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This essay combines a number of guilty pleasures. There's the author, Gillian Tett, who is US editor for the Financial Times, and in an earlier life, a goes-out-on-digs anthropologist. She doesn't get to flex her anthro background often but it's a joy when she does, the piece comes from an upcoming book. She focuses largely on John Seely Brown of Xerox Park, still very much alive despite Dr. Tett's past-tense references, and author of The Social Life of Information (2000, 2017), a hugely illuminating read despite a few glaring holes (like the World Wide Web, apparently invisible to a Xerox careerist at the time). It's one of several reads from the dawn of the Web age which have grown on me. And the question of how work, information, space, and distance combine. Please do give it a solid read. This isn't just another "remote work vs. offices" screed, not even hardly. One point that many WFH enthusiasts (I am one) tend to miss (I prove myself the exeption) is that telecommunications actually amplifies the power of locality, in a sort of perverse paradox. The logic operates somewhat akin to Amdahl's law of computer parallelisation, in which the degree of parallelisation is limited by the unparallelisable portion of processing. For remote work, the limiting factor is the obligate localised functions, or the functions in which local access is superior to remote. Tett's essay addresses several of these, most especially the difficult-to-capture, difficult-to-engineer incidental communications. Water-cooler chats, conversations overheard down the corridor, incidental meetings in tea rooms or canteens or lavatories, car pools, shared lunches. It's why Steve Jobs designed the Pixar studios with a centralised bank of washrooms. Being in a space, crossing paths with people, being familiar with their faces or voices, can be useful. (It's also often not so, especially where both dissimilar and incompatible activities are placed proximate to one another. But the opportunity exists.) And in a work environment where all the remote-comms tools are excellent and as good as possible, the temas working in proximity will still have the advantages afforded by localised contact. They'll also benefit from activities which cannot be provided remotely (though those may also substitute for services which might be provided at home or locally to a distributed workforce). Still, though, since Adam Smith and before, the power of cities and concentrations of activity to support a richer, more complex, more nuanced, and more specialised set of activities has been recognised. And telecoms simply cannot answer all of those needs, especially where physical presence of people, equipment, and/or activity are required. Even if telecoms could do so, it would have to be conscious and aware of the affordances it is being called on to replace, and the role and impace those had on earlier practices. |
so the article sees what is missing in remote work, but it's not spelling out what is gained: quiet uninterrupted focus time, with higher productivity.
edit: of course the FOSS community benefits greatly from occasional conferences to work on topics that benefit from a whiteboard, from being in the same room, from humming. and likewise workplace collaboration benefits from occasional deliberate face to face workshops, e.g. to sort out challenging allignment topics