7 ms·

Trying to propose remote working where I work at. Opinions?

29 points by skidding 14y ago

gcb0 14y ago
You have to convince management that they don't need management. Good lucky with that.
- hp50g 14y ago
  I work remotely. Management were fine when they worked out they could stuck someone else at my desk :)
- ankitml 14y ago
  One big problems which stops creative people from doing work is management. So essentially it is a good idea to move away from them.
  - ankitml 14y ago
    Edit: What I meant was managers who intrude developers with, heya whatsup! are you stuck. Where the best they can do for employees is to shut up. Also the managers where they dont understand importance of code quality and measure everything by how much closer to the end product they are. The managers, who dont understand that sometimes the code just rots and developers have strong sense of intuition when this happens. Do listen to them. The managers who dont understand that complexity of a code increases exponentially with every feature. And telling developers, "oh you just need to add this simple script to the program" can be as dangerous as drunken driving. Ok not as that dangerous, but in case you are making software for autopilots and all.
alexbardas 14y ago
While I tend to a agree to a certain degree (e.g.: you may want/be allowed to take some days to work remotely on a quarterly basis), there's a reason they saw this principle isn't working and even called back the people from large companies, like Yahoo!. Best buy is another example (http://mashable.com/2013/03/05/best-buy-flexible-employees/ http://mashable.com/2013/03/05/best-buy-flexible-employees/). Many agencies still permit this, because they may lose some valuable work force, but most of these decisions were also taken for companies to (re)build a certain culture. One of the main reasons is that it is hard to build a team / team cohesion if you don't physically interact with the other members. Also, motivation inside a team can be much higher. For newcomers, it's also the desire to work next to the best people from the company. I'd like to see the tool (which is still TBD on the github link) where you can achieve most of these and have more gains than losses.
joelrunyon 14y ago
In my opinion, the first thing you need to do for this to work is to have a rock-solid clear value add for your employer. Too many people make remote working arrangements about themselves and that's why they fail (sure, the employer cares about you, but if you act like you're only concerned with yourself, you'll come across poorly). Spend time laying out exactly how your move won't only benefit yourself, but will save the company time, energy & money and even open up future opportunities that you're willing to spearhead. You have to lay out the path so that it's a clear win for them. If you can do that, then you can usually get what you want too. Sean Ogle had an interesting write up about this here (from his own personal experience) - http://www.seanogle.com/entrepreneurship/approaches-to-quitting-your-job http://www.seanogle.com/entrepreneurship/approaches-to-quitt...
- jaggederest 14y ago
  Personally, my 'value add' is that I won't work for a company that won't support remote developers. If they value my contributions, they'll have my efforts, if not, they won't.
  - joelrunyon 14y ago
    That might work if you're getting recruited by a company - but if you're already in a "butt-in-seat" arrangement, you're going to have to bring up a value add for them to contemplate changing things (especially if everyone else in the office is happy with their butt-in-seat arrangement). It's tough to renegotiate a position if you're simply just asking for things and not giving up any sort of consideration or adding some benefit to for the other party.
    - jaggederest 14y ago
      > It's tough to renegotiate a position if you're simply just asking for things and not giving up any sort of consideration or adding some benefit to for the other party. Consideration is I don't quit. It's hard but true. Personally I've walked away from a couple jobs when they tried to reel me back in house.
peterjancelis 14y ago
> Respond to any inquiry in up to 24 hours in working days (unless explicitly taking day off.) If this means responding with the finished code, than make sure the inquiries are small enough. If this means confirming availability or that you got the message at all, than why would you need 3 full work days for that?
- eru 14y ago
  I guess he means, don't work on the weekend? I.e. respond within 8 working hours, probably.
- skidding 14y ago
  It doesn't mean responding with finished work, just providing a clear status w/out leaving people in the dark. The time for that should be WAY smaller in most cases. But the 24h margin is a no-panic zone that should cover all timezones
huhtenberg 14y ago
> Respond to any inquiry in up to 24 hours in working days Acknowledge any inquiry within 5-10 minutes unless on a lunch break. Otherwise it means you are afk. (edit) To elaborate - there are two issues involved with this. First is that you are unlikely to ever work on a fully self-contained task that doesn't require collaboration with other people. As such having shared work hours is required. Second issue is that of trust. In common tongue "working from home" means "sleeping in, sitting on a couch, going for two hour lunch breaks, etc". It's a way to slack while pretending to be working. I'm working from home, wink, wink, quote-unquote. In a perfect world you would be judged on deliverables and perfectly met deadlines. In real world, you will frequently need to prove that you've been working and that 1 page of code has indeed been a result of a week of research and numerous rewrites.
- drdaeman 14y ago
  I'd suggest making several communication channels available, with several priorities. For example, for me a phone call is something that prefers a quick response, an IM message can wait for some time, and a bugtracker ticket or an email is "I'll reply when I'll have time to do it".
  - daleharvey 14y ago
    I would put direct email as 'reply asap', usually people ping in irc and if they dont get a response its a direct email. Phone calls are only for very urgent / no point if you dont answer right now, bug tracker is certainly 'when you have time'
- davidkatz 14y ago
  Absolutely. Working remotely and responding within 24 hours is a complete non starter. Teams need to work tightly together. I'd even go as far as saying 'acknowledge all messages within 1 minute'. Being able to talk to people immediately is critical. (I've been running a remote team for 5 years)
  - _pmf_ 14y ago
drdaeman 14y ago
I do work remotely for several years (with infrequent in-person meetings at the office with colleagues), and I'd say in long run it's somehow hard to separate matters and, for example, stay focused on the work, while being at home. It's certainly manageable, but still requires some fairly strong willpower to manage oneself. Being lazy, sometimes, I would actually perfer to have a distraction-free office envinorment. So, my suggestion is, don't [completely] deprecate office space, at least for the first 2-3 years.
espeed 14y ago
Watch Greg Wilson's talk "What We Actually Know About Software Development, and Why We Believe It's True" -- he cites research that supports working remotely (http://vimeo.com/9270320 http://vimeo.com/9270320).
workbench 14y ago
> don't need to do - Be available at any particular time of a working day Sorry… but how is anyone supposed to work with you with this attitude. If I had to work with someone who was never around and I didn't even know if I could contact them for sure without waiting 24h for a reply then I'd be complaining to management to ditch the guy and hire someone who wants to work.
- eloisant 14y ago
  I agree this rule is problematic, and it's not just a matter of attitude. It's practical. When you work with someone you need to have some time of the day when you know you can contact the guy.
qwerta 14y ago
Simply make partial telecommuting hard requirement from your side. I made it very clear at interview that I need some quiet time to keep my productivity. I got hired and now I work 2 days a week from home. Surprisingly I work for large corporation at 'cubicle sea' and everyone has VPN access and works from home sometimes. My previous job in another large corp had similar policy.
- boothead 14y ago
  Why is it that big companies get this? In two weeks I'll be going from a nine person company when there's no working from home whatsoever under any circumstances to a ~250k person company where it's supposedly allowed. WTF?
  - polskibus 14y ago
    It's because of the relative importance of team cohesion on the output of entire company. In a corporation of 250k people, 1 (potential) slacker is max 1/250k lost output. In a company of 9 it is max 1/9th. It's all about risk management here, managing both probabilities and potential consequences.
    - frozenport 14y ago
      If we take the ML estimate, I would say that the 1/9th chance distributes evenly. So it is 1/9th loss for both cases. I have found that large corporations are able to capitalize better on incremental improvements and responsibilities are more narrow: hence they can tolerate less overall employee productivity. Also, they might be more experienced at managing people and understand that advantages that working from home bring. For example, taking care of your children so that you live in constant fear of loosing your job :-)
      - polskibus 14y ago
        I'd disagree, based on my observations in both environments. Law of large numbers shows that it is easier to hide unusual behavior when number of samples is large and the observer is focused on aggregate-based performance measurement.
ultimoo 14y ago
> Make your location available on each working day (for both reliability and safety) Does this mean like over Google Latitude or Find my Friends or something? How would that help with safety? It'd help if you can elaborate on this point a bit more. Also, could it be a slight privacy issue with some folk if they accidentally leave it on after working hours are over? I like the rest of the points you make though. Good luck with convincing your management!
- andyhmltn 14y ago
  And as a side note, using something like that isn't reliable at all. Say I wanted to go down the pub for an hour, what's to stop me leaving my phone at home so it looks like I'm still about?
  - ewoodrich 14y ago
    Or, what's to stop you from responding to questions while at the pub, but not while you're taking a break at home. Pure geolocation is not ideal for this usage.
    - andyhmltn 14y ago
      That's very true. I just gave that example because relying on a geolocation app (as you said) would not really guarantee your employees are working.
xradionut 14y ago
I work in a mixed office, half in/half remote. I'm one of the few people (team lead/admin) that has to be in the office 90 percent of the working hours, which is fine. But I deal with good and bad remote colleagues over the years, so here's some suggestions. Let me know when you are available, we have shared calendars and other means of indicating status, use them. Respect others time, both work and personal. If I can't get in touch with you for an extended period of time, let me know ahead of time or have a good reason afterwards. Let me know of any critical issues, technical or personal as soon as reasonably possible. Let me know at you have on your project plate so I can assist or re-balance work loads if necessary. Please keep up with the "paperwork" aka source control, logging, reports, time-tracking and documentation. If working remotely isn't working out, I've got some offices with doors and a fully stocked break room down the hall. And I'll throw in an extra monitor. :)
tixocloud 14y ago
In my opinion, you should speak with the management to understand their stance and/or concerns. This can be done formally or informally but I would prefer informally just so they won't have their guard up, preparing to say 'no' to you. After you've understood their needs and concerns, as someone else has already mentioned, clearly defined your value proposition to the management team. Provide some structure/insight into the plan on how it may work, get some research supporting remote working and how it has made a tremendous impact on organizations in terms of creativity and boosting the bottom line. Offer to do a small pilot test if the situation allows for it. It's a negotiation situation and when you're clear about the other party's interests and concerns, you'll know what's stopping to other party from saying yes. Good luck! I for one enjoyed remote work in the past but probably because I live far out and don't have kids, I find that going into office to see some faces and talking about tech stuff is more fulfilling. That said, who knows how I would feel further down the road.
justanother 14y ago
The formula that works for me, a 10-year telecommuter: Make people aware of your office hours, and always keep them. This means always starting on-time, taking lunch on-time, and hopefully ending on-time. Anytime in between is fair game for phone calls and Skypes, although of course we want to not distract someone who is getting something done. Any deviations from the agreed-upon schedule are no different from a commuter being AWOL. Don't do it without prior notice. Skypes get acknowledged and replied to within 0-10 minutes, depending on whether I'm getting something out of my head and into the editor and therefore cannot answer you (or getting something out of somewhere else in the bathroom). But they do get answered promptly. E-Mail gets checked hourly or less (personal preference for me, but I don't permit e-mail to interrupt my workflow). Also it's nobody's damn business where I'm working from, and unless I'm very comfortable with you, as far as you know I'm working in a quiet home office. Not very many clients ever know I'm using LTE from (sailboat, beach, back of a moving Honda), and they don't need to, because it can be important to maintain the illusion that I too am rotting in a cubicle, not having more fun than they are.
matb33 14y ago
I'd love to see a videoconferencing solution for cheap that dedicates a full wall of your home office (projector and hd camera combo) mirrored to a similar wall at the office, always on. I know there are expensive 100K type solutions out there, but I think a simple kit could be pulled off. If someone wanted to do a quick face to face, they'd just walk up to your wall and start talking :) Additionally you could link walls with other remote workers or other wall set-ups elsewhere in the main office. Edit: a mini short-throw projector would work well here Edit2: for privacy, since this setup would be always on, you could switch to "closed door mode" which would project a wall and door picture instead. Perhaps the camera on the office end could detect using kinect style magic when someone knocks on your "door" :)
arijo 14y ago
One thing that I've learned to do after a few years working remote is always, early in the beginning of the work day, to send an email to other co-workers with a list of TODOS I plan on working during the day and ETAs for each one of them. This way everybody knows what I'm working on and what deliverables to expect from me by the end of the day. It makes it possible for priorities and adjustments to be discussed before I start working and it makes me feel responsible for deliverables and not for being always online in fear other people might think I'm slacking work.
peterkelly 14y ago
My personal experience has been that working remotely can actually make you significantly more productive, because you can shut off email and all distractions and concentrate on difficult problems for hours at a time. Just make sure people have your phone number if something truly urgent comes up. In an office environment you have people wanting to talk to you all the time (almost always about things that could have waited), and you're constantly distracted, which means things take twice as long to get done. This of course depends very much on the nature of your job. For programming, research, writing etc. the above holds, but for other jobs the situation might be quite different.

29 points by skidding 14y ago

gcb0 14y ago

You have to convince management that they don't need management. Good lucky with that.

hp50g 14y ago
I work remotely. Management were fine when they worked out they could stuck someone else at my desk :)
ankitml 14y ago
One big problems which stops creative people from doing work is management. So essentially it is a good idea to move away from them.
- ankitml 14y ago
  Edit: What I meant was managers who intrude developers with, heya whatsup! are you stuck. Where the best they can do for employees is to shut up. Also the managers where they dont understand importance of code quality and measure everything by how much closer to the end product they are. The managers, who dont understand that sometimes the code just rots and developers have strong sense of intuition when this happens. Do listen to them. The managers who dont understand that complexity of a code increases exponentially with every feature. And telling developers, "oh you just need to add this simple script to the program" can be as dangerous as drunken driving. Ok not as that dangerous, but in case you are making software for autopilots and all.

alexbardas 14y ago

While I tend to a agree to a certain degree (e.g.: you may want/be allowed to take some days to work remotely on a quarterly basis), there's a reason they saw this principle isn't working and even called back the people from large companies, like Yahoo!. Best buy is another example (http://mashable.com/2013/03/05/best-buy-flexible-employees/ http://mashable.com/2013/03/05/best-buy-flexible-employees/). Many agencies still permit this, because they may lose some valuable work force, but most of these decisions were also taken for companies to (re)build a certain culture. One of the main reasons is that it is hard to build a team / team cohesion if you don't physically interact with the other members. Also, motivation inside a team can be much higher. For newcomers, it's also the desire to work next to the best people from the company. I'd like to see the tool (which is still TBD on the github link) where you can achieve most of these and have more gains than losses.

joelrunyon 14y ago

In my opinion, the first thing you need to do for this to work is to have a rock-solid clear value add for your employer. Too many people make remote working arrangements about themselves and that's why they fail (sure, the employer cares about you, but if you act like you're only concerned with yourself, you'll come across poorly). Spend time laying out exactly how your move won't only benefit yourself, but will save the company time, energy & money and even open up future opportunities that you're willing to spearhead. You have to lay out the path so that it's a clear win for them. If you can do that, then you can usually get what you want too. Sean Ogle had an interesting write up about this here (from his own personal experience) - http://www.seanogle.com/entrepreneurship/approaches-to-quitting-your-job http://www.seanogle.com/entrepreneurship/approaches-to-quitt...

jaggederest 14y ago
Personally, my 'value add' is that I won't work for a company that won't support remote developers. If they value my contributions, they'll have my efforts, if not, they won't.
- joelrunyon 14y ago
  That might work if you're getting recruited by a company - but if you're already in a "butt-in-seat" arrangement, you're going to have to bring up a value add for them to contemplate changing things (especially if everyone else in the office is happy with their butt-in-seat arrangement). It's tough to renegotiate a position if you're simply just asking for things and not giving up any sort of consideration or adding some benefit to for the other party.
  - jaggederest 14y ago
    > It's tough to renegotiate a position if you're simply just asking for things and not giving up any sort of consideration or adding some benefit to for the other party. Consideration is I don't quit. It's hard but true. Personally I've walked away from a couple jobs when they tried to reel me back in house.

peterjancelis 14y ago

> Respond to any inquiry in up to 24 hours in working days (unless explicitly taking day off.) If this means responding with the finished code, than make sure the inquiries are small enough. If this means confirming availability or that you got the message at all, than why would you need 3 full work days for that?

eru 14y ago
I guess he means, don't work on the weekend? I.e. respond within 8 working hours, probably.
skidding 14y ago
It doesn't mean responding with finished work, just providing a clear status w/out leaving people in the dark. The time for that should be WAY smaller in most cases. But the 24h margin is a no-panic zone that should cover all timezones

huhtenberg 14y ago

> Respond to any inquiry in up to 24 hours in working days Acknowledge any inquiry within 5-10 minutes unless on a lunch break. Otherwise it means you are afk. (edit) To elaborate - there are two issues involved with this. First is that you are unlikely to ever work on a fully self-contained task that doesn't require collaboration with other people. As such having shared work hours is required. Second issue is that of trust. In common tongue "working from home" means "sleeping in, sitting on a couch, going for two hour lunch breaks, etc". It's a way to slack while pretending to be working. I'm working from home, wink, wink, quote-unquote. In a perfect world you would be judged on deliverables and perfectly met deadlines. In real world, you will frequently need to prove that you've been working and that 1 page of code has indeed been a result of a week of research and numerous rewrites.

drdaeman 14y ago
I'd suggest making several communication channels available, with several priorities. For example, for me a phone call is something that prefers a quick response, an IM message can wait for some time, and a bugtracker ticket or an email is "I'll reply when I'll have time to do it".
- daleharvey 14y ago
  I would put direct email as 'reply asap', usually people ping in irc and if they dont get a response its a direct email. Phone calls are only for very urgent / no point if you dont answer right now, bug tracker is certainly 'when you have time'
davidkatz 14y ago
Absolutely. Working remotely and responding within 24 hours is a complete non starter. Teams need to work tightly together. I'd even go as far as saying 'acknowledge all messages within 1 minute'. Being able to talk to people immediately is critical. (I've been running a remote team for 5 years)
- _pmf_ 14y ago

drdaeman 14y ago

I do work remotely for several years (with infrequent in-person meetings at the office with colleagues), and I'd say in long run it's somehow hard to separate matters and, for example, stay focused on the work, while being at home. It's certainly manageable, but still requires some fairly strong willpower to manage oneself. Being lazy, sometimes, I would actually perfer to have a distraction-free office envinorment. So, my suggestion is, don't [completely] deprecate office space, at least for the first 2-3 years.

espeed 14y ago

Watch Greg Wilson's talk "What We Actually Know About Software Development, and Why We Believe It's True" -- he cites research that supports working remotely (http://vimeo.com/9270320 http://vimeo.com/9270320).

workbench 14y ago

> don't need to do - Be available at any particular time of a working day Sorry… but how is anyone supposed to work with you with this attitude. If I had to work with someone who was never around and I didn't even know if I could contact them for sure without waiting 24h for a reply then I'd be complaining to management to ditch the guy and hire someone who wants to work.

eloisant 14y ago
I agree this rule is problematic, and it's not just a matter of attitude. It's practical. When you work with someone you need to have some time of the day when you know you can contact the guy.

qwerta 14y ago

Simply make partial telecommuting hard requirement from your side. I made it very clear at interview that I need some quiet time to keep my productivity. I got hired and now I work 2 days a week from home. Surprisingly I work for large corporation at 'cubicle sea' and everyone has VPN access and works from home sometimes. My previous job in another large corp had similar policy.

boothead 14y ago
Why is it that big companies get this? In two weeks I'll be going from a nine person company when there's no working from home whatsoever under any circumstances to a ~250k person company where it's supposedly allowed. WTF?
- polskibus 14y ago
  It's because of the relative importance of team cohesion on the output of entire company. In a corporation of 250k people, 1 (potential) slacker is max 1/250k lost output. In a company of 9 it is max 1/9th. It's all about risk management here, managing both probabilities and potential consequences.
  - frozenport 14y ago
    If we take the ML estimate, I would say that the 1/9th chance distributes evenly. So it is 1/9th loss for both cases. I have found that large corporations are able to capitalize better on incremental improvements and responsibilities are more narrow: hence they can tolerate less overall employee productivity. Also, they might be more experienced at managing people and understand that advantages that working from home bring. For example, taking care of your children so that you live in constant fear of loosing your job :-)
    - polskibus 14y ago
      I'd disagree, based on my observations in both environments. Law of large numbers shows that it is easier to hide unusual behavior when number of samples is large and the observer is focused on aggregate-based performance measurement.

ultimoo 14y ago

> Make your location available on each working day (for both reliability and safety) Does this mean like over Google Latitude or Find my Friends or something? How would that help with safety? It'd help if you can elaborate on this point a bit more. Also, could it be a slight privacy issue with some folk if they accidentally leave it on after working hours are over? I like the rest of the points you make though. Good luck with convincing your management!

andyhmltn 14y ago
And as a side note, using something like that isn't reliable at all. Say I wanted to go down the pub for an hour, what's to stop me leaving my phone at home so it looks like I'm still about?
- ewoodrich 14y ago
  Or, what's to stop you from responding to questions while at the pub, but not while you're taking a break at home. Pure geolocation is not ideal for this usage.
  - andyhmltn 14y ago
    That's very true. I just gave that example because relying on a geolocation app (as you said) would not really guarantee your employees are working.

xradionut 14y ago

I work in a mixed office, half in/half remote. I'm one of the few people (team lead/admin) that has to be in the office 90 percent of the working hours, which is fine. But I deal with good and bad remote colleagues over the years, so here's some suggestions. Let me know when you are available, we have shared calendars and other means of indicating status, use them. Respect others time, both work and personal. If I can't get in touch with you for an extended period of time, let me know ahead of time or have a good reason afterwards. Let me know of any critical issues, technical or personal as soon as reasonably possible. Let me know at you have on your project plate so I can assist or re-balance work loads if necessary. Please keep up with the "paperwork" aka source control, logging, reports, time-tracking and documentation. If working remotely isn't working out, I've got some offices with doors and a fully stocked break room down the hall. And I'll throw in an extra monitor. :)

tixocloud 14y ago

In my opinion, you should speak with the management to understand their stance and/or concerns. This can be done formally or informally but I would prefer informally just so they won't have their guard up, preparing to say 'no' to you. After you've understood their needs and concerns, as someone else has already mentioned, clearly defined your value proposition to the management team. Provide some structure/insight into the plan on how it may work, get some research supporting remote working and how it has made a tremendous impact on organizations in terms of creativity and boosting the bottom line. Offer to do a small pilot test if the situation allows for it. It's a negotiation situation and when you're clear about the other party's interests and concerns, you'll know what's stopping to other party from saying yes. Good luck! I for one enjoyed remote work in the past but probably because I live far out and don't have kids, I find that going into office to see some faces and talking about tech stuff is more fulfilling. That said, who knows how I would feel further down the road.

justanother 14y ago

The formula that works for me, a 10-year telecommuter: Make people aware of your office hours, and always keep them. This means always starting on-time, taking lunch on-time, and hopefully ending on-time. Anytime in between is fair game for phone calls and Skypes, although of course we want to not distract someone who is getting something done. Any deviations from the agreed-upon schedule are no different from a commuter being AWOL. Don't do it without prior notice. Skypes get acknowledged and replied to within 0-10 minutes, depending on whether I'm getting something out of my head and into the editor and therefore cannot answer you (or getting something out of somewhere else in the bathroom). But they do get answered promptly. E-Mail gets checked hourly or less (personal preference for me, but I don't permit e-mail to interrupt my workflow). Also it's nobody's damn business where I'm working from, and unless I'm very comfortable with you, as far as you know I'm working in a quiet home office. Not very many clients ever know I'm using LTE from (sailboat, beach, back of a moving Honda), and they don't need to, because it can be important to maintain the illusion that I too am rotting in a cubicle, not having more fun than they are.

matb33 14y ago

I'd love to see a videoconferencing solution for cheap that dedicates a full wall of your home office (projector and hd camera combo) mirrored to a similar wall at the office, always on. I know there are expensive 100K type solutions out there, but I think a simple kit could be pulled off. If someone wanted to do a quick face to face, they'd just walk up to your wall and start talking :) Additionally you could link walls with other remote workers or other wall set-ups elsewhere in the main office. Edit: a mini short-throw projector would work well here Edit2: for privacy, since this setup would be always on, you could switch to "closed door mode" which would project a wall and door picture instead. Perhaps the camera on the office end could detect using kinect style magic when someone knocks on your "door" :)

arijo 14y ago

One thing that I've learned to do after a few years working remote is always, early in the beginning of the work day, to send an email to other co-workers with a list of TODOS I plan on working during the day and ETAs for each one of them. This way everybody knows what I'm working on and what deliverables to expect from me by the end of the day. It makes it possible for priorities and adjustments to be discussed before I start working and it makes me feel responsible for deliverables and not for being always online in fear other people might think I'm slacking work.

peterkelly 14y ago

My personal experience has been that working remotely can actually make you significantly more productive, because you can shut off email and all distractions and concentrate on difficult problems for hours at a time. Just make sure people have your phone number if something truly urgent comes up. In an office environment you have people wanting to talk to you all the time (almost always about things that could have waited), and you're constantly distracted, which means things take twice as long to get done. This of course depends very much on the nature of your job. For programming, research, writing etc. the above holds, but for other jobs the situation might be quite different.