However, I am not sure the analysis method used in this article is really the way to look at this issue. The fact that lots of people spend 15 minutes sitting on their rear is not a serious problem, despite the fact that you can multiply that 15 minutes by millions of people to get a large number.
The problem is that some people have very long commutes. 30 minutes or more is a problem. An hour or more is a serious problem. 90 minutes or more is, for most jobs, ridiculous.
Actually, I see rather more good news than bad news in the referenced statistics. According to the source ([1], see the table on page 2) only 2.3% of Americans have a one-way commute of 90 or more minutes. Only 7.5% have an hour or more. But 33.5% -- more than a third -- have 30 minutes or more; that is troubling.
By the way, the statistics in the source[1] strike me as a little suspect. In particular, the big bump at "30 to 34 minutes" suggests that a lot of people were thinking, "Oh, about 30 minutes." That kind of estimation is not mentioned among the possible sources of error. Someone was not thinking clearly enough when that Census Bureau report was written.
Hi. I'm the author of the post. The Census report you mention is cited by a lot of other posts out there re work habits. That definitely doesn't make it more credible - just wanted to mention that it's often cited.
I don't think there's any problem with citing an official Census Bureau report. Certainly they are the definitive source for statistics on the U.S. population. And I imagine the numbers in the report give a correct overall impression of commute times. However, I suspect the conclusions in the report as to the accuracy of the data are a bit overblown.
I live 4 miles from midtown Manhattan. That's about a 30 minute bus ride during rush hour. An hour commute is probably the average commute from the suburbs to NYC.
Which suburbs? An hour sounds rather optimistic. It's at least an hour to midtown from Westchester, Long Island, and the NJ suburbs that aren't on the PATH.
Multiplying minutes by millions of people does give a first approximation to how much energy use, pollution, and congestion you are causing. Commute times matter even if you don't care that people are sitting for 15 minutes (or 45, or 90).
That's why I think everyone should bike to work if possible. It has little to no environmental impact and a positive health impact. And because you are killing two birds with one stone by exercising during your commute, you really aren't wasting any time.
Unfortunately, where I'm at, four or five months out of the year, it's below freezing and even if you could brave the cold, you'd be taking your life in your hands with the narrowed roads, drivers that cannot navigate snowy/icy conditions, and snowplows.
That's a good alternative, in places where buses exist. In New England, at least, outside the very core of the urban areas, public transit of any kind is uncertain at best, and mostly completely unavailable.
Biking is fine if you are a prof at a college campus, or the boss of some hip startup, but I cannot arrive at work sweating through a horribly wrinkled suit. We don't have showers.
I have yet to meet anyone who has communized by bike in my city (Vancouver BC) for more than a few years without a major altercation with a motorvehicle. It might be healthy, but it is also physically dangerous.
Some places have lots of off-road bike trails. I live in Minneapolis and bike to work most days in the spring, summer, and fall (on a bike trail). The ground is flat, so it's easy to go 12+ mph without breaking a sweat.
There's a double standard for women in many jobs, even in the most bike friendly city in the US, as a biker I've observed most of my fellow commuters are men. Its easier for me as there's less expectations placed on my appearance. I put on a fresh set of clothes, a hat and I'm good to go. I'm lucky I live where biking is easy, working a non-client facing job, as male and a company with an indoor bike rack and shower.
We have a shower at my work but I don't use it. I just take it easy for the last mile or two of biking and then spend a few minutes cooling off in the bathroom stall once I get there and I'm fine. Also, I wear workout clothes while I bike. I wouldn't recommend wearing your work clothes during the commute.
The root cause of long commutes isn't a lack of biking, it is a lack of proximity. Riding a bike for two hours each way isn't an option for many people.
The solution is to increase density in the core parts of the Bay Area. Density reduces the distance between workplace and housing. Especially increased density around existing rail public transit (BART, Caltrain...) There is a lot of room for improvement here: Paris is thrice as dense as San Francisco despite having a 37m building ceiling.
Yeah, that's great, but here in NYC it's either freezing or hazy-humid for 2/3 of the year. Oh yeah, and my commute would be about 2.5 hrs each way, according to Google Maps.
Google maps is not very good at plotting bike routes or at knowing which streets are truly bike-appropriate. I frequently have to adjust any bicycle travel directions I get from them because they list a lot of busy 45 MPH roads with sidewalks as "bicycle friendly." This is in contrast to the multitude of slow residential streets that run to either side of the selected road. In fact, I've had Google Maps recommend that I bicycle downhill on a 50 MPH road because there was a sidewalk on one side. I was able to find a much slower, shallower grade about a mile south of where they wanted to take me.
I'm super happy with how our move back to the US has worked out: I'm working at a good company, and I ride about 15 minutes each way back and forth from work on my bike.
Yup! People complain that the bay area cost of living is high, but for me it's a quality of life issue. I'm able to bike to work 30 minutes each way. Sure it takes longer than driving (which I do on occasion), but it's a good workout. I can do it year-round, and it's not so warm or humid here that I show up at work dripping with sweat. Put the bike away, toss a hoodie over my t-shirt once I've cooled off a bit, and I'm set.
Yup. 9 miles each way, over the last ten years that's varied with different jobs, but I've managed to do it year round in Chicago. It's funny, when suggested, the gut reaction from a lot of people is to say why it won't work for them, instead of considering ways it might, even if used supplementally and not replacing alternatives completely.
My commute is a solid 2+ hours each way. I thought it would make me crazy, but acceptance has sort of seeped in after a couple of years. On one hand, it would be nice to have free time and/or see my family, but on the other hand, my family simply won't fit into a 900 square foot box in South Bay or a hammock in SF, which is what I could afford in those locales.
Mine has been an hour and a half by bus each way for 2 years or so, it's not all the bad to me. I do hate it when I'm delayed though - even ten minutes extra seems soul killing.
Mine is a little over 30 minutes in good weather[1] (28 miles of mostly highway), Sirius XM and Audible have been great investments. Its about the right length to get the days work sorted out in my mind, but I would live closer if I could.
The reservation suffers from a serious housing shortage never mind not being a member of the local tribe, and eastern ND has a lot of families of folks working in western ND, so housing is a bit hard to find.
1) 2 hours in crappy, why the heck didn't I go home sooner weather
"...strong, rational and tangible reasons why an employee needs to be based on-site, rather than intangibles like culture, narrative or norms."
What.
This sentiment is exactly what's wrong with trying to push for more remote work. I don't think we have the tools, either technical or managerial, to build fully-remote companies that are as effective as in-person companies. There are niches where this is true, but they're not particularly fun places to work: call centers come to mind. Companies are living, breathing, organic organizations.
The fundamental assumption that I'd challenge is that productivity towards a goal is what's hold back most organizations (or divisions / teams). I think productivity can be a bottleneck, but most of what makes companies successful is doing the right thing, not the most things. (Otherwise, startups could never compete.) As of 2015, I don't believe we have ways to get everybody in a company aligned in ways to make that happen. One of the most powerful ways of getting people working on the right things is to have them hang out with each other. Sitting next to each other, getting coffee with each other, BSing with each other before / after meetings, etc. There's a lot of unstructured communication that's simply lost, even with tools like Slack.
If that direction is there, then you can start to complain about things like lost productivity and commutes. But if there's isn't a strong sense of direction and consensus on where we're going, it doesn't matter how fast everybody is running.
(FWIW, I put my money where my mouth is on this one. I did a 3.5 hour daily commute for 2.5 years, in spite of an office 5 minutes away, because it made things better for me team.)
I would love to see better tools to help people collaborate remotely, or even just from a different building on the same campus. Certainly the rise of applications like slack and github show that the demand is there. Personally I'm surprised that most businesses haven't invested more time in collaboration tools since labor is such a big portion of the service economy's expenses.
I do think that remote work requires some culture and managerial changes as well but the success of many popular open source projects with remote teams shows that it certainly is possible.
> One of the most powerful ways of getting people working on the right things is to have them hang out with each other
There are blatant examples to the contrary: Just look at most large organizations. Getting people to work on the right things isn't a matter of spending time together, it's a matter of company culture! In a company that's constrained by processes and pointless bureaucracy for bureaucracy's sake hardly anything ever will get done, much less so the right things.
Long commutes are not a sustainable way of living and working. If we don't have the tools for making remote work a realistic option for most companies we simply need better tools.
You cant have people drive 2.5 hours to work however that does not make the parent comment incorrect. Working together is the better option and we need better tools for remote workers.
I think the many successful businesses and open source projects that exist prove that not only do we have the right tools, but that real, successful, big projects can be and are completed with some or all of the contributors being remote.
I started to walk to work more than a year ago (5km one way, about 45mins). Makes a world of a difference, as it gives me more or less two hours of exercise per day, time to get my mind on/off of work, call family/friends and other stuff. Bottom line for me - it's less the time spent commuting, than whether you can spend it in a useful way.
Good point. I have a standing desk, so always looking for ways to turn work into some health benefits. Also reminds me of my commute in London via tube from Putney to Canary Wharf which was over an hour each way. I learned two new programming languages while doing that commute.
I ride the metro for about 1:30 a day (part of which is walking to and fro), which I prefer to my prior driving commute of 25-30 minutes. I have had to increase my fantasy and sci-fi novel budget, however.
I agree completely. I take the shuttle from SF to Mountain View every day (I work at Google). It's about 70m door to door each way. For the first 6 months of work I was miserable, 70 minutes is way more time than I wanted to check my RSS and Email so I was bored. Boredom kept my mind on the commute, and thinking about the time made me angry.
I decided to use the time to read books as a new years resolution. Having at least 2h a day, 5 days a week to read books has made me fly through books faster than any other time in my life. I've already read 21 books since January and I actually look forward to my reading time now! I think if I had this time at home I would not be using it so peacefully/productively, I'd probably waste it on Netflix.
That said, 70m each way is more than I need. I think 30m each way would be the ideal balance of forced mind-clearing and reasonable work-life balance.
I do enough work at work. Plus I am not very productive on a 13" computer SSHing over flaky highway WiFi while bumping down the highway compared to sitting at a workstation with two 24" monitors, gigabit internet, 12cores, and 64GB RAM.
The article argues for telecommuting to reduce commutes. I think a far less radical approach would be to open multiple offices and put teams in more affordable secondary cities. Modern technology has made it pretty easy to spread your organization across multiple offices. I work at an organization of less than 35 people that has offices in three cities. Outsourcing IT/HR/building administration makes it pretty low-cost to have additional offices, to the point where it might actually be cheaper when you weigh the fixed overhead of each location against the cheaper office space outside NYC/SF.
I live in Baltimore now, and before that in Wilmington, and I'm astonished that more companies don't have offices in those cities. Both cities have a lot less traffic than D.C. and Philadelphia, respectively, and are well-served by rail. I'd imagine there would be a lot of talented people who would sign up at offices in those cities so long as they weren't backoffice locations and they could still do frontline work.
That works OK, but it increases the costs of reorganizing teams and projects. If your project structure changes frequently, it really helps if that just involves moving people from one room to another and not having to tell them to find a new home.
I guess that depends on what you think the value-add is of offices versus remote working.
In our organization, the value-add is forcing everyone to be on the same work schedule, promulgating organizational culture, giving managers an idea of peoples' workload so they can load-balance, and meeting the need of people to socialize. We cross-staff on a per-matter basis, and we'll generally conduct inter-team communication over email and phone whether even when the team is within a few doors of each other. Email is efficient and asynchronous. We get together in person at milestone events, where, e.g., the whole team will fly in and take over a conference room for a day or two to prepare for a big upcoming event.
If you think the value-add of offices is facilitating informal, day-to-day inter-team communication, than obviously having people in different offices makes reorganization harder. And admittedly, its been years since I was on a software team. That said, even at that time, I found people dropping by my cube, instead of emailing, to ask a question about an API I restructured to be annoying rather than productive. It's PIO instead of DMA--a waste of clock cycles.
There's a definite benefit to colocation for software teams. When someone is poring over gigabytes of logs and stack traces there's no substitute for someone more experienced looking over their shoulder, maybe grabbing their keyboard and typing in a few commands of their own then handing the keyboard back and making a few suggestions.
There also is a definite benefit to letting less-skilled developers interrupt the more skilled. Skilled developers without interruption kind of become data silos. They're extremely productive, but they could have a multiplicative effect on others' productivity that is wasted.
Even if most interruptions are useless, it's still worth it for the times when a senior dev stops a junior dev from wasting a week puzzling over a stack trace or implementing something useless.
> I guess that depends on what you think the value-add is of offices versus remote working.
Right, which I think is a calculation people need to take seriously. There are real benefits and trade-offs on either side and articles arguing that one is uniformly better than the other always come across as terribly misguided to me.
The physical and social environment that a social animal like a human spends the majority of their waking day in has a profound impact on almost every aspect of their lives. We should be thoughtful about how we arrange it.
I've worked in Wilmington, Delaware and I'm surprised any company chooses to have an office there. I had coworkers robbed at gunpoint a block from our office in the financial district, strong arm robberies of cell phones, angry and violent homeless people everywhere, etc. Add to that a high city wage tax and I just don't get it. I worked there for eight years and it seemed to just get worse and worse.
Very apparent how bad it was when DuPont of all companies even moved out of the downtown area.
For startups and new business, assuming you can draw talent, I can see this approach working... You also hear about this happening in Google Fiber cities, etc. Relocating people is a lot harder than relocating/decentralizing place-of-work, and making people go "rural" or "suburban" might not sell well for folks who are already city dwellers (i.e. the majority of the talent pool).
I know this probably sounds crazy to folks from the Bay Area, but I would gladly move offices if my company had remote offices in Boise, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Chicago, or Denver. I would even take a small pay-cut as long as I came out ahead when you adjust for cost of living. I don't know why no companies seem to offer this.
I'd imagine this doesn't sound crazy to many of those Bay Area folks. Making a large salary isn't nearly as much fun when you throw it all into rent/mortgage payments.
I've heard that Austin TX is a good city for CS people - high paying jobs, low(ish) cost of living.
I feel the same way about NYC. I can see why early-stage companies want to be in the city, but all these Fortune 500 companies, big law firms, and banks wouldn't even have to move very far. Instead, I'm stuck on the subway every day for over an hour (each way) with a few thousand of my nearest and dearest.
This is a brilliant point. If you look at Amazon and their radical expansion in the South Lake Union district (down-town Seattle) and the commuting capacity problems that creates - One wonders why they don't base satellite offices on the east side of Seattle (Redmond, Bellevue where Microsoft is) and give employees that option.
I think for large companies this is an excellent alternative and solves the problem where employees can't telecommute because of sensitive IP or security clearance.
> The way I see it, remote-workers are like work-place superconductivity: Brain power and productivity arrive instantly where they’re needed with zero transmission cost.
I think that's a weak analogy. I think a better one is that you have a core that's off the motherboard but starts up fast. Sure, there's no wake up time, but your communication with the chip is limited by the bus.
We work together to communicate. Being physically remote, even with email, chat, phone, VC, etc. is still lower bandwidth that physical presence. You can certainly make remote work successful, but I think you're lying to yourself if you don't acknowledge that being together in space matters.
This article really isn't an argument for remote work any more than it is an argument for living closer to work.
" Brain power and productivity arrive instantly where they’re needed with zero transmission cost."
Except, it doesn't, because achieving productivity usually requires remote workers to be able to collaborate effectively, and whether they can or not varies wildly.
The author doesn't seem to get this - if remote workers were so amazing, and had been so amazing in practice, companies would use them more.
Companies do not want the expense of real estate, amenities, etc
Maybe the author should stop to wonder about "hmmm, i'm clearly not the only one to think of this idea, maybe this hasn't happened because there aren't a lot of huge success stories".
> If remote workers were so amazing, and had been so amazing in practice, companies would use them more.
This kind of thinking forgets the fact that the standard office arrangement has been the same since long before modern technologies became the standard way of communicating and planning.
We're dealing with a huge legacy of "how it's been done" that is slow to change, despite the fact that I talk to my colleagues by chat and e-mail the vast majority of the time and reliable voice, video, and collab techs are now widely available.
Add to this the fact that the remote office has been shown to work for companies that start out that way and work towards that ethos (e.g. Basecamp, others).
If telecommuting was giving a significant advantage to companies, at least some companies would have implemented it successfully. Apart from specific cases, that's not happening. The author's hypothesis is that telecommuting is at least as efficient, consumes less resources and makes people happy. A bold claim, but many have written that before. In light of the evidence, nobody's really doing it, what's the most likely, that the author is right and every company with brick and mortar offices is wrong, or the reverse?
Telecommuting is to work what VR sex is to sex. Will some people be content with VR sex only? I'm sure some people will. A majority of them? Not so sure.
You're looking at this from a founder/company perspective. When I wrote that, and most of this post I was thinking of three things: The employee, the greater good (all of us, environment, etc - 'community' for lack of a better word) and the company.
So you could change that first sentence to read:
"Brain power and productivity arrive instantly where they’re needed with zero transmission cost [to the employee]"
Employee, company and community aren't mutually exclusive. Reducing commuting cost for employee makes for someone who's happier, healthier and has more time available which benefits company and community.
I'd say only considering cost-to-company is less effective and a narrow way to measure how well your work environment and policies are doing.
"if remote workers were so amazing, and had been so amazing in practice, companies would use them more..."
An argument that can be used against any innovation with a legacy alternative.
"The author doesn't seem to get this - if remote workers were so amazing, and had been so amazing in practice, companies would use them more."
A nice idea in theory but it doesn't hold up in practice. In fact the entire premise of startups is that large companies are run incredibly inefficiently and get stuck in local optima.
Managers typically stick to known practices and rarely experiment unless they are forced to or there are clear personal benefits. It is very difficult to move against entrenched corporate culture and pretty much nobody does it "for the company".
Mark Maunder is being generous with his statistics... With his average 50 min/day commute time, and assuming a 16 hour waking day, you're actually losing a full 2 weeks of waking days each year to commuting.
And I think that average belies the large number of people in tech working in dense cities like San Francisco or Seattle where the commute is much worse... We're talking 1-2 hours/day in the Seattle area if you have to cross the bridges.
Commuting is truly costly for time, health, and lifestyle in ways that neither the employers nor the employees usually account for. It's a serious externality that I wish we had a better mechanism for capturing, since people more or less take it for granted that they'll be locked in their cars for a large part of their day.
i love how i moved to be closer to my office, then the office moved some 10miles away to be in a hype place that doesn't even have chairs. only standing desks. and the CEO boasted that sitting kill BS. and here i am, having to drive 20min instead of walking 30min. with an expensive rent next to the old place...
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 146 ms ] threadHowever, I am not sure the analysis method used in this article is really the way to look at this issue. The fact that lots of people spend 15 minutes sitting on their rear is not a serious problem, despite the fact that you can multiply that 15 minutes by millions of people to get a large number.
The problem is that some people have very long commutes. 30 minutes or more is a problem. An hour or more is a serious problem. 90 minutes or more is, for most jobs, ridiculous.
Actually, I see rather more good news than bad news in the referenced statistics. According to the source ([1], see the table on page 2) only 2.3% of Americans have a one-way commute of 90 or more minutes. Only 7.5% have an hour or more. But 33.5% -- more than a third -- have 30 minutes or more; that is troubling.
By the way, the statistics in the source[1] strike me as a little suspect. In particular, the big bump at "30 to 34 minutes" suggests that a lot of people were thinking, "Oh, about 30 minutes." That kind of estimation is not mentioned among the possible sources of error. Someone was not thinking clearly enough when that Census Bureau report was written.
[1] https://www.census.gov/prod/2011pubs/acs-15.pdf
I live 4 miles from midtown Manhattan. That's about a 30 minute bus ride during rush hour. An hour commute is probably the average commute from the suburbs to NYC.
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/new-yorkers-havelongest-...
This includes people commuting from Brooklyn and Queens, which is most likely less than 10 miles to work.
90 minutes in, 2 hours coming home most days. Only saving grace is that I'm not driving for most of it.
Also, fortunately, few people live in such extreme climates as us.
I have yet to meet anyone who has communized by bike in my city (Vancouver BC) for more than a few years without a major altercation with a motorvehicle. It might be healthy, but it is also physically dangerous.
It's awesome if you're in a car though.
http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/04/18/get-rich-with-bike... - some of the benefits of bicycling.
The reservation suffers from a serious housing shortage never mind not being a member of the local tribe, and eastern ND has a lot of families of folks working in western ND, so housing is a bit hard to find.
1) 2 hours in crappy, why the heck didn't I go home sooner weather
What.
This sentiment is exactly what's wrong with trying to push for more remote work. I don't think we have the tools, either technical or managerial, to build fully-remote companies that are as effective as in-person companies. There are niches where this is true, but they're not particularly fun places to work: call centers come to mind. Companies are living, breathing, organic organizations.
The fundamental assumption that I'd challenge is that productivity towards a goal is what's hold back most organizations (or divisions / teams). I think productivity can be a bottleneck, but most of what makes companies successful is doing the right thing, not the most things. (Otherwise, startups could never compete.) As of 2015, I don't believe we have ways to get everybody in a company aligned in ways to make that happen. One of the most powerful ways of getting people working on the right things is to have them hang out with each other. Sitting next to each other, getting coffee with each other, BSing with each other before / after meetings, etc. There's a lot of unstructured communication that's simply lost, even with tools like Slack.
If that direction is there, then you can start to complain about things like lost productivity and commutes. But if there's isn't a strong sense of direction and consensus on where we're going, it doesn't matter how fast everybody is running.
(FWIW, I put my money where my mouth is on this one. I did a 3.5 hour daily commute for 2.5 years, in spite of an office 5 minutes away, because it made things better for me team.)
I do think that remote work requires some culture and managerial changes as well but the success of many popular open source projects with remote teams shows that it certainly is possible.
There are blatant examples to the contrary: Just look at most large organizations. Getting people to work on the right things isn't a matter of spending time together, it's a matter of company culture! In a company that's constrained by processes and pointless bureaucracy for bureaucracy's sake hardly anything ever will get done, much less so the right things.
Long commutes are not a sustainable way of living and working. If we don't have the tools for making remote work a realistic option for most companies we simply need better tools.
I decided to use the time to read books as a new years resolution. Having at least 2h a day, 5 days a week to read books has made me fly through books faster than any other time in my life. I've already read 21 books since January and I actually look forward to my reading time now! I think if I had this time at home I would not be using it so peacefully/productively, I'd probably waste it on Netflix.
That said, 70m each way is more than I need. I think 30m each way would be the ideal balance of forced mind-clearing and reasonable work-life balance.
Not to compete, but a 2013 study found bike commuters to happiest. Walkers were #2. :)
http://www.outsideonline.com/1795631/study-bike-commuters-ar...
I live in Baltimore now, and before that in Wilmington, and I'm astonished that more companies don't have offices in those cities. Both cities have a lot less traffic than D.C. and Philadelphia, respectively, and are well-served by rail. I'd imagine there would be a lot of talented people who would sign up at offices in those cities so long as they weren't backoffice locations and they could still do frontline work.
To rephrase, think if WeWork closed their doors to non-WeWork employees, and let their employees work from any WeWork, or from home.
In our organization, the value-add is forcing everyone to be on the same work schedule, promulgating organizational culture, giving managers an idea of peoples' workload so they can load-balance, and meeting the need of people to socialize. We cross-staff on a per-matter basis, and we'll generally conduct inter-team communication over email and phone whether even when the team is within a few doors of each other. Email is efficient and asynchronous. We get together in person at milestone events, where, e.g., the whole team will fly in and take over a conference room for a day or two to prepare for a big upcoming event.
If you think the value-add of offices is facilitating informal, day-to-day inter-team communication, than obviously having people in different offices makes reorganization harder. And admittedly, its been years since I was on a software team. That said, even at that time, I found people dropping by my cube, instead of emailing, to ask a question about an API I restructured to be annoying rather than productive. It's PIO instead of DMA--a waste of clock cycles.
YMMV.
There also is a definite benefit to letting less-skilled developers interrupt the more skilled. Skilled developers without interruption kind of become data silos. They're extremely productive, but they could have a multiplicative effect on others' productivity that is wasted.
Even if most interruptions are useless, it's still worth it for the times when a senior dev stops a junior dev from wasting a week puzzling over a stack trace or implementing something useless.
Right, which I think is a calculation people need to take seriously. There are real benefits and trade-offs on either side and articles arguing that one is uniformly better than the other always come across as terribly misguided to me.
The physical and social environment that a social animal like a human spends the majority of their waking day in has a profound impact on almost every aspect of their lives. We should be thoughtful about how we arrange it.
Very apparent how bad it was when DuPont of all companies even moved out of the downtown area.
http://www.newsweek.com/2014/12/19/wilmington-delaware-murde...
I've heard that Austin TX is a good city for CS people - high paying jobs, low(ish) cost of living.
I think for large companies this is an excellent alternative and solves the problem where employees can't telecommute because of sensitive IP or security clearance.
I think that's a weak analogy. I think a better one is that you have a core that's off the motherboard but starts up fast. Sure, there's no wake up time, but your communication with the chip is limited by the bus.
We work together to communicate. Being physically remote, even with email, chat, phone, VC, etc. is still lower bandwidth that physical presence. You can certainly make remote work successful, but I think you're lying to yourself if you don't acknowledge that being together in space matters.
This article really isn't an argument for remote work any more than it is an argument for living closer to work.
Except, it doesn't, because achieving productivity usually requires remote workers to be able to collaborate effectively, and whether they can or not varies wildly.
The author doesn't seem to get this - if remote workers were so amazing, and had been so amazing in practice, companies would use them more.
Companies do not want the expense of real estate, amenities, etc
Maybe the author should stop to wonder about "hmmm, i'm clearly not the only one to think of this idea, maybe this hasn't happened because there aren't a lot of huge success stories".
This kind of thinking forgets the fact that the standard office arrangement has been the same since long before modern technologies became the standard way of communicating and planning.
We're dealing with a huge legacy of "how it's been done" that is slow to change, despite the fact that I talk to my colleagues by chat and e-mail the vast majority of the time and reliable voice, video, and collab techs are now widely available.
Add to this the fact that the remote office has been shown to work for companies that start out that way and work towards that ethos (e.g. Basecamp, others).
Telecommuting is to work what VR sex is to sex. Will some people be content with VR sex only? I'm sure some people will. A majority of them? Not so sure.
So you could change that first sentence to read:
"Brain power and productivity arrive instantly where they’re needed with zero transmission cost [to the employee]"
Employee, company and community aren't mutually exclusive. Reducing commuting cost for employee makes for someone who's happier, healthier and has more time available which benefits company and community.
I'd say only considering cost-to-company is less effective and a narrow way to measure how well your work environment and policies are doing.
"if remote workers were so amazing, and had been so amazing in practice, companies would use them more..."
An argument that can be used against any innovation with a legacy alternative.
A nice idea in theory but it doesn't hold up in practice. In fact the entire premise of startups is that large companies are run incredibly inefficiently and get stuck in local optima.
Managers typically stick to known practices and rarely experiment unless they are forced to or there are clear personal benefits. It is very difficult to move against entrenched corporate culture and pretty much nobody does it "for the company".
And I think that average belies the large number of people in tech working in dense cities like San Francisco or Seattle where the commute is much worse... We're talking 1-2 hours/day in the Seattle area if you have to cross the bridges.
Commuting is truly costly for time, health, and lifestyle in ways that neither the employers nor the employees usually account for. It's a serious externality that I wish we had a better mechanism for capturing, since people more or less take it for granted that they'll be locked in their cars for a large part of their day.