Remote work hasn't taken off on a large scale because massively successful multi-billion dollar companies like Google/Facebook/Amazon/Apple/SpaceX were not built with remote workers.
You get (relatively) minor companies touting it such as Automattic and Basecamp. Those smaller businesses haven't achieved enough success to convince business leaders on a large scale.
So to riff on your writing... "if only there were a multi-billion dollar company built on the competitive advantages of remote work."
If that happened, we'd then have Harvard Business Review doing endless case studies on its superiority.
EDIT TO ADD:
There is a limited type of "remote" work that existing successful companies will allow (and even encourage): it's the offsite remote _team_.
Some examples include IBM's team to build the "personal computer" down in Miami instead of working in the New York offices. Amazon (Seattle hq) has Lab126 (Silicon Valley) working on the Kindle. Google wanted a rewritten Javascript V8 engine and hired Lars Bak from Denmark. From the story I remember, Lars Bak made it a condition of employment to not relocate to California and because he already had the reputation, Google agreed. At first, he worked out of his home in Denmark but then he opened a Google office and his programming team then worked in that office.
Those semi-remote scenarios are about as far as you're going to get until other businesses with full remote employees working from home proves to the business world that "remote working" is a competitive advantage.
Remote office with an onsite team in that remote office -- yes. Remote telecommuting from home on a large scale? Not yet.
All I hear is excuses and lack of willingness to work remotely, coped with lack of experience on how to make it work. From all sides.
The secret is following the procedure and working remotely even if the person is sitting next to you. (I don't mean get into a video chat if the person is sitting next to you) but:
- Procedures for idea exchange. You might talk to the person next to you or through a private PVT channel but make the ideas circulate.
- "Oh Slack/IRC/etc is distracting", do you know what else is distracting? My colleague next to me. Deal with those.
- Have good tools and follow procedures.
I'm a full 100% remote worker and I would never bring up "Linux development" as evidence for businesses to adopt remote work. If remote work evangelists want to argue for the benefits of work-from-home, please do not use Linux as an example because it undermines credible business thinking. As I've said before[1] and paste again here:
Open source development as "obvious" proof of remote work superiority is often brought up but proponents don't realize they aren't the same. E.g. open source project like Linux kernel where volunteers choose what they want to work on, with little or zero effects on careers for missing deadlines has different dynamics than businesses.
If we want to convince businesses to adopt remote work, the Linux kernel is not a relevant example. Businesses have:
1) finite budget
2) deadlines
3) pressure to innovate for marketplace acceptance or go bankrupt
We need a better explanation for why business-related success of Google Pagerank/Bigtable, Apple iPhone, Facebook, etc comes more from teams in the office rather than remote workers on Skype. The Linux project -- even though it is "successful" -- is not that explanation.
The vast majority of Linux kernel contributors work for companies who pay them to work on the Linux kernel. Many of those developers do have some flexibility in what they spend their time on but it's not like they can do whatever they feel like.
Sorry for not being clear, the context was "building" a product. E.g. rewind the clock to 1991 when Linux Torvalds and volunteers and hobbyists are "working remotely" via USENET and exchanging emails. The Linux kernel they iterated on is an astounding achievement but that collaborative process is a totally different dynamic than a business that has to spend real money and get a product out.
And yes, they do often work for upstream projects as part of their jobs, pushing for changes they need for their deadlines.
Most of open source work is done by companies. And yes, a lot of them with remote workers.
Though I agree, I don't expect an iPhone to be made remotely though, hardware is complicated.
Yes, the employees of companies at Intel, RedHat, and IBM contributing to Linux work within a finite budget (paid salaries) but The Linux Kernel itself does not have a budget. If Intel/RH/IBM all stopped funding programmers to work on Linux, the Linux project would still continue with volunteers. It may continue at a slower pace but it would continue nonetheless.
The point remains: Linux kernel remote workers cannot be used as a case study for businesses to adopt remote telecommuting.
The Linux kernel's ~26 million lines-of-code[1] is much smaller than the proprietary code bases at Google, Facebook, and Microsoft. E.g. Google had 2 billion LOC in 2015.[2] MS Windows is ~50 million LOC. All those companies have faster commit velocities to their repos than the Linux project.
[1] https://phoronix.com/misc/linux-2017/index.html
[2] https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/7/204032-why-google-stor...
It's only might be necessary if you want a large, single family house.
Which is fortunate for any US or European citizen who hopes to ever find employment again.
Culture is an issue (both from the contractor and the hiring sides), quality is another (in some places).
maybe in theory, but every company I've ever even heard of has been more than happy to throw together almost any random group of people regardless of culture (or even language) as long as they had the right credentials and expect for culture issues to sort themselves out and good quality to appear. But if consistent culture is the important thing... it's a lot easier to find a homogeneous culture in Hyderabad, India than it is in San Francisco, CA (of all places).
The idea seems to be that remote employees are expected to establish a little mini-outpost of that company within their own home, while local employees who "work from home" are more often than not really handling errands or lounging or whatever. It's a double-standard, but a very common one in my experience.
More curiously, I'd like to see if remote work was responsible for preventing a company from reaching milestones like being a multi-billion dollar company.
As a farmer, I like to think of it as the original working remotely career. Especially in history where your entire land-base and home were one in the same. Working in an office away from home is the 'new fangled' way to work.
There is also the friction of the software itself. Whiteboarding and freewheeling discussion is possible but it doesn’t have the same feel to it
But consider the costs of that colocated time. 3 hours out of a worker's day is a lot - they could either do more work (boo) or be less stressed while they work (yay) without that commute. They'd also have fewer sick days (colds don't do TCP).
And the flip side of serendipitous conversations is distracting chatter. Which one affects productivity more?
Oh yeah, and office space costs a lot.
Remote work isn't all roses. But colocation is extremely expensive. The question is whether it's worth it.
But 3 hrs daily commute time is still an outlier, even in the Bay Area. Especially since many major companies have shuttles that allow people to use their commute time productively.
Is it possible that we're missing something in this? And that there might be more to this than companies being unwilling to try remote workers?
I know my own experiences with working remotely and having remote colleagues have upon occasion been other than an unalloyed positive.
Maybe if it was structured like this then it would be more win/win.
If open-plan offices are any hint, it's that actual knowledge worker productivity (let alone well-being) is pretty low on the list of things managers look for.
> I know my own experiences with working remotely and having remote colleagues have upon occasion been other than an unalloyed positive.
Sure but the same can be said of office work.
At the same time management has cracked down on any work from home requests. So somehow management does not care about individual productivity. As long as a crappy HP laptop is hooked on to 2 monitors every developer is good to go.
Alternatively, leadership has decided the price of lower density seating is not worth the increased productivity. Realizing there was no expectation of working at 100% significantly improved my well-being.
Yes, because construction sites remain under construction for 10-20 years. /s
Not everyone wants to find a new home every month.
We're getting there.
I'm about to go vote for taco makers to have the pleasure of not living in a big city right now.
I live in a pleasant medium-sized town, I bought a house for less than a Bay-area toolshed, and I can commute myself downstairs to make a sandwich.
If every worker were remote, can you even imagine how hard you'd have to work to justify a physical office to the CFO and potential hires?
- Social isolation
How do you ensure that your social brain is exercised? If I don't make a conscious & deliberate point of it, I can go an entire day without leaving the house, sometimes multiple days.
Working from home can mean 8 solid hours of programming, but that can be difficult to sustain even if you have the environment for it. Natural social breaks are missing in this environment, it's just you and the code.
I often work outdoors in the warmer months. I've got an office at home, but I've also got a handful of places where I can park my Jeep and either hang my hammock or pull out the back seat and work in the shade, with the background noise of nature and/or traffic depending on my mood. I'll do that for 2-4 hours, then go grab a coffee or go to the park with my kids (we homeschool). After a couple of hours of that, I usually go back to one of my spots and do it again. Other days I'll work at night after my wife and kids are in bed.
I go play with my friends and family after work, sometimes also at lunchtime.
Even to the US's outsized standards, 150k is a mid-size city, not a small town.
I think it really just boils down to hiring talented people you can trust. Paying them plenty. And fighting off all the unnecessary project management nonsense that makes politics and therefore in person meetings important.
I work in a remote office, and I collaborate every day with my team in Dallas (and most company members are distributed mostly all through the U.S. but also Canada, the UK and India).
There's a LOT of collaboration tools, we use Slack (well, we were forced on Microsoft Teams now), Jira, Skype, e-mail, WhatsApp...
I still appreciate meeting in person, they flew me once to meet most of the team.
Videocalling is decent, but still no substitute, but all those tools I outlined do enable us to create value :) .
There have been ginormous cost overruns, not to mention real technological problems and delays getting to market when collaboration has not been close. For example, the Airbus A380 (and to a larger extent the Boeing 787) were both massively delayed and over budget because far-flung suppliers of various major components faced big issues coming together on many details. A counterexample (mentioned in a book by the 'father of the 747', Joe Sutter) is how the 747 program was endangered in a big way when the Boeing company considered moving production (of the 747) to Walnut Creek, CA.
Similar problems happen on a routine basis in many software shops; only routine, well-scoped work has been successfully carried out by offshore teams.
The project I'm currently leading definitely gives lie to your assumption, and I'm a member of an offshore team.
I'm not saying that projects with substantial manufacturing components don't benefit from proximity. Also, those project you mention had huge political issues (not great examples).
And yes, the ideal situation is to have everyone on-site. But the disadvantages are that you have to pay them ridiculous wages to offset cost of living, and compete with a smaller subset of talent, or they have to do 90 minute super-commutes.
Many people can't move to the Bay Area for various reasons. Does a top developer that leaves the U.S. magically become worse? Or is a top developer bad just because he hasn't tried hard enough to get into the U.S.?
Even YCombinator believes that founders don't have to be physically present if it doesn't make sense.
Individual anecdotes that support one case or another are easy to dig up, but you would be hard-pressed to find large pieces of really innovative software products developed without people in close proximity (you could claim that the Linux Kernel is a big project but that's an open source software that is not really a commercial product).
Everybody can not move to the Bay Area, and good developers do not become bad by moving away or not being there, but the simple fact remains: there are no (financially) large and successful software companies have been fully distributed from the ground up.
Claim I agree is there are no (financially) large and successful software companies have been fully distributed from the ground up.
Which is very different from the claim I strongly disagree with which is: only routine, well-scoped work has been successfully carried out by offshore teams.
I DO agree that there's an advantage to on-site work.
This jobs exist where they are because the "nerds" work there. They could choose not to work at those nerd-service jobs (forcing nerds to buy there food closer to home) or form a union to demand higher pay, or organize and build housing there.
Also, "nerd" is unhelpful trash talking.
Right. And here's one nerd who goes to lunch a couple times a week in a not-huge town far from the Bay area, supporting the ability of restaurant managers to not live there, either.
> Also, "nerd" is unhelpful trash talking.
I meant it to be humorous but not derogatory. I'm a programmer.
Remote work is only part of the solution. Urbanism, prioritizing transit & deprioritizing cars, increasing density are also parts
It is a source of friction, sure, but it also has a lot of positives.
I'm pretty sure there's an equilibrium point for on-site vs remote, but I also believe we're nowhere near that right now - and technology might keep bridging the gap to swing it even more towards the remote side.
We can dream.