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Why Do We Still Commute?

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Re: Why Do We Still Commute?

#181

Post by ZeroGravitas »

vog wrote: post #133
codingdave wrote: post #81

I worked from home for five years, and just this week started back into a job where I commute to an office. I don't love the commute, but I also don't agree that working from home is a universally better answer for me on a personal level. Everyone knows the benefits of working from home, but there are downsides as well. Fixable downsides, but they exist nonetheless -- it is easy to become a hermit. Easy to over-work.…

> it is easy to become a hermit. Easy to over-work. Hard to draw the line between your work time and your personal time Not just that, but there's also the other side: Easy to procrastinate, easy to give false reports which then leads to regular overwork in the days just before a hard deadline. I know these issues from remote workers I worked with, but also know this personally while working on my Diploma theses. Whi…

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

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

Re: Why Do We Still Commute?

#182

Post by wpietri »

swat535 wrote: post #151
codingdave wrote: post #81

I worked from home for five years, and just this week started back into a job where I commute to an office. I don't love the commute, but I also don't agree that working from home is a universally better answer for me on a personal level. Everyone knows the benefits of working from home, but there are downsides as well. Fixable downsides, but they exist nonetheless -- it is easy to become a hermit. Easy to over-work.…

I too have both in office and remote and I agree with all your points regarding working from home. However I must confess that the downsides of working from the office majority outweighs the other. I can no longer focus. I am constantly pulled into meetings. I have 120 minutes of commute everyday. When I get home I am too tired and can no longer spend quality time with my partner like I did when I was working from ho…

> I can no longer focus. I am constantly pulled into meetings.

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

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

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

Re: Why Do We Still Commute?

#183

Post by AstralStorm »

wernercd wrote: post #112
pythonboi wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why you are being downvoted. I just started working as a software developer 10 months ago and my supervisor had told me the work culture has changed so much since upper management has transitioned to MBAs and previous military over promoting workers from within who have worked on projects. I doubt that the government will allow any remote work any time soon because most of the people here have neve…

I doubt it's just "Stupid MBA's and military 'intelligence'"... We live in a post Snowden world. It only takes one mistake to have all your data out in the wild. I think attributing changes away from trusting employees to simply "bad management" and ignoring issues like employee malfeasance... is overly simplistic and dilutes complicated issue conversations. There needs to be a balance between trust and security. It'…

Different kinds of trust. Trust that you will get the work done properly vs trust that you will not steal or expose critical business data.

Re: Why Do We Still Commute?

#184

Post by SaltySolomon »

dasmoth wrote: post #95
ransom1538 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Working remotely requires the participants to be much more communicative because in such a setting communication for the most part doesn't just happen serendipitously, you have to work to make it happen. " Yes. Having managed remote teams and being a remote dev, it's all about response time . If someone slacks you, the response should be as quick as if it were verbal in the office. If it takes 2 hours to get a respo…

I'm going to disagree here. It's entirely possible to work effectively with others via mostly-asynchronous communication. Open source projects, as you point out, can be a pretty good example of this. I'd further argue that for some (I suspect many...) people work much better when they can have long stints of focus without fear of interruptions. Two-minute responses on Slack absolutely is a model that can work, and pe…

But open source projects have no other way so they need to work that way, also there is little pressure to meet deadlines and such.

Re: Why Do We Still Commute?

#185

Post by inertiatic »

gerardflo wrote: post #65
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.

This, so much.

Just the past 2 weeks I've had multiple face to face meetings to decide on a plan of action for a project. Everyone left the meeting thinking something has been decided.

Turns out there were 2 or 3 separate ideas on how we were proceeding with handling things!

Can't help but think that if this conversation was held in text, proposed approaches would have been more clear to everyone, and the problem of whether a conclusion was reached or not would be easily solved by revisiting the conversation.

Re: Why Do We Still Commute?

#186

Post by wpietri »

briandear wrote: post #110
twoquestions wrote: post #98

We commute because businesses can push off the cost of commuting to their employees. I'd personally be in favor of a "congestion tax" or somesuch for companies that force their employees to come in rather than work remotely. Commuting takes up energy and resources, and the congestion incurs costs on third parties (car accidents, higher gas prices, and the like). While it's debatable whether remote works for businesse…

Who ultimately pays for this congestion tax? The employees in the form of lower salaries, the customers in the form of higher prices and the shareholders in the form of lower profits. I prefer an alternative approach: a telecommuting incentive tax credit. Telecommuters themselves get a tax credit and companies also get a tax credit. That would be the fastest way to spur more remote friendly workplaces. Then the envir…

Everybody's already paying the congestion tax. They just pay in time, health, and lost productivity. But since it's a negative externality, the incentive to fix it is blunted.

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

Re: Why Do We Still Commute?

#187

Post by briffle »

imgabe wrote: post #107
twoquestions wrote: post #98

We commute because businesses can push off the cost of commuting to their employees. I'd personally be in favor of a "congestion tax" or somesuch for companies that force their employees to come in rather than work remotely. Commuting takes up energy and resources, and the congestion incurs costs on third parties (car accidents, higher gas prices, and the like). While it's debatable whether remote works for businesse…

I've thought about this in the past. What if companies had to pay for the time you spend commuting? They'd have an incentive to hire people as close as possible, and support local policies that make it easier to live closer to work. On the other hand, employees would have an incentive to try to stretch out their commute as much as possible, to get extra pay for time "not working". I don't know how rampant that would…

Or at least encourage you to 'start at 10am' and other times, so that 7:30am-9am is not a single solid rush hour.. Spread the traffic over 3-4 hours, and its much nicer for everyone..

Re: Why Do We Still Commute?

#188

Post by duckmysick »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #88
jpttsn wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's kind of a leap to assume the value is low just because it's hard to measure. This is in general a common, elusive mistake: "We can't measure it, so it must be zero." Better to be ridiculous and say it's worth between $100 and $10,000.

It's subtler than that. Because it is hard to measure, one has to make explicit effort to demonstrate value. This wastes time and energy that could have been used to increase the very value that needs to be demonstrated. Value is lower because of the consequences of being hard to measure. Then there are actual bullshit jobs, whose value is difficult to measure because they have no value to begin with.

> This wastes time and energy that could have been used to increase the very value that needs to be demonstrated.

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

Re: Why Do We Still Commute?

#189

Post by wpietri »

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…

What you ignore is that the amount of work a person can do is finite.

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

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

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

Re: Why Do We Still Commute?

#190

Post by nfriedly »

marksellers wrote: post #124
ransom1538 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Working remotely requires the participants to be much more communicative because in such a setting communication for the most part doesn't just happen serendipitously, you have to work to make it happen. " Yes. Having managed remote teams and being a remote dev, it's all about response time . If someone slacks you, the response should be as quick as if it were verbal in the office. If it takes 2 hours to get a respo…

Now if only people would stop using `@here` for every little thing, it'd be easier to separate "blue" notifications from "red" and Slack would actually be the perfect model of async communication. I could prioritize whether to pull myself from my current task to look or not. Doesn't work when people just write "@here, making nachoes" all day. `@here` should really be yellow. Only direct communications red. Or somethi…

BTW, slack let's you supress @here and @channel notifications - I do it for almost every channel I'm in ;)
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