My son started eighth grade in the Texas public school system last week – trudging to the bus with an overladen backpack on a muggy August morning, returning in the afternoon’s 100-degree heat exhausted and overwhelmed.
My son is a great student. He’s rules-bound, focused, and more concerned about his grades and pleasing his teachers than I ever was. At the same time, he’s artistic and self-motivated. To be truly happy, he needs a lot of downtime to explore his interests.
As I’ve watched my bright, sensitive son engage with the public school system – which serves as half education and half caretaking in an economy where many households have only one parent present or both parents working – I’ve witnessed a slow ramp-up of pressure. Each year brings more homework, deadlines, and rules in a system that (though at our local level is excellent in many ways) is not geared toward individual human differences.
Some of this increased pressure is healthy. Kids have a lot of growing up to do, and they need to learn how to function in the world. But the American public school system today – especially in a post-pandemic world where teachers are underpaid and overworked – is designed primarily to feed fresh workers into the machine of an economy that increasingly feels like a relic of the industrial age.
Over the last several decades, that economic engine has transparently tilted against the average worker. Corporate profits rose while wages stayed stagnant; home ownership became out of reach of many Americans; health care costs spiraled out of control, taking increasingly ludicrous chunks out of paychecks.
Even the value proposition of college education, once a core aspirational goal of middle-class parents, has become questionable in the modern “gig economy.” Particularly in the game industry, a college education on a resume doesn’t carry the same weight that it did when I graduated. When I interview potential game developers, I’m far more interested in their thought processes, experience, and what they’ve built and accomplished.
The Wake-Up Call
The COVID pandemic sent legions of office workers – or, as I’ve heard them referred to, the “computer toucher class” – home.
More than most professions, game development was well-equipped to handle the transition. Many studios were already familiar with how to manage distributed global teams. At BonusXP, several full-time employees – including critical senior staff – worked on a permanent remote basis in different timezones long before COVID.
Remote work creates challenges; even with BonusXP’s experience, we had problems to solve. Some folks thrive on working side-by-side with others. When we were able to reopen our office space on a hybrid basis, several newer employees, especially those coming from academic environments, wanted the buzz and excitement that being around others provided.
However, the flexibility of remote work was a wake-up call for many employees who had only ever known traditional office environments. Being able to step outside for a walk or to meet the kids when they get off the school bus, save money on lunch and gas, have more flexibility for doctor’s appointment scheduling, and get back an hour a day or more by not having to commute was life-changing for many.
Further, the cultural shift to more asynchronous communication improved productivity for many. People who work in tech know how important it is for programmers to get “in the zone” – and how hard it is to stay there. A co-worker knocking on your office door with a “quick question” can cost half an hour if you are deep in thought. By contrast, the same question sent in a Slack message can be responded to when you arrive at a logical breakpoint.
It’s no wonder corporate America experienced blowback when managers began pressuring workers to return to the office.
The Machine Fights Back
As we find ourselves in the late summer of 2023, the collective message in the media and from business leaders feels both inevitable and coordinated – a flood of repetitive articles claiming remote work is dead, citing studies saying it’s not as productive, and that workers are just going to have to “deal with it” and “make compromises” and “get back in the office.”
Some of the arguments are disingenuous, bordering on ludicrous. Elon Musk has made murdering work-from-home a cornerstone of his billionaire brand, frequently labeling remote workers lazy. Further, he suggests that because many workers can’t work remotely – for example, delivery drivers, service workers, and construction laborers – it’s elitist for tech workers to advocate for remote work.
Beyond the silly-on-its-face “Elon Musk, a champion for workers” presentation, the core of that argument simply makes no sense. Every job is different and always has been, long before remote work was a discussion.
On a hundred-degree day in Texas, I’m extremely aware of how fortunate I am to be part of the computer-toucher class while folks are out spreading asphalt or nailing on a new roof. In a just and equitable world, they should be compensated more highly than I am. (To be fair, some of them are.)
The fact that certain jobs can’t be done remotely is a poor argument for not allowing remote work for jobs that can.
Similarly, I have zero sympathy for the authors of frenzied business articles bemoaning the death of the commercial real estate market in a remote-work world. Throughout human history, economic foundations are forced to shift as technology changes.
Mass-produced cars killed the horse and buggy. Green energy solutions will eventually outperform and kill the coal industry. The increasing use of AI threatens entire sectors of the economy, but it’s not going away.
Perhaps the death of the “office skyscraper downtown” should result in a sea change in how we live – killing commuter lifestyles, reducing the use of cars, and leading to new sustainable, walkable neighborhoods with high-speed internet. Perhaps, in this “modern” economy in 2023, commercial downtown real estate could be repurposed into affordable housing, killing two birds with one stone.
What Do We Value?
What’s less easy to dismiss are articles that cite recent studies suggesting remote work is proving to be less productive. That’s more substantive and worth analysis.
I’m skeptical of the methodology behind these studies. Anecdotally and personally, I’ve seen remote and hybrid work function well – provided a studio doesn’t approach the problem as “business as usual, just from home.”
Being good at operating a remote or hybrid studio requires new ways of thinking about how we work. It puts more weight on managers, requiring them to accurately measure results, rather than “time spent visible to the boss.” It requires using the right tools and processes to communicate asynchronously and globally. It requires more patience in a society where we have become so used to immediate gratification and instant answers.
If companies don’t make a cultural and execution shift at the same time they shift to remote work, then it’s not at all surprising they see productivity decline.
Further – and this is entirely heretical to “the machine” – productivity is not the only metric that we should care about. It’s the right metric if the primary driver is corporate profits. But in a world where the gap between the haves and have-nots is increasing, maybe it’s time to talk about different metrics.
What value do we place on employee happiness? What value do we place on flexibility, on the peace of mind that comes from not having to take a day off just to go to a doctor’s appointment? What value do we place on being able to greet our kids at the door when they come home from school?
What are those things worth to a company – to us as a society? Is it worth accepting a few tradeoffs? Maybe a CEO can make 25% less on his bonus this year? Maybe corporate profits (gasp!) could be 5% lower?
Toward the Future
It seems like ages ago, but the majority of my son’s fifth-grade year was spent learning remotely.
It’s valid to talk about the impact of that lost year of remote learning on kids. The social benefits of being around others and learning how to navigate situations face-to-face can’t be understated; they’re core pieces of the human experience.
Yes, many children failed to thrive in a remote environment. Even my self-motivated son, who does well when he has a lot of alone time for his personal projects and interests, missed his friends.
But just as we can’t fully evaluate the success of remote work unless we look at how a company executes its remote work policies, it’s impossible to accurately assess the tradeoffs made in the school system’s panicked first-year response to COVID.
At the time, public schools were ill-equipped to handle remote learning and quickly overstretched their IT capabilities. Teachers had to teach and maintain order when half the kids in their classes might not be able to get online consistently.
In a future where high-speed internet is everywhere and augmented reality is everyday technology, short-term periods of remote learning in the next global pandemic might not be so bad. Similarly, the world of work will be changed forever by technological progress and natural shifts in the global economy.
My son, creative and bright, is not at his best in a traditional classroom, slogging home on a hot bus with his overloaded backpack and an hour of homework. And I know from personal experience that the game industry is not at its best with a traditional office circa 2005.
Game developers do not do their best work crowded together in an “open-office” floor plan in a major city, with many employees having lengthy commutes five days a week – and forced to tear up roots and relocate their families every few years when the inevitable layoffs roll around.
It’s at its best when a project can draw on a flexible, distributed workforce – when I can work with a talented artist in Poland, hop on a video call with a programmer in New York, and collaborate with a part-time UI artist in Oregon via a Miro board.
It’s at its best when I can choose where and how I work, when and how I collaborate, and when I carve out focused time for problem-solving and pure execution.
So who is going to win the war between workers who want to work remotely or hybrid, and a powerful economic and cultural machine (staffed by an aging generation of middle managers) that wants them back in their seats in traditional office settings forty-plus hours a week?
Stay tuned. Despite a flood of media articles claiming remote work is dead, the conversation’s just beginning.
Back next week with fewer societal criticisms and more fun game stuff.