Malcolm Gladwell slams working from home: ‘What have you reduced your life to?’

Correct. And now they can. So-called "Knowledge Economy" workers aiming to prove that their roles can be done remotely and on flexible schedules, i.e., prove that their work can be reduced to a set of tasks they complete throughout arbitrary times of the week, are creating for their employers a perfect working model for insourcing/outsourcing.

That seems a lot better than when you got escorted out of your last job by security.

But they didn’t. Outsourcing is not working from home. not even close to the same thing. If it was, it would be done outsourced. Mindless call centers are outsourced and even something as simple is that is a cluster.

Ah, the Canucks are so kind. On a similar note, read these stories.

alexberenson.substack.com

The price of fear (Part 3, Canadian edition)

Alex Berenson

Anti-Trump feeling and the strong Canadian preference for social cohesion meant lockdown and vaccine skeptics north of the border faced off-the-charts pressure.

Link:alexberenson.substack.com/p/the-price-...

If your job can be done remotely, then it can be done just as well from India. Wages will have to converge.

You are perfect. I bow to your prowess.

What will happen is that roles considered to require work that is highly complex, strategic, important, will be simplified or dumbed down to accommodate the employee demand for remote work. Possibly, salaried work will go away, and employees will be like contractors receiving a fee for unit of work.

I have been mostly working from home for 20 years - approximately 2/3 of my career. I work to live, I don't live to work. Being remote has allowed me a lot of freedom in my daily schedule and in my travel schedule. I spent a lot more time with my family than I could have as a full time, in office employee. I saved a ton of money on gas. And I was still very productive work wise and I do enough in person visits to have personal relationships with co-workers - some of whom I have only met when hired for mostly remote consulting jobs.

Not everyone has this opportunity because many jobs just require face to face interaction. Some people really need a social aspect of work. Heck, I met my wife at work (same building, different company). But for me, it is rarely necessary anymore, so I avoid the office unless there is a compelling work reason.

I had good mentors early in my career and it was wonderful to have people to learn from. This can be critical early in your career. Team chat / video meetings are just not the same, but it is so much better than what was available in the 90s as I started my career. I have been surprised how well some younger workers do in remote environment. I suspect it has a lot to do with being able to search the internet for answers and not necessarily rely on mentors as much.

You could say that about any job

Some of you are WAY over-thinking this. The office is not some kind of magical sanctuary. The physical office space is not the critical factor in production. Whatever skilled work you were doing before in one location, the office, is just done in a different location, in your home, which is typically not very far away from the office. This change in location does not necessitate a complete overhaul of the work process.

Companies have been outsourcing for decades when the benefits outweigh the costs: manufacturing, call centers, some coding, maybe some accounting functions, etc.

At this point, most jobs cannot be done effectively on the other side of the planet, overcoming cultural, language, time zone, relationship issues etc. If it could, it would. None of those things are changing. It barely works for something as simple as a call center, and I would argue that the experience is almost always fu$ked up. And it’s 100x more fuc&ed up when dealing with real work, complex projects, etc.

I believe the evolution will be a reworking of the office space. The office will be used mostly for collaborative work that is better face to face. Come together In one spot in a space that is designed to facilitate that kind of work, and then work wherever you want the rest of the time.

So we should be luddites and pretend the job absolutely has to be done from an office, otherwise it will go to India? Some people look beyond borders and realize the problem of low wages in India and the problem of companies abandoning their workers to move there, are caused by the same race to the bottom.

It's been known for some time there isn't an actual need for everybody to work every hour for there to be an economy.

The contradiction is though, if those workers lose their income or if AI removed 60% of jobs, the system collapses due to the reduction in participation in the economy and social unrest.

I don't think working from home is very "polarizing" as the article suggests. I think it's pretty one sided in favor of working from home by any study / survey that I've seen. Polarizing is not the right word.

It’s really dumb to generalize people, what they do, how they do it, what they value and how they want to live and work.

What I got out that article is that more people need to be in the office so Shake Shack can sell more burgers in the city.

I have seen a lot of work get offshored to India, get performed terribly then slowly be brought back on shore. People think you can just dump jobs to “India” and pocket huge savings. The reality is that the people performing that job now in India naturally have no loyalty or regard for the actual role. Turnover is incredibly high because people will move on for a few more rupee a week and so most of the time it’s a revolving cycle of new people being trained then leaving (repeat) and your western product suffers as a result.

Let's bottom line this thing: Gladwell is a contrarian gadfly who wouldn't know an office environment or a boss if one bit him on the as-cheek. He has become a wealthy personality without much to say anymore but (wrongly) believes that his opinion on EVERYTHING is valid and must be heard. In this case he has no clue and has embarrassed himself and lost credibility, but hey his name is in stories so the coverage must be good.

That's what it comes down to in this sh-tty modern world: how can I get clicks/eyeballs on my name to keep 'my brand' (barf) relevant?

Your first sentence is all that needs to be said.