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."

Comments

Do not want

[MacDork]

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.

Re:Do not want

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry to hear you had a sadistic employer who took advantage of his ability to contact you outside the office, but it's not always like that. In my case, I found that working from home allowed me to work fewer hours. When I went to the office every day, I was forced to stay there 8 hours a day even if I had finished my tasks in 5. Working from home, I do what I need to do for my own company and then pursue my own interests. Plus, working from home is not necessarily working from home as a reliable internet connection can be had cheaply nearly everywhere now. I was able to backpack Asia for months while still fulfilling my duties.

Re: Do not want

[hawks5999]

Exactly backwards. Working for yourself you have the hardest boss. Working as TFA article describes you can log out of chat and set your phone on DND when your workday ends.

Re: Do not want

[notthepainter]

Exactly. I've done both, currently working for myself. All my friends say, "Oh man, that's great, you can take the day off if you want." Sigh... when you work for yourself you don't get a day off.

Re: Do not want

[plopez]

I used to work for myself. But my boss was a jerk. And my employee was an idiot.... :)

Re:Do not want

[MysteriousPreacher]

Another problem of working from home is that it hinders the building of contacts. A lot if what I can do is through chance contact: I go for a smoke and get chatting with a person in logistics. I receive and email from somebody, who I realise is in the building, so I go chat with them. Face to face makes a difference. It's way easier to fix something if I've had a beer or two with the right people. It's not deliberate; more serendipitous resultsof wanting to be social, and more easily done in person.

Re:Do not want

[TobinLathrop]

Thanks to my current work position I am out of on call rotation, so other than the odd big outage or emergency (well customer needs it yesterday) server build I rarely put much extra time *knock wood*. But due to long ago lack of desk space the company decided to push server admins in to telecommuting cause a cable internet is cheaper than desk space. Not that they pay for it anymore and there is still no permanent desk space but it is cheaper than gas on the 40 mile round trip if I had to drive it every day. My biggest problem is remembering to get out every day for a walk or something, while I am good at locking the work machine/setting away at quitting time sometimes it is a yeah still the same old walls I have been looking at all day stir crazy that really gets to me.

Re:Do not want

[currently_awake]

If you can do the job from home, then so can someone with better (on paper) qualifications in the 3rd world, getting paid 1/10.

Been doing it for 2 decades now - love it

[notthepainter]

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.

Wage scale is wrong

[egcagrac0]

$20/hr ... So much for that high paying job.

$20/hr is not a high-paying job anymore, (unless you're comparing it to stocking shelves at the discount store, which you shouldn't).

The writer missed two advantages

[plopez]

1) Money savings by not eating out. Where I work most people I see eat out either in the company cafeteria or off campus. I estimate would be about $10/day, or $160/month. Which could be about an insurance payment or a wifi plan. Personally I only eat out about twice a month as a treat, right after payday. Otherwise it is normally leftovers and sandwiches. Working from home you just walk over to the fridge.

2) Free gym membership! Get some weights or an exercise bike. Then take a break over lunch and work out.

Ryan knows what he's talking about...

[urbanriot]

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.

Careful what you wish for...

[Stiletto]

If your job can be done from home, it can be done from India.

Definitely good parts and bad with WFH

[sirwired]

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.

telecommute from home 4 days a week - love it

[mrflash818]

Mondays - in the office. Face time. Dept meetings.

Tuesdays through Fridays - telecommute from home.

Tools work provided: laptop, VPN RSA dongle, cell phone.

Tools I provided: DSL, home network (netgear router connected to the DSL), desk, chair.

Love it! Allows me to sleep in till 8:15am, then walk to work PC, boot it, and start my workday at 8:30a. I do not have to drive to and from work. Saves a tank of gasoline a week, and wear-and-tear on the car. No worries about fwy traffic, car accidents, or road rage making me late to work.

Also allows me to be home, working, when the kids get home from school. Money savings there, too, by not having to have them in after-school daycare. Money savings not having to eat out, can eat what is in the fridge.

Stress is lower, too. No having to hear nonconsensual gossip or phone calls from co-workers in office cubes around me. Do not have to wear 'office attire', and usually wear t-shirts and shorts at home. Can play music I like, as loud as I like, as long as I am not on a work phone call. Can use my network to listen to youtube, or surf the web on my non-work PC while I work, no worries about triggering IT alert that I am accessing non-sanctioned websites, as for that I am not using work's network or PC.

Caveat: a person has to have a strong work ethic, and make sure to get the work done, and even do extra work, to keep boss 'happy' that you are deserving to be allowed to be a telecommuter. I always pick up work phone in first or second ring. I always work an extra hour a day, minimum (I never work under 45hrs a week).

this is a fair criticism

[mrflash818]

It is true that telecommuting can hinder networking with people in water-cooler/cigarette breaks.

For the company I work for, a very large healthcare, the offices are all distributed nationally, no no real chance at face time with those units, even if I was in the office every day.

Not probably as good a substitute, but we end up using instant messaging a lot and get to do a bit of social networking that way, like in the old dot-com days.

Re:this is a fair criticism

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Work from home a trap? Depends ....

[King_TJ]

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....

A home office is hard to pull offf

[chad_r]

The article is rather light on the cons of working at home. I have been self-employed for 7 years consulting for my ex-employer. Over the years I've come across various pitfalls of being paid hourly, such as:

• - Sitting in a regular chair instead of an office chair, resulting in a year of back problems before I figured it out
• - Your coworkers think you're rich because you make a good hourly amount, without considering they get paid vacation, health care, 401k and many other benefits
• - For any errands or chores that have to be done during work hours, you're expected to do it since your family can't leave work to do it
• - You can't work after hours because you're expected to be with the family
• - You can't work after hours because there is way too much noise and interruption, and no door is thick enough to block it out
• - It's difficult to leave the house, knowing how much it's effectively costing you
• - With no place to walk to, you could go a whole day and not walk more than 200 steps
• - Less than ideal lighting and air movement
• - Time goes much slower with nobody around, and 6 hours feels like a full day
• - Vacation is unpaid, so you're less likely to take one
• - Being at home 24 fucking hours a day for weeks on end

My goal was 6 hours a day of work, and it was difficult most days to fill this amount. I got crazy after 6 years, and am now renting an inexpensive office space. It's a much better environment for many reasons, and the additional hours I can put in per month makes it pay for itself within a day. I have an office mate, and even though he works in a different field, it makes a difference having someone else around. It has been great being able to work in a real office environment, and I'm a more cheerful person as a result. Lessons learned the hard way.

Re:An Homesourced?

[toygeek]

Actually no its just a typo more than anything. I thought I'd fixed it but because of the way Google's blogger service works, it got stuck in the URL that way and for some reason carried over into it when I submitted it to /. Isn't that odd.