For engineers who are in the habit of thinking of their job and their career (and maybe a lot of other things?) exclusively in mechanistic terms of inputs and outputs, it's a tempting abstraction.
But when you work remotely, you're basically advertising your work as commodity work. You're basically consistently reminding the company -- and the job market -- that you are substitutable. In economic terms, that is simply not a smart signal to be sending.
It's also short sighted in terms of the arc of your career. Right now you might be making economic value in the marketplace strictly by extruding a software widget from your keyboard. Great! But at some point, the odds are good (not 100%, but good) that the way you'll make value is by enabling others to build software; reading body language, detecting issues in a team; or negotiating; or motivating; or selling; etc. The proportion of people reading this who will hack til their retirement day is quite small.
Sitting in your home office being "productive" isn't preparing you to do much that's important in the second half of your career. It's a case of over-fitting. You're optimizing around your current skill set and not thinking about the larger portfolio of useful -- human -- skills.
You don't provide an argument for why working in an office provides what you are claiming remote workers to lack, nor do you provide evidence to backup your claim that remote workers are more replaceable.
> But at some point... the way you'll make value is by enabling others to build software; reading body language, detecting issues in a team; or negotiating; or motivating; or selling; etc.
If you can't do this through verbal communication and hangouts, maybe you should work on your communication skills as a manager - sometimes listening to the words people say is more reliable than making assumptions based on body positioning. On the flip side, maybe you should focus your hiring efforts on developers with strong communication skills, and enforce an evaluation period w/ new developers to see if they can meet the mustard in terms of remote communicating. Good developers don't communicate passively; they use their words and this can be assessed by good managers.
Maybe the reason you don't see that this is obviously the case is that you haven't been in enough direct contact with the people making these replacement decisions. :P
> If you can't do this through verbal communication and hangouts, maybe you should work on your communication skills as a manager - sometimes listening to the words people say is more reliable than making assumptions based on body positioning.
...and sometimes it's not. Also, you're making it sound like people are more likely to make assumptions based on body positioning--every form of communication involves assumptions. Communication without body language inherently communicates less--you're making more assumptions because you have less information to go on.
We are all remote at my company. We've had to train managers to stay in their damn offices and put on the headset, instead of walking around or gathering people in conference rooms. Because being away from the collaboration tool is the biggest source of isolation and communication trouble we have.
If everybody is jacked in, can see everybody else in their space, knows who is talking to whom at a glance, and can talk/webcam/share with a mouse click, why then we get so much more done. More than being physically present, which really means being close to 1 or two people but physically isolated from everybody else in the building.
Again I realize offices are all different as are tasks, but this is my opinion from experience in about 7 different offices spanning full time, contract and temporary onsite freelance work.
I would love a job where I NEED to be at the office, instead of feeling like it's a waste of my time just to satisfy my supervisor's 'feelz' but not his / her or the company's actual needs.
I'm for balance between in and out of office. I'm for not being locked into one chair as if sitting in the same place was ever the way that humans were supposed to live for the majority of their day / life.
On the other side of things: a team with good communication skills will communicate effectively either in-person or remotely.
I'm calling out the dumb logic of the article, not arguing against remote work. I think remote work is bad for productivity generally, but it's a small problem. Personally I prefer the flexibility that working remotely allows.
BTW - since I work from home I just got to on a 20 min jog with my wife. Yes, we do go outside.
That is the opposite of true: I prefer to work remotely.
The purpose of my post was to tear apart bullshit claims that working remotely fixes all sorts of problems. Working remotely is better for workers, not for companies (at least not in the ways claimed).
> They prioritize communication and collaboration by necessity
This is exactly what remote culture doesn’t do. A remote culture inherently has decided that being off-site is more important to them than being able to communicate and collaborate quickly and easily.
> It is easy to reach out for help
Easier than standing up and asking for help over the cubicle wall? No.
I can see how the increased difficulty of communication could be arguably a better thing, but let’s not pretend it’s easier.
> There is a lot less wasted communication
This is true, but it’s balanced by the fact that the non-wasted communication costs a whole lot more. And I think it’s also an overstated claim: just because you can refer back to your communication doesn’t mean anyone actually can find the communications or actually does go back and refer to it.
> There is a lot less posturing
I can see how this is annoying, but I’m not sure how this relates to a claim of productivity. In the end, I’m not sure presenting ideas with logic is actually the best way to do things: often I’d rather just do what the best doers on the team suggest, with or without justification. The best plan is the one that gets the job done quickly and with quality, even if it’s one that’s hard to justify logically beforehand. Requiring logical justification for things means that you prioritize the talk of people who talk well over the intuition of people who are actually good at their jobs. It’s worth noting that posturing tends to be most effective for people who are respected by their teammates, which tends to correlate with being good at your job in technical fields. Posturing evolved as a behavior for a reason, and I’d not be so quick to discard it.
Also, there’s an apparent contradiction between "Even if we are over-communicating, it is okay, because we aren't forcing a squadron of employees to sit in a meeting room pretending to be interested.” and "I have to believe that it has something to do with the fact that most of the effective communication is either written, or is done in large meetings where lots of people are watching.” Either your meetings are larger or they aren’t; don’t pick whichever fits the point you’re trying to make.
> There is often a higher caliber of workers
Uh, okay. If we’re allowed to make vague unjustified claims, I guess I can just counter with, “Remote work tends to lead to unhealthier workers because they don’t go outside”.
> You get a huge portion of your life back
This is also a pretty unjustified claim. When I worked from home I found that it was a lot harder to “turn off” when my workday was done.
Citing commute times is a good justification for living near where you work, not necessarily for working remotely. I’m a 25 minute train ride from my work, and having an excuse to get up and go out is pretty good for me in general.