Why I Only Work Remotely
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Why I Only Work Remotely
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Re: Why I Only Work Remotely
#2Some employers would argue that your privacy is forfeited during working hours. After all they pay you a salary, and if they want you in the office so be it - even if it is a less effective environment. Needless to say, I sympathize with the OP view here.
Re: Why I Only Work Remotely
#3I agree that forcing the same strict work hours (9am - 7pm) is not always effective. The author explains exactly why that doesn't work for them and why they are much less effective.
However, I've found that when people all have different hours (especially over different timezones) it's difficult for the one-off meetings when something needs to be hashed out in person or skype. I suppose this problem may actually be a side effect of our office having strict working hours so we don't know how to operate on the days when most of the office is remote and working on different hours. Companies like 37Signals have clearly figured out how to build a collaborative and productive company across multiple timezones.
Re: Why I Only Work Remotely
#4Some employers would argue that your privacy is forfeited during working hours. After all they pay you a salary, and if they want you in the office so be it - even if it is a less effective environment. Needless to say, I sympathize with the OP view here.
Good point. It's often stipulated in the contract or made clear during the interview process what the expectations are, which is good. The unfortunate part is that employers may not realize that their policies are actually decreasing productivity.
Re: Why I Only Work Remotely
#5I work at a company which has a beautiful building, I spend the majority of time in the office which is fantastic, the social aspect plus internal networking is very good.
I work from home on average maybe 0.8 days a week, for various reasons, but I get lots of work done and am quite productive from home.
There are some things that you just can't do the same from home. You can be much more agile when working in proximity. Face to face conversations are important and effective. There is a lot of missing out if you work 100% remotely in companies that aren't 100% remote.
Re: Why I Only Work Remotely
#6Agreed. I've been working remotely for 2 years now and don't think I could go back to an office. The open office floor plans are just horrendous for actually getting any work done.
The article doesn't talk about the high cost of commuting but this is the biggest factor for me. Having that extra two hours per day, and not being exhausted when I get home, has really expanded the amount of living (social, fitness, hobbies) I've been able to do and has expanded my life more than anything else. Not to mention the cost savings.
It's a lot more difficult to find remote jobs than traditional office jobs, especially ones that pay well. But the extra effort in the job search more than pays off.
Re: Why I Only Work Remotely
#7I completely agree with the author's points, except for one small caveat--the overall quality of projects that one can find in remote work (at least based on my personal experience and search) is usually abysmal. At first glance, a good indicator would be the salaries that remote companies pay, and most remote companies tend to pay peanuts, using 'remote' as an excuse to underpay, and thus also signaling that they don't care to pay a premium for software engineers because their projects don't really need top talent or a lot of experience. From all this, it also follows that career development is quite stagnant at remote companies. I wish things were different, but until the Big Five start allowing and encouraging remote-only distributed work, things won't change a lot...
Re: Why I Only Work Remotely
#8For as much as people like to hate on open offices on HN, it still baffles me why there aren't more Y Combinator startups founded with remote work or private offices as core company principles.
Just a guess, but I wonder if the decision to just go with open offices has to do with the ability to scale such a plan quickly and easily, whereas scaling a remote team is too difficult or building or rearranging private offices takes too long and costs too much.
A possibly poor analogy might be the difference between going with some cloud provider which scales more quickly vs building out your own server which is more costly and possibly more difficult to maintain.
Re: Why I Only Work Remotely
#9At home I can control the noise & temperature of my work environment. These aren't brought up often but they're huge to my productivity. I can't work well when I'm uncomfortable. Trying to code with numb fingers or while sweating is miserable to my productivity.
Re: Why I Only Work Remotely
#10I work at a company which has a beautiful building, I spend the majority of time in the office which is fantastic, the social aspect plus internal networking is very good. I work from home on average maybe 0.8 days a week, for various reasons, but I get lots of work done and am quite productive from home. There are some things that you just can't do the same from home. You can be much more agile when working in proxi…
To me, that last bit is an argument for more companies being 100% remote. After all, many open-source projects have been developed by 100% distributed teams.