There is and always has been an element of remote work in every multinational corporation (even small ones). When a company is globally distributed, its employees are rarely or never all in the same place at the same time.
People learn to deal with this. It means strange hours sometimes, and in the past meant travel (though that is now difficult). Remote collaboration can always be done better, and we all have more to learn and invent about this way of working, but many businesses have for decades been working effectively with far-flung colleagues (some of my Sun Microsystems colleagues spoke about managing globally distributed teams at GHC 2009). Somehow, teams do manage to thrive and innovate across international borders.
As part of my regular commute, I used to drive past the Nvidia HQ building while it was still under construction. No one flying in or out of San Jose airport could miss Apple’s giant donut, completed around the same time. Facebook bought the (already large) Sun Microsystems campus ten years ago, and added the world’s largest open plan office as part of a suite of new buildings across the road. Last I heard, Google was still going ahead with plans to build a big new campus in “downtown” San Jose, and Amazon continued constructing new buildings in Seattle even as it was one of the first companies to tell its staff to work from home last year.
How does all this affect remote work? My suspicion is that, the more a company is invested (both financially and otherwise) in big, gaudy real estate, the less likely it is to support remote work for its employees. It’s hard to justify billions spent buying prime land in some of the world’s most expensive locations, and more billions spent building gigantic monuments to executive hubris upon that land, if you’re now allowing all that to stand empty.
After a lot of travel in the autumn of 2017, we spent a quiet winter break at home, with a week of being full-time parents while Mitchell’s mother had a well-deserved vacation of her own.
Mitchell and I went on a day trip to San Francisco, where he experienced “snow” for the first time at the Academy of Science, and Lindsay and her sister taught him how to climb a tree.
In March of this year, I spoke at the Southern California Area Linux Expo (SCaLE), a conference I’ve been attending for years and highly recommend for its kind community, and great people and content.
I’m submitting this talk to other conferences, and it will evolve over time, so I hope to get a chance to continue refining it and sharing what I know with more people.
When I attended US schools in the 1970s, the term “bullying” was used to describe extreme cases of recurrent physical abuse of kids, by kids. Verbal abuse, no matter how severe, was identified by the soft term “teasing.”
Most of the adults around us did not see teasing as a problem that they could or should address. Everyone advised victims to reply with the childish chant: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.” We all knew that this was bullshit: words can hurt – a lot – and are often intended to do so. But adults believed that: “It’s all part of growing up; kids have to toughen up and learn to handle it.”
