Why I Decided to Spend More Time Working from Home

My current and previous jobs have been 100% (or certainly >90% including travel) working from home. You need to let them know in your initial contact and they need to already have remote workers. The ones who say "maybe" will wait until the end of the interview process and change their mind.

It does take a lot more applications to get an offer and it does mean you have to write off most the big players (Facebook, Google, Apple generally won't have new hires working from home) but it's totally possible and I doubt I'll ever work in an office (or maybe even for an employer in Scotland where I work from) ever again.

Its a no brainer for companies that are distributed anyways. I work at a bigCo, spread across the country. Many of the people that I work/interact with daily are in different timezones. Suddenly driving to the office isn't a big deal. Doesn't hurt that I have a horrible commute. Have been working here for a little over a year, and have went from 1 work from home day a week to 3 (although in practice it often ends up 4). As someone fresh out of college, it was an unexpected surprise, and will unfortunately tarnish my opinion of any future job prospects, as it's something I've grown quite fond of.

Yes, it is true that working from home is not some panacea, there are simply different issues. Like all engineering, there are no solutions, only trade-offs. That said, for someone like me, who has no kids (just 2 dogs) and a g/f that works out of the home during the day, I have little to no distractions at home that I can't manage and I find I get MUCH more done, and MUCH more efficiently when working from home.

I am sure at the start of the industrial revolution there were people that complained that migrating to some remote location to work was 'unnatural' and 'full of problems' and it could never compete with someone working at 'home' (on the farm or in some small scale industry). They were both right and wrong and industrialization and centralization of the work force served a good purpose. I believe modern 'knowledge' work (I don't like that term, but whatever) again tilts the pendulum towards the 'work from wherever you prefer' kind of situation. We have ways of communicating and coordinating work even across the world. The fact that teams aren't routinely made up of members all over the world is somewhat surprising to me.

I realize there is overhead with coordination, but having essentially a 24 hour 'someone's always working' situation seems far more beneficial than 'everyone is working between the hours of 9 and 5, inclusive!!' (perhaps in two time-zones, so we have coverage approaching, but not quite reaching '24 hours'). Also coordination really isn't that big of an overhead as long as all people are professional and responsible (which, as I said before, is perhaps the bigger problem :))

Again, I am hand-waving over the complexity of how you get a team to work well in that situation. I think it takes a group of people with great respect and trust for one another, so perhaps the best idea is to work together for some period of time (say a ship cycle, a year, whatever you think is best) in a traditional setting to get those normal human bonds you form by working directly with / seeing people day in and day out, then let them scatter and continue the relationships over mail/IM/Skype/IRC/etc... if they wish.

The idea that great coders have to move geographical location to pursue some jobs in a connected world just seems very depressing to me.

I work from home for a company that is 100% remote (even the local guy) with all of its 60+ employees (almost entirely developers).

We basically just work regular hours like any normal job, except no commute. Seems to work very well (at least for me).