I'm actually wearing pants right now

I  just finished reading 'The Year Without Pants,' written by a Scott Berkun, a former manager at Wordpress.com. It's an in-the-weeds tale of life at a distributed (remote work) company, something anybody who has ever sat in a cubicle fantasizes about. I picked the book up because I wanted to know more about working from home, and whether it's a realistic alternative.

 

I love Wordpress, the company, which is a great way to write, receive feedback, and share my thoughts with whoever wants to read them. As a user of their products I totally endorse their mission and what they stand for. But a few things about the story make me think the author wasn't completely sold on working remotely all of the time.

 

The story finishes with the writer's departure from the company, only a few years after starting. To me, this makes a pretty big statement. He doesn't really elaborate on his decision to leave, aside from claiming an aspiration to 'the writing life.' Hmm... everybody aspires to the writing life, but nobody quits a job over it.... Right? I wonder if he is reserving his negative opinion of the experience because the experience is what gave him a subject for his book, and he is grateful for it to that end. 

 

From an editorial perspective, it's a pretty sleepy read. There is an entire page describing a game of shuffleboard played between two coworkers. I think it was shuffleboard - I had to skim several re-tellings of 'meetups,' which read like journal entries from a 16 year old girl coming home from a date. The author's enthusiasm over these rare in-person interactions between colleagues seemed awkward - I felt like too much excitement was garnered from the kind of trivial stuff that happens daily in any regular work environment. The banal was given epic status - to paraphrase what is described as brilliant team-building, "We stayed up late and drank beers together, tee-hee!" 

 

The lack of clarity in the narrative is interesting. The story bounces annoyingly between soapbox tirades on the virtues of good leadership, and very boring histories of meetings, arguments and project schedules. Many of the 'conversations' recounted in the book, sometimes pasted in verbatim from online chat records, are synopses of interactions that took place via text, on the internet. Communicating with someone via chat is dull enough already, reading someone's recount of a conversation from that medium is even worse. Is it possible that in the years of working at Wordpress, communicating only through brief, unedited and casual chat windows, the author lost all sense of what makes paragraphs, sentences, and chapters engaging units of a cohesive whole? 

 

At any rate, I think the book (and Wordpress) indirectly raise interesting questions about working remotely. There are absolutely benefits to it. For people who do this kind of advanced technology labor, there really isn't a need for them to inhabit the same physical space. The internet enables mostly the same kinds of interactions that an office space would, to a point. But that line is drawn somewhere around being able to pick up on your cube-mate's non-verbals, eavesdropping on hallway conversations, and having someone besides a cat to drink coffee with. 

 

So maybe the answer is not having people work from anywhere in the world at any time, as Wordpress does, nor is it requiring punch cards to a suburban cube farm from 8:30 to 6. Perhaps there's something in the middle to strive for.

 

I am curious if any companies have had success with 'hub' offices in 'home' cities, leaving a space open to all, and having people who work out of their homes regularly attend in person only for weekly or bi-weekly gatherings - as opposed to hiring globally and sponsoring jet-set international meet-ups every four or five months, as happens at Wordpress. 

 

All criticism of the story's boring moments aside, I hope Wordpress continues doing whatever it's doing to put out this great platform for blogging. Whatever works for you all - carry on!