16 ms·

Let employees work from home

261 points by douche 9y ago

sigi45 9y ago
Or don't. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. There is a story of mysql as a company who had an employee who was not reachable for a few months. Yahoo got there workforce back at the office. I personally like to have the option to work at home when necessary and i might get more stuff done at home i also might just not work.
- ajanuary 9y ago
  "There is a story of mysql as a company who had an employee who was not reachable for a few months." I couldn't find the story with some (brief) googling. What makes it different to "they didn't turn up the office for a few months"? Were they still getting work done?
- geekamongus 9y ago
  > I personally like to have the option to work at home when necessary and i might get more stuff done at home i also might just not work. I might just not work at the office either.
- Baeocystin 9y ago
  I'm not sure I would take anything Yahoo is doing as an example of a good idea.
  - besogne 9y ago
    They did buy a share in Alibaba! Yahoo's share in Alibaba is worth more than the total value of Yahoo. So, if you buy Yahoo, fire all its staff, close all its web sites, and then liquidate its share in Alibaba, you can make a lot of money.
- purple-again 9y ago
  And that is the reality of the situation. Work from home simply doesn't work for many people because they don't have the discipline or morals to make themselves work 8 hours without supervision.
- matwood 9y ago
  > There is a story of mysql as a company who had an employee who was not reachable for a few months. How does this have anything to do with WFH? If someone is not reachable and has not communicated up front they are going to be out, then fire them. This is no different than if they just stopped showing up to an office job. I always love the arguments that are around 'well how will I know my programmers are working'? Well, how do you know they are working when they are in the office?
- jperkin 9y ago
  MySQL is a great example of it working. Hundreds of employees, the vast majority remote, regardless of where they were located. Sold for $1B. It was my first remote job and I enjoyed it immensely, so much so that I haven't had an office job in 10 years now, and have no desire to return to one.
mcculley 9y ago
I've a contrarian view on this. Not all IT jobs are amenable to remote work. Some work benefits from tighter collaboration than current technology offers. Sometimes that collaboration is with folks other than IT staff, who may be less comfortable using technology solutions for collaboration. If the inputs and outputs of your job can be delivered entirely over email and version control commits, then work from home is a good idea. However, how do you deliver more value than someone from a developing country if your pipes are so narrow? I think there's still a lot of room for the value provided by teams working closely together.
- alansammarone 9y ago
  Basically every piece of useful information that can be encoded using your voice can also be encoded using an email - and in a much more efficient way, since you don't have to keep deciphering emotional cues. Of course, expressing emotions, for example, can be harder, but I don't think engineers should be relying too much on expressing their emotion as a way to do a good job.
  - joe_fishfish 9y ago
    If true, this is fine, as long as you are an engineer and talk only to other engineers. People from different backgrounds don't use email this way, though.
  - sillyquiet 9y ago
    This is nonsense. Body language, tone, empathy: all are crucial to successful communication between people, even engineers, even technical communications, believe it or not.
    - hn_throwaway_99 9y ago
      Completely agree. Often times the emotion is even worse over email or IM - I've seen people (engineers) be a lot harsher and a lot less receptive to alternative ideas over a text medium than they ever would face-to-face.
    - 9y ago
camelNotation 9y ago
I think WFH is a great idea, but until we can do multi-user video conferencing over the average home internet connection, it just isn't going to be as good as in-person interactions. However, once we can reliably see one another's faces in HD and share screens at the same time, it might even be superior to sitting next to someone and having them try to look over your shoulder as you show them something or ask a question. WFH is all about communication tech. If it's high grade, WFH works. If it's low grade, it doesn't.
- kbart 9y ago
  "average home internet connection" is varied factor. Were I live there's no problem with HD streaming, but working from home is still an exception not the rule.
  - camelNotation 9y ago
    The fact that it is a varied factor is exactly the issue I'm point out. It needs to no longer be varied.
- beachbum8029 9y ago
  Doesn't Google Hangouts let you do this? Is the average home connection not good enough for hangouts?
  - jacobkg 9y ago
    Our experience with a Google Meet (formerly Hangouts) is that it is almost always good but during any given 30 minute meeting the audio will drop out for one person at least once. It breaks up the flow for sure but isn't a deal breaker.
  - twothamendment 9y ago
    Just today we tried slack for video and screen share (I can only view in chrome on Linux, but that was enough for today). Slack was stable, clear, didn't drop and didn't heat up computers like Hangouts. Our two failed attempts on hangouts were right before trying slack. We have on our list to request early access to Hangout Meet (if that is the right name). We have a remote team, all with average home connections. The ironic part is when we try to have a meeting with the office and their network is the issue and all of us at home are still on the call and seeing clearly seeing each other.
rmah 9y ago
This article essentially boiled down to: I want X. A few companies already offer X. You should offer X too. There are sometimes advantages to offering full or partial work-from-home options to employees. For some projects and company cultures, it can work well. But honestly, this blog post was a rather shallow argument in favor of it.
- Qwertious 9y ago
  I think what the article is trying to say is that employers' arguments are more often bullshit than legitimate (and obviously, both sets of employers think their arguments are legitimate), so usually they should just give it a shot.
  - dsacco 9y ago
    Unfortunately, that's not meaningfully different from, "I want X, you should offer X." It is basically the same as saying, "I want X, some companies do X, give it a shot" in persuasive power. I love working from home and have done it for most of my career. The next job I take will probably be in an office though for a change of pace. I honestly find that despite my personal affection for it, most arguments in favor of remote work really just aren't very compelling. "Some companies do it successfully" is not compelling to most companies. It's a disingenuous portrayal of the real difficulties and sacrifices that need to occur for remote work to be successful. Remote work rarely works partially, because without a deep seated remote culture the employees who are not in the office will be fundamentally left out of subtle but important group interactions. If you are the only remote employee on your team, they're not going to video conference with you to have a spur of the moment discussion that leads to a business insight. Conversely, asking a company without a remote culture to change is asking all of the employees who are already there to embrace a new, unfamiliar culture where they can't just lean over and ask someone a question. It's my personal opinion that there is a very vocal minority that wants remote work to succeed, a more silent swath larger than the first that is indifferent, followed by a supermajority that silently disapproves (or at least, wouldn't want to work in such an environment). Even though I enjoy it, it appears selfish to me to ask companies to offer remote work without significant evidence it will work for them, all the while imposing a real communication cost on employees that work there who already thoroughly enjoy the status quo. It seems to me like it's similar to a lot of other things in professional life: you can't have everything, and if this is really important to you then find a job that offers it. But don't expect companies to alter their organizational machinery to cater to you when they have no reason to.
jasode 9y ago
>Objections to work from home fall apart Essays from workers like Jen McCown isn't going to work. What works is to have massively successful businesses that beat the competition because their employees work remotely. Since no multi-billion dollar business has demonstrated that specific cause & effect, the idea doesn't gain traction. Yes, businesses like Basecamp and Automattic have remote workers but I'm talking about significant business successes on the scale of Google/Apple/SpaceX/etc. If a remote workforce can demonstrate unequivocal superiority, there would be endless case studies about it in Harvard Business Review and every manager would be copying it like the Six Sigma craze a few decades ago. What the WFH movement needs is evidence of massive business success instead of essays. So far, the real-world evidence just hasn't tipped the scales yet.
- grp 9y ago
  Can we take into account some really big open source projects?
  - tyingq 9y ago
    I think that's a great point, but I'd argue that one of the reasons that works well is that the developers are (typically) also the product owners, project managers, etc.
    - WorldMaker 9y ago
      Didn't Google, GitHub, Valve, and some others used to pride themselves that most of the product owners/project managers/etc were also developers? That's not necessarily something that companies couldn't adopt if it turned out to be a good way to run a remoting-based organization.
- Veen 9y ago
  I don't follow your logic. The vast majority of businesses aren't like Google or Facebook. The vast majority of the nation's GDP isn't created by companies like Google and Facebook. Hundreds of thousands of businesses are the size of Automattic, Basecamp, or smaller. Those businesses employ the the vast majority of workers. Therefore, Basecamp and Automattic are excellent role models. Unequivocal success does not mean the same thing as Unicorn. A sustainable and profitable business of any size is an unequivocal success.
UseStrict 9y ago
I've always looked for companies that offer flexible working options. My employer has a default of being in-office but allows for flexible hours (like working 7 - 3, or splitting my day) and allows for occasional remote work. In return for this benefit I end up working more. Days I would have taken off for appointments, obligations, extremely bad weather, or mild illness I end up working remotely. I also find that days when I work from home tend to be more productive - no pets and no family means I have no distractions at home, I can just sit and code all day.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
neogodless 9y ago
We know that workers want choice, autonomy. Whether they really want to work from home is only an unanswered question because of a bigger question that isn't always answered very well. How productive am I? When teams do well in defining production metrics (aka key performance indicators/KPI), and employees have some way to know what conditions work best for optimizing their KPI, they figure out if they want to work from home, the office, the subway, etc. I was probably most productive at a job that just had an enjoyable environment, three-quarter height cubicles (i.e. almost private, reasonable sound division) that were tucked away from phone users and conference rooms, solid team contribution on projects (inclusion of key players in kick-off meetings, without excessive status checking, but cooperative design from developers, design, business analysts, etc.) and... very occasional work from home. It helped that I lived less than 10 minutes away, too, and could come in at (what I consider) a reasonable hour, rather than forcing myself awake. In addition, we had "billable" targets - we'd work together on estimates, and we'd try to spend 80% or more of our time measurably attributable to projects. We could readily access this information, and know how well we were doing. But... there are other jobs where remote work is far superior. Noisy open spaces, cramped workspaces with not enough monitor real estate. Then I just want to get out of there. I want to have the choice, and the ability to know if I made the right choice, by looking at how productive I am.
radmuzom 9y ago
As a divorced single guy with not too many friends, I look forward every day to go to work and have people around me. I interact socially only with three or four of my office mates. Anyway, I may be the exception, but I am not an employee who wants to work from home.
- throwaway2016a 9y ago
  I'm in a different social situation but I am the same. Working from the office is one of my best chances to interact with other humans during the day. I find working from home to be exceptionally boring.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  I think companies need to accommodate the differences in people here; either within one company or within the industry they need to split into "office friendly" and "remote friendly" groups. I'm on the introvert side of things and I'm simply oversaturated with human interactions. I have to actively avoid being physically around other human beings just to keep my sanity. I recently managed to convince my boss to give me 2 WFH days a week and I saw both my productivity and happiness skyrocket within those days. A lot depends on the type of project, I guess. Mine is such that I'm mostly collaborating with the customer side, which works in a different country. For me, 99% of events in the office are off-topic. Others in this thread seem to have close-knit team projects, so I'm not surprised they feel more productive in the office.
  - dsacco 9y ago
    I'm sensitive to the fact that you're more productive in an environment that caters to being an introvert. But if an organization were to allow people to work from home who asked to, how would they maintain the same overall productivity between groups? What if you want to work from home but your team believes there will be a productivity-reducing communication cost? How does the organization respond to this? Can it bifurcate the teams between remote only and office only? What happens if they identify consistent productivity differences? My point is not that you're wrong, but that I think adopting remote work requires answers to very challenging questions for companies that do not settle on one culture or the other. And if they don't start with a remote culture, in my experience they'll never have it.
bluedino 9y ago
I have some IBMer friends that have been recently notified that their remote working privileges are going to be terminated.
eldubz 9y ago
I'm all for WFH opportunities, but just to play devil's advocate I do really think there's a difference in team dynamics when everyone's in the office collaborating in person versus working remotely. I'm not saying it has a significant impact on productivity, but the team "connectedness" is sometimes not as strong if some people are never in the office.
barrkel 9y ago
I worked remotely, from home, for 5 years. These days, I work mostly in the office, with a 40 minute commute each way, despite the option for occasional working from home. There's a few reasons to prefer working in the office. The single biggest one is the hard delimiting of the work day; when I'm not in the office, I'm not working, I'm not available on email or chat, and unless it's an exceptional situation, nobody will phone me either. My evenings belong to me and my loved ones only. That's precious. It's far too tempting to let one thing bleed into the other when working from home. The biggest secondary one is influence on the business. Simply being present when decisions are being made, whether they're technical or business, means you have a chance to speak up and help set direction. Stuff that emanates over remoteable media like chat, email, project planning tools tends to be after the meeting, not before or instead of the meeting. This doesn't change for a company until most / all of the workforce is remote, and that's simply not true for most companies. If you're interested in a career, turning up is a significant boost for most people. The final one is bandwidth and transaction costs. Chat is a dreadful medium for remote communication - if you've ever had to sit there waiting for a reply, and wonder whether it would be more efficient to switch back to what you were doing - it's almost impossible to come to a decision in good time in chat. I've seen 5 minute conversations take half an hour. Starting a video chat is far better, but it has a big barrier to entry; it's not like talking to someone a few desks over. Try and do it with 4 or more people, and it turns into a coordination problem, people dropping in and out, someone eating while not on mute, synchronization for startup, etc. Frankly, I prefer email. You can put together a logical argument, a coherent or strawman proposal, and discuss things at length point by point. It's much higher bandwidth. But too few people read long emails, and even fewer respond correctly with inline replies. The days when people were trained on newsgroup netiquette are long gone.
- jusuchin 9y ago
  I guess it's different strokes for different folks. Personally, I feel I can communicate much more efficiently via chat/messaging mediums than email. Chatting, in my opinion, at least in a late 20 something (27 year old)'s mind, emulates a real conversation where if you don't respond it's essentially ignoring the other person. If you have a bigger thought, sure you can type it out and get that message to multiple people in a better format - but for the majority of quick Q and A's I don't see any issue with messaging.
throwaway2016a 9y ago
I like working from home sometimes. A line is crossed for me when a company goes 100% remote. I would go crazy working from home day in and day out. I actually did have a borderline nervous breakdown years ago because I couldn't take being alone so much of the day. In fact if I have to work from home full time again I would pay to have a membership in a co-working space just to be around other humans. I think work from home full time reinforces the idea that programmers and anti-social and not creative. The opposite is true for many (most?) of us. And for people who are social and creative you need other humans around. I say let people work from home but make sure they have the option of an office.
- abalashov 9y ago
  Oh, indeed. I can relate to this. So much so that I wrote a blog post about it: https://likewise.am/2015/12/18/why-i-love-industrious-and-about-coworking-and-offices-more-generally/ https://likewise.am/2015/12/18/why-i-love-industrious-and-ab...
- schtitt 9y ago
  Curious about the implied link between social-ness and creativity.. care to expound? I can think of several individuals who are highly creative but who prefer being alone.
  - throwaway2016a 9y ago
    > Curious about the implied link between social-ness and creativity They are linked in that I think they are both related to working in an office. - Social interactive as it relates to an office environment is fairly obvious - As far as creativity... that requires more explanation. That was more a response to people saying things like "I can get more code done working from home"... as a manager who also still codes (a lot) I can say, I am paying you to solve problems not write code. If the problem gets solved I don't care if it is 10000 lines of code or 10. Solving problems takes creativity. And for many people, creativity is enhanced by being around other people. Other people expose you to new ideas. You can still do that work from home but but I think an office accelerates. Granted, history is full of people who were immensely creative but also recluses, so that can swing both ways.
tyingq 9y ago
Careful what you wish for. If your company works out a system where everyone can reliably work 100% remotely, you become a very replaceable cog. Replaceable from a much cheaper labor pool.
- sqeaky 9y ago
  Why does working from home make someone more replaceable than someone working from an office? I would think in most IT positions the thing that makes one least replaceable is their value to the team. If you constantly provide in the form of More code written or servers maintained because you can focus better then you could be more valuable. I don't think working from home directly relates to values, and I think arguments can be made for value increase or reduction.
  - tyingq 9y ago
    You compete with a larger pool when working 100% from home. Both skillwise and costwise.
    - sqeaky 9y ago
      That is an interesting take on it. I am comfortable with that, but I can see why many might not be. I will have to think more on that to see all of the ramifications. Immediately, I can see how it looks like businesses might try to hire devs from inexpensive overseas shops, but I know why employers rarely do that a second time. Then there are the really expensive devs who are clearly some of the best in their field, but that is so expensive few shops would consider it. as an aside, I suspect working from home as a cultural shift would allow some real estate prices to normalize. There would be less need to move many people into very expensive areas.
      - tyingq 9y ago
        Sure. It doesn't have to be overseas though. A SV startup switching to work from home could save money by hiring remote developers from cheaper places in the US.
II2II 9y ago
To The Author: Please show us some numbers to back up the claims? The few numbers that you do provide either fail to support your argument or can be construed to contradict it. (I am thinking of: everybody wants to the option to work from home followed by 35% would change jobs for the option to work from home, even if it is part-time.) Also, anecdotes don't cut it. You can find counter examples to almost anything that is based upon human nature, particularly when it involves self-assessment or personal opinions. Businesses will care more about the quantifiable. The bigger the business, the more likely they are to care about the average over a large group of workers (rather than individual cases). I am sorry, but most of the debate over working from home is based upon what people want rather than what businesses or even their employees need. Your article does nothing to change that. If you want to change people's opinions, please be more persuasive by dealing with the quantifiable rather than the subjective.
- JenMcCown 9y ago
  Hi there, author here. The article actually links to a NY Times article and the Gallup study that it cites. But remember, this is an opinion piece. I've been in the industry for 15 years...hang on, no, it's 20 years, but who's counting? And except for those stats and linked articles, these are my observations and opinions. I can't write an article that will convince 100% of the people. A book deal and a set of long discussions wouldn't convince 100%. If you disagree with me, that's fine. I spent my time knocking down the most common arguments I've heard, and a little time talking up the observed benefits. One final point: I think companies should take "what people want" as part of their career into account! Even big business doesn't completely dismiss trends in the workplace - which are indeed driven, in part by what workers demand. More places offer considerations for ergonomics, pleasant work spaces, tea and coffee rooms, snacks, health programs, and so on. This is just one more thing, and this is my small contribution to the talks.
GoToRO 9y ago
The problem with work from home for companies is that they need managers that can actually evaluate someone's work. Most of the time this is not happening (either there are too many things to know or the manger never did any actual work for a very long time). Also the problem is that companies want to hire the best and the brightest and then they quickly turn around and they don't trust their employees. Funny enough this is exactly how communist countries operated: they needed very smart people to fight the West but then they could not trust them because smart people had a tendency to like the West.
- yourapostasy 9y ago
  > ...they need managers that can actually evaluate someone's work. Most of the time this is not happening... When the situation that managers in aggregate do not know how to evaluate their staff's work prevails at a company, forcing everyone on-prem and letting the managers evaluate that is likely what causes a lot of the organizational dysfunction we talk about. WFH definitely offers managers fewer readily-available cues to evaluate their direct reports, but I wonder what a quantification of those cues versus those available on-prem by a professionally-trained anthropology observation team might turn up. I hear a lot of stories of people getting pissed off that a less-capable coworker is far more successful within the organization because the coworker was fantastic at say, face-to-face networking within the organization. Could such activity be much more difficult to pull off in a WFH-dominant organization, and fool managers who are deficient staff evaluators in an on-prem-dominant organization, sufficient to offset the drawbacks of WFH? To a certain extent, I think the WFH-versus-on-prem debate obscures an overarching requirement that managers still must sweat out the details, and cannot delegate to a set of company policies the need to lead and manage, a core component of which is knowing your direct reports at a granular level in many dimensions.
rumcajz 9y ago
The article assumes that making money is the primary goal of a corporation. If it was, then sure, WFH would make sense. However, the corporation is not a sentient entity. It cannot desire anything, be it money or something else. It's only human participants that have incentives. Of those, only shareholders have direct incentive to make profit, but even then they may own the shares for speculative purposes and desire share price to grow, not necessarily the profit. And even that's not necessarily true: Those who short their position may actually want the shore price to drop. But shareholders in fact don't have much influence of business decisions of the corporation. Those are delegated to the management. The management, in turn, has incentives to extract as much rent from the business as possible. Thus, it cares about profits only to the extent where it adds to their rent. Increasing profit while decreasing the rent is a bad trade-off. Regular employees, in their turn have incentives very similar to the management. They want to be paid as much as possible without losing the job. All in all, you can think of it as of struggle for a limited resource (bananas, share of profit) in a group of chimpanzees. Now, imagine what would happen if one chimpanzee refused to participate in the group's interactions, walked away, but still demanded his share of bananas. It's not going to work. In the end, I would say that WFH would only work if everybody worked from home, completely changing the way the group interacts.
- CPLX 9y ago
  > imagine what would happen if one chimpanzee refused to participate in the group's interactions, walked away, but still demanded his share of bananas. It's not going to work. I feel like this part of your comment could easily be overlooked, but it's a pretty astute observation of how group dynamics applies to this situation. We're wired to be tribal animals, to some extent. Everyone knows that "culture" is an important part of a company's success. The idea of working from home profoundly affects the culture.
- cname 9y ago
  What if one chimpanzee sometimes stepped away from the group and all their bickering, noise, ego-driven shenanigans, and other distractions? Maybe that chimpanzee would pick more bananas (and share them with the group). Office culture is often (I'd say usually) toxic and/or inefficient. Being in the office doesn't mean any useful work is getting done. And just because people are in the same general vicinity doesn't mean they're interacting in a useful/beneficial way or even interacting at all. Working from home is certainly different from working in the office, but being in the office isn't some natural state of affairs or a particularly useful baseline.
misiti3780 9y ago
I have been working remotely for 6+ years and it would be very hard for me to go back to an office. I have complete control over my life right now, can work from anywhere, make my own hours, etc.
partycoder 9y ago
An open plan office can be productive if people move long discussions to meeting rooms, and try to solve their problems via chat or e-mail. An open plan office where everyone is trying to talk, quickly degrades into people raising their voice to be heard, becoming a yelling mess where it's impossible to do serious work unless you are very good at ignoring noise, or you are blocking noise physically... like using earplugs or moving to a meeting room. Working from home, you can just focus and do your work. However this is not the case for everyone. If you live with a bunch of people or pets this might not be your case.
sumanthvepa 9y ago
I'm the founder of my own company and my co-founder and I both work from home -- our respective homes that is. I know my experience is probably not what people have in mind when they think of a work-from-home employee, but for what its worth -- my productivity is orders of magnitude greater than it was when I was employed (at Yahoo!) Productivity is more a function of motivation(+) and bureaucracy(-) than anything else. Skype and telephone, and the commit log seem more than enough for us to keep abreast of each others' doings (although we definitely meet about once a week for a 5-6 hours) I would absolutely hate to have to micro-manage someone to the point that they have to be in the same room as me to get work done. (I'd rather hire a more self-driven individual)
- pkaye 9y ago
  So you are running a two person company? I think some of the issues with remote work come when the company scales up to 10+ people. Coordinating among multiple people becomes more complicated. The skill level of individuals start to vary. Something that could have been hashed out in 5 minutes on a white board takes half an hour.
dionidium 9y ago
I can't help but think that a lot of this desire is driven by the existence of far-flung suburbs and painful commutes. I was planning to work from home today to receive a delivery that now seems to be delayed, so, since I live within walking distance to the office, I decided to come in anyway. I guess if I lived an hour away I'd have preferred to stay home.
peapicker 9y ago
I don't want to work from home, thanks anyway. Except on bad weather days. Then again, I'm at a senior principle engineer level, and need to have face time with my VPs and directors in addition to other devs. I don't believe it would be possible to work at the level I'm at remotely, nor to be promoted to such a level. And my commute isn't horrid at ~25min.
- JenMcCown 9y ago
  "Except bad weather days." Exactly! Your company has to offer any kind of WFH to allow that!
  - peapicker 9y ago
    And I do work from home on bad weather days so this isn't an issue
    - JenMcCown 9y ago
      That's marvelous. The point is that many companies don't allow that, and should.
accountyaccount 9y ago
Here's the problem I run into: I can get 90% of my work done at home, but my boss can't. So I have to come in every day because he has to. It's completely childish, and I imagine this is the same in a lot of places. I personally would love to give the ability for my employees to work at home, even if I didn't. I don't understand the mindset where people don't want things to be better for someone else... even if they can't also be better for you. This happens even when those benefits to others come at no cost to yourself. Does anyone else have any experience overcoming this with someone else? Like it's bad to the extent where if this person works late he'll be passive aggressive towards everyone who doesn't have to also work late.
darkstar999 9y ago
I think these arguments are missing a big aspect of successful companies: culture. How can you have good office culture if everyone works from home?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- JenMcCown 9y ago
  You're missing the point that WFH doesn't mean "all employees must WFH full time". WFH is everything from "I gotta go home, the kid's sick" to "I'm going to WFH Wednesdays to concentrate", to "see y'all online!"
  - mcgrath_sh 9y ago
    Exactly! That is what I have. I work from home about two days a week. The flexibility to work from home is what is golden. If my boss said "hey this week stay in the office," I am like can do. This also lets me visit inlaws and the like without using up loads of vacation. I don't have to worry about handling tedious things on weekends and it frees up my commute to do things like cut the grass. It is a win win.
Pukkap 9y ago
Having worked at home for many years the hardest thing i found was to switch of from work and have a home life. even after reading all the article on separating work/home life. now i work in a office i feel i get more done.
dionidium 9y ago
I know a handful of professionals who don’t want to work from home at all…but even those people admit that they want the flexibility to work from home on days when their kids are sick, the car has a flat, or workers are coming, rather than having to take time off of work. Is this a problem that people who work in technical fields actually have? Even in companies with aggressively unfriendly WFH policies, I've had good luck requesting time at home in situations like the above.
- JenMcCown 9y ago
  Yes. I have a colleague whose kids get sick a lot, and they're very concerned that a firing is imminent for that reason.
  - sjg007 9y ago
    Family Medical leave might be helpful.. You can schedule it e.g. take 1 day off a week or something. It's protected.
    - JenMcCown 9y ago
      It's a lot harder to navigate that one might think, and FMLA is for serious illnesses, not "one kid got the flu this week and another got the runs last week and before that it was stomach upset and before that..." etc.
coffeemug 9y ago
Efficacy of remote workers is just a thing some people really want to be true, but it's not clear that it's true at all. (It's also not clear that it isn't, but the evidence is nowhere near as overwhelming as some people make it out to be)
lemonsqueeze 9y ago
How about instead saying: "I only work from home". Don't bring me any offers that treat me like a child.
bitL 9y ago
The crab mentality here is really appalling :-( I work remotely for 6+ years; during that time I created some unique algorithms, traveled around the world, met diverse types of people giving me unexpected inspirations from which business benefited tremendously (unique stuff nobody else has). I have the big 4 companies trying to contact me all the time if I wouldn't want to work for them, however seeing inside e.g. crammed offices of Google in Zurich with monitor next to monitor, makes it very unappealing. Remote work requires focus and discipline. Focus is way easier than in an open office, discipline is more difficult. I still remember finishing some server part and tests while laying on a beach in Barcelona using their public Wi-Fi, getting tanned, and whenever I felt like, dipped into the sea - it was super energizing and motivating to continue working. Also viewing sunset above the place of refuge on the Hawaiian Big Island from a rented cottage, while sipping a cocktail and working on some advanced algorithm was superbly motivating. Just because some managers need to control everyone around and enforce the same misery on their subordinates doesn't mean there aren't better ways to work. It's actually stupid not to give people WFH and make them miserable commuting (some people spend up to 6 hours/day in the traffic). The technology is there, but the perceived lack of control and insecurity of power structures must spoil it for everyone, "'cause everybody is doing it in the office and it can't be done other way well". Phew
- korzun 9y ago
  You are an exception. I was a huge advocate for working from home because I would get things done and end up saving two hours of commute. Your perception of this approach changes relatively quickly in a managerial role. If you are shaving 1-2 hours off your commute, then the overall output should be in line with whatever it was in the office. I probably met two other engineers that kept that in check.
  - bitL 9y ago
    It's not for everyone. You can often see middle-aged men escaping their homes and working long hours because they feel miserable around their wives; for them office is the only "safe space" they have. But for self-motivated high-performing communicative people WFH might be a much better arrangement. They might have a different problem - not knowing when to stop and risking a severe burnout which would be limited by office hours.
nzonbi 9y ago
Imagine how much energy the world would save if most people where working from home. Electricity, transport fuel. How much less pollution and traffic jams. How much less need to build cars and transport systems. How much extra time to enjoy life would people have by not commuting. With so huge positives. I don't understand why not more research is put into work-from home.
HeshamA 9y ago
Pro remote work but need like this tells me that maybe the tide is turning https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/05/ibm-to-remote-workers-come-back-to-the-mothership-or-else/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/05/ibm-t...
nsedlet 9y ago
I agree with many of the WFH benefits put forward in the article. However, I think it ignores & mischaracterizes many of the WFH costs. Ignores: * Face-to-face communication is often more efficient. Just my opinion, but conversations are usually faster and easier in person than over Slack or email. Asychronous communication can be nicer for certain things, but it sucks when that's the only option. Video hangouts are better, but there's a barrier to setting one up, and they're still not as effective as face-to-face. * Presence in the office helps keep everyone in the loop. Team members are much more likely to speak to one another actively. They're more likely to understand what everyone else is working on. They're more likely to understand the business's main priorities and problems. Even physically just sitting a few desks away from someone, vs. right next to them, makes it less likely that two people will interact. * The office provides important social interaction. If you work a lot, your office might be your main opportunity to have substantive interactions with other people. Some of my past coworkers have become my closest friends. People who work from home (I'd guess) are much less likely to form close bonds with their coworkers. * A professional setting can be motivating. I find it energizing to walk into the office where everyone is working hard. My day is measured out in minutes and I feel a constant pressure to get something done. When at home, I feel the pressure less - it makes me feel better about what I get done, but it also makes me less productive. * Boundaries between work & home are helpful for relaxation. The ritual of leaving the office helps reset the mind, I think. Otherwise, workdays easily bleed into evenings that neither productive nor relaxing. Mischaracterizes: * "Some people need close management". The internet is incredibly addictive & distracting. Sitting at home makes it much easier to succumb to that distraction. Obviously that can happen at work, but there's a limit: you can't watch Netflix, for instance. And you'd feel weird if your screen was constantly on Hacker News or Reddit or whatever every time someone walked by. * "How do I know they’re working if I can’t see them?". This is a strong point and I agree that most managers over-emphasize face-time as a measure of productivity. But that doesn't mean it's useless. For non-routine, creative, or project-based work (e.g. engineering) it's hard to measure productivity. Deadlines can be great but oftentimes are artificial - much of the time, the most engineers can really promise is that they'll work efficiently, smartly, and to the best of their abilities during the workday. So it is of some benefit to the manager to see that the employee is there for 40+ hrs each week. Managers also want to know if their reports are frustrated, anxious, demotivated, happy, confused, etc. - much easier to get a read on that in person so that the manager can address it. Many of my friends who are able to work from home choose to rent coworking space for many of the reasons above. Admittedly I rarely work from home, but I do manage people who work remotely. Also, neither me nor most of my friends are parents yet.
pacomerh 9y ago
To the people who say`I'd go crazy if I worked from home`. The trick is not to work entirely from home, but to mix it up with an shared office, co-work space, cafe, etc. There's a big difference in having people around you that don't know you. They wont distract you because they won't talk to you or call you into a meeting.
ksk 9y ago
I don't believe WFH actually works (as an exclusive means of working for everyone). I have done the WFH thing for a couple of years at a startup (where everyone was remote), and even leaving aside the camaraderie aspect, collaboration was always a challenge. You're forced to give up several ways of communication which are valuable. You can't walk into a colleagues office for a quick whiteboard discussion. You have to schedule time when both of you are available. Not only that if the discussion brings up things that other people are working on you have to again wait and schedule time with them too. You also can't pickup on non-verbal cues, which can tell you if they're nervous/apprehensive/unhappy about something in the project, etc. You give up laughing at silly things over lunch, or sharing a quick joke as you pass someone in the hallway, or giving someone a hug on their birthday. All the little things that do lift your spirit when you're frustrated or feeling a bit low.
jefe_ 9y ago
Was in a management meeting the other week where HR mentioned they were considering implementing a more official work-from-home policy. What we're trying to get away from is hourly employees 'working from home' when really they're sick, by offering formalized remote work opportunities. Sounded great until they mentioned the 'monitoring systems' they were evaluating. I shared my very strong opposition to the proposed monitoring systems, went home and crafted a Less-Orwellian Remote Office policy. Shared the policy with HR the next day, and they really liked it, agreeing there were ways to accomplish the goals without surveillance. Writing the policy was trickier than I expected. Started very much with a spirit of 'Hire people you trust,' but thinking about the policy, applied to specific people who have been hired, it brought some more specific guidelines to the policy. Here are the highlights: Eligibility for Remote Work (pick 4 from: 1 year with company, management status, strong performance record or recommendation from team lead, one department-specific criteria) Requirements for the Remote Office (minimum equipment, ample space, etc. clearly defined) Approval Process & Remote Work Guidelines / Contract (lays out guidelines for working remotely and collects employee commitment to adhere) Saw some commentary that the frequency of working from home shouldn't be a privilege (i.e. if you do a good job, you can work from home for a week), that it should be as routine as possible, so we're making eligibility to work remotely, on a set frequency, an attainable privilege (so it can be revoked if necessary). For the alternatives to surveillance, we will be implementing some improved communication tools, and departments will be adopting the concept of an ultra-brief daily scrum. Tried to keep it lean, will be interesting to see where it excels and where it can improve.
- megamindbrian 9y ago
  I have a very strong opinion that the "evaluation systems" should be built for EMPLOYEES to use, not middle managers. A system that provides insights in to how you spend your time would be extremely useful to me. For example, if I wanted to sum up the total hours that I spend on a project, I have kept pretty decent track in Google calendar of when I am working. I have to go to a third part and upload my calendar dump to them, they convert the ICS to an Excel spreadsheet where I can finally do some addition if the duration field is properly formatted. Modern monitoring tools are the opposite of this approach and they are all built for some ephemeral opinion of what data matters to employers who can't decide what to do even if they had all the employee data in the world.
pklausler 9y ago
All I need as a programmer is a place where I can concentrate. If I can't do that at work, my employer has failed in a self-defeating way.
abalashov 9y ago
I felt the need to write a full article as a response, and link it here in place of a comment in the hope that it won't be viewed as gratuitous self-plugging: https://likewise.am/2017/05/19/in-response-to-the-cult-of-remote-working/ https://likewise.am/2017/05/19/in-response-to-the-cult-of-re...
kimsk112 9y ago
"Everybody – EVERYBODY, I say – wants at least the option of work from home." I think his sentence nails it. I also prefers working at the office and interacts with fellow developers either formally (meeting) or informally (water-cooler talk), but it makes no sense to force anyone to be at the office all the time. I'd like the flexibility of working remotely out of country or WFH during rush hours and commute whenever I want. This really affects my decision to join or leave the company.
- alltakendamned 9y ago
  Everybody wants it, few can handle it in a responsible way for more than a few days per month.
dboreham 9y ago
I worked remote from home, or at least a building 100ft from my home, for many years. But then I founded a company and made that building its International HQ. So now I'm not remote any more.
k__ 9y ago
I switched to freelancing so I could work remotely without questions asked. Worked quiet well. It also showed me that I have a problem with employment in general. People telling me when to work where and on what. It agitates me.
mcgrath_sh 9y ago
I feel like my current setup is perfect for me. I work at an office that is 15 minutes away by car with no traffic and 30-35 mins with traffic and via back roads. I can go in and leave when I want, as long as I am doing the work. I have never been a morning person. Essentially, I wake up at 8, hang around my house til 8:45-10 depending on the day and zip into the office. I then work until 5 and do some more work either before or after at home. There are 2-3 days a week that I work from home if I feel like it. I will come in for a half day over lunch break. Or I will leave at or after lunch and finish the day at home. Basically, I am presented both options and do what I want. I don't think I would want either exclusively, but the ability to mix and match is wonderful!
msmm 9y ago
I charge almost double if client wants me on site, especially if all the company is crammed in open plan arrangement. You either can't focus well or have to keep destroying your hearing with headphones and work takes longer to complete. If WFH make sure to do a walk in the morning and after work and go somewhere for a lunch.
zollidia 9y ago
I have mixed feelings about WFH. I love the idea and it works perfectly for those that don't/can't commute. Can work independently with out direct supervision. Then there are some that need the office structure to get their work done. But, sadly, there are some that abused WFH privilege. And we, for the most part know what the out come is when a small group of people abuse a privilege - it's gets removed as a whole.

261 points by douche 9y ago

Or don't. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. There is a story of mysql as a company who had an employee who was not reachable for a few months. Yahoo got there workforce back at the office. I personally like to have the option to work at home when necessary and i might get more stuff done at home i also might just not work.

ajanuary 9y ago
"There is a story of mysql as a company who had an employee who was not reachable for a few months." I couldn't find the story with some (brief) googling. What makes it different to "they didn't turn up the office for a few months"? Were they still getting work done?
geekamongus 9y ago
> I personally like to have the option to work at home when necessary and i might get more stuff done at home i also might just not work. I might just not work at the office either.
Baeocystin 9y ago
I'm not sure I would take anything Yahoo is doing as an example of a good idea.
- besogne 9y ago
  They did buy a share in Alibaba! Yahoo's share in Alibaba is worth more than the total value of Yahoo. So, if you buy Yahoo, fire all its staff, close all its web sites, and then liquidate its share in Alibaba, you can make a lot of money.
purple-again 9y ago
And that is the reality of the situation. Work from home simply doesn't work for many people because they don't have the discipline or morals to make themselves work 8 hours without supervision.
matwood 9y ago
> There is a story of mysql as a company who had an employee who was not reachable for a few months. How does this have anything to do with WFH? If someone is not reachable and has not communicated up front they are going to be out, then fire them. This is no different than if they just stopped showing up to an office job. I always love the arguments that are around 'well how will I know my programmers are working'? Well, how do you know they are working when they are in the office?
jperkin 9y ago
MySQL is a great example of it working. Hundreds of employees, the vast majority remote, regardless of where they were located. Sold for $1B. It was my first remote job and I enjoyed it immensely, so much so that I haven't had an office job in 10 years now, and have no desire to return to one.

mcculley 9y ago

I've a contrarian view on this. Not all IT jobs are amenable to remote work. Some work benefits from tighter collaboration than current technology offers. Sometimes that collaboration is with folks other than IT staff, who may be less comfortable using technology solutions for collaboration. If the inputs and outputs of your job can be delivered entirely over email and version control commits, then work from home is a good idea. However, how do you deliver more value than someone from a developing country if your pipes are so narrow? I think there's still a lot of room for the value provided by teams working closely together.

alansammarone 9y ago
Basically every piece of useful information that can be encoded using your voice can also be encoded using an email - and in a much more efficient way, since you don't have to keep deciphering emotional cues. Of course, expressing emotions, for example, can be harder, but I don't think engineers should be relying too much on expressing their emotion as a way to do a good job.
- joe_fishfish 9y ago
  If true, this is fine, as long as you are an engineer and talk only to other engineers. People from different backgrounds don't use email this way, though.
- sillyquiet 9y ago
  This is nonsense. Body language, tone, empathy: all are crucial to successful communication between people, even engineers, even technical communications, believe it or not.
  - hn_throwaway_99 9y ago
    Completely agree. Often times the emotion is even worse over email or IM - I've seen people (engineers) be a lot harsher and a lot less receptive to alternative ideas over a text medium than they ever would face-to-face.
  - 9y ago

camelNotation 9y ago

I think WFH is a great idea, but until we can do multi-user video conferencing over the average home internet connection, it just isn't going to be as good as in-person interactions. However, once we can reliably see one another's faces in HD and share screens at the same time, it might even be superior to sitting next to someone and having them try to look over your shoulder as you show them something or ask a question. WFH is all about communication tech. If it's high grade, WFH works. If it's low grade, it doesn't.

kbart 9y ago
"average home internet connection" is varied factor. Were I live there's no problem with HD streaming, but working from home is still an exception not the rule.
- camelNotation 9y ago
  The fact that it is a varied factor is exactly the issue I'm point out. It needs to no longer be varied.
beachbum8029 9y ago
Doesn't Google Hangouts let you do this? Is the average home connection not good enough for hangouts?
- jacobkg 9y ago
  Our experience with a Google Meet (formerly Hangouts) is that it is almost always good but during any given 30 minute meeting the audio will drop out for one person at least once. It breaks up the flow for sure but isn't a deal breaker.
- twothamendment 9y ago
  Just today we tried slack for video and screen share (I can only view in chrome on Linux, but that was enough for today). Slack was stable, clear, didn't drop and didn't heat up computers like Hangouts. Our two failed attempts on hangouts were right before trying slack. We have on our list to request early access to Hangout Meet (if that is the right name). We have a remote team, all with average home connections. The ironic part is when we try to have a meeting with the office and their network is the issue and all of us at home are still on the call and seeing clearly seeing each other.

rmah 9y ago

This article essentially boiled down to: I want X. A few companies already offer X. You should offer X too. There are sometimes advantages to offering full or partial work-from-home options to employees. For some projects and company cultures, it can work well. But honestly, this blog post was a rather shallow argument in favor of it.

Qwertious 9y ago
I think what the article is trying to say is that employers' arguments are more often bullshit than legitimate (and obviously, both sets of employers think their arguments are legitimate), so usually they should just give it a shot.
- dsacco 9y ago
  Unfortunately, that's not meaningfully different from, "I want X, you should offer X." It is basically the same as saying, "I want X, some companies do X, give it a shot" in persuasive power. I love working from home and have done it for most of my career. The next job I take will probably be in an office though for a change of pace. I honestly find that despite my personal affection for it, most arguments in favor of remote work really just aren't very compelling. "Some companies do it successfully" is not compelling to most companies. It's a disingenuous portrayal of the real difficulties and sacrifices that need to occur for remote work to be successful. Remote work rarely works partially, because without a deep seated remote culture the employees who are not in the office will be fundamentally left out of subtle but important group interactions. If you are the only remote employee on your team, they're not going to video conference with you to have a spur of the moment discussion that leads to a business insight. Conversely, asking a company without a remote culture to change is asking all of the employees who are already there to embrace a new, unfamiliar culture where they can't just lean over and ask someone a question. It's my personal opinion that there is a very vocal minority that wants remote work to succeed, a more silent swath larger than the first that is indifferent, followed by a supermajority that silently disapproves (or at least, wouldn't want to work in such an environment). Even though I enjoy it, it appears selfish to me to ask companies to offer remote work without significant evidence it will work for them, all the while imposing a real communication cost on employees that work there who already thoroughly enjoy the status quo. It seems to me like it's similar to a lot of other things in professional life: you can't have everything, and if this is really important to you then find a job that offers it. But don't expect companies to alter their organizational machinery to cater to you when they have no reason to.

jasode 9y ago

>Objections to work from home fall apart Essays from workers like Jen McCown isn't going to work. What works is to have massively successful businesses that beat the competition because their employees work remotely. Since no multi-billion dollar business has demonstrated that specific cause & effect, the idea doesn't gain traction. Yes, businesses like Basecamp and Automattic have remote workers but I'm talking about significant business successes on the scale of Google/Apple/SpaceX/etc. If a remote workforce can demonstrate unequivocal superiority, there would be endless case studies about it in Harvard Business Review and every manager would be copying it like the Six Sigma craze a few decades ago. What the WFH movement needs is evidence of massive business success instead of essays. So far, the real-world evidence just hasn't tipped the scales yet.

grp 9y ago
Can we take into account some really big open source projects?
- tyingq 9y ago
  I think that's a great point, but I'd argue that one of the reasons that works well is that the developers are (typically) also the product owners, project managers, etc.
  - WorldMaker 9y ago
    Didn't Google, GitHub, Valve, and some others used to pride themselves that most of the product owners/project managers/etc were also developers? That's not necessarily something that companies couldn't adopt if it turned out to be a good way to run a remoting-based organization.
Veen 9y ago
I don't follow your logic. The vast majority of businesses aren't like Google or Facebook. The vast majority of the nation's GDP isn't created by companies like Google and Facebook. Hundreds of thousands of businesses are the size of Automattic, Basecamp, or smaller. Those businesses employ the the vast majority of workers. Therefore, Basecamp and Automattic are excellent role models. Unequivocal success does not mean the same thing as Unicorn. A sustainable and profitable business of any size is an unequivocal success.

UseStrict 9y ago

I've always looked for companies that offer flexible working options. My employer has a default of being in-office but allows for flexible hours (like working 7 - 3, or splitting my day) and allows for occasional remote work. In return for this benefit I end up working more. Days I would have taken off for appointments, obligations, extremely bad weather, or mild illness I end up working remotely. I also find that days when I work from home tend to be more productive - no pets and no family means I have no distractions at home, I can just sit and code all day.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

neogodless 9y ago

We know that workers want choice, autonomy. Whether they really want to work from home is only an unanswered question because of a bigger question that isn't always answered very well. How productive am I? When teams do well in defining production metrics (aka key performance indicators/KPI), and employees have some way to know what conditions work best for optimizing their KPI, they figure out if they want to work from home, the office, the subway, etc. I was probably most productive at a job that just had an enjoyable environment, three-quarter height cubicles (i.e. almost private, reasonable sound division) that were tucked away from phone users and conference rooms, solid team contribution on projects (inclusion of key players in kick-off meetings, without excessive status checking, but cooperative design from developers, design, business analysts, etc.) and... very occasional work from home. It helped that I lived less than 10 minutes away, too, and could come in at (what I consider) a reasonable hour, rather than forcing myself awake. In addition, we had "billable" targets - we'd work together on estimates, and we'd try to spend 80% or more of our time measurably attributable to projects. We could readily access this information, and know how well we were doing. But... there are other jobs where remote work is far superior. Noisy open spaces, cramped workspaces with not enough monitor real estate. Then I just want to get out of there. I want to have the choice, and the ability to know if I made the right choice, by looking at how productive I am.

radmuzom 9y ago

As a divorced single guy with not too many friends, I look forward every day to go to work and have people around me. I interact socially only with three or four of my office mates. Anyway, I may be the exception, but I am not an employee who wants to work from home.

throwaway2016a 9y ago
I'm in a different social situation but I am the same. Working from the office is one of my best chances to interact with other humans during the day. I find working from home to be exceptionally boring.
TeMPOraL 9y ago
I think companies need to accommodate the differences in people here; either within one company or within the industry they need to split into "office friendly" and "remote friendly" groups. I'm on the introvert side of things and I'm simply oversaturated with human interactions. I have to actively avoid being physically around other human beings just to keep my sanity. I recently managed to convince my boss to give me 2 WFH days a week and I saw both my productivity and happiness skyrocket within those days. A lot depends on the type of project, I guess. Mine is such that I'm mostly collaborating with the customer side, which works in a different country. For me, 99% of events in the office are off-topic. Others in this thread seem to have close-knit team projects, so I'm not surprised they feel more productive in the office.
- dsacco 9y ago
  I'm sensitive to the fact that you're more productive in an environment that caters to being an introvert. But if an organization were to allow people to work from home who asked to, how would they maintain the same overall productivity between groups? What if you want to work from home but your team believes there will be a productivity-reducing communication cost? How does the organization respond to this? Can it bifurcate the teams between remote only and office only? What happens if they identify consistent productivity differences? My point is not that you're wrong, but that I think adopting remote work requires answers to very challenging questions for companies that do not settle on one culture or the other. And if they don't start with a remote culture, in my experience they'll never have it.

bluedino 9y ago

I have some IBMer friends that have been recently notified that their remote working privileges are going to be terminated.

eldubz 9y ago

I'm all for WFH opportunities, but just to play devil's advocate I do really think there's a difference in team dynamics when everyone's in the office collaborating in person versus working remotely. I'm not saying it has a significant impact on productivity, but the team "connectedness" is sometimes not as strong if some people are never in the office.

barrkel 9y ago

I worked remotely, from home, for 5 years. These days, I work mostly in the office, with a 40 minute commute each way, despite the option for occasional working from home. There's a few reasons to prefer working in the office. The single biggest one is the hard delimiting of the work day; when I'm not in the office, I'm not working, I'm not available on email or chat, and unless it's an exceptional situation, nobody will phone me either. My evenings belong to me and my loved ones only. That's precious. It's far too tempting to let one thing bleed into the other when working from home. The biggest secondary one is influence on the business. Simply being present when decisions are being made, whether they're technical or business, means you have a chance to speak up and help set direction. Stuff that emanates over remoteable media like chat, email, project planning tools tends to be after the meeting, not before or instead of the meeting. This doesn't change for a company until most / all of the workforce is remote, and that's simply not true for most companies. If you're interested in a career, turning up is a significant boost for most people. The final one is bandwidth and transaction costs. Chat is a dreadful medium for remote communication - if you've ever had to sit there waiting for a reply, and wonder whether it would be more efficient to switch back to what you were doing - it's almost impossible to come to a decision in good time in chat. I've seen 5 minute conversations take half an hour. Starting a video chat is far better, but it has a big barrier to entry; it's not like talking to someone a few desks over. Try and do it with 4 or more people, and it turns into a coordination problem, people dropping in and out, someone eating while not on mute, synchronization for startup, etc. Frankly, I prefer email. You can put together a logical argument, a coherent or strawman proposal, and discuss things at length point by point. It's much higher bandwidth. But too few people read long emails, and even fewer respond correctly with inline replies. The days when people were trained on newsgroup netiquette are long gone.

jusuchin 9y ago
I guess it's different strokes for different folks. Personally, I feel I can communicate much more efficiently via chat/messaging mediums than email. Chatting, in my opinion, at least in a late 20 something (27 year old)'s mind, emulates a real conversation where if you don't respond it's essentially ignoring the other person. If you have a bigger thought, sure you can type it out and get that message to multiple people in a better format - but for the majority of quick Q and A's I don't see any issue with messaging.

throwaway2016a 9y ago

I like working from home sometimes. A line is crossed for me when a company goes 100% remote. I would go crazy working from home day in and day out. I actually did have a borderline nervous breakdown years ago because I couldn't take being alone so much of the day. In fact if I have to work from home full time again I would pay to have a membership in a co-working space just to be around other humans. I think work from home full time reinforces the idea that programmers and anti-social and not creative. The opposite is true for many (most?) of us. And for people who are social and creative you need other humans around. I say let people work from home but make sure they have the option of an office.

abalashov 9y ago
Oh, indeed. I can relate to this. So much so that I wrote a blog post about it: https://likewise.am/2015/12/18/why-i-love-industrious-and-about-coworking-and-offices-more-generally/ https://likewise.am/2015/12/18/why-i-love-industrious-and-ab...
schtitt 9y ago
Curious about the implied link between social-ness and creativity.. care to expound? I can think of several individuals who are highly creative but who prefer being alone.
- throwaway2016a 9y ago
  > Curious about the implied link between social-ness and creativity They are linked in that I think they are both related to working in an office. - Social interactive as it relates to an office environment is fairly obvious - As far as creativity... that requires more explanation. That was more a response to people saying things like "I can get more code done working from home"... as a manager who also still codes (a lot) I can say, I am paying you to solve problems not write code. If the problem gets solved I don't care if it is 10000 lines of code or 10. Solving problems takes creativity. And for many people, creativity is enhanced by being around other people. Other people expose you to new ideas. You can still do that work from home but but I think an office accelerates. Granted, history is full of people who were immensely creative but also recluses, so that can swing both ways.

tyingq 9y ago

Careful what you wish for. If your company works out a system where everyone can reliably work 100% remotely, you become a very replaceable cog. Replaceable from a much cheaper labor pool.

sqeaky 9y ago
Why does working from home make someone more replaceable than someone working from an office? I would think in most IT positions the thing that makes one least replaceable is their value to the team. If you constantly provide in the form of More code written or servers maintained because you can focus better then you could be more valuable. I don't think working from home directly relates to values, and I think arguments can be made for value increase or reduction.
- tyingq 9y ago
  You compete with a larger pool when working 100% from home. Both skillwise and costwise.
  - sqeaky 9y ago
    That is an interesting take on it. I am comfortable with that, but I can see why many might not be. I will have to think more on that to see all of the ramifications. Immediately, I can see how it looks like businesses might try to hire devs from inexpensive overseas shops, but I know why employers rarely do that a second time. Then there are the really expensive devs who are clearly some of the best in their field, but that is so expensive few shops would consider it. as an aside, I suspect working from home as a cultural shift would allow some real estate prices to normalize. There would be less need to move many people into very expensive areas.
    - tyingq 9y ago
      Sure. It doesn't have to be overseas though. A SV startup switching to work from home could save money by hiring remote developers from cheaper places in the US.

II2II 9y ago

To The Author: Please show us some numbers to back up the claims? The few numbers that you do provide either fail to support your argument or can be construed to contradict it. (I am thinking of: everybody wants to the option to work from home followed by 35% would change jobs for the option to work from home, even if it is part-time.) Also, anecdotes don't cut it. You can find counter examples to almost anything that is based upon human nature, particularly when it involves self-assessment or personal opinions. Businesses will care more about the quantifiable. The bigger the business, the more likely they are to care about the average over a large group of workers (rather than individual cases). I am sorry, but most of the debate over working from home is based upon what people want rather than what businesses or even their employees need. Your article does nothing to change that. If you want to change people's opinions, please be more persuasive by dealing with the quantifiable rather than the subjective.

JenMcCown 9y ago
Hi there, author here. The article actually links to a NY Times article and the Gallup study that it cites. But remember, this is an opinion piece. I've been in the industry for 15 years...hang on, no, it's 20 years, but who's counting? And except for those stats and linked articles, these are my observations and opinions. I can't write an article that will convince 100% of the people. A book deal and a set of long discussions wouldn't convince 100%. If you disagree with me, that's fine. I spent my time knocking down the most common arguments I've heard, and a little time talking up the observed benefits. One final point: I think companies should take "what people want" as part of their career into account! Even big business doesn't completely dismiss trends in the workplace - which are indeed driven, in part by what workers demand. More places offer considerations for ergonomics, pleasant work spaces, tea and coffee rooms, snacks, health programs, and so on. This is just one more thing, and this is my small contribution to the talks.

GoToRO 9y ago

The problem with work from home for companies is that they need managers that can actually evaluate someone's work. Most of the time this is not happening (either there are too many things to know or the manger never did any actual work for a very long time). Also the problem is that companies want to hire the best and the brightest and then they quickly turn around and they don't trust their employees. Funny enough this is exactly how communist countries operated: they needed very smart people to fight the West but then they could not trust them because smart people had a tendency to like the West.

yourapostasy 9y ago
> ...they need managers that can actually evaluate someone's work. Most of the time this is not happening... When the situation that managers in aggregate do not know how to evaluate their staff's work prevails at a company, forcing everyone on-prem and letting the managers evaluate that is likely what causes a lot of the organizational dysfunction we talk about. WFH definitely offers managers fewer readily-available cues to evaluate their direct reports, but I wonder what a quantification of those cues versus those available on-prem by a professionally-trained anthropology observation team might turn up. I hear a lot of stories of people getting pissed off that a less-capable coworker is far more successful within the organization because the coworker was fantastic at say, face-to-face networking within the organization. Could such activity be much more difficult to pull off in a WFH-dominant organization, and fool managers who are deficient staff evaluators in an on-prem-dominant organization, sufficient to offset the drawbacks of WFH? To a certain extent, I think the WFH-versus-on-prem debate obscures an overarching requirement that managers still must sweat out the details, and cannot delegate to a set of company policies the need to lead and manage, a core component of which is knowing your direct reports at a granular level in many dimensions.

rumcajz 9y ago

The article assumes that making money is the primary goal of a corporation. If it was, then sure, WFH would make sense. However, the corporation is not a sentient entity. It cannot desire anything, be it money or something else. It's only human participants that have incentives. Of those, only shareholders have direct incentive to make profit, but even then they may own the shares for speculative purposes and desire share price to grow, not necessarily the profit. And even that's not necessarily true: Those who short their position may actually want the shore price to drop. But shareholders in fact don't have much influence of business decisions of the corporation. Those are delegated to the management. The management, in turn, has incentives to extract as much rent from the business as possible. Thus, it cares about profits only to the extent where it adds to their rent. Increasing profit while decreasing the rent is a bad trade-off. Regular employees, in their turn have incentives very similar to the management. They want to be paid as much as possible without losing the job. All in all, you can think of it as of struggle for a limited resource (bananas, share of profit) in a group of chimpanzees. Now, imagine what would happen if one chimpanzee refused to participate in the group's interactions, walked away, but still demanded his share of bananas. It's not going to work. In the end, I would say that WFH would only work if everybody worked from home, completely changing the way the group interacts.

CPLX 9y ago
> imagine what would happen if one chimpanzee refused to participate in the group's interactions, walked away, but still demanded his share of bananas. It's not going to work. I feel like this part of your comment could easily be overlooked, but it's a pretty astute observation of how group dynamics applies to this situation. We're wired to be tribal animals, to some extent. Everyone knows that "culture" is an important part of a company's success. The idea of working from home profoundly affects the culture.
cname 9y ago
What if one chimpanzee sometimes stepped away from the group and all their bickering, noise, ego-driven shenanigans, and other distractions? Maybe that chimpanzee would pick more bananas (and share them with the group). Office culture is often (I'd say usually) toxic and/or inefficient. Being in the office doesn't mean any useful work is getting done. And just because people are in the same general vicinity doesn't mean they're interacting in a useful/beneficial way or even interacting at all. Working from home is certainly different from working in the office, but being in the office isn't some natural state of affairs or a particularly useful baseline.

misiti3780 9y ago

I have been working remotely for 6+ years and it would be very hard for me to go back to an office. I have complete control over my life right now, can work from anywhere, make my own hours, etc.

partycoder 9y ago

An open plan office can be productive if people move long discussions to meeting rooms, and try to solve their problems via chat or e-mail. An open plan office where everyone is trying to talk, quickly degrades into people raising their voice to be heard, becoming a yelling mess where it's impossible to do serious work unless you are very good at ignoring noise, or you are blocking noise physically... like using earplugs or moving to a meeting room. Working from home, you can just focus and do your work. However this is not the case for everyone. If you live with a bunch of people or pets this might not be your case.

sumanthvepa 9y ago

I'm the founder of my own company and my co-founder and I both work from home -- our respective homes that is. I know my experience is probably not what people have in mind when they think of a work-from-home employee, but for what its worth -- my productivity is orders of magnitude greater than it was when I was employed (at Yahoo!) Productivity is more a function of motivation(+) and bureaucracy(-) than anything else. Skype and telephone, and the commit log seem more than enough for us to keep abreast of each others' doings (although we definitely meet about once a week for a 5-6 hours) I would absolutely hate to have to micro-manage someone to the point that they have to be in the same room as me to get work done. (I'd rather hire a more self-driven individual)

pkaye 9y ago
So you are running a two person company? I think some of the issues with remote work come when the company scales up to 10+ people. Coordinating among multiple people becomes more complicated. The skill level of individuals start to vary. Something that could have been hashed out in 5 minutes on a white board takes half an hour.

dionidium 9y ago

I can't help but think that a lot of this desire is driven by the existence of far-flung suburbs and painful commutes. I was planning to work from home today to receive a delivery that now seems to be delayed, so, since I live within walking distance to the office, I decided to come in anyway. I guess if I lived an hour away I'd have preferred to stay home.

peapicker 9y ago

I don't want to work from home, thanks anyway. Except on bad weather days. Then again, I'm at a senior principle engineer level, and need to have face time with my VPs and directors in addition to other devs. I don't believe it would be possible to work at the level I'm at remotely, nor to be promoted to such a level. And my commute isn't horrid at ~25min.

JenMcCown 9y ago
"Except bad weather days." Exactly! Your company has to offer any kind of WFH to allow that!
- peapicker 9y ago
  And I do work from home on bad weather days so this isn't an issue
  - JenMcCown 9y ago
    That's marvelous. The point is that many companies don't allow that, and should.

accountyaccount 9y ago

Here's the problem I run into: I can get 90% of my work done at home, but my boss can't. So I have to come in every day because he has to. It's completely childish, and I imagine this is the same in a lot of places. I personally would love to give the ability for my employees to work at home, even if I didn't. I don't understand the mindset where people don't want things to be better for someone else... even if they can't also be better for you. This happens even when those benefits to others come at no cost to yourself. Does anyone else have any experience overcoming this with someone else? Like it's bad to the extent where if this person works late he'll be passive aggressive towards everyone who doesn't have to also work late.

darkstar999 9y ago

I think these arguments are missing a big aspect of successful companies: culture. How can you have good office culture if everyone works from home?

deleted 9y ago
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JenMcCown 9y ago
You're missing the point that WFH doesn't mean "all employees must WFH full time". WFH is everything from "I gotta go home, the kid's sick" to "I'm going to WFH Wednesdays to concentrate", to "see y'all online!"
- mcgrath_sh 9y ago
  Exactly! That is what I have. I work from home about two days a week. The flexibility to work from home is what is golden. If my boss said "hey this week stay in the office," I am like can do. This also lets me visit inlaws and the like without using up loads of vacation. I don't have to worry about handling tedious things on weekends and it frees up my commute to do things like cut the grass. It is a win win.

Pukkap 9y ago

Having worked at home for many years the hardest thing i found was to switch of from work and have a home life. even after reading all the article on separating work/home life. now i work in a office i feel i get more done.

dionidium 9y ago

I know a handful of professionals who don’t want to work from home at all…but even those people admit that they want the flexibility to work from home on days when their kids are sick, the car has a flat, or workers are coming, rather than having to take time off of work. Is this a problem that people who work in technical fields actually have? Even in companies with aggressively unfriendly WFH policies, I've had good luck requesting time at home in situations like the above.

JenMcCown 9y ago
Yes. I have a colleague whose kids get sick a lot, and they're very concerned that a firing is imminent for that reason.
- sjg007 9y ago
  Family Medical leave might be helpful.. You can schedule it e.g. take 1 day off a week or something. It's protected.
  - JenMcCown 9y ago
    It's a lot harder to navigate that one might think, and FMLA is for serious illnesses, not "one kid got the flu this week and another got the runs last week and before that it was stomach upset and before that..." etc.

coffeemug 9y ago

Efficacy of remote workers is just a thing some people really want to be true, but it's not clear that it's true at all. (It's also not clear that it isn't, but the evidence is nowhere near as overwhelming as some people make it out to be)

lemonsqueeze 9y ago

How about instead saying: "I only work from home". Don't bring me any offers that treat me like a child.

bitL 9y ago

The crab mentality here is really appalling :-( I work remotely for 6+ years; during that time I created some unique algorithms, traveled around the world, met diverse types of people giving me unexpected inspirations from which business benefited tremendously (unique stuff nobody else has). I have the big 4 companies trying to contact me all the time if I wouldn't want to work for them, however seeing inside e.g. crammed offices of Google in Zurich with monitor next to monitor, makes it very unappealing. Remote work requires focus and discipline. Focus is way easier than in an open office, discipline is more difficult. I still remember finishing some server part and tests while laying on a beach in Barcelona using their public Wi-Fi, getting tanned, and whenever I felt like, dipped into the sea - it was super energizing and motivating to continue working. Also viewing sunset above the place of refuge on the Hawaiian Big Island from a rented cottage, while sipping a cocktail and working on some advanced algorithm was superbly motivating. Just because some managers need to control everyone around and enforce the same misery on their subordinates doesn't mean there aren't better ways to work. It's actually stupid not to give people WFH and make them miserable commuting (some people spend up to 6 hours/day in the traffic). The technology is there, but the perceived lack of control and insecurity of power structures must spoil it for everyone, "'cause everybody is doing it in the office and it can't be done other way well". Phew

korzun 9y ago
You are an exception. I was a huge advocate for working from home because I would get things done and end up saving two hours of commute. Your perception of this approach changes relatively quickly in a managerial role. If you are shaving 1-2 hours off your commute, then the overall output should be in line with whatever it was in the office. I probably met two other engineers that kept that in check.
- bitL 9y ago
  It's not for everyone. You can often see middle-aged men escaping their homes and working long hours because they feel miserable around their wives; for them office is the only "safe space" they have. But for self-motivated high-performing communicative people WFH might be a much better arrangement. They might have a different problem - not knowing when to stop and risking a severe burnout which would be limited by office hours.

nzonbi 9y ago

Imagine how much energy the world would save if most people where working from home. Electricity, transport fuel. How much less pollution and traffic jams. How much less need to build cars and transport systems. How much extra time to enjoy life would people have by not commuting. With so huge positives. I don't understand why not more research is put into work-from home.

HeshamA 9y ago

Pro remote work but need like this tells me that maybe the tide is turning https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/05/ibm-to-remote-workers-come-back-to-the-mothership-or-else/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/05/ibm-t...

nsedlet 9y ago

I agree with many of the WFH benefits put forward in the article. However, I think it ignores & mischaracterizes many of the WFH costs. Ignores: * Face-to-face communication is often more efficient. Just my opinion, but conversations are usually faster and easier in person than over Slack or email. Asychronous communication can be nicer for certain things, but it sucks when that's the only option. Video hangouts are better, but there's a barrier to setting one up, and they're still not as effective as face-to-face. * Presence in the office helps keep everyone in the loop. Team members are much more likely to speak to one another actively. They're more likely to understand what everyone else is working on. They're more likely to understand the business's main priorities and problems. Even physically just sitting a few desks away from someone, vs. right next to them, makes it less likely that two people will interact. * The office provides important social interaction. If you work a lot, your office might be your main opportunity to have substantive interactions with other people. Some of my past coworkers have become my closest friends. People who work from home (I'd guess) are much less likely to form close bonds with their coworkers. * A professional setting can be motivating. I find it energizing to walk into the office where everyone is working hard. My day is measured out in minutes and I feel a constant pressure to get something done. When at home, I feel the pressure less - it makes me feel better about what I get done, but it also makes me less productive. * Boundaries between work & home are helpful for relaxation. The ritual of leaving the office helps reset the mind, I think. Otherwise, workdays easily bleed into evenings that neither productive nor relaxing. Mischaracterizes: * "Some people need close management". The internet is incredibly addictive & distracting. Sitting at home makes it much easier to succumb to that distraction. Obviously that can happen at work, but there's a limit: you can't watch Netflix, for instance. And you'd feel weird if your screen was constantly on Hacker News or Reddit or whatever every time someone walked by. * "How do I know they’re working if I can’t see them?". This is a strong point and I agree that most managers over-emphasize face-time as a measure of productivity. But that doesn't mean it's useless. For non-routine, creative, or project-based work (e.g. engineering) it's hard to measure productivity. Deadlines can be great but oftentimes are artificial - much of the time, the most engineers can really promise is that they'll work efficiently, smartly, and to the best of their abilities during the workday. So it is of some benefit to the manager to see that the employee is there for 40+ hrs each week. Managers also want to know if their reports are frustrated, anxious, demotivated, happy, confused, etc. - much easier to get a read on that in person so that the manager can address it. Many of my friends who are able to work from home choose to rent coworking space for many of the reasons above. Admittedly I rarely work from home, but I do manage people who work remotely. Also, neither me nor most of my friends are parents yet.

pacomerh 9y ago

To the people who say`I'd go crazy if I worked from home`. The trick is not to work entirely from home, but to mix it up with an shared office, co-work space, cafe, etc. There's a big difference in having people around you that don't know you. They wont distract you because they won't talk to you or call you into a meeting.

ksk 9y ago

I don't believe WFH actually works (as an exclusive means of working for everyone). I have done the WFH thing for a couple of years at a startup (where everyone was remote), and even leaving aside the camaraderie aspect, collaboration was always a challenge. You're forced to give up several ways of communication which are valuable. You can't walk into a colleagues office for a quick whiteboard discussion. You have to schedule time when both of you are available. Not only that if the discussion brings up things that other people are working on you have to again wait and schedule time with them too. You also can't pickup on non-verbal cues, which can tell you if they're nervous/apprehensive/unhappy about something in the project, etc. You give up laughing at silly things over lunch, or sharing a quick joke as you pass someone in the hallway, or giving someone a hug on their birthday. All the little things that do lift your spirit when you're frustrated or feeling a bit low.

jefe_ 9y ago

Was in a management meeting the other week where HR mentioned they were considering implementing a more official work-from-home policy. What we're trying to get away from is hourly employees 'working from home' when really they're sick, by offering formalized remote work opportunities. Sounded great until they mentioned the 'monitoring systems' they were evaluating. I shared my very strong opposition to the proposed monitoring systems, went home and crafted a Less-Orwellian Remote Office policy. Shared the policy with HR the next day, and they really liked it, agreeing there were ways to accomplish the goals without surveillance. Writing the policy was trickier than I expected. Started very much with a spirit of 'Hire people you trust,' but thinking about the policy, applied to specific people who have been hired, it brought some more specific guidelines to the policy. Here are the highlights: Eligibility for Remote Work (pick 4 from: 1 year with company, management status, strong performance record or recommendation from team lead, one department-specific criteria) Requirements for the Remote Office (minimum equipment, ample space, etc. clearly defined) Approval Process & Remote Work Guidelines / Contract (lays out guidelines for working remotely and collects employee commitment to adhere) Saw some commentary that the frequency of working from home shouldn't be a privilege (i.e. if you do a good job, you can work from home for a week), that it should be as routine as possible, so we're making eligibility to work remotely, on a set frequency, an attainable privilege (so it can be revoked if necessary). For the alternatives to surveillance, we will be implementing some improved communication tools, and departments will be adopting the concept of an ultra-brief daily scrum. Tried to keep it lean, will be interesting to see where it excels and where it can improve.

megamindbrian 9y ago
I have a very strong opinion that the "evaluation systems" should be built for EMPLOYEES to use, not middle managers. A system that provides insights in to how you spend your time would be extremely useful to me. For example, if I wanted to sum up the total hours that I spend on a project, I have kept pretty decent track in Google calendar of when I am working. I have to go to a third part and upload my calendar dump to them, they convert the ICS to an Excel spreadsheet where I can finally do some addition if the duration field is properly formatted. Modern monitoring tools are the opposite of this approach and they are all built for some ephemeral opinion of what data matters to employers who can't decide what to do even if they had all the employee data in the world.

pklausler 9y ago

All I need as a programmer is a place where I can concentrate. If I can't do that at work, my employer has failed in a self-defeating way.

abalashov 9y ago

I felt the need to write a full article as a response, and link it here in place of a comment in the hope that it won't be viewed as gratuitous self-plugging: https://likewise.am/2017/05/19/in-response-to-the-cult-of-remote-working/ https://likewise.am/2017/05/19/in-response-to-the-cult-of-re...

kimsk112 9y ago

"Everybody – EVERYBODY, I say – wants at least the option of work from home." I think his sentence nails it. I also prefers working at the office and interacts with fellow developers either formally (meeting) or informally (water-cooler talk), but it makes no sense to force anyone to be at the office all the time. I'd like the flexibility of working remotely out of country or WFH during rush hours and commute whenever I want. This really affects my decision to join or leave the company.

alltakendamned 9y ago
Everybody wants it, few can handle it in a responsible way for more than a few days per month.

dboreham 9y ago

I worked remote from home, or at least a building 100ft from my home, for many years. But then I founded a company and made that building its International HQ. So now I'm not remote any more.

k__ 9y ago

I switched to freelancing so I could work remotely without questions asked. Worked quiet well. It also showed me that I have a problem with employment in general. People telling me when to work where and on what. It agitates me.

mcgrath_sh 9y ago

I feel like my current setup is perfect for me. I work at an office that is 15 minutes away by car with no traffic and 30-35 mins with traffic and via back roads. I can go in and leave when I want, as long as I am doing the work. I have never been a morning person. Essentially, I wake up at 8, hang around my house til 8:45-10 depending on the day and zip into the office. I then work until 5 and do some more work either before or after at home. There are 2-3 days a week that I work from home if I feel like it. I will come in for a half day over lunch break. Or I will leave at or after lunch and finish the day at home. Basically, I am presented both options and do what I want. I don't think I would want either exclusively, but the ability to mix and match is wonderful!

msmm 9y ago

I charge almost double if client wants me on site, especially if all the company is crammed in open plan arrangement. You either can't focus well or have to keep destroying your hearing with headphones and work takes longer to complete. If WFH make sure to do a walk in the morning and after work and go somewhere for a lunch.

zollidia 9y ago

I have mixed feelings about WFH. I love the idea and it works perfectly for those that don't/can't commute. Can work independently with out direct supervision. Then there are some that need the office structure to get their work done. But, sadly, there are some that abused WFH privilege. And we, for the most part know what the out come is when a small group of people abuse a privilege - it's gets removed as a whole.