Hacker News Reader

Comment by jaggederest | Hacker News Reader

It would be handy if people could work from wherever they liked.

Maybe we could build a large system that allowed rapid communication. We could include a software layer, so that not just verbal communication could happen, but even information in all sorts of other formats.

We could call it the GlobalSys. Then commutes would stop being a problem.

I've been working from home, wherever I wanted that to be, since 2011. All of this nonsense could be avoided by simply optimizing for asynchronous cooperation via the internet.

We could also avoid some of the approximately 12% of total energy usage devoted to maintaining office space, and some of the 10%+ of urban land usage taken up by offices and parking. That's all leaving aside the approximately 50%+ of all driving miles done for commuting purposes, the maintenance and manufacturing of automobiles for commuting, etc.

View on HN

Personally, I am a lot less effective when I work from home. I need the social pressure of being in the office around other people that are working to stay focused.

But I've hired some incredible people that I totally wouldn't be able to afford in person who were able to be pretty effective working remote. I have worked with people who are absolute monsters when you leave them alone at home with a problem. Certainly, some people are far more effective working remote than working in the office. I'm just not one of them. In my experience... I am in the majority here.

(interestingly, I think I'm a better manager when managing remote than managing in person, the opposite of my effectiveness as an individual contributor. though I think that might also have had something to do with the sort of people I've managed.)

Right now, the market values people willing to go into an office who are able to communicate well face to face and get work done in that context a lot more than the market values people who are able to make themselves effective while working remote, though, and I think that's in part due to the preponderance of people who are more effective workers when they are physically near other workers? But... certainly part of that is that management is behind the times.

I don't think that management is behind the times. I think that the fundamental problem is that management has no real way to value individual contribution, and thus no way to pay people according to their value, rather than tradition, random guessing, or whatever their peers make. It's easy with salespeople, which is why so many work independently. It's much, much harder with an engineer or product designer.

Remote work requires better ability to follow the money through the process and that kind of close accounting is very threatening to a lot of people.

I also think that if we invested similar sums of money to what we spend on office space instead on collaboration technology, you'd see the effectiveness differential between remote and onsite work go down substantially.

The commutes would stop being a problem for what is still a minority of workers. If you are in manufacturing, retail, construction, food service, etc. telecommuting is just not an option.

I think the assumption is that these people can afford to live closer to where they work because of the reduced housing demand.

> Broadcom, EMC, drobo, Palo Alto Networks, Dell, citrix, and hundreds of tiny tech companies.

> google, facebook, linkedin, etc

Any of those qualify? That's what the parent post was talking about, and that's about a million people in the bay area alone that could skip a commute.

I did say some. The whole point is, for anyone who can telecommute, they should. As a matter of not just personal freedom but social responsibility.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com