Life is short, and I agree with the author, you won't remember most of the hours you spend working.
If I had 10 dollars for every set of stock options that I've been granted I'd be a hundred-aire by now.
I've lost count of the number of times I've been told, that if I just work really hard right now, I'll be able to retire soon.
Every time I read an article about some employees making big bucks off their stock options or six figures off an iPhone app, I see that for what it is: propaganda designed to make sure we keep feeding our young bodies into the machine.
That machine will grind you up and spit you out like hamburger on the other side.
Life is short as I said, and it seems to go faster the further along you are.
Work as little as you can, and if you must work, try to work for yourself.
And: View stock options as strictly a bonus. I've been offered a low salary in exchange for lots of equity before. I enjoy having some stake in the long-term success in the company, but it depends on so many factors beyond the hard work of the employees, that you can't afford to sacrifice your day-to-day finances on a far-distant potential pay-off.
Have you honestly been told that if you were really hard right now, you'll be able to retire soon? What was the context? A manager trying to sell you on putting in extra hours, because the IPO is going to make you rich?
I nodded to a lot of your points (although I have personally done well by 1 of the 3 companies to offer me options), but I've never had a boss actively try to push me like that. It's always been encouragement or constructive criticism, but never (potentially) false promises. That just strikes me as so wrong.
Being forced to work from an office is the biggest scandal in the western world.
I can see the highway coming from the Sydney harbour bridge from my office window - it's alway congested, it takes a huge amount of time to get to and from work.
I guarantee most of the people burning fuel, creating congestion and stopping themselves (and everyone else) from getting home to their families on time have jobs that could easily be done from home.
The argument that unexpected collaboration happens when people are forced to go to the office is a joke and certainly not worth protecting when you consider all the other negative effects of commuting and working in a central location:
- Rising house prices
- Sprawling high density housing resulting in more people living in smaller areas creating a massive strain on infrastructure and massive reduced living standards
- Commuting for hours per day which affects family life
- Creating pollution hot spots
- Burning large amounts of oil and petrol
A truck spilt several tons of dirt onto the Sydney harbour bridge last week, this caused hours of delays for thousands of people trying to get home. Why should one truck accident hold thousands of people to ransom? How many people missed their kids bed time because of that?
Most companies even being amenable to change based on me bumping into someone from a different department is a laughable idea.
We need a massive culture shift in the way we approach most office work. It's an absolute scandal.
I work from home often. I like working from home. I fight to work from home. I've worked from home off and on for over a decade.
That said, in my experience there are some things that are just done better face to face. Not many, but some.
* meetings where you want to sketch something out--I haven't found a digital solution for sketching say, architecture diagrams, that works as well as a whiteboard.
* the chance to meet and interact with someone outside of your team/department by happenstance, say at a FAC. Of course, you can go onto different slack channels, but I think the interaction wouldn't be as fluid.
* one on ones. While I guess a hangout might give you some of the face to face time, video conferencing isn't as high bandwidth as face to face conversation, including all the nuances of pauses, body language, etc.
I think there might be others, and I bet they all have the component of physicality that can't be delivered digitally. (Yet? Maybe VR will deliver it.)
I'm not a fan of required in office work, but see the tremendous value in it on occasion.
"I guarantee most of the people burning fuel, creating congestion and stopping themselves (and everyone else) from getting home to their families on time have jobs that could easily be done from home."
Bandwidth.
No NBN and what you have is copper by default, maybe cable then a sat connection. This is the price paid for poor leadership. NBN should be thought of as the rail of the 21st century. Instead we get a few main lines, some branch lines, everyone else gets donkey carts. [0]
>The argument that unexpected collaboration happens when people are forced to go to the office is a joke and certainly not worth protecting when you consider all the other negative effects of commuting and working in a central location:
You got it, the reason people are required to work from a central office is that current managers are simply not able to manage remote teams.
I exclusively do remote work yet have found myself renting an office (funnily enough not far from the harbour bridge) so I'm not at home getting cabin fever. I was amazed at how much you miss out on little things like human interaction, sharing a lunch, etc you miss out on when isolated. I guess that changes when you have kids.
Speaking of Sydney, are there many tech companies that allow remote work in Australia? (I'm a software developer, primarily .NET but also C++ and embedded firmware FWIW).
Are there any job sites / directories specifically for finding remote-work jobs?
As a fellow Aussie I'd love to work remotely, but I don't necessarily want to work for an overseas company, for example.
"Enjoy lunch with your spouse instead of in the break room with Connie from accounts payable!"
I'm fully in favor of the freedom for everyone to work from home, but I think there are unique upsides to being in the office, too. Incidental contact with people from other departments (e.g. "Connie from accounts payable") is one of them, as this can give you a unique perspective on your organization and can spur new ideas/reveal new avenues for improvement you would've never encountered had you been sequestered away in "deliberate contact only" mode at home.
Creating opportunities for serendipitous meetings between people or teams is one of the challenges of remote work. Several ways to create similar opportunities without needing to rely on chance.
The idea of relying on chance encounters to drive innovation within an organization is insane.
I (like others in the comments have said) agree that there is value in this, but as an employee it's not worth it to me to give up so much for just this.
Say one day you figure out that the format of a report Connie gets isn't optimal, but you could do a quick change (1/2 day of work), that means she'll save an hour a month. That's easy to work out the economic benefits of the off chance meeting. But what you can't easily work out is how much time your employees have to waste to get there.
As a dad, the family argument is the most important one but has already been well stated here.
I'd like to add that we now have the tools to make remote working not only on par but better than in-office work:
- Chat systems (Spark, Slack, HipChat…) provide the kind of informal communication that offices are good for, but with major improvements: asynchronous by default (though the conversation can easily escalate to become synchronous) and topic-oriented. Even when I was in-office, our team actually preferred chat-based conversation in many cases.
- Tele-presence (video call) provide the face-to-face communication complete with visual emotional cues that one would get in the office. Use it for structured meetings, or use it as an informal background video feed.
- Location independence helps the team be geographically dispered. You can then build a team that is spread out and takes advantage of time differences (useful in devops).
Just last week, my wife had a work-related conference out of town and instead of being apart for a whole week, I just worked from the hotel with no change of routine. After the work was done, we got to enjoy the area. Bonus: our child came along.
The one caveat is all this is predicated on reliable network connections, epecially for the telepresence part. However, homes have the option of reliable network access, and for crappy wifi at hotels or coffee shops, it's always possible to tether or fallback to text-only chat.
I started working remotely recently. One of the first things I did was to go out and buy a portable 4g router+connection (searched for a deal, wasn't disappointed). This alone has made my remote working experience incredibly good.
Why not dongle? Because within buildings some areas the 4g signal is much better than others. So keeping router in one place and working from multiple places within the same building has been awesome.
-- Lower office costs - which is really important for startups.
Ironically a lot of startups seem to be office focused, but if there's less than 8 people in the company, don't get an office. You don't need the expense and hassle of an office.
When you need to meet face to face to hash things out, you can go to someones house, or you can go to somewhere like Panera Bread which often has meeting rooms you can just use.
This has the benefit of making those meetings more focused, since the effort to have a meeting is higher than in an office.
I'm continually amazed by the companies that have a daily meeting wasting engineers time (never been to a good standup) and how attached they are to this-- it seem to be very management driven, much like the "need" for na office: "IF I can't see them and waste 30 minutes of their time each day, how will I know they are working?"
Apparently looking at issue tracking systems doesn't work for bosses.
The comments here are super interesting. I think the point of the piece has nothing to do with interruptions, eureka moments, or productivity—it’s not really about work at all. It’s about identity, and the fact that our collective identities are so wrapped up in our work selves that we don’t really know what we’re working for. Are we working for our families? For retirement? For self worth?
He, and I guess “I” by extension, would argue that you’re working to enjoy those little moments in life you’ll never get back—the ones you’re supposed to savor. If you’re in that headspace, working from home is one of modern society’s greatest advances.
Your spot on here. I work with some great people, but I also have 2 young kids now and I frequently miss dinners at home. Getting everyone out of the house is probably more stressful than it needs to be because I'm 40 mins door to door and that feels more important than being present with family in the morning.
I've been thinking quite a bit over the years that this isn't how raising a family should be. I remember growing up and when my dad got home, work was over. Fat chance now with sms, slack, email, etc - you're never off work anymore.
One one hand, I love tech and it's how our family survives. On the other hand, we're completely disconnected from our planet and appreciation of generations before. We are modern and life is fast paced, but for what reason?
I keep the discussions going in my head and let the glaring issue just kinda dissolve as we go thru another day. That issue is (for me) that this probably isn't how - as a society - we should be living nor should we be valuing the things we do. :-/
Interruptions suck and you don't need to embrace them. You can perfectly have a dedicated time for your family as well as dedicated time for your job. It's all about planning and ensuring that people around you understand your schedule.
You can still have 1 hour allocated time with your son during the day and you can be present, that doesn't mean your son needs to interrupt you 5 random times within 3 hours. If you know when he comes home from school, by all means allocate that fixed 30 minutes or whatever to him, perfect.
There is pretty much no difference between allocating random time frames to people you love vs. allocating fixed times to people you love.
We all know from experiments, various sources and for many from personal experiences interruptions do hurt productivity, induce stress and generally bad.
Also, you can turn this around. Instead of being interrupted between your tasks (out of zone moments) just make rounds at the house, talk to your wife, enjoy a snack, take 15 minutes break. Then go back to hacking with a clear, recharged head.
So why sacrifice your focus/productivity when you don't have to?
For me, it's that I get to save an hour and an half of not commuting (and my commute is not bad at all, just walking to/from BART), that hour and half is an hour and a half more of sleep or reading or anything else. It also means I dont have to be in an obnoxiously loud open office plan with people some from other department whiteboarding 3ft behind me.
I run a 20-person fully distributed product / engineering team at Parse.ly, and this post is a great summary of why we do it. It's not about hating on offices, it's about loving on quality of life.
Work-life balance and harmony is enabled by remote work. I don't have kids, but many of my colleagues do, and they really appreciate the flexibility.
I don't think all roles can work perfectly remotely, but software engineering certainly can. Github (any day but today :)), Trello, Flowdock/Slack/IRC, AWS, GHangout, GDocs -- these are the tools you would use anyway in a good company. And you can trade the money spent on offices for plane tickets to do team retreats and hackathons from time to time.
I go to work to eat the free food. THEY SMOKE THEIR OWN BACON.
I think companies try to be competitive with the perks (eg google - massages, food within a few steps, a nice space to be.) There is definitely a benefit in that and the social interactions for a young professional to work in a team with smart people can be pretty rewarding too. With modern tooling you can still do that remote - I've seen code review processes work very will with teams that aren't co-located and that has been very rewarding and brought a lot of growth for me personally.
But I understand as a family man what you're saying. If I could do remote work I'd probably be in Tamarindo or similar (which I'd like to do one day.) Until then, bacon is pretty awesome.
Like many, the ability to be present with your family resonates a lot for me. I’ve been working remotely (at least 3/5 of my time) for most of the past decade, but in the last two years it has been an absolute godsend.
Without going into detail, we ended up in a high-needs situation with one of our teenage kids a couple of years ago. Fortunately I have a very good relationship with the company I work with, so was able to switch from partially remote to 100% remote, and as things shook out, ended up part-time (3 days a week).
Some days I’ve been unable to start work until 10 or 11, or I’ve had to go down to the school three times, or quite frankly I’ve had days of just being too emotionally drained and upset to be able to work as well as I would like. So have certainly had some late working nights to compensate. Measure based on what I expect to have completed more so than total hours worked, and carefully curate the todo list with my manager regularly.
My wife works in customer service, so she has nowhere near the flexibility in scheduling that I have, so it has worked out the best for the situation we’ve been in.
Never could have happened if we were both office-bound. One of us would have had to stop working for a couple of years.
(Addendum: Some of the above sounds quite dire, and it has been at times, but we are well into recovering and approaching a more “normal-needs” situation.)
I love working remotely for all the usual reasons, plus this more recent one: my 2yo daughter had ever-more-terrible eczema which we eventually learned was caused by molds ubiquitous to the region in which we lived. So we moved. Across the country. The very next day. She's light years better, and the whole family is so much happier. No job hunt, no asking for a transfer; we just moved.
I work remotely for past four years, and I totally agree with this. I still go to the office for occasional meetings and events but there is not that much pressure for it since most of my team is remote.
I worked for a lot of companies for the past 15 years, but this is the first time I find it hard to change my job - because working remotely is amazing.
I wish more companies were open to letting people telecommute. I had office based position offers that paid twice what I make but I am never trading that for the ability to get out of the room and hug my daughter. And the productivity argument is still there, it is just not the sole reason why remote rocks.
One of my other favorites: Work is very stressful sometimes, so I go out to a different room and punch my training bag a few times. Instant stress relief - try doing that in the office!
P.S. If you are reading this and are considering hiring for a remote position, drop me a line, I am a sysadmin with a fair bit of coding and extensive networking (Cisco) and teaching/mentoring background, living in central Europe, and I grok programming and web development.
I may be biased since I'm a founder of a 100% distributed company, but I feel the value of working from home every.single.day and I know my employees do too. Midday naps and gym visits, not feeling bad wandering out of the office for a break, getting to be just as productive when at home. No commute.
The modern office is a scam and a relic from the fifties and we are only now able to break free from its chains.
It's about quality of life for me. The higher my quality of life, the happier I am, the happier I am, the more productive I am. I'm happier not dealing with a commute, having my own space and seeing my daughter throughout the day. If you're truly happy then the rest follows, i.e. establishing a routine, work/life balance, etc...
I've worked from home for years and its worked out well (in my opinion and my employer's). In my 3rd year WFH I just received an "exceeds expectations" in our standard corporate review and was told I carry all the values of the corporation (yikes), trust, respect and all that hand wavey stuff. One thing that has dramatically improved is my general morale and attitude, because I'm not involved with specific "office types".
People in the office that don't seem to really work, but seem to think their only job is trying to find things they can make you work on, so they look like they're managing someone. I already have a boss, tasks and get everything done with stalwart dedication and personal pride. That type of middle-manager intervention is much harder when you're not in a cube. Or just annoyances like spending time looking at your screen when walking by.
I get just as much done as I used to in the office, save the environment, less stressed (just as much over my work but less with those office lice), and now never really want to work another office job again.
Driving stress is real and avoiding that is a health benefit, not to mention my sweet standing desk with treadmill underneath where I've lost 40lbs using while working during the day. I'm less likely to get horribly sick and drain the company's insurance plan. I spent years on a 24/7 pager that went off all the time, and worked from 9AM-3:30AM in offices in downtown Chicago many days/nights. I've done some harm to my health sticking out bad jobs and situations to build a resume. I'm very thankful for my current situation.
While someday I'd like to land a Django gig, I hope when my wife and I have children I'm still working from home. I don't want to die having missed out on the things this author mentioned. And definitely not my wife, I'll go back into an office if it means a big enough pay raise so she can quit her job as a teacher not miss those moments.
Not commuting saves a ton of time and energy, not only in gas but also calories for me.
I have found a lot of people don't communicate enough when working remotely though. So you have to remind people to get in Slack/Skype/Hangouts/phone. Also a video or voice chat is higher bandwidth so it is good to do that at least once a week or more often depending on tight the collaboration is.
But considering that most office jobs can actually be done over the internet now, the highway congestion, the logistical/military implications of maintaining the massive imbalance of fossil fuel distribution largely to support the commuting in oversize vehicles, global warming, etc., it surprises me that we even allow so much commuting to continue. Seems unethical.
I enjoy remote work and dislike the stigma it has with some people. I hear a lot of "everyone else deals with it!" when you mention the (significant) time you save on getting ready and commuting each morning, and some people are suspicious that remote workers slack off because they're not in an office.
[+] [-] gerbilly|10 years ago|reply
If I had 10 dollars for every set of stock options that I've been granted I'd be a hundred-aire by now.
I've lost count of the number of times I've been told, that if I just work really hard right now, I'll be able to retire soon.
Every time I read an article about some employees making big bucks off their stock options or six figures off an iPhone app, I see that for what it is: propaganda designed to make sure we keep feeding our young bodies into the machine.
That machine will grind you up and spit you out like hamburger on the other side.
Life is short as I said, and it seems to go faster the further along you are.
Work as little as you can, and if you must work, try to work for yourself.
[+] [-] TallGuyShort|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rconti|10 years ago|reply
I nodded to a lot of your points (although I have personally done well by 1 of the 3 companies to offer me options), but I've never had a boss actively try to push me like that. It's always been encouragement or constructive criticism, but never (potentially) false promises. That just strikes me as so wrong.
[+] [-] assocguilt|10 years ago|reply
I can see the highway coming from the Sydney harbour bridge from my office window - it's alway congested, it takes a huge amount of time to get to and from work.
I guarantee most of the people burning fuel, creating congestion and stopping themselves (and everyone else) from getting home to their families on time have jobs that could easily be done from home.
The argument that unexpected collaboration happens when people are forced to go to the office is a joke and certainly not worth protecting when you consider all the other negative effects of commuting and working in a central location:
- Rising house prices
- Sprawling high density housing resulting in more people living in smaller areas creating a massive strain on infrastructure and massive reduced living standards
- Commuting for hours per day which affects family life
- Creating pollution hot spots
- Burning large amounts of oil and petrol
A truck spilt several tons of dirt onto the Sydney harbour bridge last week, this caused hours of delays for thousands of people trying to get home. Why should one truck accident hold thousands of people to ransom? How many people missed their kids bed time because of that?
Most companies even being amenable to change based on me bumping into someone from a different department is a laughable idea. We need a massive culture shift in the way we approach most office work. It's an absolute scandal.
[+] [-] mooreds|10 years ago|reply
That said, in my experience there are some things that are just done better face to face. Not many, but some.
* meetings where you want to sketch something out--I haven't found a digital solution for sketching say, architecture diagrams, that works as well as a whiteboard.
* the chance to meet and interact with someone outside of your team/department by happenstance, say at a FAC. Of course, you can go onto different slack channels, but I think the interaction wouldn't be as fluid.
* one on ones. While I guess a hangout might give you some of the face to face time, video conferencing isn't as high bandwidth as face to face conversation, including all the nuances of pauses, body language, etc.
I think there might be others, and I bet they all have the component of physicality that can't be delivered digitally. (Yet? Maybe VR will deliver it.)
I'm not a fan of required in office work, but see the tremendous value in it on occasion.
Edit: formatting
[+] [-] bootload|10 years ago|reply
Bandwidth.
No NBN and what you have is copper by default, maybe cable then a sat connection. This is the price paid for poor leadership. NBN should be thought of as the rail of the 21st century. Instead we get a few main lines, some branch lines, everyone else gets donkey carts. [0]
[0] Aus, Melbourne perspective.
[+] [-] r2dnb|10 years ago|reply
You got it, the reason people are required to work from a central office is that current managers are simply not able to manage remote teams.
Here's an article explaining it : http://read.reddy.today/read/3/remote-teams-are-the-future-b...
[+] [-] ENTP|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] randomacct44|10 years ago|reply
Are there any job sites / directories specifically for finding remote-work jobs?
As a fellow Aussie I'd love to work remotely, but I don't necessarily want to work for an overseas company, for example.
[+] [-] gerbilly|10 years ago|reply
I consider it to be a form of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_violence
[+] [-] RankingMember|10 years ago|reply
I'm fully in favor of the freedom for everyone to work from home, but I think there are unique upsides to being in the office, too. Incidental contact with people from other departments (e.g. "Connie from accounts payable") is one of them, as this can give you a unique perspective on your organization and can spur new ideas/reveal new avenues for improvement you would've never encountered had you been sequestered away in "deliberate contact only" mode at home.
[+] [-] mhurron|10 years ago|reply
I step away from my desk to eat lunch when I'm in the office to explicitly take a breather from work.
[+] [-] nedwin|10 years ago|reply
The idea of relying on chance encounters to drive innovation within an organization is insane.
[+] [-] lucaspiller|10 years ago|reply
Say one day you figure out that the format of a report Connie gets isn't optimal, but you could do a quick change (1/2 day of work), that means she'll save an hour a month. That's easy to work out the economic benefits of the off chance meeting. But what you can't easily work out is how much time your employees have to waste to get there.
[+] [-] MCRed|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] athenot|10 years ago|reply
I'd like to add that we now have the tools to make remote working not only on par but better than in-office work:
- Chat systems (Spark, Slack, HipChat…) provide the kind of informal communication that offices are good for, but with major improvements: asynchronous by default (though the conversation can easily escalate to become synchronous) and topic-oriented. Even when I was in-office, our team actually preferred chat-based conversation in many cases.
- Tele-presence (video call) provide the face-to-face communication complete with visual emotional cues that one would get in the office. Use it for structured meetings, or use it as an informal background video feed.
- Location independence helps the team be geographically dispered. You can then build a team that is spread out and takes advantage of time differences (useful in devops).
Just last week, my wife had a work-related conference out of town and instead of being apart for a whole week, I just worked from the hotel with no change of routine. After the work was done, we got to enjoy the area. Bonus: our child came along.
The one caveat is all this is predicated on reliable network connections, epecially for the telepresence part. However, homes have the option of reliable network access, and for crappy wifi at hotels or coffee shops, it's always possible to tether or fallback to text-only chat.
[+] [-] new_hackers|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nstart|10 years ago|reply
Why not dongle? Because within buildings some areas the 4g signal is much better than others. So keeping router in one place and working from multiple places within the same building has been awesome.
[+] [-] cwbrandsma|10 years ago|reply
* more time with family
* smaller food costs (don't eat out as much)
* smaller clothing budget -- not dressing up
* complete control over my environment (lighting, wall color, music, etc)
* fewer interruptions (even with 5 kids in the house)
* almost no sick days...like I'm not going to work when I have a bad cold? I go stir crazy.
* 1 am eureka moments happen more naturally.
* I can justify my increased home internet bandwidth
[+] [-] lukasm|10 years ago|reply
- no routine that gets you going
- less time with your friends and colleagues
- less team lunches/nice dinners
- getting dressed can help you mentally make the switch to start your workday and can translate into higher productivity
- you have to spent money for office equipment
- more interruptions (you are at home, surely you can do x)
- you have more sick days, since kids are bags of disease
- no eureka moments after water cooler chats
- extra cost
PS I'm a fan of remote work
[+] [-] MCRed|10 years ago|reply
Ironically a lot of startups seem to be office focused, but if there's less than 8 people in the company, don't get an office. You don't need the expense and hassle of an office.
When you need to meet face to face to hash things out, you can go to someones house, or you can go to somewhere like Panera Bread which often has meeting rooms you can just use.
This has the benefit of making those meetings more focused, since the effort to have a meeting is higher than in an office.
I'm continually amazed by the companies that have a daily meeting wasting engineers time (never been to a good standup) and how attached they are to this-- it seem to be very management driven, much like the "need" for na office: "IF I can't see them and waste 30 minutes of their time each day, how will I know they are working?"
Apparently looking at issue tracking systems doesn't work for bosses.
[+] [-] dba7dba|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chriswrites|10 years ago|reply
He, and I guess “I” by extension, would argue that you’re working to enjoy those little moments in life you’ll never get back—the ones you’re supposed to savor. If you’re in that headspace, working from home is one of modern society’s greatest advances.
[+] [-] equalarrow|10 years ago|reply
I've been thinking quite a bit over the years that this isn't how raising a family should be. I remember growing up and when my dad got home, work was over. Fat chance now with sms, slack, email, etc - you're never off work anymore.
One one hand, I love tech and it's how our family survives. On the other hand, we're completely disconnected from our planet and appreciation of generations before. We are modern and life is fast paced, but for what reason?
I keep the discussions going in my head and let the glaring issue just kinda dissolve as we go thru another day. That issue is (for me) that this probably isn't how - as a society - we should be living nor should we be valuing the things we do. :-/
[+] [-] fmavituna|10 years ago|reply
Interruptions suck and you don't need to embrace them. You can perfectly have a dedicated time for your family as well as dedicated time for your job. It's all about planning and ensuring that people around you understand your schedule.
You can still have 1 hour allocated time with your son during the day and you can be present, that doesn't mean your son needs to interrupt you 5 random times within 3 hours. If you know when he comes home from school, by all means allocate that fixed 30 minutes or whatever to him, perfect.
There is pretty much no difference between allocating random time frames to people you love vs. allocating fixed times to people you love.
We all know from experiments, various sources and for many from personal experiences interruptions do hurt productivity, induce stress and generally bad.
Also, you can turn this around. Instead of being interrupted between your tasks (out of zone moments) just make rounds at the house, talk to your wife, enjoy a snack, take 15 minutes break. Then go back to hacking with a clear, recharged head.
So why sacrifice your focus/productivity when you don't have to?
[+] [-] mmanfrin|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pixelmonkey|10 years ago|reply
Work-life balance and harmony is enabled by remote work. I don't have kids, but many of my colleagues do, and they really appreciate the flexibility.
I don't think all roles can work perfectly remotely, but software engineering certainly can. Github (any day but today :)), Trello, Flowdock/Slack/IRC, AWS, GHangout, GDocs -- these are the tools you would use anyway in a good company. And you can trade the money spent on offices for plane tickets to do team retreats and hackathons from time to time.
[+] [-] ninjakeyboard|10 years ago|reply
But I understand as a family man what you're saying. If I could do remote work I'd probably be in Tamarindo or similar (which I'd like to do one day.) Until then, bacon is pretty awesome.
[+] [-] desdiv|10 years ago|reply
Where do you work, if you don't mind me asking?
[+] [-] anotherevan|10 years ago|reply
Without going into detail, we ended up in a high-needs situation with one of our teenage kids a couple of years ago. Fortunately I have a very good relationship with the company I work with, so was able to switch from partially remote to 100% remote, and as things shook out, ended up part-time (3 days a week).
Some days I’ve been unable to start work until 10 or 11, or I’ve had to go down to the school three times, or quite frankly I’ve had days of just being too emotionally drained and upset to be able to work as well as I would like. So have certainly had some late working nights to compensate. Measure based on what I expect to have completed more so than total hours worked, and carefully curate the todo list with my manager regularly.
My wife works in customer service, so she has nowhere near the flexibility in scheduling that I have, so it has worked out the best for the situation we’ve been in.
Never could have happened if we were both office-bound. One of us would have had to stop working for a couple of years.
(Addendum: Some of the above sounds quite dire, and it has been at times, but we are well into recovering and approaching a more “normal-needs” situation.)
[+] [-] jjd1103|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hydandata|10 years ago|reply
I worked for a lot of companies for the past 15 years, but this is the first time I find it hard to change my job - because working remotely is amazing.
I wish more companies were open to letting people telecommute. I had office based position offers that paid twice what I make but I am never trading that for the ability to get out of the room and hug my daughter. And the productivity argument is still there, it is just not the sole reason why remote rocks.
One of my other favorites: Work is very stressful sometimes, so I go out to a different room and punch my training bag a few times. Instant stress relief - try doing that in the office!
P.S. If you are reading this and are considering hiring for a remote position, drop me a line, I am a sysadmin with a fair bit of coding and extensive networking (Cisco) and teaching/mentoring background, living in central Europe, and I grok programming and web development.
[+] [-] lincolnq|10 years ago|reply
I may be biased since I'm a founder of a 100% distributed company, but I feel the value of working from home every.single.day and I know my employees do too. Midday naps and gym visits, not feeling bad wandering out of the office for a break, getting to be just as productive when at home. No commute.
The modern office is a scam and a relic from the fifties and we are only now able to break free from its chains.
[+] [-] turlingdrome|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BuckRogers|10 years ago|reply
People in the office that don't seem to really work, but seem to think their only job is trying to find things they can make you work on, so they look like they're managing someone. I already have a boss, tasks and get everything done with stalwart dedication and personal pride. That type of middle-manager intervention is much harder when you're not in a cube. Or just annoyances like spending time looking at your screen when walking by.
I get just as much done as I used to in the office, save the environment, less stressed (just as much over my work but less with those office lice), and now never really want to work another office job again.
Driving stress is real and avoiding that is a health benefit, not to mention my sweet standing desk with treadmill underneath where I've lost 40lbs using while working during the day. I'm less likely to get horribly sick and drain the company's insurance plan. I spent years on a 24/7 pager that went off all the time, and worked from 9AM-3:30AM in offices in downtown Chicago many days/nights. I've done some harm to my health sticking out bad jobs and situations to build a resume. I'm very thankful for my current situation.
While someday I'd like to land a Django gig, I hope when my wife and I have children I'm still working from home. I don't want to die having missed out on the things this author mentioned. And definitely not my wife, I'll go back into an office if it means a big enough pay raise so she can quit her job as a teacher not miss those moments.
[+] [-] ilaksh|10 years ago|reply
I have found a lot of people don't communicate enough when working remotely though. So you have to remind people to get in Slack/Skype/Hangouts/phone. Also a video or voice chat is higher bandwidth so it is good to do that at least once a week or more often depending on tight the collaboration is.
But considering that most office jobs can actually be done over the internet now, the highway congestion, the logistical/military implications of maintaining the massive imbalance of fossil fuel distribution largely to support the commuting in oversize vehicles, global warming, etc., it surprises me that we even allow so much commuting to continue. Seems unethical.
[+] [-] melted|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seanwilson|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wsha|10 years ago|reply