Why Showing Your Face at Work Matters
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Why Showing Your Face at Work Matters
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Re: Why Showing Your Face at Work Matters
#2Working from home reduces visibility, you don't work from home to make more and get promoted, you work from home to avoid the retardation of a commute, busy work, excessive meetings, etc.
You work from home so you can put in 2 hours work, accomplish as much as anyone else did and spend the remaining 6 enjoying your life.
I'm pretty sure that everyone who decides to work from home did so for quality of life reasons rather than climbing the corporate ladder reasons.
Re: Why Showing Your Face at Work Matters
#3Working from home reduces visibility, you don't work from home to make more and get promoted, you work from home to avoid the retardation of a commute, busy work, excessive meetings, etc. You work from home so you can put in 2 hours work, accomplish as much as anyone else did and spend the remaining 6 enjoying your life. I'm pretty sure that everyone who decides to work from home did so for quality of life reasons ra…
Agreed. The topic of a more liberal teleworking schedule came up at work recently. It seemed widely agreed upon that working from home would be for those people who are happy where they are on the ladder already and don't intend to move up.
Re: Why Showing Your Face at Work Matters
#4Working from home reduces visibility, you don't work from home to make more and get promoted, you work from home to avoid the retardation of a commute, busy work, excessive meetings, etc. You work from home so you can put in 2 hours work, accomplish as much as anyone else did and spend the remaining 6 enjoying your life. I'm pretty sure that everyone who decides to work from home did so for quality of life reasons ra…
Absolutely agree with this. Two sides of the spectrum:
1) I've noticed that of all the remote positions in various departments, marketing is the one that is almost always co-lo. They tend to have the most say in product direction (duh) and in turn strategic, company-wide policy changes.
2) Sales is the counter-example here. I've seen talented remote sales people rapidly and deservedly climb the corporate ladder. However, the catch is that they tend to have brutal travel schedules (which they'd probably have anyway if they were in corporate HQ), so it's arguable whether they are reaping the same benefits of working from home as other remote workers.
Re: Why Showing Your Face at Work Matters
#5Working from home reduces visibility, you don't work from home to make more and get promoted, you work from home to avoid the retardation of a commute, busy work, excessive meetings, etc. You work from home so you can put in 2 hours work, accomplish as much as anyone else did and spend the remaining 6 enjoying your life. I'm pretty sure that everyone who decides to work from home did so for quality of life reasons ra…
Agreed. The topic of a more liberal teleworking schedule came up at work recently. It seemed widely agreed upon that working from home would be for those people who are happy where they are on the ladder already and don't intend to move up.
Unless you have a unique culture that was founded by remote workers (admittedly rare), or you have a large enough company that needs to have a sizable field organization.
I guess this is why living close to work combined with a flexible teleworking schedule would be the best of both worlds. You'd at least get the option of dialing up the social hobnobbing on an 'as needed' basis.
Re: Why Showing Your Face at Work Matters
#6The article does a good job of going over a few (seemingly obvious) biases, but I also expected an honest discussion of job duties (implicit or explicit) that get missed when one works from home. I'm disappointed that part of the topic was skipped.
I know the HN crowd is fairly pro- working from home, and I am too, but I was wondering if some of the more experienced (than myself) people here could chime in with examples of implicit/explicit things that are "missed" when team members work from home.
The only major one I can think of is mentoring, of new hires and interns, which seems to be done much better in person than over email. I would think that mentoring these two groups is an implicit duty in most companies, but it would seemingly always fall on the backs of those who are not working from home.
I would also think that actually being there in person for new hires and interns also helps shape company culture for those people, or otherwise make them feel like more of a team. I suppose that all of this could be mitigated by not working from home for the first month+ of interns/new hires starting.
Re: Why Showing Your Face at Work Matters
#7All this assuming the majority of other employees or managers don't work remotely too.
Re: Why Showing Your Face at Work Matters
#8All this assuming the majority of other employees or managers don't work remotely too.
I was going to go on this tangent as well, but the article and the comments are focusing on teams that do mostly work in offices.
Re: Why Showing Your Face at Work Matters
#9I can't speak of other jobs, but developers shouldn't care about raises and promotions, because if they are in an organization where those matter, there are going to be non-technical ladder climbers who will promote each other and take all the money allocated for raises. The only real choices for developers are a) start a business b) job hop c) work at valve. 360-degree evaluations are a farce because these evaluations just go directly to one or more non-technical manager to 'help' with their decisions on advancement and raises. It's lip service. If you don't have a budget and hiring authority, all you really have is the ability to quit, and the wealthiest developers hop often. In instances where developers become too powerful and high up on the tech ladder they are going to be given fancy titles and isolated anyways, so why not work from home?
Re: Why Showing Your Face at Work Matters
#10Working from home reduces visibility, you don't work from home to make more and get promoted, you work from home to avoid the retardation of a commute, busy work, excessive meetings, etc. You work from home so you can put in 2 hours work, accomplish as much as anyone else did and spend the remaining 6 enjoying your life. I'm pretty sure that everyone who decides to work from home did so for quality of life reasons ra…
Absolutely agree with this. Two sides of the spectrum: 1) I've noticed that of all the remote positions in various departments, marketing is the one that is almost always co-lo. They tend to have the most say in product direction (duh) and in turn strategic, company-wide policy changes. 2) Sales is the counter-example here. I've seen talented remote sales people rapidly and deservedly climb the corporate ladder. Howe…
Note that sales people are usually trivial to measure. Look at their quota and their sales and you are pretty much done. With other departments it is considerably harder.