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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)?
You don't. Get your lazy ass out of home, you bum.
One trick I learned just recently: Tell them at the interview, that you got another offer, and you have to think about which one is better for you.
Then they'll ask what the final decision critera will be, and then you tell them "well, at the other company, I will be working from home.".
In my case that got them to say "well, home-office is not a problem at all, as long as you show up for the meetings" :-)
good luck!
andi
I'm always driving past flyers on street sign posts offering jobs earning £5000 a week from home!
However I'm happy earning tuppence in an office away from the kids, so haven't ever given them a try...
Generally? You don't.
The trend is away from this for software developer positions, unless you are willing to do contract work. There are several major things driving this right now:
(1) The employer doesn't have to allow it in order to be able to recruit talent, so they don't. A lot of managers engage in "management by walking around", and you are unlikely to get one of these types to sign off.
(2) Stacked ranking. If you're not in the office, and not "seen as being a strong contributor by your nominal coworkers, you'll get ranked poorly, and you will be the first person "PIP'ed" (Performance Improvement Program), and, if there are layoffs, you get to be near the top of the list.
(3) If they don't care where you are working from, be pretty sure that the job isn't going to be landing in a country with expensive labor, like the U.K., the U.S., and so on; if they are going to take on a remote worker, it's not going to be from your neck of the woods.
(4) Employer culture is considered important; if you want to have an employer, expect to come into the office so that they can culturally indoctrinate you. Yahoo laid off all their remote employees over this, and it's been the trend at Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, and so on. This is somewhat part and parcel with the stacked ranking, but it's the other side of the coin.
(5) Indentured Work: as things are developing these days, corps like to show off their legions of "slaves". It's a status symbol at parties for those "up there".
$ curl http://job.list/ | egrep -i 'from home | homeworking'
Up until recently I was an independent software development contractor. In the beginning of my career, I was working from home on semi isolated components, and I really hated it. It's very hard to concentrate on anything with all the distractions, you can't talk to anyone (even if it's just bitching about something), you don't get to know what's going on in the company, and when you have as small an apartment as I had back then, it's very hard to "switch off" from work after work, because in my case, my desk and bed were in the same room, and that makes it hard to "switch".
Add to that the obvious problem of constant distractions... but then, you get those in the office, too ;)
If a train station is a place where a train stops, what's a workstation?
This pretty much happened to me at HP. I worked the first 10 years mostly in the office, and the last four years as a remote worker.
At the end of 2003 HP announced they wanted all employees in the office again.
http://www.marketplace.org/topics/business/no-more-working-home-hewlett-packard-employees
I lasted a couple more years after that, but I knew it was only a matter of time. I didn't want to go back into the office anywhere, so I became a medical marijuana caregiver. By the time I was laid off I was able to replace my income by selling cannabis...legally (at the state level, at least).
Now I focus on projects I want to work on. I am getting into microcontrollers...the esp8266 will blow your freakin' tits apart.
I can still take on contracting work if I want, but cannabis is my core business.
Easy:
https://weworkremotely.com/
http://37signals.com/remote/
Difficult:
Software is usually developed in a team.
Working remotely in a software team: simply does not work!
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
(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.
Firstly to say I am not arguing against what you said. I do however want to add to point 4.
Getting employee buy-in is important. An employee that is engaged, that believes he has a higher purpose than just working for this company will put more effort and pride into his work. In theory higher quality and more work is the result.
This internal marketing helps employee retention as well as getting many of them to do more for no additional pay because they are committed and feel it is their duty.
Most new employees will eat this up and feel they are part of a larger group, a wider family, with a purpose beyond just plain old Monday work. After a period of time people, being smart, wisen up and read between the lines if they have not already. then the "engagement" becomes a game of pretending. Managers pretend to be engaged and pursue engagement activities (that include making sure no one works from home) and employees pretend to be engage and embrace the "culture" as a valued framework.
Many companies will cite Yahoo's experience and many managers will see it as "proof" of something. I believe it all boils down to the employee in question.
Most employees will be very concerned that they may be viewed as not doing much if they are working from home and will often do more "just to make sure". but perception is the name of the game. If your manager thinks people that wear jeans are not serious about work well...we know what happens if a candidate shows up to an interview in jeans.
As a society we are still a bit far off the holy grail of working from home. The old way of thinking is still prevalent and despite having the technology this way of thinking is holding us back as a society. Imagine the cost savings if you did not have to provide your employees with environmentally controlled facilities and giant office spaces. Imagine how much traffic will be saved if 50% of us do not have to actually be physically at work.
Personally I find working from home easier. I can sleep more and have an environment that I enjoy and helps me concentrate. I don't need a manager to interrupt me as he reads through his emails or colleagues playing music wanting to gossip over coffee or deal with the less than gourmet food on offer.
In conclusion I think that a person wanting to work from home needs to find the right employer and that is where the real challenge lies. Most do not advertise that you can work from home so it's still a matter of finding out manually. It's one of the questions I'd ask of a future employer.
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
Ask.
If employers are reluctant, ask for a trial -- say, commute everyday for the first two month (settle in, build relationships). Then the trial - work from home a day a week for two months. Then, the employer considers changing your home/office mixture.
Please remember -- more productivity at home is often at the expense of less productivity of your colleagues at the office. Simply because its easier to walk up and interrupt them in person. Acknowledging this fact will go a long smooth toward smoothing over potential jealously (your colleagues), and potential heartburn (your's - if your request was declined).
If still no, and the job's a keeper, try moving closer to work.
I'd say that employers must be solely concerned with people talking to each other all of the time, and not concerned one bit about productivity!
It depends on the company: in companies where there is a culture of working from home at least some of the time, ranking, perception, and opposition from management are much less of an issue. And if you prefer to work from home most of the time, an employer who is used to remote working may still appreciate someone from a similar culture who can be called in for the occasional face to face meeting over someone cheaper at the other end of the earth.
So, if this is important to you, the right time to ask is not a few months in, but during the job interview. If you are interviewed by several people, ask all of them: the manager can tell you what the company policy is, and a peer will tell you how that works out in practise.
There are some companies in the UK that employ staff working 5 days a week from home (I've had one as a client), but I'm not sure about software developers.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Find somebody who has money, and keep him happy. That's what the best hookers do, and it has fed me and my family for 25 years. I found a (Chinese) family with money and I build whatever software / servers / sites they ask me for. I even live where they asked me to live.
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.
The same thing applies in an office environment, only instead of one wife you now have 50 colleagues who want help with this and that (often not work related), or just want to chat about the weather...
Many people are single, or have wives/girlfriends who also work and aren't at home during the day.
The other thing is being able to prioritise distractions... If someone sends you an email asking for something, you can wait until you're finished whatever you're currently concentrating on, but if they walk up to your desk or call you then it forces you to immediately stop what your doing to respond to them... This can be very troublesome if you're trying to concentrate.
My job has a mix of home working, office working, and working in client's offices... I find i get a LOT less done if i'm working in our office, partly because of the distractions and partly because it's just a terrible office with bad seating, bad desks, broken climate control etc.
Client offices are a different story, as most of the people there don't know you there are usually much fewer distractions, although the actual conditions can vary... If it's quiet and comfortable then i can get a lot more done there, if it's noisy and/or uncomfortable then a lot less gets done.
That said i still think home working is better overall at least for me, if only because of the time and inconvenience saved on travel... There are more and more businesses being crammed into a small area in most cities and expecting people to all work at the same time, this creates massive congestion on all travel routes at certain hours, and results in inefficient over capacity at other times. I find it utterly ridiculous how they insist on so many people travelling to the same area at the same time, things should be far more spread out.
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I imagine that part of your desire to work from home is self-actualization and better use of time? I think a good way to achieve this is to try to build a strong foundation and cut your living expenses. This way you can be selective about the types of employers and jobs that you work on. You might need to offer a very competitive rate initially, or just start working from home (open-source) and let people know you're for hire, but once you've got your foot in (your own front) door, opportunities should steadily improve. Get set up to make that first move. I think this advice applies to other pursuits too, not just working from home.
If it acquires resources on instantiation like a duck, then its a shared_ptr<Duck>
the esp8266 will blow your freakin' tits apart.
I love these little modules. I have some 01s, 03's, and 11's and they are a blast to play with hooked up to my teensy 3.1's
A real blast until you forget the 3.3v issue and they really smell bad @ 5v.
This is a problem with you - you have not established clear boundaries with your wife. My wife works from home and I know to leave her alone. She informs me of which calls are important so I take the dogs and keep them in the bedroom with me so that they are quiet if the doorbell rings, etc. Since I work from home too but I'm more flexible I make lunch at the time she agreed to have it (according to her outlook calendar for the day). I only start complaining when I see it's 7pm and she's still working... or when she allows herself only 10 minutes for lunch, but I know she won't change. But tell me - why doesn't your wife work? That way she'd leave you alone.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I'm a UK employer with around 50 employees in the business, with 6 in the dev team. The sales team are mostly remote and whilst my development team are office based I'm not that worried where they're based as long as they get the job done. Our head office is oop north and the dev team down south anyway so there is already an element of remote working involved.
However I've yet to see anyone make a truly compelling case for routine remote working. My developers tried it when we first started the business and really didn't like it. They missed being in an environment dedicated to work with no kids running around downstairs and also the social aspects of being part of a team physically sat in the same room.
I'm recruiting at the moment for a new web developer (good all round skills required in PHP and / or Node, general experience with SQL databases) so if someone can convince me they can do the job remotely then I'm all ears.
This is a problem with you - you have not established clear boundaries with your wife. My wife works from home and I know to leave her alone. She informs me of which calls are important so I take the dogs and keep them in the bedroom with me so that they are quiet if the doorbell rings, etc. Since I work from home too but I'm more flexible I make lunch at the time she agreed to have it (according to her outlook calendar for the day). I only start complaining when I see it's 7pm and she's still working... or when she allows herself only 10 minutes for lunch, but I know she won't change. But tell me - why doesn't your wife work? That way she'd leave you alone.
I've suggested working to her a number of times. When the kids were younger it made sense for her to stay at home - before they started school the day care costs would have been more than her salary, but she could work during the school day now.
I have to say though that apart from when I try to work at home she looks after the house and the kids well, has a meal ready for me when I get home and is always attentive - which is nice.
The same thing applies in an office environment, only instead of one wife you now have 50 colleagues who want help with this and that (often not work related), or just want to chat about the weather...
It's a lot easier to tell someone at work to go away because you are busy, and there is a clear escalation path if they don't. Just to be clear I am not saying that everyone has difficulty working from home, there were times in my life when it would have been easy - just that not everyone can work as well from home. Obviously as well there are some jobs that need physical presence.
I've been working from home for the better part of 10 years now across two very different jobs and employers. At first I thought it was dream! When I took the job I had no idea I would be allowed to work from home. My first day on the job they gave me a very high-end laptop, docking station, monitor and company cell. They also allowed me to expense the entirety of my internet connection and a second phone line dedicated for business. This was in addition to very comfortable in-office space. Dream job! I thought. I worked almost exclusively from the office for the first six months and then they slowly started pushing me out the door. At some point shortly after that they gave my desk away. For four years I worked from home an average of 65 hours a week. I came in one day every week or two for meetings and face time. I was relegated to a back conference room. When something needed done at night or on the weekend, I was the guy they called because, 'Hey, you can do it without having to come in!' I was salary so I didn't see extra income from that. It was a nightmare. Finally, I quit. My current job is much more relaxed. I go in for half a day every two weeks or so. I still work more than 40 hours a week but I'm hourly now and so I get paid for it. I very much doubt that the extra hours I work are greater than the time I would spend commuting daily to the office. I get far more done at home than I ever could at the office. I have a team that works half from home and half from the office. They take written instruction well. If I need to talk to them I can do it over the phone or Skype. The biggest downside is the lack of advancement incentive. I have turned down three small promotions simply because I would not be able to do it from home. This is my choice, of course; I'm older and not chasing position anymore. The higher end promotions require in-office politics, from which I am pretty much immune. I think you get the picture. Oh! The wife likes the days I have to go in. That's when I take a shower. It can be a little lonely. But that's what Slashdot is for. :)
Well, since we're sharing, after 15 years in the office, I'm now working from home (for the past 2 years) and it works for me.
Distractions are certainly not the problem - I have a dedicated room for work. It's the opposite, really, being alone all day and not going to the office, to see and talk to other people is not for everyone.
I'm doing great and I'm more productive than ever. Not having to spend one hour commuting is great too.
One way to get to work from home is to become indispensable. For example, I told my boss that I will move to another country and he asked me if I could continue working from there. I accepted and it had many advantages, the biggest for me being the fact that I then moved to a third country, still keeping the same job. But it is true that you have many distractions and it is hard to separate your working from non-working hours, which poses problems if you have a family or at least a wife. And the lack of the social contact at work is also something you have to replace somehow. ;)
I would think the best deal would be to be able to work from home a couple of days a week. That would offer some of the advantages without giving you much of the problems. But good luck convincing your boss
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
My most productive hours are from 10pm till midnight, at home.
Everybody else is sleeping, nobody calls, no colleague can bother me.
I listen to a CD I've listen to a few hundred times, and I work in a very focused manner on important new features or bugfixes.
Before going to bed, I send a short email to my boss describing what I did.
After about a week, we have our usual meeting, during which colleagues say "we should do this and this, it'll probably take a month or two", with the hope that they won't be the ones having to do it. I just tell them "No problem, I did it yesterday night". Everybody's happy.
I tell my boss I'd like to take my day off, and go skateboarding.
So for me, it began by working the usual 9 to 5, adding some very productive overtime, and showing my colleagues and boss that I don't actually need the 9 to 5.
Home work can indeed be = awesome.
A few things though.
I've seen people completely fail at this task. This seems to fall into two categories.
1) People with unhelpful spouses, which are home a lot. Constant interruptions, not understanding that home does NOT mean that you are actually HOME! Thinking that if something is urgent, it is OK to bug / talk to / etc. Heck, sometimes the worker finds this interaction enjoyable, making it harder to say no. Which can easily lead to failure.
2) Some people are quite simply put, unable to work at home without being at home. They can't get into the work mindset, no matter how much they try. For myself, taking that morning shower, and behaving as if I'm about to leave for work, helps quite a bit. It seems to kick the body into drive, and get me going.
However, it can't be stressed enough.. you are NOT at home, you are AT WORK! People think of sitting around in their bathrobe all day, and sure one can do that, but is that really the state of mind that will engender you to work hard? To think of time away from your chair, as cheating?
On the other side of the coin, I've found that I hate working from home in the summer, and enjoy it in the winter. The winter, with -40C -- well, the reasons are obvious. The summer? Well, there's a lot to see on the way to work, it's pleasant and nice to get out.
Overall, it's a plus. However, if you do not have a supportive family -- just give up right now. You're not going to be successful.
I did, 13 years of working at home, the odd contract in an office to break things up.
I'm lucky to have found a few clients from the contracts who were happy to keep giving me work after I left, so you could try that route.
One problem I do have with working at home, is the wife nagging that I didn't do any house chores - I'm always pointing out I'm too busy working to worry about such things ;)
homeworking jobs? Is it better to demand it from the get-go
I doubt there's a company in the land that would recruit an unknown, straight off the street, give them a salaried post and let them work 100% from home.
For a start, there's no guarantee you wouldn't just goof around for the 6 months or so it would take for them to realise you're a lazy freeloader and then go through the process of firing you (sacking people in the UK and the rest of Europe is a long-drawn out process: employees have rights). Second, they'd have to install a load of kit in your house which would take time and you'd also have little or no "induction" into the company, your boss, the goals and culture.
So on the occasions where I have worked for places that do have home working: either as perk for trusted employees or as a cost-saving measure for the one that seriously messed up its estate management, it's not something you go "demanding" and definitely not from the start - or "get-go" in your language.
Finally, home working has many, many disadvantages. Apart from being isolated, you become an invisible part of the team - and therefore disposable. You never interact with your work-mates and never get to hear "grapevine" stuff, like where the promotion opportunities are. Neither does your boss "see" you, so you never bond and can easily get passed over for pay rises or interesting projects. Some people also find they instead of working, they spend all day with their face in the fridge and pile on the pounds.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
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
I've worked from home in years gone by. Speaking for myself I'm definitely NOT most productive working from home. Far too easily distracted. I also know several other people who have worked from home and had the same experience. Furthermore people generally do not use the commute time to squeeze in another hour of work in general. Some people can work effectively from home. I would say most are more effective in an office.
Not only that, but you're not adding to road congestion either.
True, though most companies really don't care about that much if at all. They regard that as your problem, not theirs and the marginal decrease of one car from the road is basically negligible.
Skype, etc. make communication with coworkers a snap these days.
It makes it easier but it isn't the same as being in the same building. Furthermore it is MUCH easier to have a quick group meeting in person than through video conferencing. There tends to be a lot of administrative overhead with phones and video. Now that isn't always a bad thing since too many meetings is possibly worse than too few. I've noticed programmers frequently think that a few skype calls is all that is needed to communicate effectively with coworkers and that often is not the case. A distributed team presents some very real challenges to work effectively together.
(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.
When I was working from home a lot, I was in the fortunate position of not having daily deadlines to meet. As a result, I was *more* productive at home. The scheduling freedom meant that I could take care of occasional personal stuff during the day that just couldn't get done on evenings or weekends. But because I tended to be kind of 'uptight Protestant' about my work ethic, (and because I really liked what I was doing), I more than made up for that by working early mornings and late evenings. Being at home also meant that I could take the breaks necessary to understand a problem and/or come up with solutions, without being stressed out about the watchful eyes of co-workers and management seeing me 'slack off'.
IMHO, some weekly presence in the office is required; if not for meetings, group discussions where telepresence isn't enough, etc, then for the social aspect of team building and maintenance. But in a lot of jobs, for a lot of people, two or three days a week working from home can be a win for both employer and employee.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
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:
Check your spam folder
There are tons of mails in there containing the secret of getting rich by working from home.
I can give you such a job myself, just send me your résumé and transfer the required hiring fee of 249.50$ to the following account ....
I work from home as a Lead Developer in the UK. I go into the office when needed which is probably once a week.
I'm lucky because by immediate boss is 6,000 miles away so we only see each other 2-3 times a year.
So the Stacked ranking thing you mentioned does not apply here because the whole company is structured towards working hundreds of locations around the world. If you knew the biz we are in then you would understaqnd how this works.
In general the company does not worry about where the work is done but more about it being done right.
This is my last job before I retire. My boss knows that and the sort of things that will make me retire early so we are good on this.
Skype, Teamviewer and other toold makes working with the rest of my team easy. Even the daily 'stand up' is done using Google Hangouts.
If I want to take a couple of hours out to say, cut the grass then I can do that. As long as I do what I said I was going to do that day no one cares.
There are jobs out there that will allow you to work from home but they are not the easiest to find.
While that is definitely important, I find that management buy-in is more important. More specifically, director/VP/C-level management. Managing remote workers or teams is more difficult than helicopter micromanagement. Bad, insecure managers need to see you working; good managers look at your productivity. Measuring productivity is hard, it's difficult to put numbers on. Seeing that you're warming your chair is much easier.
I recently was working from home 40% of the time or so. Every Friday, other days as required (two small children, do the math) with just a notification to my manager. Then I switched managers and the new guy put together a spreadsheet showing all the days I'd worked from home in the previous couple of months. After pointing out that four of the days he was talking about were actually sick days (which I reported as such, and had the time taken out) and showing how all the non-Fridays I'd taken from home were for legitimate reasons (my son having surgery, etc), he took away the privilege anyway. By his own admission, I'd done nothing wrong. (He then went on to tell me, in the same breath, that 1) I should collaborate more with my co-workers, and 2) I should figure things out on my own. Then he told me that my 2.5% raise could have been 3% had I performed better. Gosh, I feel so motivated now.)
The problem is not that I was working from home too often. The problem is that he's a shit manager. All of his reports hate him. If his boss (or his boss' boss, the CEO) was fully on-board with remote work, then he'd have a harder time being such a dick about it.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
Become a virtual assistant, and we'll pay you all that you're worth.
I hate working from home except when I'm sick or the weather is bad, stuff like that. My productivity is increased when I can quickly communicate ideas with my peers. If I had a good collaborative whiteboarding software at home, that could be all the difference I need. Drawing on a tablet or laptop won't suffice, I need a large surface on which to whiteboard.
I also find that random discussions are much harder to have remotely. I need these to relax my brain. For every 30min-1hr of real work, I need about 15min-30min of not thinking about work, but still doing something mentally engaging. Having a discussion with my cube mate is perfect for this, but it's hard to know when to bother him if I can't see him.
The same thing applies in an office environment, only instead of one wife you now have 50 colleagues who want help with this and that (often not work related), or just want to chat about the weather...
Except that this is actually good. Sure your productivity drops. But the company's as a whole increases. You should absolutely see it as your job to help your colleagues be able to do their job. Your company certainly does.
How is that feasible when it reportedly costs $6,000 for a driver's license? Some jurisdictions reportedly require 120 hours of logged supervised driving on a learner's permit before they will issue a license (source), and not everybody has parents who both drive and are willing to sit in the car that long. At $50 per hour for a professional instructor, it starts to add up.
https://careers.mozilla.org/
HTH, HAND. :-)
On the other side of the coin, I've found that I hate working from home in the summer, and enjoy it in the winter. The winter, with -40C -- well, the reasons are obvious. The summer? Well, there's a lot to see on the way to work, it's pleasant and nice to get out.
I haven't worked from home, but I'm sure my opinion of it would be based on the season. Winter snow and ice, great. Summer, with no central AC, not so great.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
First of all, I get where you're coming from. I've never been as productive as when I'm working from home, and I've never been as happy. To answer your question: You look for jobs you know involve an incredibly distributed workforce. In my experience, many open-source projects run this way. I applied only to companies I knew had globally distributed teams, and I knew I lived in an area where they didn't have an office. The challenge you'll run into with such companies is that you're no longer competing with people in a city radius-- you're competing with the world.
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
I have not yet had an interview where the employer would not allow any working from home. "Full time" home work (i.e. show up once a week for the meeting) type offers are rare, yes. But I can't remember a single interview where 1 day a week would not be offered.
Perhaps I don't scout as many job interviews as you do, as I am happy with my current job (which doesn't put a limit on my telecommuting, so it ends up with 2-3 days a week, which I find a nice balance). So perhaps I just pick my interviews more carefully?
I work for a leading enterprise in the US.
Among our ~50,000 US/Can employees, the leading office location is "remote". More of our employees work remote than at our largest fixed point facility.
Not making a guess at this; it's lately been my job to research it.
My wife also works at a US enterprise, from home, all day, every day. She's a project manager working with teams worldwide. She has a VERY long work day, due to time zone math, but is very productive, and has flexibility through the day to tend to what needs doing.
I work from home a couple days a week to cut down on the commuting hours. I have better equipment in my home office than the company will buy for me. It's customized to my tastes. There's no goddamn white noise streaming out of speakers in the ceiling. I'm not shivering in the summer from the lousy hvac system. And if I can get into flow, I'm very productive indeed.
If kids are on school holiday on a day where there's no kid care, hard to stay in flow. If you think you're gonna work from home and keep young kids, just don't. These intents are not compatible.
I have worked from home for about five years now. Generally it is harder to find from-home jobs. But I find companies are more open to hiring people who work this way as contractors. So long as the job gets done on time they are happy and I get to set my schedule and time line.
I'm a little surprised at the original asker's question, and his suggestion that the UK may be culturally behind on this aspect because what you say is true, of the US.
I've had 5 dev jobs at different employers and all of them have allowed home working. To address your points relative to the UK:
(1) I don't think this is true in the UK, developer salaries are still very much on the increase and have been for years. Companies are still stuck having to improve terms and salaries to get the necessary staff. If you can't go to market and receive job offers from at least 3 different employers with reasonable salary and benefits packages in the UK in the space of a couple of weeks as a software developer then you're doing something very wrong.
(2) I've never even heard of stacked ranking being used in the UK. I'm not entirely convinced that some elements of the way it's done in the US and used to determine redundancies would even be legal here.
(3) I don't think outsourcing in software is as prevalent here as it is in the US, I've worked at employers that used it but it's always been used in addition to, not instead of home grown talent. Experiments in outsourcing to India at places I've worked have always been failures, it's a classic case of you get what you pay for and the quality of developers being put forward by Indian outsourcing companies is beyond a joke - it costs you more to pay people locally to fix their code or even rewrite it than if you'd just hired a wholly local team in the first place. We do have offices in Eastern Europe with large teams of developers, but these teams are managed by the developers back here.
(4) Again, I don't think that's really the case here. I've seen companies that try and emulate that Silicon Valley trend but it's usually the small companies that don't know any better having dreamy ideas of being Google telling themselves that if they just do what Google do it'll all be great, but it never works like that because they don't have Google's budget to pay insane salaries so rapidly realise they need other sweeteners instead.
But beyond that there are other reasons why working from home shouldn't be a problem in the UK, not least because in the latter half of last year the UK government enforced a legal obligation on all employers to properly consider requests for flexible and home working:
https://www.gov.uk/flexible-wo...
This change in law means that unless there's a good reason to deny your request, it should be allowed. That means employers have to either start rationalising and sensibly justifying their reasons for denial, or they must simply allow it. Simply saying "No because that's different to what we've done before and we don't like change" isn't a valid response.
Personally I've tried home working in a number of different ways across various companies. At some employers it's typically been one or two fixed days every week, only adjusting if necessary to turn up for meetings. At others I've typically just homeworked during crunch time - the employer needs a 7 day week out of me for a couple of weeks running, and in return I get to do that 7 day week from home and get to bank the extra hours I do as leave. I didn't mind this, I did 22 days straight but then got all my weekend days (and a bank holiday back) so was able to use them to have a whole week and a bit off a week later post-delivery.
But I typically like to do it around certain tasks, if we're in the product concept and design phase where there's a lot of back and forth, and a lot of discussions over ideas and a lot of decision making then I come into the office. If I'm doing a rather solitary task like just churning through a bug fix list, putting together a detailed design doc once all the decisions are made, or trying to find a solution to a complex problem without any outside support then I much prefer doing that from home where I can focus on the task at hand with no interruptions, and with the be
You create them. All examples I have ever seen or heard about working from home were following the same pattern:
- A guy works in his company
- He builds lots of trust with his manager, boss, whatever
- (optional) he wants to move to another place for whatever personal reasons
- He asks if remote work is possible
- If enough trust was built, it happens. - If he dedicates a room to it, without distractions, he has a proper internet connexion (good enough for reliable teleconferencing), it works.
Stupidity is the root of all evil.
Many of the items you mention as "win-wins" are myths.
While it is true for some, most people are not more productive at home. There are more distractions. There are fewer opportunities to engage with coworkers, and the management resources are further away. (yes, management is supposed to be a resource to help you get things done more efficiently. If that's not the case, then someone is doing something wrong)
Most workers don't consider the commute time to be "company time" so when they move away from that commute time, they don't automatically give it back to the company. They take it for themselves.
Finally, until someone comes up with the "whiteboard killer app" (and I've used lots of candidates), nothing beats a whiteboard for communication.
For the most part, the only people who are more productive with work-at-home options are workaholics since they have even more opportunities to get stuff done. But even or them, the lack of office time can be counterproductive if they aren't coming in on a regular basis.
I also work 3rd shift, as a network operator for a rather large ISP (3rd shift being something of a requirement, since folks don't like it when we do disruptive work during waking hours. Can't imagine why....)
So for me, the distractions are pretty minimal. Everyone else is asleep when I'm working, and other than my cat occasionally deciding she wants to play when I have six figures of customers down at the moment, there's no problem. When I'm in the office, the distractions are non stop.
Now, I'm a loner type, and my work doesn't involve a whole lot of in person communication. Most of the time the folks I'm talking to with whatever I'm working on aren't local, so it's done over a conference bridge, and that's just as easily handled from home as at work. So this kind of environment is perfect for me. That, and the office is a 2.5 hour commute.
Unfortunately, things have changed within the company enough that I've decided to leave come September. It's going to be interesting, as there isn't much call for skilled network operators in decent driving distance, so I'm going to have to either work 3 to 4 month contracts that take me away from home, or find something that will allow me to telecommute.
Fortunately, my wife makes very good money and we have no debt other than the mortgage, so leaving my job doesn't threaten our quality of life, but I still don't relish the idea of being away from my family for months at a time, nor do I relish the idea of going back to associating with office drama.
I've been working at home on and off for 35 years (mostly on). I've been very successful at making my work at home experience both productive and pleasurable. When I start working I get "in the zone" and produce high quality work in short order. Then I tried to put together a team, each working at home, to do development, QA, and documentation for various projects. Documentation was the only piece that I could claim worked. I found that, left on their own, my development team became unproductive and the QA team drifted away from the goals I specified and documented. I ended up doing much more micro-managing than I imagined to keep the team productive and focused. My productivity went dramatically down and the quality of my work was suffering from all the interruptions.
As for finding work to do at home, I ended up doing it by circumstance. The company I worked for shut their doors at a really bad economic time. I started a company to develop software products, but ended up mostly consulting and designing hardware and software under contract to keep bread on the table. I developed a reputation for quality work so when a former client started up a new company, he didn't balk on my request to continue to work at home across the country.
The hardest part of working at home is training your family that you shouldn't be disturbed during work hours. I don't know if I would entertain someone working for me at home again unless I saw the same commitment that I have. The worst part of working at home is the isolation from your colleagues and co-workers. I think my company keeps my visits to a minimum because I try to make up the time I wasn't interacting when I come.
This. I am fortunate to still be in a cube with 5' walls but my coworkers and I are on the phone nearly all day and it makes concentration a wreck. I like the interaction I have with my team but it's not necessary. I did a 7 year stint working from home and as long as you have separate space where you can retreat it is doable. The new cube standard here is low walls and I think I'd have to look for another position or request for work from home if that change made its way down the hall. This is the first position in the last 18 years where I haven't had a private office either at the company or at my home office. It definitely lowers my productivity to be within earshot of all these distractions.
For point 3, it really depends where you live. Some of our employees have 2-hour commutes each way. While we prefer for them to first move closer to the office, it often is not possible. The least likely position in our office we recently agreed to let work from home two days per week-- someone that needs to coordinate with all the executives on tight deadlines.
If someone is good, you try to make it work. This person will have an uphill battle, but we will try.
When it was 'in vogue' in the 2000s, people abused working from home horribly. That pretty much killed it. There are some companies that still allow it for a lot of their top talent, but usually you have to prove that you are top talent. ADP comes to mind.
In God we trust, all others require data.
If your job can be done from your home, it can be done from India. Why would your employer pay $100/hr when they can pay $10/hr?
How does one "find an agent"?
It's a lot easier to tell someone at work to go away because you are busy, and there is a clear escalation path if they don't.
It is not, however, easier to tell someone at work to shut up because their noise is distracting you, and there is frequently no escalation path on that. Open-plan office and "talk out loud whenevr you like" are by design. Headphones often don't fully shut out the noise and are just a distraction in themselves.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
I am neither a machine-minder nor a clerk. I cannot get things done effectively simply by switching on and off like a light. I need to sit down, do stuff, then take a rest to recuperate and meditate what I did so I can come back and make sure that they're done better.
Over the years, I've observed that my most productive workday consists of 2-3 sprints with recovery times of about 2 hours between them.
This is not a good match for the factory-style roll-in at 8, work until noon, roll-out at 5 that's the accepted norm around here. If I'm really going to get that important rest time, I need to get away from the office, and ideally have someplace for a power nap and my commute times mean that it's unrealistic to go home and come back. And for the benefit of those who yammer that I should live closer to work, I would like to point out that residential and commercial areas in my state tend to be widely separated, sprawl is the norm and public transportation is virtually non-existent.
So, you can put me to work under the traditional factory-inspired conditions and get about 60% of my productivity. Or, you can allow me to work in a framework that gets more out of me. And, as a bonus, doesn't require me to relocate to your city. Which I have no intention of doing. I work to be able to enjoy my life where I am.
If so just subscribe to some mailing lists (I could name some but you give very little useful information when you say "software developer") - those sort of jobs come up all the time (weekly). Generally you're dealing with the people you'll be working with - not there HR department or some agency so the usual channels won't get you many leads.
Recently there have been a few jobs in the EU every week, which has been a consistent pattern for the last twenty years (UNIX and Linux).
I also find that random discussions are much harder to have remotely. I need these to relax my brain.
Just goes to show how different people are - I'm the opposite. If my brain suddenly gets distracted for 15 minutes after 45 minutes of concentration, I'm totally thrown off what I was doing and it will make me a lot less productive.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
Ask your mom or your brothers and sisters.
I kinda stumbled into telecommuting with my company about 6 years ago.
We'd just replaced our phone system and the new one allowed for remote extensions.
It started out as a day or two a week and converted into full time work-from-home with only occasional trips to the main office.
Mostly because I proved to my employer that I could be trusted to work responsibly from home.
And, even though I've only got a short commute to work (24 miles round trip), the amount of money I've saved in gas (about $1000 a year) and mileage (about 40K) is non-trivial.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
For me: 1) Have a very rare yet valuable skill set 2) The regional office where I work gets downsized and closed. They don't want to lose the skills I have, and I don't want to move across the continent. So working from home it is.
To expand on this, it also depends a lot on the job. While you're absolutely correct for software developer positions, there are other completely different positions that offer work from home that actually works.
One prime example is my job. I'm a consultant who works for a (very) large technology company. In my role I have very clearly defined deliverables that require me to get off my butt and do stuff; namely customer visits, presentation, system designs and so forth. And my pay is structured such that I can live on my base without lifting a finger, but I will live a lot better with the commissions I am paid in addition to my base. Yes, my role is partly sales but I have found I am quite good at it (which was a surprise for someone who spent the last 15 years or so locked up in a datacenter). This means I am measured but also driven... and I get to see an almost immediate return on my investment of time and work.
My job is one that works particularly well for work from home. If I don't work, I get paid less... and eventually those "measurables" show that I'm not doing anything. It might take a couple of quarters but eventually I'll get replaced and that'd be my own fault. But if I work hard and do the job I'm asked to do then I see improvements in my paycheck that encourage me to work even harder, and the statistics show that I'm doing my job. Everyone wins, right? Yeah, there are catches but generally it's good for everyone involved. It doesn't hurt that I enjoy the hell out of my job.
Obviously this doesn't work well for all jobs. My job requires customer face-time so it can't be sent to India. Though theoretically about 80% of my job probably could be done by someone in an office in Bangalore, it's that 20% "soft-skill" stuff that can't. 99% of my customers are quite conservative and would NEVER accept someone trying to do my job via Skype or some other technology. It just doesn't work. By the time the generation of kids coming into the workplace who are weaned on Facetime are in the CIO/CEO/CFO positions that I typically talk to I'll either be dead or retired. Software developers are particularly vulnerable to this problem because they are doing work that can be easily offshored. This is why WFH doesn't work for every job.
I guess my point of this ramble is that Work From Home is possible, and can be extremely enjoyable (I consider it a great perk of my job) but first you need to have the right kind of job. And if you don't want to be constantly concerned about losing your job to someone in India or China then you need a job that's customer-facing and profit-making for the company. Software developer is a no... customer-facing consultant is a yes. Finally, a good incentive program to work hard is not required but certainly makes it a lot easier. Just be wary of the risks of such an endeavour; if your boss doesn't also work from home then you might find yourself excluded by the fact that he doesn't see you every day. Mine works from home in another state so I rarely see him... but he covers an entire region so he rarely sees any of his people in person. But again there's that mindset; he works from home too so he knows how to work with employees who also WFH.
you think I kid. Try it. I did a throwaway one a while back just to see what'd happen, in less than a day I'd had offers of free money from Nigerian princes, claims that people were making $7,000 a month from their kitchen table, and even marriage proposals from lonely Russian brides.
Now, out of all that spam, if just ONE of those work-from-home things was genuine, out of all the THOUSANDS that're floating around just on Facebook, I'd've been set.
If you decide to try it and get lucky, please let the rest of us know.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
You don't want to be responsible for x * $1000 dollars worth of company equipment at home.
Let me tell you a story. I had to work home my mom's home for two weeks because she needed care. The company let me bring one lab prototype home so I can get a critical patch written and tested on a device driver. All was fine and dandy until the cat nearly got tangled in the wires. Fortunately, I had to be very watchful when I had that prototype out. I ended up unplugging everything and putting the prototype into a cat-proof cabinet when I was not actually sitting at the table. This slowed down progress.
Also, what about dangers? What if my prototype used high voltages and the cat gets zapped or worse. My mom had some memory problems at the time. What if she accidently touched the prototype while I was tested and she gets zapped.
No. Please do you lab work at the company lab. Too many things can go crazy at home!
Most Respectfully Yours Mrs. Cleara Plastique
Stop looking for a "job" and start looking for contracts.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
It does seem to be rare. I had one job in the UK that allowed it, but I was reporting to a US project team and my UK manager didn't really give a fuck as longs the cash kept flowing through his department.
I've seen some terrible abuse and it's quite clear that some people just can't be trusted to work from home. In the US i've never had a job that didn't allow it at least some of the time, though at one place I had to spend at least 40% of my time in the office or I'd lose a permanent desk.
It seems like a good thing to negotiate. If your skills are in demand and you have no shortage of people trying to hire you then it seems like you can negotiate nearly anything you want.
Why are people so quick to assume that they can't ask for something, and negotiate their compensation?
Because when I have asked for things, the result has ended up being "we went with another candidate for this position", and "how can I make myself a better fit for your company in the future?" has gone unanswered.
I've been working from home as a salaried employee for the past five and a half years. Prior to that, I worked in an office and commuted for seven years. There are pros and cons to both.
Office: The daily commute, which sucked up two to three hours of my life every day. It was definitely the worst part of my day.
Home: No commute. I spend $20 on gas every two months for short jaunts to the store, etc. The mileage on my car is ridiculously low given its age. I tend to feel less irritable, though that may have other causes.
Office: Fixed work schedule. I consider this a pro.
Home: No fixed work schedule unless you're disciplined enough to establish one (I now am). Without discipline, there is a horrible tendency to either work way too much or work not nearly enough.
Office: Rigidly separates personal life from work life (pro).
Home: No such separation exists unless you are disciplined enough to establish one (I now am). Still, days can sometimes blur together.
Office: With open-floor offices (like the one I worked in), there was always some loud conversation or other disturbance going on nearby that ruined my ability to concentrate. People walked up to me at my desk every day to ask me questions rather than send an email. Lots of unproductive meetings.
Home: Just as many distractions, but different ones (dog barking, people coming to the door, etc). However, I evolved a schedule that shifts the majority of my work time into the night/early morning hours when everything is comparatively quiet. I have far more frequent and more lengthy periods of "zoned" concentration at home than I ever did at an office A secondary benefit here is that I can plan my work around my day rather than the other way around. If I want to take five hours off in the afternoon to go drink a couple of ciders on my patio in the sun, I can do that. Or watch a football game on TV, etc. As long as I put in my eight hours, it's all good. With regard to meetings, there really aren't any other than Skype chat. I have to drive into town once every two or three months for a company meeting, typically only if we have to meet new clients face to face.
Office: Clothing is mandatory.
That's how I got my current job.
The catch is that you are competing with all the best developers in the world, so you'd better be very good.
That is how I got started, we outgrew our office space and I volunteered to work from home. I made sure to increase my production and do a good job and the change became permanent. My next job after that was offered to me by a former co-worker who was already familiar with my ability to work from home, so there was never any question about it.
My next position is likely to be running my own operation, which is the guaranteed way to be able to work from home.
Try sites such as elance.com and freelance.com to start...
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
If you work from home, you are competing with inexpensive overseas labor at "3rd-world" rates, and have to price yourself as such.
It's unfortunate it's come to that, and is largely why commute traffic exists. Imagine all the fuel saved and reduced pollution if most could work from home. It's a shame.
Table-ized A.I.
I do contract work so my 'employers' don't get the option of having me in the office; it's not something I offer.
I live in the middle of San Francisco so there's many jobs I could reach with a minimal commute (or on a Google/Apple/etc bus) but I choose not to because I really like working from home. I do a mixture of hardware+software jobs so I have a well equipped man-cave with everything my geekin' heart desires, all purchased with pre-tax dollars as well a chunk of my cable inet and rent being a business expense. This doesn't suck at all.
I get to pick the jobs I do; tending to alternate between doing cloud server work and embedded systems work (the opposite ends of the spectrum in many ways) which keeps things interesting; I hugely enjoy the work I do, so motivating myself to put the hours in isn't a problem.
I'm fortunate to be on my wife's health insurance which otherwise would be a significant expense. We have a 4.5year old daughter and WFH means I'm around in the mornings and evenings to do school runs and help out, which contributes greatly to domestic harmony as well as being fun. Typically I'll work 9.30am till 5.30 and very frequently squeeze in a 10pm-2am shift as well (like I say, I enjoy my work a lot).
I really enjoy not having to attend pointless meetings or do tedious commutes :-)
I use Google Hangouts a lot for work stuff; it's definitely better than pure voice chat because you can see if everyone's paying attention, but most communications is email and text chat. Github is fantastic for distributed working both for the obvious reasons but also because it allows less-technical management types to see who's been doing what and be reassured progress is being made.
Another big win is vacation time; I simply go whenever it suits my family, not at the whim of my employer. Most of the time I'll take a laptop with me and be available for some working hours, sometimes I'll go off for longer periods (e.g. several weeks with my folks in Australia) and set up a mini home-office there.
It's not for everyone, especially if you're the go-stir-crazy-at-home type who wants company, but it's perfect for me; recently I interviewed for a "real" job and got some decent offers but realized I really didn't want to compromise on many of the above advantages of WFH - especially being around mornings and evenings for my daughter (in most coding jobs it's not 'the done thing' to leave at 5pm).
Overall I think the whole WFH thing is much easier to swing if you can do contract work rather than be an employee.
As for finding gigs - here's a trick I learned; interview for a few full time in-office positions in your chosen field. When you get a full-time job offer, very politely decline it and offer to do the same work but as a contractor. In some cases they won't bite, but frequently they will; their logic being: :-)
a) We would have hired this guy full time so we've vetted him and want him to work for us
b) It's about the same price (I price myself at what appears to be a fairly high rate as a contractor but once you subtract the cost of providing me an office, benefits, paid vacation etc, it's about the same)
c) It's commitment-free - if we don't like the work we don't have to fire him we just don't give him more tasks.
d) We need someone to do X right now; let's give it to him and see how it goes, we can still look for a full-time employee
So it's not actually the bait-and-switch it appears to be, you're actually doing them a favor
I typically find that I have more contract job offers than I can do; previous clients frequently call you up out of the blue when they need something doing or recommend you to others.
Finally, there's a lot of mental freedom with this approach, rather than your manager saying "I need you to..." they say "do you have time to..."; it's much more respectful. Also I'm never afraid of losing my job; because I do a fairly wide variety of different things my resume is pretty colorful and I'm not a one trick pony.
[FrLz]
If it doesn't show up and count at review/raise time, it is not a part of my job. No matter what the job description says.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Not an advice how to find such a job, rather one more experience with one. I've been working as a software developer remotely from my home office since almost 9 years now, in the beginning as self-employed, since some time again in a fixed employment. For me it's a mixed experience. Clearly there are some significant advantages, but also some difficulties. One of them is that I do find, that I'm missing the even mostly silent background communication with colleagues, that's taking place when you work in an office. I was even thinking about joining some kind of a "virtual online office," but I haven't been able to find anything like that. So, I can confirm - everyone's experience is different, some find more advantages in this kind of work, others would rather prefer a traditional on-site setting.
it's going to count at review time, when your colleagues rate you.
1. Become indispensable
Demonstrate your value. Make your employer want to go the extra mile to keep you happy so you stay in the organisation.
2. Become an independant consultant
The benefit that is relevent to be able to work from home is that being a consultant the usual setup is renewable mandate. Typical mandate length varies but usually it is, 3, 4 or 6 months. Sometimes it can be up to 1 year mandates but those are rarer. What that means for you, is that you will have opportunities several times per year to renegotatiate your work conditions, including the option to work from home.
3. Be in demand
Having several organisations desiring your services is very powerful. For one, having several options gives you the freedom to easily leave from an organisation if the work conditions ever change and stop meeting your expectations.
Secondly, having several organisations competing for your services will make them want you more (scarcity influence principle in action as described in the Influence book from Robert B. Cialdini) and make them more willing to offer what you want to have your services.
This was an excerpt of an article that this story inspired me.
If you want to work remote, buy an expensive house. Seriously, that is the secret. I am lucky that I have a highly in demand skills and so have some leverage when it comes to negotiating salary and benefits.
The conversation usually goes something like this.
Mr. Employer: We loved your resume and the interviews when really well. We would like to offer you a job.
Me: Thank you. I would like to work for you.
Mr. Employer: We want to move you to our office in (somewhere not close)
Me: Thank you. I own my own home and would need a relocation package of £200,000 (US$300,000).
(long pause)
Mr. Employer: How would like to work remote...
Bingo!
Cheap storage VM.
If you honestly have the skills, then you have more negotiation power than a worker-bee drone coder who may need a bit of on-site polish. Of course, if you have these skills, the term job is not in your vocabulary, the term contract is...and with a contract, you can state the terms...with a job, the terms are stated to you.
You know that section of your review that says "team work", and how your team members get to rate you, and make comments about you?
Honestly, the best way to get a "work from home" job is to quit looking at jobs that want a presence.
Which brings us back to the original question: How can someone who recently graduated from university find a job that doesn't require a presence?
By having a linkedin profile first and foremost, and then going to dice and careers.stackoverflow.com and search for jobs with telecommuting as an option. I shit you not, the jobs are there. Perhaps they are not the most numerous of all, but if you, the generic you, spent an hour every day perusing through those job openings, you will have about a half a dozen decent leads.
Then you look at those jobs, and you look at those requirements. Then you ask yourself, am I a match? If so, then apply. Rinse and repeat until that shit delivers what you want.
If you are not a match, then get a job that requires a presence that can lead you to acquire the desired skills. Wait a couple of years acquiring skills, experience and connections, all the while searching for the desired types of jobs until you get a feel for it, a feel of where the industry is headed, which skills are common in telecommuting jobs, etc.
Then, when you are ready, you apply. You search and apply till you get it.
This advise works for anyone, fresh out of college, or veteran from the trenches. It also work for anything other than telecommuting jobs. Define what you want, research and understand what it takes to get what you want, get those things, then go get it.
As far as IT is concerned, the most common types of jobs that are amenable to telecommuting are sysadmin/L3 support/JEE administrator jobs, Dev/Ops and freelancing with Ruby or Python (JEE/C++/C# work is less common in the telecommuting realms.)
And if you have a lot of experience, you can branch into business analysis, architecture or security, which are also open to telecommuting (the more experience you have, the greater the chances.)
Citations: 20 years doing this shit, both in person and telecommuting.
Why are people so quick to assume that they can't ask for something, and negotiate their compensation?
Because when I have asked for things, the result has ended up being "we went with another candidate for this position", and "how can I make myself a better fit for your company in the future?" has gone unanswered.
Well, duh. That's the risk you have to take. It's like anything. You ask for something, and you risk getting a "no". And "risk" is the operative word here. Risk implies possibility, not certainty.
Fine, don't ask. You will never hear a "no", but you will never get what you want. To make an omelette you need to break some eggs. Interviews and job offers are nothing more than conducting business, between you and the prospective employer. And in business, like in anything else, there is a fine balance between risk-taking and rewards.
There are times to play it safe, and there are times to take a chance and risk it.
If you can do the job from home, so can some guy in India who gets paid 10% of your wage. Working from home is code for "Easy to outsource", and is not something you want to look for in a job.
Yeah, because the majority of people in IT who get outsourced were working from home... oh, wait.
Seriously, how far up the ass do you guys have to come up with such lame statements? Do you guys even think before you post them? Just think about it. Thousands of people get replaced all the time via offshore? The overwhelming majority of them worked with a required presence, in an office or a factory.
So how the hell do come up with such opinions?
Whether you work from home or from an office is irrelevant to outsourcing. We are all going to deal with it, so the question is whether we have the skills to delay it, and the skills to rebound quickly at another place, and the social skills and network connections to deal with this permanent feature of a global economy.
This has been going on for 15 years now, and it is an extension of the transition from work-for-life to oh-shit-everyone-is-a-contractor-now that has been going on since the late 80s. Where have you guys been?
To each their own. Depends on what I'm doing. If I'm trying to solve a complex issue, I can only devote about 30 minutes at a time before I need to step away. If I'm already past the designing phase and I'm just cranking out code, then I can sit for 2-3 hours strait and I prefer no interruptions at this point.
But same thing from the other perspective. My cube mate can turn around and see that I'm in-the-zone and leave me alone. Programming is in phases, some phase I need breaks, some I don't. In the end, I need people more than I don't.
Did they? Didn't they simply require them to be in-office employees instead, and the employee chose to quit if that was so important to them?
I'm not saying it doesn't suck/isn't unfair if the previous agreement with their management was that they were remote.
Make yourself so valuable that they don't have a choice. How?
Work for a small company.
Be highly specialized.
Be very good at what you do.
Basically put yourself in a position to make demands.
It's pretty difficult to realize, but I have seen two ways to pull off remote work:
- Do work with a client locally for a while and earn their TRUST. Multiple contract renewals are a sign they really like you and need you and are likely to accept a remote working arrangement.
- Become a senior SWE and acquire enough skill and "brand" that you will be desired by the larger companies which make exceptions for this type of thing. I've many people, almost always in management roles, pull this quite well for a number of years. All the largest software companies have some remote managers and developers (Microsoft, Autodesk, even Google), even if at first contact they'll tell you they don't do that. Usually, those who get those exceptions are senior and their skill is in high demand (they're "experts" at something, or they're great managers).
I've never seen anybody get well-paid remote work in different circumstances (though that's not saying it's impossible).
I'm a UK employer of developers based in central London and I let people work from home. Almost all do so every now and then (we allow 15 days a year automatically and always add more if asked). Some work from home on a regular or semi-regular basis 1 or 2 days a week. I have had one person move to Hong Kong for 4 years and one move to Mexico City for 18 months. Both are now back in the UK and both are working as hard as ever and delivering great work.
The problem is less about working from home, more about finding the right people with the right skills. It's not just development skills (I'm looking for Progress and Python coders currently) but it's also the ability to communicate remotely, to pick up the nuances of meetings remotely and to have the self-motivation. A lot of the work is pretty boring (we're contract developers rather than a trendy web shop or start-up) and so it is easy to not communicate and not pick up the vibe. Don't expect to just not show up at the office one day and for everything to be fine. Some of our team work from home for a day and we just don't hear from them or even know that they exist. Don't let yourself be one of them! Be prepared to put in the days in the office when you start - otherwise people just won't know who you are.
The time will be once you get your driver license
Where does a recent graduate find the money to pay for that, as I mentioned?
and get a job
You need a driver's license and a car to get a job, but you need a job to get a driver's license and a car. Or what am I missing?
I work for Dell and am remote. I travel some, but that varies by role. Many of the people I work with are remote. http://jobs.dell.com/united-ki...
Perhaps a bit of a late reply but just to say that your manager sounds like he's not worth working for.
Otherwise I say "employee buy-in" because managers are employees as well. Although they often forget....
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
Oh he's definitely not worth working for, and I'm looking for a new gig. It's hard because I'm relatively near a major urban center, so everyone assumes I want a job in the city. The trouble is that I'd spend 20 hours a week commuting were I to do that (2 hour one way if I take the train in, more like 1.5 should I drive, but parking spots are at a premium and therefore expensive). So, by turning down even considering jobs that would require that commute, I look lazy and not worth pursuing for my skill set. Remote jobs do exist, but competition for those jobs is high, and I'm not that good.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.