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Let employees work from home

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Re: Let employees work from home

#161

Post by gozur88 »

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…

>It's far too tempting to let one thing bleed into the other when working from home.

I worked with a guy once who'd been WFH in a previous job. He would get up, shower, put on a suit and tie, unlock the door to his home office, hang the suit jacket on a peg in the office, and sit down to work. At the end of the day he'd reverse the procedure, locking the office. He said he had to do it to keep things separate.

Re: Let employees work from home

#162

Post by tyingq »

sqeaky wrote: post #160
tyingq wrote: post #48

Careful what you wish for. If your company works out a system where everyone can reliably work 100% remotely, you become a very replaceable cog. Replaceable from a much cheaper labor pool.

Why does working from home make someone more replaceable than someone working from an office? I would think in most IT positions the thing that makes one least replaceable is their value to the team. If you constantly provide in the form of More code written or servers maintained because you can focus better then you could be more valuable. I don't think working from home directly relates to values, and I think argum…

You compete with a larger pool when working 100% from home. Both skillwise and costwise.

Re: Let employees work from home

#163

Post by k__ »

I switched to freelancing so I could work remotely without questions asked. Worked quiet well.

It also showed me that I have a problem with employment in general. People telling me when to work where and on what. It agitates me.

Re: Let employees work from home

#164

Post by devoply »

gozur88 wrote: post #161
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…

>It's far too tempting to let one thing bleed into the other when working from home. I worked with a guy once who'd been WFH in a previous job. He would get up, shower, put on a suit and tie, unlock the door to his home office, hang the suit jacket on a peg in the office, and sit down to work. At the end of the day he'd reverse the procedure, locking the office. He said he had to do it to keep things separate.

It seems to imply that people need more regimentation in their lives to make things work a certain way. I wfh and was thinking that it might be good to have a robot in the office that I could control that would be my avatar in the office. And also hilarious.

Re: Let employees work from home

#165

Post by yourapostasy »

GoToRO wrote: post #50

The problem with work from home for companies is that they need managers that can actually evaluate someone's work. Most of the time this is not happening (either there are too many things to know or the manger never did any actual work for a very long time). Also the problem is that companies want to hire the best and the brightest and then they quickly turn around and they don't trust their employees. Funny enough…

> ...they need managers that can actually evaluate someone's work. Most of the time this is not happening...

When the situation that managers in aggregate do not know how to evaluate their staff's work prevails at a company, forcing everyone on-prem and letting the managers evaluate that is likely what causes a lot of the organizational dysfunction we talk about. WFH definitely offers managers fewer readily-available cues to evaluate their direct reports, but I wonder what a quantification of those cues versus those available on-prem by a professionally-trained anthropology observation team might turn up.

I hear a lot of stories of people getting pissed off that a less-capable coworker is far more successful within the organization because the coworker was fantastic at say, face-to-face networking within the organization. Could such activity be much more difficult to pull off in a WFH-dominant organization, and fool managers who are deficient staff evaluators in an on-prem-dominant organization, sufficient to offset the drawbacks of WFH?

To a certain extent, I think the WFH-versus-on-prem debate obscures an overarching requirement that managers still must sweat out the details, and cannot delegate to a set of company policies the need to lead and manage, a core component of which is knowing your direct reports at a granular level in many dimensions.

Re: Let employees work from home

#166

Post by noobhacker »

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.

Re: Let employees work from home

#167

Post by bitL »

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.

edX, Coursera, Udacity, Udemy, online M.S./MBA degrees, making speeches at universities or local tech gatherings, throwing parties at home to relax and meet people of different backgrounds/age etc.

Basically you decide to make a speech on some topic, e.g. this month I talk about how to make a compiler easily, then you work on it & learn what is necessary and in the end present it. Next month you decide to do Paxos vs RAFT on transacted clusters, then you study and prepare. Next month it's about using GANs to make new, sci-fi looking furniture, so you learn and present. Then you throw in perpendicular stuff like how to retouch beauty photoshoots properly, mix deep house as a DJ or compose trance quickly in Ableton, just not to get stuck in programming only. And so on.

Re: Let employees work from home

#168

Post by wayn3 »

korzun wrote: post #142
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…

You are an exception. I was a huge advocate for working from home because I would get things done and end up saving two hours of commute. Your perception of this approach changes relatively quickly in a managerial role. If you are shaving 1-2 hours off your commute, then the overall output should be in line with whatever it was in the office. I probably met two other engineers that kept that in check.

I'm the first person to admit that if I was to run a company, I wouldn't allow people to work remotely only.

But as an employee, there's no way I'm going to drag my ass into an office ever again on a regular basis, when I can just as well work from exotic beachfront homes.

This is going to work out just like companies who cut compensation work out. You'll be left with the mediocre engineers and everyone who's able to choose to work remotely will eventually do so. If you don't permit that, you're left with the chaff.

Besides, isn't it kind of the managers job to help keep output in check? If my output was down I'd expect a friendly note telling me to quit slacking.

Re: Let employees work from home

#169

Post by overgard »

jasode wrote: post #118
overgard wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 could make this argument about any benefit, and it would be equally silly. 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…

Maybe a better example would be health insurance. Health insurance won't directly change productivity, but good luck recruiting skilled people if you dont offer it. Same with WFH in my opinion. A company that offers WFH isnt going to magically become more productive, but it will help to attract top tier talent. I know a lot of people that factor that heavily into their decision making over gimmicks like ping pong tables and free lunches.

I dont see working from home as being a paradigm shifting productivity enhancement but I do see it as something that has been shown to be workable, and companies that refuse to offer it will be at a disadvantage attracting skilled employees that can get that benefit elsewhere.

Re: Let employees work from home

#170

Post by TelmoMenezes »

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…

If only Picasso had been forced to work in an open office, imagine what he could have achieved.
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