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Comment by zak_mc_kracken | Hacker News Reader

Worse for the employee, better for the company.

Companies draw the line between these conflicting goals at various places.

It's a trade off. You gain raw code output but lose a lot of the culture and serendipitous communication that leads to awesome breakthroughs. So many great things have come from random talks or drunken brainstorming.

As an employee, I always tried to work from home 2-3 days and then work from the office 2-3. Was a great happy medium.

This sounds like it could work well but unless there was desk sharing, companies would end up paying for floorspace lying idle half the time.

How is it better for the company? That's my whole point. I feel like people produce better work as remote employees.

Probably better for the investors who own SF property, that's why I assume VC are always so anxious for companies to relocate.

"Investors who own SF property?"

I would be hard-pressed to name a venture investor that also finds themselves in the real estate business to such an extent that they want their investments to relocate? Investors do not own SF property for their companies and even the traditional ones on Sand Hill Road are leasing (expensive) office space like the rest of us.

It is possible that the investment and the board had influence on the decision but that could be for reasons independent of real estate ownership.

It is better for company, because it can control workers.

There is a reason companies give all those perks to employees - their (employees) loyalty grows. Employees get addicted to all the great stuff large corpo have to offer.

Its like small startups getting office dog. People get emotionally connected to it so they wont leave the company... Cheap trick but it works. Free snack bar, transport and gym anyone?

That doesn't always work. Working remotely is worth far more to me than free food, massages, free flu shots, laundry, etc.

I worked remotely for a small company that was acquired by Google & I had to relocate with my family to the SF Bay area against my will, similar to the Reddit folks. I had 10x the loyalty to the small company that I will ever have to Google, mostly because of the forced relocation. I can't wait for the retention bonuses to run out & to move back home.

You dont get it. I said its better for company. Ofc its worse for you, but why those large companies should bother? They are interested in results and royalty. No explanation from you is worth as much as having employee in-house for them.

> You dont [sic] get it. I said its [sic] better for company. Ofc its [sic] worse for you ...

Only explanation -- a broken apostrophe key.

Many, many business leaders feel that real collaboration takes place in person. Google and Yahoo seem to be two prominent examples. Remote productivity may be wildly different for different roles.

MIT tech review just published a piece about Eric Schmidt's view on remote work and leadership: http://www.technologyreview.com/news/531056/google-execs-hav...

Places with giant piles of bad code require maintenance coders to sit with the original authors.

Linux Kernel is 100% remote workers.

And look how badly Linux turned out. ;-)

(sarcasm in case it wasn't obvious)

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