Research on remote work shows less collaboration and info sharing
Based on 61K Microsoft workers' data: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01196-4
It is a legit Nature paper, so high quality peer-review etc. coming from a UC Berkeley/MIT researcher's work mostly (who worked as Data Scientist at Airbnb and holds a master's in Physics & Astronomy, so he knows the stats he is applying). The findings are not that surprising to be honest.
Below a personal rant about WFH, don't read it if you are not in for a 100 page book:
Not surprising to me that many people want to WFH. If I had the possibility to work 4 days x 8 hours a week with the same salary, would I say no? How would that be reflected in company polls? Would it be in the company's best interest to follow the polls?
One thing I never understood of all this fad is the logic behind companies moving fully remote just now. Take any big FAANG company and think about the money spent on real state worldwide. Think about whether the means of remote working were available (>10 years). Think that these companies already have a minority of workers doing full remote and can collect their data. They have for sure already evaluated this idea in the past and concluded it was not in the best interest of the company, otherwise they would have saved money and increased hiring possibilities years ago.
The only difference now is fad, worker pressure and marketing. Companies struggling to survive in the near term cut cost by moving fully remote (nothing new, partial remote move happened at Yahoo and IBM when they started to lag, later reversed). Other fad-followers (for example Square, not surprising that it intersect with "bitcoin adpoters") take the "this is the new paradigm" illusion and go with it. Others will try to compete for talent with this strategy because they are not able to match compensation. In the end, max. 5 years from now, I wouldn't be surprised if some were forced to modify their policy like it happened for IBM and Yahoo.
(Offtopic rant about bitcoin below):
I am honestly a bit surprised by the lack of critical reasoning to follow this argument within the tech community, but then again I am also very surprised by the lack of critical reasoning of Bitcoin and what a currency is. What it means, what it is supported by, what its utility is, why we use one currency and not 5000, what the problem is with a free market of currencies with respect to currency stability and trust, the problem with not being backed by a state (legal system, law enforcement, etc.), what property actually means and what supports it and so on.
#WFH #Remote #RTO #Office
The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers - Nature Human Behaviour
comments
I'm not saying that the paper/authors are biased, but those drawing conclusions (and making posts, news articles, etc) from it are.
Personally, I’m not going to work from office anymore.
Anyhow… crypto is garbage and not the future. It’s a tragedy that so many talented engineers/others are wasting time and effort working on that crap. Block chain is legitimate and a breakthrough technology, but I reckon it won’t find its day within cryptocurrency ….