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Full-Time Telecommuting -- Does It Work?
beznadan asks: "I am software developer currently located in Silicon Valley, but I just bought a house in a neighboring state. The high-tech job market there is picking up, but doesn't come close to the market here (linux.com/jobs returns 0 results for the entire state in all categories). I am wondering if full time telecommuting (with occasional trips in for meetings, etc.) is a feasible option. Does anybody out there have experiences with this? Would prospective employers even consider an applicant who planned on working offsite all the time?" This is a topic for all of you who have ever wanted to (or currently do) work at home.
The biggest downside for me is rather a mixed blessing - office politics - on one hand most of them sail over your head you don't have to get involved with the tacky trivia - the downside is that when they do matter you tend to lose out because you're not there. Make sure you have a manager you can trust to regularly keep you up to date with what's going on in the company.
I've worked at 2 companies this way now - the one common piece of experience was that things worked great for the first few years - but over time I find I tend to get disinterested managers and less interesting work than when I started - this may also related ton the size of the company - when they were small they were great - when they are larger it's easy to forget about the people who aren't there.
Oh yeah when it's free tee-shirt time you always end up with choosing from the leftovers - XXL :-(
I work for a company called Altemi Interactive and we have our server equipment located in the U.S. but we're a Canadian company and all of our employee's telecommute to the server and to meetings as well, we have programmer's located all over the globe working for us. We find it works, I mean it's nice to get up in the morning and work in your bathrobe and drink coffee reading slashdot when your supposed to be fixing sendmail security flaws. :-)
System Panel (Linux When Possible, WinDOH's when nothing else is avalible)
Telecommuting out of state will kill your Drag Coefficient as an employee. To be more competitive, you should consider a combination desk/hideaway-bed. You won't miss the morning commute! ;^)
While I was able to get a great deal of work done, there was the feeling that things were happening in the office that I wasn't party to. The social nuances of having a physical presence should not be underestimated. Its almost impossible to exert a meaningful influence over serious decisions remotely. That said, if you really want to "climb" in your organization, a physical presence at work is probably mandatory. If you're a contractor or simply don't care that much about advancement, telecommuting rocks.
I've been working out of a home office writing software for 10 years now - long before it was "cool" to do so, and before we had the 'net to make it easy. Here's one thing I can tell you - after a long while the isolation that was your friend (because you can get so much work done) becomes your enemy, as you totally lose touch and daily contact with your technical peers. I'm thinking about getting a regular day job just to get back in circulation with other humans again. So, my conclusion after ten years of it: it works, and with the 'net, it works really well now, and plenty of employers support it. Just watch and care for the psychological aspects of prolonged isolation if you decide to make this a lifestyle.
Rob Malda and Jeff Bates live in Holland, MI ... Timothy Lord and I live in adjoining Maryland towns ... Cliff "Ask Slashdot" Wood lives in VA ... Jamie McCarthy lives in Kalamazoo, MI (semi-near Holland) ... Michael Sims lives on Staten Island in New York ... Emmett Plant lives in Philadelphia PA ... Nik Clayton lives in England ... Jon Kats lives in New Jersey ...
... Jeff Covey, Steve Killen, and Dan Pearson live in Maryland ... Skud and Nathan live in Australia ...
:)
On freshmeat, scoop lives in Germany
Andover's HQ is in Massachussets. I fly there once or twice a month, and that's enough. The trick seems to be that people performing defined individual tasks can easily telecommute, but management work is easier if everyone is in the same place most of the time. But since we like to keep editorial separated from management and ad sales, it's probably a Good Thing that I'm 400 miles away from HQ and that Rob/Jeff are 1000 miles away.
Programming, writing, and editing are all essentially solitary tasks, and since that's what we do, telecommuting works for us.
I don't think it would work as well if we were running a machine shop or auto repair garage, though.
- Robin "roblimo" Miller
The single most important factor: Do you have small children that will be around the house most of the day?
I worked from home via modem/DSL for about three months, and it is very difficult if you have small kids (ours are 1.5 and 2.5 years old). No matter how hard you might try, it is impossible to actually "go to work" and isolate yourself from the bedlam. If you write code with complicated pointer arithmatic, you start to eat a lot of Advil.
And now that we have office space, and are moving into it, my wife really resents me not being around the house to "help out for a minute" several times a day. The kids are also having to adjust to having me out of the house most of the day...
I guess it also depends on your personal work habits. I like what I do enough that sitting down to do it does not require a manager in the immediate vicinity. Not everyone or every job is like that.
Bander
What we need more of is science!
The time that succeeded, I was able to get a lot more work done than I would have at work. I was able to fix gobs of bugs, and was able to develop near perfect concentration. And, when I was concentrating too hard, I'd take my two year old to the park. In this case, a happy employee was also a productive employee, and I cranked code at an astonishing rate.
The time that failed, nothing got done. I couldn't make any progress on the project. My wife was continually bugging me, and couldn't seem to understand that I needed to work, Damn It (Janet)!
I think the big difference was this: the time that worked, I had clear goals and objectives. I had a clear path ahead of me from management, and I was not given a lot of conflicting assignments. The other time, all of the above problems were present. The company didn't know what they wanted me to do, they didn't have a clear assignment for me, and I was continually being dragged to other projects unrelated to the one I thought was supposed to be mine. In fairness, all these problems existed in the office. But in the office, I had eight hours a day that I /had/ to work. At home, it was too easy to just slack off.
I guess the bottom line is this: if management is already screwed up, working at home will make it worse. If it is already working, working at home will make things even better. It's like anything else: telecommuting is a powerful tool, which can be used for good or evil. And it tends to amplify whatever it finds.
Incidentally: on the selection of a home office, may I suggest the smallest room practical? There are fewer distractions that way.
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-- Slashdot sucks.
If your job function requires any significant interaction with other employees, it's not going to work. Video conferencing and e-mail can help, but isn't a substitute. If you're strictly a code jockey or tester you might be able to work effectively from home, but even then you'll need the occasional trip in from the office. I work for an insurance company, and here's how we handle things as a rule:
We have two 3/4 time claims analysts working out of home (they are both trained workers who left to have children). We set them up with ISDN Centrex for network access, regular Centrex for telephone and fax, and periodically they will come in to go over paperwork or meet with people in their department. They each work approximately 30 hours per week. It was a win for us because we kept office space open (it's especially tight in our claims department), and we kept two trained workers who otherwise would be lost entirely. Both live within commuting distance, though.
We also have four marketing reps who are in the office an average of one day per week and either work from home or the road the rest of the time. We accomodate them through dial-up from their laptops. We also handle our five claims adjusters (who are scattered all over the state) the same way. The adjusters rarely come in - they work mainly by PC, fax, and mail.
In IS, we will occasionally have people work from home, but not on an extended basis. I have a mainframe wizard/DBA working under me that I will have work from home sometimes when he's in a deep coding mode because he's demonstrated he's very productive that way without distractions. Other programmers in the department get nothing done out of the office and therefore don't have this option. We decide it on a case-by-case basis.
Basically, I think most companies don't hire with the objective of having people work from home full-time, since there is a group element that helps much of the time in a development environment (and most others). Telecommuting as I see it is more of an option that companies use to resolve situations that would otherwise result in losing a trained, high-skill worker, and even then sometimes not. Unless your work is the kind of work that is solitary by nature (like being a field claims adjuster, for instance - though that example doesn't fully apply here), don't expect a telecommuting gig. You probably are going to have to fish where the fish are.
An option could be having a home where you really want to _live_, but renting (or sharing) an apartment where you want to work, with commuting on the weekends. Though that can get old awful fast.
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
Couple of points from a geezer that used to sell industrial sewing equipment, before he became a technocog in the "new economy"...
At the turn of the century, the sewing machine was a close analog of the PC, in its potential to "free the nation's populace from the drudgery of manual labour." Like the PC, the sewing machine was a universally adopted device in both rural and urban homes, and considerable fortunes were made supplying ever improved and cheaper models to a large domestic and industrial market. Within 40 years of the patenting of the practical mechanical lockstitch mechanism, most American homes had at least one sewing machine, and virtually all commercial textile product manufacturers were fully mechanized. (Anybody see any real close analogy here?)
A price war in clothing developed, that continues to this day. In America and Europe, commercial manufacturers sought to capitalize on the large potential workforce of women who stayed at home, by supplying them with foot powered machines, and by setting up delivery and pickup services to bring them work, and take back completed bundles of clothing. Piecework pay systems were developed to reward those who would work longer or harder, or who could enlist the help of underage children, many of whom began to be held home from school, to increase the family income.
Eventually, organized labor unions (the first being the famous Ladies Garment Workers Association, headed by Samuel Gompers) brought political pressure to bear, to pass stringent "home work" and "child labor" laws that effectively ended the practice of employers setting up individuals to work at home. The enlightened thinking of the day held that only in commercial workspaces that could be inspected by government and union officials could adequate health and safety regulations be effectively enforced, and workers be compensated without the abuses of child labor, so prevalent in the home situation. Many of these laws are still on the books, and are probably applicable to employer/employee home work situations today...
But today, we call it "telecommuting" and we think that somehow the natural economic forces which mandate people getting other people to produce the most work for the least money may not apply. Perhaps "knowledge workers" are somehow immune from economic exploitation in a large, fast virtual services market? Perhaps, but how many people in the financial markets now "start" at 3:00 a.m. from home, via PC, when London opens, and don't "quit" until the wee hours, when the Far East markets start again?
I dunno. Perhaps a more perfect flow of information does, somehow, materially change relationships that once required law and enforcement to keep in equilibrium. Even in the early years of the 20th century, the end of abuses in "home work" and "child labor" didn't end abuse in the workplace, as the New York garment workers fire of, I think, 1907, demonstrated. In that case, a multi-story building full of sweatshops burned, with considerable loss of life, because the doors to fire escape routes had been chained shut to prevent employees from going into stairwells and out on fire escapes during working hours.
In our company's case, we have a couple of women who were formerly full time office employees, who left to have have children, that we've supplied with machines and software to work from home, at their request. They do special projects, mostly database maintenance and "key punch" work, not the jobs that they used to do in our office. Our sales people have laptops, and we've bought cell phones, Notes servers and bandwidth primarily to let them file reports and do paperwork anywhere, anytime (except for the limitations the FAA makes on use of these devices on airplanes). A few of us have voluntarily installed AS/400 and network access software on some of our own machines at home, and use it to do projects on weekends that would otherwise require us to come in. So far, it's all employee driven, and it's genuinely being done to enable people to better balance work and home life.
But as the IT manager, I frequently get proposals from companies offering cheaper and faster IT services using "virtual development teams", generally meaning that they have a bunch of people in India or somewhere else that are willing to work all hours for less than I'd pay for local talent. I haven't used them yet, but I know companies that have, and it's a growing business.
I do know that those who forget the lessons of history are doomed to repeat the mistakes of their forbearers...