The joys and drawbacks of being able to work from anywhere

http://www.economist.com/specialreports/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10950378

by maurycy • 18 years ago

23 10 18 years ago

osipov• 18 years ago

Great article. I do all my work entirely from home and up until this point I couldn't pinpoint precisely what was missing. The article uses an excellent phase I was trying to articulate: "casual serendipity". Effectively, this is about casually describing your work to random people and finding serendipitous connections to other projects or learning unexpected, but relevant information.

michaelneale• 18 years ago

I find the same. But I am close into a large city, so attending multiple user groups/conferences (even in subjects/technologies I am not currently involved with) seems to help alleviate that. Plus you tend to meet people at those places of a higher "quality" (or some measure) then the average office drone in a regular business.

jrockway• 18 years ago

> Effectively, this is about casually describing your work to random people and finding serendipitous connections to other projects or learning unexpected, but relevant information.

I work at home, but I find that IRC is a fine outlet for this. There is a much bigger pool of people to draw from when you're talking about a worldwide network as opposed to a few people in your office.

The real problem is that when you work at home, it's very easy to go for days (or weeks) without talking to anyone in real life. It's not bad in general (communicating on the Internet is not that different from communicating face to face), but it is difficult to meet girls :) (To be fair, it was like that when I worked at a big company too. I'm 22, everyone else was in their 40s. I would rather be alone than to have to talk to those people :)

yters2• 18 years ago

I wonder if US culture's attitude towards introverts is going to change now that we're starting to be the new entrepreneur. I think it's been biased towards extroverts because people consider extroversion to be necessary for making the US great, i.e. cowboys. Not that cowboys were all that extroverted anyways.

baha_man• 18 years ago

Great article - seconded. I also liked the fact that it wasn't split across six pages, and reader comments were kept separate from the article itself.

donw• 18 years ago

One really intelligent thing is his rule forbidding more than two people to share office space. Oftentimes, I've noticed that the telecommuters often suffer at the hands of their in-office colleagues, due to that whole insider/outsider problem.

Flemlord• 18 years ago

I feel strongly that "virtual" startups dramatically increase your chances of failure. You need everybody in the same place, bouncing ideas around and sharing the workload. And many people simply don't have the discipline to work a full-time day without being surrounded by peers. I am one of them--I thrive on the shared energy and, without it, my interest fades and I get distracted.

dangoldin• 18 years ago

I think you may have a point with this for startups where each employee is a huge contributor and innovation is required. But if you have a large company with multiple corporate levels it may not be that horrific to let a few employees work from home. If they are spending more time with their family they may be happier and more motivated to work.

CHIEFARCHITECT• 18 years ago

In terms of insider/outsider politics, the key factor is developing trust, collaboration and accountability from the start

The joys and drawbacks of being able to work from anywhere

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