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Ask Slashdot: Would You Take a Pay Cut To Telecommute?
coondoggie writes "IT pros want to telecommute — so much so that more than one-third of those surveyed by Dice.com said they would take a pay cut for the chance to work full time from home. In a survey conducted by the careers site, 35% of technology professionals said they would sacrifice up to 10% of their salaries for full-time telecommuting. The average tech pro was paid $79,384 last year, according to Dice's annual salary survey, which means a 10% pay cut is equivalent to $7,900 on average."
When you factor in commute time, gas and car maintenance, the need for 2 cars for family ,child care and office politics it's definitely a pay raise.
Really, I would think that the company themselves should be willing to pay more for someone who telecommutes, due to needing less facility needs (space, cubicles, utilities) that would be saved from allowing telecommuting. And there is the added benefit of making sure all the equipment can be administered via telecommuting as you can then simply call up the IT group(s) and they can fix the problem from home without waiting the upwards of a hour that it would take to bring someone in to flip a switch/enter a password.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
In some companies, telecommuters tend to be forgotten about. This means that Jack Brown-Nose who comes in and does almost nothing will always be seen by the boss and keep an impression, while the co-workers who are at home actually working are invisible. End result: Jack tends to have an edge when it comes to promotions, or even keeping the job.
I've telecommuted for 5 of the past 6 years.
I've saved thousands of Pounds on the commute into London.
I can spend more time in the morning in bed.
But
You have to be comfortable with your own company.
It can get lonely.
You need the heating on all day in Winter.
On the whole it is great.
Now... If I had a job it would be great. If said job offered me the opportunity to work from home then even better
At the moment, this is all wishful thinking though.
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
I think some working families throw their children into daycares during the day after school (if the kids go to school) until they come home from work. I hear daycares can cost a lot too.
You'll save 3-6K in gas, parking and transport alone. Pick up another $800-$1500 in phone, cell and internet reimbursement. Get back 1-2 hours of your day that you used to spend commuting. Not a bad deal.
Pro tip: If your job can be done from your house, it can be done from India.
You save money on time and logistics, but you also have to create a work area in your home. Certain organizations have sqft requirements. You also need to establish locked areas to hold files and documents. And, ultimately, you're no longer allowed to check-out. With a standard job you are expected to be responsive during your normal work hours (say 9--5:30). With telecommuting the work hours shift and you will easily find yourself on call 12 hours a day. Additionally, you lose camaraderie with your coworkers, a chance to hunker down and drive through projects faster, and possible extensive delays in communications.
Then factor in the possibility of children banging down the door to play, and the guilt you feel by having to shuffle them out to finish a project. Then a spouse who takes advantage of you "being there" for babysitting, phone calls, emotional chats, and I'd rather be at work during the day.
I work for Rackspace full time from home, and I'm paid the same as I would be at the office. Whether I work from home or not is ultimately irrelevant, because the most important variable of all is loving your job. I work where I do because it is a truly amazing place to work.
That said, volunteering a pay cut is risky business. Your salary is a gauge of how much your company values you, so you should try to get as much as you possibly can.
A few things to keep in mind:
1. If you telecommute, it's also cheaper for the employer (less electricity, water, bandwidth, etc)
2. If you take a pay cut, any time you get a raise it's going to be less than it could have been, since most companies do raises as a percentage of your current salary
3. The downside of working exclusively from home is that it's easier to not get noticed. If you're not getting much face time with your peers, you better be doing some amazing work
If you can telecommute full time and do your job from the comfort of home, then so can anyone in the world. You're now competing with folks who would be happy to have your job at 10% of what you're paid -- not just a 10% discount!
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I work from home sometimes with a wife and four kids. I'd take a pay cut to be forced to go into the office.
Rebooting a server .. not so much. All our servers have lights-out management or are VMs. And if you're paying me to swap a stick of RAM, you're paying over the odds.
And I can prove that I score better on certain productivity metrics while I work at home (like hours worked, lines of code committed, etc). Whereas when I'm in the office I have to content with a noisy open-plan designed to destroy productivity, and I have to skip out of the door at 1700 sharp to catch my ride home, instead of being able to stick with any problem that requires my extended attention until my daughter gets home from school.
So on the whole, I think it would be fair play to pay me the same, even though I'm actually providing more value for less cost to the enterprise, because I also benefit from it - I can do things like slip out for a run in my lunch hour that I would never be able to do at work.
If you "roll out of bed, make a cup of copy" you've been working alone too long!
Just in gas, it typically costs me $7800/yr in gas. So add in wear and tear plus insurance savings, its likely a break even at worst. For most people, working from home saves money for both the employee and the employer.
I can work in the buff and no one knows, except Slashdot I guess.
Unless you forget to turn off your webcam.
I had a glorious couple of months telecommuting till the "incident". There was some fall out, and psychological care needed for some in the conference room.
Later on, some people told me that watching me via webcam (when I knew it was on) was like watching evolution backwards. After a month and half they wondered if I just sat a semi-shaved ape in front of the monitor with a banana.
I disagree, they're not designed to destroy productivity. They're designed to cut costs. Destroying productivity is just a happy side-effect.
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I'm a single guy. If I could fully telecommute, I would take a $20k pay cut for sure and spend time traveling to Europe etc.
Currently hooked on AMP
Firstly, I don't make as much as the average tech pro.
So... what's the weather like in Bangalore today?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Seeing as how it cost almost $7,900 just to put gas in my Prius this morning, I'd come out ahead by not having to drive to work every day.
The absolute best money the govt could put forward towards green initiatives is a heavy tax break based on number of telecommuters employed by a company.
It is absolutely absurd the amount of fuel I waste every year to unplug from my network at home just to drive to work to plug back in and perform the same job. In fact there are very few people in my office that really could not perform their job full time from home.
Got Code?
It is a figure of speech as well as a measure of desire to say that "I would take a pay cut ...". In this case, it actually makes sense, but that still doesn't mean taking it literally....
I switched to full-time telecommute 10 years ago, and it definitely has financial advantages, in addition to enhancing your quality of life.
Career-wise was quite the change. Being out of immediate touch is a nice bonus, since you don't have to put up with all those 'quirky' people you work with, but you can still pull off informal social occasions with the co-workers you can stand.
Eventually, you become a 'virtual contractor' - you aren't really part of it, you are an outsider that does task work. This is the perfect segue into becoming a 'real contractor' and working for yourself.
If you time it right, you can arrange a 'buy out' from your employer, to help ease the transition, and from then on everything is great.
Next time you are listening to some doofus expand a 30s presentation into a 1 hour seminar; look at the people around you. Some will have a look of annoyance at their time being wasted; some will be asleep; some will be hanging on every word as if their next advancement depended upon it; and some will be quite serene. The latter is your contractor, because how your company wants to piss away its money doesn't bother them. They just want some to splatter on them.
I've worked out of my house and it should really come with a RAISE, not a pay cut.
First of all, who pays for high speed internet access? It can be a drag when someone in the house decides to stream a HD movie or some other bandwidth suck that slows network access. Sure, you can get another connection, but who pays for it? And in some cases, the broadband provider (yes, singular) won't deliver service to the same address twice, no matter how you explain it.
What about the computer equipment required? Am I supposed to use my home PC or will I be provided with a computer? What kind? Printer? Color, laser, etc?
Telephone? In some cases, a mobile would work, but in a lot of cases mobiles blow -- voice lag, weak signals, the whole laundry list of problems.
Then there's the SPACE issue. Most people I know don't have a huge empty spare room in their house they can put a proper desk, computer, printer, phone and all the crap associated with many jobs. If you have a wife and kids you definitely need to have a totally seperate room with a door you can close.
And then who pays for the other items? Electricity? Heat and A/C? Heat is significant -- I turn mine down WAY LOW in the daytime. Misc office supplies (paper, staples, pens, toner, etc)?
I doubt I'll ever be in the position to negotiate for it, but if someone said "we want you to work with us but its a telecommute position" I'd almost be tempted to negotiate the price of a small apartment and turn that into an office, or find one of those one-man-band offices that are kind of like a studio apartment.
There's so many BS small items associated with working from home that really add up you can't take a pay cut.
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Thailand
As someone who has telecommuted for half of my working life at a variety of companies I would say that in my experience there are obvious pros and cons to working from home.
Ask yourself the following questions:
1) Do you have space for an office at home? Will it take up space currently being used for other purposes? Will your office be used for other purposes in your other 8 hours? You need to be able to close the door on your work at the end of your working day and keep it closed until the next morning.
2) Are you a workaholic or do you have tendencies towards that problem? If so, working from home is dangerous for you as you may not be able to put down what you are doing at the normal end of your working day and may return to your work outside of your core hours. The OP is talking about taking a pay cut. Are you willing to do more for less?
3) Are you disciplined enough to work consistently when your garden, laundry, kitchen, TV or games room are in need of attention or are a potential distraction? Will your spouse expect you to do more housework because you are "at home"?
4) Is your boss disciplined enough to work from home? If your boss would fail to be disciplined when working from home, he/she may assume that you are too. If your office does not have a telecommuting culture, being "different" may breed resentment or envy in your colleagues.
5) Is your office political or cut-throat? Does your job rely on working closely with the end user? Will not being in the office result in your being manoeuvred out of the door if cuts are made, as a result of you being "Out of Sight, Out of Mind"?
6) Not being in the office results in a huge drop in levels of human contact. Can you do without the social aspect of your workplace?
7) Is your company geared up for telecommuting? Will they pay for your home office equipment (printers, paper) and costs (heating, lighting, electricity, furniture, internet, coffee) in the same way that they would if you were in the office? Will they pay for your travel to the "Office" as it's now not your usual place of work?
Don't get me wrong, for the right person and personality, telecommuting is a fantastic opportunity. But I would never have taken a pay cut to work from home. You are saving your company on office space use, electricity, heating, lighting, furniture costs and in my experience you will be hugely more productive working from home where there are far fewer distractions than you would encounter working in an office. You will be fresher when you arrive at your desk having commuted down the stairs rather than down the motorway [freeway/turnpike/peage/autobahn]. Typically the coffee's better too!
My commute is 40 miles each way.
I leave in the dark and come home in the dark.
I can do 99% of my job from a keyboard.
I'd telecommute for TWENTY PERCENT less.
I am my own gestalt.
I'd love to work at home but then how would I communicate with my co-workers?
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Telecompute is so.... 90s. I hate to say it. But we've moved past that.
The future is ROWE. Results Oriented Work Environment. In a ROWE only results matter. Not how you get it done, or where you get it do it.
In essence, if you can get your work done from a tropical island (with good wifi), then by all means do it. You are not paid for putting your butt in a seat, but rather for your productivity.
ROWE treats employees as adults who know how to manage their own time. Telecommuting, "flex time" and the like are just ways of rewarding employees with what they should already have... control over their lives.
ROWE came out of a successful experiment at Best Buy (HQ not retail stores). Its been adopted by a lot of big name companies, including Netflix.
To learn more, check out: http://gorowe.com/
I switched my company to ROWE last year after months of due diligence. And we've never looked back.
David
David Whatley