Going remote

[garote]

When people visualize working remotely, they see two scenarios. It's either a quiet office space at home, or a laptop open on a series of coffee shop tables. The home office scenario looks like a dream to the introvert whose work demands focus, and the laptop seems like a dream to the adventure-hound vagabond, who wants to put in eight hours at the keyboard and then go wander the city until bedtime, from city to city across the world.

I've done variations on both of these, for different chunks of time in my career, but the vast majority of my work experience has still been in a physical office, with a real commute. And I can state with confidence: The appeal of remote work - home or abroad - diminishes quickly with time. You really should not build your life around it, because you're giving up something valuable.

If you have an office, with a reasonable commute, you not only get the physical presence of workmates as social contact, but you stand a chance of actually hanging out with them after work, because most of your social venues overlap. If you want to go to a show or throw a dinner party, your workmates can probably get there. In my workaholic country, this is a major way that adults renew their social lives. If that strategy is closed to you, you need to renew that social life by other means, or your emotional health will crumble.

If you have a home office, your social contact is restricted to your household. By itself, that's unsustainable, so you also need to have friends over, or go outside with them. Where do you find those friends? Perhaps you made some earlier in life, or perhaps you lean on your spouse to provide them. Either way you are not actually able to maintain or renew that supply of social contact. You have outsourced that task to others. If friends peel away from your life and no one else replaces them, you can't compensate. The walls close in.

If you work from a series of hotel rooms, RV spaces, campsites, or whatever, the social deficiency is worse. You have abandoned any chance of being in the same physical space with people who know you beyond a superficial level, except perhaps the person you are traveling with - friend or spouse - and it's guaranteed you will get sick of them for large chunks of time. You may be content with that for a month, six months, two years, and so on... But the changes that you push yourself through, in order to stay contented with being rootless for such large chunks of time, come with side effects. You may think you have moved beyond loneliness into something different. It has merely grown transparent and you are breathing it now.

I've met people who have cobbled together various habits and patterns to make remote work sustainable for them. Specific gear, complicated rituals, rules and limits... You can make it work, and stave off the emotional decay for a long time. People pursue it because they can save up money by living somewhere cheaper, or split their time between work and childcare, or because they can be in exotic places without taking vacations. At the same time, the company saves money by not having to provide a desk, a parking space, meeting areas, bathrooms, power, water, and so on, in the kind of costly urban area that most people would prefer to live -- not just for the weather and the clean sidewalks, but for the thriving social life.

To keep that equation fair, a person handling all those resources by working remotely should be paid at least as much money as someone driving to an office, right? More, in fact, because the missing social contact is a very expensive loss indeed, even if it's rarely acknowledged.

Instead, the white-collar world has attempted to scam people into thinking they are granted the "privilege" of going remote, based on the questionable assumption that someone who works remotely has more opportunity to hide from their obligations, since they're not physically close to a manager who could sneak up behind them at any moment and make sure they're not browsing Instagram on the office computer. Seriously; that's the logic: If you're remote, you can't be policed, so you will be lazy, so you're worth less. The more you think about it, the more insulting it becomes.

Measuring productivity can be complicated, but if your company is measuring it by how busy a person looks while sitting in a specific chair, they're definitely doing it wrong. With modern internet tools there isn't a single white-collar performance metric that can't be evaluated by digging around in some electronic documents and having a few virtual meetings with the right people. Companies have no real excuse for mistrusting you, aside from their own paranoia and incompetence perhaps, but they know remote work is appealing. So if you ask for it, it's an opportunity to renegotiate your wages down.

Meanwhile, if you're highly productive and working remotely, but accepting less money for the "privilege" of kneecapping your social life and providing your own office furniture, food, water, and power, you're not living the dream, or getting away with anything. You're being exploited. Same as usual. Why did you accept the pay cut? And now, the company can use any sense of isolation you feel from your co-workers against you, to convince you that the loneliness itself is evidence of your lack of effort, so you deserve that lower wage.

I expect it will take the workforce a while to collectively wake up to this scam. Working remotely is a win-win, not a win-lose. The last time I saw this sort of smoke-and-mirrors justification for a downward pressure on wages was in the mid-2000's, when companies were gleefully embracing the idea of outsourcing all their difficult programming and IT work to India, and shouting that domestic workers had better get used to accepting equivalent wages because there was clearly way more supply than demand now. How could a lowly domestic worker with their high mortgage and social needs possibly compete on a global scale?

People are fretting over the same question nowadays. If your job can be done from a cafe in Bangladesh, why would anyone pay you more than the cost of living there?

Here's some food for thought, leading to an answer: It's also possible to do your job really, really badly from a cafe in Bangladesh.

If you're good at what you do, insist on a decent wage. You're worth it! And, if you're remote already, you may want to explore the idea of returning to an actual workplace, so you don't go nuts. Maybe the new white-collar social contract will be "eight months here, four months remote", in some kind of staggered configuration, and the company would only need to provide two-thirds of the desks and floor space. I could honestly really go for that.

Comments

[juan_gandhi]

Hmm, interesting. Working from home was my preferred mode since 1991. Spent years working from home, doing remodeling in parallel. Now my schedule is to spend Spring and Fall in my French home, and Winter and Summer in my Carolina home. In Carolina, we hardly see any people around, except each other. Enough for us. In France, we walk around every day, so we see some people.

But no commute, no office noise, no nagging meetings, just work and live. The only trick is to strictly limit the working hours. Takes some experience.

Yes, I'm getting about half of what I was earning while at Salesforce, in Palo Alto and in SF. But, on the other hand, at Salesforce I was surrounded and controlled by assholes. Not interested anymore.

And why do I work anyway? It's because I enjoy it. I don't have to work, but I can.

[garote]

Reminds me of why my Dad took a job grading math papers over the internet, even though he was retired up in Roseburg. The extra pocket money was nice, and, he had a really refined skillset that he enjoyed exercising.

Sounds like you have an excellent setup! Was it difficult buying property in France? What's the tax burden like?

[juan_gandhi]

It was a bit of an adventure; but realtors were really helpful. And we were prepared: opening a French bank account was an important step, and we did it about a year before. The taxes are pretty low.

Also, another important step was getting a French cellphone (which is pretty cheap, $14/mo).

The problem was with setting up water and electricity accounts. But the biggest one was buying a car and getting an insurance for it. First they told us that we'd have to wait 3 months for a new car to arrive. Etc. Even the Toyota app on my French phone, in France, is telling me I'm in the wrong country, and does not work.

[garote]

Seems pretty straightforward. But if I wanted to do the same thing, wouldn't I be locked out because I'm not a French citizen?

[juan_gandhi]

That's the problem. Medical insurance? No. Car insurance? Only after our dealer spent days calling all possible insurances he knows. Home insurance was ok, but the same guys refused to provide us with a policy for our car.