I don’t have any hard data but I’d bet that the ratio of “work locations per market cap dollar” has been steadily increasing in the economy over the last few years. (A measure of how distributed each company’s workforce is, and weighting higher-market-cap companies higher.)
I also bet more than 50% chance that within 3 years at least one of {Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon} will give more than 50% of their software engineers the ability to work from home for at least 80% of their workdays.
The fact that Stripe ($30B+ valuation) is now actively hiring many remote employees is a significant recent anecdote I can offer. Do you have any significant anecdotes indicating a remote work decrease?
I also bet more than 50% chance that within 3 years at least one of {Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon} will give more than 50% of their software engineers the ability to work from home for at least 80% of their workdays.
If that’s not just a figure of speech, I’ll take this bet. $100 each?
(This is not intended as commentary on the question at hand.)
According to this article by the Society of Human Resource Management, Best Buy, Yahoo, IBM and Honeywell have all abandoned remote work initiatives after noting that the costs of such outweighed the benefit.
I would also say Stripe is roughly 2000 employees, which puts it in line with the other remote-first companies I’ve posted above. They’re a long way from companies that have tens, or even hundreds of thousands of workers.
Alright I shall update to a belief that maybe there’s some different dynamic that makes remote work less advantageous when an organization size is in the 10,000+ range.
What are all these “costs” that outweigh the benefits? I suspect they are easy enough to circumvent. My observation is that all the same tools being invented that make non-remote companies more productive (e.g. Slack) are usable remotely.
I’d still bet 1:1 odds that 2+ of the top 10 US companies by market cap in 5 years will allow more than 50% of their employed software engineers to work from anywhere.
maybe there’s some different dynamic that makes remote work less advantageous when an organization size is in the 10,000+ range
I would expect the opposite. When you have 10k employees, it is physically impossible to have all of them receive the benefits of co-location to everyone else. It’s also more expensive to co-locate 10k employees with each other than two, even though most of the “co-located” employees are still functionally remote from each other.
I dug into this last year, and my conclusion was that either fully remote or fully co-located could work, and the real villain was hybridization.
As I indicated in my other comment every worker does not need the benefits of co-location with every other worker. The corporation desires that every worker be co-located with every other worker with whom they communicate on a regular basis. Teams aren’t spread across locations randomly, they’re arranged geographically by function.
I didn’t mean to suggest that there were no benefits to co-location, merely that I don’t understand how those benefits would scale up with total number of employees at a company.
It’s not that the benefits of co-location scale up with size, it’s that, to a first approximation, communication overhead scales linearly with the number of employees in a remote-work environment and scales with something like the logarithm of employees in a co-located environment.
New technology, such as e-mail or slack, in my model, doesn’t go far enough to address that disparity. I think there’s still a point at which the benefits of having everyone in a centralized office outweighs the savings from not having to rent office space.
I don’t have any hard data but I’d bet that the ratio of “work locations per market cap dollar” has been steadily increasing in the economy over the last few years. (A measure of how distributed each company’s workforce is, and weighting higher-market-cap companies higher.)
I also bet more than 50% chance that within 3 years at least one of {Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon} will give more than 50% of their software engineers the ability to work from home for at least 80% of their workdays.
The fact that Stripe ($30B+ valuation) is now actively hiring many remote employees is a significant recent anecdote I can offer. Do you have any significant anecdotes indicating a remote work decrease?
If that’s not just a figure of speech, I’ll take this bet. $100 each?
(This is not intended as commentary on the question at hand.)
You think I would use the language of belief probabilities as a figure of speech???
I’m up for $100 vs $100. Just send me a message at https://m.me/sendmessage to confirm with your real identity.
Update: I lost this bet and have paid out. https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/10/tech/google-work-from-home-coronavirus/index.html
That was not how I was expecting this bet to resolve!
Always remember to model tail events causing all your bets come out the wrong way… :)
According to this article by the Society of Human Resource Management, Best Buy, Yahoo, IBM and Honeywell have all abandoned remote work initiatives after noting that the costs of such outweighed the benefit.
I would also say Stripe is roughly 2000 employees, which puts it in line with the other remote-first companies I’ve posted above. They’re a long way from companies that have tens, or even hundreds of thousands of workers.
Alright I shall update to a belief that maybe there’s some different dynamic that makes remote work less advantageous when an organization size is in the 10,000+ range.
What are all these “costs” that outweigh the benefits? I suspect they are easy enough to circumvent. My observation is that all the same tools being invented that make non-remote companies more productive (e.g. Slack) are usable remotely.
I’d still bet 1:1 odds that 2+ of the top 10 US companies by market cap in 5 years will allow more than 50% of their employed software engineers to work from anywhere.
I would expect the opposite. When you have 10k employees, it is physically impossible to have all of them receive the benefits of co-location to everyone else. It’s also more expensive to co-locate 10k employees with each other than two, even though most of the “co-located” employees are still functionally remote from each other.
I dug into this last year, and my conclusion was that either fully remote or fully co-located could work, and the real villain was hybridization.
As I indicated in my other comment every worker does not need the benefits of co-location with every other worker. The corporation desires that every worker be co-located with every other worker with whom they communicate on a regular basis. Teams aren’t spread across locations randomly, they’re arranged geographically by function.
I didn’t mean to suggest that there were no benefits to co-location, merely that I don’t understand how those benefits would scale up with total number of employees at a company.
It’s not that the benefits of co-location scale up with size, it’s that, to a first approximation, communication overhead scales linearly with the number of employees in a remote-work environment and scales with something like the logarithm of employees in a co-located environment.
New technology, such as e-mail or slack, in my model, doesn’t go far enough to address that disparity. I think there’s still a point at which the benefits of having everyone in a centralized office outweighs the savings from not having to rent office space.