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Let employees work from home

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Re: Let employees work from home

#61

Post by besogne »

mcculley wrote: post #3

I'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…

> However, how do you deliver more value than someone from a developing country if your pipes are so narrow?

I have moved to a developing country, and now I work from here.

Below the line, there are many candidates to one job. Above the line, there are many jobs to one candidate. Above the line, you can work from where you like. Below the line, you are lucky to have a job at all. They can even tell you to dress like a clown for work, if that is their fancy, and what can you do about it? Nothing.

> I think there's still a lot of room for the value provided by teams working closely together.

Not really. Anybody with talents above the line, will not join such team. So, you will be surrounded by people with talent that is too limited to get what they want. You will most likely not learn anything useful either. What you describe is the prototypical dead-end job.

Re: Let employees work from home

#62

Post by TeMPOraL »

dsacco wrote: post #55
TeMPOraL wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think companies need to accommodate the differences in people here; either within one company or within the industry they need to split into "office friendly" and "remote friendly" groups. I'm on the introvert side of things and I'm simply oversaturated with human interactions. I have to actively avoid being physically around other human beings just to keep my sanity. I recently managed to convince my boss to give…

I'm sensitive to the fact that you're more productive in an environment that caters to being an introvert. But if an organization were to allow people to work from home who asked to, how would they maintain the same overall productivity between groups? What if you want to work from home but your team believes there will be a productivity-reducing communication cost? How does the organization respond to this? Can it b…

Yeah, I agree. Allowing WFH is not a trivial thing for a company. My impression is that many don't allow it out of risk aversion ("nobody got fired for not allowing people to work remotely"?).

As a tangent, I wonder a project with such "productivity-reducing communication cost" for (even partial) WFH looks like. Honest question, because so far I've never worked in one. I ask because the very idea of it goes against what I consider a properly organized programming project.

On the design meetings of the projects I worked in, I always pushed for figuring out appropriate architecture to minimize required communication between people. We decomposed the problems until we were able to identify isolated areas of the project and design interfaces between them, and then we coded them in isolation, with occasional exchanges for adjusting the design (interfaces, in particular) when things changed, like they always do.

Re: Let employees work from home

#63

Post by rumcajz »

The article assumes that making money is the primary goal of a corporation. If it was, then sure, WFH would make sense.

However, the corporation is not a sentient entity. It cannot desire anything, be it money or something else. It's only human participants that have incentives.

Of those, only shareholders have direct incentive to make profit, but even then they may own the shares for speculative purposes and desire share price to grow, not necessarily the profit. And even that's not necessarily true: Those who short their position may actually want the shore price to drop.

But shareholders in fact don't have much influence of business decisions of the corporation. Those are delegated to the management. The management, in turn, has incentives to extract as much rent from the business as possible. Thus, it cares about profits only to the extent where it adds to their rent. Increasing profit while decreasing the rent is a bad trade-off.

Regular employees, in their turn have incentives very similar to the management. They want to be paid as much as possible without losing the job.

All in all, you can think of it as of struggle for a limited resource (bananas, share of profit) in a group of chimpanzees.

Now, imagine what would happen if one chimpanzee refused to participate in the group's interactions, walked away, but still demanded his share of bananas. It's not going to work.

In the end, I would say that WFH would only work if everybody worked from home, completely changing the way the group interacts.

Re: Let employees work from home

#64

Post by abalashov »

throwaway2016a wrote: post #47

I like working from home sometimes. A line is crossed for me when a company goes 100% remote. I would go crazy working from home day in and day out. I actually did have a borderline nervous breakdown years ago because I couldn't take being alone so much of the day. In fact if I have to work from home full time again I would pay to have a membership in a co-working space just to be around other humans. I think work fr…

Oh, indeed. I can relate to this. So much so that I wrote a blog post about it:

https://likewise.am/2015/12/18/why-i-love-industrious-and-ab...

Re: Let employees work from home

#65

Post by intoverflow2 »

mcculley wrote: post #3

I'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…

Probably an unpopular opinion but as someone working in a creative side of a tech company, my interactions with remote workers are tedious at best.

Discussions that would be counted in seconds sitting side by side turn into 10-20 minute long video awkward skype calls.

There is so much anecdotal evidence in blog posts about how great remote is for your devs because "an interruption costs 15 minutes of concentration" yet very little about the reality of other people in the organisation having to work with these privileged employees.

Re: Let employees work from home

#66

Post by matwood »

user5994461 wrote: post #16
alansammarone wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Text is the least efficient of all forms of commutations. How long to write a long email? How long to speak to someone?

> How long to write a long email? How long to speak to someone?

A better question is how long to say something that is well thought out and matters vs. how long to write something that is well thought out and matters. I have found that talking leads to lots of talking with little real substance unless it is meant to be a brainstorm session. And even then, writing ideas down before hand help to quickly get to the sticking points rather than bike shedding over something trivial and wasting everyones time.

Writing out a page long email forces the writer to think through and address their idea more seriously up front. This is why Bezos famously requires a written memo for a new idea before the meeting [0].

[0] http://blog.idonethis.com/jeff-bezos-self-discipline-writing...

Re: Let employees work from home

#67

Post by mabbo »

barrkel wrote: post #45

I worked remotely, from home, for 5 years. These days, I work mostly in the office, with a 40 minute commute each way, despite the option for occasional working from home. There's a few reasons to prefer working in the office. The single biggest one is the hard delimiting of the work day; when I'm not in the office, I'm not working, I'm not available on email or chat, and unless it's an exceptional situation, nobody…

> when I'm not in the office, I'm not working

This resonates very strongly with me. A "wfh" day for me means I get half as much done. My home is where I keep all my distractions!

> You can put together a logical argument, a coherent or strawman proposal, and discuss things at length point by point. It's much higher bandwidth. But too few people read long emails

My trick for this: I write the email, then I go back to the to start and write a 3-4 sentence summary of the rest of it. Often doing that leads me to delete the rest of the email entirely. Always check: are you writing at length to help someone else, or just to clarify your own thoughts?

Re: Let employees work from home

#68

Post by athenot »

barrkel wrote: post #45

I worked remotely, from home, for 5 years. These days, I work mostly in the office, with a 40 minute commute each way, despite the option for occasional working from home. There's a few reasons to prefer working in the office. The single biggest one is the hard delimiting of the work day; when I'm not in the office, I'm not working, I'm not available on email or chat, and unless it's an exceptional situation, nobody…

> The days when people were trained on newsgroup netiquette are long gone.

That is why it is hard to do decisions by email. Also, poor thread representation by email clients doesn't help.

Chat has the potential of being used efficiently, where arguments are stripped of their emotion and converge faster to a point without rambling. To your point, chat can be made high-bandwidth, with multi-sentence points made in a single message, or they can be a verbose rambling that consumes time and focus.

It really comes down to the professionalism of the team you're working with. Some people are a lot more cognizant about minimizing the waste of other people's time, and get to the point instantly. Others just type whatever is going through their mind—and I should point out that they are equally good at wasting time in in-person meetings.

So then it's not about the communication medium or whether people are physically present; it's about how we use each other's time.

Full disclosure: I work in the BU that makes Cisco Spark, a chat/collab tool. :)

PS: I agree with your other points about home/work context separation. We solve that by explicitely "checking in" / "checking out" of chats. There's an expectation that people are NOT always-on (except for a few rare operations chats). Notifications are adjusted accordingly, so as to not be disturbed during family time.

Re: Let employees work from home

#69

Post by matwood »

sigi45 wrote: post #2

Or 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.

How does this have anything to do with WFH? If someone is not reachable and has not communicated up front they are going to be out, then fire them. This is no different than if they just stopped showing up to an office job.

I always love the arguments that are around 'well how will I know my programmers are working'? Well, how do you know they are working when they are in the office?

Re: Let employees work from home

#70

Post by besogne »

jusuchin wrote: post #56
barrkel wrote: post #45

I worked remotely, from home, for 5 years. These days, I work mostly in the office, with a 40 minute commute each way, despite the option for occasional working from home. There's a few reasons to prefer working in the office. The single biggest one is the hard delimiting of the work day; when I'm not in the office, I'm not working, I'm not available on email or chat, and unless it's an exceptional situation, nobody…

I guess it's different strokes for different folks. Personally, I feel I can communicate much more efficiently via chat/messaging mediums than email. Chatting, in my opinion, at least in a late 20 something (27 year old)'s mind, emulates a real conversation where if you don't respond it's essentially ignoring the other person. If you have a bigger thought, sure you can type it out and get that message to multiple peo…

Chatting favours subjects that only require a short span of attention. At the same time, anything of real value will take a minimum length and complexity to explain. That is why the output of chat/messaging tends to be worth little to nothing. Chat/messaging is something appreciated by demographics who do not have anything useful to say anyway. To an important extent, it is the same kind of people who have a hard time finding a job, and when they finally get one, they don't manage to keep it for long.
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