Ezra Klein: preference

Transcript context

…But why doesn’t it just work? You pay people by performance, right? Set them loose. Is it that they feed the dog all day? Weakness of will? Something else? I am not sure it doesn’t just work. This is one of the things I wonder about. I think that it may fail more at the level of the people managing the organization, who maybe don’t feel like it’s working, or want to be able to exert more control, than whether or not it’s not working. Look, my experience is in media. My organization has a lot of people working in different places. We have offices in New York and Austin and DC and California and a number of other places. We have a lot of people who just work from home in different areas of the country, and a lot of those people are really, really excellent performers. Now, that is individual, right? Some people work well in that context, some don’t. I’m now basically telecommuting. I’m in the SF office for Vox, but my team is primarily in DC, with a number of them in New York. And I think that my work has remained, hopefully, quite good in most ways, although there’s certainly things I’m worse at than I was before. I think that the two things that are hard about it — one is one, it is pretty difficult to run an organization that is 70/30. I think that running an organization that is entirely telecommuting is probably — I don’t want to call it easy, but it’s a lot easier than running an organization where most people are in one place, and then some significant, but not near majority percentage of them are not, because what you end up having then is dual processes, where a lot of things are built for everybody being around each other, and then the people who are not around everyone else are at somewhat of a disadvantage. So, I think that’s one issue, that oftentimes what people want to do is not create a telecommuting equilibrium, but they want to create a 70/30 equilibrium, and that one doesn’t work that well. And it certainly doesn’t work that well if you’re ambitious and want to advance within the company, particularly within its bureaucratic hierarchy. But then, the other piece of it that I think is very real is that you just lose a lot of information, even in the very best telecommuting software. And this isn’t even just a question of it being buggy. It’s a question of . . . Do you ever do this podcast remote? Never. We refuse.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.