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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

#51

Post by dasmoth »

lazyjones wrote: post #26

I've read a lot about telecommuting here on HN lately. While I do this myself, I'm hoping that one day infrastucture and cost of living near the workplace will be at a point where everyone can just walk to the office (in 5-10 minutes). This is the best of all possible worlds for me: healthier, allows working from home and still dropping in at work for meetings or lunch or whatever comes up and no getting stuck in rus…

Doesn't that imply living in cities? Not to everyone's taste, by any means.

Also, how is this going to work out for couples/families?

Re: One day offices will be a thing of the past

#53

Post by Frozenlock »

vellum wrote: post #48

Employers like the current setup because they can make sure people aren’t playing Minesweeper all day. And people still feel that face-to-face conversations have higher information density. But if holographic teleconferencing becomes mainstream, then I could see a lot more knowledge based work being done remotely. That has downsides as well. Why employ an American, if you can get a qualified person in say, Poland, wh…

What's the downside? You say that as if it was bad to hire someone from Poland...

Re: One day offices will be a thing of the past

#54

Post by sologoub »

I recently had a friendly debate about this with a friend (ex-Yahoo of the golden years). The interesting thing is that a distributed organization, such as Yahoo or Google, or pretty much any multi-national, telecommuting is already in their work practices - whenever you have to coordinate across office locations, you are effectively telecommuting to that office.

However, that's not the interesting part of the conversation. What we pretty much both agreed on is that as the technology progresses, what we term in person interactions will change drastically. Today, when we talk about virtual reality, we are still bound in our conduits into that world.

Imagine if we had the ability to completely immerse ourselves into a virtual reality, Matrix-style. In that world, your commute is nothing more than going to a chair and loading the program. From there, you can appear anywhere in that virtual reality. It can be in the shape of an office, or a green field with desks, or no desk, pretty much anything the organization/group of people wants. With the totality of human senses present, neither of us debating the issue could see anything missing that a physical presence would provide.

Throw in the current trend of shrinking employment, and the future of the office buildings in the next few hundred years seems to be in question.

Technologically, we are not there yet and it's not clear if this will happen in our lifetime. However, it no longer feels like a pure sci-fi notion.

Re: One day offices will be a thing of the past

#55

Post by corresation »

vellum wrote: post #48

Employers like the current setup because they can make sure people aren’t playing Minesweeper all day. And people still feel that face-to-face conversations have higher information density. But if holographic teleconferencing becomes mainstream, then I could see a lot more knowledge based work being done remotely. That has downsides as well. Why employ an American, if you can get a qualified person in say, Poland, wh…

Employers like the current setup because they can make sure people aren’t playing Minesweeper all day

This is the aspect of the argument that makes me have to take a self-imposed time-out.

The prime time of every major online site is during office hours. Ebay, Reddit, Slashdot in its prime, Digg in its prime, even our loveable Hacker News. Most of the people here are sitting at a desk in an office, biding the day away until they clock out.

We know that many (if not most) office workers piss away a significant portion of time that they're in the office.

A good manager of people knows the realm that their charges work in, and understands the contribution each of them makes. That they warm a seat 60 hours a week is absolutely irrelevant if they make no contribution, yet for mediocre managers everywhere it is the only thing they can competently measure so you see that desperate fear of people working remotely.

Marissa Meyer has become the hero of terrible managers (and jealous people) everywhere. I mean no ill towards her (Yahoo is in tough times, this may be a way of letting go of some people, they're regrouping everyone, and the initiative might not even have been hers), but there is a cluster of mediocrity that is raising a banner around this action of Yahoo.

Re: One day offices will be a thing of the past

#56

Post by nsxwolf »

pionar wrote: post #37
talmand wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the same argument that is often heard against home-schooling, the lack of socialization with other kids. What such people tend to not realize, or ignore, is that there are opportunities for kids to get socialization other than through school. True, it requires some effort on the parent's part but that doesn't mean they are not there. If you work remote then there are avenues for socialization outside of an off…

The problem, though, is that there's no "forced" interaction with others outside your own interests/background. When I was in school, I was a white kid from a white neighborhood in a school that was 50% black. Had I been homeschooled, even if I had interactions outside of home, I would not have been exposed to the diversity of cultures. I feel this will lead to a form of tribalism.

I went to public school. The tribalism existed there in full force. One just had to look around the lunch room to see all the blacks at one table, all the asians at another, all the whites at their own tables further subdivided by various labels.

Re: One day offices will be a thing of the past

#57

Post by kyllo »

This has to happen sooner or later, if for no other reason than the tremendous amount of damage that commuting by automobile is doing to the environment. Commuting is also a huge, inefficient waste of time and a major source of unhappiness and poor health.

Self-driving electric cars and buses will help alleviate this pain point, but electric cars still cause pollution--just at a (often coal-burning) central power plant instead of an internal combustion engine.

Re: One day offices will be a thing of the past

#58

Post by OmarIsmail »

sologoub wrote: post #54

I recently had a friendly debate about this with a friend (ex-Yahoo of the golden years). The interesting thing is that a distributed organization, such as Yahoo or Google, or pretty much any multi-national, telecommuting is already in their work practices - whenever you have to coordinate across office locations, you are effectively telecommuting to that office. However, that's not the interesting part of the conver…

In my opinion we're actually a lot closer to it than most people may realize. I think virtual-offices are going to be a reality in 3-5 years. This will be driven by a few key technologies that are coming out in that timeframe:

  Oculus Rift - fully immersive digital environment
  Leapmotion/Kinect - natural UI for interacting in 3D
  Google Fiber - high-speed bandwidth networks
  Modern GPUs - can already produce movie-level graphics in realtime.
In fact, I could see the first prototype virtual offices being released within 18 months.

Re: One day offices will be a thing of the past

#59

Post by crazygringo »

These kinds of black-and-white views need to stop.

Some jobs (highly self-directed, autonomous, don't need teamwork) can be done just fine from home.

Other jobs (collaborative, creative, culture-building) just can't, or it's very difficult.

And then there are obviously a lot of gray areas in the middle, since a lot of jobs are a mix of things, as well as accountability and productivity-measurement being a big factor too (some people will get away with slacking off if they can).

Every kind of job and company is different, and needs to figure it out for themselves. And when you don't work at a specific organization, it's hard to know what they really need.

Re: One day offices will be a thing of the past

#60

Post by bdunbar »

pionar wrote: post #37
talmand wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the same argument that is often heard against home-schooling, the lack of socialization with other kids. What such people tend to not realize, or ignore, is that there are opportunities for kids to get socialization other than through school. True, it requires some effort on the parent's part but that doesn't mean they are not there. If you work remote then there are avenues for socialization outside of an off…

The problem, though, is that there's no "forced" interaction with others outside your own interests/background. When I was in school, I was a white kid from a white neighborhood in a school that was 50% black. Had I been homeschooled, even if I had interactions outside of home, I would not have been exposed to the diversity of cultures. I feel this will lead to a form of tribalism.

Clearly this is a YMMV thing.

I was public schooled, semi-rural Oklahoma in the 1970s.

The only diverse culture we had was 'town' vs 'country'.

My kids, who _are_ home schooled, have more exposure to diversity because of where we live, who we associate with.

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