111–120 of 228 posts
Is this a problem that people who work in technical fields actually have? Even in companies with aggressively unfriendly WFH policies, I've had good luck requesting time at home in situations like the above.
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Your syllogism doesn't work. You begin by stating accurately that most companies aren't like Google and Facebook, which is true. Then you implicitly state that Basecamp and Automattic are more representative of most companies, which is patently false in many ways; in the relevant way, it's untrue because most companies do not have remote workers, and most people do not work remotely. You can't really lead with, "Base…
> it's untrue because most companies do not have remote workers, and most people do not work remotely There is work at home and there is remote work. Most companies of any size (more than 1 location), have remote workers. My first job out of college in the late 90s had most of my 'team' spread across the globe in other offices. We got everything done through conference calls and emails. Eventually I stopped going to…
"I only work from home". Don't bring me any offers that treat me like a child.
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…
Curious about the implied link between social-ness and creativity.. care to expound? I can think of several individuals who are highly creative but who prefer being alone.
They are linked in that I think they are both related to working in an office.
- Social interactive as it relates to an office environment is fairly obvious
- As far as creativity... that requires more explanation. That was more a response to people saying things like "I can get more code done working from home"... as a manager who also still codes (a lot) I can say, I am paying you to solve problems not write code. If the problem gets solved I don't care if it is 10000 lines of code or 10. Solving problems takes creativity. And for many people, creativity is enhanced by being around other people. Other people expose you to new ideas. You can still do that work from home but but I think an office accelerates. Granted, history is full of people who were immensely creative but also recluses, so that can swing both ways.
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. I've never understood why private news servers and groups never caught on. Company newsgroups on a company news server seem to me to often make a lot more sense than company mailing lists on a company mail server or company forums on phpBBB or similar. News readers generally do a much better job than mail client of organizing discussions into…
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 clients, stopped providing NNTP support alongside POP3/SMTP/IMAP.
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. crammed offices of Google in Zurich with monitor next to monitor, makes it very unappealing.
Remote work requires focus and discipline. Focus is way easier than in an open office, discipline is more difficult. I still remember finishing some server part and tests while laying on a beach in Barcelona using their public Wi-Fi, getting tanned, and whenever I felt like, dipped into the sea - it was super energizing and motivating to continue working. Also viewing sunset above the place of refuge on the Hawaiian Big Island from a rented cottage, while sipping a cocktail and working on some advanced algorithm was superbly motivating. Just because some managers need to control everyone around and enforce the same misery on their subordinates doesn't mean there aren't better ways to work. It's actually stupid not to give people WFH and make them miserable commuting (some people spend up to 6 hours/day in the traffic). The technology is there, but the perceived lack of control and insecurity of power structures must spoil it for everyone, "'cause everybody is doing it in the office and it can't be done other way well". Phew
>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…
You could make this argument about any benefit, and it would be equally silly. "Blog posts about company provided snacks arent going to move the needle, we need a company that is massively successful because of free snacks before people take notice!"
You misunderstand my explanation.
To be clearer, one can argue the "work-from-home" from 2 perspectives:
(1) WFH as a nice employee benefit -- such as ping pong tables, massage chairs, and free food.
(2) WFH as a non-negotiable employer business requirement to be the best most profitable company that crushes the competition. If you don't implement WFH, your business will be extinct.
Regarding (1)... if one only thinks of WFH as part of a "benefits package", the adoption of it will be sporadic and inconsistent among businesses. E.g. "free food" is implemented at Google & Facebook but not at Amazon & Microsoft. Yes, for arbitrary employee benefits, the bar of evidence is much lower (or none) in this case. All of those companies are profitable.
I think a lot of people are more ambitious about WFH and position it as (2). This would be similar to repeated demonstrated evidence of superiority similar to Henry Ford's "assembly line" manufacturing, JIT just-in-time inventory control, software engineering "source revision control", etc. If WFH wants to accumulate respect in this bucket, there needs to be amazing business success that points directly to remote workers as the cause & effect. The author of the essay had some citations promoting the "business productivity" angle which attempts perspective (2) but they are unconvincing for business leaders. In contrast, all 4 companies Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft implement "source code management" and it's an absolute requirement to be productive and competitive.
It would be better if WFH was elevated to the importance of "source code management" than to let it get grouped in with "free food".
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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…
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.
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From what I've seen in my team, it's very subjective. I think it's more of a "you need to have a reason to WFH", it's fine if once in a while you just stay home and work and all that matters is your deliverable, but ideally you should attend to all the meetings you need to and be reachable. If you keep doing WFH every day then yes, that's frowned upon. I'm honestly neutral on this, I prefer when my coworkers are arou…
> 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…
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 design docs rather than doing dev work, for design docs I like simply sitting on my couch with my chromebook and be "lazy", 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. Also more coworker interaction.
Whenever I need to write design docs, I simply tell my team I'll be working from home that day and nobody so far has complained.
>Working from home has no real impact on either of those.
Yes and no. I agree with you that it doesn't have a significant impact especially since we usually have people from the other side of the world dialing in the meeting so it's not a huge difference, but I personally think that if everybody is participating in the meeting remotely, it gets harder to talk because there's more chances for talking over each other and the audio/video quality is always impacted by the connection or by the headset quality. So many people have terrible headsets/microphones that really it gets confusing if everyone does so.
But all these are problems that can be simply fixed by providing your employees with the appropriate hardware for it, obviously.