81–90 of 228 posts
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What about IBM? A lot of their workers work remotely.
Not true. The policy was that you could work from home at manager's discretion, but full time work-from-home-employees were sort of rare. Plus, they are ditching that as we speak.
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I guess it's different strokes for different folks. Personally, I feel I can communicate much more efficiently via chat/messaging mediums than email. Chatting, in my opinion, at least in a late 20 something (27 year old)'s mind, emulates a real conversation where if you don't respond it's essentially ignoring the other person. If you have a bigger thought, sure you can type it out and get that message to multiple peo…
Chatting favours subjects that only require a short span of attention. At the same time, anything of real value will take a minimum length and complexity to explain. That is why the output of chat/messaging tends to be worth little to nothing. Chat/messaging is something appreciated by demographics who do not have anything useful to say anyway. To an important extent, it is the same kind of people who have a hard tim…
One can have lengthy and substantive conversations over chat — and I do — but it's definitely an uphill battle, both against the medium and against the prevalent psychological, and intellectual cognitive characteristics of the people who favour it. I frequently get the feeling that I'm not using chat the way I'm "supposed" to, which is to write in short sentences and traffic in reductive sound-bites.
I worked remotely, from home, for 5 years. These days, I work mostly in the office, with a 40 minute commute each way, despite the option for occasional working from home. There's a few reasons to prefer working in the office. The single biggest one is the hard delimiting of the work day; when I'm not in the office, I'm not working, I'm not available on email or chat, and unless it's an exceptional situation, nobody…
I guess it's different strokes for different folks. Personally, I feel I can communicate much more efficiently via chat/messaging mediums than email. Chatting, in my opinion, at least in a late 20 something (27 year old)'s mind, emulates a real conversation where if you don't respond it's essentially ignoring the other person. If you have a bigger thought, sure you can type it out and get that message to multiple peo…
>Objections to work from home fall apart Essays from workers like Jen McCown isn't going to work. What works is to have massively successful businesses that beat the competition because their employees work remotely . Since no multi-billion dollar business has demonstrated that specific cause & effect, the idea doesn't gain traction. Yes, businesses like Basecamp and Automattic have remote workers but I'm talking abo…
The only way this is even possible is if someone is willing to allow work from home while simultaniusly having a hugely successful business. Usually when you're on your way to being successful, you hire MBAs to do your people management and those people are the ones suually vehemently opposed to remote work. Chicken and Egg problem.
Wow. That means that the existing technical staff will be gone in no time. New hirees will have a hard time figuring out how to even just press the "build" button, let alone, add new features. Furthermore, anybody with more than one job offer will never pick the one from an MBA. Therefore, in my impression, the success won't last, because its very reason will have been destroyed.
I worked remotely, from home, for 5 years. These days, I work mostly in the office, with a 40 minute commute each way, despite the option for occasional working from home. There's a few reasons to prefer working in the office. The single biggest one is the hard delimiting of the work day; when I'm not in the office, I'm not working, I'm not available on email or chat, and unless it's an exceptional situation, nobody…
> The days when people were trained on newsgroup netiquette are long gone. That is why it is hard to do decisions by email. Also, poor thread representation by email clients doesn't help. Chat has the potential of being used efficiently, where arguments are stripped of their emotion and converge faster to a point without rambling. To your point, chat can be made high-bandwidth, with multi-sentence points made in a si…
An open plan office where everyone is trying to talk, quickly degrades into people raising their voice to be heard, becoming a yelling mess where it's impossible to do serious work unless you are very good at ignoring noise, or you are blocking noise physically... like using earplugs or moving to a meeting room.
Working from home, you can just focus and do your work. However this is not the case for everyone. If you live with a bunch of people or pets this might not be your case.
The article assumes that making money is the primary goal of a corporation. If it was, then sure, WFH would make sense. However, the corporation is not a sentient entity. It cannot desire anything, be it money or something else. It's only human participants that have incentives. Of those, only shareholders have direct incentive to make profit, but even then they may own the shares for speculative purposes and desire…
Office culture is often (I'd say usually) toxic and/or inefficient. Being in the office doesn't mean any useful work is getting done. And just because people are in the same general vicinity doesn't mean they're interacting in a useful/beneficial way or even interacting at all.
Working from home is certainly different from working in the office, but being in the office isn't some natural state of affairs or a particularly useful baseline.
Or don't. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. There is a story of mysql as a company who had an employee who was not reachable for a few months. Yahoo got there workforce back at the office. I personally like to have the option to work at home when necessary and i might get more stuff done at home i also might just not work.
I'm not sure I would take anything Yahoo is doing as an example of a good idea.
>Objections to work from home fall apart Essays from workers like Jen McCown isn't going to work. What works is to have massively successful businesses that beat the competition because their employees work remotely . Since no multi-billion dollar business has demonstrated that specific cause & effect, the idea doesn't gain traction. Yes, businesses like Basecamp and Automattic have remote workers but I'm talking abo…
I think society is understandably waiting for repeated large scale remote work success before shifting their thinking.