More Americans now work full-time from home than walk and bike to office jobs

Re:More Americans now work full-time from home than walk and... by ghaff on Thursday April 13, 2017 @03:32PM (#14110225)

> The tech is here.

While I WFH quite a bit, I have to disagree with this statement. For a lot of interaction modes, being remote still lacks a lot of the bandwidth (for lack of a better term) than in person. If you're working out a problem/presentation/etc. with a group, it's still hard to beat a conference room with a whiteboard.

Things are better than they used to be. Something like Google Docs can certainly help. But working with a group F2F, serendipitous encounters, informal interactions, etc. can be hard to replicate. And, again, I say this as someone who works remotely much of the time and doesn't go out of my way to commute, even though it's not a bad commute.

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Re:More Americans now work full-time from home than walk and... by CydeWeys on Thursday April 13, 2017 @07:51PM (#14111732)

Thanks to Google Docs and video Hangouts it's gotten a lot better than it used to be when I first joined the industry a decade ago. You're right though, it's still not as good as being physically co-present in a conference room, or sitting side-by-side at a computer. I suspect it will get better with VR. For now, though, I definitely enjoy working in an office with my coworkers the most, with perhaps a very occasional work-from-home day (only 5% of all work days) thrown in as a sort of quasi-vacation.

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Re:More Americans now work full-time from home than walk and... by davidjnelson on Thursday April 13, 2017 @11:42PM (#14112586)

I love my vive and all, but having to deal with it for every meeting just sounds like a hassle.

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Re:More Americans now work full-time from home than walk and... by CydeWeys on Friday April 14, 2017 @02:41PM (#14116247)

That's actually a good point. I hated remote meetings back in the day when you had to call up a number and then enter a meeting ID, and having to put on a VR headset seems like a similar amount of hassle. I also have eye issues readjusting for some time after using one -- that doesn't seem like fun to deal with repeatedly throughout the day.

Maybe we'll have to wait until mind-integration VR becomes a thing.

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Re:More Americans now work full-time from home than walk and... by davidjnelson on Thursday April 13, 2017 @11:41PM (#14112580)

I'm perplexed that to this day there still aren't physical whiteboards with a screen underneath where you can write on them and see others writing. This, along with seeing the face of whoever is talking would be basically as good as being in person.

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