In reality, remote work makes you vulnerable to outsourcing, reduces your job to a metric, creates frustrating change-averse bureaucracies, and stifles your career growth.
Our remote work future is going to suck
I have only worked for about 30 years at this point but each of those points has always been applicable. Since I have gone remote though I have felt more flexibility to work with whom I also want to work with, not just who is within a 30 minute commute. Sure there are crap remote based companies out there, but there have always been crap office based companies.
I hear the argument about the loss of office culture and the spontaneity of it all. Again based on my limited office based experience this usually means they miss not getting work done, or trying to date a co-worker. To me spontaneity in the work day usually means I have been interrupted from work that I am focused on. I am all for the “Yes, and” philosophy of improv but most of my work day is spent on specific tasks and goals.
This argument was also made about the Web in the 90’s. That looking for information on the web would lose the spontaneity of going to the library and browsing the shelves. Then search engines showed up and forums and blogs and a deluge of information.
Remote work is in a similar position. This is still early days and we are figuring it out. Software like Slack has helped a lot. There are tons of tools being used by various departments that enable them to make remote work better. To me the loss of office contact is felt most when there is a lot of nuance to a conversation. Video chat helps a lot with this but its still not quite 100%. We are making progress though.
So I guess if you want remote work to suck then it is going to suck. I choose to make it awesome and I hope that helps make it happen at least a little bit.
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