Remote

Perhaps it's because, as the the book notes, that overlap in working schedules (which timezone overlap facilitates) is important to collaboration.

I work for a major F500 company and while they are currently not allowing any new remote employees, there are still thousands of us. My team is all over the country and I don't have an office to go into.

Honestly when I first started working from home for them years ago, I figured more and more companies would embrace it and it would become much more commonplace. They did it to save money having to house employees somewhere, but I guess other companies don't see it that way. It works wonderfully for getting work done during your own schedule and still be there with your family. Though I still find it amusing when I walk the dog and it's just me and the retirees.

My full time job in technology morphed into work-from-home after about eighteen months. It happened for two reasons: #1, they knew me and trusted me to get the work done, and #2, I was literally the last person on my team still on site. My team's spread all over the world at this point.

I kept going to the office for a while, then realized that, aside from having three monitors on my desk, there was no advantage for me going there, and there are disadvantages. After two years, this is what I've learned.

Advantages of remote work:

- Time: I save 2-3 hours daily from getting dressed up, making lunch, and commuting.

- Efficiency: it's quiet in my home office (the family knows to leave me alone while the door's closed). I've got 16 gigs of RAM on my home computer, plenty of disk space, and it's actually faster and better than my work computer. The work computer required so much bureaucratic rigmarole to get it updated that I gave up.

- Comfort: my chair is always where I left it, unlike at the office :(. My coffee is made the way I like it, unlike the crappy K-Cup thing at the office which never has decaf (I can't drink full caffeine). Lunch consists of pulling a piece of cold chicken out of the fridge 10 feet away. I can walk outside into the conservation land across the street while thinking about a problem.

- Quiet: I don't have to listen to nonstop irrelevant conversation, computer noises, phones ringing.

- Financial: We took a trip to Nova Scotia and I managed to work every day from my laptop in wifi hotspots, avoiding using any vacation hours. Of course, it was not a vacation for me during the working day, but the family got to enjoy a nice trip. I do the same when visiting the parents at Thanksgiving--we land Monday or Tuesday evening and I work before the holiday begins. My vacation time has accordingly piled up and I'm going to cash some of it in.

- Family-friendly: I can pick up and drop off my kid to school, and be at home for her while my wife's at work. No need to pay for after-school or a nanny.

- Healthy: no stress from commuting. I can go jogging at lunchtime, grab a shower later on in the day. It's just an hour out of my day, whereas there's not even a shower at the office, let alone a gym.

Disadvantages:

- The fridge, as noted above, is only 10 feet away. Even worse is the bowl of surplus Halloween candy sitting on the counter nearby.

- Always available means never offline. My manager knows I'm probably at my computer at 9pm or 10pm, so he'll text me with questions. (I always answer. To me, this is the price of WFH: out of fear that some small minded executive will some day say, "You should be in the office from now on so we can better track you", I make sure that they never have reason to doubt my productivity and availability. I'm overcompensating of course, but then I enjoy my work and I am grateful for the flexibility so I return the favor. We're kind of a start-up within a big corporation anyway, so long hours are the norm.)

- The family sees me sitting there and talks to me. I have to fend them off.

- Very tempting to spend time on Facebook and other sites such as Hacker News :) I rationalize it as blowing off steam, but jogging's better, really.

While writing my master thesis in electrical engineering (pure matlab based), I found the best way was to go about 2-3 days a week to the shared computer room from the department where other students where working. Most of those days I didn't get as much work done in terms of writing compared to when I was at home, but many days I got new ideas, algorithms or a new perspective by hearing other students talk about a different but related topic or discussing a problem with a college. So for me it was the best way to have both worlds, long phases of time at home for writing and implement stuff and quick interrupted time at the university for some quick code trying new stuff, discussing etc. It was commonly accepted that you are no as productive in the computer room and no one would blame you if you just picked up your notebook and went to a room next door for an hour or so to get stuff done.

I'm completely taking this off course with a minor nitpick, but

> We're kind of a start-up within a big corporation anyway, so long hours are the norm.

How is that an implication? You're making a new product instead of an existing one, so you're expected to sleep less and not see your family?