Will Telecommuting Kill a Career?

coondoggie writes to mention that Network World has a piece taking a look at the effects of the telecommute on advancement within your career. From the article: "Over 60% of 1,320 global executives surveyed by executive search firm Korn/Ferry International said they believe that telecommuters are less likely to advance in their careers in comparison to employees working in traditional office settings. Company executives want face time with their employees, the study said."

Comments

Of course...

[rrohbeck]

if you're just a voice on concalls and a name on emails, what do you expect?
You got to have at least some face time.

Independance

[MindStalker]

Its really about weighing your opportunities. Sure if you telecommute your chances of promotion within your company are much lower. But a telecommuter is more of an independent agent anyways. If your telecommuting you can work multiple jobs much easier. Don't consider yourself tied to that one employer, consider yourself a free agent, even if your not..

All telecommuters take note

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been working from home for a company based 400km away for 2 years, and having no face time has resulted in my position being viewed in a resentful and misunderstood manner by other staff. managment think i do nothing and are constantly having new brain farts attempting to make me do more work for the same money.

unseen == unappreciated. this is dispite the fact i dragged this multimillion $ company out of the dark ages and wrote them a business system and POS system linked together which run the entire venture, i also admin their web/email/db services at the same time. without me they would still be scratching away are hand written paper reports and trying to make it work on excel.

to add to this insult, i did all this on a cut throat budget at a bargin price for them. my rate is 50% of what the next guy would charge.

non-exclusive telecommuting.

[flaming-opus]

In my office we use telecommuting not to recruit people in different metropolitan areas, but cantidates further away, within our metro area. I usually go into the office 2-3 times a week, and try not to be driving at rush-hour. If I can work at the office 10:00-3:30, a few times a week, and get the rest of my work done remote, that's considered sufficient "face-time". It means I can live a lot further away, and endure the long commute because it's not very often, and not at rush hour.

I don't think we'd put up with complete telecommuting, not unless the employee was phenomenal.

Bah (telecommuting for 5 years now)

[Kostya]

The only thing that will hamper your career if you tele-commute is if you suck at tele-commuting.

I have been working from a remote location for 5 years now. For 3 of those years, I would travel once a month or once every two months for a week on-site. The rest of my time (that is at least 40, but usually 46, of the 52 weeks of the year) I was working out of my home. And during those three years, my clients were 3 time zones away. I was a senior technical lead and I usual lead teams from 2-5 people. I was a senior contributor and I received 2 "absolute best" team awards on one project. During the other two years, I worked exclusively from my home.

The only time telecommuting hurts your career is if:

1. You have poor interpersonal skills (well, this will hurt you regardless, but it tends to lead to even more misunderstandings if you are remote)
2. You are not self-motivated. If you can't stick with the code instead of catching ST:DS9 on G4 because you are bored or frustrated, telecommuting is going to expose this weakness.
3. You do not have a dedicated workspace. If you are trying to do 10 things at once AND work, you are screwed.
4. Your company isn't telecommuter friendly (kind of a "duh", but it needs to be said). You can't force a company to accept you as a telecommuter if they hate telecommuters.

I find a lot of companies that are "family friendly" are usually good telecommuting places. They usually have the infrastructure and have good speaker phones in their conference rooms. They are set up for it and they don't look down on you if you attend a meeting by phone.

You can also mitigate a lot of issues by coming in for face time on a regular basis. While it isn't my favorite approach, it tends to make most employers happy. Just having a good chat program and a dedicated phone will work wonders. If people can almost always get ahold of you exactly when they want to, they usually don't mind the telecommuting. It's when they can never get a hold of you and you never seem to be "on-line" that they get fiesty.

To be clear, I usually work the schedule of the company, not my own. So even if I could wake up at 12p and work till 8p, I don't do it. I work 8a-4p so that people in different time zones can reach me at a reasonable hour their time. And since most coders come in late and work late, that works pretty good when I am three hours behind them ;-)

All that said, I have never wanted to be a manager. Sr. technical lead is as far as I let a company promote me. So maybe I don't care about career advancement in the technical sense. I'm happy cranking out quality code, and companies continue to hire me for exactly that reason. Even if I had worked on-site all these years, my career would be pretty much the same, since I would never take a management position.

I don't think you can be a manager and tele-commute--unless your whole company is virtual or network based. There is just too much that goes wrong on a daily basis, and if 90% of your workers are in one place and you only see them once a week ... well, stuff is going to go bad.

Sometimes design or brainstorming meetings are difficult. But this could be solved with tech too--it's just that most companies don't want to be bothered with true teleconferencing setups and virtual whiteboards. I find this forces people to be a bit clearer when explaining things over the phone--which can be an added bonus. Or you just make sure you are on site for important design meetings.