Vermont Wants To Pay Companies To Let Employees Work Remotely (fastcompany.com) 79
A proposal for an act in the Vermont legislature is actively trying to give grants to small companies to employ remote workers. From a report: Under the terms of S-0094, a $10,000 micro-grant will be given to a business that will "establish or enhance a facility that attracts small companies or remote workers, or both, including generator and maker spaces, co-working spaces, remote work hubs, and innovation spaces, with special emphasis on facilities that promote colocation of nonprofit, for-profit, and government entities."
Re: uh, what (Score:3)
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Malls actually would benefit from this. Think of it as a sort of mini-city. In fact the mall in downtown Indianapolis would benefit mostly because of it's great location. The one's on the east side would benefit, but that's mainly because of the expressway. It also has a lot of warehouses left over from the economic downturn that could be converted.
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Yeah, this is not at all what we need. Encouraging small businesses is fine, but it does nothing about the very real problem that so many businesses still expect workers to be physically present most or all of the time. What this will do is pay someone to build a work area designed for a small business, and afterwards, that small business will then require people to work out of that small office, resulting in exactly zero changes to telecommuting behavior/support.
What we need is an actual tax break for b
uh, what-Impossible! (Score:2)
Three meg?! Shhhh! Don't let the "addicted to video" broadband people hear you say that. They still thing anything less than the FCC definition is blasphemy.
Re: uh, what (Score:1)
they had 300 people in Peru over a 3meg circuit. Easily handled with about 30 servers...
VDI with XenDesktop really demands about 100 kbps per user. So really you'd need 10 times that much bandwidth - 3 mb/s, try 30 mb/s!!
Unless of course you ment 3 Megabytes per second (24 mb/s)?
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Specific to my understanding of Vermont, there area large number of towns that don’t have high speed (residential) internet. This basically creates an opportunity to stimulate these areas and bolster the local economies. Smart move in my book.
The big name co-working companies are a different animal. Their price structure (at least for private offices) is pretty hard for me to understand the value proposition unless your staffing levels have huge swings.
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The advantage of working remotely is that you don't have to sit in a fucking open-plan office.
Re: uh, what (Score:1)
Easy. Lets say you have 500 employee company. Suppose those 500 people currently commute into the downtown area. If 50 of your employees live in a remote suburb, where they currently commute 60 minutes each way, building a small satellite office in the suburb would promote remote work and potentially give those 50 employees 90-120 minutes each day.
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Their options are to either spend $X for the space in downtown or spend ~$X for the space elsewhere, and the only difference is the grant to fund construction, which almost certainly won't cover the construction costs. No business will take advantage of this to let employees work closer to home. If businesses were interested in spreading out, they would have already done so. A few thousand dollars of seed money won't change that equation meaningfully, because a small, one-time grant can't balance out th
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So in your world the cost of buildings downtown is the same as in the suburbs? That's an interesting world, and not very similar to the one I live in.
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For housing, the prices get a lot cheaper the farther out you go. For commercial real estate, the difference is smaller, because if the market is heavy enough to command high prices, there are businesses ready to snap up the limited commercial real estate quickly, even in the suburbs. (Remember, there tends to be a smaller percentage of commercial real estate in the suburbs; that's what makes it suburbs.) The larger the metro area, the farther out you have to go before the cost difference becomes meanin
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The reason the value of property decreases as you get further out is because workplaces are centralised and people want to minimise the amount of time they waste travelling. If workplaces were more distributed, people would have more freedom to decide where they wanted to live, instead of being forced to choose between cramped and expensive city apartment or long arduous commutes.
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If you have users working from home, you can downsize your expensive downtown office and make significant savings that way. The idea isn't to build your own facilities all over the place, its to have shared facilities where people can go to do their remote work which are close to where they live for those who for whatever reason can't work from their home.
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Here is the cynical reason why companies wouldn't opt for that - there is already a mechanism for aggregating 50 people in a suburb all going to the same place - a commuter bus. If the bus has wifi there's a good chance that companies are getting free work out of that 90-120 minutes of commuting time anyway, because bus rides are boring.
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I worked several years at a software company whose 180 or so engineers mostly worked from home. The main office contained a number of high tech conference rooms of varying sizes with the largest one able to hold around 50 people at a time. There were also a few small offices available for those that just needed to get away from home for a few days to concentrate on something. Most teams would meet about once a week in one of the conference rooms.
The conference rooms all had WiFi projectors that we could sha
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Yes, that's the whole point that people seem to be missing..
They're not advocating that a single company open branch offices all over the place for their staff.
They're advocating remote work, while also promoting shared working spaces where multiple employees from different companies can go and have a decent working environment without having to waste a long time travelling.
Working from home doesn't suit everyone for various reasons... Some people don't have the space (although this is often because of thei
Sudden Outbreak of Common Sense (Score:4, Insightful)
That is an idea who's time has very much come!
Bravo, Vermont!!!
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It's not only the travel expenses, but the location expenses... There are lots of very cheap places to live, which are cheap because they are far from most workplaces which makes commuting impractical. Anywhere that's within daily commute distance of major cities is much more expensive.
Many people would happily accept a lower salary if it also meant significantly lower costs for them, resulting in a higher overall standard of living.
Happy Friday From The Golden Girls (Score:1)
Thank you for being a friend
Traveled down the road and back again
Your heart is true, you're a pal and a cosmonaut.
And if you threw a party
Invited everyone you ever knew
You would see the biggest gift would be from me
And the card attached would say, thank you for being a friend.
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Haven't seen you around in a while, welcome back! I'm afraid you'll be disappointed though - the trolling has degenerated tho the point that your brand of cheerful irrelevance now barely even qualifies. Thanks for brightening up the place though!
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I'll work there, remotely from California (Score:2)
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Why do you think this wouldn't already be the case? Do you really think a one-time, $10,000 grant intended to promote remote work is going to tip a company over into outsourcing? If it does, that's not a company to work for anyway, because it's not going to be around a long time if a minor, one-time grant trumps cost analysis of workers over an extended time.
Companies who'd benefit from outsourcing are going to pursue outsourcing (if they aren't already doing so) regardless of this proposal. Really, outsour
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Of course things change and, in the future, may change for the worst (or may not). I don't know how they'll change, and neither do you. I wasn't challenging you about what will happen in the future, though, I was challenging you about the way things "are," which is what you stated. Very clearly, the present state of affairs contradicts your claim. The jobs "are" not leaving.
You're just wrong, friendo.
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I sort-of agree, but also disagree.
My job requires three general things: 1) I'm an expert in my field, 2) I understand the legal landscape in my field, and 3) I can pull these two things together and communicate processes, policies, and paths forward to the rest of the people in my business.
While someone in another country could possibly pull these skills together, #3 becomes a lot harder if you're not fluent in English, but if even if you are and you're not fluent in the "office speak" of that business. Wh
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While someone in another country could possibly pull these skills together, #3 becomes a lot harder if you're not fluent in English, but if even if you are and you're not fluent in the "office speak" of that business.
I think this is more a case of "everybody thinks they're special". Almost every sector, every business develops their own lingo. If I say TDD, do you know what I mean? Probably, but only because most of us are developers. If you were in procurement, you'd instantly know what a RFQ was. If you are an MBA (you know that one right?) you'd know what EBIDTA is. And that's just the general terms, in this company XYZ means something in particular. As a total outsider, you'd not understand shit and that's completel
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You say this as though companies would never have though of outsourcing if it wasn't for this one particular grant. Do you really think a one-time, $10,000 grant will suddenly cause a company to say, "Fuck! We've been ignoring India all this time! Let's get on that outsourcing bandwagon!"?
Companies who'd benefit from outsourcing would already, and will continue to, benefit from outsourcing regardless of this proposed grant. Instead of promoting outsourcing, this grant will pretty clearly provide an incentiv
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there is still a bit of a cultural norm that says office-time is company time, and home-time is me time. If you remove the office, though, that norm necessarily diminishes.
I know a couple of people who work from home, and both have made one room an office and separated it from the rest of the house. When they're "at work" they're in the office. When they leave the office, they are no longer at work.
If you can't look your supervisors in the eye and lay down expectations for a reasonable work/life balance, you're not going to get one either in the office or working from home. It's about setting clear boundaries, and if your company won't respect them, find a new one. Or make su
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You're doing it backwards.
A friend of mine actually does live in Vermont, and has a silicon valley job. The cost of living where he is is under half that of silicon valley, and he's making about three times the pay of similar regional jobs. If you'd take the beach over the 6x cost of living differential, you're really making a mistake. Because you can work remotely from anywhere, and that 6x of money buys a lot of beach time, which you don't even need to spend vacation time to use.
and why hire someone in vermont? (Score:3)
The error of the physical place which is the state of Vermont paying for companies to DE-LOCALIZE their workforce is that they might succeed... and then why hire someone from Vermont at all?
once the state has bootstrapped by de-localization effort... why hire someone from Vermont at all... you could hire someone from canada or anywhere.
Governments should be very careful when they involve themselves in social engineering ventures. Its very frequently more sophisticated and complex in its ramifications than the C or even D student bureaucrats can handle.
We're getting into the philosopher king territory here when it comes to such things. And the overwhelming majority of dabblers in it are incompetent to the task. Even if intellectually they could handle it they rob themselves of even that chance typically by not taking the issue seriously. We require educations and certifications for people to engineer bridges or tinker around with the health of ONE person in a medical field... but what training or certification is required for government officials to use the power of the state of social engineer?
None.
Imagine a bridge built by a man with no training that took the task not seriously at all... imagine a man performing a surgery with no training that took the task not seriously at all.
That is what happens when the government messes around with these things. Sure, every so often you get a brilliant novice but such are far and few between. The vast majority are Vogons doing stupid destructive Vogon things.
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The error of the physical place which is the state of Vermont paying for companies to DE-LOCALIZE their workforce is that they might succeed...
Sounds like someone who has no idea what Vermont, its people, and its businesses are all about. There is no more de-localized state in the country, nor is there a state with such a large percentage of local businesses owned by people whose values are as important as their profits. If this can work anywhere, it's Vermont.
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sounds like someone that missed my point.
when I said de-localized... who was I suggesting would be taking these de-localized jobs?
That's where my taxes go !! (Score:2)
I understand it - they want to employ more people throughout the state. Smart people do live in remote locations - and the available rural "high-speed" internet options can be few and slow. There are several co-location places in Burlington ('da "big" city) - I know people who rent space. This plan sounds like encouraging a consolidation of resources to a single "office" and providing high-speed from there - rather than running wires to the home. I suppose this could help solve part of the "last mile"
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Around here we're getting tax fatigue in the form of Property "School Equalization Fairness" Tax.
Otherwise known as the "Our schools are consistently in the top ten in the nation because we fund all of our schools and not just the ones in rich towns" tax.
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Yeah, specific to Vermont it seems like a great plan to help rural communities without high speed residential internet.
Working remotely with crap internet is a painful experience.
I Think They're Confused (Score:1)
I work remotely so that I can work from home, not so I can commute to an office that happens to be remote from the company's office.
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I work remotely so that I can work from home, not so I can commute to an office that happens to be remote from the company's office.
Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head. How is this different than "going to work?"
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Depends on the individual...
The idea of going to a shared workspace which is close to where you live instead of an office which is far away will appeal to some.
I don't mind going to an office occasionally, what i dislike is the discomfort and timewasting of travel, if i could walk 10 mins to a nearby office i would go there often by choice but as it stands a 1.5hr each way commute in great discomfort on a crowded train means i work from home 99% of the time.
Some people don't like working from home, they don
A Vermonter's Perspective (Score:2)
The people in the state legislature are pretty clueless about most things. Our Lt. Gov. is a farmer with a pony tail that almost reaches his ass.
In per-capita spending on our public colleges, we come in dead last. And they wonder why all the kids move away.
I work from home for a company in Virginia. Some of the benefits of working from home is that I can wear pajamas all day and take a short nap in the afternoon if I want. I can't do either of those if I have to drive into town to work from a office that I
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The people in the state legislature are pretty clueless about most things. Our Lt. Gov. is a farmer with a pony tail that almost reaches his ass.
In per-capita spending on our public colleges, we come in dead last. And they wonder why all the kids move away.
I work from home for a company in Virginia. Some of the benefits of working from home is that I can wear pajamas all day and take a short nap in the afternoon if I want. I can't do either of those if I have to drive into town to work from a office that I share with other people who all work for a different company.
Pennsylvania's state legislature ain't much better! In fact I'd argue that it's worse.
Difficult for some jobs... (Score:2)
This is going to be difficult on our farm... I realize some of you think you're farmers because you iFarm and play other farming games but real farming requires a physical presence for now. Same for our on-farm butcher shop - someone's got to do all those dexterous manual tasks. Possibility for when we have telepresence robots... but then who needs a human at that point. :)
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People who work on farms can generally afford to live near a farm and get to work easily and quickly without stress, many people cannot afford to live near the business district of a major city and are faced with a long commute down congested routes with thousands of other commuters travelling to the same area at the same time.
Commuting time and cost of property within commuting distance are both significant problems for most office workers, and most office work these days is done on computer and doesn't ne
New Hampshire applauds this jobs program (Score:2)