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Let employees work from home

midnightdba.com

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Re: Let employees work from home

#171

Post by overgard »

Mz wrote: post #146
jasode wrote: post #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 abo…

So, my first thought was Textbroker. But then I searched and couldn't even find a Wikipedia article profiling them, though I did find this: https://techcrunch.com/2010/10/24/textbroker-raises-multi-mi... And then it occurred to me that their thousands of writers are not employees. They are 1099 contract positions. And then I remembered the awful stuff that went down when the Fortune 500 company I worked for created W…

It sounds more like you just had dysfunctional management, not that the concept is bad.

Re: Let employees work from home

#172

Post by dasmoth »

Morgawr wrote: post #120
RHSeeger wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you need to have a reason to WFH Personally, I have reasons... I prefer it, I get more done, it cuts out the commute time (which includes a lot more than actual time in the car), it lets me work on things at night when I want to... Sure, there are negatives too, but there's a heck of a lot of positives, too. > you should attend to all the meetings you need to and be reachable Working from home has no real impact on…

> I prefer it, I get more done, it cuts out the commute time (which includes a lot more than actual time in the car), it lets me work on things at night when I want to... Don't get me wrong, I absolutely agree with you. I don't prefer it but I understand where you are coming from and I think you should be allowed to do so if you find it's better for your productivity. I find I prefer working from home when writing de…

whereas if I am developing I prefer a more customized setup with multiple screens and stuff so I have that better at work than at home.

That may be true at Google, but there are a bunch of supposedly high-tech companies which are happy to give people seriously cruddy workstations. Even though my home setup is actually a 5-year-old monitor on a standing desk I bodged from an off-cut of worktop, it's dramatically nicer than what I have in the main office.

Re: Let employees work from home

#173

Post by TimJYoung »

e12e wrote: post #151
TimJYoung wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was the first choice for many companies. In the Delphi development world (starting in 1996), NNTP was pervasive and almost every company related to the 3rd party ecosystem ran an NNTP server (we still do, it provides both NNTP and web access to the same message store). Believe it or not, the issue wasn't as much the servers not being maintained any more, it was the clients . Various clients, especially email clien…

Just a reminder that the d programming language forums are architected on the back of nntp: https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed

Thanks, it's nice to see that it's still kicking around elsewhere.

Re: Let employees work from home

#174

Post by Blackthorn »

foobarge wrote: post #141
brianwawok wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My overall impression that WFH is very frowned upon at Google. Sure, maybe you can use it 2 days a month. But no thanks, I get to WFH every day. Life is too short to commute.

I work for the big G. and I work from home. There's a couple hundred employees that work full time from home, a minuscule amount in comparison to the work force. I travel to the office every two quarters and I usually get nothing done (meetings, interruptions, etc...) VC, chat and email makes it possible to do work. Folks saying that they can't, err, "ideate" when they're not together making noise and preventing othe…

I do as well. It's very rare, and I've accepted that my career is probably ended at T5 (which is what I'm at). I've had team members promoted to T6 for being individual contributors but I recognize that I've got a very long uphill battle.

Furthermore I have to travel to the office for a week every month and a half or so. That amount of travel sucks, but it's the price I pay for being able to work remotely so I pay it.

Re: Let employees work from home

#175

Post by dasmoth »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #119
barrkel wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who ask quick questions on chat almost invariably could have found the answer with 20 minutes work. Answering those questions frequently costs the answerer more than 20 minutes of flow; interruptions are costly to focus.

But this is the case for face-to-face conversations as well.

Quite. Which is why I'd like a full-remote job.

A while back, while working in a relatively large but sparsely filled open-plan setup, I had a tendency to hide in the far corner of the building when I had code to write. My manager at the time once complained "I start walking over to see you, but when I'm half way there I decide it's not important". I think he did, at least, pretty quickly realise what he was saying.

Having a (low-ish, but meaningful) transactional cost to "quick questions" is a good thing.

Re: Let employees work from home

#176

Post by barrkel »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #119
barrkel wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who ask quick questions on chat almost invariably could have found the answer with 20 minutes work. Answering those questions frequently costs the answerer more than 20 minutes of flow; interruptions are costly to focus.

But this is the case for face-to-face conversations as well.

People can pick up on social cues much easier in person, however.

Whether it's headphones, or making it clear what a context switch looks like, trivial questions are definitely cut down.

Re: Let employees work from home

#177

Post by douche »

noobhacker wrote: post #166
bitL wrote: post #117

The crab mentality here is really appalling :-( I work remotely for 6+ years; during that time I created some unique algorithms, traveled around the world, met diverse types of people giving me unexpected inspirations from which business benefited tremendously (unique stuff nobody else has). I have the big 4 companies trying to contact me all the time if I wouldn't want to work for them, however seeing inside e.g. cr…

How do you keep learning without much serendipitous interactions with people in your field? This is the biggest reason that makes me hesitate to try out WFH.

The same way I keep learning now: reading books, reading my rss feed, newsletters, Hackernews, etc, etc.

There's not much serendipity in any office I've ever worked in; I've always had to do the legwork myself.

Re: Let employees work from home

#178

Post by barrkel »

mabbo wrote: post #67
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…

On the topic of emails, if they're long, I try to structure them a bit like newspaper articles. Start with an executive summary, then say the same thing again with a bit more detail, and then say it a third time with data, if possible / necessary.

Re: Let employees work from home

#179

Post by taternuts »

radmuzom wrote: post #36

As a divorced single guy with not too many friends, I look forward every day to go to work and have people around me. I interact socially only with three or four of my office mates. Anyway, I may be the exception, but I am not an employee who wants to work from home.

I just moved across the country and feel the same. I also just feel as if I accomplished more by going into the office, even if I get the same work done.

Re: Let employees work from home

#180

Post by mcgrath_sh »

I feel like my current setup is perfect for me. I work at an office that is 15 minutes away by car with no traffic and 30-35 mins with traffic and via back roads. I can go in and leave when I want, as long as I am doing the work. I have never been a morning person. Essentially, I wake up at 8, hang around my house til 8:45-10 depending on the day and zip into the office. I then work until 5 and do some more work either before or after at home. There are 2-3 days a week that I work from home if I feel like it. I will come in for a half day over lunch break. Or I will leave at or after lunch and finish the day at home. Basically, I am presented both options and do what I want. I don't think I would want either exclusively, but the ability to mix and match is wonderful!
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