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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 g

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.
- mechanical_fish 14y ago
  Agreed so far. What's wrong with working from home? When the CEO brings guests to the office so that they can "meet the team", you're never there. When the guests ask about your project, someone else on your team will represent you. When your manager is muttering jokes to the team during the design meeting, you won't hear those jokes. Some of the jokes may involve the projects that are already being discussed in other parts of the company but which haven't yet officially arrived on your team's radar: You will tend to be the last to find out about those projects. When one of your direct reports is fighting back tears, you won't see those tears. When the VIP, whose schedule is booked so tightly that you can't get a meeting, is hanging out in the kitchen at the end of the day, you're not there to talk to her for five minutes. Every time you present something, you'll be unable to see your audience's reactions in real-time, you won't see their raised hands, the remote slideshow software will take five minutes to launch, and the high-latency phone connection will drop at least once. Now, I've worked at a company with a lot of remote employees, and a good company and a good manager who are conscious of these difficulties can compensate for a lot of this. But you're still playing at a higher difficulty level than everyone else.
  - kamaal 14y ago
    I guess working from home, you miss the 'Human Network'. Painters, mathematicians, writers, programmers all need the 'Human Network'. But when they actually work on their 'real work', they crave and long for isolation. Undisturbed time(Tuits: Uninterrupted stretches of time), devoid of any distractions, disturbance- time all alone for themselves to produce something awesome.
    - mechanical_fish 14y ago
      You need both time alone to work, and time with other people. There's also something to be said for doing both at once. My term for that is ambient sociability: Sit in the corner of the coffeeshop or the library, where there are people around, but not too noisy, and none of them focused on you, and none of them likely to disturb you.
  - 14y ago
otoburb 14y ago
Mentoring is a funny one. It's much easier to mentor somebody who is local to the city, especially where the article implies a scenario where workers who telecommute are the exception rather than the rule. However, I find that within field organizations (Sales, Services and Support), where working remotely is the norm, mentoring is easily achievable by spending quality, productive time in-your-virtual-face. Personal (i.e. non-intimate but beyond strictly professional) relationships can still be formed (and often do) but simply take longer. Also, mentoring shouldn't be done over email, but over the phone and via WebEx/GoInstant. As you point out, email is the worst possible medium to mentor somebody. In our organization, if you attempt to pass off emails as 'mentoring' then you're in for bummer ratings during your quarterly calibration and review sessions. To answer your original question, a few things that may be missed by team members who occasionally telecommute: 1) Sense of time and punctuality: The sense of time is important because people aren't generally wired to think about different timezones or lunchtimes when scheduling meetings or dialing out. And punctuality usually suffers when you don't make a conscious effort to always heed your 10-15 reminder warnings. 2) Picking up the phone: Onsite staff never seem to have a problem picking up the phone and talking to somebody (even for 10seconds). Maybe it's the close proximity and the option of being able to saunter over in case the phone call doesn't work out. Or the proximity of the lunch room or water cooler. But once these occasional telecommuters are home, it's as if they go into hermit mode and default to pure email. The irony should be obvious -- when you're working remotely, you should usually rely MORE on ad hoc phone calls vs. IM/emails to maintain the sense your sense of connectedness. 3) Productivity: This is the least reliable and is more tightly correlated with how social somebody's job needs to be in the office, but I often find that productivity drops for occasional telecommuters because they haven't been conditioned to fight against the usual distractions at home, such as losing track of time while in the zone (#1), napping & surfing (tied at #2), television/movies (#3), chores (#4), etc. You'd think that somebody would be MORE productive when they're in the zone and not answering IM/email/phone, and I'd answer that for a narrow subset of jobs this is true; but the majority of tasks often involve interaction with other parts of the organization or with customers, in which case all-day zone marathons are a net productivity killer when more than 2 people wasted their time waiting/pinging/fretting/bottlenecked by you. The above 3 problems typically only happen to staff that only occasionally work from home. Regular remote workers typically don't exhibit the behaviours above because these slip-ups are more noticeable to other staff (both remote and onsite) when they happen on a regular basis. EDIT: grammar
reedlaw 14y ago
There's certainly a trade-off between having the convenience to talk to someone next to you and having a distraction-free environment. Working from home I enjoy hours of coding in the zone that makes me much more productive than in the office. On the other hand, in the office I enjoy hearing about the latest trends in technology and being able to rack brains with someone else on a tough problem. But working in an open office where others can similarly interrupt you is not ideal, so I advocate having personal offices along with shared spaces.

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.

mechanical_fish 14y ago
Agreed so far. What's wrong with working from home? When the CEO brings guests to the office so that they can "meet the team", you're never there. When the guests ask about your project, someone else on your team will represent you. When your manager is muttering jokes to the team during the design meeting, you won't hear those jokes. Some of the jokes may involve the projects that are already being discussed in other parts of the company but which haven't yet officially arrived on your team's radar: You will tend to be the last to find out about those projects. When one of your direct reports is fighting back tears, you won't see those tears. When the VIP, whose schedule is booked so tightly that you can't get a meeting, is hanging out in the kitchen at the end of the day, you're not there to talk to her for five minutes. Every time you present something, you'll be unable to see your audience's reactions in real-time, you won't see their raised hands, the remote slideshow software will take five minutes to launch, and the high-latency phone connection will drop at least once. Now, I've worked at a company with a lot of remote employees, and a good company and a good manager who are conscious of these difficulties can compensate for a lot of this. But you're still playing at a higher difficulty level than everyone else.
- kamaal 14y ago
  I guess working from home, you miss the 'Human Network'. Painters, mathematicians, writers, programmers all need the 'Human Network'. But when they actually work on their 'real work', they crave and long for isolation. Undisturbed time(Tuits: Uninterrupted stretches of time), devoid of any distractions, disturbance- time all alone for themselves to produce something awesome.
  - mechanical_fish 14y ago
    You need both time alone to work, and time with other people. There's also something to be said for doing both at once. My term for that is ambient sociability: Sit in the corner of the coffeeshop or the library, where there are people around, but not too noisy, and none of them focused on you, and none of them likely to disturb you.
- 14y ago

otoburb 14y ago

Mentoring is a funny one. It's much easier to mentor somebody who is local to the city, especially where the article implies a scenario where workers who telecommute are the exception rather than the rule. However, I find that within field organizations (Sales, Services and Support), where working remotely is the norm, mentoring is easily achievable by spending quality, productive time in-your-virtual-face. Personal (i.e. non-intimate but beyond strictly professional) relationships can still be formed (and often do) but simply take longer. Also, mentoring shouldn't be done over email, but over the phone and via WebEx/GoInstant. As you point out, email is the worst possible medium to mentor somebody. In our organization, if you attempt to pass off emails as 'mentoring' then you're in for bummer ratings during your quarterly calibration and review sessions. To answer your original question, a few things that may be missed by team members who occasionally telecommute: 1) Sense of time and punctuality: The sense of time is important because people aren't generally wired to think about different timezones or lunchtimes when scheduling meetings or dialing out. And punctuality usually suffers when you don't make a conscious effort to always heed your 10-15 reminder warnings. 2) Picking up the phone: Onsite staff never seem to have a problem picking up the phone and talking to somebody (even for 10seconds). Maybe it's the close proximity and the option of being able to saunter over in case the phone call doesn't work out. Or the proximity of the lunch room or water cooler. But once these occasional telecommuters are home, it's as if they go into hermit mode and default to pure email. The irony should be obvious -- when you're working remotely, you should usually rely MORE on ad hoc phone calls vs. IM/emails to maintain the sense your sense of connectedness. 3) Productivity: This is the least reliable and is more tightly correlated with how social somebody's job needs to be in the office, but I often find that productivity drops for occasional telecommuters because they haven't been conditioned to fight against the usual distractions at home, such as losing track of time while in the zone (#1), napping & surfing (tied at #2), television/movies (#3), chores (#4), etc. You'd think that somebody would be MORE productive when they're in the zone and not answering IM/email/phone, and I'd answer that for a narrow subset of jobs this is true; but the majority of tasks often involve interaction with other parts of the organization or with customers, in which case all-day zone marathons are a net productivity killer when more than 2 people wasted their time waiting/pinging/fretting/bottlenecked by you. The above 3 problems typically only happen to staff that only occasionally work from home. Regular remote workers typically don't exhibit the behaviours above because these slip-ups are more noticeable to other staff (both remote and onsite) when they happen on a regular basis. EDIT: grammar

reedlaw 14y ago

There's certainly a trade-off between having the convenience to talk to someone next to you and having a distraction-free environment. Working from home I enjoy hours of coding in the zone that makes me much more productive than in the office. On the other hand, in the office I enjoy hearing about the latest trends in technology and being able to rack brains with someone else on a tough problem. But working in an open office where others can similarly interrupt you is not ideal, so I advocate having personal offices along with shared spaces.