Not really. For a start, I don't believe the off-line office is realistic. Whilst I'm sure the megacorps would be willing to displace their key employees to achieve this, I don't think it would be useful. How many offices and projects do you think could function or be useful if there were no outside phone lines. In 2070, the equivalent is matrix connection. Now you could have the whole building wifi-inhibited and all traffic goes through a secure connection, but that's still a route in for the hacker and the way the matrix works, everything is distributed. Nodes are defined by physical security and purpose, not locality (except where that purpose is a function of locality).

So you don't gain much (any?) matrix security in return for all the costs of gathering people, making them commute, etc. Certainly not dependable security. And if there are any places that want to go these lengths, they're still going to be a small minority of businesses.

I just don't see offices existing for the most part in SR2070.

No that's far less efficient. If you want to monitor someone's productivity / activity, I can give you tools right now today that will track keyboard activity, file access, etc. etc. That commuting time is wasted time and time that you have to pay for by grudginely keeping the employees wages high enough to pay for the travelling.

In 2070, I can't believe there are many office workers doing dull routine work like adding up figures and returning accounts. The company's expert systems will pull out whatever is needed on demand. It will even file accounts information to your bank, taxman, etc., automatically. Any office work that's being done in 2070 is going to be work that you want a comfortable, non-distracted, non-tired employee performing. Not "Mr. I was stuck in traffic and now I'm late."

And we haven't even considered the enormous cost savings in working from home. Trust me on this one - it costs a lot to run a big building of staff.

secondary question then is, where is said home located?

A+ corps could probably own walled garden enclaves where the workers have their whole life, no need to leave corp territory.

dont forget, any outside signal device have to be within range of the lowest rating device to maintain effective communication. so by having all corp "issue" comlinks have a very low signal rating, one can build a "firewall" around the enclave.

any data going in or out will be investigated. and given how encryption works in SR, forget about trying that...

so, if you want to get your hands on the data, you have to break in...

You do remember the matrix right? If they are working from home they'd have matrix access and could link up to the office from their. Which was the point of why don't they just do telecommuting.

And a enclave would just be an office with more homely feel, if the comlinks have to be within signal range of each other. As the signal ranges have to be close to each other if your not using the matrix. Your right back to an office building.

Its quite expensive to have those enclaves it much cheaper to just have an office and have your employees come in to work and monitor them at home. Most corp workers don't live in enclaves other wise the corp territory would be larger then all the nations.

I was responding to why they still have offices and the problems with working at home. Not that they DO.

This is a world where you can store movies in your shirt. Making an employee come all the way into work is not going to prevent them stealing data. And as to the security of people targetting employees in their homes, well that can happen anyway. People don't take work home with them? People at other offices don't want to connect in remotely? Even today, we're seeing virtual private networks coming into common use. Offices at different sites share their data invisibly. How much more so in the megacorporate world of 2070 ? No IT department is going to make their manager go all the way to the next city or even country to check up on things. And calling the site up brings us straight back to the matrix connection.

I'm just really not convinced that the disconnected office is feasible and that's the only reason people are giving me for the gross, costly inefficiency of running a big office for all your employees and making them trundle in and out twice a day.

There might be some highly paranoid labs that force everyone on site, but the vast, vast, vast majority of businesses have no good justification for running more than a skeleton office. Offices in SR2070 being anything other than a rare exception just doesn't make sense.

Having worked in these sort of places before, I can tell you two big reasons a lot of places don't do telecommuting. First is productivity. People do work more in the office. Yes they can track key strokes, work out put, etc. They do that in offices these days all over the place. Companies are constantyl having to be on employees to make sure that they're meeting performance goals. People still don't make them, sitting right there in the office. With the distractoins at hime, that's going to be even more of an issue. If they have to fire the person for not producing, then they have to hire someone else.

It can take thousands of dollares to hire a new emploee, especailly when you factor in advertisement costs, hiring processes, back ground checks, and training. $3000 to bring in a new employee is not unusual. There are people that hire on to jobs like call centers just to go to the training, and then quit, and go for another similar company, go to the training, rinse repeat. Obviously it's something different for say a computer programmer since there isn't going to be training involved.

Second problem is security. All that firewall work and wi-fi blocking paint and on and on is going to be a big waste of money if you've got hundreds of employees signing on all over the 'plex. Much more secure to have all of the access points in the same area. There's also the issue of managerial over sight. Much more effective to walk down an aisle to chew someone out then call them.

This is an erroneous statement. You base it on the assumption that the company bears any cost whatsoever for commute time. That is not the case. A PROGRESSIVE company in which you work at a PROGRESSIVE POSITION might offer some form of compensation for your commute time but it's not likely. The cost of commuting is born almost entirely by the worker and the worker's home government. Ooops, you're a Renraku citizen? Sorry we don't offer mileage and gas tax credits for commuting/sales calls.

You also have to keep in mind vis a vis paper output what the legal climate might be like. I find it hard to believe that the UCAS IRS, SEC, and Law Courts don't require a physical copy of contracts and filings. Most things will be 100% electronic in 2070 but there is probably still a requirement to have certain key documents in paper. Not to mention the ease with which an electronic copy can be messed with. "Hey, Ares! You didn't follow the letter of this contract with us!" "But that's not the contract we signed, see here's our copy." Call the lawyers.

I have to agree with Fist on the issue of productivity. At work the distractions are limited to whatever the company puts on your computer and your coworkers. At home there are nearly inifinitely more distractions, not to mention you can write a program to spoof the keystroke counting program. On top of all that it is much easier to chew out an employee face to face. When you tele-yell it doesn't have the same effect. Same goes for instructions, tasks, and meetings. It is much harder to keep people focused and productive when they aren't gathered together in a work place.

Employees working from home seems like a security nightmare. I can't imagine any business doing work it deems valuable to anyone (ie. shareholders) advocating this arrangement, especially in a world like Shadowrun. How can you consider having your employees store potentially valuable data off site??

A "run of the mill" wi-fi-inhibited office building routing its traffice through a secure connection isn't perfect, but it's a much more protective arrangement. The network the building uses to communicate with the outside world is a route in for a hacker, yes, but so what? You have to get access to that network in order to see anything behind the wi-fi blockers. I'm not sure what point you're making by saying that everything is distributed.

Your first point is completely invalidated by the Matrix's virtual reality. A number of people seem to have the image of a guy typing in front of his monitor from home being what teleworking in 2070 is like.

There is no screen! You jack in and appear in a completely true-to life replicated work environment. You ARE in a cubicle. You boss DOES walk around and talk to you. It's almost exactly like being in an office, except your boss can track even MORE info about you, not less.

Whatever productivity is available from employees all physically present in one building can be achieved, and surpassed, by Matrix teleworking.

Yes it is and I explicitly stated: you have to pay for by grudginely keeping the employees wages high enough to pay for the travelling.

The employee's profit is Wage - Cost of Living. If the Cost of Living goes up because of the expense of commuting all the time, then wage has to be higher to maintain the same profit. Now if you're saying that the company wants to ideally leave the employee with only enough to cover cost of living, then fine. But the cost of living is going to be a lower figure if the company can avoid the employee having to travel in and out every day. That seems simple enough to me. And when competing for the same employees the company that allows telecommuting effectivly offers a substantially higher salary to its employees than the company that doesn't even though that other company is actually paying their employee the same amount. Again, that seems simple enough.

As to the requirement to have paper copies, I don't see what that has to do with telecommuting at all. You can print it out at the other end just as easily as you can print it out on the desk next to you. Though that said, I find it hard to believe that paper copies are necessary or signatures required. There are far more effective electronic ways of confirming authenticity than a bit of coloured ink on a page.

On productivity, I refer you to my earlier point that any office work that needs to be done by humans in 2070 cannot be routine work. It has to be special if a programe can't do it cheaper. Something that can translate spoken dialogue in a foreign language in real time and get the nuances right costs 1,000 in 2070. Can you imagine what the accounting software does? So I imagine the office workres of 2070 must be doing something at least a little innovative. Speaking personally, I sometimes choose to work from home because I get more done. I see no reason why a culture of telecommuting wouldn't be effective due to an inability to yell at people. Not that I agree you can't - I imagine SIMsense yelling can be pretty darn effective when you have a three foot hologram of your angry face over your employee's desk.

The comment about spoofing key strokes is meaningless unless you're suggesting that the program you wrote is producing meaningful work that can't be analysed by the software. And if it is, then I'd certainly hire you.

I'm sorry folks, but lack of an ability to yell at people in person is not a sufficient counter-balance in my mind to not having to cover heating costs, lighting costs, ground rent, building rent or building purchase or building construction, cleaners, toilet facilities, parking areas, kitchen areas, health and safety, insurance, increased wages to cover the cost of employee travel, not being able to casually trade workers as needed with other branches or offices, not being able to make employees work even when too ill to come in physically or when in hospital, employees being late in, not being able to have your employees "present" whenever needed. I'm sure I can think of more, if I try. This is off the top of my head. I know that some of my people have relished the usefulness of being able to access our systems from home. It's been a big boost to productivity.

I'll post something on the security angle a little later, when I have time.

-K.

Heh! How hard would you work if you knew that you Boss ran Stealth rating 4 on his commlink?

unless he was actually present most of the time, probably not any harder... out of sight, out of mind, and all that.

the *real* question is, how much harder would you work if your base had a bunch of agents at his disposal running stealth 4 and analyse 4, constantly reporting on what employees are doing?

Yes it is and I explicitly stated: you have to pay for by grudginely keeping the employees wages high enough to pay for the travelling.

The employee's profit is Wage - Cost of Living. If the Cost of Living goes up because of the expense of commuting all the time, then wage has to be higher to maintain the same profit. Now if you're saying that the company wants to ideally leave the employee with only enough to cover cost of living, then fine. But the cost of living is going to be a lower figure if the company can avoid the employee having to travel in and out every day. That seems simple enough to me. And when competing for the same employees the company that allows telecommuting effectivly offers a substantially higher salary to its employees than the company that doesn't even though that other company is actually paying their employee the same amount. Again, that seems simple enough.>>>

Again you are wrong. The reason people commute to work in the first place is because they are living somewhere that ALREADY has a lower cost of living. Only the super rich live somewhere where the cost of living is higher BEFORE commuting into work (or else those who are somehow restricted in their choice of living. Here's an SR example. Assume it is cheaper to live in Tacoma than it is to live Downtown. Now assume that all the jobs are Downtown. Not everyone can afford to live Downtown so they move out to Tacoma where the Cost of Living is cheaper than Downtown. If the cost of commuting is less than the difference between living downtown and living in tacoma then people start flocking to tacoma. This is a basic principle of Suburbanization. The cost is not borne by the company. It is born by the employee.

Skill level is what determines your wages. It takes more skill to be an accountant than it does to flip burgers. So the accountant gets paid more than the McEmployee. The McEmployee is forced to live near to his work and probably take public transit. The cost of living near the skyscraper is high so the accountant moves to the 'burbs. His cost of living in the burbs + commute expenses is still less than cost of living downtown. His wages don't change at all. All he could possibly get would be some tax credits.

I think however that I'm going to stop arguing this topic with you because looking at your further comments I can tell that you are firmly entrenched in your view of how things should work and won't budge.

the warm fuzzy that only a corp wageslave can get, not a freelance runner or other non-corp...

that is the element not to forget, sell your "soul" to the corp or stay free but potentially hungry and cold?

as for cost of transportation. have a noodle shop on one floor, have the offices on other floors, toss the apartments of the workers on the rest of the floors (with the penthouse being for the CEO or similar high up person...

its incredible what you can fit inside a tower these days

Please don't. Or at least don't because you think it is a useless online argument. I appreciate comments and I didn't start this thread so that I could have a lot of people saying "Gosh - you're so right." What good would that be? I do think currently that offices don't make sense in the SR2070 setting and I'll argue against any counter-arguments people come up with until I find one that I can't. And if someone comes up with a solid reason why offices make sense, then I will have benefited. You have my word that I'm being objective and I'm sorry if it has sounded otherwise. I still don't agree with your point about cost of living and I'm about to say why in more detail. But don't think I don't appreciate hearing it. And remember that there are a lot of people who read these threads and if I'm spouting rubbish then you contradicting me offers others a counterargument that might be useful to them. And to bring in Jack Kain's point as well:

We have had several debates on how cyberarms work. Also magic and economics. We could suspend disbelief for all of them and not consider the how and why, but I think we've several times thrashed out nice fluff explanations for something that would otherwise just be arbitrary and made the Shadowrun world that bit more believable as a result. Now I've come up with lots of material to make sense of some of the matrix and cyberware. I haven't been able to make sense of offices given the technology available. Yes - it's a game and I can do as you do and turn a blind eye, but for purposes of this thread, I'm interested in finding something that is internally consistent with the setting. I'll therefore argue against anything that doesn't make sense to me, but I very much don't want anyone thinking it's a personal attack on them or that I'm going to stick dogmatically to some point of view.

I'll go with wherever the argument leads. I'm afraid at the moment, it leads me to believe that there is no good reason for there to be more than a small handful of offices and I do feel that there is yet to be a good case against this.

I'm really not getting your point, here. It doesn't matter where you live. If you don't have to commute, you have saved money. Do you think that the worker is not commuting because she is living closer to work and is therefore losing the saved money on higher rents?

That's very much not what I'm saying. Worker A lives in Tacoma and has to commute to Downtown. It costs him a certain amount of money which must be translated into wages because the wages have to be enough for him to carry on working. Worker B lives in Tacoma and telecommutes. He can be paid less because his cost of living is lower. That is to say, worker C who is not yet employed by either company can take a job at the first company earning X nuyen or a job at the second company earning less than X and they will be equivalent to him.

Offer telecommuting on a regular basis and you have the same attractive power to a worker as a company that pays more but doesn't offer telecommuting. It doesn't matter where you live. And in fact, the telecommuter can afford to live out in the sticks where the rent is dirt cheap and really save some money.

Telecommuting is a big saver for the company not only through all the many costs of running a large enough office to contain all of your workers, but also through the fact that you can pay less on salaries and still get the same result in terms of recruiting, retaining staff etcetera.

I'll address the security thing when I've finished writing up a longer post on it.

Ahhh...now I understand you. You didn't make yourself very clear earlier. We were arguing a similar point from 2 different ends. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

I still don't think telecommuting would have much of an impact on wages however. For the megas it is more important for them to "assimilate" their workers into their "nations." Don't decrease their wages but let them live on company property and shop at the company store. What you lose in the cost of wages is more than made up in the revenue of consumption. At this point telecommuting as a term is irrelevant. You live at work. Hence arcologies.

Oh man! I just had an even better thought. Employee citizens would pay taxes and EI/PP deductions to the corporation. Yikes! Corporate banks must have a field day with stuff like that. Mind you the corps probably aren't taxing their citizens in order to make it more attractive to "sell out" but the potential is incredible. Especially since you mooch the infrastructure off of the host government thereby lowering what you need to support.

There's a natural tendancy in online forums to assume that any post that replies to your own is disagreeing with you, I think.

As you say, it may not have massive impact on wages. I've said all along that I think the main advantages lie elsewhere. But it's not going to increase them and it has a strong attraction to skilled workers. I wont belabour the point any further that I think 2070 office workers are skilled. But suffice it to say that a lot of people are going to prefer the place with the telecommute option. Megacorps might have all sorts of nasty ways of forcing people to work for them no matter the conditions, but I think smaller A corps, government organisations and others might care a lot about enticing in skilled staff.

I think the best argument so far has been that the megacorps will want to see a big impressive head office. I can see that one, actually. But over the last year, I've authorised seven people for remote access to our site and know first hand just how massively convenient and helpful it is.

I had that. For six blissful months, I worked from home, just me and my spreadsheets.

And I lived next door to a swimming bath as well so I'd get up around 6:50. Be in the pool at 7:00. Swim for an hour. Go home, shower, eat breakfast and be working from 8:30am onwards. Knock off at 4:30 and found I was already home and ready to get ready to go out. Not only that, but I have my kitchen there with a well stocked fridge so there was no searching around lousy local shops for an overpriced, unhealthy sandwich.

That set up was probably worth a grand or two on my salary, imo.

The problem is that these can be perfectly forged in several action phases. And there is no secure VPN possible in shadowrun because the the brain virus that apparently makes people only use ROT13 and XOR encryption so "hackers" don't have to work.

Only if he prints it... which only fools the casual observer.
Actually forging a handwritten signature takes the Forgery Skill.

Can they? But I didn't specify what these electronic means are. For a start, a very obvious solution is to store copies, verified at the time with trusted third parties. The Corporate Court could serve such a function. So could many banks. solicitors, etc.

Digital signing of documents will be the way to go.

But again, I don't see how this affects the virtual office in any significant way. Unless the company / government / whatever that you're doing business with happens to share an office building with you (unlikely) then the signed document would have to be sent elsewhere anyway. So what's the significance of doing this from home?

Margaret Atwood did a book signing in five countries at once last year, using a machine that mirrored her pen movements thousands of miles away. If you're really insistent on signatures being necessary in 2070, which I'm really not in agreement with, it's certainly no issue as far as the virtual office is concerned.

Because it only takes one hacker eavesdropping on that connection to create the perfect sample of your signature.

in most cases where a forged signature is actually necessary, the person you're trying to fool won't even look at the signature. on the back of all my credit cards, in the signature space, i print ASK FOR ID. i can count on my fingers the number of times i've actually been asked for my ID when making a credit card purchase. you could, in most cases where you'd want to forge a signature, scrawl "Santa Claus" illegibly in the signature spot and get away with it. or, for that matter, print a copy of the signature in the slot with a laser printer.

i'm not arguing the rules, just saying that they're not really all that accurate in the vast majority of cases. sure, there are occasions where you'd want the signature to look very real (in which case, lacking the Forgery skill, i'd just have a drone with a robot arm indent the signature onto the page prior to printing, in order to make the signature appear handwritten), but signatures are seriously overrated as a measure of authenticity.

Yeah, I know those US credit card stories. It's not like that everywhere else, though.

But we are not talking about consumer purchases here - we are talking about business contracts important enough to actually come there in person and sign a special paper.
Of course, most of the time this includes notarial seeling, drekcetera.

Now that's a cart before the horse argument if ever there was one: If the security measures weren't useful, they wouldn't be bought in the first place. You don't buy something that doesn't suit you and then make yourself less efficient so that you haven't wasted your money. Not if you're a surviving business, you don't.

But, and this is a point I made right at the beginning that I don't think anyone is getting - the matrix is distributed. Hobgoblin made the same point while I was busy writing up this longer version and he's absolutely right: A node is not necessarily a machine in your office. It can represent an entire network. Perhaps what we today call a virtual private network. And it can have IC sitting on it just the same as most other nodes can. So the wageslaves all log in to the node and get the benefits of the security of that node. This sort of stuff tends to bring out the rules arguments so I'll go through a worked example.

First we set up our office node. This node represents a network of computers. Some at a headquarters somewhere, and some being the commlinks of all the wageslaves. Can a node be a network? Yes -

In addition, it makes sense because we know a node can contain numerous terminals. Physical distance is not really going to make much difference. If the idea of commlinks being part of this bothers you, then remember that 2070 homes have a term (SR4,pg.206) and you can use that instead if you prefer. It's can be just a terminal the same as you'd find in your office.

Lets give our Office Node attributes as follows:
Response 5
Firewall 5
System 5

That's a pretty good node. Lets give it a bit of IC just to be safe:
Pilot 5, Analyse 5, Armour 5, Blackout 5.

Now that could hurt someone.

Bob Wageslave sits at his term at home and gets to work using AR and VR as needed and the company saves a bundle.

Hacker Eve (I'm so using this name for a character) wants to get some juicy data from the node. What does she do? Well lets say she goes and parks outside Bob's flat, in signal range of his term. Well for a start, the term is likely to be wired directly into the backbone of the matrix. It is a fixture in the user's house after all. But I suppose it has a wireless connection for devices in the house, so we'll allow her to park really close and connect up. Alternately the home user might be using his commlink. In any case, I just wanted to point out that there are ways of countering some of the snooping of wireless traffic with at least some hope of success.

Having got in signal range of the traffic, she needs to get the data. There are two approaches here. Hack the node or sniff the data stream. Seeing as most people are fixing on the "outside the wireless paint of the office - oh no!" issue, we'll deal with the second case first.

We can assume the security conscious company has it operating in hidden mode as standard practice. That's an Electronic Warfare + Scan (4) roll. We'll allow it, but I mention it just so we're clear that sometimes the hacker will fail at this.

We can also assume that the signal is encrypted so before we can intercept it we have to break the encryption (SR4,pg.225). We'll stick with an encryption rating of 5, in line with our node so that's a Decrypt + Response (10, 1 combat turn) roll. A good hacker with a dice pool of 10 will probably succeed quite quickly, but could glitch. This is then followed by the intercept test: Electronic Warfare + Sniffer (3) test. Again, Eve will probably succeed. What does she now get? If Bob is in AR or VR mode, she'll at best get lots of images of whatever he's working on. She can record this and might get some useful data. But what she can't get are data files themselves. What she can't do is go roaming on her own initiative. Bob's term is nothing but a glorified keyboard and screen. Everthing that's happening is actually happening on the node.

Now the more useful and traditional approach is to hack the node. In this case, the initial roll to detect the node is the same Electronic Warfare + Scan (4) roll. But after that, we can go straight to trying to break in to the node. That's a Hacking + Exploit (10,1 hour) test. If successful then she's in, though the node gets a free Analyse + Firewall (Eve's Stealth Rating) test. And the IC might well still have to be dealt with. She can get her files now, but she could easily get herself in trouble.

The point is that you should compare this to just wandering over to the company node in VR from the safety of your own home. The GM might want a roll to find the node, but it really shouldn't be too hard to locate the office building and from that point on it's not going to be any different to hacking the node from outside an employee's home. The same roll to hack the node. The same IC to deal with. You can say there will be some sort of choke point access to the site, but there's no reason a distributed node network of home workers couldn't have the same ratings.

The only difference moving things onsite has had, is that the hacker isn't going to bother fiddling around with squatting outside an employee's house and making extra "Find Hidden Node" rolls. They'll do it from the comfort of a secure location with a packet of stim patches handy.

So... you agree that signatures are meaningless as a form of security in 2070, then? Unless you're implying that people can't use remote signing solutions because then someone will find out what their signature looks like? Isn't the party that's trying to alter the terms of your agreement already going to have a copy of that?

But this is a sideshow. Lots of workers wont need to sign things and most others wont need to sign things everyday on site with another party present. The argument is surely not that someone has to come in some days, therefore everyone must come in every day?

unless "everywhere else" keeps a copy of your signature handy for comparison, then basic concept is still ridiculously flawed. it seriously doesn't take any "skill" to forge a simple signature--it takes, at most, a modicum of artistic talent (if that) and an hour or so to practice. your counterargument about printing is valid, though i still think there are readily-available technical fixes for it.

seals and the like are, obviously, tougher, but the hardest part of faking up a document is always going to be planting it once it's created.

hah, now i know you're making that up... there's no way people in 5 different countries wanted margaret atwood's signature. or her books. or anything to do with her at all

anyways, just to add my point, it's not just a matter of matrix security, there's the physical security aspect as well. your top people have to kept in a secure spot, or else another corp will "make them an offer they can't refuse" and there goes your top talent.

mind you, this still leaves very little reason for regular office workers to go to an office, but it does mean that many companies (not the really small ones, but any company with, say, 2-3 valuable employees) would have at least some sort of office, even if only a small one, imo. which then necessitates security guards, cleaning/maintenance crew, etc... so maybe not an office building like today, where you have hundreds upon hundreds of people working in them for one corporation, but certainly i could see small offices with 3-5 people in them being fairly common.

No.

No.
I'm saying that remote signing allows anyone eavesdropping to obtain the perfect instructions for reproducing your signature.

No.
They got the result, not the instructions.
That might result in slight differences when trying to reproduce it... so it's a Test.

..you mean, like on your debit card or ID?

That's called defaulting, sure.

The robot arm is one, without question... but then again, a skillwire is, too.

Indeed.

Both physical and digital systems can be infiltrated physically - but digital system could, possibly, be infiltrated digitally, too.
That's pretty much the only reason of doing important deals the old way:
To rule out one possible point of failure.

That applies to signatures today as well.
Are the still used? They are.
So, obviously, you are missing something.

In fact it doesn't matter what approach you take forging a signature - it's a Test.
If you approach it with skill or gear is your decision.

Notarial deals are not unheard of, even today.
Yet, filing them online opens one up to MitM Attacks and filing them digitally only invoke problems of leaking them.
There is no benefit in digital contracts other than eas of use... and that#s certainly not a factor in the deals we were talking about.

That's a whole other story, indeed.

But even there the point is:
Given the state the Matrix is in, you don't want your workers to dial in.