significantly more discipline for a PM to run things this way, but the reward is often better productivity and happier, less frazzled developers.

Doesn't work when people just write "@here, making nachoes" all day.

`@here` should really be yellow. Only direct communications red. Or something other than the current system.

When Mr. Exec wants a status update, and he wants it RIGHT FUCKING NOW. I'm not going to E-mail you and hope that your inbox doesn't have 10,000 other unread messages, or text you and hope you respond. I have to physically hoof it over to where you sit, apologize for interrupting, and get the info Mr. Exec needs. That's hard to do remotely.

If I know in advance I need a response about some topic, sure, try async first. If the deadline's a day out, E-mail, if it's an hour out, text or IM. But, after that if you don't respond, I've got to be the bad guy, break your concentration, and call you. And, if you don't pick up, I'm headed to where you are physically.

If your company culture embraces remote work it also must embrace responsiveness and a communication style that clearly conveys when responses are needed.

This is pretty much why I don' want to work remotely.

At the office, when busy, I can turn my email and IM off. If people need something, they are welcome to come to me and I'll engage with them. I do not want to deal with urgent issues over any kind of IM. If you are not physically present, then call me and we'll have a voice chat.

My frustration is that IM is used for both urgent requests, as well as non-urgent ones. It's used as an alternative both to phones (immediate need - synchronous) and to email (no rush - asynchronous).

My fear in working remote is that I'll get too many non-urgent interrupts using IM. I cannot see a good reason to use textual IM over a voice chat. If it's not urgent, just use email.

So while I agree that response time can be important, there should be clear policies on the medium used for it. If the team mostly had policies that match my preferences, I could do remote work. But I suspect most teams will disagree with them. Hence I get my way in the office.

Taking 2 hours for a response is often fine at the office, BTW. It all depends on the context.

>Immediate responses is a remote team. Day long responses is contract work. Week long responses is open source projects and government work.

There are very few jobs that really fit this categorization. At my work (in the office), we often respond to things the same day. On the flip side, today I plan to respond to something that had been requested a week ago. I don't work in OS or for the government.

If someone wants a quick response, they have to explain the need for it in the email. If it's open ended, it goes to the bottom of the queue. I'm willing to bet that since they haven't bugged me about it, they either no longer need the information, or it is low priority for them.

It's droll that Slack is the name of the service chaining you to notifications. I wonder if that was deliberate.

With all that (plus what you said), most individual employees will prefer the office over remote access. So remote would only work if you moved everyone from the office to remote access at a single point in time.

I suspect that a workplace where work discussions happen only in form of formal meetings would be rather unproductive.

1. All work-related discussion should take place in formal meetings.

and

2. No non-work-related discussions should ever happen in the workplace.

?

If you are having a discussion with your boss don't bother him when he is on a break, book a meeting.

I agree with parent poster in large orgs but in orgs where the founder eats lunch with you that level of formalness is awkward

"I'll grab a donut from the store across the street. Does anyone else want something?" - "No, we don't because YOU'RE FIRED."

There also seems to be a lack of properly planning tasks and as such this lack of planning is papered over with the sort of serendipitous spontaneous communication that happens when you have to walk over to someone and ask them what on earth is going on.

A focused remote worker can be orders of magnitude more productive than the typical office worker who is simply doing "busy work".

The driver of this lack of trust is the rise of managers (e.g. MBAs) who have limited expertise in the fields which they manage.

For jobs where there are measures of performance that are accurate and not gameable (e.g. certain call center workers) and/or it is a job executives probably reckon that they could do themselves, they are generally happy to let employees work from home.

IMO this is why Github and Mozilla are remote-first - by and large they're managed by developers.

Your boss doens't need to know how to do your job.

We also had a lot of slowdown because we were stuck on a shitty off-the-shelf program he bought. He went for this one instead of the more usable competitor because it was cheaper. If he could get developers to build a working tool in the cheap product by holding them 'accountable' in his Excel sheet, he could push for the product to replace the more expensive competitor and gain some reputation in the corporation.

In the end, most of the project was a horrific failure. His best employees left, and control of the project was transferred to another manager inside of a year or two.

I think a lot of this could have been avoided if my boss had any idea about what he was managing.

Do not allow your experience with a bad boss to clutter your thinking about how a good boss would handle things.

Without intimate knowledge of the tasks you do they have no idea of what you are asked to do is intrinsically hard or you are simply doing it badly.

I've been on such teams and that isn't what happens. This is:

* Team mates do not like badmouthing their coworkers unless they do not like them. Hence, if a coworker complains about another coworkers' performance its as likely to be due to a personal problem as it is performance. Most coworkers also won't know each others' wages so they are in an even poorer position to judge relative performance.

* Managers without technical chops are incapable of distinguishing hard tasks from tasks that are being done badly or easy tasks and tasks that are being done well. They are incapable of distinguishing quality engineering from hackjobs that will blow up in 6 months. They will either default to just assuming every developer is more or less equally productive or use terrible proxies for productivity (like how late each developer stays at work or their scrum 'velocity').

* Good performers who do not have their achievements recognized will leave for better paid positions, leaving mediocre and poor developers. The quality of the product takes a dive. Profitability may also take a dive as a result if the industry is competitive and the quality of the software matters.

I doubt that the government will allow any remote work any time soon because most of the people here have never heard of a VPN or even know what a secure password is.

We live in a post Snowden world. It only takes one mistake to have all your data out in the wild.

I think attributing changes away from trusting employees to simply "bad management" and ignoring issues like employee malfeasance... is overly simplistic and dilutes complicated issue conversations.

There needs to be a balance between trust and security. It's easy to take it too far in either direction.

(I love working at the cafe and shared work spaces, but that isn’t the same.)

You speak of cargo cult, but your entire comment reeks of it. Ok, we understand, you like being able to isolate yourself. That's nice, and I'm glad you found a niche, but it's not the same for the vast majority of jobs and people. You call other people lazy, but I think perhaps that's just you. Social interaction and moving above an intermediate level where you can isolate yourself is hard work. Don't be so dismissive of others that strive for more.

Working remotely is great for the unambitious and the antisocial. Please stop trying to put those who do more down though.

I think you touched on a sad aspect of tech. For anyone to be "ambitious" or to "move above an intermediate level" they essentially have to become managers, which means less technical work. The likelihood of you joining the VP/higher ranks and still working on low level issues, as a respected technical fellow, are low to nill (Google, FB, MS have some positions but otherwise you're filtered into a manager to "move up.").

Your comment about "striving for more" is disrespectful to most developers/engineers.

How are people who spend their entire work days talking to others, but not actually working, "doing more?" I've seen more talkative/social people not getting work done than "antisocial" workers being "unambitious" or stagnant.

https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/working-papers...

http://www.cosocloud.com/press-release/connectsolutions-surv...

https://www.zenefits.com/blog/remote-employees-happier-and-m...

I think these are both true and would advocate for a work solution that allows amble work from home but encourages common face to face time especially if a team is tackling a complex issue. Maybe two or three days per week remote?

Remote vs face to face debate is about the interplay of folks trying to earn a living, providing value to an organization, living life, and companies making profits. In this regard, it looks like a balance of remote to face to face could increase productivity, happiness, and ability to work on complex tasks.

Let's say you're right and people are to blame for being lazy. How would you address this?

This isn't all that different from what in larger organisations is nowadays called agile transformation. How often do we hear "Yeah, that whole agile thing is nice but it doesn't work for us."?

The reason why 'agile' (or any other new approach for that matter) doesn't work in these cases often is that people are only used to doing things a certain way and are too lazy or otherwise unwilling to let go of that way and try a different approach.

Bringing about change on that scale is a long and often painful process. It's not that people are inherently lazy or stupid. It just can take considerable effort to unlearn habits you've gotten used to over a long time.

The crucial difference - at least so far - between the adoption of remote work and that of agile methods is that the latter for better or for worse nowadays seem to be largely accepted as the common approach for organising work (in the software industry at least).

As for remote work on the other hand there's no large-scale buy-in by (middle-)managers. I think this points to a larger issue at play here: Implementing remote work can surface shortcomings and waste.

If remote work requires workers to proactively communicate amongst themselves anyway what do you need traditional facilitators like middle-management for? With agile software development methods there are at least still roles like Scrum master or product owner that to some extent still resemble those traditional roles.

With remote work implemented properly we could very well arrive at a point where those roles aren't needed at all anymore.

But seriously... I would expect there to be examples of both - Good remote teams. Good office teams. Bad remote teams. Bad office teams.

And every shade in between.

I'd, personally, prefer a mix? Couple days in the office... couple days remote. Time to "schmooze" with the team. Time to be in a quiet place to concentrate.

Why does it have to be one or the other? Anyone that claims one extreme is better or worse generally misses the truth: The best option is generally somewhere in the middle of the extremes.

I can either put a lot of time and effort into remote communication, or I can work closely with people in a space that supports direct communication, putting that time and effort into whatever we're actually trying to do.

I freely grant that most office setups are shitty, so that for many people they waste time commuting and then waste plenty of time dealing with a bad office space and bad office culture. But that doesn't mean that offices can't be great places to work.

If I have my choice, it will always be working in close physical proximity with a team, just as long as we have a good space for that and a culture that supports actually getting things done. I like writing and am good at remote communication, but I'd rather save that energy for actual productive work.

But regardless you need to put in the same effort documenting in person. Being able to talk over a solution doesn't help anyone when you've left the company.

There are extensive sets of studies that show all of that it generally doesn't, where it especially doesn't, and why it doesn't (which the article mentions.)

Data > anecdote.

https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/working-papers...

http://www.cosocloud.com/press-release/connectsolutions-surv...

https://www.zenefits.com/blog/remote-employees-happier-and-m...

Speaking as someone who has worked in three different remote companies of varying sizes, I have not found any evidence that remote teams achieve this any more frequently than conventional ones do.

> - an atmosphere of trust rather than petty control freaks who need to constantly keep an eye on their subordinates in order to know they're still 'working'

Again, I have not seen that remote teams make this any easier than conventional ones. Moreover, I think proponents of remote work in general are unaware of, or vastly underestimate, how many remote coworkers fudge their productive time because they can get away with it.

You can just as easily establish a culture of trust in a conventional office environment.

> - adapting to different forms of communication

Sure, but it’s unrealistic you’ll appeal to everyone’s favorite mode of communication, and many people don’t really care to adapt because they don’t need to. It is just as unreasonable to expect in-office coworkers to adapt to remote workers as it is to expect remote workers to come into an office for face-to-face communication.

I agree with you that remote teams can be effective in communication and productivity; however, I think your comment does more to support the position you’re arguing against than it does to negate it. Listen to what you’re saying here:

> Working remotely requires the participants to be much more communicative because in such a setting communication for the most part doesn't just happen serendipitously, you have to work to make it happen.

This is fundamentally why most companies do not have remote teams. It’s attractive to remote workers and to teams that are entirely remote, but most people don’t really want to work remotely most or all of the time. What you are stating evidences this friction, because you keep reiterating that remote teams can be just as good if they put in the work, but that’s precisely the point - most people and teams really don’t want to put in the work because it’s an extra hassle.

You started your comment by attacking the idea that face-to-face interaction is important, but it quite demonstrably is important. By your own comment (and my experience, as well), remote teams need to invest a significant amount of “cooperative machinery” to make communication and productivity as seamless as it is in face-to-face interaction. That’s obviously not to say it cannot happen, or that it shouldn’t be a goal, but my point here is that this is an additional hurdle that companies considering remote teams need to be work on, which is frankly unattractive.

Some people are disciplined and motivated enough to work productively in any environment, and that’s fantastic. Some people are not intrinsically so, but they become that way in the environment of an office. And some people are simply never optimally productive! Also consider that while a very vocal minority of people want to work remotely, this does not typically jive with people who are in-office and who then have to deal with an additional friction to communicate with some subset of coworkers.

I guess to put my point more succinctly: yes, of course remote work can be wonderful and properly engaging for optimal productivity if the majority of your coworkers are intrinsically motivated and really want to work remotely. But that’s not the world we live in, and it’s not reasonable to put the effort of achieving that ideal on companies that have already established a culture that works for them through face-to-face interaction in the office.

People traveling for 30-90 (or more!) minutes to and from work, particularly the ones driving in traffic, are the commuters. And the ones I know that fall into that category hate it.

Good for you that you have such a nice situation, though!

Between a chatty wife, active kids, and unfinished projects around the house, I don't have the willpower or ability to avoid distractions at home. I'm more productive going into work even if you factor in the time spent driving.

Plus, my drive gives me some down time to listen to audiobooks or podcasts. I do look forward to self-driving cars though (adaptive cruise control helps a lot in the meantime...)

Commutes are not all bad. But the bad ones can be miserable. Self driving cars (for all drivers!) would make it so much better...

Generally it's not bad in the morning, and it's going home that's worse, but at that point, it matters less if I get sweaty.

I used to bike 30-45 minutes each way to work, and, yeah, I got very sweaty. I always wished there were a shower I could use there. It's not ideal biking (or walking) weather, for sure.

One additional anecdote I'd like to share: my coworker just moved to be under a mile from the office. His first time biking to the office from his new place was under five minutes. The other day he had to drive home. He messages me afterwards: "Took me 31 minutes to drive 9 blocks". (5:30pm and raining.)

So I love my bike, even in the Texas summer. :-)

I worked for a company in NYC for years and lived 8 miles from work. It took me a minimum of 90 minutes to get to work.

You seem to think I can either just uproot my family and move to some sort of utopia city with short commutes, good public schools, and well-paying jobs; OR I can just change New York City itself.

The fact is that most people in the US have commutes of 25+ minutes. Folks who walk to work are not the norm, and city schools across the US are a complete failure and joke. Don't assume your situation applies to everyone.

* According to the US Cencus Bureau: https://project.wnyc.org/commute-times-us/embed.html

I used to walk with my wife to her office and back when I started full remote work (it's been 6 years, in a fully remote company).

Also, you're free to rent coworking space or shared office space if you like to. Working remote means you have a choice - not that you have to work from home :)

A majority of people don't have to prefer something for it to become standard. It's possible for only a minority of influential or vocal people to prefer commuting for it to be widespread.

In that case, 'they' prefer it, not 'us'.

So while I don't like the commute, I do still prefer it to living closer to London.

(took some photos... https://gallery.tasuki.org/2017/10-few-hours-in-tallinn)

I lived 10 mins away on foot from my job. It was all fine and dandy for some time, but then things got seriously tense in the workplace and it meant the super short commute gave me no time to unwind. It ended up being mentally taxing to live so close to my workplace, even when I was not working since I ended up being near or walking in front basically anytime I got out. Nasty. Too long a commute and you're wasting so much time and energy in our life, but too close and it can have deleterious effects too.

When I'm at home I'm specifically not at work, which means I don't do any work, I don't think about work, I don't talk to anyone from work (unless there's an emergency that someone else can't fix).

What I think would be an awesome balance between this, is very small regional shared offices. Just shared office spaces that offer usage of their space as a 'subscription' to businesses, and as part of that subscription you get 24/7 access, a desk, internet, a kitchen etc. That way you don't have to have dirty dirty work things in your house, AND you only have to "commute" to a potentially very local office.

This is not quite a commute.

Still, sounds more like a daily walk that happens to be to the job than a commute.

If your job is well defined, e.g. make an app or a website design, you can do it anywhere in the world. The app/design is your deliverable that anyone can see and judge.

If your job is a poorly defined "management" or "product ownership", with no real deliverable, how can your work be judged? Your job turns into convincing other people that your job is useful. Work long hours, seem busy, attend meetings, leave the office late. An epitome of the corporate environment.

We'll finally be able to stop tying health insurance to employment in the ridiculous way that we currently do.

Skilled professionals will more often be able to make their own hours and find more variety/novelty in their work by taking jobs for a variety of customers.

And there will be so many freelancers that a solid industry for helping them connect with consumers of their services so that the hardest part of freelancing (finding work) starts to become a non-issue.

Transitions are messy, of course.

This is in general a common, elusive mistake: "We can't measure it, so it must be zero." Better to be ridiculous and say it's worth between $100 and $10,000.

Value is lower because of the consequences of being hard to measure.

Then there are actual bullshit jobs, whose value is difficult to measure because they have no value to begin with.

How do we know the value has been increased at all?

I can think of an awful lot more jobs that are pretty well defined but nonetheless can't be done in someone's living room.

The person you're responding to didn't say what you think they said.

That's the OP's exact words. Inspecting a ship hull is clearly defined, yet I cannot do it in my living room. Likewise mopping the floors at MacDonald's. Very clearly defined, yet cannot be done anywhere in the world; I have to go to the actual floor that needs mopping.

True, I probably get more done on the days I work from home as I don't have a commute, and there are fewer distractions, however, I find I can collaborate far more effectively when I'm in the office - instant messenger, email and video calls just don't cut it.

Plus I have an amazing commute, mostly along British A roads through the countryside.