Ethics - Working From Home

Working from home as a trend

Working from home is a growing trend, and it's expected to continue to grow (at least according to this FastCompany article.) More and more people are embracing the advantages and getting used to the compromises (like using video/audio/text chat as opposed to meeting in person.) Companies are seeing the economic benefits and are starting to come around as well.

This extremely biased website has a bunch of statistical data to say that remote work is super awesome. I have to admit that they are pretty biased and use some questionable sources, but I think they are still correct. Also at least one of their sources is fairly legitimate.

This article uses a lot of Gallup poll data to make the same arguments essentially, that more people are working from home, that it's saving everyone money and making workers happier.

Finally, Gitlab is an all remote company, and they're making it work. Go Gitlab!

My experience with working from home over the years

Obviously this is purely anecdotal, and is heavily flavored by my opinion and should be judged as such. That being said, I first got a chance to work from home in early 2000. I was a Sysadmin for a San Francisco startup, and as we grew, desk space started to be in higher and higher demand. We needed more developers but had no more room, and couldn't afford to move to a larger space. One day my boss came up to me and asked "Can you do your job from home? I need your desk for a developer." My answer was of course, "Yes."

It was, without exaggeration, fantastic in every way. I was no longer losing 1.5+ hours a day getting from the Mission to SoMa and back, my work environment was distraction free, and I got to spend a lot more time with my cat (and for pet owners that can be stress relief in itself.) Also I was working as a nightclub DJ at the time so getting to sleep just a bit more made all the difference.

After the dot-bomb came and my company was one of the casualties, I moved back to NYC and worked as the music director at PS1 Museum in Long Island City. That was another job where I did not have an office and did the great majority of my work remotely, although in that capacity it was about 50% from nightclubs in addition to my home. I did have to go to the office for some meetings, but a lot was done over the phone. Obviously I was on-site for events, but that was a small part of my job when one considers the whole year. Despite working remotely, I was able to do a great job and produce a wildly successful music series called "Warm Up" for them when I was working there.

After a few years of that, I ended up going back into Sysadmin work, and had a few years of on-site work before ending up at a small place that was very flexible about work arrangements. Once I had our server room built (with remote console of course!) I rarely had to go to the office and did almost all of my work from home. This lasted over six years, and was my best job ever in terms of work/life balance as well as job satisfaction and co-worker relationships. One interesting aspect of that place was that while we started with a dedicated office space with a server room, 8 desks and a conference area, within a few years we had so few people actually working in the space that once we shut down the server room and moved that stuff to AWS, we gave up our office space in favor of a couple of desks in a WeWork nearby, which was a huge savings to the company, all because of remote workers.

Is there an ethical imperative to work from home when possible?

We've established that for certain workers, there's at least an argument for remote work from a cost savings and quality of life point of view, but we haven't yet touched on the matter I really want to discuss, which is the ethics involved. In order to do this we're going to have to work with certain assumptions, however I don't think they are very controversial. While I will be making some arguments that are based on climate change, these same arguments can also be made from a financial savings perspective, so even those who are skeptical of climate change science should be able to see the financial benefits.

To move on to my argument, we need to accept the following premises, I suppose I could find sources for these if anyone really needs a source:

• Public transportation in cities like NYC and San Francisco is overloaded, a strain on public funds and resources, and both relied on and despised by residents. In the case of NYC, where I live, the subway is deteriorating faster that it can be fixed and is a perennial issue for politicians to talk about but not fix (because the job is long, difficult, and they can't do it within their terms.)

• Driving commutes in most other large cites are also terrible. Roads are in bad shape and getting worse. Repairs cause delays and more traffic.

• A greater number of commuters puts a larger strain onto any system that they are using

• A greater strain on such a system will by nature have an environmental cost

• If one does not believe that the greater strain will have an environmental cost, then at least a financial cost is obvious in terms of upkeep and individual expense

If we start with those assumptions it becomes hard to argue against working from home for those who want to, and whose jobs can be done remotely.

When it comes the NYC subway system, one of the obstacles in fixing it is the sheer volume of users. Any reduction in use would by nature make repairs easier. Trains could be taken out of service more regularly for inspection and maintenance, shuttle buses and other alternative transit options are less odious to the commuters when the total number of passengers is lower, so track maintenance would be easier on them as well.

If we also are concerned with environmental impact, the argument gets even stronger. If the majority of the scientific community is to be believed, we need to make every effort to reduce our negative impact on our environment. Since this is all cumulative there is quite a bit to be gained by paying attention to every aspect, including the effects of working from home.

Every worker who does not get in a car to go to work reduces the negative impact to the environment directly. That worker may still use the car depending on where they live but not nearly as much as they would if they were commuting.

If enough train commuters were to start working from home, we would see fewer trains, using less electricity/diesel to run and cool/heat fewer cars. We see smaller offices with lower heating/cooling/electricity needs.

As in-person work becomes less important, we could see lower concentrations of people in the cities as living two hours by car or train from a major city wouldn't be a huge time-draining commute anymore. This would help spread out our economy a bit and help some of our struggling rural areas.

Even if we don't believe in the scientific community and don't buy the environmental argument, there's still a huge argument for the cost savings and diverse labor pool being available for employers who see the advantages of employing remote workers.

Ok, so what's the catch?

Working remotely isn't for everyone. Some people like an office environment away from where they live. Some get lonely without face to face engagement with coworkers. Some can't manage their own time and need a manager in the same room as them.

Companies are finding ways to deal with these issues for those who want to, with things like encouraging regular "water cooler chat" to paying to fly employees to retreats and other events like Gitlab does. For those who just need a space outside of their home, there are increasing numbers of places that will rent out a desk by the day or month and the company will foot the bill. This space can be quite close to home and regulars will probably get to know each other, providing an increase in social interaction.

All in all, I think that it's an idea that is worth considering, especially if one is concerned with saving the environment, saving money or both.