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I'm on a fully remote team, though I happen to live two subway stops from our product's HQ. A few times a year I will go in to work alongside people from other

I'm on a fully remote team, though I happen to live two subway stops from our product's HQ. A few times a year I will go in to work alongside people from other teams, or when someone from my team is in town for one reason or another. My experience working remotely has been overwhelmingly positive. A notable advantage is avoidance of certain office dogmas -- particularly, the expectation of 8 contiguous work hours. When it comes to coding, I don't have the mental stamina to produce meaningful technical thoughts for longer than 4 or 5 straight hours. 8 hour shifts are inefficient for me personally, because I get drained and "waste" 25-35% of those working hours with lower quality output. Working from home lets me work in multiple 2-4 hour spurts a day with time to mentally refresh inbetween. I'm still available to my team during the 9-5 block(computer nearby, phone always on if I'm out), but if I were in an office, I think coming in and out for 2-5 "micro shifts" a day would be frowned upon. The major downside is that at times it is difficult to turn off. My manager's (tongue in cheek) claim is that WFH is a trick to make employees work longer. I'd say that's true. The lack of effort it takes to start working when you're at home makes it easy to justify "oh, I'm here; I'll just hit this now." At it's worst -- this August -- there was so much work that I'd work straight into the night, fall asleep, wake up, and pick up my laptop. If I was working from an office I imagine the 9-5 rhythm might have been easier. One other thing worth mentioning is that I lucked out with a great team. They are great technologists from a wide variety of backgrounds and I'm humbled and impressed by my teammates frequently. Sometimes I think learning little things from them has been more valuable to me than the experience I've gained in our "hot" technologies..

daly 12y ago
"WFH is a trick to make employees work longer" -- the term for this is "Living at Work" rather than "Working from Home". Some days work gets WAY more time than 8 hours, some days it gets WAY less time. Programming is a lot like art work. I've watched my wife (an artist) spend hours mixing paint, stretching canvas, washing brushes ... and have not a stroke of paint on the canvas. Then the next day she spends 12 hours doing nothing but painting. Programmers also have to do "setup" time work which does not result in code and appears unproductive. When working from home it appears that you're not working because bad managers only count lines of code. In the office environment setup work still looks like work because you are "at your desk". Learn to live with the fact that you appear to be slacking when working remote. Also be aware that NOBODY does more that 70% of their total possible output on a continuous basis. NOBODY. Even bricklayers, where you can count the bricks laid, take time for lunch, use their cell phone, drive to the hardware store, mix cement, and everything but lay bricks.

daly 12y ago

"WFH is a trick to make employees work longer" -- the term for this is "Living at Work" rather than "Working from Home". Some days work gets WAY more time than 8 hours, some days it gets WAY less time. Programming is a lot like art work. I've watched my wife (an artist) spend hours mixing paint, stretching canvas, washing brushes ... and have not a stroke of paint on the canvas. Then the next day she spends 12 hours doing nothing but painting. Programmers also have to do "setup" time work which does not result in code and appears unproductive. When working from home it appears that you're not working because bad managers only count lines of code. In the office environment setup work still looks like work because you are "at your desk". Learn to live with the fact that you appear to be slacking when working remote. Also be aware that NOBODY does more that 70% of their total possible output on a continuous basis. NOBODY. Even bricklayers, where you can count the bricks laid, take time for lunch, use their cell phone, drive to the hardware store, mix cement, and everything but lay bricks.