19 ms·

Why Showing Your Face at Work Matters

161 points by dougbright 14y ago

fleitz 14y ago
Working from home reduces visibility, you don't work from home to make more and get promoted, you work from home to avoid the retardation of a commute, busy work, excessive meetings, etc. You work from home so you can put in 2 hours work, accomplish as much as anyone else did and spend the remaining 6 enjoying your life. I'm pretty sure that everyone who decides to work from home did so for quality of life reasons rather than climbing the corporate ladder reasons.
- jere 14y ago
  Agreed. The topic of a more liberal teleworking schedule came up at work recently. It seemed widely agreed upon that working from home would be for those people who are happy where they are on the ladder already and don't intend to move up.
  - otoburb 14y ago
    Unless you have a unique culture that was founded by remote workers (admittedly rare), or you have a large enough company that needs to have a sizable field organization. I guess this is why living close to work combined with a flexible teleworking schedule would be the best of both worlds. You'd at least get the option of dialing up the social hobnobbing on an 'as needed' basis.
- otoburb 14y ago
  Absolutely agree with this. Two sides of the spectrum: 1) I've noticed that of all the remote positions in various departments, marketing is the one that is almost always co-lo. They tend to have the most say in product direction (duh) and in turn strategic, company-wide policy changes. 2) Sales is the counter-example here. I've seen talented remote sales people rapidly and deservedly climb the corporate ladder. However, the catch is that they tend to have brutal travel schedules (which they'd probably have anyway if they were in corporate HQ), so it's arguable whether they are reaping the same benefits of working from home as other remote workers.
  - rogerbinns 14y ago
    Note that sales people are usually trivial to measure. Look at their quota and their sales and you are pretty much done. With other departments it is considerably harder.
    - otoburb 14y ago
      I agree with your basic premise that it's harder to objectively measure other departments as easily as sales quotas and top-line revenues. However, I'd like to provide some additional metrics that I know other field organizations [have] use[d] (including ours): Services - Professional Services (PS) margin, bookings, customer satisfaction scores, normalized mean project completions, budget ($ or hrs) actuals vs. estimates Support - mean time ticket resolution, ticket volume, Maintenance & Support (M&S) margin, cust sat scores, # feature enhancements You and every other HN reader know that all metrics are flawed in some way, but I'd still like to point out that although Sales quotas are easily judged, many organizations struggle to quickly/easily quantify the frequency with which sales people sacrifice longer-term sales for short-term quarterly wins.
- paulsutter 14y ago
  If these tactics work, you are working for a shitty company and need to find a better employer.
  - paulsutter 14y ago
    The original post got edited, so now my comment doesn't make sense - apologies.
- gwern 14y ago
  > I'm pretty sure that everyone who decides to work from home did so for quality of life reasons rather than climbing the corporate ladder reasons. Which alone might cause the observed penalty: by opting for telecommuting, you are indicating you are a slacker and disloyal.
- umjames 14y ago
  Thank you, I'm glad I'm not the only one who sees the benefits. It's true, some jobs are soul-crushing enough that you'd rather not be there. You might have family and/or financial responsibilities that make you have to keep such a job. You may be bootstrapping a business on the side so you can escape from such a job, but in the meantime, you still need your regular paycheck. Not every job has you working with self-motivated co-workers and great bosses. Some jobs put you in a cube farm in a room where everyone fights over the thermostat. Sometimes you have to head a weekly meeting where you have to explain to other programmers why you get NullPointerExceptions on line 5 when line 4 initializes the variable to null. Some jobs still make you use CVS. The office talk at some jobs is never about learning anything, but it sure is loud and distracting. If you were offered a chance to work from home and avoid a lot of that, I'm sure you'd also jump at the opportunity. Getting a promotion in such a job isn't worth it.
  - monksy 14y ago
    That can actually turn into a good thing. When you're not facing the other person, you should become better and better at communicating what exactly is the issue. At the very worse this leaves a paper trail that can indicate "see I worked on this"
- pwaring 14y ago
  "You work from home so you can put in 2 hours work, accomplish as much as anyone else did" Agreed. I'm the only technical person in the company - if I went into the office every day I would spend half my time being asked to fix printers, 'can you just take a quick look at this?' etc. which would kill my productivity. The other problem for me with 'being seen' is that I spend a lot of my time planning relative to writing code - e.g. for a major project I might spend half the time thinking about how to break down the problem into chunks which can be dealt with individually, then chaining them together for the final result. From an outsider's point of view, it would look like I was just sitting at a desk doodling all day. So it's actually better for me to announce a new feature every so often, because that output looks productive, whereas the process of producing it doesn't. Having done home and in-office working, I've found that if it's a company of engineers (including managers with that background) then I prefer working the office, because I get to converse with like-minded people, and they understand that sometimes days can go by without churning out vast quantities of code. If I'm working for a company where the technical side is less central, then working from home tends to win out.
- sreyaNotfilc 14y ago
  Yes. I love being able to sleep in and avoid meetings. It takes me an 1 1/2 hours to commute into work. By that time, I'm exhausted from dealing with traffic. Next, you have to deal with coworkers and their noise noise noise. Everyone wants to small chat at my job. That's fine, but don't hang around my desk and try to get my attention while I'm staring down a bug (death stare). Its rude and I can't concentrate. As a software engineer, I try to avoid as many meetings as possible. I just want to build the things that are needed to be built. Avoiding meetings helps with that for two reasons... 1) You have more time to work on a task 2) You don't have to break your thought pattern to fixing a bug/solving a problem As you said, with telecommuting you get more done with less time. Its basically a daily mini hack-a-thon in your living room/Starbucks. I normally get in about 2-5 hours of solid developing. It really depends on the task and when I can review the changes to my boss for the final push. The rest of the time I can relax and think out the problems. At work, I just can't concentrate that well. You're stuck at one location for 8 hours. At the same time, you just want to go home. With telecommuting, I can wake up later (which makes me more alert), work for a few hours, relax, and come back to the problem when I have those occasional "eureka!" moments. Now, I like to say that working at home is the be all end all. I still need to show up to push code to production. I still occasionally need to talk to staff about what projects should be next on the list. But, if your main job requires you to just be imaginative and churn out code, then being isolated is where its at.
  - bradfa 14y ago
    You're stuck at one location for 8 hours. At the same time, you just want to go home. I think this is a big deal. You feel stuck. You want to go home. When you're already home, there's not usually an urge to go to the office, you're already where you want to be. Also, if you do feel an urge to go somewhere, if you're at home already it's much less guilt inducing to head to Starbucks for an hour or two than it is to leave work to go to Starbucks for some time.
simonsarris 14y ago
The article does a good job of going over a few (seemingly obvious) biases, but I also expected an honest discussion of job duties (implicit or explicit) that get missed when one works from home. I'm disappointed that part of the topic was skipped. I know the HN crowd is fairly pro- working from home, and I am too, but I was wondering if some of the more experienced (than myself) people here could chime in with examples of implicit/explicit things that are "missed" when team members work from home. The only major one I can think of is mentoring, of new hires and interns, which seems to be done much better in person than over email. I would think that mentoring these two groups is an implicit duty in most companies, but it would seemingly always fall on the backs of those who are not working from home. I would also think that actually being there in person for new hires and interns also helps shape company culture for those people, or otherwise make them feel like more of a team. I suppose that all of this could be mitigated by not working from home for the first month+ of interns/new hires starting.
- suresk 14y ago
  Personally, I overwhelmingly dislike working from home, although it is nice to have the option to do so occasionally when I'm sick, waiting for something to be delivered to my house, the weather is poor, etc.. The main ways I think it is harder for you to contribute remotely are: 1) Whiteboard sessions I've spent a lot of time sitting around a whiteboard, talking out a (software) design for something and collaboratively working it out on the board. I've yet to see software that can come close to this, and even those that sort of do involve a bit of overhead vs just walking into an empty conference room. 2) Debugging/working through things on someone else's machine Sometimes you can solve a problem or work through some design much more quickly by just sitting down at a computer with someone and walking through the code. This is certainly possible to do remotely, but it always feels a lot more clunky, and I tend to avoid it. 3) Office talk Not office gossip, but simply overhearing co-workers talking about something and either learning something or offering them a better way to do it. This adds happens fairly frequently in my experience, and it is hard to duplicate remotely. Sure, if you have everyone working remotely, you can invest time to figure out ways to mitigate these losses, but if it is just one or two people working from home full-time, I think either way you are adding less net value than if you were there in person, all else being equal.
ricardobeat 14y ago
All this assuming the majority of other employees or managers don't work remotely too.
- bung 14y ago
  I was going to go on this tangent as well, but the article and the comments are focusing on teams that do mostly work in offices.
codeonfire 14y ago
I can't speak of other jobs, but developers shouldn't care about raises and promotions, because if they are in an organization where those matter, there are going to be non-technical ladder climbers who will promote each other and take all the money allocated for raises. The only real choices for developers are a) start a business b) job hop c) work at valve. 360-degree evaluations are a farce because these evaluations just go directly to one or more non-technical manager to 'help' with their decisions on advancement and raises. It's lip service. If you don't have a budget and hiring authority, all you really have is the ability to quit, and the wealthiest developers hop often. In instances where developers become too powerful and high up on the tech ladder they are going to be given fancy titles and isolated anyways, so why not work from home?
- jcdavis 14y ago
  This has to be one of the more ridiculous things I've read on HN recently. I (or any other developer) shouldn't be care about getting raises? Why exactly? There are lots of plenty of good places to work not called Valve that don't suffer over-politicalization
  - codeonfire 14y ago
    I think I made it very clear why you shouldn't care. If developers don't have any power in deciding who gets raises, developers are not likely to get raises. Are you going to work 80 hour a week in the office hoping for a promotion like an idiot year after year so you can get 3% instead of 1%? No, you're going to go across town and get 15%. If you disagree that's fine, but by and large this is my experience.
    - zeroonetwothree 14y ago
      Some companies give real raises (15% or more) to their developers.
seivan 14y ago
That seems like it only applies to WidgetFactories and not FilmCrews. Read more here; http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/45814 http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/45814 I wouldn't make my career in a WidgetFactory anyway.
- adrianhoward 14y ago
  That seems like it only applies to WidgetFactories and not FilmCrews. Why?
kamaal 14y ago
Let me explain this to you in simple terms. If your manager appreciates 'blow your trumpet' culture where 'making noise' is more important than work, then Working from home might be disastrous to you. But if your manager understands the wastage of time during travel/commute. The troubles faced by programmers due to frequent meetings and interruptions, the need for solitary isolation to think and work on tough problems. He won't have problems, and will rather appreciate you for taking more time to be productive and get work done. People who stay late are thought to be productive, and doing more work. Unfortunately this is the problem with our Industry. And unless your manager has done some real work himself he won't understand most of this. And trust me expecting a technically sound manager is asking for too much. Your ordinary corporate middle level manager, is totally incapable of understanding this. Because he despises any form of extreme nerd/tech/geek culture. He perceives that as a threat to his own kingdom, he is afraid that your success will overshadow his noise making. He will do everything in his power to keep people mediocre, to make himself look good to his bosses. In all of this a ferevrishly hacking geek churning features, coding by the minute, his way of work, culture and cult is a threat/disease that can destroy the managers career. Working from home, will not work with those kind of managers.
- einhverfr 14y ago
  Indeed. In fact I would say "management usually gets in the way more than it helps." However, this isn't the only issue and it's not the only reason to work face-to-face. There are many cases where face-to-face communications are just better. These include design sessions and the like where more and better real time feedback can be given by a group than in any other approach. For this reason I think periodic get-togethers are important even for teams which work remotely.
- xxpor 14y ago
  >Your ordinary corporate middle level manager, is totally incapable of understanding this. Because he despises any form of extreme nerd/tech/geek culture. He perceives that as a threat to his own kingdom, he is afraid that your success will overshadow his noise making. He will do everything in his power to keep people mediocre, to make himself look good to his bosses. In all of this a ferevrishly hacking geek churning features, coding by the minute, his way of work, culture and cult is a threat/disease that can destroy the managers career. Why would you continue to work for such a shit manager? My manager is is all about interacting with customers, prioritizing tasks, and shielding us from the bullshit. I suspect that a lot of the difference is in companies where the managers are devs vs MBAs
cletus 14y ago
Working from home is a popular topic for us engineers. Generally speaking there are two broad camps in this argument: 1. Those who want to work from home and argue largely from that position. They say they'll be just as productive, you can write code from anywhere, having a more flexible schedule will make them happier and more productive and so on; and 2. Those that think there is more to your job than the lines of code you write. In even small companies (maybe even especially small companies?) culture is important. Culture transmits largely by physical proximity. Osmosis if you will. There is value in team camaraderie, whiteboard sessions, going to lunch with colleagues, sometimes just sitting around and shooting the breeze about whatever. I fall very firmly into camp (2). This also applies to splitting teams geographically (common within Google) and, all other things being equal, you're better off having your organization in N locations versus N+1 locations. Raises and promotions are more a function of relationships than anything else. Not being there decreases visibility and diminishes relationships. Or perhaps it's just that those who basically just want to write code see no value in and/or spend no time on building relationships? So I think if you found a group of likeminded people that just wanted to put their heads down and write code then they could probably work together as an effective distributed team but as soon as you're in the minority in that situation you're losing out and (IMHO) it's not what's best for a colocated team anyway.
- xutopia 14y ago
  It was clear which camp you fell into just by the way you defined the two.
- SCdF 14y ago
  We have a tester who lives in another city from us, and I've managed to build camaraderie with him using nothing but skype IM, including breeze shooting and other non-work based activities. I have done the same in previous jobs, with people on the other side of the world. I don't think you need to be in the same room.
  - seany 14y ago
    I was just going to say more or less the same thing. I think I have a better working relationship with one of my coworkers that lives 1500mi from me than the guy I sit next to. Now I'm sure that personality plays a part here, but it's clear that distance really isn't `that` much of a detractor.
cup 14y ago
This is the advice I recieved from an old supervisor who was known around the world for the quality and depth of her research. 1. It doesn't matter how hard you work but how hard people think you're working. If the door is shut and you're working all night you're only hurting yourself as people will fail to give you the recognition you deserve. Work hard, but make your hard work known. 2. You don't have to be intelligent to create great research. You can buy intelligence (and equipment etc) etc. What you need is imagination, organisation, motivation and an ability to network.
freshfunk 14y ago
This reminds me of an incident I had with a former employer. It was xmas break and I was at home the final week (xmas to new years). I spent about 75% of my time working. When I got back I was accused of taking "10 days off." He counted the Saturday I left to the Sunday before I got back. By that logic, I often took 2 days off a week. Anyway, even after I told him I was working during that time he still said "this wasn't the end of it." When I told him he was overly sensitive to face time he seemed to want to just deny reality.
- gcp 14y ago
  Sounds like your boss is just an asshole, really.
GoodIntentions 14y ago
Working from home limits your opportunities to kiss ass
jimmytucson 14y ago
So this applies if your manager/team is in another city/timezone? Ironically, I got my first promotion and biggest bonus as the only NY member of a London-based team. However, I certainly wondered whether being the lone wolf in my region was good for my career in the long run.
mb_72 14y ago
It's not an either / or situation - it can be 'and'. I work from home 2-3 days a week, and I'm in the office the other days (and that includes days I do for 'credibility', i.e. I go in, say hi to everyone, work all day in my office, then say bye again when I leave - might as well be at home those days, but I realise sometimes it's necessary just to turn up for the sake of it). If there is 'pure' technical work to be done, it's more efficient working from home. For one, you save time on the commute. My manager gets check-in updates (via Assembla), and we can talk via the phone or via email. I can provide updated staging builds for him to download and test too, if necessary. If you have a reasonable manager, a reasonable employee, good tools, and can balance in / out of office days, then the situation can be a big 'win' for everybody. More work gets done, there's enough 'face time', and it's far less stressful.
rushabh 14y ago
We have been experimenting in work-from-home recently, switching from a work-in-office only setup. Work from home has a lot of ambiguity unless you are doing support (which you can do from anywhere). When you are working on long term projects its important for everyone to know what you are up-to, else people might thing you are goofing off. To fix this, we sync up once a month where everyone demos what they have been doing for the month. So short term activity is evaluated by responses to customer, commits, chatrooms and long term activity is evaluated on "demo day". We just had our first "demo day": http://erpnext.com/demo-day---june.html http://erpnext.com/demo-day---june.html (disclaimer: we are a really small team of 3 devs + 1 support + 1 admin)
rlu 14y ago
I guess it depends what sort of track you're trying to get promoted in. If you're trying to get a raise and continue to be an individual contributor (i.e. not manage anyone) then I don't think WFH should really be an issue. However, if you do want to become a lead and have reports then I think it makes perfect sense to promote those that go into the office. I personally would never want to report to someone who consistently works from home if I'm going into the office. There's a difference between kissing ass and having a good relationship with your boss. A human relationship flourishes with actual proximity.
gcb 14y ago
Gotta love how the comments here have datapoints than the whole study the article mentions
fierarul 14y ago
I guess it depends on the company. If you telework only part of the week, I think you have a clear advantage since the telework days are when you actually get stuff done! If you telework full-time but you still have colleagues that show-up then there may be some bias as the article shows and people need to be aware of it. Another solution to this problem is to have the entire company work remotely. Not sure how well this scales, but for a small company such as ours it seems to be the best solution.
EzGraphs 14y ago
Many of the comments are focused on how workers should be evaluated. The article is discussing how workers are evaluated. In fact, the authors emphasize: "Managers may not be aware they are making evaluations based on face time." You can argue that managers should be aware of a bias in this area and strive to minimize its effect. However, workers need to simply be realistic about the effect of working remotely - regardless of whether it seems fair to them. Personally, I prefer to work remotely - but I have always been wary about not spending enough time in the office because of the tendencies described in the article. Physical presence is a powerful thing, and difficult to ignore. Email, IM, Skype, and phone calls are much easier to ignore.
pinaceae 14y ago
I think it all depends on the overall setup of the company/team. If you are the odd one out telecommuting, then yes, issues arise. But, anecdotal evidence to the rescue, here is my personal experience: I work for a US-headquartered software company. I live in Austria. I lead a product team. My team members live in France and Germany. We all telecommute. We see each other in front of clients or at organized internal events. The rest is done through various online solutions. Everyone is on equal footing. I, as a manager, am a telecommuter myself. I can relate, understand how to measure performance as I am measured this way myself. Do I have a disadvantage against the colleagues in the US HQ? Absolutely, but they cannot do my job as I cover Europe. Which is fine. My team has no drawback. And yes, by now, I am a strong advocate of tele-work for knowledge workers. A lot of reasons, but often overlooked is the ecological one. I actually use my home more. I don't have a separate office that sits around empty (still heated/ac'ed) for non-working hours. I don't waste energy hauling my physical presence back and forth to work. And yes, my company saves a metric ton of money on office space savings.
ANH 14y ago
I work remotely, but make it into the office every couple of weeks. I had already worked with this team for two years prior to making this arrangement, so the managers and I know each other well. However, it does seem the new folks on the team (and one or two of the old ones) treat me with some suspicion. I'm the sole developer on this project, so the "12 engineers in front of a whiteboard" thing does not apply. Anyway, I'm happier for not having to spend three hours commuting each day, and if Lines of Code is any judge (I know, I know), I'm an order of magnitude more productive.
nerdfiles 14y ago
Forget this. I'm not reading this hogwash. Look, make working outside a practical consideration. I need the sun, not shoddy impressionist artwork, not another goddamn water cooler. I want to pull my drink from a nearby stream and then commit my bug. Get out of my face with your goddamn ugly buildings and their ugly interiors. My code is ugly enough without having to deal with in-building noise and 'in-office' politics.
nerdfiles 14y ago
I just do not understand. We're at the point now where all of our commit messages are on display. How could anyone seriously argue: "Our findings suggest that remote workers might be further handicapped by perceptions that they are not as responsible or committed as other employees. To avoid such unfair perceptions, managers who implement telecommuting and flexible hours should revise their performance appraisals to measure mostly objective outputs, such as number and type of projects completed or expert evaluations of project quality." Rather, we're _already_ doing this. Check the commit logs. Obviously one can make trait-inferences based on commit logs. If one can infer a "life story model" from a Facebook profile, one can infer a "worker commitment model" from a github profile. And "... remote workers might be ..."? Seriously? This is the kind of argument coming from MIT? Look, I'm not going to argue the difference between a theory-might-be-true and a theory-is-probably-true. Nor will I argue that they're _just_ working with theories, the just-theory argument. I don't want to bore you to death, but you obviously don't need _evidence_ to corroborate a claim that _might_ be true. I mean, c'mon... A lot of "findings" might be true. That said, who's to say their explanation establishes any causal connection at all. All sorts of things lead to the perception of lack of commitment, but most notably, that someone fails to perform unit tests, or doesn't document, etc. -- but "hallway conversations"? This presupposes that the content of the conversation is even contextualized by the work itself that is to be done. I mean, with such a "finding" there are an infinite number of provisional assumptions which can be thrown in, when there's already a perfect focal point for determining commitment, etc. -- again, the commit(ment) logs. Is this just bad writing, or am I missing something?
ozataman 14y ago
I believe this article is missing the point. When you're physically present at the office, you get plenty of opportunities to have conversations with different people and voice your opinion, revealing your thought patterns, values and abilities. These often complement and boost people's observations of you during actual assigned work. This effect is not about "passive face time" or merely people seeing that you're there from a distance. It is about plugging into the whole environment in the office - which is what you need your leaders to be good at. Taking it further, a bunch of great happenstance opportunities really come up by being in the right place at the right time talking to the right people hitting the right chords. You will never stumble upon these opportunities if you're constantly away, chucking away at your "assigned" duties.
ef4 14y ago
There's nothing magical about proximity. It's all just a question of sufficiently high-bandwidth, low-friction communication. There's no getting around our monkey brains' desire to see other people's faces and bond with them. But that's just a technical problem: high quality video that starts instantly, or that is always on, provides the same stimulus. The fact that most remote workers don't have that kind of setup just shows why we're not quite there yet. So the problems with remote work that people discuss endless are not problems with remote work per se. They're problems with our nascent, not-quite-good-enough-yet tools for remote work. But the tools are getting better really fast.
lcargill99 14y ago
Signal is signal and noise is noise. A bias towards passive face time is embracing noise and will reduce the ability to execute.
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161 points by dougbright 14y ago

Working from home reduces visibility, you don't work from home to make more and get promoted, you work from home to avoid the retardation of a commute, busy work, excessive meetings, etc. You work from home so you can put in 2 hours work, accomplish as much as anyone else did and spend the remaining 6 enjoying your life. I'm pretty sure that everyone who decides to work from home did so for quality of life reasons rather than climbing the corporate ladder reasons.

jere 14y ago
Agreed. The topic of a more liberal teleworking schedule came up at work recently. It seemed widely agreed upon that working from home would be for those people who are happy where they are on the ladder already and don't intend to move up.
- otoburb 14y ago
  Unless you have a unique culture that was founded by remote workers (admittedly rare), or you have a large enough company that needs to have a sizable field organization. I guess this is why living close to work combined with a flexible teleworking schedule would be the best of both worlds. You'd at least get the option of dialing up the social hobnobbing on an 'as needed' basis.
otoburb 14y ago
Absolutely agree with this. Two sides of the spectrum: 1) I've noticed that of all the remote positions in various departments, marketing is the one that is almost always co-lo. They tend to have the most say in product direction (duh) and in turn strategic, company-wide policy changes. 2) Sales is the counter-example here. I've seen talented remote sales people rapidly and deservedly climb the corporate ladder. However, the catch is that they tend to have brutal travel schedules (which they'd probably have anyway if they were in corporate HQ), so it's arguable whether they are reaping the same benefits of working from home as other remote workers.
- rogerbinns 14y ago
  Note that sales people are usually trivial to measure. Look at their quota and their sales and you are pretty much done. With other departments it is considerably harder.
  - otoburb 14y ago
    I agree with your basic premise that it's harder to objectively measure other departments as easily as sales quotas and top-line revenues. However, I'd like to provide some additional metrics that I know other field organizations [have] use[d] (including ours): Services - Professional Services (PS) margin, bookings, customer satisfaction scores, normalized mean project completions, budget ($ or hrs) actuals vs. estimates Support - mean time ticket resolution, ticket volume, Maintenance & Support (M&S) margin, cust sat scores, # feature enhancements You and every other HN reader know that all metrics are flawed in some way, but I'd still like to point out that although Sales quotas are easily judged, many organizations struggle to quickly/easily quantify the frequency with which sales people sacrifice longer-term sales for short-term quarterly wins.
paulsutter 14y ago
If these tactics work, you are working for a shitty company and need to find a better employer.
- paulsutter 14y ago
  The original post got edited, so now my comment doesn't make sense - apologies.
gwern 14y ago
> I'm pretty sure that everyone who decides to work from home did so for quality of life reasons rather than climbing the corporate ladder reasons. Which alone might cause the observed penalty: by opting for telecommuting, you are indicating you are a slacker and disloyal.
umjames 14y ago
Thank you, I'm glad I'm not the only one who sees the benefits. It's true, some jobs are soul-crushing enough that you'd rather not be there. You might have family and/or financial responsibilities that make you have to keep such a job. You may be bootstrapping a business on the side so you can escape from such a job, but in the meantime, you still need your regular paycheck. Not every job has you working with self-motivated co-workers and great bosses. Some jobs put you in a cube farm in a room where everyone fights over the thermostat. Sometimes you have to head a weekly meeting where you have to explain to other programmers why you get NullPointerExceptions on line 5 when line 4 initializes the variable to null. Some jobs still make you use CVS. The office talk at some jobs is never about learning anything, but it sure is loud and distracting. If you were offered a chance to work from home and avoid a lot of that, I'm sure you'd also jump at the opportunity. Getting a promotion in such a job isn't worth it.
- monksy 14y ago
  That can actually turn into a good thing. When you're not facing the other person, you should become better and better at communicating what exactly is the issue. At the very worse this leaves a paper trail that can indicate "see I worked on this"
pwaring 14y ago
"You work from home so you can put in 2 hours work, accomplish as much as anyone else did" Agreed. I'm the only technical person in the company - if I went into the office every day I would spend half my time being asked to fix printers, 'can you just take a quick look at this?' etc. which would kill my productivity. The other problem for me with 'being seen' is that I spend a lot of my time planning relative to writing code - e.g. for a major project I might spend half the time thinking about how to break down the problem into chunks which can be dealt with individually, then chaining them together for the final result. From an outsider's point of view, it would look like I was just sitting at a desk doodling all day. So it's actually better for me to announce a new feature every so often, because that output looks productive, whereas the process of producing it doesn't. Having done home and in-office working, I've found that if it's a company of engineers (including managers with that background) then I prefer working the office, because I get to converse with like-minded people, and they understand that sometimes days can go by without churning out vast quantities of code. If I'm working for a company where the technical side is less central, then working from home tends to win out.
sreyaNotfilc 14y ago
Yes. I love being able to sleep in and avoid meetings. It takes me an 1 1/2 hours to commute into work. By that time, I'm exhausted from dealing with traffic. Next, you have to deal with coworkers and their noise noise noise. Everyone wants to small chat at my job. That's fine, but don't hang around my desk and try to get my attention while I'm staring down a bug (death stare). Its rude and I can't concentrate. As a software engineer, I try to avoid as many meetings as possible. I just want to build the things that are needed to be built. Avoiding meetings helps with that for two reasons... 1) You have more time to work on a task 2) You don't have to break your thought pattern to fixing a bug/solving a problem As you said, with telecommuting you get more done with less time. Its basically a daily mini hack-a-thon in your living room/Starbucks. I normally get in about 2-5 hours of solid developing. It really depends on the task and when I can review the changes to my boss for the final push. The rest of the time I can relax and think out the problems. At work, I just can't concentrate that well. You're stuck at one location for 8 hours. At the same time, you just want to go home. With telecommuting, I can wake up later (which makes me more alert), work for a few hours, relax, and come back to the problem when I have those occasional "eureka!" moments. Now, I like to say that working at home is the be all end all. I still need to show up to push code to production. I still occasionally need to talk to staff about what projects should be next on the list. But, if your main job requires you to just be imaginative and churn out code, then being isolated is where its at.
- bradfa 14y ago
  You're stuck at one location for 8 hours. At the same time, you just want to go home. I think this is a big deal. You feel stuck. You want to go home. When you're already home, there's not usually an urge to go to the office, you're already where you want to be. Also, if you do feel an urge to go somewhere, if you're at home already it's much less guilt inducing to head to Starbucks for an hour or two than it is to leave work to go to Starbucks for some time.

simonsarris 14y ago

The article does a good job of going over a few (seemingly obvious) biases, but I also expected an honest discussion of job duties (implicit or explicit) that get missed when one works from home. I'm disappointed that part of the topic was skipped. I know the HN crowd is fairly pro- working from home, and I am too, but I was wondering if some of the more experienced (than myself) people here could chime in with examples of implicit/explicit things that are "missed" when team members work from home. The only major one I can think of is mentoring, of new hires and interns, which seems to be done much better in person than over email. I would think that mentoring these two groups is an implicit duty in most companies, but it would seemingly always fall on the backs of those who are not working from home. I would also think that actually being there in person for new hires and interns also helps shape company culture for those people, or otherwise make them feel like more of a team. I suppose that all of this could be mitigated by not working from home for the first month+ of interns/new hires starting.

suresk 14y ago
Personally, I overwhelmingly dislike working from home, although it is nice to have the option to do so occasionally when I'm sick, waiting for something to be delivered to my house, the weather is poor, etc.. The main ways I think it is harder for you to contribute remotely are: 1) Whiteboard sessions I've spent a lot of time sitting around a whiteboard, talking out a (software) design for something and collaboratively working it out on the board. I've yet to see software that can come close to this, and even those that sort of do involve a bit of overhead vs just walking into an empty conference room. 2) Debugging/working through things on someone else's machine Sometimes you can solve a problem or work through some design much more quickly by just sitting down at a computer with someone and walking through the code. This is certainly possible to do remotely, but it always feels a lot more clunky, and I tend to avoid it. 3) Office talk Not office gossip, but simply overhearing co-workers talking about something and either learning something or offering them a better way to do it. This adds happens fairly frequently in my experience, and it is hard to duplicate remotely. Sure, if you have everyone working remotely, you can invest time to figure out ways to mitigate these losses, but if it is just one or two people working from home full-time, I think either way you are adding less net value than if you were there in person, all else being equal.

ricardobeat 14y ago

All this assuming the majority of other employees or managers don't work remotely too.

bung 14y ago
I was going to go on this tangent as well, but the article and the comments are focusing on teams that do mostly work in offices.

codeonfire 14y ago

I can't speak of other jobs, but developers shouldn't care about raises and promotions, because if they are in an organization where those matter, there are going to be non-technical ladder climbers who will promote each other and take all the money allocated for raises. The only real choices for developers are a) start a business b) job hop c) work at valve. 360-degree evaluations are a farce because these evaluations just go directly to one or more non-technical manager to 'help' with their decisions on advancement and raises. It's lip service. If you don't have a budget and hiring authority, all you really have is the ability to quit, and the wealthiest developers hop often. In instances where developers become too powerful and high up on the tech ladder they are going to be given fancy titles and isolated anyways, so why not work from home?

jcdavis 14y ago
This has to be one of the more ridiculous things I've read on HN recently. I (or any other developer) shouldn't be care about getting raises? Why exactly? There are lots of plenty of good places to work not called Valve that don't suffer over-politicalization
- codeonfire 14y ago
  I think I made it very clear why you shouldn't care. If developers don't have any power in deciding who gets raises, developers are not likely to get raises. Are you going to work 80 hour a week in the office hoping for a promotion like an idiot year after year so you can get 3% instead of 1%? No, you're going to go across town and get 15%. If you disagree that's fine, but by and large this is my experience.
  - zeroonetwothree 14y ago
    Some companies give real raises (15% or more) to their developers.

seivan 14y ago

That seems like it only applies to WidgetFactories and not FilmCrews. Read more here; http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/45814 http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/45814 I wouldn't make my career in a WidgetFactory anyway.

adrianhoward 14y ago
That seems like it only applies to WidgetFactories and not FilmCrews. Why?

kamaal 14y ago

Let me explain this to you in simple terms. If your manager appreciates 'blow your trumpet' culture where 'making noise' is more important than work, then Working from home might be disastrous to you. But if your manager understands the wastage of time during travel/commute. The troubles faced by programmers due to frequent meetings and interruptions, the need for solitary isolation to think and work on tough problems. He won't have problems, and will rather appreciate you for taking more time to be productive and get work done. People who stay late are thought to be productive, and doing more work. Unfortunately this is the problem with our Industry. And unless your manager has done some real work himself he won't understand most of this. And trust me expecting a technically sound manager is asking for too much. Your ordinary corporate middle level manager, is totally incapable of understanding this. Because he despises any form of extreme nerd/tech/geek culture. He perceives that as a threat to his own kingdom, he is afraid that your success will overshadow his noise making. He will do everything in his power to keep people mediocre, to make himself look good to his bosses. In all of this a ferevrishly hacking geek churning features, coding by the minute, his way of work, culture and cult is a threat/disease that can destroy the managers career. Working from home, will not work with those kind of managers.

einhverfr 14y ago
Indeed. In fact I would say "management usually gets in the way more than it helps." However, this isn't the only issue and it's not the only reason to work face-to-face. There are many cases where face-to-face communications are just better. These include design sessions and the like where more and better real time feedback can be given by a group than in any other approach. For this reason I think periodic get-togethers are important even for teams which work remotely.
xxpor 14y ago
>Your ordinary corporate middle level manager, is totally incapable of understanding this. Because he despises any form of extreme nerd/tech/geek culture. He perceives that as a threat to his own kingdom, he is afraid that your success will overshadow his noise making. He will do everything in his power to keep people mediocre, to make himself look good to his bosses. In all of this a ferevrishly hacking geek churning features, coding by the minute, his way of work, culture and cult is a threat/disease that can destroy the managers career. Why would you continue to work for such a shit manager? My manager is is all about interacting with customers, prioritizing tasks, and shielding us from the bullshit. I suspect that a lot of the difference is in companies where the managers are devs vs MBAs

cletus 14y ago

Working from home is a popular topic for us engineers. Generally speaking there are two broad camps in this argument: 1. Those who want to work from home and argue largely from that position. They say they'll be just as productive, you can write code from anywhere, having a more flexible schedule will make them happier and more productive and so on; and 2. Those that think there is more to your job than the lines of code you write. In even small companies (maybe even especially small companies?) culture is important. Culture transmits largely by physical proximity. Osmosis if you will. There is value in team camaraderie, whiteboard sessions, going to lunch with colleagues, sometimes just sitting around and shooting the breeze about whatever. I fall very firmly into camp (2). This also applies to splitting teams geographically (common within Google) and, all other things being equal, you're better off having your organization in N locations versus N+1 locations. Raises and promotions are more a function of relationships than anything else. Not being there decreases visibility and diminishes relationships. Or perhaps it's just that those who basically just want to write code see no value in and/or spend no time on building relationships? So I think if you found a group of likeminded people that just wanted to put their heads down and write code then they could probably work together as an effective distributed team but as soon as you're in the minority in that situation you're losing out and (IMHO) it's not what's best for a colocated team anyway.

xutopia 14y ago
It was clear which camp you fell into just by the way you defined the two.
SCdF 14y ago
We have a tester who lives in another city from us, and I've managed to build camaraderie with him using nothing but skype IM, including breeze shooting and other non-work based activities. I have done the same in previous jobs, with people on the other side of the world. I don't think you need to be in the same room.
- seany 14y ago
  I was just going to say more or less the same thing. I think I have a better working relationship with one of my coworkers that lives 1500mi from me than the guy I sit next to. Now I'm sure that personality plays a part here, but it's clear that distance really isn't `that` much of a detractor.

cup 14y ago

This is the advice I recieved from an old supervisor who was known around the world for the quality and depth of her research. 1. It doesn't matter how hard you work but how hard people think you're working. If the door is shut and you're working all night you're only hurting yourself as people will fail to give you the recognition you deserve. Work hard, but make your hard work known. 2. You don't have to be intelligent to create great research. You can buy intelligence (and equipment etc) etc. What you need is imagination, organisation, motivation and an ability to network.

freshfunk 14y ago

This reminds me of an incident I had with a former employer. It was xmas break and I was at home the final week (xmas to new years). I spent about 75% of my time working. When I got back I was accused of taking "10 days off." He counted the Saturday I left to the Sunday before I got back. By that logic, I often took 2 days off a week. Anyway, even after I told him I was working during that time he still said "this wasn't the end of it." When I told him he was overly sensitive to face time he seemed to want to just deny reality.

gcp 14y ago
Sounds like your boss is just an asshole, really.

GoodIntentions 14y ago

Working from home limits your opportunities to kiss ass

jimmytucson 14y ago

So this applies if your manager/team is in another city/timezone? Ironically, I got my first promotion and biggest bonus as the only NY member of a London-based team. However, I certainly wondered whether being the lone wolf in my region was good for my career in the long run.

mb_72 14y ago

It's not an either / or situation - it can be 'and'. I work from home 2-3 days a week, and I'm in the office the other days (and that includes days I do for 'credibility', i.e. I go in, say hi to everyone, work all day in my office, then say bye again when I leave - might as well be at home those days, but I realise sometimes it's necessary just to turn up for the sake of it). If there is 'pure' technical work to be done, it's more efficient working from home. For one, you save time on the commute. My manager gets check-in updates (via Assembla), and we can talk via the phone or via email. I can provide updated staging builds for him to download and test too, if necessary. If you have a reasonable manager, a reasonable employee, good tools, and can balance in / out of office days, then the situation can be a big 'win' for everybody. More work gets done, there's enough 'face time', and it's far less stressful.

rushabh 14y ago

We have been experimenting in work-from-home recently, switching from a work-in-office only setup. Work from home has a lot of ambiguity unless you are doing support (which you can do from anywhere). When you are working on long term projects its important for everyone to know what you are up-to, else people might thing you are goofing off. To fix this, we sync up once a month where everyone demos what they have been doing for the month. So short term activity is evaluated by responses to customer, commits, chatrooms and long term activity is evaluated on "demo day". We just had our first "demo day": http://erpnext.com/demo-day---june.html http://erpnext.com/demo-day---june.html (disclaimer: we are a really small team of 3 devs + 1 support + 1 admin)

rlu 14y ago

I guess it depends what sort of track you're trying to get promoted in. If you're trying to get a raise and continue to be an individual contributor (i.e. not manage anyone) then I don't think WFH should really be an issue. However, if you do want to become a lead and have reports then I think it makes perfect sense to promote those that go into the office. I personally would never want to report to someone who consistently works from home if I'm going into the office. There's a difference between kissing ass and having a good relationship with your boss. A human relationship flourishes with actual proximity.

gcb 14y ago

Gotta love how the comments here have datapoints than the whole study the article mentions

fierarul 14y ago

I guess it depends on the company. If you telework only part of the week, I think you have a clear advantage since the telework days are when you actually get stuff done! If you telework full-time but you still have colleagues that show-up then there may be some bias as the article shows and people need to be aware of it. Another solution to this problem is to have the entire company work remotely. Not sure how well this scales, but for a small company such as ours it seems to be the best solution.

EzGraphs 14y ago

Many of the comments are focused on how workers should be evaluated. The article is discussing how workers are evaluated. In fact, the authors emphasize: "Managers may not be aware they are making evaluations based on face time." You can argue that managers should be aware of a bias in this area and strive to minimize its effect. However, workers need to simply be realistic about the effect of working remotely - regardless of whether it seems fair to them. Personally, I prefer to work remotely - but I have always been wary about not spending enough time in the office because of the tendencies described in the article. Physical presence is a powerful thing, and difficult to ignore. Email, IM, Skype, and phone calls are much easier to ignore.

pinaceae 14y ago

I think it all depends on the overall setup of the company/team. If you are the odd one out telecommuting, then yes, issues arise. But, anecdotal evidence to the rescue, here is my personal experience: I work for a US-headquartered software company. I live in Austria. I lead a product team. My team members live in France and Germany. We all telecommute. We see each other in front of clients or at organized internal events. The rest is done through various online solutions. Everyone is on equal footing. I, as a manager, am a telecommuter myself. I can relate, understand how to measure performance as I am measured this way myself. Do I have a disadvantage against the colleagues in the US HQ? Absolutely, but they cannot do my job as I cover Europe. Which is fine. My team has no drawback. And yes, by now, I am a strong advocate of tele-work for knowledge workers. A lot of reasons, but often overlooked is the ecological one. I actually use my home more. I don't have a separate office that sits around empty (still heated/ac'ed) for non-working hours. I don't waste energy hauling my physical presence back and forth to work. And yes, my company saves a metric ton of money on office space savings.

ANH 14y ago

I work remotely, but make it into the office every couple of weeks. I had already worked with this team for two years prior to making this arrangement, so the managers and I know each other well. However, it does seem the new folks on the team (and one or two of the old ones) treat me with some suspicion. I'm the sole developer on this project, so the "12 engineers in front of a whiteboard" thing does not apply. Anyway, I'm happier for not having to spend three hours commuting each day, and if Lines of Code is any judge (I know, I know), I'm an order of magnitude more productive.

nerdfiles 14y ago

Forget this. I'm not reading this hogwash. Look, make working outside a practical consideration. I need the sun, not shoddy impressionist artwork, not another goddamn water cooler. I want to pull my drink from a nearby stream and then commit my bug. Get out of my face with your goddamn ugly buildings and their ugly interiors. My code is ugly enough without having to deal with in-building noise and 'in-office' politics.

nerdfiles 14y ago

I just do not understand. We're at the point now where all of our commit messages are on display. How could anyone seriously argue: "Our findings suggest that remote workers might be further handicapped by perceptions that they are not as responsible or committed as other employees. To avoid such unfair perceptions, managers who implement telecommuting and flexible hours should revise their performance appraisals to measure mostly objective outputs, such as number and type of projects completed or expert evaluations of project quality." Rather, we're _already_ doing this. Check the commit logs. Obviously one can make trait-inferences based on commit logs. If one can infer a "life story model" from a Facebook profile, one can infer a "worker commitment model" from a github profile. And "... remote workers might be ..."? Seriously? This is the kind of argument coming from MIT? Look, I'm not going to argue the difference between a theory-might-be-true and a theory-is-probably-true. Nor will I argue that they're _just_ working with theories, the just-theory argument. I don't want to bore you to death, but you obviously don't need _evidence_ to corroborate a claim that _might_ be true. I mean, c'mon... A lot of "findings" might be true. That said, who's to say their explanation establishes any causal connection at all. All sorts of things lead to the perception of lack of commitment, but most notably, that someone fails to perform unit tests, or doesn't document, etc. -- but "hallway conversations"? This presupposes that the content of the conversation is even contextualized by the work itself that is to be done. I mean, with such a "finding" there are an infinite number of provisional assumptions which can be thrown in, when there's already a perfect focal point for determining commitment, etc. -- again, the commit(ment) logs. Is this just bad writing, or am I missing something?

ozataman 14y ago

I believe this article is missing the point. When you're physically present at the office, you get plenty of opportunities to have conversations with different people and voice your opinion, revealing your thought patterns, values and abilities. These often complement and boost people's observations of you during actual assigned work. This effect is not about "passive face time" or merely people seeing that you're there from a distance. It is about plugging into the whole environment in the office - which is what you need your leaders to be good at. Taking it further, a bunch of great happenstance opportunities really come up by being in the right place at the right time talking to the right people hitting the right chords. You will never stumble upon these opportunities if you're constantly away, chucking away at your "assigned" duties.

ef4 14y ago

There's nothing magical about proximity. It's all just a question of sufficiently high-bandwidth, low-friction communication. There's no getting around our monkey brains' desire to see other people's faces and bond with them. But that's just a technical problem: high quality video that starts instantly, or that is always on, provides the same stimulus. The fact that most remote workers don't have that kind of setup just shows why we're not quite there yet. So the problems with remote work that people discuss endless are not problems with remote work per se. They're problems with our nascent, not-quite-good-enough-yet tools for remote work. But the tools are getting better really fast.

lcargill99 14y ago

Signal is signal and noise is noise. A bias towards passive face time is embracing noise and will reduce the ability to execute.

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