Remote startups may win the war for top talent (in the short term) but who will win on productivity and by extension revenue? I guess we will all see that in the next 24 months.
Colocated employees clearly cost more in the form of office space. They can also command higher salaries than similarly-skilled remote workers because they constitute a significantly smaller labor pool.
Despite the counter-arguments in the article I do find it plausible colocated employees (ed: or maybe organizations) may be, on average, more productive.
But because there are so many confounding variables I think it'll take many years of evidence before we can empirically answer the question of whether the increase in productivity generally exceeds the costs of being in-person.
(For the record my guess is that it will be dependent on the industry and role. I think winner-take-all markets and roles like R&D and startup founders may be worth the added in-person tax, and everyone else will eventually be remote.)
This thread treats the question as if it has a single correct answer, but there's a pretty big probability it will vary between sectors, companies, employees and countries.
I'm not sure productivity maps that directly to revenue. People are wildly productive when they work remotely. What's harder is sharing context and tackling large problems with other people.
Maybe the word productivity is creating some ambiguity here. Company (net) productivity is very different than individual or team productivity. Direction, Strategy and Agility play a much more significant role than raw speed or throughput.I believe with in person communication & interaction it is much easier to succeed in that.
Remote introduces barriers. It is theoretically possible that remote can move 100x faster & have better net productivity than in person, however that is far from the truth today.
Remote vs. in office has no difference in productivity from what I've seen. Most of in office communication is still over slack/chat. When collaboration is needed usually a tv screen is needed to screen share since two people sitting at one laptop is uncomfortable, and video chat screen share is better for that anyways. On top of that you don't have to wait for a meeting room that may be booked at the moment you want to collaborate.
Another big thing is the psychological effect of being a chair warmer. Sitting in an office environment, and being "seen" gives the impressing of working. Imagine seeing someone in their chair before and after you leave each day. It gives the impression that they are "working hard". With remote only there is no chair warming, you have to show results.
IME: This aspect of things has not proven to be a problem in practice; Slack and videoconferencing works well, FWIW. Managers are mainly complaining about forward planning not working as well as pre-pandemic, but they’re unwilling to actually change to fix that problem, which is how you get rigid hybrid plans and not flexibility.
There are better and worse ways to do it. But I found it uncomfortable to provide the "spin around and ask your co-worker" experience when helping to onboard people remotely. If someone's taking much longer than expected to get up to speed you want to find some way to make yourself more available without looking like you're watching their every move.
Great! but the docs are on the offensive side:
- "Yes, send me all your stupid updates"
- "The new print modifier lets you style how your site should look when animals(in strikethrough) people print it."
Because by definition offensive has to do with how people receive something. I love the library, will continue using and donate, I would prefer the docs not to assume that people that print papers are animals. That's all! Take it or leave it.
i read that as sarcasm delivering a subtle critique on digital consumption in 2021 and how print has been killed by digital media (for most folks). obviously they acknowledge that people still want to read in print, otherwise, why would they bother to add this feature?
maybe i'm reading into it too much, but i don't think they think print readers are inferior.
