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> How much meaningful and interesting work do you think exists in this world? If you're willing to take a salary cut, lots.
Depends on your definition of meaningful and interesting. I have no doubt that public school teaching, working in a nursing home, working as a social worker is meaningful, but I wouldn’t find any of those to be interesting.
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Although it is pretty strong evidence office space is a boondoggle. That’s a lot of pointless overhead costs that hurt the bottom line. I like seeing my peers in person. I like hashing things out in person. Apparently that’s a waste of time and money.
that’s just fine and good for you, but please don’t impose your preferences on the rest of us.
Most employees can screw around websurfing or shopping just as well at work as at home. They mostly do it because they are bored. Give them interesting, meaningful work and they will be productive.
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Water cooler chat used to be the big thing when I worked in an office.
I’ve worked in an office for over 25 years. I’ve never chatted with anyone at the water cooler (those, these days it is a water dispenser machine that can dispense cold or hot still water or sparkling water). I assume this water cooler chat thing must be from farther back in time.
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To put it pithily: it uses proxies of both dependent and independent variables, which increases the noise of both, in a study to determine signal-to-noise ratio.
Which proxies do you think are bad / why? The moment you go more coarse than documenting every single worker's perfect timesheet and working out their direct individual output, you're introducing some kind of proxy. What you wrote applies to every economics statistical analysis so far.
They never actually measured the amount of work hours being done remotely. They never measured the number of employees working remotely. They just had some guy make up "remote-ability" numbers for each sector and then carefully pretended to be doing science. Meanwhile all these sectors have seen unrelated changes to operating environment that have not been controlled for. It's BS on BS on BS.
Overall I am not even convinced their remote work metric would correlate with hours worked remotely.
As a Tech PM, I can say,remote work definitely increases productivity. I noticed, employees tend to work more when diligently when they were allowed to work remotely. In case of complex Troubleshooting, this is definitely an added advantage , as people can focus more and solve these issues comfortably.
I honestly got a little nervous when everyone started working from home suddenly. I think everyone that can, should have the option, but some people just don't have the discipline or haven't learned it yet. I know this because another person on my team wanted to emulate my success (pre-COVID) and blew it and proved they couldn't get work done outside the office.
> If remote work boosts productivity in a substantial way, then it should improve productivity performance Not necessarily given the methodology. For example, if remote work allows a worker to do their laundry in parallel where they would be otherwise unable to in an office, their productivity has increased, but the gains would not show up in the study. It observes industry productivity, not work productivity.
Although it is pretty strong evidence office space is a boondoggle. That’s a lot of pointless overhead costs that hurt the bottom line. I like seeing my peers in person. I like hashing things out in person. Apparently that’s a waste of time and money.
Or put the other way: Remote work let's the employee pay for the office space.
I've been working 100% remote since 2017 and I'll never willingly change it.
This is not what I want to happen, but I have to think the American tech worker gets screwed in the world where remote work is the norm. If you make the labor market global, there's a lot of really smart Europeans who will work for half or a third of what American devs will. Can anyone refute this line of thinking? I'd love to be wrong.
2. Taxation regimes. These too vary by country, and add compliance and operational costs.
3. Other laws (both U.S. and foreign) that make hiring foreign nationals complex in certain situations, e.g., ITAR.
When considered together, these costs and operational obstacles can be significant.
This is not what I want to happen, but I have to think the American tech worker gets screwed in the world where remote work is the norm. If you make the labor market global, there's a lot of really smart Europeans who will work for half or a third of what American devs will. Can anyone refute this line of thinking? I'd love to be wrong.
I think language, accents[0], time zones, and culture are the main things providing any resistance to this happening even quicker than it should.
[0]We once had a person on our team from India, sharp guy but his accent was extremely difficult to parse over audio. We ended up doing most communication over email and chat.