| > Businesses gave mixed results on remote work productivity, with 30% saying it boosted output, and 40% saying it reduced it. I think this is a continuation of the theme of technology making time-space co-ordination more independent. Recorded music/videos made it possible for artists to record their content and for consumers to enjoy it across space and time. E-commerce companies such as Amazon, Ebay, Craigslist made it possible for people to not require to be physically present at the same location at the same time to exchange goods and services. Zoom, Slack, Confluence, GitHub etc. did make it possible for people to build great products and services by collaborating across space and time for a long time, it just validated during COVID. The thing is remote work is what enables western companies to hire high quality labour from Asia, Eastern Europe etc to push out great innovations. If it works for that, why can it not work for employees across the length and breadth of the organisation? I remember when I used to work at a company where I had to do some testing on physical servers in a datacenter. When I had to install new operating systems, I had to physically walk into the data center and stand in the hot/cold isles, pop in my USB drive and (re)install the Operating Systems I needed. The day I discovered IPMI, I stopped going in. The IPMI implementation was not that good, but it was still better than going in physically to the data center. It cemented by view that, if something can be done remotely, it should be done remotely, even if the remote solution is not perfect. |
This doesn’t work - 95% of software is communication - and that drives successful projects to hire within timezone and with folks that can communicate well. We have decades of failed India outsourcing projects as proof of this.