Are Remote Offices Becoming The New Normal? (backchannel.com) 250
"As companies tighten their purse strings, they're spreading out their hires -- this year, and for years to come," reports Backchannel, citing interviews with executives and other workplace analysts. mirandakatz writes:
Once a cost-cutting strategy, remote offices are becoming the new normal: from GitHub to Mozilla and Wordpress, more and more companies are eschewing the physical office in favor of systems that allow employees to live out their wanderlust. As workplaces increasingly go remote, they're adopting tools to keep employees connected and socially fulfilled -- as Mozilla Chief of Staff David Slater tells Backchannel, "The wiki becomes the water cooler."
The article describes budget-conscious startups realizing they can cut their overhead and choose from talent located anywhere in the world. And one group of analysts calculated that the number of telecommuting workers doubled between 2005 and 2014, reporting that now "75% of employees who work from home earn over $65,000 per year, putting them in the upper 80th percentile of all employees, home or office-based." Are Slashdot's readers seeing a surge in telecommuting? And does anybody have any good stories about the digital nomad lifestyle?
The article describes budget-conscious startups realizing they can cut their overhead and choose from talent located anywhere in the world. And one group of analysts calculated that the number of telecommuting workers doubled between 2005 and 2014, reporting that now "75% of employees who work from home earn over $65,000 per year, putting them in the upper 80th percentile of all employees, home or office-based." Are Slashdot's readers seeing a surge in telecommuting? And does anybody have any good stories about the digital nomad lifestyle?
Hate the office life (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Hate the office life (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately, any job you can do from home can be done more cheaply from Bangalore. Just ask anyone who ever worked for IBM.
Re:Hate the office life (Score:4, Interesting)
That Bangalore pendulum swings quite a bit... the head count is cheaper, but the net productivity that translates to actual income for the company... that can actually be more expensive to get from another culture on the other side of the world, even if they do all speak English and hold college degrees.
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Much of the problem is not because of culture, but because of ... telecommuting. I have worked for several companies that had many of their employees working remotely, and they were all dysfunctional. Whether those remote employees were in India or somewhere else in America, didn't really matter. Telecommuting for just one or two days a week can work okay, be even then it depends on the employee. Many people treat their "work-from-home-day" as a day off. My neighbor works for Yahoo, and used to work fr
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He would usually start mowing his lawn by 8am, so I was happy when Marissa cancelled telecommuting.
Maybe he gets it out of the way first and then get to work, whats the problem? Was he drinking beers on the porch for the rest of the day?
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I mow my lawn from 9pm to 6am, almost every night:
https://www.thebusyhomeowner.c... [thebusyhomeowner.com]
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Why just Bangalore? I hate the traffic in Bangalore. So I live in a smaller town :)
Re:Hate the office life (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree - a lot is outsourced to India because it's cheaper. The problem is that they don't always produce what you want but what they think you want. What we in the west takes for granted and don't have to specify is uncharted territory in India. So if you order a pig you get a chicken.
Re:Hate the office life (Score:5, Informative)
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I was at a major uni during the dotboom. Especially when Y2K was hot, companies would hire just about anyone. Some of our less intellectually endowed students decided to get out as quick as they could to get in on the feast. They got snapped up, and probably axed as soon as the Y2K bug was past. They certainly didn't have what it took to be productive. Even after the Y2K bug, that sort of culture during the aughts was still prevalent. After the 2007-2008 El Tanko, it appears to have changed a bit.
However, b
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Ack, vain people are easily flattered. Vane people change their minds with the merest zephyr.
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True.
But one solution is to be on projects that deal with information not allowed to be sent out of the country.
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You cannot change this by going in to an office.
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Dang! Posted in the wrong place!
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while classic rock blasts on repeat over the speakers
Wait, what?? Is that a software job?
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Re:Hate the office life (Score:5, Insightful)
I've never worked in a dev house that doesn't have some kind of music blasting. Usually electronic, sometimes rock or indie - depends what the boss is into usually.
Damn. Does any other dev besides me actually require silence to be able to work? That's especially true when concentrating on solving difficult problems. I've never actually been in an office where they blast music, and I work in the videogame industry which is notoriously casual, even among software developers. I wouldn't last a week.
Besides which, peoples' taste varies so widely that it seems like you're just inflicting pain on everyone but yourself and the few you also share your musical tastes. To me, it's incredibly rude to assume you have the right to inflict your music on everyone else around you.
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Does any other dev besides me actually require silence to be able to work?
Yeah, mostly. Anything involving deep concentration needs silence. Rarely, but somewhat consistently, I find I am helped by something to listen to. Oddly though something repetitive on loop for a few hours seems to do the trick. That's so bad for other people it's break the Geneva convention I think.
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I've never worked in a dev house that doesn't have some kind of music blasting. Usually electronic, sometimes rock or indie - depends what the boss is into usually.
Damn. Does any other dev besides me actually require silence to be able to work?
Both. Sometimes I blast music to activate the idea factory then silence when I get focused, I don't want to disturb others. What I really need is to *not* be interrupted when I am in the zone because it is a fragile mental state to acquire.
In the office I interact, at home I smash it, easily twice as productive in terms of achieving goals I have identified. It becomes a good balance because commuting takes productive energy.
These are the kind of life/work balances we should expect the 21st century to del
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I had only one dev job where they had a virtual jukebox loaded with music which played at annoying volumes all day long. The real problem was that the people who loaded it up had terrible generic radio friendly taste in music. I heard the same dull songs day after day with the worst offender being a guy who queued up La Bamba and Come on Eileen every single day near knock off time.
I couldn't stand it, so I had to bring in a big set of headphones and play something I liked just to drown out the 80's / 90's r
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I had only one dev job where they had a virtual jukebox loaded with music which played at annoying volumes all day long.
The only thing worse than a live jukebox is a live speakerphone. I had an officemate that would routinely sit through one or two hour meetings with the speaker phone on. I confronted him several times but he didn't stop until I escalated it to our bosses, at which point we both looked stupid. I'd take top 40 any day over that.
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The speakerphone conference call is one reason I prefer working from home - I can have open/loud conference calls without worry of bothering anyone, and without trying to scramble around to book a conference room.
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I've never worked in a dev house that doesn't have some kind of music blasting.
That is odd. I have worked for half a dozen software companies, and consulted for many more, and never once seen this. If you want music, you use headphones.
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I've never worked in a dev house that doesn't have some kind of music blasting. Usually electronic, sometimes rock or indie - depends what the boss is into usually.
If you don't like it, report them to ASCAP, BMI and SESAC. I bet they didn't bother to pay for the "jukebox" licence required to legally to play a selection of music for employees (except an over-the-air radio station). The $500/year/pro bill from each of ASCAP/BMI/SESAC is probably enough to scare the boss into silence.
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WHy are you wearing uncomfortable clothes? Wear a tshirt, just like every other developer I've ever known does. They don't like it? Let them fire you- the market is hot right now, you'll probably make 40% more. Also, who the hell plays music over the speakers at an office?
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Dressing in uncomfortable clothes, sitting in a freezing office, while classic rock blasts on repeat over the speakers.
Or just get a normal software dev job where you can wear normal cloths like t-shirts / polos in a normally heated office without any annoying music.
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Software dev here. Going to the office is worst part of the job. Dressing in uncomfortable clothes, sitting in a freezing office, while classic rock blasts on repeat over the speakers. Always looking for a remote job so i don't have to deal with that shit any more.
I work remotely 100% and while I would say I prefer it over the office, it is a double-edged sword. Many of my co-workers are poor communicators and collaborators. Working remotely makes it much more difficult. Then there is the way I think it's sold to executive management which is essentially that employees will work more hours and be more available thus crushing work/life balance. I can tolerate what I do for a living but I want a division between it and my personal life. Working remotely makes it h
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if you feel like you can do your job just as well from home (All the time) the chances are your job is at risk. Because that job can easily be done from anywhere else in the world for less money.
There is value working face to face with your coworkers. Bouncing ideas off them seeing if they find a better solution to the mess you feel like you are coding yourself into. Helping out others you may be coming to a deadline while they help you when it gets to you.
Yes it will require many developers to get past th
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I have a question: Does your "office job" involve you making lattes? We may have different definitions of "office".
I have a remote option but go in anyway (Score:5, Insightful)
I get things done quicker leaving the distractions of my home and going to a dedicated work environment.
I also prefer in person collaboration, problems get resolved much quicker.
Of course, it helps that my job is only a 5 min drive away, I like the people there, and there's plenty of free food/drinks.
Re:I have a remote option but go in anyway (Score:4, Interesting)
The office can be a good thing, especially if your home is not an ideal "developer" environment. My home is less than perfect for work (wife, kids), but it's still more productive than sitting in my cube. Interruptions by e-mail and chat are so much more manageable than the "Hey, you got a minute?s" that happen all too often in the office. Also, there are times in the office where it would actually be better to fire up remote screen sharing instead of walking back and forth between cubes - when we're remote, things get shared electronically by default, copy-paste of code snippets, etc. can be a whole lot more efficient than listening to someone who doesn't know what they are doing try to explain what they are trying to do...
Re:I have a remote option but go in anyway (Score:5, Interesting)
The thing with the "hey you got a minute" is that your productivity is not all that matters. Its the group productivity that does, and the group productivity almost always increases from those, even if yours suffers. Someone coming over to you means they were blocked, and are going form near 0 to near 100 by interrupting you.
Re:I have a remote option but go in anyway (Score:5, Interesting)
That is what a group chat window is for.
10:03 Guy A: Guys, I need a second opinion. ...
10:03 Guy B: Shoot
10:06 Guy A: *insert page long explanation, no one was interrupted while he was typing it*
10:08 Guy C: I know, you just
Guy B stopped paying attention to the chat because he was focusing on something else, but Guy C was taking a moment to collect his thoughts anyway. Far more efficient than Guy D (who didn't feature in this little story) being known as the go-to guy for ALL problems, tanking his productivity constantly.
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The thing with the "hey you got a minute" is that your productivity is not all that matters.
I couldn't agree more. I've created so much from going to other offices (and others coming to mine), half informally, half trying to solve some problem. Sitting down and enforcing 100% productivity can often be counter-productive. Anyone can make a new implementation of quicksort or implement some well defined API, but these unscheduled quasi meetings where engineers wander into other engineers' offices is where the real inventing happens.
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I agree, and, ironically, if people would learn remote work skills, they could (and some do) "Hey, you got a minute?" me from anywhere in the world.
90% of the time, the team is better off if I do have a minute and I can help them. 50% of the time, they are asking something that I can only help them with a "well, let's ask Google" approach. When I'm physically present in the office, I seem to get a whole lot more of those lower quality requests for help. Even when I get one remotely, I can handle it so mu
Re:I have a remote option but go in anyway (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's nice to separate work from home.
In my job, we had the "working from home" folks. We could more often than not, be unable to reach them on phone, let alone email. I ran in to situations where they'd be on a phone on a tractor or calling from Toys R' Us.
We had one guy that lived in Paradise, California and used to lob dye and pry jobs to us. We had another that would try to get us to do his job for him "because it's my work from home day and I can't come in". We had another slacker living in Maui.
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Several jobs ago, when I had my kid, there were a few occasions and days that I needed to be home and take care of him. On those occasions, I took the work from home, but made it clear to my colleagues that they could call me if and when needed. I got my work done while he was asleep, spoke to colleagues at random, and my productivity was none the worse for it.
I do get your point that it's too tempting to abuse such a perk, and chances are that it is. Which is why I prefer going to work and separating
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I do get your point that it's too tempting to abuse such a perk, and chances are that it is. Which is why I prefer going to work and separating it from my personal life
I don't think the problem is abuse. You want people to interact and challenge each other with different ideas. It's really hard to do that informally over the internet. Saying something on a company slack channel or creating a pull request comes with a lot more friction than walking into a co-workers office down the hall and running your "crazy" idea by them.
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Same here. I have a job that can be perfectly done from home, but I do the 15 min drive to the office. I do the job there, and return home at the end of the day once it's done. If I happen to be under the weather, I tell my boss that I'll be working from home.
Mainly, sitting at home, I just don't feel like there's a line b/w working and not, which is why I dislike the work from home option.
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I get things done quicker leaving the distractions of my home and going to a dedicated work environment.
This is a sign of poor self discipline.
I also prefer in person collaboration, problems get resolved much quicker.
That is what office days are for, interaction and collaboration. Work from home is concentration and deliberation.
Of course, it helps that my job is only a 5 min drive away, I like the people there, and there's plenty of free food/drinks.
Same here, but I still work from home because I need the extra productivity working from home so I can get everything done.
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It is possible. First time I had that kind of commute it was because we moved the office and I managed to make a good case for a building that was close to my existing house, then I moved to another house that was even closer. Next time I just bought a house that was close to the office. Last 10 years or so, there hasn't been any place that I would want to live anywhere close to the offices, so we've lived farther.
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Re: I have a remote option but go in anyway (Score:5, Insightful)
Major difference between my home and office working situation: at home, my office door locks, and my family knows to respect my space while I am working. At work, I have a cube, no door, and I am present to serve whoever makes the effort to walk to my cube entrance.
The family is still a distraction, but they're much easier to manage than the drop-in crowd.
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The family is still a distraction, but they're much easier to manage than the drop-in crowd.
I have the option of both and I chose to go to the open floor plan. The drop-in crowd and the distracting conversations often result in problems being solved long before they escalate wildly out of control and then hitting my desk anyway. Yes there's the occasional day that I just need to focus on one very specific task, and on those days I'll work from home. But for the most part, that is not a net benefit for me.
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Wow... it's really common apparently for people to not understand that their job is not just to sit at a computer coding all day, and that by doing that, they are far from 100% productive.
Your job is to work as part of a team - it's to make sure that all the parts of the team are able to function. Those office door conversations are hugely efficient communication about design, how things currently work, how things should work, what who is working on, when, why the design looks like that rather than somethi
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Well, if job performance and reward metrics are based on your direct personal productivity, as measure by code commits, etc., as is often the case, then management is explicitly saying that you are wrong about that...
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Yes, teamwork and cohesion is important... however, at the end of the project, some things need to have gotten done.
I have literally, without exaggeration, witnessed 80 to 90% declines in actual productivity due to team coordination activities. Things that should take a week taking 2 to 3 months because of team coordination, meetings, informal meetings, drop-ins, re-discussion of issues that were discussed and decided months ago, circling back around to the original plan, etc.
The team is important, but it'
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good for the environement (Score:4, Insightful)
hopefully it will help reducing the pollution due to the millions of people driving to work...
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It's not just the burning of fuel that's saved. Cars off the road don't have to be built, maintained and recycled as often. Cars off the road means the roads don't have to be constructed to carry as much capacity. Cars off the road mean less parking spaces that need to be paved. For me the big one is: Cars off the road means an extra hour, sometimes two, of time spent not-driving every day... when you only get 16 waking hours in a day, getting 10% of them given back is a huge bonus.
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I drove 3 to 4 hours a day getting to and from work.
The commute is the mind killer.
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I do a mix of remote and in-office, and a lot of days I remote at the start and end of the day just so I can miss the rush hours. Sailing in to work, and back home, in 15 minutes or less on your own private interstate highway is so much better for the soul than 45 minutes of dealing with tailgating aggressive lane changers and all the other BS that happens on that same stretch of road during rush hours.
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All work and no play makes for a shallow character... do make sure to get out and live life some too.
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Unless you live 70 miles from work, and have to take one of the most dangerous highways in the state to get there and back.
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I drive 1 hour a day to and from work. The commute is the mind cleanser. It helps sort problems out in your head, and context shift you into and out of work mode.
Perhaps your issue was living a retarded distance from work, not the fact that you commuted.
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I'd be surprised if working from home was actually more environmentally helpful. I would think the cost of heating / cooling an entire house for one or two people would require more energy than it takes to commute to work. If your spouse is already home with the kids I could see the green argument, but otherwise I would have thought going to the office to be the green option.
After typing that I went to Google as found this [agreeneroffice.co.uk] which does back up my assertion. Most search results do state the opposite, but since
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Due to the large thermal mass of a house, turning down the heat for 8 hours each day won't have a dramatic impact on energy use. You'll save something, but it's probably in the single-digit percentages. When you get home, you have to run the furnace on high continuously for quite a while to bring the temperature back up, negating most of the savings from not running it intermittently while away at work.
Meanwhile, driving even a fuel-efficient car uses as much or more energy than a furnace that can heat a la
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You obviously didn't read the study. Your assumptions are wrong and you have no numbers. Out here, each additional degree on the thermostat adds about ten per cent to the bill.
If your number is correct (which I doubt), that applies to keeping it low all the time. That's not what we're talking about.
From https://energy.gov/energysaver... [energy.gov]:
You can save as much as 10% a year on heating and cooling by simply turning your thermostat back 7-10F for 8 hours a day from its normal setting. The percentage of savings from setback is greater for buildings in milder climates than for those in more severe climates.
Like I said, in the single-digit range. (Changing the temperature setting even more wouldn't help because a house would barely drop 10F in 8 hours anyway.)
My average-sized house uses about 50 therms of gas per month for heating over an annual average, which is about the same as 50 gallons of gasoline. Throw in 50% extra for cooling in the summer,
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require more energy than it takes to commute to work.
Even if it requires the same energy the net benefit is still to the environment. Centralised electricity generation and combined gas heating systems are far more efficient than an electric car ever will be.
To put numbers to it, I live in an apartment. Based on weekend energy use during winter I use roughly 12 kWh to heat my apartment day/night when someone is always home. Being kind we'll say that all of that is during the day, but I'm home for 1/4 of that anyway so we're down to 9kWh to heat an apartment
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require more energy than it takes to commute to work.
Even if it requires the same energy the net benefit is still to the environment.
When you take the commuters of the road it also means it takes the pressure off people who are forced to commute.
Re: good for the environement (Score:2)
... And there's the location of the pollution too... My previous job was situated in a city where pollution has more effect to more people than where my home is. I guess that's a common situation.
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It will just move the pollution to a third world country.
It's about time (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It's about time (Score:4)
Have you ever actually worked for a proper manager? I've heard about them, but only as fictional academic constructs.
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I'm waiting for the employee that knows how to do the job and can do it well and on time without management. I hear this is possible, but I suspect only as an academic premise.
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Nope, employees all need that stare of disapproval to get them going. Without the manager's withering scowl, employees would all stay home, smoke weed and watch TV all day.
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Oh man, I wish my team would mellow out more. Instead I get the drama.
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Oh man, I wish my team would mellow out more. Instead I get the drama.
Maybe you need to let them work from home more often.
Re:It's about time (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm waiting for the employee that knows how to do the job and can do it well and on time without management. I hear this is possible, but I suspect only as an academic premise.
At one job I went two years without a manager and the work still got prioritized, including adjustments based on business needs, and completed on time. Part of the feedback from my various managers is that I got a lot done, get it done on time, and keep everyone happy, but that I don't meet with the manager regularly enough to discuss what I am doing. And they think that they need to somehow "fix it".
My thought is that you have met such an employee. But that you think that you knew better and had to tell them what to do. More than likely they ignored you and went about getting the job done.
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My comment was meant to be somewhat insulting as a response to an insulting post. I have met such employees who get things done. They are not too common though and become rarer as a company grows in size.
I think those who don't have direct managers do still have a lot of people running about given them orders anyway, they're being asked to attend the project meetings, and so on.
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Proper managers can manage this. It makes sense, it's about time.
Even "proper managers" aren't telepathic. I know that what I do doesn't produce results in any predictable fashion. Sometimes I'm stumped, sometimes I'm working down dead ends, sometimes I'm running a maze with no exit, sometimes I spend forever tracking down a bug I missed while other times I'm just blazing through. Even if I'm asked to do roughly the same again subtle differences often throw estimates totally out of whack. In the long run my bad beat story will wear thin that these assignments aren't hard
Great way to take the family on Summer vacation... (Score:3)
Instead of hitting the road for an intense two weeks of "time off" - we've taken a couple of 3-4 week summer vacations where we travel (off work) for a week, settle down somewhere not-home and I work remote for a week or two, then travel a bit more as time off. The office doesn't "lose me" for two weeks straight, and the family gets a longer trip, even if they do have to "share me" with work in the middle of it.
There's definite value in "face-to-face time" - especially with people who don't know how to work remote. But, for big corporations, employees who know how to work remotely are more effective at inter-site (cross country, and around the world) collaboration, working with consultants, and using modern collaboration tools - even with the face-to-face crowd.
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This is great, if your job involves inter-site skills. But you can't split the employees up this way. If you say that half the employees from San Francisco are allowed to work from home or a remote office, and the other half are required to head down to San Jose every morning, it can be bad for morale. Now you could split it up into job types or duties. But even then there will be one or two trouble cases that you can't trust to work from home and still get stuff done, and morale doesn't stay up if you
Downer sides of remote offices? (Score:2)
You must be a new article here? Or am I just making excuses for the decline of Slashdot?
Anyway, no funny or insightful posts yet, and not even any mentions that I could find of the important issues, especially the negative sides of those issues.
For some people it's a good thing, but in my case it's much harder to stay focused on work when I'm at home. Lack of high-bandwidth contact with my coworkers is also a major problem. Security problems, too, both for the physical security of corporate documents and eq
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Looking at some of the points you raised;
High-bandwidth contact with co-workers. In the team I'm in there is one other at the site I work at. The rest work in different offices or at home, so we hold meetings via Lync (Skype for Business). That
Re: Great way to take the family on Summer vacatio (Score:2)
I just prefer to work for a company that offers unlimited vacation and allows me to take extended time off, more than once a year.
We usually do 3 weeks in July and I take off another 4-5 weeks of time off throughout the rest of the year.
Modern, forward-thinking companies have been moving this way as of late in order to attract and retain top talent. I'm kinda surprised it's not talked about more here on ./ considering the audience.
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Hah, no. "Unlimited time off" is code for "you have no contracted amount of time off that you're allowed to take off, so we can make you feel guilty about taking any amount of time off at all, while making it much harder to track how much time you really are taking".
It's awesome (Score:2)
Yeah I don't think I can ever go back to going into an office everyday. Or really even going back to have a regular job rather than just doing contract software development.
The only thing that would make things better is an actual decent single payer healthcare system like every other civilized country. Yeah for profit healthcare insurance tied to the vagaries of your employment situation, genius!
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Would you consider something like the UK's NHS as a single payer system?
My situation... (Score:2)
As I write this, I am in an apartment my wife and I rented in Rome for a month. I put in a few hours every day.
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I hope you're good enough to pull that off. I've had some "international developers" who seemed to think that it was acceptable to work a full-time day job in the home country while still charging 40 hours a week to the Americans for a few hours every evening they spend replying to e-mails on their cell-phone while out to dinner and maybe do 30-60 minutes of coding when they get home. It is not, and people who pull that crap will be replaced.
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Pretty much, I put in the same hours I do when I'm home.
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IOW, your are a slacker.
Work/Family Balance (Score:3)
Nope (Score:2)
I'm on the job market now, haven't seen more remote jobs than I did previously. If anything the pendulum is moving away from full time remote. And I don't blame them for it- I've done the remote thing, I was nowhere near as effective. I've seen other go remote, they always lost efficiency. Those hallway meeting, brainstorming sessions, co-working sessions, easy quick meetings where you can scribble on paper/whiteboards and read body language- they're all important. So is the chit chat and socializati
A wave of steel, toxic fumes & rubber dust (Score:2, Insightful)
They could do it perfectly well from private offices at home without spending two ours of driving and without destroying the environment. But the problem is that the current cast of business leaders does not understand technology well.
Even at the highest levels we see a complete technological ignorance. For example, John Podesta could just turn on two factor authenti
Office Interaction (Score:2)
Just an anecdotal point: in my last large engineering firm, I went to another engineer's office almost daily and we would go back and forth about dozens of ideas. Only one tenth of them would be implemented, only one half of those would be shown to management, and only one third of tho
from GitHub to Mozilla and Wordpress, (Score:2)
how about you find some more real world examples other than stagnate dot com crap, and "startups"
there's plenty of offices that do other things than shuffle documents around all day
It works better when everyone does it (Score:5, Interesting)
I've worked remotely for most the last 20 years, in two different companies, Google and IBM. The two experiences have been very different.
My current employer is Google, and I've been working from home full time, 500 miles from the nearest office, for the last three years. Google has great tools for remote work, including an excellent video conferencing system (Google Video Conferencing (GVC), essentially an enterprise version of Google Hangouts) that is deployed in all conference rooms, with good cameras, microphones and screens. I have a dedicated GVC unit in my home office, a Chromebox connected to a touchscreen, so it's trivial for me to be remotely added to all meetings. Also, Google runs on e-mail, all documents are in Google Docs with its great collaboration/sharing features, and a great deal of informal communication occurs over Hangouts chat. For software engineers like me, a tremendous amount of communication also occurs via the bug tracker and in the code review tools.
So... it would seem that it would be easy to work remotely at Google. It's not. The tools are great, and in fact a lot of people I work with don't even realize that I'm remote because Googlers rarely meet the people they interact with only occasionally. But the company philosophy is that co-locating all of your employees is the best way for them to be productive and maximizes opportunistic interactions that spark creative ideas, so there are very, very few people who work remotely like I do. I recently came across a shared spreadsheet where NetOps tracks all of the people who, like me, have VPN systems configured for access to the engineering VLAN. There are 14 of us, out of ~25,000 engineers.
Because there are so few people working remotely, most Googlers simply don’t give any thought to how to manage their interactions with someone they never see in person. The people I work with only occasionally are no problem; everyone expects those interactions to be electronic anyway. The people I work with closely are no problem; they adapt. But it’s a challenge to keep my presence and concerns visible to those who fall in between. My approach is to try to overcommunicate via email, etc., and to travel to Mountain View regularly (roughly one week out of six) and make sure I get face time with everyone while I’m there. It works, but it’s definitely less efficient and I regularly find that I miss out on important bits of information that everyone else knows.
For perhaps 10 of my 15 years with IBM I worked from home full time. The tools weren’t nearly as good as what I have today at Google. We did use chat a lot (Lotus SameTime), and email was a communications staple, but we didn’t have good document collaboration tools (we emailed MS Office docs, mostly), issue tracking or code review systems. We did a lot of teleconferences.
But working remotely for IBM was at least an order of magnitude easier than working remotely for Google. Why? Because everyone I worked with was also working from home. Everyone understood that if you needed to communicate something, you had to put it in an email, you couldn’t rely on chance meetings at the micro kitchen or in the halls. Everyone expected that during meetings they could expect random house noises, dogs barking, kids playing, whatever. Not that my colleagues at Google ever complain -- or, I’m sure, would ever even think to complain -- but I can’t help but recognize that when random interruptions occur they’re always coming from me and that therefore it’s my job to minimize them.
While working remotely at IBM, I rarely traveled to see other employees (actually, I think it would have been good to do it a little bit more). I really only met the other IBMers I worked with when we attended meetings at customer sites... but even most of our customer meetings were via teleconference.
Another difference was that at IBM it was expected that people might have slow-ish Internet connections. At Google
I prefer the office... (Score:2)
Great, so long as you just "turn a crank." (Score:2)
But, for REAL system design and implementation, it's the professional interaction and collaboration that is the source of novel ideas, and the casual walker-by who intrudes with a few relevant facts that change the entire narrative. These have no comparable form in "discussion groups," because you have to make a specific effort to join a conversation, which eliminates the "casual listener" that sparks a radical rethink. That's why it's called "group think."
Many programmers like the solitude of doing their
Re: (Score:2)
Just remember, if you can telecommute to your job than anyone can...
Posting as Coward for a reason. If you are good at your job, nobody can replace you, your depth of knowledge about the product, the market, your coworkers, the tools, systems and processes your company uses. Most skilled knowledge workers need 6 months to "get up to speed" in a new organization, and continue to grow into more valuable employees as the years go by.
If you're just taking up space in the office, then, yeah, you'll need to be present to do that. Remote workers who do nothing are available rea
Re:Streamlined Outsourcing (Score:5, Insightful)
If you are absolutely invaluable then there may be two surprises. One is that you get replaced anyway because upper management is stupid. The other is that you're not as invaluable as you thought. In both cases you have to prove that you're invaluable instead of just assuming it. I thought I was invaluable to a critical project once, but they went and cancelled the project and then downsized...
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There may be a small percentage who are "elite", but if we put our stubborn egos aside, the reality is that most of us are replaceable, and if somebody in Timbuktu can do your job for 1/4 your salary, that's far too attractive for a bean counter to ignore, even if some intangibles may be against it.
There is enough Management by Spreadsheet being done that the intangibles will be ignored because those managing by spreadsheet won't know and won't care abo
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I was once replaced by two people, which I assume cost them more. Nothing to do with management by spreadsheet - my face didn't fit.
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If they're trying to build a fast food franchise type of business, then, sure, the bulk of employees are just another commodity.
People who try to develop software with commodity developers get what they pay for, or less. Generally less.
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Untrue. Not everyone provides as high quality results in the consistent and reliable manner as I do. I haven't seen an office or co-worker in 4 years.
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Look around for another post... I worked for a traditional crew like that, high turnover, miserable bunch. Felt good being part of the turnover there.