The piece that everybody in the world that’s written about remote work in the world is now responding to is the New York Times piece about how spont

Office and Company Culture Are Bullshit

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2021-06-24 23:00:08

The piece that everybody in the world that’s written about remote work in the world is now responding to is the New York Times piece about how spontaneous collaboration is not actually real. It quotes all the greats, including JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, who, said working from home “doesn’t work for spontaneous idea generation, it doesn’t work for culture,” running a company that likes to move around the UI on their online banking constantly so it’s never possible to know where card security is on any given day. Charlie Warzel, a writer, wrote a good summary of the Times’ piece, along with adding his own anxieties that he experienced going remote:

When I left New York to work remotely in 2017, I bought into this idea hard. I enjoy offices and talking to people and have had chance encounters that led to stories or opportunities that have subsequently benefited my career. I figured that losing those moments would cause my work to suffer, or just lower my visibility in my company such that I might become expendable. None of my bosses suggested as much (in fact, they were all quite supportive of the move) but Spontaneous Encounter Theory still preyed on my insecurities and exacerbated my fear that the real core of my successes up to that point were not my own, but a product of my environment.

Charlie’s worries are reasonable, and the same justifications that most middle management freaks are still arguing about in the comments of my work from home article from earlier in the month. Everybody is terrified that the magical things that happen in an office might not happen if we’re remote, as if being in each others’ personal space is a magical force of unity.

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