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Experiences and Realities of an Homesourced IT Worker
toygeek writes "Some companies have small corporate offices with a few desks and some basic staff, and the balance of their staff works from home. I have worked for two companies that have home-sourced their staffing. I wish to take you through my journey in working from home in the IT world and share some facts that I've accumulated along the way."
Work from home is a trap. I would only consider working from home if my employer is me. Work from home blurs the lines between home life and work life to the point where you are always on call. I work 40hrs a week as a software developer and sys admin. The rest of the time in my week is mine.
I'm an iOS developer (and used to do OS X) who has worked at home for over 2 decades now. I did have one year where the new boss wanted me in the office. (I upgraded bosses via the resume route eventually.) And I once was laid off because I refused to move halfway across the country (new boss wanted me sitting there.) You need discipline to not blur the line between home and work. For me that means regular hours and an office with a door that shuts. Once place I lived even had the office in a studio that was attached but I needed to go outside to get to it. I loved it. Family also knows what working means and treats it as such. I wouldn't change it for anything.
A large component of my job is working from home and my experiences are entirely the same as Ryan's. I often start 'work' as soon as I wake up while sipping my morning coffee and before I know it the day is over at 6 PM and I've worked through what regular people think of as breaks, hopefully having snacked at some point in between. There are entire weeks of week days where I don't leave the house for no explainable reason other than I have no reason to and I'm tired. Similarly to Ryan, I have to remind myself to shower for the benefit of people I may encounter throughout the day and wear clean clothes.
There is the benefit of saving gas, avoiding car maintenance, less time involved in a commute and the convenience of having access to things like juicers or blenders for a healthy bite to eat when I think about it. I can also change throughout the day as the weather changes and that's always convenient. However since I'm in a seasonal climate there are additional energy costs that would be absorbed by an employer.
I suppose additional benefits include the ability to loudly listen to whatever music I like if I'm not actively voice communicating and I suppose I'm less likely to die in a car accident.
The question is, is this a big deal that seriously affects the quality of my life? No, not really, there are also pros and cons about working in an environment with more structure and the time I save in avoiding a commute, I could make it up at an office with less personal distractions. I wouldn't say one way is better or worse than the other for me, they're just different.
If your job can be done from home, it can be done from India.
I just started WFH in April after 13 years doing L2 support for enterprise storage equipment. The team I came from was, to be totally honest, really great to work for. We had a great manager (the same one) the entire time up until he retired in April, and there was nothing wrong with his replacement other than being a little green. We were a tight-knit group with little turnover (which is good, as it took about 2 years of OTJ to train somebody new), and most of us worked from home rarely, even though our manager encouraged us to do so at least once a week if we were so inclined; the nature of the work (solving new, unique, and subtle ways customers found to break our stuff) involved a lot of collaboration and whiteboarding that would have been nearly impossible remotely. Lots of eavesdropping over the cube walls and hearing a co-worker describe a problem that vaguely resembles one you just fixed five months ago. I left not out of any deep-seated problem, but rather it was time for me to move my career forward; I had no complaints about my pay or anything, but there was no way for me to advance, as there was an engineer senior to me (and just as good) next in line for the team-lead position.
My new team (pre-sales DR architecture) is spread out all over, and only one even bothers with a desk to go to. While we all get along, and chat on the phone and over IM all the time (I'm on the phone for 3-4 hours every day), it's not nearly the same. With the new job, the work definitely comes and goes in spurts, so the flexible work hours are a plus; sometimes I take a long lunch and clock-punch right at five, and others I have to work a long day to get a sales proposal rolled out in time. I miss carpooling with my wife (20 minute commute), and I miss shooting the $hit with my coworkers.
I need to do better job finishing the setup of my home office, so I have a "real" place to work besides the kitchen table or the screened-in porch (namely, I need a whiteboard and bigger monitor.) I need to be better about getting dressed in actual clothes in the AM instead of when it's time to leave the house next. I could get myself a cube assigned by my employer at my former site (probably the same cube I left if I wanted it) but it's just not the same hanging around your former co-workers if you are now doing a completely different job (not to mention I'd probably routinely get asked for my advice there.)
In the end, I won't say it's better or worse, but it IS very different. My new job works better from home than the office, and my old one was better done in the office.
I currently work in I.T. for a company that is fairly flexible about my working from home. Truthfully, the biggest issues with it are the more subtle things. Since many of the people I do support for have to be in the office the vast majority of the time, there's that psychological issue where they don't see me, so they begin to feel like I don't put in as much time/effort as they do. (And by the same token, I eventually start feeling a sense of guilt or concern that I'll get perceived that way if I don't make an appearance sometimes, despite there really being no pressing reason to spend money on the gas to drive 45 minutes into work and back again.)
The "always on call" thing is definitely a problem, especially since there are only a few of us working in I.T. supporting around 150 users in multiple time zones. If one of us is on vacation, you can bet on getting at least a few calls or emails about "need it now" issues happening after you should really be done for the day. But I don't find it's any worse working from home than in the office? Either way, people are going to put in their requests whenever they need to and you either see it on a PC at home or on a PC at work, or on your smartphone while you're out someplace. If you don't push back a bit ,saying "This time is now MY time... so I'll just ignore this one until tomorrow.", then yes - you're caught in a trap. But it's a trap you allowed yourself to get locked into....
Same here. I supervise a team of 5 network and system engineers spread across 3 physical locations at a large US based law firm.. We are responsible for all things network and system related for 15 offices in 6 different countries. When I am doing my day to day I don't know if the engineer I am talking to is home or in their designated work office or at a remote office and they don't know where I am either. It does not matter. If I need them they are just an IM, phone call, or an email away and the same for me. Even if we all came to our respective "offices" everyday we would be contacting each other the same way and our work is spread around the 15 offices so 14/15's of our work is remote too and even that 1/15 can often be done remotely. Who goes to the data center and to reconfigure a router or build a virtual machine unless you have to and why would a second person be going? We all get along and work well together and have been doing this for years. We travel a lot and usually meet up somewhere in person every few months as work dictates like large moves, large swap-outs, major changes etc.
After a decade of working in the social work / child welfare world, I got headhunted by a smallish software company that noticed I was using some technical solutions I made up on my own to solve some of the issues I had with structural/process gaps in the landscape of the job ... a wiki of social services providers here, a small app that visually mapped out family risk factors there, simple stuff. They hired me as a proto-Business Analyst - they needed a guy with industry intel with a little technical background.
I started working from home, three years ago, with about a third of the year being business travel to customer's locations to elicit specifications/requirements/best-place-to-get-a-sandwich. The other 2/3rds I'm at home, authoring, following thru - you know the deal.
The first three months were "WOO HOO I CAN MAKE DOLLARS IN MAH PAJAMAS!" mixed in with "OMGWTF IS A BUSINESS ANALYST??" Very tough time, that was.. didn't really know anything about the world (universe[metaverse]) of software projects, and i had a lot to learn (still do!)
The next three months were spent figuring out how to ensure there was a clear distinction between work-me and not-work-me.
Some advice I initially thought was hare-brained was stuff like "get in your car and drive around the block, or get a coffee, before "going to work", or "dress like you're at the office." These and may others were surprisingly effective.
It's /very/ easy to fall into the trap of gradually slipping into "Always at home = "Always at work.. Having a place in your home that is ONLY ONLY ONLY for work is very important. Being able to tell your employer that you vanish at 5pm, and will reappear at 8am the next workday is dicey, but very important.. one recalls the story of the frog in the pot of water, as the temperature is turned up..
Fighting distractions is a constant battle. I originally scoffed at those applications that one installs to 'cripple' the machine into only doing workish things.. but I've been considering them a lot lately.
If you can, book a week each month to set up shop at the company's physical office. Getting folks to have a face to the name will pay off tremendously later (unless you're miserable at social situations), and you can use that time to remind yourself what working in an office is like: you'll be more grateful for the home office, and also take a little of the energy and pace of the work-office home with you.