One day offices will be a thing of the past
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Re: One day offices will be a thing of the past
#2Offices are a cost center and have their own set of inefficiencies. I think Mayer was correct in "correcting" an issue at Yahoo! which is that many employees were gaming it. There is a value in face-to-face connection. We can do away with offices as long as there are community spaces (public or private) where people can connect. There is good value in finding a balance between isolation time and collaboration time. Offices might tend towards collaboration time and lose out on isolation time, while the opposite is often true with strictly home offices.
Re: One day offices will be a thing of the past
#3Yep, partially due to technology but I also think in 30 years almost everyone will be a freelancer and "jobs" as we know them today will be very very rare.
Re: One day offices will be a thing of the past
#4Yep, partially due to technology but I also think in 30 years almost everyone will be a freelancer and "jobs" as we know them today will be very very rare.
Not without some serious legislative and financial changes - the deck is stacked very much in favor of 'companies' (and generally larger ones at that) than smaller ones, and certainly not in favor of freelancers.
Re: One day offices will be a thing of the past
#5A lot of proponents of home working seem to ignore one of the big reasons people may want to work in a centralised space (be it an office, co-working space, somewhere else..) - the interaction with other people.
I hate working at home - I get cabin fever, bored and lonely. I prefer being around other people and having that interaction (IM, video calls just aren't the same). I like a change of scenery during the day.
It's nice to have the option to work from home when necessary (e.g. to avoid having to take a sick day, wait in for a delivery etc) - but I'd hate to do it every day.
I don't doubt that the nature of offices will change (e.g. I find it hard to imagine that cubicle farms have much future), and that the number of people working remotely will increase, but I'd be very surprised if offices disappear completely.
Re: One day offices will be a thing of the past
#6Yep, partially due to technology but I also think in 30 years almost everyone will be a freelancer and "jobs" as we know them today will be very very rare.
Firms exist to reduce transaction costs. In order to freelance everything, you'll need to bring the costs way, way down -- and that includes learning what you're working on and figuring out how to cooperate with other people much faster than we've ever seen that happen.
I suspect this is not ever going to match the efficiency of a good team with history.
Re: One day offices will be a thing of the past
#7People seem to think there is only one answer to this question but companies need to figure out what is best for them depending on their employees, culture etc. Right now I think the core problem of remote work is verifying that people are in fact working efficiently. Also people really need to use better metrics to make judgments; parking lot 'emptiness' or even VPN access logs do not hold meaning if projects are on time, and the deadlines are not lax.
Re: One day offices will be a thing of the past
#8In general, predicting that something that has been around for centuries will be gone in decades is a bad bet. I wonder if Richard Branson has ever spent long periods of time working alone.
I spent six months working remotely in 2004. What led me to start my company in 2005 was not the desire to make money; I had enough back then. I really missed the in-person interaction with other hackers. I was living in Buenos Aires at the time. What I wanted did not exist there so I had to create it.
Re: One day offices will be a thing of the past
#9A lot of proponents of home working seem to ignore one of the big reasons people may want to work in a centralised space (be it an office, co-working space, somewhere else..) - the interaction with other people. I hate working at home - I get cabin fever, bored and lonely. I prefer being around other people and having that interaction (IM, video calls just aren't the same). I like a change of scenery during the day.…
I work remotely but I have space in a shared office about 10 minutes walk from my house. This means I never have to a long commute, can work from home or work around others when I want a bit of company. In terms of working conditions this seems to be the best of both worlds.
Re: One day offices will be a thing of the past
#10Offices? Probably not. Entire floors and buildings without any purpose other than holding offices and cubicles? Yes, they were a fairly recent invention and will probably be gone soon.
Remote work may be somewhat inefficient now, but when our technologies get good enough to build a room for consistent telepresence, there will be little point in having a cubicle across town when you can own a customized office and virtually project it anywhere.