Distributed Work is Eating the World

In 2011, Marc Andreesen in wrote: Why Software is Eating the World—and it has. Over the last 10 years everyone company that matters has morphed into a software company.

In the same way the 2010’s were eaten by software, the 2020s are being consumed by distributed work, decentralization, and access to opportunity.

Nothing has a bigger impact on quality of life for workers and their families. With the benefits on both sides of the working relationship — companies and workers — being so great, the rise of Distributed work is inevitable. Workers want this and companies should give it to them as quickly as possible.

Why Distributed Work is Eating the World

Every day I hear another company is transitioning to offer Distributed work.

From the world’s largest enterprises to the earliest startups, companies of every size are awakening to the fact that Distributed working isn’t going away and are embracing it before they are pushed. This is a revolution being driven by world-class people demanding more trust, control, flexibility and autonomy in their lives. Where companies don’t give it to them, they will move to their biggest competitors.

Historically, disruption comes from external threats. Distributed work kills companies from the inside: death by a thousand cuts, bleeding your best talent as your competition grows in power. 

Distributed working isn’t new. Telecommuting's been around for over 20 years

The problem is that tech hadn’t progressed enough to make it seamless. Lack of super-fast internet connection and bad software made communication, collaboration and access to data and documents hard. That problem has now been solved.

Problem two is that offices are great for specific demographics terrible for others. Talk to certain people and they will champion the environment and culture; this is typically due to the fact that everyone there is exactly like them.

Promotion decisions are made on the basis of who you drink beer with out of hours rather than your level of performance. Time spent in the office is still the KPI for many companies rather than output.

Much of the debate about whether a company will offer Distributed work still revolves around trust. "How do we know workers will do what they are meant to at home?" In reality, the opposite is usually true. The challenge of Distributed work isn’t people not working enough, it’s them working too much and burning out.

Anyone who has ever worked in an office knows what offices are: distraction factory adult kids clubs where people struggle to pad out an 8 hour day. A collection of headphone-wearing workers desperately fighting for the focus and isolation to get shit done.

Slowly companies in every industry recognize what has been obvious for at least 5 years. Distributed work lets them slash real estate costs, employ happier workers, boost engagement, all while lowering turnover.

The companies making the transition first are smaller tech startups who no longer want to compete for talent in big cities with large tech enterprises who monopolize talent. Over the next 10 years, very industry to be disrupted by distributed work, with companies moving first having a key advantage to retain their best people, expand their hiring pool globally rather than a fixed 30-mile radius around the office, and steal competitors best people.

It’s Already Bigger than you Realize

Over 20 million people work Distributed accross the EU and USA today, up from 9 million a decade ago — that number is projected to grow to 80 million people by 20390. Eventually, any of the 255 million desk jobs globally will be able to be done remotely. 4.5 billion people now use broadband internet globally. Every single one of them has an opportunity to participate as a cloud-native worker in a decentralized global economy. 

The result will be a global economy that is decentralized, accessible to anyone, anywhere, with a reliable, fast internet connection. When you talk about equality, nothing offers greater promise. This will have the biggest impact on global GDP in history.

Today, the world’s most innovative companies are moving towards a distributed model of working.

Mozilla, the creator of open-source browser Firefox, is fully distributed.

InVision, one of the leading design products on the planet, is fully distributed.

GitLab, one of the leading developer repository tools, is fully distributed.

Figma, Automattic, Basecamp, HubSpot, Hubstaff, Upwork, Airtable, Github, Elastic, Buffer, Zapier, Auth0, Stripe, Gitlab, Trello, Doist, and Remote are some of the other visionary companies delivering a higher quality of life to their workers.

The world’s largest enterprises are watching. Large non-technical enterprises like Banks, Credit Rating Agencies, Professional Service Firms, Government Bodies with hundreds of thousands of employees each are leaning in. They have to. They've lost their best people to tech companies for a generation. They can't afford to lose anyone else.

Distributed work is here, it’s just not very evenly distributed yet.

Work in an office? There’s no difference between being Distributed on different continents or working on different floors of the same building. In both situations, people use Slack, Email, or pick up the phone to communicate.

Convenience will always beat proximity.

If you answer emails out of hours, take your laptop home to work, or respond to calls while you're away from the office, you already have everything you need to be a Distributed worker.

Distributed work is becoming an expectation of every worker. Eventually it may be a right. Until then, we need to keep improving it in order to ensure it deliver on its promise: a higher quality of life for workers, the best work they've ever produced for their companies.