Why Showing Your Face at Work Matters

It takes me an 1 1/2 hours to commute into work. By that time, I'm exhausted from dealing with traffic. Next, you have to deal with coworkers and their noise noise noise. Everyone wants to small chat at my job. That's fine, but don't hang around my desk and try to get my attention while I'm staring down a bug (death stare). Its rude and I can't concentrate.

As a software engineer, I try to avoid as many meetings as possible. I just want to build the things that are needed to be built. Avoiding meetings helps with that for two reasons... 1) You have more time to work on a task 2) You don't have to break your thought pattern to fixing a bug/solving a problem

As you said, with telecommuting you get more done with less time. Its basically a daily mini hack-a-thon in your living room/Starbucks. I normally get in about 2-5 hours of solid developing. It really depends on the task and when I can review the changes to my boss for the final push. The rest of the time I can relax and think out the problems.

At work, I just can't concentrate that well. You're stuck at one location for 8 hours. At the same time, you just want to go home. With telecommuting, I can wake up later (which makes me more alert), work for a few hours, relax, and come back to the problem when I have those occasional "eureka!" moments.

Now, I like to say that working at home is the be all end all. I still need to show up to push code to production. I still occasionally need to talk to staff about what projects should be next on the list. But, if your main job requires you to just be imaginative and churn out code, then being isolated is where its at.

You can use the finest meats, freshest vegetables and highest quality herbs, and still produce an awful meal by assembling them wrong. But on the flip side, you CAN make a very good meal from mediocre ingredients by preparing them properly.

Two examples form my career:

Workplace A: full of smart, motivated problem solvers and "A players" who failed in key ways because a toxic culture just poisoned anything. People were nasty and busy protecting fiefs. The individual work efforts were great, but they couldn't come together.

Workplace B: A place where there was a fairly broad range of people from marginally skilled folks to the super-smart where the teams just got along and had leadership that promoted cross-training and cooperation. People were friendly & professional.

As a leader, doing the care & feeding to maintain good culture (aka making work a place where you want to work) is hard. I think that after you reach a certain size, 100% remote workers make it harder, at least for a core team. Also, your business requirements around security and other factors may force you to do things that will damage that remote culture.

I want to work from home, and do enjoy doing so. I also like working from the office and enjoy doing so. There's more to my job than lines of code that I write. Culture is important. Culture sometimes transmits via physical proximity, and sometimes other means (IM, Phone, etc). Sometimes one or two meetings a week (or even month) is more than adequate to cover the parts that don't communicate so easily remotely. Sometimes remote workers go to lunch (or dinner) with colleagues. Sometimes my whiteboard is a computer.

Your group 2 covers a broad range of people and needs, some of which may sometimes require (or significantly benefit from) close proximity, and some of which often won't.

Basically, people, personalities, and working style vary.

Whereas with smaller companies where you can pretty much do carte blanche ("install whatever software you need on your PC as long as it doesn't drain our Comcast business internet"), working from home would probably be looked down upon.

That's the real rub. It's entirely possible that the Right Thing To Do - from the perspective of the firm - is the do something other than what is most optimal for the individual. Sp, as a lot of us geeks tend to be fairly individualistic, and because it can be hard to isolate the variables when you're talking about team productivity, a lot of us fall on the side of "optimize for the individual."

As somebody who's radically individualistic, and who is also a startup founder, I find myself torn on the idea of whether or not it even makes sense to have an office, or whether it makes sense to push for a completely distributed team.

I'm getting a bit of a real-world experiment with these issues now, as my $DAYJOB has me in Chicago for a 6 month consulting gig and my co-founders are back in the RTP area. We use email and IM heavily now... but we had an in-person "hack day" last weekend when I was home, and there was definitely value in all 3 of us being in the same room, huddled up together.

I'm leaning towards thinking firms probably should have offices, and that most people should be in the office at least part of the time. But I would take a pretty laissez-faire approach towards it, I think. Provide offices, but give people fairly unlimited freedom to work remotely or come into the office as they see fit.