Wandering Thoughts archives

My dividing line between working remotely and working out of the office

I want to talk about working out of the office (because I have some views on it) but before I launch into that I want to draw a careful dividing line between remote work and simply working outside of the office, lest I accidentally drag the former into a discussion of the latter.

To me, working remotely is when you are not in the same (general) location as your employer so you couldn't come in even if you wanted to; there simply is no local office for you. Working remotely is great for some people for various reasons; for example, they can live in their preferred location while working for a company that is located elsewhere (if the company is really located anywhere in particular; some companies these days are basically all remote). Remote workers and remote teams have their own challenges, which you can find a lot of people with actual experience writing about in various places.

By contrast working outside of the office (which often means working from home) involves there at least nominally being an office for you to go in to if you wanted to; you just don't, for various reasons. I have somewhat cynical views on how this particular situation often comes about. Certainly over the years I've read plenty of writeups about how an increasingly mobile workforce cuts down on your need for expensive office space and attractive office furniture and so on.

(Perhaps not oddly, most of the writeups were about sparkling new office spaces instead of retrospective looks back at how well such spaces had worked over the span of a few years.)

My personal view is that, for example, a coffee shop is not really a good working environment for most people and that if your office is really not better than the local coffee shop something terrible is happening. As for working outdoors in the nice sun and breeze, a lot depends on the typical local weather; here in Toronto we alternate between gloomy, freezing, and humidly hot with only relatively modest periods of temperate sunny weather in the spring and fall.

To be clear: despite my cynicism, not all people working outside of the office are doing it because their office is bad. There are plenty of people who do so for other excellent reasons, including wanting to spend time with their kids and wanting to live in a nice location they like that is a painful commute from their employer's office.

Technological progress and efficiency

Let's start with a tweet (via @etrever):

Sit down and ponder the fact that the fastest tools on your machine come from the 1970s and tool speed correlates negatively with time.

My reaction to this is 'isn't technological progress great?'

Tools in the 1970s had no choice but to be both screamingly efficient and generally relatively limited because they ran on machines that today we would consider extremely tiny. For one extreme example, the embedded CPU on your disk drives is almost certainly more powerful than the machines Unix originally ran on.

(Yes, your disk drives have onboard CPUs. Even and especially SSDs.)

Every step of improved computing since the 1970s has made feasible programs that are both more inefficient and more powerful than before, and so of course people have written them. Often these programs have been written in ways that are themselves more inefficient but faster in coding time. Garbage collection, widespread use of hash tables for everything, object oriented programming with multiple levels of indirection, dynamic types with runtime type dereference; any litany of modern programming techniques is also a litany of inefficiency. All of this inefficiency has been enabled by the relentless march of technological progress.

(Of course you can take this too far. You can take anything too far.)

All of this is great. We have not lost any possibilities in this technological progress; you can still write programs that are just as efficient as programs from the 1970s (although people generally don't). Instead we have gained possibilities. The march of technology has made it possible to do things that would have been crazy ten or even five years ago, and it will probably keep on doing so.

(I'm also a little bit dubious that the fastest tools really do date from the 1970s. I would not be surprised if the GNU grep family were faster than their V7 equivalents, for example.)