Who Really Benefits From the Great Remote-Work Experiment?

Рет қаралды 4,489

Ай бұрын

Four years after the Great Remote-Work Experiment began, the public debate has boiled down to: Bosses hate it and workers love it. But is that all there is to it? Who really benefits from remote work-and who doesn’t? And why is it that women with more job experience suffer the most?
Host Jerusalem Demsas talks to Natalia Emanuel, a labor economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, who co-authored a paper looking at the effects of remote work. Do people understand the tradeoffs they’re making when they choose to work from home? What’s the impact on the team if even one person is remote? And does remote work benefit older workers at the expense of younger ones?
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Пікірлер: 21

@tHebUm18 Ай бұрын

I can't see ever wanting to go back to wasting like 10 hours every week getting ready and commuting to/from an office again after having been fully remote for years. I do not think there's been any downsides to my work, mostly personal things like getting enough exercise and physical social interaction which is really on me since I plainly have more time than before for it.

@WeeWeeJumbo Ай бұрын

i’m a senior analyst. i’ve been working from home since 2014, and so have all my close colleagues. it benefits us, we are those who benefit: skilled digital service-industry workers

@aluisious Ай бұрын

"Senior analyst" doesn't mean anything.

@tHebUm18 Ай бұрын

As a software engineer, I feel like this conversation is looking at my profession like a zoo animal. The ideal PR has 0 comments and is approved--more "feedback" means the code is worse. Also, lots of feedback, even remotely, occurs via other means--messaging or a call--since comments are async and slow since you don't have a direct back-and-forth. A smart junior developer is reaching out for feedback prior to PR if they have fundamental questions for tackling the problem--waiting to be told you did it entirely wrong on the PR (e.g. a load of comments) is wasting your and your mentor's/teammate's time. I imagine it's person dependent, but when I was a junior I felt far more comfortable messaging about issues than initiating a face-to-face conversation and rarely did the question warrant more involved discussion that progressed to sitting down at a computer together.

@tHebUm18 Ай бұрын

Relatedly: that feedback around women junior engineers receiving more valid feedback suggests to me they're more hesitant to reach out for help than their male counterparts. Unfortunately in a male-dominated field that is unsurprising, but also disappointing because most software folks I've ever worked with are if anything too willing to invest time helping anyone with an interesting problem over doing their own work. 🤣 But there's probably some psychological factors there--in the same way male students in K-12 are suffering from the dearth of male teachers.

@fburton8 Ай бұрын

I’m an academic who teaches students and also spends a lot of time in front of a computer screen. Remote working to interact with students is definitely inferior to doing it in person. Computer work is often done better remotely (less interruption). So I mix the two modes as necessary, and am glad my employer allows this flexibility.

@dudere Ай бұрын

It has been more successful with some of my students. Just like there are multiple learning styles, some students flourish with online instruction.

@fburton8 Ай бұрын

@@dudere You're right; we should probably try to cater for students too. We did that to a certain extent by leaving recorded lectures online after the end of the pandemic, but the trend is to go back to the way we used to do things (under the plausibly erroneous assumption that that was best).

@dudere Ай бұрын

@@fburton8 I was not referring to just recording classes. Even at the high school level. My students who don't call into class and collaborate on practice problems do worse. Generally, there are exceptions for good and bad. But I had some students that had huge discipline issues but are fine in their online community. Build healthy relationships with classmates and everything. I think the key is a reasonable sized cohort. Too few and no one talks. Too many and the students cannot even keep up in the comments. I am thankful my school didn't try the 1 teacher 100 students model.

@jamiesray Ай бұрын

I have been listening to Jerusalem since her Vox days. She deserves her own show for sure!

@roguekoala71 Ай бұрын

As a truck driver i cant work "remote" 😂

@info781 Ай бұрын

But having people work from home reduces traffic, directly helping you.

@Rash-ll9wb Ай бұрын

Give it few years, you will be able to drive your truck from home.

@nathanielparker4421 21 күн бұрын

@info781 cite your work or live in humble silence

@info781 Ай бұрын

Love work from home, for social stuff, use the real estate savings to have a 3 day conference once a quarter, where everyone can meet up, drink eat and socialize.

@trevorprice2490 Ай бұрын

Software engineering is a field where we have really good measures of productivity? I'd love to see that source...

@karstenszajner6043 Ай бұрын

I have immensely enjoyed work from home, and it clearly has had some profound impacts on my physical and mental wellbeing. Saving on commute time, being able to spend more time with my dogs, wife, and being able to do homework during slow periods to free up my evenings is worth a lot of money in my eyes. I concur with the new values alignment. Being able to have less focus on work and on the things that matter more to me in life has really been an eye-opening perspective change. Many of our state government's employees are still WFH, and I believe they use this as a competitive advantage in the hiring market because obviously the state can't pay as much as private business. I think there is actually a large benefit to government agencies and businesses in terms of talent acquisition and employee retention. I know we had a large state utility go from WFM to a mandatory 3 days a week in the office. Guess who also experienced a wave of retirements and employees leaving shortly after? Hard to capture these large effects when studying WFM's effects on productivity.