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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

#61

Post by vellum »

Frozenlock wrote: post #53
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...

I meant that it's bad if you're an American knowledge worker, and you have to compete with cheap foreign labor, thanks to holographic technology.

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

#62

Post by bdunbar »

Jare wrote: post #49
pionar wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My anecdotal experience with homeschooled kids (my son is not old enough yet) is that the lack of 'forced' exposure at school is more than compensated by the habit of indulging and exploring one's curiosity. Especially because it applies not just to social aspects but to any area of knowledge, activity and culture. By the time the child's direct interests and background start showing their limits (9-ish years old?),…

> Homeschooled does not mean hermit.

Agreed. My three oldest were public schooled, my two-youngest are home schooled. And what do they do after school hours? They're outside with their friends in the neighborhood, doing kid stuff.

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

#63

Post by icebraining »

dasmoth wrote: post #51
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?

I'm not GP, but I think it implies either living on a human settlement (not necessarily cities, they could be towns or villages) and working there, or working from one's home and/or farm, field, etc.

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

#64

Post by corin_ »

dasmoth wrote: post #51
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?

And suddenly changing jobs means either moving home, or limiting your search to within a very, very small radius.

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

#65

Post by silasb »

ollysb wrote: post #9
jmaskell wrote: post #5

A 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.

This does sound like a good balance. Do you have a dedicated desk or is it just general tables where you setup at?

Also how much does it cost per month?

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

#66

Post by jjtheblunt »

This seemed to completely ignore expensive shared capital, like the tens of millions of dollars of digital test equipment engineers use to design iOS devices, Android devices, perform diagnostics in medicine, fly that capital as Virgin airlines, for examples. Nice buzz-generating headline, though.

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

#67

Post by randomdata »

diego wrote: post #8

In 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 Ai…

It wasn't much more than century ago when the majority of the population did work from home (on the farm). It really has only been decades that the office has been the primary place of business.

To see working patterns shift back to "the farm", so to speak, doesn't seem unreasonable at all in my mind. It probably will not completely eliminate the office, but we could see only, say, 10-20% of the population still working in offices in the future.

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

#68

Post by lazyjones »

corin_ wrote: post #64
dasmoth wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

And suddenly changing jobs means either moving home, or limiting your search to within a very, very small radius.

It could mean unhooking your housing module (something like this: http://www.arcspace.com/features/kisho-kurokawa/nakagin-caps... but bigger) from the provided base near your workplace and transporting it to one near your new job.

OTOH, in large cities, there's plenty of possible work places within e.g. 1 square Km or mile. Perhaps they should be clustered so that similar companies are close together? Plenty of room for optimization (from an utopostic viewpoint).

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

#69

Post by j_baker »

crazygringo wrote: post #59

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…

I think you're strawmanning Branson into saying something he isn't.

Let me ask you this: why do you automatically assume that this decision rests with the organization to fit its needs? Don't a firm's workers also have a lot of different situations that may require different solutions? Some workers love working at the office. Others love working from home. Others like to have a mixture. It sounds to me what Branson is saying isn't necessarily "telecommuting good, office bad" as much as "It's a bad idea to rigidly force choices on your employees", and I think there's some truth to that view. After all, I don't buy that employment at Yahoo necessarily means that a person won't be successful working from home.

Regardless of my views, I don't think it's accurate to say that this is black-and-white thinking.

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

#70

Post by Tyrant505 »

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…

Is that not one of the best use cases for Google Glass(Regardless of their marketing pitch)?
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