The vast majority of businesses aren't like Google or Facebook. The vast majority of the nation's GDP isn't created by companies like Google and Facebook. Hundreds of thousands of businesses are the size of Automattic, Basecamp, or smaller. Those businesses employ the the vast majority of workers. Therefore, Basecamp and Automattic are excellent role models.

Unequivocal success does not mean the same thing as Unicorn. A sustainable and profitable business of any size is an unequivocal success.

You can't really lead with, "Basecamp and Automattic are closer in size to most companies, and companies of that size employ the most people; therefore they're excellent role models." Size draws a false equivalence, because the remote culture at those two examples depends on far more than size, and they differ from most companies in the same size range.

As for the parent's logic, he is starting from the premise that larger companies have a much stronger signaling effect for business case studies, which in turn prompts changes adopted at other organizations in the same industry regardless of size. I think that's probably a fair premise; it's not necessarily rational, but it's correct that the business practices of large tech companies are reported on, studied and emulated more than smaller companies.

As for other factors, of course there are lots of companies and roles for whom remote working won't work, but there are certainly more it would work for than currently allow it - and many of the reasons they don't allow it aren't sensible, which is why I think essays like this that make the argument in favor are useful.

1) A collection of insightful essays discussing the merits of remote working for amenable cultures, written by people who work at companies that basically only our ingroup is very familiar with; or

2) An academic study explored by Harvard Business Review, which discusses the way remote work at a household name improved productivity in a quantitative way?

There's a herd mentality here. Larger companies impact organizational choices down the size chain. It's very similar to open source software. A large, recognizable company is much more likely to have its open source software adopted by other companies of different sizes. Not necessarily because it's more functional or robust, but very often due to signaling.

And I already seen it happen several times in my home country.

https://finance.yahoo.com/chart/AMZN#eyJtdWx0aUNvbG9yTGluZSI...

https://finance.yahoo.com/chart/AAPL#eyJtdWx0aUNvbG9yTGluZSI...

https://finance.yahoo.com/chart/GOOG#eyJtdWx0aUNvbG9yTGluZSI...

Which brings us back to my fundamental premise - companies emulate the business practices of the companies they desire to become (or in the special case of tech, desire to be acquired by). For every company that wants to virtue-signal their remote culture, or be avante garde out of sincere appreciation for the concept, there are many more that don't want to make changes like that without seeing it work at widely recognizable examples. When the companies with the collective lions' share of business signaling power in the industry have returns that look like those, they're not concerned about having mediocre engineers. Privately, they'd probably disagree with you that their engineers are even the competitive advantage.

To reiterate: this is all coming from someone who presently works remotely and enjoys it thoroughly. I just really don't think there are substantive arguments that it should be adopted by companies that don't already have the culture in place.

I dislike the herd mentality you're describing but I know it's real. And I know that most people are followers -- only when they see something like WFH brings widely recognized benefits from bigger corporations, it's only then when they will follow suit. Sad state of affairs but nothing much can be done.

At the same time, such changes never happen overnight. The returns you're linking to IMO hardly have any meaningful correlation with the on-site vs. WFH work. Engineers must deliver and produce, but the company's bottom line is only partially influenced by the engineers.

There is work at home and there is remote work. Most companies of any size (more than 1 location), have remote workers. My first job out of college in the late 90s had most of my 'team' spread across the globe in other offices. We got everything done through conference calls and emails. Eventually I stopped going to the office because there was no point. This also was not some super forward thinking tech company, but it was very cost conscious. The cost savings alone led the company down the path of figuring out who could WFH and how to make that work.

But no thanks, I get to WFH every day. Life is too short to commute.

I travel to the office every two quarters and I usually get nothing done (meetings, interruptions, etc...)

VC, chat and email makes it possible to do work. Folks saying that they can't, err, "ideate" when they're not together making noise and preventing other people from working just don't know how to use the tools they have.

Furthermore I have to travel to the office for a week every month and a half or so. That amount of travel sucks, but it's the price I pay for being able to work remotely so I pay it.

I'm honestly neutral on this, I prefer when my coworkers are around me because it's easier for me to interact with them (I noticed I'm a big procrastinator with remote communications, I keep thinking "I'll message them later" or "I'll send the email later", but that's a personal thing), it's easier to have the casual chat that leads to some form of rubber duck debugging or simply just an innocent exchange of opinions that ends up solving a problem/implementing a feature. I honestly don't get that while WFH.

However, some people feel the opposite of me and think they are more productive at home so I'd say leave it to the person to decide and, as the author of the article said, calibrate your employees based on deliverables, not on their presence in the office.

Personally, I have reasons... I prefer it, I get more done, it cuts out the commute time (which includes a lot more than actual time in the car), it lets me work on things at night when I want to...

Sure, there are negatives too, but there's a heck of a lot of positives, too.

> you should attend to all the meetings you need to and be reachable

Working from home has no real impact on either of those.

Don't get me wrong, I absolutely agree with you. I don't prefer it but I understand where you are coming from and I think you should be allowed to do so if you find it's better for your productivity.

I find I prefer working from home when writing design docs rather than doing dev work, for design docs I like simply sitting on my couch with my chromebook and be "lazy", whereas if I am developing I prefer a more customized setup with multiple screens and stuff so I have that better at work than at home. Also more coworker interaction.

Whenever I need to write design docs, I simply tell my team I'll be working from home that day and nobody so far has complained.

>Working from home has no real impact on either of those.

Yes and no. I agree with you that it doesn't have a significant impact especially since we usually have people from the other side of the world dialing in the meeting so it's not a huge difference, but I personally think that if everybody is participating in the meeting remotely, it gets harder to talk because there's more chances for talking over each other and the audio/video quality is always impacted by the connection or by the headset quality. So many people have terrible headsets/microphones that really it gets confusing if everyone does so.

But all these are problems that can be simply fixed by providing your employees with the appropriate hardware for it, obviously.

That may be true at Google, but there are a bunch of supposedly high-tech companies which are happy to give people seriously cruddy workstations. Even though my home setup is actually a 5-year-old monitor on a standing desk I bodged from an off-cut of worktop, it's dramatically nicer than what I have in the main office.

A lot of mediocre middleman managers in the typical company aren't capable of setting expectations and evaluating work results.

You need very good workers and leaders in a remote company.

I think that's a point that some people miss. To have remote workers, you need people who can effectively work remotely. It's a learned skill, like any other, and not everyone will be good at it.

Saying "we're only local" or "we're only remote" is a bad idea, you can have both and call it a win on both ends.

Honestly, I think it needs to be one or the other. Mixing some remote people into an otherwise local team often doesn't work.

The fact is WFH does not need to be a full time thing for most companies. Just offer it as a benefit-if you want, you can work from home 2 days a week, or WFH if you need to be home to pick up a package or have a doctors appointment.

That alone will make your company much more attractive.

This is one of the key problems. It's not that remote work doesn't work, it's that a bunch of mediocre middle managers only have the "butts in seats" metric to fall back on to answer whether work is getting done.

If a manager is properly tracking progress and managing the pipeline, people working remotely shouldn't be a problem.

For my own edification, I looked this up.

There are about 125 million full-time employees in the U.S. [0] Of which, there are:

* 35 million Fortune 1000 employees [1]

* 22 million government employees [2]

So, government and the Fortune 1000 account for about 45% of all employment.

I also found a census reckoning [3] (that seems to exclude government altogether) that puts large- and medium-sized enterprises at 65% of all employment (and growing).

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/192361/unadjusted-monthl...

[1] https://www.quora.com/How-many-employees-are-there-in-the-Fo...

[2] http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/terence-p-jeffrey/govern...

[3] https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...

Edited to fix sources.

Far from being role models amongst small businesses, businesses like Basecamp, Automattic are seen as outliers if they're really referenced at all. Hell, in some circles even Atlassian is seen as progressive.

Similar in a way to the amount of resistance you see to DevOps style practices / even moving to cloud with lines like "But we're not Amazon/Netflix/Etsy/Soundcloud or one of these modern businesses."

Businesses will be won over by case studies of WFH working with similarly massively conservative cultures.

What the WFH movement needs isn't proof, because you're not going to get proof without first having activists. And if companies like Basecamp and Automattic aren't wildly sucessful, is not evidence against WFH, because clearly WFH is not the sole determinant of business growth and success.

You misunderstand my explanation.

To be clearer, one can argue the "work-from-home" from 2 perspectives:

(1) WFH as a nice employee benefit -- such as ping pong tables, massage chairs, and free food.

(2) WFH as a non-negotiable employer business requirement to be the best most profitable company that crushes the competition. If you don't implement WFH, your business will be extinct.

Regarding (1)... if one only thinks of WFH as part of a "benefits package", the adoption of it will be sporadic and inconsistent among businesses. E.g. "free food" is implemented at Google & Facebook but not at Amazon & Microsoft. Yes, for arbitrary employee benefits, the bar of evidence is much lower (or none) in this case. All of those companies are profitable.

I think a lot of people are more ambitious about WFH and position it as (2). This would be similar to repeated demonstrated evidence of superiority similar to Henry Ford's "assembly line" manufacturing, JIT just-in-time inventory control, software engineering "source revision control", etc. If WFH wants to accumulate respect in this bucket, there needs to be amazing business success that points directly to remote workers as the cause & effect. The author of the essay had some citations promoting the "business productivity" angle which attempts perspective (2) but they are unconvincing for business leaders. In contrast, all 4 companies Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft implement "source code management" and it's an absolute requirement to be productive and competitive.

It would be better if WFH was elevated to the importance of "source code management" than to let it get grouped in with "free food".

I dont see working from home as being a paradigm shifting productivity enhancement but I do see it as something that has been shown to be workable, and companies that refuse to offer it will be at a disadvantage attracting skilled employees that can get that benefit elsewhere.

Why is this one different and requires that much higher standard of proof ? because i'm not sure that there's much value there, at least today.

And then it occurred to me that their thousands of writers are not employees. They are 1099 contract positions.

And then I remembered the awful stuff that went down when the Fortune 500 company I worked for created WFH positions for my exact job. It was a big fat nope for me for reasons that boiled down to the company invading my home and trying to control my life in ways I found highly objectionable. And then thing got worse as it went along because they put your quota 30% higher if you worked from home for no real reason. This was literally a figure pulled out of thin air by a person high up in the department.

When they found that people were working 11 hours a day and this was a violation of the law on their end, rather than lower the quota, they just got psycho controlling about how many hours a day you could be logged in. So I guess at that point people needed to log off to go pee in order to preserve the 8 hours a day of work time they were allotted.

This has me thinking that there may be deeper systemic issues with the very concept of a WFH employee than just "Well, it is new and different and weird and it just needs good PR." Perhaps the (apparent) Textbroker model is the actual sane thing: If you want to work from home, you get a contract position and are not classified as an employee.

None of that precludes the possibility that WFH arrangements may be inherently poorly suited to an employee contract and may be better suited to a freelance type situation.

I thought it was worth tossing the idea out there.

I think society is understandably waiting for repeated large scale remote work success before shifting their thinking.

That's not necessarily something that companies couldn't adopt if it turned out to be a good way to run a remoting-based organization.

They don't have to prove anything else beyond that.

You're talking about business succeeding because their employees work remote. Sounds like you mean "cofounders", not "employees" however. Employees are often times not directly related to the company's bottom line. Sure if I finish this project on time the company might win over a customer, which is good. But from then on, my employer's income from the customer comes from support, PR, upselling, business negotiations etc. All things I can't even remotely touch while I am in a corporation.

https://www.invisionapp.com/blog/remote-worker-truths/

Basecamp and Automattic are basically full remote companies with world wide reach of their products. Automattic is even global marked leader with Wordpress.

What else do you need?

Plus, they are ditching that as we speak.

Usually when you're on your way to being successful, you hire MBAs to do your people management and those people are the ones suually vehemently opposed to remote work.

Chicken and Egg problem.

Wow. That means that the existing technical staff will be gone in no time. New hirees will have a hard time figuring out how to even just press the "build" button, let alone, add new features. Furthermore, anybody with more than one job offer will never pick the one from an MBA. Therefore, in my impression, the success won't last, because its very reason will have been destroyed.

So, the business success piece doesn't matter. Losing key employees will turn things around quite quickly.

Or it wont, and the business suffers, and maybe eventually fails, maybe eventually doesn't.