

You Can’t Go Home Again - cyunker
http://www.cringely.com/2010/12/you-cant-go-home-again/

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beoba
The title reminded me of this article, which doesn't really have anything to
do with the OP but I felt like sharing:
<http://www.economist.com/node/15108690?story_id=15108690>

"The funny thing is, with the passage of time, something does happen to long-
term foreigners which makes them more like real exiles, and they do not like
it at all. The homeland which they left behind changes. The culture, the
politics and their old friends all change, die, forget them. They come to feel
that they are foreigners even when visiting “home”."

~~~
ojbyrne
As someone who moved to their first foreign country at 6, the second at 14,
and a couple more later in life, the neat thing is that you discover a new
homeland, or at least your own people - expatriates.

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dabent
"Management is cocking the pistol for workers they don’t like then allowing
the next layoff to pull the trigger."

Management is _always_ doing that.

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tmcneal
I don't agree with the author's argument. Here's one excerpt:

"In this case efficiency often means that oxymoron bureaucrafic efficiency.
When something was needed fast at IBM they used to be able to fill out the
paperwork and hand carry it to the group, eventually finding someone who could
handle the problem on the spot. Now all requests go into a big queue in the
sky and nobody knows who will handle it, or from what country."

1) I'm pretty sure a multi-national corporation with 400,000 employees
considers hand-carrying paperwork to be an operational deficiency. This is the
21st century, why create an unnecessary paper-trail when your company _builds
products_ to specifically handle this type of use-case?

2) Is the author talking about some sort of routine process (Level 1 Support
needs to escalate the issue to someone in L2) or some sort of special case (A
client is experience a major outage and we need to find an expert who can fix
it)? If it's the former, then this should be a documented repeatable process
that is done many times a day, and thus why would it matter if the L1 and L2
are in different buildings/countries/whatever.. If it's the latter, then the
chances of the right expert working in the same building as person seeking her
out is going to be pretty low. Telecommuting does come into play in either of
these scenarios.

3) The author seems to be correlating telecommuting with increased
bureaucracy. I'd argue that reducing telecommuting will not decrease
bureaucracy; it will still take 4-6 approvals to make that purchase, and the
tools to expedite the approval process (contacting the right people directly,
escalating to managers) will still be the same.

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iwwr
I wonder if it would work to lay several always-on high definition cameras and
project their outputs onto large screens in both locations. Call it "immersive
telecommuting". Useful for virtual/distributed offices and the always-on, HD
nature makes interaction, as well as supervision unavoidable.

~~~
ojbyrne
I think the key is for _everyone_ to work at home. If you have an office, and
some people work there and others don't, eventually the people in the office
will find it easier to work with the people nearby, and will marginalize the
people who aren't.

~~~
iwwr
One of the problems could be that remote work is not immersive enough.

