[assocguilt]

Being forced to work from an office is the biggest scandal in the western world.

I can see the highway coming from the Sydney harbour bridge from my office window - it's alway congested, it takes a huge amount of time to get to and from work.

I guarantee most of the people burning fuel, creating congestion and stopping themselves (and everyone else) from getting home to their families on time have jobs that could easily be done from home.

The argument that unexpected collaboration happens when people are forced to go to the office is a joke and certainly not worth protecting when you consider all the other negative effects of commuting and working in a central location:

- Rising house prices

- Sprawling high density housing resulting in more people living in smaller areas creating a massive strain on infrastructure and massive reduced living standards

- Commuting for hours per day which affects family life

- Creating pollution hot spots

- Burning large amounts of oil and petrol

A truck spilt several tons of dirt onto the Sydney harbour bridge last week, this caused hours of delays for thousands of people trying to get home. Why should one truck accident hold thousands of people to ransom? How many people missed their kids bed time because of that?

Most companies even being amenable to change based on me bumping into someone from a different department is a laughable idea. We need a massive culture shift in the way we approach most office work. It's an absolute scandal.

[mooreds]

I work from home often. I like working from home. I fight to work from home. I've worked from home off and on for over a decade.

That said, in my experience there are some things that are just done better face to face. Not many, but some.

* meetings where you want to sketch something out--I haven't found a digital solution for sketching say, architecture diagrams, that works as well as a whiteboard.

* the chance to meet and interact with someone outside of your team/department by happenstance, say at a FAC. Of course, you can go onto different slack channels, but I think the interaction wouldn't be as fluid.

* one on ones. While I guess a hangout might give you some of the face to face time, video conferencing isn't as high bandwidth as face to face conversation, including all the nuances of pauses, body language, etc.

I think there might be others, and I bet they all have the component of physicality that can't be delivered digitally. (Yet? Maybe VR will deliver it.)

I'm not a fan of required in office work, but see the tremendous value in it on occasion.

Edit: formatting

[assocguilt]

I don't doubt that there are good reasons to work from a central location - I do a lot of pre-sales work so I understand the importance of face to face - however, if I weigh up the cost of commuting (as a whole for society) then we just cannot justify having all office workers commuting 5 days per week.

We can still make face to face work, I just don't believe everybody has to commute everyday - it's all about balance - we just need a culture shift.

[mooreds]

> I just don't believe everybody has to commute everyday

Agreed!

[jschwartzi]

You should take a look at Lucidchart. I can attest that it works well for sketching diagrams collaboratively.

[Stubb]

Any idea how it compares to Astah Share?

http://astah.net/editions/share

[mooreds]

Will give it a try, thanks for the recommendation.

[bootload]

"I guarantee most of the people burning fuel, creating congestion and stopping themselves (and everyone else) from getting home to their families on time have jobs that could easily be done from home."

Bandwidth.

No NBN and what you have is copper by default, maybe cable then a sat connection. This is the price paid for poor leadership. NBN should be thought of as the rail of the 21st century. Instead we get a few main lines, some branch lines, everyone else gets donkey carts. [0]

[0] Aus, Melbourne perspective.

[assocguilt]

Hahaha, obligatory NBN complaint :-D

I agree, NBN has been turned into a joke, however, I would be surprised if most people around Sydney and its suburbs don't have access to fast enough broadband to use email and other online services they require - but yes, bad internet infrastructure would prove to be an issue and would need to be addressed.

[stonith]

The upstream on cable is not fast enough for screen sharing anything requiring visual detail. It maxes out at 2Mbps or some garbage which means collaborating on something visual is a pain in the ass. ADSL is even worse. For code you can use screen or tmux, but working together on a CAD model or whatnot isn't a great experience.

(I say this as someone happily working from home in the East)

[assocguilt]

Most office workers need email. Your needs are niche, I'm not saying that you should not go to the office or have awesome internet, I'm saying your needs are not the same as the average.

However, I do anticipate that a culture shift to working from home will require higher bandwidth as more services move to the cloud and as workers start to require video conferencing.

[karmelapple]

How is cell internet in Australia? I will be remote working there soon, and I've seen the 2 Mbps upload speeds from at least one of the cable internet providers, and am kind of... shocked. That won't do for a decent google hangout.

Are there good internet providers? If so, which ones should I look for at an Airbnb I will stay at?

[Tsagadai]

Mobile internet is reasonably fast (around 25MB up and down with my provider) but very expensive. About the cheapest data rate I have found is $15AUD/GB (measuring uploads and downloads). Performance is also patchy, there are blackspots with limited EDGE level connections in most capital cities and you are lucky if you have any reception in rural areas.

[assocguilt]

I've got fibre in my area so tend to do really well. I also have 4G on my phone which reports upload to be over 25MB

[r2dnb]

>The argument that unexpected collaboration happens when people are forced to go to the office is a joke and certainly not worth protecting when you consider all the other negative effects of commuting and working in a central location:

You got it, the reason people are required to work from a central office is that current managers are simply not able to manage remote teams.

Here's an article explaining it : http://read.reddy.today/read/3/remote-teams-are-the-future-b...

[ENTP]

I exclusively do remote work yet have found myself renting an office (funnily enough not far from the harbour bridge) so I'm not at home getting cabin fever. I was amazed at how much you miss out on little things like human interaction, sharing a lunch, etc you miss out on when isolated. I guess that changes when you have kids.

[randomacct44]

Speaking of Sydney, are there many tech companies that allow remote work in Australia? (I'm a software developer, primarily .NET but also C++ and embedded firmware FWIW).

Are there any job sites / directories specifically for finding remote-work jobs?

As a fellow Aussie I'd love to work remotely, but I don't necessarily want to work for an overseas company, for example.

[siquick]

If theres one country in the world that needs to embrace remote work its Australia.

We seriously need to move away from tech companies only setting up base in Sydney and Melbourne and in turn, killing other cities and making us all live in ridiculously overpriced apartments so we don't have to commute for hours per day.

I would love to live in a more rural area one day but this is just never going to happen while I work in tech.

[sams99]

I have been doing remote from Sydney for the past 9 years. Not sure about sites or directories (maybe try Stack Exchange jobs)

As sad as it is, I think it is significantly easier to find a US or Europe based company to work for from Sydney than an Australian based company.

All the friends I have that work remote are doing so for US based companies (GitHub, Docker and me at Discourse)

Sydney based companies in usually will only offer you a day or two from home and even that is often pushing it.

[toomuchtodo]

https://github.com/lukasz-madon/awesome-remote-job

[assocguilt]

No idea, I'm not in a position where I will be able to work from home regularly so I haven't looked into it.

Even the better tech companies (e.g. Atlassian) aren't keen on WFH.

[_kyran]

Envato have a pretty liberal remote policy.

[gerbilly]

>Being forced to work from an office is the biggest scandal in the western world.

I consider it to be a form of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_violence