Why Do We Still Commute?

Speaking as someone who has worked in three different remote companies of varying sizes, I have not found any evidence that remote teams achieve this any more frequently than conventional ones do.

> - an atmosphere of trust rather than petty control freaks who need to constantly keep an eye on their subordinates in order to know they're still 'working'

Again, I have not seen that remote teams make this any easier than conventional ones. Moreover, I think proponents of remote work in general are unaware of, or vastly underestimate, how many remote coworkers fudge their productive time because they can get away with it.

You can just as easily establish a culture of trust in a conventional office environment.

> - adapting to different forms of communication

Sure, but it’s unrealistic you’ll appeal to everyone’s favorite mode of communication, and many people don’t really care to adapt because they don’t need to. It is just as unreasonable to expect in-office coworkers to adapt to remote workers as it is to expect remote workers to come into an office for face-to-face communication.

I agree with you that remote teams can be effective in communication and productivity; however, I think your comment does more to support the position you’re arguing against than it does to negate it. Listen to what you’re saying here:

> 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.

This is fundamentally why most companies do not have remote teams. It’s attractive to remote workers and to teams that are entirely remote, but most people don’t really want to work remotely most or all of the time. What you are stating evidences this friction, because you keep reiterating that remote teams can be just as good if they put in the work, but that’s precisely the point - most people and teams really don’t want to put in the work because it’s an extra hassle.

You started your comment by attacking the idea that face-to-face interaction is important, but it quite demonstrably is important. By your own comment (and my experience, as well), remote teams need to invest a significant amount of “cooperative machinery” to make communication and productivity as seamless as it is in face-to-face interaction. That’s obviously not to say it cannot happen, or that it shouldn’t be a goal, but my point here is that this is an additional hurdle that companies considering remote teams need to be work on, which is frankly unattractive.

Some people are disciplined and motivated enough to work productively in any environment, and that’s fantastic. Some people are not intrinsically so, but they become that way in the environment of an office. And some people are simply never optimally productive! Also consider that while a very vocal minority of people want to work remotely, this does not typically jive with people who are in-office and who then have to deal with an additional friction to communicate with some subset of coworkers.

I guess to put my point more succinctly: yes, of course remote work can be wonderful and properly engaging for optimal productivity if the majority of your coworkers are intrinsically motivated and really want to work remotely. But that’s not the world we live in, and it’s not reasonable to put the effort of achieving that ideal on companies that have already established a culture that works for them through face-to-face interaction in the office.

This is a severe misunderstanding of the economics of the situation. Employees know that they're going to be spending time commuting, and they take that into account when they decide whether to take a job. In more academic terms-- that information is already informing the labor supply curve of which each individual is a part, and thus the market is already incorporating the information in the wages.

If you've ever taken microeconomics 101 then they'll probably have explained how it doesn't matter which side of the market, buyer or seller, pays a tax on business. The tax is incorporated into the price one way or another, whether it's the buyer or the seller that has to actually pony up the physical cash, and the actual tax burden of the two sides has nothing to do with who does that. The same principle applies to commuting, which is after all just a tax that the workers have to pay to the void when they have to wastefully sit around in their car.

We also had a lot of slowdown because we were stuck on a shitty off-the-shelf program he bought. He went for this one instead of the more usable competitor because it was cheaper. If he could get developers to build a working tool in the cheap product by holding them 'accountable' in his Excel sheet, he could push for the product to replace the more expensive competitor and gain some reputation in the corporation.

In the end, most of the project was a horrific failure. His best employees left, and control of the project was transferred to another manager inside of a year or two.

I think a lot of this could have been avoided if my boss had any idea about what he was managing.