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Why Do We Still Commute?

citylab.com

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Re: Why Do We Still Commute?

#61

Post by nunez »

BjoernKW wrote: post #14

I think that the 'importance of face-to-face interaction' argument is a helplessly contrived one, an attempt to avoid the elephant in the room. 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 pol…

I personally wouldn’t want to work somewhere where I hardly ever saw my coworkers. I’m pseudo-remote as a consultant and wish I got to have more face time with my peers.

Re: Why Do We Still Commute?

#62

Post by nunez »

Why do we still commute? Because outside of the tech bubble, most jobs still require face to face communication and living close-by to the office in many cities is cost-prohibitive to many.

Re: Why Do We Still Commute?

#63

Post by gerardflo »

Tade0 wrote: post #40
have_faith wrote: post #24

Has anyone studied if people outside of cushy tech jobs want to commute? particularly people with lower wages and things at home they would rather escape for 9 hours a day. Most people can't afford a home office too.

A few of my friends(working in non-IT fields) have coworkers who do everything to stay as long as they can in the office because their home life is hell. Aside from them most of the people I asked about this would either want to have a very short(20 minutes max.) commute, or work from home, since it's usually the most comfortable environment for them. Nearly everybody I know who spends at least two hours daily in tra…

> to stay as long as they can in the office because their home life is hell.

This is pathetic. They have hell at home and instead of fixing it, they bring it to the office. My home life is awesome and I'd rather spend more time at home than in office full of miserable people. Sadly they are the loudest one and their moans are music to the ears of managers who are control freaks. Thankfully I decided never again work for a company that doesn't allow remote.

Re: Why Do We Still Commute?

#64

Post by laumars »

humanrebar wrote: post #52
dagw wrote: post #9

Because 'we' prefer it? I like going into the office. The morning walk to the office with its clear demarcation between work and not work, the ritual of grabbing a coffee in the morning with some colleagues and catching up on what's happening in their projects even if they're not directly related to anything I'm working on, having a dedicated space and a dedicated computer that's just for work, all those little thing…

> Because 'we' prefer it? 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'.

For many of us, the preference isn't down to liking the commute itself but because we choose to work in a different town to where we live. In my case I like living in a rural village even if it means a 1.5 hour commute into London each morning. It's still worth it for the tranquility I get on evenings and weekends. Plus the commute still works out significantly cheaper than buying a comparable place closer to the city.

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

Re: Why Do We Still Commute?

#65

Post by gerardflo »

fwsgonzo wrote: post #2

I work from home as much as I can, but nothing trumps seeing your colleagues face to face. Text can also cause misunderstandings, and apparently no one likes video, at least in my company. I don't like video much either, though.

You can have misunderstandings face to face. This is a matter of communication skills. Having entire conversation in text form also means you can easily make references and go back to it even weeks later, whereas with face to face conversation you don't have that luxury.

Re: Why Do We Still Commute?

#66

Post by gerardflo »

blunte wrote: post #46
keganunderwood wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We could still work from home and have time where we meet our coworkers? I read somewhere that gitlab is trying out something like this. I'd love to learn wrist they conclude from this experience.

At one company I worked for (that was mostly remote workers), people who lived within an hour of each other would periodically meet up for social or work reasons. We had one guy who had a nice house with a big dining room, and once a month we'd work from there in one room. Less work got done, but some things that otherwise might never have been done/resolved got handled. Plus it was "kind of" fun. So unless you're ge…

> but some things that otherwise might never have been done/resolved got handled

This is a fallacy. If something really needs resolving, the setting is not relevant.

Re: Why Do We Still Commute?

#67

Post by majewsky »

switch007 wrote: post #23
majewsky wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another huge problem is the transition path from "everyone in the same office" to "everyone working remote". If you have 60% of your team sitting in the office, and 40% remote, you can be absolutely certain that those 40% will be out of touch on all those important decisions that just emerge during a watercooler conversation. (The watercooler also provides a way for different teams to get to know each other, even if…

I try those watercooler conversations: the rare occasion the bosses aren't avoiding the proles on purpose, they just quickly make their drink then make excuses to disappear. If you touch on an important topic, it's not taken seriously because you're not in a meeting room. Colleagues on the same level that hang out and discuss the latest new TV series seems that's good, but I don't think the bonds that builds are alwa…

Depends on your boss. I had plenty water cooler conversations with mine.

Re: Why Do We Still Commute?

#68

Post by peterwwillis »

Things that happen when you're in the office:

- spins around in chair, interrupts and asks coworker a question, workshops ideas for 15 minutes, comes up with solution, makes a meeting

- boss comes over and tells workers there's some issue going on he's going to go deal with and he'll be available via cell only

- when SCRUM ends, conversation continues in person, things get decided

- walk into boss's office and make tentative strategy plans

- discuss current issues, decide to rework something, meet with another team, make plans, start working on it

Sometimes you can just walk around, bug people, and get shit done. It's very efficient.

But all of these things also involve communication which isn't relayed to remote workers. People either forget you, or including you in the conversation is a hassle, so they don't. You feel like the unwanted stepchild, constantly pinging people to get some kind of feedback and never seeming to reach them until much later. It's really inefficent.

Re: Why Do We Still Commute?

#69

Post by rralian »

blunte wrote: post #45
have_faith wrote: post #24

Has anyone studied if people outside of cushy tech jobs want to commute? particularly people with lower wages and things at home they would rather escape for 9 hours a day. Most people can't afford a home office too.

I wonder what is a "cushy tech job"... But regarding people who might want to avoid being home, that is a whole different problem that needs solving. Wanting escape should not be an argument for commuting.

> I wonder what is a "cushy tech job"

Probably a job that is extremely well paid for knowledge work in technology and where workers are highly sought after so employers provide lots of perks.

Re: Why Do We Still Commute?

#70

Post by mbrock »

dingo_bat wrote: post #39
fwsgonzo wrote: post #2

I work from home as much as I can, but nothing trumps seeing your colleagues face to face. Text can also cause misunderstandings, and apparently no one likes video, at least in my company. I don't like video much either, though.

I also hate video. Ugh. I don't know why I love face to face but hate video :/

One really weird thing about video conferencing is that you're constantly exposed to a slightly delayed, pixelated, and poorly lit picture of your own face.

That's a deeply abnormal situation. It's like talking to someone while sitting in front of a fun house mirror. Who would subject themselves to such a metaphysical nightmare?

And that's just one of the little uncanny distortions that video conferencing brings.

You might enjoy this excerpt from a novel, which predicts a bad future for video chat:

http://declineofscarcity.com/?page_id=2527

Sample:

> It turned out that there was something terribly stressful about visual telephone interfaces that hadn’t been stressful at all about voice-only interfaces. Videophone consumers seemed suddenly to realize that they’d been subject to an insidious but wholly marvelous delusion about conventional voice-only telephony. They’d never noticed it before, the delusion — it’s like it was so emotionally complex that it could be countenanced only in the context of its loss. Good old traditional audio-only phone conversations allowed you to presume that the person on the other end was paying complete attention to you while also permitting you not to have to pay anything even close to complete attention to her.

And:

> This sort of appearance-check was no more resistible than a mirror. But the experience proved almost universally horrifying. People were horrified at how their own faces appeared on a TP screen. It wasn’t just ‘Anchorman’s Bloat,’ that well-known impression of extra weight that video inflicts on the face. It was worse. Even with high-end TPs’ high-def viewer-screens, consumers perceived something essentially blurred and moist-looking about their phone-faces, a shiny pallid indefiniteness that struck them as not just unflattering but somehow evasive, furtive, untrustworthy, unlikable. In an early and ominous InterLace/G.T.E. focus-group survey that was all but ignored in a storm of entrepreneurial sci-fi-tech enthusiasm, almost 60% of respondents who received visual access to their own faces during videophonic calls specifically used the terms untrustworthy, unlikable, or hard to like in describing their own visage’s appearance, with a phenomenally ominous 71 % of senior-citizen respondents specifically comparing their video-faces to that of Richard Nixon during the Nixon-Kennedy debates of B.S. 1960.

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