Slashdot Mirror
The Real Reasons Companies Won't Hire Telecommuters (oreilly.com)
Long-time Slashdot reader Esther Schindler points us to a new article at OReilly.com: Those of us who telecommute cannot quite fathom the reasons companies give for refusing to let people work from home. But even if you don't agree with their decision, they do have reasons -- and not all of them are, "Because we like to be idiots." In "5 reasons why the company you want to work for won't hire telecommuters", hiring managers share their sincere reasons to insist you work in the office -- and a few tips for how you might convince them otherwise.
The arguments against telecommuting range from "creativity happens in the hallway" to "the extra logistics aren't worth it," and the article suggests the best counterarguments include pointing out a past history of successfully telecommuting and allowing your employer to gradually transition you into a remote position. And if all else fails, just become a "rock star," because according to one tech placement company, "For the right talent and when a role has been open for a very long time, they tend to give in."
The arguments against telecommuting range from "creativity happens in the hallway" to "the extra logistics aren't worth it," and the article suggests the best counterarguments include pointing out a past history of successfully telecommuting and allowing your employer to gradually transition you into a remote position. And if all else fails, just become a "rock star," because according to one tech placement company, "For the right talent and when a role has been open for a very long time, they tend to give in."
just become a "rock star," because according to one tech placement company, "For the right talent and when a role has been open for a very long time, they tend to give in."
Conform to the role on offer, and you too can abuse the term "rock star" for profit.
How in the world can Real Work(tm) get done without the constant barrage of face-to-face interruptions? Think of the children!
Brought to you by Management. Management - for when you need to divide your day into never-ending 30-minute chunks of time. Focus? What the hell is that?
I was getting ready to throw some serious shade at this, but there are actually a few good points in this article. In particular the comments regarding mentoring junior members and knowing when they are struggling.
Managers like to sneak up on their employees, and look over their shoulders. They like to be an ever-present looming threat keeping the prole's heads down and working hard. It's a constant trickle of pleasure in their bloodstreams. Productivity and mental health numbers don't matter to them.
As someone who's spent the last two years working on nothing but remote projects, I completely understand it. Doesn't always have anything to do with the worker, either. It's been my experience that it's something that doesn't experiment well.
What I mean by that, is that you can't easily mix the office model and the work from home model easily. You're usually doing all one, or all the other.
If you don't, and you haphazardly experiment with it, without knowing how to do this, your office people will screw everything up, or hire the wrong people.
Sometimes, they'll intentionally mismanage projects, because the notion of remote workers is seen as a threat. I've seen it. They also have this nasty habit of wanting all of the productivity gains of remote workers, while insisting they work with constraints that don't make sense for remote contractors or employees.
It's not for everyone, at least not yet. The whole idea is a pretty radical change from the established order. Better tools need to be built. Better protocols need to be in place more consistently. Better practices need to be thought up and deployed, because the state of it now is objectively bad at the corporate level.
And if companies know their weaknesses here, I say good. Good. It means fewer shit remote jobs.
This signature has Super Cow Powers
Given that Slashdot is a technically oriented site, I'd say in this specific case we'd usually be the ones setting up said "extra logistics" - so that argument doesn't hold water here. Whether or not you choose to laugh in the person's face when they bring that point up is up to you (I'd argue that you should show restraint, though; PHBs generally don't have a sense of humor, especially on subjects where they're out of their depth).
I set up an openvpn server on my "test box" (an old Dell running CentOS 6.8 which sits under my desk) specifically to facilitate certain tasks when I'm telecommuting. That thing's been running longer than the VPN server we provide... although nowadays I could just use our VPN server I guess.
#DeleteChrome
...managers are controllfreaks. Work has to be done their way, in their speed (not slower, not faster). Also, happy workers tend to get more feisty than workers who are afraid...
And it is more fun to fire them in person.
If you can do the job from home then EditorDavid, manishs, msmash[1] or BeauHD can do it from Calcutta.
[1] Suspiciously close to an anagram if your handwriting is as bad as your accent.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Don't some of these same reasons apply to hiring developers in India or wherever? Yet that gets done all the time.
Part of the reason it's a problem: If companies wake up to the fact that information flows freely, and people don't need to be tightly controlled, they might also wake up to the fact that neither jobs, nor companies need to exist at all anymore.
apart from people who don't have a business that is developed enough to make it worth shelling out for office on-costs?
Telecommuting is a perk for trusted in-house rockstars who aren't quite board material. The value those rockstars deliver is nearly always organisation specific. It isn't tranferable. Don't believe the hype. Unless you is a global rockstar or sumfink.
... but their local guy is not allowed to telecommute to avoid the daily commute & stress of it?
That's weird.
No, wait.
It's stupid.
The real reason? Simple: people are lazy as shit. If you give them a chance to slack off, they will. And that's far more likely at home than at work where a pointy-haired boss can tell you something else that needs doing.
All the rest is just hand-wavy bullshit. And it's right. I personally think "working from home" is *never* as efficient as a dedicated, isolated workspace. If you do it, it should be a level of trust you EARN from a company, certainly not start with. Plus, I think if you work from home you should get paid less, because working from home is so desirable and convenient.
And I personally have the full choice of working from home, or at my office; I've worked for the firm for 23 years, they couldn't care less. But generally, I work from the office.
-Styopa
for entire article:
s/honored/disdained/
s/reasons/excuses/
that is all
Musicians take offense to trivialization of their profession.
...they don't know how to manage remote employees. I find this difficult myself, but primarily because I ad hoc manage a few people who are remote - I think if you manage the entire team in a remote fashion, it can be a win.
With a management process built to support this type of team - remote teams actually coordinate and communicate better than physically co-located teams.
We currently have a single remote team (many other teams in-house) at our company - and they're fantastic. That's primarily down to the fact that the guy running the team (also remote) has a great and transparent system for communication that works well.
Now, there are many reasons why it wouldn't work for a given company - but I can definitely state that it can work, and work REALLY well - given the right circumstances.
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And if all else fails, just become a "rock star,"
As if it was that easy. This reminds me of when I explained that the cost of housing was too high and a friend said 'people should just earn more money'. Don't you think they aren't already trying?
How much of the advice out there is for a very select few able, talented, healthy, and driven individuals. What about the other 99.5% of us? The ordinary folk. The very best of us don't need advice. They will virtually always find a way to succeed.
What is wrong people that they would dish out such myopic 'advice'?
According to a lot of posters I've seen recently, many companies want Rock Stars as interns... and Jimmy Johns wants to hire Rock Stars, so maybe they are "Freaky fast"
I don't know, but I would like to think you have to have some other qualifications, especially with retarded "rock" like that screamo crap that was so popular a few years ago. I'd prefer it if my sandwiches weren't delivered by somebody with the ability to make a pig squealing noises that ruin an otherwise listenable tune.
I used to work for a company that introduced a policy of two working from home days per week. This was done because the company needed to hire people but they couldn't expand the office space, so basically your desk would be used by other people the days you worked remotely
In reality, a "working from home" day was more like an "on-call" day. You could easily avoid any work, except responding to emergency emails or addressing urgent issues. So most likely you would be working two or three hours those days and do your own stuff the rest of the time. It was well understood that if you needed something from coworkers working remotely it wouldn't get done until the next day unless something was really on fire. Non-urgent emails would not get responded and IM chats would just get a "Sure, I'll take a look" kind of answer.
I'm not sure if managers were too dumb to realise what was going on, or they just didn't want the program to end since they were also taking advantage of it, but the thing is productivity did suffer
I'm not saying remote work is impossible, just that the organisation needs to be prepared for it
Companies pay people for being at their desk 8 yours a day (and yes, HP payed me for doing nothing for over a week). If companies actually payed people based on the results they produced rather than being warm bodies at a desk, then they wouldn't have any problem with where they were when they produced those results. The "need to be in the same room" is bullshit, because I've been forced to work with coworkers on the other coast and even overseas while sitting at my desk -- I even have a direct manager in another state. Granted, the real reason they don't like you working at home is they can't directly monitor the hours you work.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
One advantage of planning for remote work is that it makes it easier to get people on-line and working in an emergency. If production goes down unexpectedly on a weekend, if the company's already set up for remote work they can make phone calls and get engineers on-line and working on the problem in a matter of 5-15 minutes. If the company isn't, engineers are going to have to get dressed and get in to the office before they can even start looking at the problem and that can take a half-hour to an hour (or more depending on how far away the engineer lives). It also makes it easier for employees to turn what would've been a day taken off to deal with appointments into a half-day or less of time away from the keyboard, which helps get more work done. I've always felt that those benefits more than outweigh the costs of setting the company up for remote work, and that having people working remotely on a regular basis makes sure all that infrastructure's working properly and gives confidence that it'll be there and working when things go pear-shaped and you really need to get people on the problem quickly. To me that justifies telling the HR people and the managers "The company needs this. If you don't know how to run things this way, go start learning.".
Communication works better in person
By far, the most prevalent attitude is that rapport and camaraderie are generated best from in-person relationships.
Unfortunately, this is true. it's why companies spend millions of dollars a year on travel expenses when it would be much cheaper to use phone/video conferencing.
Creativity happens in the hallway
Questionable. Especially when the only examples they can come up with is Yahoo and Best Buy. Seriously? Yahoo and Best Buy? WTF?
Just write the damned code there is no requirement for it to actually work seems to cross all cultures.
Yes, productivity is higher if you don't keep being interrupted, but if you are off site, emails texts and even voice calls can always be used to destroy productivity if there is any risk of it actually happening.
But its hard to operate CNC machines from home, and group hugs are also a problem for telecommuters.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Working at home every day is not efficient if you're into software development for example.
In one whiteboard session with some coworkers you get more done than by e-mail for two weeks.
But there are tasks that require absolute concentration if you want to get the best results, like designing and implementing a complex algorithm, or fixing a complex bug.
My days in the office are mostly filled with meetings, Skype calls with the offshore team, writing e-mails, etc. I work at home one day per week, and that's the day that I usually get most programming work done. It allows me to focus for a couple of hours without being disturbed.
The only real alternative to working at home is working really late. Arrive at 11:00 and leave at 20:00. Most coworkers are probably gone around 18:00, which leaves you with two hours to get some real shit done.
I would recommend according to sources on the net to be on the look out for shape shifting aliens disguised as humans, who, like the hybrid humans+aliens, must consume human flesh to maintain their human appearance.
Hey aliens and hybrids, we're onto you!
Human flesh is being found more and more in common food today,
There exists a certain barrier in normal, everyday thought which hides the reality of these creatures and their hybrids along with the smell and taste of human flesh in common food as well as the scent of these creatures. they all smell the same. while the aliens and hybrids are safe within their homes, they prepare higher concentrates of human flesh in food because they can get away with it and unless you're in the right state of mind, you would not smell the human flesh in the food. They use some type of masking agent so you normally can't smell the taint. They have been studying us for years upon years and much of what you hear coming from government/military experiments are just a preview of things to come.
A certain modification to the mind can bring the typical human into a different frame of mind where these... "things" can be smelt/detected. there are other effects which follow, too, but the frame of mind of the individual would often be too flooded with different events occurring within and outside of the human mind/body.
Never trust a mason or someone giving you food/drink out of the blue, even if you have known these people for your entire life. always buy food at random, never return to the same product more than # of dice rolls. Always buy food and drink in sealed containers. Look for typical "Illuminati/occult" symbols and don't purchase from these companies.
Things are not what they appear to be on Earth, unless you are enabled to really see. Then you'll probably wish you never had. (like in The Matrix where the delicious fake steak is being consumed and a deal struck)
Managers don't know enough about the ins and outs of the job, so they substitute butts warming seats instead of proper performance metrics.
Other reasons, such as mentoring, are fullof sh*t. There's no reason a group of coders, documentation writers, even accountants, can't rotate meeting at each other's homes in small groups of 2 to 6 people, especially if they all live in the same area. This also takes care of the "communications work better in person", because sometimes having a frank discussion to find out what is bothering a co-worker isn't ever going to happen under the watchful eyes of everyone else.
As for the "creativity happens in the hallway", first, consider the source. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer banned telecommuting, and Yahoo fell into the shitter - over and over and over. There is no reason for ANYONE to be stupid enough to write an article on October 4th, 2016 (the date of the article) with advice from Marissa Mayer, unless it's "How to ruin a business, screw over employees and shareholders, and collect a golden parachute". Seriouisly. WTF was Esther Schindler thinking? Or EditorDavid, for that matter?
"Managing remote workers is harder" - sure, if you don't understand what they're doing, don't trust them, don't have a way to measure performance, and want to justify your job as a manager by being seen managing those chair-warming butts. Don't use the manager's incompetence as an excuse. It indicates that whoever hired the manager should also be fired.
"It's more complicated." Aw, gee whiz. If you're going to use that excuse, put a gun in your mouth and eat a bullet. LIFE is complicated. Other companies can do it, managing nurses visiting patients in their homes, truck drivers on deliveries, any company that dispatches workers to the job. Anyone making the excuse that it is complicated should be ashamed of themselves,
As for "we've always done it this way", we could have used the same excuse to keep the old outhouse around. Both are equally full of shit.
Crap article by someone who is stuck in the past.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Think of the office sports pool!
FTFY.
A lot of the push to get people into the office is made by those for whom the office is their social life as well. The repeated interruptions aren't always about work.
Have gnu, will travel.
Every one of us living in a major metropolitan area deals with the stress and bullshit surrounding just getting to your workplace from home. Not only does commuting suck hours of productivity away from your employer (2 hours a day equates to 40 hours lost every month per FT employee), it also contributes to excess reliability and consumption of fuel within the economy, along with helping destroy the environment, primarily that air you're breathing every day living in the same area.
Why not speak to what matters with companies, and provide considerable federal and/or state level tax breaks for every position that a company converts to 100% telecommuting.
Beyond the environment and opening up productivity windows, this might be a model that enables companies to perhaps want to support a change that can easily be supported by technology today. Needless to say, I'm not buying the anti-communication reasons brought up in TFA. If we can rely on technology today to bond families over thousands of miles, I'm pretty sure we can build a simple professional relationship with a co-worker or boss.
TL; DR - Federal/State level tax breaks for each corporate position converted to telecommuting, because technology can support it.
so why does Esther Schindler get to blogspam Slashdot...???
It would shear away an entire strata of "management" and their sycophants that are blantantly useless and non-productive.
Poor managers will always use excuses why it won't work, but effective managers will always get the best out of every situation.
That's _their_ viewpoints. I certainly don't mean to suggest that I agree with them. But it's the perception, and you don't change someone's mind simply by saying, "You're wrong."
The article does indeed make some good points.
Particularly the last point about introducing work-from-home gradually. That's been my experience both as an employee and as a manager. As an employee, first I established a good reputation as a solid worker in the office. Then I worked from home one day because I waiting for the AC repairman or whatever. That day, I made it a point to start working at the time I would otherwise be starting my commute, stop when I would have finished my commute home, and communicate fully with co-workers while I was working in my home office. Btw, my home office doesn't have TV or other "home" stuff in it either, it's set up for work. As my boss SAW that it was effective to have me work from home, she became comfortable with it. The same process repeated at my next job. Now I work from home most days. I appreciate saving the commute time, so once in a while I do the same thing the office chief does and finish up a project just before bed - he notices that I'm online just he is. (Occassionally, I even email or message a manager late when appropriate, knowing they'll see the timestamp.)
When I ran my own company, it was similar. Early on, I preferred people to be in the office so we could more easily get to know them and they could easily ask someone a quick question. As they became familiar with our systems and processes, most would try working from home occasionally. For many people, that worked well. Other people had trouble. Being at home, they forgot to get to their desk at the scheduled time and were easily distracted by "home" stuff. One guy eventually moved to another state and kept on working remote.
"Creativity happens in the hallway"...?
What kind of pathetic, corporate bullspeak is that supposed to be? Creativity happens everywhere and anywhere that one is comfortable enough to just sit and let their mind wander, free associate, and play with ideas. And it's a lot easier to relax enough to be creative, when doesn't have some pointy-haired manager standing over their shoulder yapping "Why are you just sitting there? Get to work! I want to see some creativity RIGHT NOW!"
John Cleese gave a fantastic talk about this. It's on YouTube. Go find it and watch it.
The reason I work from home: To get away from all the idiots at work and get something done. Reason managers don't like telecommuting: They think everyone's an idiot and wont work if not watched (unfortunately 85% true) In tech a few people waste everyone's time. Silicon valley x5. I understand, Bobby's surgeon was his mom, can I go back to work now!
My company is pro-telecommuting. In fact, there is not a single member of staff that doesn't spend most of the week telecommuting.
The way we ensure people are around and active though is that we track activities and work through an online kanban system tied into tickets (code commited to repositories is reported on tickets automatically, wiki documentation is tied in automatically too, office documents are also tied to tickets automatically using our storage system). Additionally, when employees are working, we sit in a push-to-talk enforced voice chat system, where we can easilly collaborate (unlike Slack, Hipchat and Skype for business, that either don't care about voice chat, or think that push-to-talk isn't necessary).
A lot of tools that are being sold that are effective as telecommuting tools are pretty terrible and instead we've found many tools focused on online collaboration for consumers and gamers tend to be much better, which is absurd. I don't see most larger companies (I have worked in and with a few) ever considering adopting the better technologies because they're not "enterprisy", even though the vast majority can be tied into an AD at least (but maybe not single sign in).
Because we are focused on telecommuting, even if we're in a office, we are logged into voice chat with headsets (which are typically gamer headsets because they're more comfortable for long hours). I just cannot see the corporate world adopting this, for people that join my company, it's a culture shock that some find difficult to adjust to at first and within the first week, they really struggle to understand how we consider it essential (and not just an occasional thing) to be on the headset when you're working or move to the AFK channel if you're not.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
> Who "hires" telecommuters?
Everywhere I've worked doing software development, a reliable employee could transition to a lot of working from home, no need to be a "rockstar". Work from home one day while waiting for the AC repair guy, or when your and SHOW that you get your job done from home. Skipping the commute (working half of the commute time) makes that easy for anyone who has the skills from working from home or working for themselves. (For example, you learn to work in a room with no TV or family members distracting you.)
My current employer has offices in many places, in the UK, Colombia, several US states, etc. Therefore meetings are ALREADY teleconferenced and people already use IM as the routine method of communication. Basically, our normal ways of doing things assume that co-workers may be in a different physical location. That makes working from 25 miles away easy.
I've been approached about out of state positions similar to one I had before, where I'd be responsible for systems running in some datacenter away from the corporate office. If I worked in the corporate office, I'd sit in the corporate office and ssh to the systems in the datacenter. Working from home, I ssh to the systems in the datacenter. There's absolutely no difference in the work. I just don't have to drive in to the office, possibly move to their city, and the company doesn't pay for an office. Ideally are positions where the person has primary responsibilty for maintaining and developing some software system which interacts with other systems only in well-defined ways. The job doesn't call for a ton of communication with different people.
As someone who works for a large multi-national, trying to hold someone accountable that works for home is a pain in the rear. If they work in a remote office, I can ask someone to walk past their office and ask them to call or email. There are a lot of people who are good remote workers. However, almost none of them seem to work as developers and system admins. The couple of dozen or so that I have worked with while they have worked from home have been absolute pain in the neck, since they are passive aggressive little twerps.
If you want to work from home. Prove you can work in the office, that your skillset is significantly better than others who could do you job and are willing to show up, and give a cost/benefit that matters to your management, not to you
In God we trust, all others require data.
Because of euhm ... their reasons dont matter to me, if they dont and someone else will i would break my contract and fuck off to get to the place that lets me do it and let them eat cake and sue if they want to
but thanks for the polite suggestions, those days are over sadly
past experience i keep it simple in case of actually invited over
10 print "nod"; 20 print "smile"; 30 until (find_one_that_does){goto 10;} #seriously bad taste using goto basic isnt it 40 if (find_one_that_does){fuckofftothebetteroffer;} 50 #they are not my friends and i dont do charity i clearly, truly do not give one flying fuck about anything but the money unless it would be a totally awesome job where its my company and i get to be the one telling people what to do outdated skillz obviously honestly
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?
Not according to Trump. --wrong!
All of the reasons listed in the article are pure bullshit. The real reason companies don't want employees to telecommute is because they don't trust them. If an employer doesn't trust you, you shouldn't be working for scumbags like that.
In reality the ONLY thing an employer should be concerned with are deadlines. If a project has been assigned to you and you deliver by the deadline, then there should be no issue. That's how most of my past employers have thought, fortunately. Nowadays, I'm the employer.
If you monitor and track the remote work performance ANYBODY should be eligible for it, tools like this can help flexible work arrangements tracking tool and keep managers from favoring who works remotely.
Yes, raymorris. Totes agree. Anyone who has ever done that knows it to be a fine way to do things. How could anyone disagree? But, also, I would argue that you need to have established the trust with that particular employer. (Try doing it with your next one.)
I'd further argue that to a new employer with whom your only established credentials are that you generally haven't been in prison and your referees have found you to be to some extent agreeable, you need to put in a fair bit of face time first. Unless your value add is quantifiably obvious. (In which case, why would you be an employee at all?) Employers may tolerate telcommuters - if they have to or have a spare desk - but I'm not persuaded that many see a good reason to go out looking for them.
In my world "rockstar" = "reliable and doesn't take the piss". Which I imagine is a bit of a treat for a lot of employers/ees. Don't get me started on global "rockstars", which is a different and ridiculous ballgame. Except in the odd case where they actually do something more than promote themselfs.
Remote work is about results.
If people (bosses and coworkers) cannot see you doing the work, you had better deliver the results that are promised. Any problems are your problem. Distractions to disasters, they do not excuse any lack of success.
but we don't tell our managers:
1) Constant interruptions, everything is an emergency when you can just walk into someones office and destroy the work schedule deliverables for a week with constant nagging.
2) Regional concerns. No F'in way I am working in California. You offerred me the job, but I am not paying those taxes or those rents. I will work from IOWA thank you or find someone else.
Besides, Californians are insane.
3) You want me to work where? Downtown Chicago? I don't think so. I can't personal carry and I don't feel like being robbed.
Same for the recruiter who tried to convince me making 70K a year was "Competitive" for a job in Detroit. These people look at me with a straight face and say "Detroit is a wonderful opportunity with beautiful surroundings. It is simply the opportunity of a lifetime."
No Thanks, and I currently make twice that in Scottsdale AZ minus the bombed out buildings and the political establishment that sold its population out a long time ago.
Keep voting the way you do all you people in Michigan. Its just working out grand for ya during the past 20 years hasn't it?
But the whole thing is stupid.
Working in a global company like Yahoo with servers in VA with operations in Washington and Bangalore, what is the diff if I work at home?
I work remote anywhere I go for the real work I do and I can't avoid it even if I report to a specific office location.
This article is crap.
The real issue here is the reduction of work force without declaring layoffs for this sort of thing. The Yahoo CEO did the same thing.
Instead of announcing layoffs, which would hurt the stock, they terminated the remote work program so they can force people to quit.
Total and COMPLETE CRAPOLA.
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
> Distractions to disasters, they do not excuse any lack of success.
If you heroically resolve some disaster and your boss doesn't find out about it, one of two things is true:
a) You /caused/ the disaster and solved your own fuck up without it being noticed. Good job.
or
b) You fail at boss management.
All of the reasons given in this article are why you wouldn't want employees disappearing into the telecommuting ether forever, but why not two days a week? If tech employees were to do that, with in-office days properly synchronized by team, companies could save money without demolishing the company culture. Your city would benefit environmentally too.
> But, also, I would argue that you need to have established the trust with that particular employer. (Try doing it with your next one.)
I'm going to try. :) Actually I'm probably going to be bold and mention it at the interview. Because I'm now working from home most days, and the head of the office sees me working past midnight sometimes, I will have a strong reference telling the hiring manager I do well with it. Other references will say the same. We'll see what happens. I suspect I'll find which employers are comfortable the idea of doing that in the future, after I'm in the office for a while. And some companies, like my current one, have a standard policy of one day per week or whatever. (My boss currently ignores the written policy in my case.)
> In my world "rockstar" = "reliable and doesn't take the piss".
"Doesn't take the piss" - that's a phrase I'm not familiar with. I found a vague reference that sounds like it might fit. Do you mean "doesn't take advantage", "doesn't screw the employer over"? If so, where are you from? I wondered if it's British or Australian English. For British I found:
take the piss out of (someone/something) - to make fun of.
pissed - drunk, roughly equivalent to hammered in AmE.
on the piss - out drinking, similar to on the town, on the tiles.
piss (someone) off - to offend, irritate, anger someone. (Hence: pissed off = angry, closely equivalent to AmE pissed.)
Piss off! - Go away! (Milder analogue of Fuck off!)
piss about (or around) - to mess around, do things that aren't really worthwhile.
Might be Singlish?
And quality. Any employer that isn't concerned about that really isn't working for.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
It's more difficult to abuse employees from a distance.
I have had the opportunity a number of times and refused it. I have no desire whatsoever that an employer be able to consider that just because I work from home, my home is an extension of their environment. I worked 40/wk with the occasional on-call and that's as far as I wanted it to go. Every single workaholic that you interface with at the business now thinks that you're also available at all the hours they make themselves so. Nope, I am not. I have another life and it is sacrosanct.
Vice versa, by the way. When I work, I don't want friends and family interrupting me.
An American boss once stipulated that I include some of his American chums in a software procurement. His guys won out on purely objective criteria (for real), which ended up suiting me well. I'd probably have tried to unload the whole thing on someone perkier than me, but I'd met a very fine lady from Kansas on a side trip to meet friends at Burning Man after one of talky nicey exploratory missions; so I rose to the challenge. And Skype had been invented and I knew how to use it, and there was a primitive form of telecommunications in Kansas and Denver, so it kinda seemed ... serendipitous.Thus I recommended that my fairly regular presence in that sort of time zone would be an effective use of resources. I would be able to keep in touch with things back at the ranch in the UK via the wonders of the interweb and would be there for the CO programmer guys with a prompt response to their bogus engagement questions. ("Yeah, postgres is good. Go with that" sort of thing.)
How did that go? In many respects, brilliantly. Until one time I came back for an all-hands big meeting, full of US spunk which told me that my new alligator boots were appropriate attire (I have to say, they were considered ridiculous even in Denver) and found my desk to be considerably nearer the elevator than it had been on my last visit to the UK office a couple of months before. Perhaps unsurprisingly, my subsequent request to work more or less completely from home, based in St Leonards-on-Sea in the south east of England (a town mostly known for cider, mental illness and heroin; the Tenderloin of Europe, if you will) was welcomed more warmly than I thought it ought to have been. Since my arrival - but not necessarily because of it - St Leonards has seen an influx of Bohemian arty people. But it's been a while since I've had to do an out-of-timezone conference call. And you may be surprised to learn that programmers and software project managers who lack weapon systems experience are pretty much scraping the barrel for work in these parts.
Would I recommend telecommuting? For sure. If you think you can get away with it. But maybe not before the kids have left home.
Funny, I mentioned something similar to my boss last night. Anyway, I totally agree, and that was a bad example to use for making my point. I work late in fairly rare instances, when there is either an emergency or about twice per year when there is a *real* deadline, such as a government imposed legal deadline that's non-negotiable. I work in order to take care of my family; neglecting my family in order to work late would be putting the means before the ends.
Anyway, you make a good point. *My* point, which a slightly missed, was that I make sure my boss knows that when I "work" from home, I actually *work*, from home, and things get done.
Maybe just grow up and realize that you don't get to dictate terms to an employer or potential employer. By all means, ask. And when they say no, deal with it. Non-stop bitching about it just shows they're making the right decision in not hiring or retaining you.
Or maybe they don't trust you because you are not trustworthy... Dipshit.
> when it would be much cheaper to use phone/video conferencing.
Actually it could work for a lot of things. Except that phones and video conferencing solutions (at the very least the commercial ones) are all of utter garbage bin quality.
Half of the time, it is simply impossible to understand more than half the words said.
If someone sits in a room that you would consider having a "tiny echo", over the phone you will not understand even ONE word that is said.
How can special (so-called) conference phones suck that much that they can't even filter out simple echos?
Video conference solutions? All I know still use regular I-frame (no intra-refresh), so the quality regularly jumps up and down even on a static image. They jump from video standard to video standard to save a little bit of bandwidth, but actually making sure that bandwidth is used for something useful? That would actually be WORK!
Even just consider remote desktop solutions.
Windows remote desktop: Works fine for a static image, but once there's animation and you use a VPN suddenly you get minutes of latency! Why did nobody have the good sense to just make it NOT refresh the animated parts when the bandwidth just isn't there?!?
TeamViewer: Not as catastrophic, but doesn't really work all that well either.
xpra: Actually quite great! Except the default of sending every few seconds a losslessly compressed update, spiking the latence from 30s! At least you can disable it. Also it doesn't seem able to much use the bandwidth to slowly improve a static image, instead it just uses no bandwidth at all. That surely must be possible to do better?
a) Their building will float away unless bums are on seats?
b) Productivity is a problem. By soliloquising in back-to-back shifts (particularly after a restful weekend when productivity levels might spike to dangerous levels), we can - as a team - keep it at bay
Requiem for the American Dream
Requiem for the American Dream
All the special stuff happened in marketing and billing?
Requiem for the American Dream
Echo cancellation has been available for quite a long time, and I've used it in large rooms with open microphones without an issue.
The issues are more in terms of network and connection quality and the HCI differences between in-person and remote conferencing, such as non verbal cues. There was, at one point, interest in using Second Life to overcome this, but it was rather too primitive.
How would a third party distinguish between the two cases?
Requiem for the American Dream
Unfortunately, this is true. it's why companies spend millions of dollars a year on travel expenses when it would be much cheaper to use phone/video conferencing.
They do that because IT cannot manage the video bandwidth. If everyone was remote, that could easily be 100 bidirectional video streams. Even at 1MB/sec, you're looking at two 100Mbit pipes. That may or may not be available for a particular office. Companies like to keep communication infrastructure in-house instead of using a hosting provider. Comcast business maxes out at maybe 20Mbit/sec, so any compnay sized > 20 will have streaming issues. The solution is to use a local telco at $30,000 to $120,000 per month (OC3 plus a T3). That's so batshit crazy that you may as well bury your own fiber if you need it for more than a couple years. Now do you see why AT&T is fighting other fiber deployments with lobbying and local ordinances? It's slaughtering their cash cow.
a Counterstrike 1.5 server would be not bad. Quake-like is a great interface to move yourself around in the virtual "world", there is some lag compensation (predictive movement), simple stereo sound pinpoints the sound sources well enough and get this.. the old Half-Life 1 synced the "lips" to voices already, or more accurately moved what passes for a mouth up and down. It works with Counterstrike in-game voice talk. Server plug-ins can prevent people be killed (or an admin or people wronged can slap them trolls)
Doesn't deal with audio lag and dropped packets probably (or firewall punching) and I doubt the idea could be taken that seriously.
Everyone has his mike and speakers or headphone. So there's that, it may work well. Also, referencing your own PC is hard if you have a video game taking monitor room and input focus.
Really, for the video conference room.. One that will fit many people that all want to be clearly heard, and would like to interact with another room worth of people behind a "video wall". First you likely need fiber internet to not care about issues on your end, and perhaps even have some real time 1080p or 60fps. It's a problem if the ISP will ask $15000 for running a fiber to your company, or whatever they'll ask. But let's say it's not a big deal to eat it up.
The real solution is likely to have a purpose-built room, engineered so that it isn't is a mix of echos and faint voices (the physical sound side), with the right microphones and adequate other hardware, and hire a technician who otherwise works in concert halls, radio stations, setting up the gear for a concert or DJ evening in a bar etc. ; perhaps even for every time you use the room, or at least when there are particularly important persons and deals and situations. Even the lighting needs to be deal with, you're building some kind of amateur TV set.
For best results.. all sides ought to be of similar quality!
So, if you're going to tear down walls, hire an accoustician, have a good swich and QoS things, have pseudo broadcast grade stuff (perhaps relatively cheap), get furniture even, hire a technician.. Could cost like $100K? just a figure I pull out of nowhere to try and appreciate it.
I wonder if you could get much of non-verbal cues (some will always be missing, like.. body odor or whatnot)
Most famously, in 2013, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer banned telecommuting at the company
We should all strive to follow her prime example of how best to run a company.
30 minute chunks? Some of us have to account for time on a given project in 6-minute chunks.
There is a special place in the Special Hell for the guy who wrote Deltek. . . .
There ARE decent videoconferencing solutions. But they're hella expensive. They put one in on a site I once worked at: 1.2 million for a relatively small room. But in action, it really WAS like they were across the table from you. . .
I cap telecommuting at 3 days a week for my team, but telecommuting isn't offered to everyone. Why? The key reason that some people are incapable or managing their time and will end up browsing /. and reddit whole day if they are not afraid I will be checking on them regularly. Why are they not fired? Because finding replacement is hard and expensive, and because replacement can turn out no better. So it is easier for me to just monitor everyone, or at least create perception that "The Boss is always watching". If I had "ideal team", I'd be all for 100% telecommute, but that just doesn't happen.
How are you gonna telecommute if you dig ditches, pick up garbage, are an international jewel thief, pave streets, etc?
I live 15 minutes away and rarely come in.
It works well for us simply because we hire people who respect this freedom: we have core hours in which you are expected to respond to email, slack, phone calls. Missing meetings is not an option - you will attend over GTM. People are pretty professional. No gossiping or stuff like that.
We realistically scope our work - an Agile shop, our two week sprints are rarely ever slipped, our stories are are rarely ever 5 points (Fibonacci). We usually make the goals that management and engineering agree to. While of course they ALWAYS want more, they have tasted the sweetness of perfectly predictable product release dates... and they like it.
We also fire. Quickly. Not only is it a reminder to all that slackerdom is not tolerated... just one lazy apple can bring the whole thing down. So we end up working *very* solid 8 hour days. Rarely have to work overtime. It usually ends up feeling like a low grade constant crunch time, but is not so bad.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Yep, not long ago I had to travel for a 4-hour client meeting which involved a 9-hour round trip with an overnight hotel stay as since the meeting started at 8am we needed to travel up there the night before.
I'm also the employer and I refuse to let anybody telecommute unless they spend at least 3 months on-site. If you start doing it from the first day, there is either too much hand holding that is a waste of my time, especially on a text based chat as opposed to just sitting next to the person, or in some cases, people that start steering off what they were supposed to do. And let's not forget, the inexperienced guy who gets stuck and will not improve because he won't just use the resources provided to him, because of that deadline focus.
Of course it could be argued that better communication is key and blah blah, but why the hell do I have to make this massive effort just to have somebody save commute time. I'm the one paying after all, and besides, it is cheaper to hire a team in India or Upwork if I really need remote stuff on a per project basis.
Some employers actually care about quality. Code quality is going to be much better if a reviewer and coder can actually look and point at the same screen if needed. If this is not possible, such more intensive sessions are just skipped and the resulting boost in quality will never happen.
0x or or snor perron?!
> You're not less valuable if you're not present in the room. But it's easier for people who are in the room to make themselves more valuable.
Good point.
> but a lot of our children pretend to be American these days
My two year old could be mistaken for British, she puts the "rubbish in the bin", because she loved Peppa Pig. I'll have to be sure to tell her it's okay for her to play with a FLASHLIGHT, not with a TORCH (which is 2,500 degrees here).
$30k for an OC3? WTF? $6k/m for a dedicated 1Gb fiber to Level 3 around here. $3k/m for only 100Mb, and 10Gb for $30k. And Level 3 is the most expensive. Local ISP will sell you a dedicated business 1Gb fiber with no SLA, but will give you best effort, which is quite good, for $300/m, and they use Level 3 as their trunk.
I'm in a small town in the middle of hundreds of millions of acres of farm land and I get ultra low pings to Chicago. If I've learned anything from the Internet, it's that if you want fast cheap internet, move out to the country side. My mom, who lives about an hour away from me in a town of 200 pays $80/m for 50/50, I pay $50 for a 100/100 dedicated business fiber with a 0.14ms ping to my ISP and only 1 hop from Level 3 Chicago with about a 6ms ping to game servers. Since I pay for a dedicated connection, if I get even a 10ms ping to Chicago, I'm calling in, and they typically fix the issue in an hour. Most of the time it's some 100Gb/s DDOS and they need to contract Level 3 to fix the issue upstream. Stupid 4ms additional latency messing up my counterstrike.
If you think this is unsustainable, you're wrong. The ISP is so old, they started off as a telegraph service, nearly as old as my state. They're a private family owned ISP that openly rejects government loans, subsidies, and grants, and is doing so well, they're expanding their area, trying to move into nearby cities. They're having issues breaking into the cities because of the monopolistic stranglehold the big ISPs have. During this time the ISP has been moving into neighboring counties where it's mostly farmland and offering dirt cheap internet in those areas because it's "easy money". And they don't hang fiber on the poles, they trench it. Technically they horizontally drilling it.
Running fiber and providing bandwidth is the cheapest part of being an ISP. The 90%+ of the being an ISP is customer support, sales, and advertising. They can offer cheap internet because there is almost no competition and great word of mouth, meaning cheap advertising; They have only 3 tiers of Internet, 100/100 being the lowest, and 500/500, and 1gb/1gb being too expensive for most, making sales really cheap; and they use all dedicated fiber from your home back to the CO, meaning a highly reliable network that is trivial to reorganizing, keeping customer support cheap by few issues and truly dedicated bandwidth for nearly no complaints.
Personal experience -
The Sys Admins and Sys Engineers are allowed to take "work from home days" at their own discretion. HR tried to clamp down on it a couple years ago, the director of our teams to told HR to go suck it - the work gets done, and its a perk that helps retain good people.
My job being more desktop support orientated requires me to be in the office. I am also allowed to WFH from time to time if I need to be home for something, provided I have a bunch of admin work to sit down and do, and non-surprisingly I get a ton more of it done because I'm not getting distracted by walk-ins or my co-worker. The reality is I'd only need to goto the office one or at most two days a week, the rest of the time I could do everything remote.
Just a regular developer here. Not a great speaker. Not particularly good with people.
However, I do need people around me. They are invaluable for staying up-to-date. The banter also feeds issues to my brain and I can work to finding solutions to not yet perceived problems well before escalation occurs.
At home I cannot concentrate well because wife and kids distract me with stuff I find hard to resist. At work I communicate well in a business way and at home I'm more family oriented.
Speaking for myself, I am most effective and efficient in a traditional setting. Yet I don't impose this on others. If you want to telecommute then be prepared to tell me what you're up to so that we can work well together. And yes, I will reciprocate.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
Just remember, in a global economy, when it no longer matters where you work, you are in direct competition with the entire planet for your job.
If an employee meets their deadlines, then explain how they are not trustworthy.
Employers that don't trust do so because they themselves aren't trustworthy and they are projecting their own failings.
Some employers actually care about quality.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Good one! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
You are utterly, 100% wrong junior. The only thing employers care about is money.
Telecommuting and the traditional office: Good article, but author misses some well-known obvious reasons (probably because no one wants to talk about them) Management of the traditional workplace operates with a number of well-defined, but rarely admitted, rules 1) Management power, position and prestige rely in part on the number of report-tos you control. Visibility of that group is a huge part of the equation. If you want to climb the corporate ladder, you need to seen controlling vast numbers of warm bodies. 2) Micro-management is the key to career success. From this premise you have the following conditions: a) No employee can be trusted to work without supervision. b) No employee can be trusted to see and respond correctly to a problem without supervision. c) No employee can be trusted to properly manage their time without supervision, especially breaks, meals, start and finish time and potty breaks d) All employees are inherently lazy, incompetent, and untrustworthy. e) Disciplining employees is part of your job as a manager. If employees are not being disciplined, you are not doing your job. f) Effective employee control requires vast numbers of managers. The ideal traditional office has more managers than persons managed
I telecommuted for a year. Meetings were not a problem. I was flexible. At my desk at 5 am to meet 8 am deadlines for executives for executives.
Usually worked 10hours a day.
What happened to my position was management wanted to force nevtovworkbuntil or be available until 10/11 a night.
Then there was telling me Friday at 5: 00 pm I would be working all weekend.
So I realized they thought for the privilege of working at home they could abuse your time and hours. So I left once it became akin to house arrest.
You want to avoid endless interruptions? 1. Work different hours in the office, so you only overlap 4 hours. 2. Give your employees an office where they can shut the door.
If you're not in the "office" you can't engage in chalkboard discussions of how to solve problems. Sorry, but the analog world is a lot more efficient at group work.
If your job is changing the firefox UI for the 100th time to some random new color combination of hidden options, no, you don't need to be in the office.
What you consider "Interruptions", are actually "Solutions" to the people who bother you. Guess what? It's the 21st century. You will *HAVE* to work with people. Deal with it.
Companies need to learn that introverts and extroverts need different work environments. If you are going to force all employees into a noisy, congested office, you are pretty much guaranteeing that your introverts are going to under perform their extro counterparts. Working from home is a good solution for the introverts since they can have the quiet they need without draining them on the day to day social interactions that an office lifestyle demands..
Currently, I work for a company where it's very advantageous for me to work from home whenever possible. (Otherwise, I have to deal with an hour long commute, often in heavy traffic, followed by paying about $9-10 per day in parking fees. The gas and parking adds up, cutting into my salary -- not to mention all the wasted time in transit.)
I work in an I.T. support/sysadmin role, and initially? There was definitely some hesitation from management about my not coming in to the office all the time. I have to agree very much with the article recommending you come in all the time as a new employee, and slowly gravitate towards telecommuting after you've proven you're a good, hard-worker. That's how it played out in my situation. But there's got to be the element of personal responsibility involved. For example? I may try to work from home the majority of the time, but I still have to keep an eye on the trends and what's coming up on the office calendar that might make it wise for me to drive in on certain days. I started making an effort to drive in on Mondays, for example, after noticing that the bulk of our trouble tickets for urgent problems tend to happen on Monday mornings. (People bring laptops home over the weekend and any issues they encountered then tend to get noted and brought in to get addressed on Monday. And additionally, there seems to be a general "thing" in the company that if a server or network application is starting to act up on a Friday -- they're winding down what they're working on for the week anyway, so they may not even report it. Then, the memory leak making the app slow or the failing drive causing the random faults or whatever gets worse over the weekend, until it's dead on Monday when they come back in to use it again.)
I really don't do any less work when I work from home than I do when I'm actually in the office though. I have a pretty much identical computer setup at home to my office setup, so as long as the VPN tunnel is up - I have the same remote assistance tools and apps. Our desk phones are VoIP and I have software on my cellphone allowing taking or making calls from that number and viewing the same directory of who is on the phone and available/not available. We started enforcing a rule, long ago, where people need to submit trouble tickets (either via email or the web) and our team grab them as soon as we can get to them. So to the users, they don't see anything different whether I take a ticket from home or from the office PC.
It's important to keep up those social connections too. But IMO, much of that can be done (at least in my I.T. support role) by showing up for all of the meetings that get scheduled. (Usually, such thing as our "quarterly meetings" involving the whole company include a free lunch before them, encouraging that time window to socialize and informally suggest ideas.) That, plus the previously mentioned balance/sense of when it's wise to make the physical appearances to be there if there's a high probability of more help/support needed than normal.
I take offense to the suggestion that I deserve "less pay than people who come in every day" though. Why? I'm getting the same things accomplished as anyone else they'd hire in my role.
All of the reasons listed in the article are pure bullshit. The real reason companies don't want employees to telecommute is because they don't trust them. If an employer doesn't trust you, you shouldn't be working for scumbags like that.
In reality the ONLY thing an employer should be concerned with are deadlines. If a project has been assigned to you and you deliver by the deadline, then there should be no issue. That's how most of my past employers have thought, fortunately. Nowadays, I'm the employer.
"face to face communication"; "hallway meetings"; as in many jobs in many large companies, not one person i work with lives in the same state as I do, or works in the company office in the same state, so rather than spend the whole day sitting at home on the phone and emailing with them, I drive an hour through enervating traffic to spend the whole day sitting at the office, burnt out from the moment i get there, on the phone and emailing. the chances of us having a hallway meeting or face to face communication are down there with quantum teleportation.
the basic fact is that management have no idea whatsoever how to rate employees and their contributions, so they fall back to "at least he shows up every day"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Casteism
Just make up numbers like everyone else does. Statistically, a single interruption like email notification or IM popping up, regardless if you read it, can set you back 15-30 minutes. With such common interruptions being several factors greater than the resolution of time trying to be recorded, and for something as subjective as "how much time will it take to get back on track", you may as well make up numbers.
If I've spent 1 hour thinking about a hard issue, and some other project comes a long as is all like "zomg, this needs to be fixed NOAW!", even if it takes me 5 minutes, they're getting charged that hour I just spent on the other project. Why should the other project have to pay for interruptions making their code more inefficient to create?
That's ridiculous Skype/Uber/G2M they all work quite well on 6MB connections.
Murphy was an optimist
Comcast maxes out at 200Mbit/sec locally. I mostly get the 100 I pay for.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
The first 2 reason are real things, but don't require everyone's full time presence.
It is helpful to have folks together for the head scratching design phase of a software project, but all that social time will be a burden later on in the project. It is also useful to have a relationship with your co-workers. In some situations the relationships can happen while everyone is remote, but it has always helped me to visit once in a while to do some bullshitting, if only with my manager. I find face to face time fosters empathy, but every day face time can be tedious and painful.
The last 3 reasons are signs the office infrastructure and culture will not promote helpful communication within the team regardless of where they are. I have been lucky in that I've never had a direct pointy haired manager. Every manager I have had worked hard to protect us from the pointy hairs.
I telecommuted from 1990 to 2015 when I liberated myself. I always started a new job with at least a few weeks on site so they could get to know me. At my last job at a large software company by the time I left most of the group I worked with telecommuted most of the time. It was to the point where facilities started poaching offices from some of my colleagues who lived close and only came in for meetings.
Intel has a setup like that at several of their campuses.
I've seen it used *rarely* in spite of the dosh they blew on it.
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Right before I quit working for a particular manager at my former employer (who liked to have people track their time in stupid increments, and expected your tracked time to == 8+ hrs) I started entering my time spent tracking my time spent tracking my time spent taking a dump; and other assorted bits. Hilarity ensued when he used *MY* entries in a staff meeting as an example to other employees as a model of using the system accurately.
Now, my PHB was old world Chinese and had the combo of "Better than the proles" attitude coupled with the "literal engrish translator" in his head.
I took advantage of this, so my entries were things like:
6m removal of organic material from work area
6m timekeeping balancing
30m foo (real work)
30m bar (real work)
12m timekeeping entry and value balancing
24m research of syntax and lexical scope for data entry deliverables
6m paging in component data for analog photonic review (the boss is coming signal)
etc.
The murmur of suppressed laughter was awesome. /yr territory.
Happily I don't work for that prick anymore. No one I know does either anymore. Turnover was in the 50%
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump