Telecommuters Are Not Slackers

Though IBM was an early on telecommuting pioneer, Ginni Rometty recently pulled the plug to "centralize teams in six 'strategic' offices," The Annals reports. The puzzling motility fabricated me recall of an incident in the belatedly 1990s on a Silicon Spin show I was doing for ZDTV.

Opinions One of the guests was a adult female entrepreneur who argued that "People should never piece of work from home." Equally far as she was concerned, all work was about team-building and she saw the workplace every bit a kind of basketball team. Y'all cannot work from home on a basketball squad, you see.

Then came Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo, who quickly axed the house'due south long-established telework programs afterwards reportedly examining VPN logs and finding some users who failed to consistently log on.

Information technology seems these decisions are all well-nigh optics, though; go far await like the office is full and bustling. To these CEOs, information technology's freaky to have remote workers who cannot join endless, spur-of-the-moment meetings.

I've always been a booster of the telework model. In this mean solar day and age, there are few tech jobs that tin can't exist done in the field or in the home.

Occasionally I'll be in touch with a PR person working from home and, in the background, at that place will be a dog barking or even a baby crying. The person is working from home. They are doing the task fine, and information technology humanizes the person, but some complain well-nigh it being "unprofessional."

This assumes that the specific way of doing things is more important than getting the job done efficiently. This notion—that rigid sets of old-fashioned rules of behavior are necessary or things are not right—is muddling progress at all levels of the society.

Rometty and Mayer are not the just ones eschewing telework. Silicon Valley, for example, is building massive office buildings to house tech companies, from Apple's spaceship campus in Cupertino to the new Salesforce belfry in San Francisco, which looms similar a giant tombstone. Why does the metropolis need some other massive new office building in 2022? To symbolize the function, that'southward why. A monument to the office itself. Information technology'due south never been about productivity.

Long live the office where the boss can run into yous hard at work. Or, rather, that you wait to exist hard at work. Just don't mention that y'all'd go a lot more washed if you lot were not in that location.

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John C. Dvorak

John C. Dvorak is a columnist for PCMag.com and the co-host of the twice weekly podcast, the No Agenda Show. His work is licensed around the world. Previously a columnist for Forbes, PC/Calculating, Computer Shopper, MacUser, Barrons, the December Professional likewise as other newspapers and magazines. Former editor and consulting editor for InfoWorld, he as well appeared in the New York Times, LA Times, Philadelphia Enquirer, SF Examiner, and the Vancouver Sun. He was on the offset-up squad for C/Net as well as ZDTV. At ZDTV (and TechTV) he hosted Silicon Spin for 4 years doing 1000 live and alive-to-record Television receiver shows. His Internet show Cranky Geeks was considered a …