Monitor size and keyboard are far more important than the process speed in my experience. The bottleneck is never the processor speed or even RAM, but mostly the human working memory and cognitive capacity. Bigger monitor helps the former and good keyboard helps the latter with less typos.
I came here exactly to say similar thing after reading for 5 mins and things got repetitive. Then i read the "about" section and found the author is from financial sector. I don't think i am going to get much value reading further.
EDIT: Reasoning below. A commenter asked the mental model.
Novel Insights are found when deepwork is performed over analyzing huge's volumes of data from multiple sources and thinking about the interconnections. I doubt any one in financial sector or the business types ever perform deepwork at all. There is really no new ideas or key insights that's worthy of deepwork. I think the success is mostly luck and unique to the situation which is beyond human control. When a financial person says they have 3 decades of experience, its the same thing repeated over and over again with no progress build over the previous work simply because that is not possible. For these reasons i think its not worth the time.
If Google saved that much money and the business didn't see a considerable negative impact (34% increase? Quite the opposite in fact.), then that news should be telling not just for Google, but for every company that previously catered to spoiled employees who jump on an airplane just to have lunch with the customer.
Two lies COVID has forcibly flushed out and helped dispel:
Lie #1: Remote work, cannot work.
Lie #2: Business travel, is a necessity.
It will be interesting to see how the corporate travel whores, spin this post-COVID in order to keep their Triple Diamond Medallion Platinum status.
Cigarette companies spent a lot of money on advertising [in Europe]. When cigarette ads were banned, they continued to sell cigarettes, but saved on the marketing budget. Still, it would not have been wise not to advertise beforehand: The level playing field is all that matters. For some reasons, e-cigarettes are allowed to advertise, and the shift to these products is substantial.
So for sales/consulting, it might be fine not to travel to your customer when nobody can. Afterwards, you might want to reevaluate.
(And I am speaking as an ex-consultant that hated corporate travel).
This is only true in an environment where nobody from any company travels.
However in a world where one company travels for conferences, lunches, in-person events, then that company will clearly have an advantage over the company that did none of those things.
True, but visits to far away intra-company campuses I suspect to be highly curtailed across the board when remote communications has been shown to work well.
They work when everybody is on the same page. Once things return to normal, it causes a prisoners dilemma. If a company is too cheap to send somebody to speak to you face to face, what else are they going to cheap out on?
I've been working through VC across the atlantic during the pandemic. It's been horrible. There have been multiple projects that took months - and I know, from past experience, that if I could hop over the atlantic for a week they'd be solved in that timeframe.
Why? Because of face-to-face experience and trust building and the ability to sit beside one another and grab someone quickly. It's 100% worth the ridiculously high costs of air travel and expenses.
Seconded. I did consulting for monitoring systems, and doing remote stuff (via email or weird late night calls) was just less effective and shitty.
We got on a plane to Spain, brought some Spanish speaking folks, and crushed the issue in 3 days. Left us with 3 days to chill, and our Spanish counterparts were keen to show us around Madrid; several were locals and actually took us to see their old neighborhoods and families.
Point is, fixed the issue quick AND had added benefits of travel. As an accountant I'd not be keen on it, but as someone who has to live and work, these things are the spice of life.
Do you do much work in this space internationally, for Spanish speaking countries? I'm in something related, and bilingual. I'm also interested in post-covid work travel.
I can see tech bros claiming, noshing on company catered meals, sweating in office gyms and finishing off with a massage is how world is made better place.
> It will be interesting to see how the corporate travel whores, spin this post-COVID in order to keep their Triple Diamond Medallion Platinum status.
Beautiful sentiment. I think there is "military-industrial-complex" like thing between corporate travel, hotels and airlines. So there will be enough "requirements" from clients to have face-to-face meetings, dinners and sports events to attend to. Besides off-sites and retreats are required for executives to keep the morale high of employees who do not get to travel.
> Why do you think remote work is only feasible during a pandemic?
Remote work was feasible in part during a pandemic because it had to be. When everyone is 100% remote, things aren’t bad. If companies don’t do anything to preserve that culture from during pandemic times, when folks start returning to the office again, remote work will very likely go back to sucking. Being remote you’ll very likely be the odd person out on meetings desperately trying to hear what was said and/or struggle to get a word in with everyone else jammed in a conference room.
A number of teams in my group have long had a rule that if anyone on a call is remote, everyone needs to do the call from their own computer.
I agree that the odd person out being remote is often a problem but distributed teams generally can adopt effective practices. If your company doesn't? Well, there are other companies that are going to be more effective.
Why is this a bad thing? Less crowd is good for everyone. Is it not?