Thread by @chris_herd

Is going to the office broken?

Based on @Calnewport_ piece in the @NewYorker about me & remote work: newyorker.com/culture/office…

[ a thread ] 💻🏠🌍

🧠 Knowledge work: When knowledge work became a major economic sector in the twentieth century, the necessity to have employees work together around stationary machinery, as in the classic factory model, was curtailed

📍Why Co-location Happened: Knowledge work requires collaboration and access to information, both of which are conveniently served when individuals are physically near each other

Companies adapted the standardized nine-to-five work shift into the white-collar world

🏭 The office-as-factory: the rise of computers in the nineteen-nineties, followed by the spread of high-speed Internet in the two-thousands, upended this status quo by obviating the need for individuals to be in the same building to collaborate or access information

🛑False Start: These innovations led to a telecommuting revolution that began to pick up speed in the first decade of the twenty-first century

It lost momentum as managers experimenting with remote-work arrangements realized it was more complicated than they thought

🚀 Remote-first not remote-only: “The quality of your work is increased by having time together because you have a better sense of shared empathy and coordination

The next phase of remote isn't about remote only but it is very deliverabe about time together physically

⭐️Access to Talent: A remote-first company can hire the best talent in the world

An office-first company can hire those who live in a certain radius of the office

In a knowledge economy, your value is your talent

If companies employ better talent, they are better than you

🏆 How Remote Wins: Decreased overhead and increased access to talent mean remote work is inevitably going to replace the office model completely

🐢 Darwinian Survival: If you and I run companies competing in the same space, and I have better talent and lower staffing costs, I’ll put you out of business

Repeat this enough times, with enough competitors, and the remote-first model will rise to dominate our market niche

🤖 Tech Companies: in March, 2020, @Hopin had eight employees

During the pandemic they grew to eight hundred employees and a valuation of over seven billion dollars

Could a non-remote company do this?

🌐 Startups: Because they build their organizational cultures from scratch, they can sidestep the need to rework existing management structures and habits that depend on an office

The skills learned here will be transferred to larger organizations

📈 Enterprise: you are going to see are remote-working experts emerge who transition from the startups to bigger companies, and then from there to even bigger companies, passing on that knowledge as they go

They will lead the remote work enterprise revolution

💰 Private equity: these firms will begin hiring away remote-first experts from big technology companies

They will buy companies in other sectors, deploy this expertise to help them successfully abandon long-term office leases, and hire better talent

🏔 Remote Domination: The office-as-factory model is not fundamental, but was instead a temporary solution to support collaboration and information access in a pre-digital world dominated by management ideas from industrial manufacturing

🎉 Remote Evolution: The remote-first alternative has been technologically possible for a while now but has been held back by the difficulties of reorienting organizational culture away from the office.

Covid showed everybody that remote work is possible for millions of jobs

Remote isn't about the future of work

Remote resets broken ways of living

Remote is the future of living

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