Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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?
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