[ryandrake]

Yea, those "legacy managers"... always trying to harsh our mellow. That's surely the only thing getting in the way of the ideal 100% remote-work-everywhere nirvana.

If remote working was really the slam-dunk productivity panacea that its supporters claim it is, then companies would be switching to it overnight to beat their "legacy" competitors. Shareholders would demand it! Soon, you'd have a hard time finding companies with physical offices. But that's not happening. Is it because of these old stodgy legacy managers, or could it be because there are major down sides to remote work that tend to get get glossed over by people singing its praises? What's more likely?

[glogla]

I don't think we can easily argue that "it this was good, people would have done it long time ago". Culture changes slowly, and people don't always make the best decisions.

[ryandrake]

The culture of "I want to make more money than my competitor" doesn't need to change. I can easily argue that if switching to remote work, in and of itself, were to produce clear, repeatable productivity gains that consistently outweighed the downsides, companies would switch to it very quickly.

[logfromblammo]

In that case, the easy money would be in selling remote-work consulting to businesses that want help implementing it. The results would largely depend on the quality of the people jumping onto that particular bandwagon.

Can you argue that a company that wants to try remote, but doesn't know where to start, can consistently achieve measurable gains by employing such consultants?

That element seems to be what killed the positive momentum behind Agile. If the same people end up doing the same things, remote work will likely become just as dysfunctional as local in-office work, if not more so. Companies will buy just enough rope to hang themselves from people who will even gleefully tie the slip knot for them.

[lmm]

Much as science advances one funeral at a time, I sometimes think working practices advance one bankruptcy at a time.

We are terrible at measuring productivity. I'm not sure any of the places I've worked could've distinguished a factor of 2 in productivity one way or another. There're too many other factors affecting a company's performance.

[mr_luc]

I don't know about "slam-dunk" in the sense of 'silver bullet'. But I don't find your argument convincing at all.

Why would you think that large companies, entrenched in their ways, would be capable of switching overnight to any paradigm?

Remote-work happens as most new things tend to: mostly in small companies. But it's becoming more and more common, for good reasons. There's no reason for that not to continue. And the lack of massive, immediate adoption isn't an argument for or against anything.

To cite pg's awesome OSCON talk: "I'm saying that companies will learn these lessons the way that a gene pool learns about new conditions."