Irreal

For reasons having to do with adverse serendipity, I’ve never been able to achieve one of my long held employment goals: remote work. For one reason or another, I’ve always ended up working for control freaks who just knew that if they couldn’t see and monitor their workers in real time they were going to goof off. That probably says more about them than those who work for them but it is a reality that can’t be ignored.

Rion Williams has been working remotely for a decade and has some advice. If you’re in a position to work remotely and suffering some anxiety you should definitely take a look at his post. The secret, he says, is balance. But the balance is a two-way street. You must balance your work flow so that you give your employer full value but maintain a separation between your work and non-work life so that you don’t burn out.

But you can’t make remote successful on your own. Your company also has to do things to make it work. Most important, of course, is giving up the micromanagement. Theoretically, that’s actually pretty easy. Companies have to start valuing and rewarding results rather than attendance. In actuality, it can be very hard for companies to make this adjustment and if they can’t, remote work is going to fail.

Given that you and your company have the proper attitude towards remote work, there are still some things to keep in mind. Take a look at Williams’ post to see what he thinks you should do to make it work.

Remote work isn’t for everyone. The smartest person I know went back to the office during the COVID-19 epidemic because he had difficulty knowing when to stop working and was afraid of burning out. He found it easier to leave the office at the end of the day than to stop working at home. But if remote work is for you, Williams’ post is worth reading.

Michał Poczwardowski has a nice post on Goodhart’s Law. The law is usually expressed as “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” That may seem a little abstract but its application is familiar to all of us.

My favorite example is rewarding schools or teachers for how well their students do on standardized tests. It seems like an obvious win: reward the schools and teachers who produce successful students. The problem is that that characterization is missing the part at the end that says, “as measured by standardized tests”. Of course, what actually happened is that teachers—either on their own or under direction from the school administration—started to “teach to the test”. Students didn’t actually learn more or become better students, they just became better at taking the tests. The reason I say this is my favorite example is because long ago I thought it was a great idea. Reward the good teachers and maybe even cull the bad ones. Sadly, it didn’t work out that way. Only the producers of standardized tests liked the results.

Another example is the infamous cobra effect, which, while it may be apocryphal, perfectly captures the idea. A seemingly reasonable measure for a desired result is incentivised and people find a way to maximize the measure instead of the desired goal. Very often, as with the Cobra effect, this makes the original goal worse.

Just as Goodhart says, as soon as the measure becomes the goal, people pursue it whether or not it actually helps achieve the desired result. Poczwardowski has some other modern day examples, including his own attempt to encourage engineer recruitment.

I know I’ve written about this before but it’s a lesson we forget at our peril. Take a look at Poczwardowski’s post. It’s a short and interesting read.

Someone reposted Trey Harris’ famous story about the 500 mile email. The TL;DR is that Harris, working as a university system administrator, received a call from the Statistics Department claiming that they couldn’t send an email further than about 500 miles. If you know anything at all about how email works, your reaction would be the same as Harris’: Yeah right.

Oddly, though, it turned out to be true. It was the Statistics Department, after all, and they had all sorts of data supporting the claim. Harris ran his own tests and discovered to his astonishment that it was true. Email to a site closer than 500 miles worked fine. Those to sites further away than a little over 500 miles invariably failed.

I’ve written about this at least a couple of times before but it’s such a good story that it’s worth repeating now and then for people who haven’t heard it. The solution makes perfect sense once you know what it is but until you do it’s seems like an impossibility.

Take a look at Harris’ original post for the answer and for the amusing story. You may even learn a new way of thinking about network problems. Sometimes you need to look under the layer where the problems seems to exist to discover what’s actually going on.