'Will Remote Work Kill Innovation?' Ask Silicon Valley Experts (mercurynews.com) 110
Remote work "is here to stay," argues a new article in Silicon Valley's newspaper The Mercury News (also re-published in the East Bay Times). But they've also asked industry professionals around Silicon Valley whether this will hurt our ability to innovate.
Software engineer/entrepreneur Joyce Park (who's worked in Silicon Valley over 20 years): "Fast feedback is what we're all about in this town. That's what's gone away... If you have a dumb idea or people hate your idea then you don't have to spend more time fleshing it out, and that means you don't have to spend more time defending it. When you're trying to do really innovative work, it takes so many meetings. Zoom meetings are different than normal meetings because they're much more performative. Most engineers aren't really in the putting-on-a-show business... Pretty is the death of innovation."
Park also worries about young tech workers, who represent the future of innovation and aren't in offices absorbing knowledge. "Who's going to mentor them, who's going to make them successful? A lot of the craft is just seeing problems and seeing how they were successfully or unsuccessfully solved."
Tarun Wadhwa, who's taught new innovation methods at Carnegie Mellon University's Silicon Valley outpost, most recently this spring: "The sparks wouldn't fly," Wadhwa said. "The students were just as brilliant as they've always been but the class wasn't as able to help them advance that brilliance as it once was." What was missing, Wadhwa suspects, was the free-flowing, back-and-forth-and-sideways exchange of ideas that happens in person, especially during extra-curricular gatherings such as when students from different teams and different backgrounds go out for coffee together after class...
Another perspective from a long-time Silicon Valley veteran: Mike Strasser, whose mechanical engineering career and current employment as general manager of Campbell med-tech startup Imperative Care straddle the hardware and software worlds, believes a reduced ability to develop a rapport with colleagues when working apart poses problems across both sectors. However, the problem is worse in hardware, where teams can't pass a prototype around a table, and easier in software, especially with collaboration apps supplementing video meetings.
The move to remote work has forced technologists to find new solutions, Strasser noted, such as relatively inexpensive 3D printers that can make prototypes at home.
Bay Area venture capitalist Peter Rojas, a partner at Betaworks Ventures: "We have this historic opportunity to reorganize working life and to rethink where people live and where they work...." Successful companies will be those that can nurture talent and build a strong culture while taking advantage of the opportunities remote work presents, he said. "This idea that you can only get a sense of a person in person, I think we're really getting away from that now," Rojas said.
He said his firm has money in more than 100 companies — including one that makes video-conferencing collaboration software — and none appear hurt by the shift to remote. "Everybody adjusted," he said, "and figured out how to get their stuff done."
Software engineer/entrepreneur Joyce Park (who's worked in Silicon Valley over 20 years): "Fast feedback is what we're all about in this town. That's what's gone away... If you have a dumb idea or people hate your idea then you don't have to spend more time fleshing it out, and that means you don't have to spend more time defending it. When you're trying to do really innovative work, it takes so many meetings. Zoom meetings are different than normal meetings because they're much more performative. Most engineers aren't really in the putting-on-a-show business... Pretty is the death of innovation."
Park also worries about young tech workers, who represent the future of innovation and aren't in offices absorbing knowledge. "Who's going to mentor them, who's going to make them successful? A lot of the craft is just seeing problems and seeing how they were successfully or unsuccessfully solved."
Tarun Wadhwa, who's taught new innovation methods at Carnegie Mellon University's Silicon Valley outpost, most recently this spring: "The sparks wouldn't fly," Wadhwa said. "The students were just as brilliant as they've always been but the class wasn't as able to help them advance that brilliance as it once was." What was missing, Wadhwa suspects, was the free-flowing, back-and-forth-and-sideways exchange of ideas that happens in person, especially during extra-curricular gatherings such as when students from different teams and different backgrounds go out for coffee together after class...
Another perspective from a long-time Silicon Valley veteran: Mike Strasser, whose mechanical engineering career and current employment as general manager of Campbell med-tech startup Imperative Care straddle the hardware and software worlds, believes a reduced ability to develop a rapport with colleagues when working apart poses problems across both sectors. However, the problem is worse in hardware, where teams can't pass a prototype around a table, and easier in software, especially with collaboration apps supplementing video meetings.
The move to remote work has forced technologists to find new solutions, Strasser noted, such as relatively inexpensive 3D printers that can make prototypes at home.
Bay Area venture capitalist Peter Rojas, a partner at Betaworks Ventures: "We have this historic opportunity to reorganize working life and to rethink where people live and where they work...." Successful companies will be those that can nurture talent and build a strong culture while taking advantage of the opportunities remote work presents, he said. "This idea that you can only get a sense of a person in person, I think we're really getting away from that now," Rojas said.
He said his firm has money in more than 100 companies — including one that makes video-conferencing collaboration software — and none appear hurt by the shift to remote. "Everybody adjusted," he said, "and figured out how to get their stuff done."
One would think (Score:5, Insightful)
These old people have never seen how young people interact online with their friends.
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These old people have never seen how young people interact online with their friends.
It's kinda hard to draw a network topology or software flowchart on an iPhone screen. Even on the Plus it's not really useful.
Meeting rooms with free food, I mean whiteboards, WHITEBOARDS, are crucial to innovation.
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WHITEBOARDS, are crucial to innovation.
My 4K computer monitor is 60-inches across and is bigger than most whiteboards.
Not everyone uses an iPhone screen as their interface to the world.
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Let us know how easy it is for your remote coworkers to see what you write on that with dry erase markers.
The great thing about whiteboard is that it's easy to freehand a drawing and then change it.
I have a pair of 4K monitors on my desk at home, but I still use my 42"-class whiteboard for a lot of things.
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There's this thing called software and some of it emulates a whiteboard. You shouldn't use a dry erase marker on a monitor screen.
Re: One would think (Score:5, Insightful)
But you're missing the point. Random chatter and undirected discussion is extremely important. Often referred to as "water cooler meetings" you simply don't get that in an online meeting because only one person can really talk at a time.
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Cool. You gonna buy that for everybody?
Why not? Compared to the cost of office space and commuting, the price of a digital pencil and drawing pad is negligible.
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A digital pencil's learning curve is certainly higher than just popping the cap off a dry erase marker. But it can do much more once you learn to take advantage of the features.
I tend to write pseudocode rather than drawing diagrams, so I haven't learned more than just the basics. By my daughter is a virtuoso with a digital pen and can do amazing stuff. She can draw charts that convert to XML or MS Visio on the fly.
You can also "replay" the session or fast-forward, so you can see how the diagram changed,
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Also handwriting recognition is so good now that it can even read by scrawl, and convert it into something a human can decipher.
Being able to copy/paste in images and documents is really handy too. Say you have a flowchart you want to mark up, with a whiteboard you have to copy it by hand first.
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I don't recall any meeting where the smell was a constructive contribution.
Clearly you haven't been sniffing enough dry erase markers.
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I don't recall any meeting where the smell was a constructive contribution.
Many a time [unpleasant] smell has found a way to make people want to wrap the meeting up with great haste. Smell is a highly underused tool to get to a decision quickly :)
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Compared to the cost of office space and commuting, the price of a digital pencil and drawing pad is negligible.
No kidding. In 2018, the annual cost of office space in Seattle was $40 per square foot [seattletimes.com]. The nationwide average was $30.
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But you're missing the point. Random chatter and undirected discussion is extremely important. Often referred to as "water cooler meetings" you simply don't get that in an online meeting because only one person can really talk at a time.
^^This, exactly. I have lots of experience in this, but an old anecdote from when I was a kid reading Readers' Digest is probably a better illustration.
Oil companies were looking for a cheaper way to protect something small explosive charges as they were being put down into a well. The incumbent was aluminum housings, and they were pretty expensive for a one-off use. The 'think tank' team tasked with solving the problem was getting frustrated, and out of sheer exasperation one of them said 'why don't we jus
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Random chatter and undirected discussion is extremely important. Often referred to as "water cooler meetings" you simply don't get that in an online meeting because only one person can really talk at a time.
These meetings create the type of discussion where some guy proposes something everybody who wants to go back to work know is obvious, and they're already planning, but they're politely saying, "that's a great idea, Bill." Bill then leaves those impromptu thinking, "oh, that was so productive and useful" and everybody else is thinking, "if we hadn't wasted those 15 minutes that got me completely out of my zone, I'd have gotten so much accomplished towards that. Now I need to get my brain to context switch b
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Just change your teams status to "busy" or "do not disturb", and if they complain you don't join the meeting tell them you where on a call/Zoom etc with someone else. Problem solved.
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For $100 (or less) you can pick up a decent drawing tablet that can be used with whiteboard software to freehand draw whatever you want and instantly share it with people around the world.
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>It's kinda hard to draw a network topology or software flowchart on an iPhone screen. Even on the Plus it's not really useful.
My daughter and her friends are generally on their computers, not their phones, when they're interacting for long periods of time. They do role play, watch movies together, talk through ideas. The COVID lockdowns didn't actually change anything for them, because remote interactions were already how they functioned 90% of the time.
The tech for remotely-interactive white-boarding already exists - somebody just needs to package it (or maybe just publicize what they already have on the market). Heck, Microsoft
Killing innovation (Score:2)
Remote work isn't killing innovation. Code review is killing innovation, specifically the approval part. When a teammate scrutinizes every line of code and demands changes before you can push, no fresh idea survives the gauntlet.
What they have seen (Score:4, Insightful)
That's what this is about. There's around $1 trillion tied up in office buildings and while they won't be worthless they'll be significantly devalued by 1/4-1/3 of people suddenly working from home.
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In time, they'll refill again. The networks will get bigger. The has-beens that head to Austin will be drunk on Lake Travis as their franchises slowly decay.
Maybe Simon Malls will buy them, like they bought JC Pennys and all of the other tanked pandemic over-leveraged publicly-traded stocks.
Every week, Oracle customers demonstrate their masochism, and dream of migrations. SAP should move to Austin, too, which could become the Junkyard of Trailing Edge Technologies.
Re: What they have seen (Score:3)
' And let's face it - Silly Valley isn't about innovation any more - it's about capital chasing anything speculative, getting in early, pumping it, then dumping if on the bagholders.
The actual work can be done anywhere.. that was the promise of the Internet, and now we're living it.
' I'll never work in an office again if I live to be 100.
The people pushing the lie that office towers will fill up again HAVE to be
Re: What they have seen (Score:2)
Your generalisations are wrong. These days all my colleagues are overseas, but I still want to go in to an office. I worked from home 1999 to 2008, by which point I was utterly sick of it. I need to get out of the house for my own well being, and I certainly donâ(TM)t like having work in my home either. I like being able to work from home when I need to or to mix things up (typically one or two days a week), but not full time.
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is how much stocks will devalue as the commercial real estate market bubble bursts like a rotten zit. That's what this is about. There's around $1 trillion tied up in office buildings and while they won't be worthless they'll be significantly devalued by 1/4-1/3 of people suddenly working from home.
Yeah I agree. There are huge amounts of money to be lost if remote working becomes a fundamental shift, so huge amounts of money will be spent trying to maintain the status quo. In the UK we saw this when, in September before the second wave hit, businesses and govt started making noise about lazy home workers who needed to get back into the office.
The thing is, I probably prefer going into an office, but there are a lot of things I would like that I simply can't afford. If there is one thing that remote wo
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In fact, I think cities will thrive. Commercial real estate is one of the parasites currently harming it, attracting bubble speculation while driving the workers to the suburbs, with the concomittant clogging up of the cities arteries at every rush hour.
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is how much stocks will devalue as the commercial real estate market bubble bursts like a rotten zit.
That's what this is about. There's around $1 trillion tied up in office buildings and while they won't be worthless they'll be significantly devalued by 1/4-1/3 of people suddenly working from home.
And the revenue from property tax (based on the old, inflated valuations) will crater along with it. Cities are going to be hit hard. Fun times ahead, lol.
Property tax is calculated from budget (Score:3)
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Pretty much everyone who has had a cell phone since they were 12, knows how to remote-work, and even then people who have had internet access in any shape since they were 12 (yes, like 1990's) have done the vast majority of their socializing over the internet already. Social Media (eg Facebook and Twitter) are just an evolution and intrusion by corporations into that space.
So no, it won't kill innovation, at best, it kills off nuisance socialization like micro-management off-the-record chats, sports/lottery
Re: One would think (Score:3)
The current Silly Valley is devoted to financial speculation, copycat software "platforms" that all have the same goals - milk peoples data and get bought out or do a crazy-shit-for-brains IPO evaluation.
When the Big One hits and wipes out Silly Valley
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I'm stealing the argument in your penultimate paragraph. It's brilliant; if I weren't posting in this thread I'd have modded you up +1 Insightful for that alone.
Re: One would think (Score:2)
That ship sailed long ago.
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It is strongly suspected that SARS-CoV-2 is being weaponized and targeted as we speak. When the first nation-state actor releases it to the wild, the others will have no choice but to follow suit. Many thought the world would end in nuclear hellfire, more likely it will be billions gasping for breath, unable to smell or taste. Not sure why you're worried about "innovation" interacting with other people, you should be hunting for and stocking a cabin in Canada or Wyoming and trying to get ammo, even though it's impossible in the current situation.
I hate to break it to you, but they've got multiple vaccines for that virus already.
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It is strongly suspected that SARS-CoV-2 is being weaponized and targeted as we speak.
Yeah, "strongly suspected" by the same people who believe "stop the steal" is based on anything other than one narcissistic rich guy's hurt feelings.
Kill commercial real estate more likely (Score:1)
Re: Kill commercial real estate more likely (Score:2)
For what? Trying to attract shoppers. But there's nothing they sell downtown that isn't also sold in the suburbs, so it's not going to work. The little niche shops? Put yourself online, get rid of the brick and mortar overhead, or you won't survive the taxes on your dwindling revenue.
The people who like living in the c
"teaches innovation methods" (Score:1)
Seriously? If it was something you could package into a bottle and teach it wouldn't be called innovation.
It's innovative precisely because there's no specific path to achieving a new idea.
Letting people interact in the ways they choose to interact vs dictating how they are allowed to interact is not going to affect the spontaneity of new ideas--at least not in any provable way.
Larger problem (Score:5, Insightful)
You're confusing an HR Problem with a tech one. (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the bigger problem here is that companies have apparently gotten used to these totally unplanned, unrecorded and ephemeral interactions to lead to innovation. How much better would things work if these things were purposeful? ... Embracing digital work should involve fixing this problem of office life. Innovate on purpose, not by chance.
I always tell people...that's not a technology problem, that's an HR problem...usually in reference to people wanting to do excessive automation to prevent employees from behaving super-stupidly or super-shadily. Many people communicate poorly digitally for both technology/human reasons, but really, in my experience, most of them are HR-cases...undermotivated and sloppy individuals who are obstacles to getting your job done...particularly at the management tier. Give them the best tools for communication in the world and they'll do the bare minimum to keep their job. Perhaps they're more rewarded for kissing the right ass than doing a good job.
I love your idea in theory, it just doesn't work out that way. Most people hate digital collaboration. I love digital collaboration and everyone is telling me to get off slack. I've worked full time remote for about 10 years off and on and in an office for about 15 years in the software industry. There is a difference between in person and remote communication. In person, you can really feed off the other person's energy and get feedback much faster. I've had so many great ideas that I wrote detailed e-mails and wiki pages about only to have the person completely misunderstand it...when I told them in person, same works written on the e-mail, they got it. People SHOULD embrace remote communication, but they just don't. Most employees and managers are lazy shitheads. Even if you somehow work at a place nicer than I've ever worked, I hesitate to put things in writing when I am unsure of them, I don't want to look like a total idiot. In person, I can say something idiotic and feel less judged because I can follow it up with smarter questions or see from their feedback that my question wasn't stupid. In person communication does have less friction and barriers.
Believe me, I embrace digital communication. When I schedule a meeting, I do a writeup in the wiki of everything I know. I post the link in the invite. I set an agenda and put it in writing. I follow the clock very strictly....I do all this because I think that's how you have a successful meeting...then I invite someone from management...they never come prepared. If you present them with more than 25 words to read, they say "too long....I don't want to read that" I ask them if they want to add or remove anything on the agenda at the start of the meeting and they admit they didn't bother to read it.
In person communication allows shitheads like them to thrive and unfortunately, I report to them, so I have to accommodate their laziness and sense of entitlement. So whenever we all get vaccines, I'll be going back into the office. We'll be doing all communication to accommodate those chosen to lead by those who pay my salary. Innovation will be spontaneous hallway conversation or swivel chair meetings. It "shouldn't" be that way, but the only way to change that is for you and I to get promoted enough to fire those who oppose it.
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It "shouldn't" be that way, but the only way to change that is for you and I to get promoted enough to fire those who oppose it.
The forced remote work at my company has opened some eyes. There were people who truly believed work simply would not get done if they couldn't see their people's butts in seats. But having worked 12 years now full-time remote for 2 different companies, I am disappointed that there remain people, even those who are considered thought leaders in software, who can't think their way past the idea that random encounters at the workplace are the only way to generate fresh ideas.
Re: You're confusing an HR Problem with a tech one (Score:3)
You can't say "today I will innov." Well, you can, but you're probably going to be more wrong than right.
Innovation is done by small groups. The basement dwellers and garage startups innovated. Then they got too big to do new ideas.
The SR-71 is an example of a large corp
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On the one hand, I agree. There is a lot that companies can do to promote digital work.Speaking anecdotally, I've seen major improvements in my own organization, which was a very 'legacy' organization. Today, they've gotten to that full stage of build pipelines, wikis, Jira, Microsoft Teams... That's a huge infrastructure improvement.
Now innovation is complicated for lack of a better word. Well functioning teams can already work pretty well for innovation in terms of prototypes, wikis... Obviously if you ne
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But I will say that those totally unplanned water-cooler interactions are where some things happen. I've interacted with some business folks I'd probably never even meet if things were just online. I've also discovered new areas of my organization and even changed departments once for it.
Seems like your company needs to change so that those interactions happen on purpose. Exposing different teams to each others' problems is how you get out of the box ideas.
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> Seems like your company needs to change so that those interactions happen on purpose.
That sounds like making a note on your calendar to be "spontaneous" with your wife.
Humans don't work like that.
Re: Larger problem (Score:2)
Yes! I've been thinking this as well. It's even worse where I work, because the office is bilingual French/English with a lot of unilingual anglophones. Not only do you have to be walking past the right water cooler at the right time, you need to be speaking the right language.
But it's absurd that serendipity like that is considered the only way to get work done. If a programmer has the answer to an artist's issue, why wasn't the programmer sitting by the artist in the first place? Why does the artist langu
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Also, isn't it funny that a place of innovation is presented with this minor issue and now they have no ideas? Maybe they didn't actually have any ideas to begin with other than reinventing well established things like buses, taxes and vending machines.
Ain't that the truth. It's a bit silly this attitude of how innovation must look a certain way in order to work.
Re: Larger problem (Score:2)
Because I don't want to hear the artist exchanging porn sites with the marketing droid.
It's their responsibility to ask.
I made it easier by going around with the coffee pot, milk, and sugar a couple times a day and asking them if they needed a hand while offering refills because most nerds won't ask for help in front of others if their lives depended on it. But that's the toxic bro c
Yes, they could use Dialogue Mapping with IBIS (Score:2)
... by building a recursive tree of questions, options, and pros and cons on a shared screen: http://cognexus.org/id41.htm [cognexus.org]
"Dialogue Mapping is a radically inclusive facilitation process that creates a diagram or 'map' that captures and connects participants' comments as a meeting conversation unfolds. It is especially effective with highly complex or "Wicked" problems that are wrought with both social and technical complexity, as well as a sometimes maddening inability to move forward in a meaningful and co
Obviously a MBA (Score:5, Insightful)
When you're trying to do really innovative work, it takes so many meetings.
No, no it does not. If the only way you can communicate what you're doing to to other people is through a meeting, you're a waste of space.
Draft up a project plan. Make a demo. Put down in writing what you are doing. Scaffold the documentation for it. Outline your deliverables. Mock up the UI. Actually do the work to get your idea closer to fruition.
Innovation is murdered by meetings.
I have no idea who in their right mind thinks that innovation requires meetings. Someone who either doesn't know what innovation is, or someone who secretly is trying to undermine innovation.
They're not talking about meetings (Score:2)
That said, that has nothing to do with innovation. What you *do* need meetings for is investors. I only know this because a friend of a friend worked for a tiny company that got a large influx of cash from investors. They meet in person. It's not to collaborate, it's because you can't read body language over Zoom, and they're using body language to figure out i
Re: They're not talking about meetings (Score:1)
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I agree. These people have no idea what true innovation is. Take the canonical example of the touch screen smartphone - if you'd gone to a meeting at Blackberry/Nokia and presented this as the future, imagine what everyone would say. You would have a whole corporate machine saying 'people need a keyboard', 'the screen is too expensive', 'we've done focus group testing - nobody likes touch screens', 'this is useless for real work', or my favourite - Balmer laughing at the price. This makes sense because inno
Re: Obviously a MBA (Score:2)
That's not true. The real innovators were small startups in gagages, basements, and kitchen tables. A few smart nerds, no management types who didn't understand what was going on or what they were trying to do.
Non-tech people were only hired as needed, and kept in their place. Which was handling the non-technical aspects of the business
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I have no idea who in their right mind thinks that innovation requires meetings. Someone who either doesn't know what innovation is, or someone who secretly is trying to undermine innovation.
Someone who's entire career revolves around their attending meetings.
There's an old joke about an outsider looking in at a large organization and asking, "Wow! How many people work here?"
Answer. "Oh, about half."
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Re: Obviously a MBA (Score:2)
Consider that stolen. (Copied, really...) Well put, my hat's off to you, sir.
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Draft up a project plan. Make a demo. Put down in writing what you are doing. Scaffold the documentation for it. Outline your deliverables. Mock up the UI. Actually do the work to get your idea closer to fruition.
That doesn't work in most dev shops, as each of your hours must be logged to a ticket, and only a PM can create projects for devs to create tickets against.
If you try that approach, your timesheets are going to have large holes
no (Score:3)
No. It won't. 99% of work is grinding, coding, JIRA timesheets, water cooler talks, and shitting during office hours.
99% of workers aren't innovators. The big majority, because they have no say. And when they can say anything, it's not listened anyways. The 99% of silicon valley workers don't get to sit on the Big Boys table where decisions are made. They are at their desk with headphones on, to escape the bullshit of other coworkers.
99% of us are Code monkeys, and will code from office or home just fine.
Re: no (Score:2)
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The real risk is that by not being quite as distracted by your coworkers and your bosses bullshit, you may spend time innovating on personal projects. Innovation won't die, it just may not be "captured" as readily.
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you have no idea how my personal projects have moved forward since i started wfh. All the "dead time" waiting for tickets, permissions, meetings, i can now use to monitor my 3D printer more closely, or alt-tab to a personal project.
At the office in these moments all I could do is stare at the ceiling, or go and have a chat with the support guys who were mostly in the same situation, waiting for a ticket to arrive.
Getting stuff done vs innovation (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:3)
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Agreed. The same things can be communicated through most any medium given the chance and too many management folks (yes, I am picking on them) are not comfortable in a remote environment. I have been work at home for most of a decade now and properly managed productivity is not a problem (knowing when to stop and break for the day can be).
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Information Desnsity (Score:2)
NO! (Score:1)
Having to be somewhere specific to be able to qualify for "innovation" is a terribly backwards way of thinking.
Who are these guys? (Score:2)
All these quotes are from old fucks in management or "consultants", not people who are going to do the work or perform the innovation.
Distraction tactic (Score:2)
This is a way to draw attention away from Silicon Valley businesses relocating to Texas.
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No, this is a way to draw attention away from empty office buildings crashing their investments in commercial real estate.
God I hope so (Score:5, Insightful)
"'Will Remote Work Kill Innovation?' Ask Silicon Valley Experts"
God I hope so, I've had just about all the 'innovating' I can stand lately.
For example, GUIs. Just leave the goddamn buttons 1) where they were and 2) make them look like buttons. What is wrong with you fuckers?
For example, furniture. Furniture is supposed to be comfortable. Looking "cool" comes in a distant second. No I don't give a shit if it folds up into a gas-powered bagel launcher, I want to sit on it.
For example, people. Why are so many of them so awful? Go away and stop breathing on me.
In conclusion, whatever blah blah blah. Is Matlock on yet?
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Yeah! Get off my lawn, you whippersnappers!
Is this for real? (Score:5, Informative)
However, the problem is worse in hardware, where teams can't pass a prototype around a table, and easier in software, especially with collaboration apps supplementing video meetings.
The move to remote work has forced technologists to find new solutions, Strasser noted, such as relatively inexpensive 3D printers that can make prototypes at home.
Is the cheaper 3D printer not a valid innovation? It sounds to me that these folks don't recognize innovation when it walks up and slaps them in their faces.
Also, it's clear they donâ(TM)t know how much mathematics work has been done over written letters over the centuries. So much good work has been done at a distance; maybe we should take some lessons there.
Re: Is this for real? (Score:2)
This.
Essentialy all the F/OSS, in its entirety arguably the most significant innovation of our generation (or at least in the top 3), was done by remote collaboration. Everything in Silicon Fucking Valley that wasn't F/OSS was displaced & disrupted, transformed, or pushed into a niche market by it.
Chances are the guy wrote and distributed his essay on F/OSS.
Oh, and to anticipate the next idiot with a "but Facebook/Instagram/Whatsapp/Twitter" argument: they're up to their teets into F/OSS. None would ex
Fuck Silicon Valley "Experts" (Score:1)
In fact, Fuck Silicon Valley.
'Nuff Said
What will it bring to life? (Score:3)
Remote work will likely kill something, but one should include the question what it will bring to life and not just look at it one-sided.
People will adapt, and the change will shine a light on some of the old problems, habits and behaviours, and when this happens may some change for the better. Especially when everyone has already problems due to the pandemic will many try to make the best of it and not necessarily turn for the worse.
I generally expect for mobbing to go down, and since online meetings can get recorded and nobody can be quite sure who else might be listening do I expect that many will show themselves from their better side, meaning people will pick a little less on one another, gender and racial tensions at the work place gets a little less, too. The families will also push somewhat more into the foreground when people working from at home have family nearby. Attitudes then change and instead of "the boss" do people start to get to see "the husband and father", meaning they may see each other's personal and intimate personalities more often. Of course there will be exceptions.
For innovation to die does the need for it need to die, too. And as long as there is such a need will some people try to work towards it. With the above mentioned change in attitude could this bring more innovation, but it could also reduce needless innovation, because not all innovation is good just because it's new.
In my 40 years working in the valley the last 15 (Score:2)
In my 40 years working in the valley the last 15 years have been the worst. As the open office fiasco rose my productivity loss from constant distractions got worse and worse. I finally asked my boss if I could WFH on Fridays and I loved it. Towards the end I WFH everyday. Phone calls when I needed it and focus when I needed it.
My multiple greatest recognitions from customers and management all the way to the top which happened many times did not require sitting in a room or hallway schmoozing.
Hopefully
Innovation ... (Score:2)
Coffee after class? (Score:3)
when students from different teams and different backgrounds go out for coffee together after class
My experience is that students tend to get a beer after class, or even stronger alcohols
Re: (Score:2)
It's a cultural thing. In Greece, for example, students go for a coffee after class. In Germany for beer, and in Norway for rocket fuel.
Innovation? Let's Thing about that... (Score:3)
Baltimore City (Score:2)
Hot take... (Score:1)
The ego of bad managers (Score:2)
That's what remote work will kill -- the egos of bad managers, when they cannot see their worker bees buzzing around them licking their boots all day long.
Even before the pandemic, many multinational companies already have many cross-country teams that collaborate remotely everyday. Technology has already solved nearly all problems with remote teams, Unless the work is physical, there is very few (I daresay no) reason to have the team sitting together in the same room.
One situation I would agree would be i
Remote will/is failing... (Score:1)
Because everything is recorded.
Which means all sorts of people/effort will be spent looking for some form of purity - maybe avoiding being sued, maybe because someone... needs to be cancelled.
Other than that, it is massively intrusive in terms of life outside of work. My daughter works from home and is scared witless that unless she puts in even more hours now (circa 90) than when in the office (circa 70) she will find herself jobless. Why does she think this? Well, some of her colleagues have just gone. An
Remote work is a blessing (Score:2)
It allows me to completely ignore that one employee who never seems to learn anything no matter how long they have been there, or how many times you have explained it to them in the past.
This is that employee who absolutely gets on your last nerve by asking the same basic things for the Nth time ( where N = a ridiculously large number ) or why, when they click it, the icon on their desktop doesn't work. :|
By working far away from said employee, they absolutely cannot walk over to your cubicle and bombard yo
Re: Remote work is a blessing (Score:3)
Your and your colleagues' social disability / sociopathy is not a basis for arguing anti-social evironments are a good thing.
"Innovation" (Score:2)
Let's face it: Most "innovation" nowadays is idiotic and blatantly obvious (in the insanity if its way too). I mean, come on... "Blog, but limited to 160 chars" or "Phone, but with anorexia and no ports nor replacement parts" are not innovations!
Most stuff is just hair's with away from the preventing hair loss and prolonging erections in Idiocracy.
Watch the socially disabled come oit of their hole (Score:2)
To complain about the sociopaths.
Only digitally though.
Hint: Neither your nor their illness makes an anti-social environment any less horribly harmful for society.
Not Really (Score:1)
I''m not opposed to remote work but it's not... (Score:2)
I'm certainly not opposed to remote work, but there's something lost in not working physically co-located. In particular, when you're working remotely you only have meetings on specific planned topics, and you lose out on the casual interactions that people have passing in hallways, over lunch, etc., where people can explore ideas informally that can turn out to be fantastically valuable. The remote teams I'm working in try to address that in different ways, and we certainly get a lot of work done, but peop
Re: (Score:1)