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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

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.
- besogne 9y ago
  Chatting favours subjects that only require a short span of attention. At the same time, anything of real value will take a minimum length and complexity to explain. That is why the output of chat/messaging tends to be worth little to nothing. Chat/messaging is something appreciated by demographics who do not have anything useful to say anyway. To an important extent, it is the same kind of people who have a hard time finding a job, and when they finally get one, they don't manage to keep it for long.
  - abalashov 9y ago
    So much this. One can have lengthy and substantive conversations over chat — and I do — but it's definitely an uphill battle, both against the medium and against the prevalent psychological, and intellectual cognitive characteristics of the people who favour it. I frequently get the feeling that I'm not using chat the way I'm "supposed" to, which is to write in short sentences and traffic in reductive sound-bites.
  - dbingham 9y ago
    What an incredibly arrogant and conceited thing to say. As someone who favors chat this amounts to a personal attack on me and everyone like me -- a personal attack completely devoid of supporting evidence. I've worked at two different remote companies over the past 5 years. One was failing the other is succeeding and growing. Chat played little role in either case, it was simply one of the chosen methods of communication. One method in a tool box that also included email and video chat. In both companies, chat functioned very well as the stand in for most office conversations. We only fall back on video chat when we find ourselves talking past each other in chat and need the higher bandwidth of voice communication to clear up the confusion. We almost never use email in either case. I've also used it in several non-profit organizations I've served on the board of and as an organizing tool among local activists. In all cases, it has served me well, allowing conversations that could span from exchanges of long, in depth arguments or explanations to quick exchanges of information or Q&As. Chat is a tool. It doesn't favor or dictate anything. It's all in how you use it. If you find yourself continuously having low value conversations over chat, I think that says far more about you than it does about chat.
mabbo 9y ago
> when I'm not in the office, I'm not working This resonates very strongly with me. A "wfh" day for me means I get half as much done. My home is where I keep all my distractions! > 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 My trick for this: I write the email, then I go back to the to start and write a 3-4 sentence summary of the rest of it. Often doing that leads me to delete the rest of the email entirely. Always check: are you writing at length to help someone else, or just to clarify your own thoughts?
- poslathian 9y ago
  This is good advice, thanks!
- barrkel 9y ago
  Oh, I get more work done when I work from home; but worse, I also work longer hours. It's lose-lose.
- RHSeeger 9y ago
  I had a manager that asked me to put summaries at the top of my emails. It was super effective. I also label sections as to who they target (ex, when something is a technical explanation that not everyone needs) and add footnotes (with raw data and the like) when it's appropriate. I'm a serial long-emailer, but I've learned how to interact with normal society ;)
- barrkel 9y ago
  On the topic of emails, if they're long, I try to structure them a bit like newspaper articles. Start with an executive summary, then say the same thing again with a bit more detail, and then say it a third time with data, if possible / necessary.
athenot 9y ago
> The days when people were trained on newsgroup netiquette are long gone. That is why it is hard to do decisions by email. Also, poor thread representation by email clients doesn't help. Chat has the potential of being used efficiently, where arguments are stripped of their emotion and converge faster to a point without rambling. To your point, chat can be made high-bandwidth, with multi-sentence points made in a single message, or they can be a verbose rambling that consumes time and focus. It really comes down to the professionalism of the team you're working with. Some people are a lot more cognizant about minimizing the waste of other people's time, and get to the point instantly. Others just type whatever is going through their mind—and I should point out that they are equally good at wasting time in in-person meetings. So then it's not about the communication medium or whether people are physically present; it's about how we use each other's time. Full disclosure: I work in the BU that makes Cisco Spark, a chat/collab tool. :) PS: I agree with your other points about home/work context separation. We solve that by explicitely "checking in" / "checking out" of chats. There's an expectation that people are NOT always-on (except for a few rare operations chats). Notifications are adjusted accordingly, so as to not be disturbed during family time.
- barrkel 9y ago
  Chat (both video and text) also suffers from not having a easily usable whiteboard. And if you want to talk to someone about some code, hopping around between different bits, that needs screen sharing including remote access, so either person can hop around, highlight code, etc. It's all just fiddly.
  - athenot 9y ago
    We've had the same realization, so here's a shameless plug about how we are solving it. It will improve but it's already a big leap from what was previously available. https://www.ciscospark.com/products/spark-board.html https://www.ciscospark.com/products/spark-board.html
  - douche 9y ago
    We don't use it as much as we ought to, but the times we have remembered that this feature exists, it's worked pretty well with Lync/Skype for Business. The screen sharing is actually pretty good, in my experience, and the whiteboarding is about as good as you can get, trying to draw stuff freeform with a mouse.
JustSomeNobody 9y ago
All of this, but I'd like to add a couple things. It is hard, after a time, to not be around people. If you WFH, make sure to spend some time in a cafe or something. No matter how good the team is at communicating, you're still going to miss those hallway conversations. Just know this and accept it. When you realize you have missed something, get the team to fill you in immediately and document what you've missed. Which brings me to... Whether you WFH or not, always follow up with a persistent[0] communication form for important bits of information. [0] Email, Bug tracker, whatever. If you've had a conversation about it, make sure it is documented. Otherwise it never happened.
tzs 9y ago
> The days when people were trained on newsgroup netiquette are long gone. I've never understood why private news servers and groups never caught on. Company newsgroups on a company news server seem to me to often make a lot more sense than company mailing lists on a company mail server or company forums on phpBBB or similar. News readers generally do a much better job than mail client of organizing discussions into threads, and the hierarchical structure of the newsgroup namespace fits well with the way most companies and projects are organized. Nowadays the argument for NNTP is weak because the decline of Usenet has, I believe, reduced the number of good, maintained NNTP clients. But I don't understand why NNTP wasn't the first choice for these things 15-20 years ago.
- TimJYoung 9y ago
  It was the first choice for many companies. In the Delphi development world (starting in 1996), NNTP was pervasive and almost every company related to the 3rd party ecosystem ran an NNTP server (we still do, it provides both NNTP and web access to the same message store). Believe it or not, the issue wasn't as much the servers not being maintained any more, it was the clients. Various clients, especially email clients, stopped providing NNTP support alongside POP3/SMTP/IMAP.
  - e12e 9y ago
    Just a reminder that the d programming language forums are architected on the back of nntp: https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed
    - TimJYoung 9y ago
      Thanks, it's nice to see that it's still kicking around elsewhere.
bogomipz 9y ago
>"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 completely understand your point of view and I think working from home is not for everyone. But many people do have the ability to delineate without that geographical reinforcement. I think the title of the post should be: "Employer Let Your Employees Work From Home If They Prefer" since its not a zero sum proposal. >"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" This issues also exists though when a company has two offices that everyone is required to work from, one in London and one in SF for example. Relying on chat and informal lunch meetings is equally problematic for work form home as it is for employees of different offices. It seems like solving the communication issue for one solves it for both and companies seem to have no issues with having multiple offices. I completely agree with you about email, I feel like we are losing the will to compose proper arguments and counter points or parse them in the context of email.
gozur88 9y ago
>It's far too tempting to let one thing bleed into the other when working from home. I worked with a guy once who'd been WFH in a previous job. He would get up, shower, put on a suit and tie, unlock the door to his home office, hang the suit jacket on a peg in the office, and sit down to work. At the end of the day he'd reverse the procedure, locking the office. He said he had to do it to keep things separate.
- devoply 9y ago
  It seems to imply that people need more regimentation in their lives to make things work a certain way. I wfh and was thinking that it might be good to have a robot in the office that I could control that would be my avatar in the office. And also hilarious.
  - paulryanrogers 9y ago
    I worked at a place that sent such robots to clients. They said it worked well. My guess is it was an improvement to no physical presence combined with the novelty factor.
pdimitar 9y ago
Anecdotal evidence. I am never trash-talking people who prefer working on-site. Quite the contrary, I respect them just like any other valued colleague. Working from home is a learned skill. I am so good at it these days that the moment I close my second Chrome instance (the one with all my work accounts) and shut down my VMs, my mindset immediately changes to "chill and leisure mode". If you can't do it, that's fine. It's different strokes for different people. As the article says, both options must exist.

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.

besogne 9y ago
Chatting favours subjects that only require a short span of attention. At the same time, anything of real value will take a minimum length and complexity to explain. That is why the output of chat/messaging tends to be worth little to nothing. Chat/messaging is something appreciated by demographics who do not have anything useful to say anyway. To an important extent, it is the same kind of people who have a hard time finding a job, and when they finally get one, they don't manage to keep it for long.
- abalashov 9y ago
  So much this. One can have lengthy and substantive conversations over chat — and I do — but it's definitely an uphill battle, both against the medium and against the prevalent psychological, and intellectual cognitive characteristics of the people who favour it. I frequently get the feeling that I'm not using chat the way I'm "supposed" to, which is to write in short sentences and traffic in reductive sound-bites.
- dbingham 9y ago
  What an incredibly arrogant and conceited thing to say. As someone who favors chat this amounts to a personal attack on me and everyone like me -- a personal attack completely devoid of supporting evidence. I've worked at two different remote companies over the past 5 years. One was failing the other is succeeding and growing. Chat played little role in either case, it was simply one of the chosen methods of communication. One method in a tool box that also included email and video chat. In both companies, chat functioned very well as the stand in for most office conversations. We only fall back on video chat when we find ourselves talking past each other in chat and need the higher bandwidth of voice communication to clear up the confusion. We almost never use email in either case. I've also used it in several non-profit organizations I've served on the board of and as an organizing tool among local activists. In all cases, it has served me well, allowing conversations that could span from exchanges of long, in depth arguments or explanations to quick exchanges of information or Q&As. Chat is a tool. It doesn't favor or dictate anything. It's all in how you use it. If you find yourself continuously having low value conversations over chat, I think that says far more about you than it does about chat.

mabbo 9y ago

> when I'm not in the office, I'm not working This resonates very strongly with me. A "wfh" day for me means I get half as much done. My home is where I keep all my distractions! > 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 My trick for this: I write the email, then I go back to the to start and write a 3-4 sentence summary of the rest of it. Often doing that leads me to delete the rest of the email entirely. Always check: are you writing at length to help someone else, or just to clarify your own thoughts?

poslathian 9y ago
This is good advice, thanks!
barrkel 9y ago
Oh, I get more work done when I work from home; but worse, I also work longer hours. It's lose-lose.
RHSeeger 9y ago
I had a manager that asked me to put summaries at the top of my emails. It was super effective. I also label sections as to who they target (ex, when something is a technical explanation that not everyone needs) and add footnotes (with raw data and the like) when it's appropriate. I'm a serial long-emailer, but I've learned how to interact with normal society ;)
barrkel 9y ago
On the topic of emails, if they're long, I try to structure them a bit like newspaper articles. Start with an executive summary, then say the same thing again with a bit more detail, and then say it a third time with data, if possible / necessary.

athenot 9y ago

> The days when people were trained on newsgroup netiquette are long gone. That is why it is hard to do decisions by email. Also, poor thread representation by email clients doesn't help. Chat has the potential of being used efficiently, where arguments are stripped of their emotion and converge faster to a point without rambling. To your point, chat can be made high-bandwidth, with multi-sentence points made in a single message, or they can be a verbose rambling that consumes time and focus. It really comes down to the professionalism of the team you're working with. Some people are a lot more cognizant about minimizing the waste of other people's time, and get to the point instantly. Others just type whatever is going through their mind—and I should point out that they are equally good at wasting time in in-person meetings. So then it's not about the communication medium or whether people are physically present; it's about how we use each other's time. Full disclosure: I work in the BU that makes Cisco Spark, a chat/collab tool. :) PS: I agree with your other points about home/work context separation. We solve that by explicitely "checking in" / "checking out" of chats. There's an expectation that people are NOT always-on (except for a few rare operations chats). Notifications are adjusted accordingly, so as to not be disturbed during family time.

barrkel 9y ago
Chat (both video and text) also suffers from not having a easily usable whiteboard. And if you want to talk to someone about some code, hopping around between different bits, that needs screen sharing including remote access, so either person can hop around, highlight code, etc. It's all just fiddly.
- athenot 9y ago
  We've had the same realization, so here's a shameless plug about how we are solving it. It will improve but it's already a big leap from what was previously available. https://www.ciscospark.com/products/spark-board.html https://www.ciscospark.com/products/spark-board.html
- douche 9y ago
  We don't use it as much as we ought to, but the times we have remembered that this feature exists, it's worked pretty well with Lync/Skype for Business. The screen sharing is actually pretty good, in my experience, and the whiteboarding is about as good as you can get, trying to draw stuff freeform with a mouse.

JustSomeNobody 9y ago

All of this, but I'd like to add a couple things. It is hard, after a time, to not be around people. If you WFH, make sure to spend some time in a cafe or something. No matter how good the team is at communicating, you're still going to miss those hallway conversations. Just know this and accept it. When you realize you have missed something, get the team to fill you in immediately and document what you've missed. Which brings me to... Whether you WFH or not, always follow up with a persistent[0] communication form for important bits of information. [0] Email, Bug tracker, whatever. If you've had a conversation about it, make sure it is documented. Otherwise it never happened.

tzs 9y ago

> The days when people were trained on newsgroup netiquette are long gone. I've never understood why private news servers and groups never caught on. Company newsgroups on a company news server seem to me to often make a lot more sense than company mailing lists on a company mail server or company forums on phpBBB or similar. News readers generally do a much better job than mail client of organizing discussions into threads, and the hierarchical structure of the newsgroup namespace fits well with the way most companies and projects are organized. Nowadays the argument for NNTP is weak because the decline of Usenet has, I believe, reduced the number of good, maintained NNTP clients. But I don't understand why NNTP wasn't the first choice for these things 15-20 years ago.

TimJYoung 9y ago
It was the first choice for many companies. In the Delphi development world (starting in 1996), NNTP was pervasive and almost every company related to the 3rd party ecosystem ran an NNTP server (we still do, it provides both NNTP and web access to the same message store). Believe it or not, the issue wasn't as much the servers not being maintained any more, it was the clients. Various clients, especially email clients, stopped providing NNTP support alongside POP3/SMTP/IMAP.
- e12e 9y ago
  Just a reminder that the d programming language forums are architected on the back of nntp: https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed
  - TimJYoung 9y ago
    Thanks, it's nice to see that it's still kicking around elsewhere.

bogomipz 9y ago

>"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 completely understand your point of view and I think working from home is not for everyone. But many people do have the ability to delineate without that geographical reinforcement. I think the title of the post should be: "Employer Let Your Employees Work From Home If They Prefer" since its not a zero sum proposal. >"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" This issues also exists though when a company has two offices that everyone is required to work from, one in London and one in SF for example. Relying on chat and informal lunch meetings is equally problematic for work form home as it is for employees of different offices. It seems like solving the communication issue for one solves it for both and companies seem to have no issues with having multiple offices. I completely agree with you about email, I feel like we are losing the will to compose proper arguments and counter points or parse them in the context of email.

gozur88 9y ago

>It's far too tempting to let one thing bleed into the other when working from home. I worked with a guy once who'd been WFH in a previous job. He would get up, shower, put on a suit and tie, unlock the door to his home office, hang the suit jacket on a peg in the office, and sit down to work. At the end of the day he'd reverse the procedure, locking the office. He said he had to do it to keep things separate.

devoply 9y ago
It seems to imply that people need more regimentation in their lives to make things work a certain way. I wfh and was thinking that it might be good to have a robot in the office that I could control that would be my avatar in the office. And also hilarious.
- paulryanrogers 9y ago
  I worked at a place that sent such robots to clients. They said it worked well. My guess is it was an improvement to no physical presence combined with the novelty factor.

pdimitar 9y ago

Anecdotal evidence. I am never trash-talking people who prefer working on-site. Quite the contrary, I respect them just like any other valued colleague. Working from home is a learned skill. I am so good at it these days that the moment I close my second Chrome instance (the one with all my work accounts) and shut down my VMs, my mindset immediately changes to "chill and leisure mode". If you can't do it, that's fine. It's different strokes for different people. As the article says, both options must exist.