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Ask Slashdot: How Do You Find Jobs That Offer Working From Home?
jez9999 writes: I'm a software developer in the UK, and I've found that it's very rare (maybe 5% of the time) to find an employer that will even consider any working from home, let alone for the majority of the time. I see it as a win-win; you're able to work in the home environment you are most productive in, and you can use the time you would've been commuting to work a bit longer for the employer. Not only that, but you're not adding to road congestion either. Skype, etc. make communication with coworkers a snap these days. So how do you go about finding homeworking jobs? Is it better to demand it from the get-go, or wait a few months and then ask for it? Is it more common than 5% of jobs in the US (in which case I guess it's a cultural thing the UK needs to catch up with)?
(5) Not everybody is more productive when working from home as there may be more distractions at home than at work. Walking the dog, doing the washing up, etc. Troubleshooting certain problems is (far) easier locally than remotely.
Too true. We can work from home occasionally, but my wife hasn't got the idea that working from home is working. It's very nice to be offered cups of tea occasionally, but being asked if you want anything every five minutes - oh and can I come to get something heavy out of the cupboard, empty the bin, see how cute our dog looks as he's gone to sleep leaning in a corner and so on ... I only work from home if I'm snowed in or something as I really do get a lot less done.
I am the hiring manager at a software development shop. We allow working from home, and it works well for us. I don't think we ever have 100% of the developers in the office at any given time, but work still gets done. Some developers work from home 3 or more days per week.
From my company's perspective, here's how we do it:
1. If we hire you but don't know you personally, you'll be expected to be in the office daily for a few weeks to integrate with the team, get used to everyone's work style, personality, etc. You won't be working from home right away. If that's a deal breaker, then we're not the right fit for you. We really consider that team integration phase to be extremely important.
2. Communication is everything. If you're working from home, it goes into the company calendar and your Skype status. If you're working non-core hours, that gets communicated to your team and put in the calendar. If you'll be missing the daily standup meeting, your status gets sent to the team before the meeting. We have people who work from home and work from 2 AM to noon, drop out in the middle of the day, then come back and work later in the evening when they get bored of TV, etc. All of this is fine because they let the team know. Skype, Slack, email, calendar - all of these are in constant use by all of our teams.
3. The bottom line is that we want the work to get done on time. We work in 3 week sprints, so we release new code quickly and the development chunk of those 3 weeks is usually pretty full. But if you manage to finish work more quickly than expected and have a need for some time to go to appointments, get away for a day, etc. you'll probably get that time. Conversely, if things are taking longer, we'll expect either that you'll put in more hours to finish or that you'll communicate early to the project management folks that a feature is in danger of slipping so that team & client expectations can be set and there aren't surprises. Or offer an alternative approach that delivers much of the desired functionality but not all, something that can be enhanced in a future sprint. But whatever you do, communicate with the team so everyone knows.
As to your question about finding a company - if it's that important to you, ask up front. Don't take a job and assume that asking later will get you the answer you want if you just prove yourself to be a great developer. Companies don't generally work that way - it's either already a part of their company culture or it isn't (or maybe it's planned but not implemented yet). For your own happiness, you need the job to be a good culture fit, so find out before accepting how they work.
People dont understand that.
It's why I am fending off job offers monthly. I have a skillset that is in very high demand and I am in a field that has never had a lot of people in it.
So when I get a job offer and change jobs, I can dictate my pay, compensation and work conditions. I dont start a new job with the peons and starter vacation, I start at max vacation, the desk type I want, the equipment I want, and the amount of office space and window.
This is what happens when you work hard at being someone that is very very good at the job and in a very in demand field.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I managed to do it, but it took almost a year of looking, even in a job market supposedly favorable to programmers.
My strategy was to basically scour the job boards, looking for remote jobs, and apply when it looked like a good fit. Some boards I found helpful for remote, non-contract work:
Job sites which don't have a specific category for "remote" tended to produce a lot of noise, because searching on "remote" would get hits for things like "remote work not allowed".
Two other things which seemed very helpful in landing a job: