Entry for Thursday 29th July 2010
Tags: telecommuting office great-apeInspiration: mechanical_fish
## Why does corporate America have such an aversion to telecommuting?
It's a limitation of the OS that is built into humans. This is what you get when you try to build a global economic system out of bright, talkative monkeys like me. It turns out that -- amazingly! -- this can be done, but we find it much easier if we employ hacks that leverage the features of our underlying monkey OS. And -- even more amazingly! -- it turns out that we can go even farther: Using our most advanced mental and physical tools, we can do a pretty good emulation of disembodied brains sitting in the nth dimension. But the abstraction leaks. Especially when we have to interact with other people who haven't been fully schooled in the art of communicating with ghosts.
If dolphins ran the world, corporate boardrooms would be full of water. But monkeys run the world, so:
- Businesses are run as hierarchies, because the monkey OS is designed to manage bands of around ten or fifteen individuals. Beyond that, it operates in terms of alliances ("this platoon is allied with that platoon") and rivalries ("our platoon is doing its job, but that one isn't"; "our platoon is falling behind and will be targeted for cutbacks, so work hard and watch your back"; "let's all get together with Platoon Three to kick Platoon Four's obnoxious butt").
- Your status in the business world is judged based on the size of the conference room that you need to hold a physical gathering of your team members, and on the size of the contiguous physical territory that your team occupies and patrols on a daily basis. If you sit alone at your desk with the speakerphone on and claim to be conducting a meeting with fifteen colleagues, people will subconsciously think of you as a psychotic, or (at best) as a spooky witch doctor who channels the spirit world.
- There's a tendency to defer to people with grey hair, and/or people with lots of followers or lots of stuff that has taken time to accumulate, like corner offices or expensive desks.
- Talk is cheap. Many people will say they're your ally, but when a fight arrives they will not be there, or they'll discover some really interesting thing going on atop a nearby tree, or they'll hang back and not really fight very hard. You need to motivate them by really befriending them -- talking about their kids or their pets or their hobbies, bringing them little gifts. And by physically surrounding them with other friendly allies, such that they cannot easily flee without losing face. And by keeping them close enough to be able to slap them upside the head when they seem to be shirking.
- To really convince someone -- to really communicate at the highest level -- you need to be standing close enough that you could, in theory, pick fleas off of them.
Unfortunately, though humans are becoming better and better at understanding all this stuff and transcending it when necessary [1], we're never going to completely eliminate these tendencies. Unless the lizards rise up, overthrow us, and take back the planet. At which point they will have complaints of their own. ("Dear Gator News: How come companies always insist on holding meetings on rocks in the bright sunlight? I'm much more productive in my moonlit office, where I can sit on my dual 27-inch space heaters.")
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[1] Such as: When trying to write software, which is an act so unnatural to us monkeys that only some of us can do it at all, and many of us are doing it wrong. And it requires all kinds of mental tricks and energy and focus just to manage that much.
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http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=460693 - comment by mechanical_fish
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