Quotulatiousness

June 21, 2023

QotD: Working online

Filed under: Business, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

After a bit of a rocky start, most people I know who suddenly found themselves doing their “work” online quickly realized little work they actually did — and, by extension, since they were the conscientious ones, how trivially little work so many of their coworkers did. Hard on the heels of that was the realization that “work” in a physical workplace, for the vast majority of people, really means “socializing”. There are a LOT of jobs in which one person actually working from home can accomplish in one day what it takes an entire “customer service” department a week to do under “normal” — meaning, “in the office” — conditions.

[…]

For lots of people, the office was their only social outlet. Coffee breaks, water cooler chatter, happy hours … for lots of people, that was pretty much it, socially. “Work/life balance” was always a joke, because all your friends are work friends, so even if you’re “socializing” and not “working”, it’s with the same people from the office, talking about office stuff. And the longer you stayed in the same job, the higher up the corporate ladder you got, the more specialized your position, the worse it got – your rookie customer service reps still had buddies from college to hang out with, but junior managers tended to hang out exclusively with other junior managers, etc. The “professions”, of course, are famously clannish — the only ways to talk to a lawyer or doctor are to hire one, or be one.

Severian, “More Scattered Thoughts”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-10-13.

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1 Comment

  1. John Psmith, reviewing a book about the decline and fall of Boeing had these comments about the benefits of in-office work (he’s talking about outsourcing, but some of the same applies to remote work):

    As at the macro level, so at the micro level. Those McDonnell Douglas managers probably really did find some non-core job functions that could be more efficiently subcontracted away. But every such small gain in economic efficiency came with a hidden cost. For every component whose production was outsourced away, Boeing lost irreplaceable information about its “implementation details” — tolerances, design history, manufacturing approach, undocumented capabilities or limitations.

    Any engineer worth his salt can feel this ground shifting under him, and will react by piling additional details into the specification for the part that he once would have taken for granted. Indeed Robison notes that one specification document for an electronic part in the 777 that used to be 20 pages long ballooned to 2,500 pages after the outsourcing blitzkrieg. But no amount of such specification can catch every last nuance of a component’s behavior. If you want something to be exactly so, at some point you need to either make it yourself or be friends and colleagues with the person who makes it. Small wonder that top engineering companies like SpaceX, Apple, and Google frequently reject the false economies of outsourcing and bring the design and manufacture of their dependencies fully in-house.

    Mis-specification is far from the only danger of taking the engineers charged with making a component and the engineers charged with using it, and putting them under different roofs. Conversations around the water-cooler, clichéd as that idea might be, are a constant source of serendipitous discoveries across the interfaces between teams. “Oh, the reason you wanted it to have property X is because you wanted to do Y? But there’s a much easier way to accomplish Y!” Or even more importantly: “Yikes, I can see why you thought that, but in this case property X won’t actually enable Y, we need to redesign this.” Nobody gets credit for these conversations, they don’t appear on anybody’s budget, they don’t show up as a line item on anyone’s P&L statement, yet there are few things more important. Their invisible presence is felt by senior leadership and program managers as “luck” — serendipitous redesigns that come out of nowhere, or disastrous misunderstandings that aren’t caught until the last minute.

    The water cooler is also a back channel of last resort when vital information isn’t spreading any other way, due to organizational dysfunction, empire building by middle management, or just simple carelessness. Collegial relationships, where you’re all in it together and all have a common share price, reduce the psychological and emotional barriers to “betraying” your team or department by engaging in this sort of horizontal whistle-blowing. Conversely, the commercial relationship between a company and its subcontractor is governed by documents that will eventually be adjudicated in an adversarial legal system. This massively increases the personal and organizational stakes of any information leak.

    Comment by Nicholas — June 21, 2023 @ 09:27

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