Let employees work from home
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Let employees work from home
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Re: Let employees work from home
#2Or don't.
Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
There is a story of mysql as a company who had an employee who was not reachable for a few months.
Yahoo got there workforce back at the office.
I personally like to have the option to work at home when necessary and i might get more stuff done at home i also might just not work.
Re: Let employees work from home
#3I've a contrarian view on this. Not all IT jobs are amenable to remote work. Some work benefits from tighter collaboration than current technology offers. Sometimes that collaboration is with folks other than IT staff, who may be less comfortable using technology solutions for collaboration.
If the inputs and outputs of your job can be delivered entirely over email and version control commits, then work from home is a good idea. However, how do you deliver more value than someone from a developing country if your pipes are so narrow? I think there's still a lot of room for the value provided by teams working closely together.
Re: Let employees work from home
#4I think WFH is a great idea, but until we can do multi-user video conferencing over the average home internet connection, it just isn't going to be as good as in-person interactions. However, once we can reliably see one another's faces in HD and share screens at the same time, it might even be superior to sitting next to someone and having them try to look over your shoulder as you show them something or ask a question. WFH is all about communication tech. If it's high grade, WFH works. If it's low grade, it doesn't.
Re: Let employees work from home
#5This article essentially boiled down to: I want X. A few companies already offer X. You should offer X too.
There are sometimes advantages to offering full or partial work-from-home options to employees. For some projects and company cultures, it can work well. But honestly, this blog post was a rather shallow argument in favor of it.
Re: Let employees work from home
#6I've a contrarian view on this. Not all IT jobs are amenable to remote work. Some work benefits from tighter collaboration than current technology offers. Sometimes that collaboration is with folks other than IT staff, who may be less comfortable using technology solutions for collaboration. If the inputs and outputs of your job can be delivered entirely over email and version control commits, then work from home is…
Basically every piece of useful information that can be encoded using your voice can also be encoded using an email - and in a much more efficient way, since you don't have to keep deciphering emotional cues. Of course, expressing emotions, for example, can be harder, but I don't think engineers should be relying too much on expressing their emotion as a way to do a good job.
Re: Let employees work from home
#7>Objections to work from home fall apart
Essays from workers like Jen McCown isn't going to work.
What works is to have massively successful businesses that beat the competition because their employees work remotely. Since no multi-billion dollar business has demonstrated that specific cause & effect, the idea doesn't gain traction.
Yes, businesses like Basecamp and Automattic have remote workers but I'm talking about significant business successes on the scale of Google/Apple/SpaceX/etc. If a remote workforce can demonstrate unequivocal superiority, there would be endless case studies about it in Harvard Business Review and every manager would be copying it like the Six Sigma craze a few decades ago.
What the WFH movement needs is evidence of massive business success instead of essays. So far, the real-world evidence just hasn't tipped the scales yet.
Re: Let employees work from home
#8I've a contrarian view on this. Not all IT jobs are amenable to remote work. Some work benefits from tighter collaboration than current technology offers. Sometimes that collaboration is with folks other than IT staff, who may be less comfortable using technology solutions for collaboration. If the inputs and outputs of your job can be delivered entirely over email and version control commits, then work from home is…
Basically every piece of useful information that can be encoded using your voice can also be encoded using an email - and in a much more efficient way, since you don't have to keep deciphering emotional cues. Of course, expressing emotions, for example, can be harder, but I don't think engineers should be relying too much on expressing their emotion as a way to do a good job.
If true, this is fine, as long as you are an engineer and talk only to other engineers. People from different backgrounds don't use email this way, though.
Re: Let employees work from home
#9Or don't. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. There is a story of mysql as a company who had an employee who was not reachable for a few months. Yahoo got there workforce back at the office. I personally like to have the option to work at home when necessary and i might get more stuff done at home i also might just not work.
"There is a story of mysql as a company who had an employee who was not reachable for a few months."
I couldn't find the story with some (brief) googling. What makes it different to "they didn't turn up the office for a few months"? Were they still getting work done?
Re: Let employees work from home
#10I've a contrarian view on this. Not all IT jobs are amenable to remote work. Some work benefits from tighter collaboration than current technology offers. Sometimes that collaboration is with folks other than IT staff, who may be less comfortable using technology solutions for collaboration. If the inputs and outputs of your job can be delivered entirely over email and version control commits, then work from home is…
Basically every piece of useful information that can be encoded using your voice can also be encoded using an email - and in a much more efficient way, since you don't have to keep deciphering emotional cues. Of course, expressing emotions, for example, can be harder, but I don't think engineers should be relying too much on expressing their emotion as a way to do a good job.
This is nonsense. Body language, tone, empathy: all are crucial to successful communication between people, even engineers, even technical communications, believe it or not.