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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

Even most IT companies in 2017 still don't allow for home office, and the few that allow it, do a very timid "only in exceptional cases".

Meanwhile working for enterprise consulting companies, all of which have offshore teams, means remote work is a daily activity.

Funny enough some customers are exactly those companies that forbid home office to their own employees.

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Some tax incentives for remote employees may help, would be good on for workers carbon footprints too.

It is already working, but not as you suggest.

As I mentioned on my comment, instead of allowing their own employees to do remote work, they outsource the work to consulting companies that actually do support working remotely.

i think this has more to do with tax optimization than location of work, many companies outsource everything to avoid taxes, otherwise they would not be able to provide competitive salaries for direct employee doing same work

I think the 'owners' don't believe at-home work can scale properly. Given a population a subset of humans will always try to beat the system. The 'butt in seats' mentality is believed to curtail that system cheating behavior.

The idea that a seat in the butt somehow would be a good deterrent against people 'cheating' the system always sounded amusing to me. One would think that companies have some way to measure someones work that's better than "Was he here for at least x hours? Yeah? Great, job done."

I've been contracting for the last 15 years and the lack of remote working means I have to do a lot less work! If the bosses are measuring your productivity on just being there then fine, they're idiots and I've no qualms about doing as I please with my time.

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