Slashdot Mirror
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."
Tele-commuting didn't kill my career. Slashdot killed my career!
-DwS
Whilst it might slow down your progress if your goal (at that point) is progressing, it might actually be the intended target.
Getting to handle home life and work life and having time to relax and be yourself in the evenings might just be the drug some people seek.
liqbase
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.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
It's obvious that telecommutting kills job prospects if you want to move up the corporate ladder. If you telecommute, it becomes increasingly more difficult to prove to your superiors at work that you should belong in management. It doesn't matter which branch of the company you are in; if you can't prove you can belong in management, you're going to get stuck somewhere along the way.
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..
This is a study? It's an opinion poll! Unless it's a longitudinal study comparing workers who elected to telecommute against those in similar positions who didn't, it's not an answer to the question posed in the article's title. Since when have executives been a reliable source for hard data of this kind? I know we sort of canonize the executive class in this country, but this is ridiculous...
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Executives have a very hard time seeing outside of their sphere of influence. If a telecommuting employee isn't promoted as much as they desire and deserve within a company, they will advance their career by changing jobs... It wouldn't matter if telecommuters never got a promotion. If they are both ambitious and deserving, they will still advance their career.
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.
So what? I bet over 60% of global executives believed there were WMDs in Iraq, that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11, that ENRON was a great company, and so on. Just because global executives believe something doesn't mean there's any truth to it. Sheesh, what a non-story.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
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.
At the end of the day, people help those folks they know and are comfortable with. This means that if you don't have a good relationship with your boss - or his boss - then you're not really a serious contendor for a serious promotion. You might get a 7% increase in your salary at the end of the year, but your still the grunt who works 10 -15 hours a day making someone else look good.
Telecommuting may decrease the urge to "climb the corporate ladder" if the pay is sufficient. I've found that telecommuting is a strong job satisfaction component. Now, I'm not the type of person who would have ever climbed to the corner office at the top of a Manhattan skyscraper. If I had a shot at that sort of oppulence I'd be foolish to risk missing out by losing "face time".
But as far as climbing a bit faster in the middle levels of corporate IT? The job satisfaction of avoiding the 10 rush hour commutes per week, the large home office, home cooked food instead of cafeteria or lunch bag amounts to quite a lot of non-monetary compensation.
If I couldn't telecommute I'd probably jump from job to job and company to company in order to maximize my income, but as long as I can telecommute a lot of the time and as long as the job isn't too unpleasant and as long as the pay covers my expenses, I don't have a whole lot of motivation to look for a new job.
Not telecommuting itself, but staying home and watching Scooby Doo sank my career. I would have gotten away with it if it hadn't been for those meddling managers and their pesky status reports, milestones and deadlines.
More music, fewer hits
If you want to climb the corporate ladder, turn off your computer and go into work. Right now. OK? No, no, stop - go in to work, you can reply there.
If you want to be independent, set your hours, spend more time with the kids, choose your employers and your work, or whatever, then by all means, go file for an LLC and get to work. It's hard and you'll probably earn less and get less sleep.
I've seen even the best employees who were teleworkers get let go before the mediocre folks who bitched at the water cooler, come lay-offs time, that's just the way it works, humans are social creatures. It's a bad 'career' option, but a good lifestyle choice.
Neither choice is right for everybody but it's good to honestly assess which is the right one for you.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
If you're a pure-play techie, then it does not matter. What does "progress" mean to a techie? It means being taken more seriously and doing more technical leadership stuff (architectural etc). In these positions I don't see that telecommuting poses any problems.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
For every post, there is an equal and opposite re-post.
Company executives want face time with their employees, the study said.
At one company I worked for, management wanted to install new cubes with half-height walls so they could see if everyone was working with a simple glance out over the office. They backed off when we complained to their managers that the real problem was that out managers were insecure jerks who overreact to problems instead of proactively managing the department. It got even more interesting when our management banned the posting of Dilbert cartons on the cube walls that randomly appeared to mock them.
It worked remarkably well. Communication between team members was actually better than on many teams that I've worked on in cube farms. When everyone is isolated, a consciousness develops that everyone needs to be very explicit about picking up the phone and calling each other to stay on the same page. In the cube farm, it's easy to become complacent about the fact that so-and-so has a cube two aisles over, and never go and talk to them.
The telecommuting job was wonderful in terms of being able to keep up an aggressive pace, sustainably. Adding up the time for the commute to and from the job I had had before it, plus getting ready in the morning before going to work, travel time out to eat at lunch, and so forth, an eight-hour work day generally took me around eleven hours or so. On my telecommuting job, I wound up working lots of ten hour days, yet felt like I was working less hard.
On the other hand, my current job involves agile development where everyone is together in a single project room, and that's just about as pleasant, and much more efficient in terms of delivering on time. And impossible to do by telecommuting....
I don't know about most of you, but in the larger companies (I work for a Major Telecommunications Company in the US and its the one at the far end of the alphabet), a lot of staff is spread out across the country anyway. I'm in Dallas, my boss is in New Jersey, my team mates are in Los Angeles, Vermont, Philly, St Louis and Boston. When I do go to the office, I'm sitting in a room with a bunch of people that I don't work with.
So Face Time is when we all fly to a central location, twice a year, to meet up. And I have an office job - most of the time is on the phone, email or instant messaging - all of which i can do easier from home in my PJs than driving for an hour to sit in the office, still not have face time with anyone that matters, and add to my dry cleaning bill.
So does telecommuting hurt? Only if I NEVER show up to anything. As long as I make it to events, the occasional face-to-face meeting, I still get the same opportunities as anyone else.
Winter is Coming.
There are other ways for things to go wrong. You can wind up on the 'do we really need these people?' list for many reasons:
Basically, I now take it as axiomatic that without 'face time', misunderstandings inevitably accumulate. I've found you can only set up telecommuting arrangements after working onsite for a while, and developing trust, and that it's easier in small companies, or when you're essentially contracting. But if the people who trust you change jobs for any reason, you're back in a precarious position, because you can't build relational trust reliably from a distance.
I'm presently in a fabulous situation whereby my boss drives near my house on his own way to work, so any work meetings we need also take place offsite. That maintains all the face-to-face communication we need, is great for my productivity (since I don't have to go *anywhere*), and gives him a good excuse to stay out of the office once or twice a week also. But it wouldn't work if I weren't (at minimum) in the same city.
(I can't comment on whether video conferencing can produce the required level of communication; I think it may; never tried it.)
This article says that, while most people would like to telecommute at least some of the time, and companies don't perceive telecommuters as less productive than in-office employees, executives are still less likely to promote telecommuters than people in the office every day. But, why? People are talking about "face-time" and "company culture," but should decisions about promotions really be based on such incredibly subjective characteristics? It sounds like the problem that these executives have is that they haven't had time to become buddy-buddy with the telecommuters, and so they're reluctant to advance them in their careers. This is important information... because it tells us we need to change something about how executives view telecommuting, and in a larger view, career advancement.
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
I worked at home for over 3 years doing telecommuting for a small start-up, and enjoyed every minute of it, despite some of the cons.
Pros:
> work your own schedule
> wear whatever you want (even your boxers, only)
> Save money on gas
> Increased productivity due to isolation
> Listen to music as loud as you want/can!
> no boss breathing down your neck (but rather via IM instead)
> no sick co-workers infecting you with their germs
> no office-politics
Cons:
> Anti-social behavioural patterns
> Distractions (TV, Telemarketers, Fridge)
> Consuming your life with your work
> Consuming your work with your life
> No benefits (if 1099)
> get treated like a contractor (even if you are technically an employee)
Some of the note-worthy issues that made me switch from telecommuter/contractor to FT in-house cubicle farm slave...
1) I was working on average of 10-16 hour days, from home, to prove that I was not only doing my job, but accountable for my time and hours.
2) When I asked for an increase in my salary, I was told that because I am working from home, that I am 'unaccountable' for my time and efforts, even though the managers knew damn-well that I was working 10-12 hour days, and the work I did (err, product I made for them) transformed their 4 man start-up to a 120man multi-national, multi-million dollar corporation.
For the most part, I still prefer to work at home, on my own, with no distractions or office politics/strife.
However, it's not something I can do forever (nor is being a full-time cubicle farmer), and it's not for everyone.
I think that 'work ethics' need to evolve. This is a digital age, and face-time is a 20th century excuse for an archaic work-force mentality that is no longer relevent in this globalized economic structure.
the only permanence in existence, is the impermanence of existence.
I misread the title at a glance and thought it said, Wii Telecommuting Kill a Career? First the Wii is killing ladies who drink too much water, now it's killing careers. Where will it end?
Liquid is right. Maybe some of us are less concerned about "advancing" than having time with our families and a high quality of life.
I can't exactly put my finger on the day and time I decided I didn't need to "move up" any more, but let me tell you, it was a liberating moment.
The funniest part of it is that immediately after the first time I turned down a "promotion" because I felt satisfied with my life as it was, coincided directly with the really good opportunities showing up. It almost seems like happiness and satisfaction are qualities that draw success. Instead of running after success, if you reach a point where you're not quite so hungry, so desperate, success starts coming after you, instead.
I've seen what ambitious, driven people look like. Take someone like Dick Cheney for example. Here's a guy who clawed his way to the top, literally. He's worked his way to a level of wealth and power most people only dream of, and his face is like a road-map of pain and desperation. I wouldn't want to be inside his head on the day he shuffles off this earth.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I think it's not entirely surprising, and here's why:
I've worked with good managers, but I've also met at least one person whose idea of management was showing everyone who's the boss, full time. He seemed to have some deep seated belief that _noone_ and _nothing_ works unless you keep reminding them that you're watching them. He literally used to keep clicking on Netscape's title bar (this was in the 90's) to show Netscape that he's watching it. He actually believed that Netscape actually loads a page faster if he does that.
So, well, yeah, I can't see someone like that trusting that someone can actually work from home.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I have been working from home for about 5 years now. The first company I worked for, sort of forgot I existed for a while. Checks were coming in, I was providing them with results, but nobody knew who I was. In fact, very few people in the company knew I worked there to begin with. The company wasn't big either, it was only like 25 employees.
The next company (the current one), I have been with them for 1 year now. MANY people in the company know about me, I am much more in the "public" view then previously. I have a greater interaction with people then before. Every day, its conference call after conference call.
But, if I keep staying at home and working I might get passsed up. Which is why I think I am being asked to move across the country. I am ready to do it, but its going to take a lot of adjustment going back to an office structure. I get way more done at home then in the office. Which is strange why they would want you to be in the office all the time.
I don't have kids (nor do I want them) and I am not married. I am in a long term relationship, and she will be going with me. I am lucky that I don't have the distractions at home. When that office door is shut, that means GTFO. At first I had friends bothering me during the day, until I stopped answering calls from them or answering the door during business hours. That helped a ton.
Anyway, if you work at home too much you will lose touch with the office. Many times there are things going on that I don't hear about, or find out way too late. This can also make you miss promotions or showing special interest in events. Hell, even attending events becomes interesting.
until (succeed) try { again(); }
I'm not telecommuting at the moment, and living fairly close to the office, I'm not really trying to anyway, but... somehow I'm not seeing that as so critical. I have co-workers who are here 3 days a week, and, honestly, there are whole weeks when they're hardly actually needed. You'll want _some_ face time, but I'm not sure that even 2-3 days a week are necessary every week.
Going around and asking in person only works that well for a small company anyway. For example here I ended up maintaining the truly awful code of someone whose office is now at the other end of the city. If I wanted to talk to him, I'd have to set an appointment and drive there, which probably isn't any better from the office than from home. In fact, from home I'd actually be closer to his office.
Half the time we _do_ use email anyway, and the other half we just reach for the phone. Why wouldn't it work just as well from home? And since everything is in the same CVS, if you need any clarifications, you can just tell the other guy which project, file and function or line number you're interested in. Having to actually go to another department and ask in person is person is more the exception when phone and email failed, rather than having a permanent exodus of people going to paint something on other people's whiteboards.
Ditto for guys whose code we use, or guys using our code. Heck, some of the frameworks I've had to work with were from companies not even in the same city, or the same country altogether. Some of the guys whose code is being maintained don't even work here any more.
All in all, while I don't deny that sometimes it _is_ an advantage, I see more value in having good and clearly defined architectures and interfaces. That will keep serving you well even when the whole original team moved on to other jobs. It's not a theoretical situation, we actually have one framework here where that's exactly what happened over time.
And when they didn't yet, knowing (or having a way to find out quickly) who to phone or email if you have questions. If the architecture and interfaces are well designed and documented, and you have competent people at both ends of the line, chances are there won't be a whole tome of an explanation you need, so telephone and email work just as well. And when someone new to it needs a more thorough crash course, an appointment can be arranged... which is exactly what we're doing right now anyway, even without telecommuting.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
In Charlie's case, not only did he telecommute, but he was the boss. Heck, I don't think his employees ever saw him. Just a voice on the speakerphone. But then... his employees were angels.
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:
- You have poor interpersonal skills (well, this will hurt you regardless, but it tends to lead to even more misunderstandings if you are remote)
- 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.
- You do not have a dedicated workspace. If you are trying to do 10 things at once AND work, you are screwed.
- 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.
"Doubt your doubts and believe your beliefs." -- Switchfoot, Ode to Chin
I think he'll be thinking with regret about all the babies whose blood he didn't get to drink.
I mean, check google images and take a close look at the man. The Japanese invented the word "sanpaku" for him.
You are welcome on my lawn.
It depends on the situation you're in and the company you work for. I do however think that if you telecommute, that you have to work a little bit harder to make sure managment "sees" what you are doing. As long as they know you're being productive you should be fine.
I've been telecommuting for about six months now. I worked at the office for a year, year and a half, before my family and I decided to move. The company actually asked me if I would be interested in telecommuting. Now I actually have two other programmers that I directly manage. It's a lot of work to manage remotely, but VPN, phone, internal IM, email, etc. help. You don't have the cooler time talk, so you have to make up for it in other ways. It's easy to let your guard down though.
With all that said, I do enjoy telecommuting. It gives me more time with my wife and son. I can sleep in until I have to get up and clock in for work, and then take my shower on my lunch break if I want. My day is a lot more flexible, and because of that I think I'm more productive. Communication is very important though. You can't be a black hole that people only hear from time to time, that's when telecommuting is dangerous.
... who know nothing or very little about software development and just have nothing else to do than eyeing their subordinates with disapproving looks or asking them about their status every 30 minutes or so? Of course they need their playground, telecommuting would take away the very reason of their existence. Sorry, this may sound extreme, but I've been bugged by such people some time ago.
diginferno
'1. It's as if "may be provable" turned into "already proven" somewhere along the way, and I don't see any such proof. '
... Quality of life, for example, is something that [is achieved] by knowing when to ... just have a life."
... I don't think you can automatically assume that if one is better served by more networking, the other will too."
Sorry, mate. This isn't academia, it's slashdot ^_^. I wrote that off the top of my head as a hypothetical model, not an implementable one. IE: you're trying to run pseudocode directly on hardware. Of course nothing in the statement assumes that things are proven. Should be a given in a hypothetical model. Especially one that states it, as you say, at the start.
'Topic: Not necessarily a straw man'
Assuming you're refering to what I called a straw man in the first pgph of my post, of course it's a straw man; it's a statement of subjective experience placed out as evidence to the contrary of a position. There's nothing wrong with it being a straw man argument, just that this case may or may not be a border condition, depending on the results of actual research.
'...pretty much means that you found one axis that is completely independent from the others, and you can maximize without touching the others, which tends to never be true.'
Granted, but that's how the model starts; constraints and such are added as the game is fleshed out with empirical data. Note that I said in no less than two places that it's the beginning of a model in which I hypothesized that it may be a border condition, not that I promoted such a thing as fact.
'As you undoubtedly know, min-maxing in an optimal solution in pretty much any space _can_, in fact, reduce the value on one axis, to gain more on another that matters more.'
Pretty 20-20 obvious, and thank you for positing it. Still, you'll note that it is far easier, in a work setting, to quip a joke or discuss a small matter with your co-workers if they're actually in the room with you, ie: you don't have to take time away from typing code to type an IM or email. You're right, though; there are limits to a person's multitasking ability, and only so many hours in the day. That should be reflected in the game.
"There are problems and factors which you seem to not even consider at all
Very true, but harder to quantify. Should I have determined QoL via hours of free time? How about an inverse coefficient based on commuting time? I'm not being sarcastic, just throwing out examples; what do you think the best quantification of QoL would be?
"As with any other min-maxing problem, you have to reduce X to get more on Y and Z, or reduce Y to get more of the other two."
As you stated before, the model is 'ill-defined', or as I like to say, 'green'. Exchanges such as this, and empirical research are needed to refine the model. The purpose of a green model is just to give ideas about how a system works, not to rigidly define it.
"Two solutions to two different problems can end up _very_ different
True, but that's the purpose of using game theory for such a model. Notice I didn't use 'advancement', but 'movement' in my original post. The idea is to determine whether the player is more able to change his position in the environment based on a number of variables, some or all of which may or may not be connected.
"For example, it seems to me that being a good programmer (and having a boss who can actually judge that) is alone very much enough."
Absolutely true! But I'll give you an example using a real game: Final Fantasy. It's equally possible to defeat a given monster if you're uber strong or uber magical, but it's also possible to do so if your character is well balanced. Similarly, it may be possible that the ability to network somewhat well can make up for, for example, being a merely mediocre coder. If that were the case, it may be the reason for the existence of so many mediocre programm
110100 1101000 1101000 1100110 0 1101111 1101000 1100011 1
>Face-to-face time is only really needed these
... I've worked remotely for weeks at a time from home and from foreign countries (while traveling for adoption, during family illnesses and tragedies, etc.). And I do freelance web programming on the side which is *all* remote. So I'm not speaking from total ignorance and inexperience here. I work pretty effectively remotely.
..." over the cube walls, etc.
>days for those who get some sort of warm, fuzzy
>reassurance from it.
It's still not the same.
Now, I do have some experience "telecommuting"
Nonetheless, when I stayed home for just a day recently from my day job (normally 100% in the office, cube worker), which just so happened to be the day we were frantically finishing testing some stuff and moving it to our live website, I was floored by how much of a pain communication was, by contrast. So much goes on "over the cube wall", so to speak, that I hadn't even realized. It's so beneficial to have all those electronic tools of communication that you mention *and* be able to stroll over, see what somebody is doing, call "does anybody know