
We need to adopt a no-commute culture - rbanffy
https://www.irishtimes.com/business/innovation/chris-horn-we-need-to-adopt-a-no-commute-culture-1.4110977
======
cableshaft
It seems to me that remote work does a whole hell of a lot to reduce CO2
emissions, so any company that claims to care about the environment and their
future should really be doing all they can to make themselves as remote
friendly as possible, especially now that technology is good enough to make it
happen.

I've been working 100% remotely for a large company for a year and a half now.
They shut down our office (and a bunch of others) to save money on real
estate, but with software like Microsoft Teams (and I'm sure there are just as
good alternatives, but this has a solid mobile app and Outlook integration, so
it's pretty enterprise-friendly), it's not that hard to do.

We also VPN to the same network that we were on when we still had an office,
so I still have access to everything we had and can remote into our other
servers as needed, just as I could when I was at the office.

Obviously the environment is not a big factor to a lot of these companies,
despite the lip service they may pay to it, but perhaps the government could
provide incentives to facilitate the transition for several companies?

It really doesn't help that several of the biggest tech companies, which
should be a model for how other companies could use tech for this benefit,
have gone anti-remote in recent years though. I think that's shown other
companies "Well it doesn't work for them, so it can't work for us." and has
done a lot of harm as well.

~~~
chrisseaton
> It seems to me that remote work does a whole hell of a lot to reduce CO2
> emissions

Remote work involves a hell of a lot of flying in my experience... How many
car journeys do I have to have saved to pay for one flight to the office every
now and again?

~~~
notacoward
This is something I have some experience with. I work from home most of the
time, except for travel across the US one week a month. I was concerned about
my carbon footprint, so I ran some numbers. The result I got was that I was
about 8% worse than someone with an uncongested 10-mile (one way) daily
commute in a typical compact car. That guy driving a Ford Compensator thirty
miles each way at peak hours is _way_ worse. Nonetheless, I wish my number
could be reduced still further.

The problem IMO is that too little work is _truly_ remote. If the rest of your
team is colocated somewhere else then you'll have to travel. If your team is
spread all over but still relies on face to face meetings (e.g. planning
sessions, "all hands" announcements, hackathons) then you'll still have to
travel. If your job/role involves dealing with customers who aren't even
slightly remote-friendly, you'll have to travel. If you're in or adjacent to
academe, you'll have to travel to conferences. Most of these exceptions are
not necessary. Unfortunately, most people and companies don't even _try_ to
avoid them. They just do what they've done, and the not-really-remote workers
have to fly in.

~~~
gbrown
> If you're in or adjacent to academe, you'll have to travel to conferences.

I really think we should be working to change this - conferences are huge
wastes of resources IMHO. I usually see a handful of inspiring talks, which
could just as easily have been delivered as webinars (which would also allow
asynchronous viewing, involving a wider potential audience).

Then again, I'm antisocial and terrible at "networking", so those aspects of
conferences don't really appeal to me.

~~~
ghaff
>Then again, I'm antisocial and terrible at "networking", so those aspects of
conferences don't really appeal to me.

And, really, the "hallway track" is the value of going to conferences. For the
most part, if someone just goes to a conference to sit in breakout sessions,
they're probably better off just watching video of the sessions (if they were
filmed) or a webinar version of the content.

~~~
notacoward
I love going to conferences, even though I'm an introvert - some would even
say a misanthrope. I just need time to recharge afterward. But the fact that
some people enjoy them is _far_ outweighed by both the environmental harm and
the exclusionary aspect of requiring such travel. We need to figure out how to
replicate that energy and easy discovery of like-minded people online. Even as
a 30+ year online native myself, I don't quite see it yet.

~~~
ghaff
Most people are social, even if they express it in different ways.

Virtual events are fine, as are watching videos. (In fact, for bigger events,
I'll often watch the keynotes from my hotel room rather than packing myself
into a room with 10,000 of my closest friends so I can watch the distant
speaker projected on the screen.)

But it's a small subset of the experience of attending live.

------
flanbiscuit
When I go to work I have a 40-50min train commute each way. I get to the
office around 10-10:15. I make a coffee and basically just check slack and
email until my daily 10:30am meeting. Im not really productive until about
11am and even then I eat lunch around 12:30, usually with co-workers, so I
can't really get into a long productive zone until after lunch. This on top of
your typical distracting open office plan.

When I work from home I basically wake up, make coffee, and start working
around 9am. I can actually get something done before my meeting. I probably
put in more work time from home than in the office.

Personally I prefer a balance between both because I enjoy the social aspect
of coming into the office. But I'm happy that I have the flexibility to work
from home when I want.

~~~
yboris
My commute is 1 hour drive daily (each way). The traffic takes a toll on me -
hard to be energetic when I had to deal with 1 hour of stop-and-go nonsense.

~~~
blunte
I traded your commute for the parent poster's (train) commute several years
ago. It's SO much less stressful to sit on a train, even when it's crowded,
than it is to drive in heavy traffic. Plus, you can snooze, read, play phone
games, watch Netflix, or even do work!

Driving to work just frankly sux. I will never do it again.

~~~
fbnlsr
I used to go to my coworking spot by bus, and it was impossible to work. I had
to sit down or stand up in a crowded, loud bus for 45 minutes twice a day.
Since then I ditched coworking, work from home and I get my social infusion
when I do sports.

Trains are cool though.

~~~
blunte
I think you illustrate the point. Find out what works for a person in a given
situation. It can take some trial and error, but it's really worth it when you
find your happy routine.

------
Mirioron
Isn't it harder to learn from others if you're working remotely? I don't mean
to say that it can't happen, but I imagine that overhearing complaints from
coworkers about their problems or them sharing knowledge with you is more
likely to happen when you're physically in the same area.

I do think that remote working should be more common, but it's important to
think about the things we might lose if it became the norm.

~~~
maxaf
Learning in a physical office seems easier for the person being taught because
it's accomplished at the expense of a priority interrupt on the part of the
person doing the teaching. You hit a snag in your work, you get up, walk to my
desk, and tap me on the shoulder. I help you out, then return to pick up the
pieces of my concentration.

When working remotely, you hit a snag, put a "@here anyone available to help
me out with XYZ?" message in Slack, and do some stretches by your computer,
wherever that may be. Eventually, someone surfaces from their zone, sees your
cry for help, and gets you unstuck. No one need suffer.

~~~
Mirioron
But it's not _just_ that. When you're in a physical office you can see
people's workflow to a degree. You can see how somebody gets up to take
breaks, maybe you'll get a glimpse on how their windows are laid out, maybe
you'll see some useful tool being used you didn't know about etc. There are a
lot of things people do that they themselves don't think anything of that can
help others improve. If you require the teaching side to actively share what
they know then a lot of these things are going to get lost.

~~~
maxaf
I work remotely full time. Recently I’ve been running Twitch-like live
programming sessions with an audience of coworkers. They get to see my
workflow and interact with me as I build something from nothing. These
sessions have become quite popular, and accomplish the sort of learning you
describe without any of the pitfalls.

Perhaps one day I may become a Twitch celebrity due to my live programming
prowess. What say you, chat?

~~~
Mirioron
That's a nice coincidence. What actually made me think of this in the first
place was video game live-streaming. I improved much more by watching someone
play a bit than reading about it or trying it just on my own. That made me
think of the same thing in the workplace. I think being able to see live
programming is really useful in the same manner.

------
NPMaxwell
I telecommute every Wednesday and attend a lot of meetings in a global company
virtually. If every attendee is telecommuting, it works well. If some are
physically present, sotto voce comments are my nemesis. Folks in the room can
hear them just fine, and frequently they are hilarious (judging by the
laughter). For the distant attendee, the microphones do not work well enough
yet. Once that is tidied up, I can imagine much more adoption of no-office
corporations.

~~~
coldtea
I'm not sure what the problem with microphones / voice transmission is in
2019.

Using Zoom and other such platforms (across different companies, computers,
meeting rooms) the result is almost always a distorted, low bit, overly
compressed sound. Plus crazy 2-5 sec latency in some cases.

One would expect this to be solved in an age we stream 4K movies...

~~~
crazygringo
As someone who worked on videoconferencing for a while, there are four
answers: multiple microphones, echo cancellation, background noise, and
network issues.

If everyone in a conference room wore individual headsets it would be great.
But when you have 3 different mics along the table all of which are picking up
different audio signals (to make sure people at both ends can be heard), you
need to subtract background noise of construction and hallway chit-chat and
people typing on their laptops, and also subtract everything coming out of the
speakers (which has different delays in each microphone and is distorted by
both the speaker response and microphone response)... and then it's 2:30 and
your office upload link is saturated because _everyone 's_ starting a new
remote meeting uploading HD video simultaneously?

That's why.

But the main culprits behind the "distorted, overly compressed" sound are echo
cancellation and then noise cancellation. It's insanely hard. It's actually
not low-bit at all, it just winds up sounding like that in the end. (Play with
a noise removal filter in Audacity and you'll realize it will produce similar-
sounding audio.)

~~~
JoeAltmaier
The true solution to remote conferencing is, everybody stays at their desk. A
group in a conference room loses so much for everybody - others have trouble
with who's talking, faces are tiny and far away, noise cancellation in a big
room is hellacious.

Stay at your desk and join the meeting. Everybody can share a document, look
at any document share whenever they like, look straight at the camera with
good focus, sound wonderful with a headset mic. Everybody knows who's talking
instantly, with their name associated with the voice and face.

The 'conference room' idea is a terrible one, and should quietly die.

~~~
clarry
Everyone always talks about videoconferencing and cameras but do you really
need to see faces?

At my company we just dropped the cameras. We can still share screen if needed
but we didn't gain much of value from seeing faces and the occasional
bandwidth issues mostly vanished. I don't think anyone misses the video.

~~~
crazygringo
> _do you really need to see faces?_

The research I've seen points to a huge, unambiguous, flashing YES.

The fact is that a _majority_ of communication is nonverbal and emotional. And
this is _just_ as true in business meetings as it is in your personal
relationships.

Video allows us to better understand when someone is done talking and we can
speak without interrupting. It allows us to better understand if someone is
being intentionally disrespectful or merely clueless. It lets us see if
someone is deeply concerned or merely mildly interested. It lets us see if
someone is being silent because they're zoning out or because they're furious
but resigned.

All these cues (and hundreds more) allow conversations to 1) proceed far more
smoothly and efficiently, packing more productivity into a single meeting, and
2) avoid misunderstandings which can be affect both the material outcomes of
meetings as well as damage interpersonal relationships.

Many people _think_ video is unimportant, but that's because when it's
lacking, we _make assumptions_ about people on the other end for lack of
evidence -- assumptions that can turn out to be wildly untrue. Because we have
no immediate evidence to the contrary, we _assume_ we're not missing anything.
This is why research is so important -- it shows that plenty of normal human
communication tasks often perform far better with video, and more frequently
fail without it.

~~~
ScottFree
The cues only work if they're delivered in a timely manner, though. I would
argue highly compressed and delayed video is actually worse and more
frustrating than having no video at all.

This is one of the few arguments against remote work I actually agree with:
streaming video technology still isn't good enough to replace in person haptic
communication.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
As its done now, yes streaming video is problematic. I worked at Sococo, and
back when we made our own solution we had good low-latency video. Careful
bandwidth control and stream-sharing did a lot to make it more useful.

~~~
ScottFree
In your opinion, is there still space for a competing low-latency video
teleconferencing application in the market? None of the apps I've tried get
video right. I haven't heard of Sococo before, though. I'll definitely check
them out.

------
clarry
How about treating commute time as hours on the job? It's not free time for
you. So if an employer feels that it's very important to see your face in
person, they should compensate for that privilege. And yes, commute should
factor in as overtime as well.

Imho economic incentive is best incentive. If employers saved money by not
paying you to sit in a car 10 hours a week, it should make a compelling
argument to try minimize commutes.

It's a shame society can't bill them for the emissions & congestion & noise &
other harms too.

~~~
CalRobert
Speaking of incentive, though, this sets up a bizarre incentive to live
further from the office, rather than closer. Right now avoiding a long commute
is one of the reasons people are willing to pay more to live efficiently
(closer to the office). It's also why companies are more willing to spend more
to be in the middle of a city - it helps them attract talent.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
It would probably balance out with companies not wanting to hire workers who
have longer commutes.

------
welly
The company I work for is distributed. We don't have a central office. I work
from a shared office space and share a room with people in a variety of
industries, and so I get my daily fix of "people" through that.

I'm also in the lucky position that I can work from home if I choose and in a
particularly lucky position that I live on a boat and so am able to move to
different towns or cities (in the UK) and work from there, which I've been
doing over the course of the year. Currently my boat is moored right outside
my office so have a 0 minute commute.

We have a daily standup where I get to talk to my colleagues, we have a
monthly get-togther where we work together from a rented office and have a
social time in the evening.

It's not for everyone but for me I can't imagine working in a different way.

~~~
blaser-waffle
> I work from a shared office space and share a room with people in a variety
> of industries, and so I get my daily fix of "people" through that.

I did the shared coworking space a lot. People are nice, but it's hard to have
calls discussing PII with folks from different companies, even different
industries, around. Plus I can't really build any shared commonality with them
in a work sense.

------
matsemann
Optimizing my work-life to just sit at home alone all day sounds dystopian.

I like biking to work, and meet my colleagues and have some kind of social
contact during the 8 hours. If anything, one could optimize for remote teams,
not everyone has to be in the same building. And not all companies have to
have their office in the same street down town.

~~~
CalRobert
You don't have to be alone! Coworking spaces are there. Personally, I hang out
with my kid on my lunch break and that makes a big difference.

------
mnm1
Governments should offer tax breaks for every employee that works remotely,
part or full time. The more remote work, the bigger the tax breaks. In
addition, for employees that could work remotely but don't, there should be
additional taxes. With a structure like this, every company that can have
remote workers will. When the idiot managers' ideas of having everyone onsite
for their own perverse pleasure of feeling in control and no other reason (as
there is no other reason for workers who can work remotely to be in the
office) is overridden by financial (and indirectly environmental) concerns,
the companies may finally find that many of these middle managers are
disposable baggage that were just eating up resources for no reason. Even if
they don't, at least perverse power of control will be removed from these
people that generally just abuse it for their own perversions to the extreme
detriment of the company.

------
praptak
Even though I commute to work on most days, my most important meetings are
still videoconferences that span nine hours worth of timezones. I often join
these from home anyway.

This is a bit paradoxical, if not downright stupid.

------
moretai
I truly believe that the only reason most SW developers aren't full time
remote is because of some archaic sadistic attempt to maintain control over
employees mentally and emotionally.

------
liminal
But I love my 20 minute bicycle ride to work. Gets the blood moving...

~~~
gryn
Working from home doesn't stop you from doing a 20 minute bycicle circuit
around your house. The same can't be said about companies that have mandatory
physical presence in the office. For example here in France public transport
is partly stopped but my company still want to see my face at least 2 days per
week, for no particular reason.

------
alchemism
If you work 100% remote with the option to fly to meetings, remember to buy
carbon offsets for your flights. Its quite inexpensive.

~~~
CalRobert
Better yet, try to expense them so your employer knows at least one person
isn't thrilled about contributing to climate disaster.

------
logicallee
Maybe we could spin it in terms of how much a company is willing to pay to
"smell" you - since for many knowledge worker jobs, that is maybe the only
part of a person's presence that can't be communicated electronically. (For
jobs with a physical component obviously that is different.)

So if a bay area company is willing to pay $180,000 but someone would be happy
to do it from Minnesota for $70,000, maybe they are paying $70,000 for the
work and $110,000 for the chance to smell the employee in person every day.

what do you think? Could that drive the point home?

~~~
bradlys
It wouldn't work. Most of the companies are hiring on prestige more than
anything. They want to show that they have "the best." If companies in SV were
really price sensitive, this region wouldn't exist. You wouldn't see engineer
compensation regularly over 300k/yr.

Companies here believe strongly that being together in person is very
important and so is prestige. Nothing is going to change that anytime soon.

------
CalRobert
I am hugely in favour of remote work and, in fact, work remotely from a field
in the middle of Ireland (so it could help with rural depopulation as well)
but it's also worth noting that building a decent bike network - like the
Greater Dublin Area Cycle Network, which was supposed to be started in 2010,
would do a lot to address this too.

Of course, the source is the IrishTimes and Ireland has pathetic provision for
cycling (aside from the odd greenway which is great for recreation but not
transport).

Dublin seems hellbent on being 20 years behind other cities.

~~~
Accujack
I was also going to note that this article is in the Irish Times, so a lot of
the author's perspective is based on that country.

In Ireland, there's far less commuting than in the US simply due to the size
of the country, and the Irish economy has a different mix of sectors than the
US, so the types of jobs are different.

You can tell from the fact that the author targets commuting as a greenhouse
gas source that he's talking about commuting by other means than walking. 44%
of Ireland's population lives in a single city, so "going to work" may well
consist of walking or public transportation.

He makes a number of points which probably only apply to the situation in
Ireland, and which would be impossible in the US (despite the enthusiasm on
HN) because of the size of the country, the types of employment available, and
the fact that the mix of people in the US is simply socially different from
Irelend.

Offsetting greenhouse gas use in Ireland by working from home or a shared
workspace may well be a workable proposition in Dublin, but it's a complete
impossibility in the US, for very many reasons.

I wish it was otherwise, but the US and its economy are built around use of
vehicles... it's a big country.

~~~
CalRobert
I have the benefit of dual perspectives, having lived my first 30 years in the
US (California) and my most recent 7 here in Ireland.

Ireland and the US are both quite auto-dependent. Commute times are similar

44% is only true if looking at the broadest possible definition of Dublin, and
most of those places are not well-served by transit, bike infra, etc.

[https://www.visualcapitalist.com/average-commute-u-s-
states-...](https://www.visualcapitalist.com/average-commute-u-s-states-
cities/)

[https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-cp6ci/p6c...](https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-cp6ci/p6cii/p6td/)

Most people do it by car, too, though not quite as many as the US (63%)
[https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-cp6ci/p6c...](https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-cp6ci/p6cii/p6mtw/)

The US is indeed low density, but this is generally _because_ it's built
around vehicles, not because the country is big. The older cities were built
before cars and exhibit pretty high densities.

The density of the country as a whole doesn't really matter, anyway. After
all, it's not like someone said "we just added Alaska as a state, let's start
downzoning Los Angeles for lower density".

"Offsetting greenhouse gas use in Ireland by working from home or a shared
workspace may well be a workable proposition in Dublin, but it's a complete
impossibility in the US"

This is surprising considering how many of my colleagues work remotely from
the US.

------
ubermonkey
I've worked at home since October of 2001, with a brief 6-month interlude in
2004 when I joined a startup that had space in a high-tech incubator near my
house. We quickly realized the office served no purpose, so we went virtual.

For the last 12 years, I've worked for another 100% virtual company. I have 3
co-workers I've never even SEEN in person. I see my boss -- the company owner
and the person i work most with -- in person only about 2 times a year, at the
two big industry conferences we do.

My wife works for a conventional company in downtown Houston. We live close to
downtown, so it makes the most sense for her to take the bus. It's just as
fast, and much lower hassle, than driving. Her employer pays for her pass.

As a consequence, we have only one car. This is nearly unheard of for upper-
middle-class Americans outside of a few very concentrated urban areas (ie,
more than Houston -- think NYC, Washington DC, Chicago) with more substantial
and pervasive mass transit.

And this car only gets about 7K miles a year of usage, which is a little over
half what is considered "normal." Over 1000 miles of that in any year is trips
to visit my family; there's no other way to get there easily or economically.

------
blunte
I'm certain that if some natural disaster suddenly made all the roads
impassible, "business" would very quickly adapt to remote work for all
employees.

Yes there are edge cases - roles that require physically manipulating stuff
that isn't accessible remotely - but a vast number of roles could certainly be
moved remote.

The usual arguments against remote work would either be discovered to be not
actual problems (such as the fear that remote workers won't actually do their
work) or business/workflow systems would be implemented to resolve the new
problems.

Business is traditionally very slow to adapt to changes. That's why big
laggard companies get little done and make few innovations, but they buy
startups that took risks and did new things. (Now unfortunately, they often
absorb those innovative young companies and crush the soul out of it, leaving
just another drone department.)

------
riskneutral
Said the employee who will never get very high in the management hierarchy.

Why should someone want to climb the hierarchy? Well, we are not all satisfied
with being paid disproportionately less in exchange for the meager luxury of
being largely left alone in the quiet amusement of being a coder, only to be
shoved out of a job when you hit 40. Earning a living does matter in life,
whether we like it or not.

In the broader context of society, what this person is asking for is the
dissolution of the City and a return to rural society. That is not ever going
to happen, baring a catastrophic global failure of human civilization. Even
then, if any humans remain they would quickly form into villages instead of
"remoting" to the village.

------
TYPE_FASTER
My old commute was 30 miles each way. I've done the commute three ways. Here
are the emissions comparisons using
[https://calculator.carbonfootprint.com](https://calculator.carbonfootprint.com)
for reference:

* Full-time remote, monthly trip to NYC, 5544 rail miles: 0.06 - 0.42 metric tons of CO2, depending on whether you classify the Acela as a "long distance" train or a "local/commuter" train

* Drive to the train station, take the commuter rail five days a week: 3k miles of driving and 12k miles of rail travel for the year: 2.39 metric tons of CO2

* Drive 60 miles round trip five days a week: 7.83 metric tons of CO2

------
aphextim
I think this could also be applied to education and not just working in due
time.

Obviously for labs and hands on experience you will still want to go
physically to your university, however I envision a future where all you need
to do to go to class each day is pop on a pair of VR glasses and you are in a
hall with all the other students listening to the professors lectures.

Granted there are self learning / online courses already to mitigate commuting
to learn, however I believe the next step in education should be a VR college.

------
paulgerhardt
A mile of air travel is surprisingly close to a mile in car travel in terms of
emissions. Air travel used to be worse but only recently got better - about 10
years ago for short haul flights and 3 years ago for long haul flights.

Working internationally and flying in 4 times a year is probably worse than
living locally and driving in 5 days a week. Assuming you fly 16,000 miles or
would drive 12,0000. Living locally and working from home a few days a week is
probably the best compromise.

~~~
DJBunnies
What about using public transit systems?

~~~
paulgerhardt
Not economical in most of the US. This is a great thread for the Bay Area:
[https://twitter.com/paradosso/status/1081717461148266496](https://twitter.com/paradosso/status/1081717461148266496)

------
RickJWagner
I've been working from home (as a software support engineer) for 9 years now.

I love it. Conferencing software makes meetings normal and I think I have
access to everything someone on a campus would. (Well, ok. I miss water-cooler
discussions and whiteboard explanations. But otherwise, it's all good!)

It's been great. I wish more jobs offered remote work.

------
yread
I work about 3 minutes walking from home and it's amazing. Just move close to
where you work!

~~~
adwn
Are you suggesting that we should move whenever we have a new job? What about
people with partners who are also working?

~~~
souprock
I would say so. It works.

Partners working is not always a profitable endeavor. People often forget to
include housing costs in the calculation. If you are forced to live in a large
city, your costs go up.

------
0xCMP
A reminder that remote work != work from home.

Obviously in many large cities people live in small apartments . It wouldn't
be crazy to assume someone would work out of a Cafe, Co-working space, or
Library.

So you can still do a small commute with a bike or etc.

~~~
lm28469
I don't see that scaling very far, if I take Berlin as an example there is
absolutely no way to find a library/coffee shop spot for even 10% of the IT
workers. I'd reckon Zalando employees alone would fill all the coffee shops of
the city.

~~~
blaser-waffle
Coffee shops & libraries are also only good for certain types of work, too. If
I need to have a 45+ minute strategy call, or discuss the "secret sauce" of
our solution, I'm certainly not doing that in public.

Likewise, they're often loud and hard to focus in when doing detailed, focused
work.

------
buboard
We 've been saying that for quite a while(1). As much as 41% of CO2 is spent
on commercial and transportation activities. how much of that could be saved
if most of white-collar work (i.e. computer work in this day and age) is done
from home or coworkin spaces where people can walk to? As a side benefit you
would get total decongestion of busy "financial" districts and even a positive
feedback loop, because decongestion would reduce CO2 emissions even more.

1) shameless plug: we are making a community for remote workers @
[https://reworkin.com](https://reworkin.com)

------
k__
Getting money into smaller villages should be reason enough.

------
carpetfizz
I wonder if the author has ever been on a WebEx with 5 people trying to talk
over each other.

------
LoSboccacc
so Is Ford going to ship workers their quota of bolts to tighten home and back
or are we just rounding up the poors to lock them into manufactoring complexes
forever?

~~~
blaser-waffle
Those workers have already been replaced with robots.

They can tighten them remotely via RDP ;)

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bkohlmann
I work in an industry where client coaching and teaching is critical to
success. It’s amazing how much impact a 30 minute face to face has compared
with the same (or far more) time via video chat or phone.

Offline, unplanned conversations often yield incredible insights. I have the
option to work from home on Friday’s, but find being present with others gives
me a far better understanding of what’s happening in our office.

Remote work works in a lot of contexts. And in many it doesn’t.

