I see a lot of comments on HN about people wishing they could work from home and barely any wishing what I prefer instead: A workplace worth being at.
I work from home on occasion, but I also consider my workplace to be a society that I enjoy being a part of.
I like talking to the people in my office throughout the day. I like going to lunch with them sometimes. I like that I am in a building of experts and collaborators.
I suppose I am more fortunate than most in that I can walk to work and that my work is on Main Street, surrounded by many wonderful cafes and restaurants. But that many people do not share such suitable conditions I think is an argument against their conditions (poor commute, poor workplace location), and I don't think their conditions necessarily point to teleworking as the best solution, while it is certainly a better alternative than a miserable commute, I don't see it as an ideal.
So I must Ask HN: If your work was closer to you and in a pleasant location, would you still want to work from home primarily?
This the difference between introversion and extroversion. While you enjoy the company of your teammates, others may prefer to work independently.
The freedom to work from home doesn't mean you have to be cooped up inside your house. You can work from cafes, parks, anywhere and everywhere with wi-fi. Sick of the same restaurants and bars? Take a weekend flight to Europe and work from there. It's the sort of romantic nonsense that some of us find appealing.
I'm high on the introversion scale (and work from home, the cafe, etc. with some regularity) but I agree with the grandparent post. I like having a space dedicated to work and the ability to collaborate with my coworkers in person.
Indeed. One boss said to me once, working from home is a privilege not a right. I snorted in derision, me working at home is a privilege not a right for him, I expect the office to be an optimal working environment and if it's not he's not doing his job.
I'm of the mindset right now that me working for someone else should be considered a privilege by them. If they don't, it's not some place I want to be involved in. I'm not talking red carpet fawning all over me type of stuff, but at least an acknowledgement that I could be doing something else with my time (just like they could have hired someone else).
You make a good point. I started to write what promised to be a lengthy reply, but I realized it came down to a simple characteristic--flexibility. Ultimately, what's needed is flexibility provided to the employee. Provide the means to work from home (VPN, etc.), to arrive/leave the office as needed, etc. Does the employer trust their employees to do what they need to get their work done?
For myself, I work from home as much as I can because the alternative is a 2 hour commute to my current client's office (I'm a consultant). It doesn't matter if paradise awaits me at the other end of that trip - I don't want to go.
That said, half the time I work from home winds up being spent in a Starbucks 5 minutes from the house, just for the change of scenery (and free coffee).
The hardest part of development, and any human endeavor, is typically communication. Working in an isolated environment can be extremely productive for some people some of the time (e.g. A dev knows exactly what to do and needs to just crank) but even that is oversold: having someone to bounce ideas off and to talk us off the ledge can prevent a lot of malinvestment in code.
Email, text chat, even video chat just ain't the same as having a guy next to you that you can interrupt at a whim to discuss things with. In particular the ability to recognize that someone gets what you are saying is severely hampered with remote technologies, making technical communication much less efficient. Then you have the informal and overheard communication that takes place in a (sanely laid out) office. Then you have lunches. It all just piles up.
I work remotely and I hate the inefficiencies it introduces.
As gaius said, it's not about being unwilling to interact as a member of the team. It's about respecting people's "flow" and recognizing the cost of interruptions.
If I'm in the middle of something tricky, it's most efficient if it has my full attention. Once I get everything into an acceptable state, I'll typically check my IMs and emails to answer any questions that people might have for me.
For a couple people working this way, the workflow upon running up against a problem might be:
1. Send IM or email to a team member who almost certainly has the answer.
2. Wait a half minute or so for a reply.
3. (Optional) Seek the answer yourself for a few minutes.
4. If the problem is urgent, make a phone call to the team member.
5. Otherwise, work on something else until you get the reply.
If you are any sort of serious coder then you recognize that being interrupted has a cost that is much greater than the time of the other task, and unless the site is down, you just IM, even if he's sitting nearby, because then he can answer in a few minutes when he's finished whatever tricky thing he was doing.
Well, I'm not a very serious coder: I just work on a crappy programming language.
I'll take the interruptions and discussions involved in a highly social work environment that keeps me from writing code that is not necessary over a silent monastery that lets me build gleaming cubes of intellectual perfection that no one needs or that have been already built. (Caveat: with idiot coworkers, none of this applies.)
Sure, flow is important at times. It's also addictive. Programmers are introverts, undervalue communication and overestimate their understanding of, well, everything.
But I dip in and out of the flow. If I see an IM window blinking, I can ease myself out, get the code to the point at which I can re-enter smoothly, it only takes a minute or two usually. Whereas even "are you busy?", most annoying question ever, is enough to jolt me out.
I can pick up a piece of paper, scribble on it, ask if people prefer X or Y, draw on a whiteboard, wave my hands descriptively, and generally get much better communication with people who are right in front of me.
Nah, there is all sorts of informal feedback that you get from actually being local: cross talk, voice tone, facial expressions, half-sketched white boards. It's just a different thing, at least for me.
I hate working remotely. I hate working with people who work remotely. One-on-one communication is inferior but acceptable over phone or chat, but trying to have a group technical discussion with one or more people working remotely is glacial. The tools just aren't good enough yet and may not be good enough in my lifetime.
As a person who's worked at home for years: You have to communicate intentionally. I've done this for years with many clients I've never met face to face (some I haven't even seen their faces).
Also: I'm not introvert. That makes me assuredly talk to people perhaps more than many introverts would at home. I know some of the people I work with kids names, and we still ask how weekends, etc went.
Skype works fine for communication (along with emails). Screensharing is much more useful than video chat in my experience. I also have various other tools like that queued up for when they're better (Copilot for instance).
Also: you really have to develop your phone skills. I think lots of people have underdeveloped phone skills these days, so aren't good at working at a distance. They don't know how to do a phone call well, wether it be pacing, tough issues, agendas or any of that. They especially don't deal well with understaters or the like. Lastly, for many important calls, you MUST follow it up with a summary by email. You also need to learn basic drawing, as a quickly sketched diagram saves the bacon in the middle of some calls (which you then throw in your feed scanner that automatically turns it into a pdf).
I think a lot of people who work in offices lack the ability to express themselves well in these situations, and that's why they feel ineffective (they are a bit, but could get better with practice).
You also need to live in a reasonable place. You have to have a fast internet connection. If this means you have to live at the exurbs instead of a rural farm, well too bad. I personally have 2 different ISPs and a router which combines the connections for failover purposes. (I also live in the middle of a relatively large city, Midtown Atlanta).
I think lots of people have underdeveloped phone skills these days, so aren't good at working at a distance. They don't know how to do a phone call well, wether it be pacing, tough issues, agendas or any of that. They especially don't deal well with understaters or the like.
I don't think most people handle those issues well face to face either. Most f2f meetings I've been in have been abysmal wastes of everyone's time.
As a coder who often has to upload multi-MB files to the office dev and stage servers, my home upload speed of ~300Kbps doesn't cut it. Sure I have 10Mbit down, but it's kind of useless for me.
You have to actually FTP files? I ask because if you have your code in, say, github, and you deploy from that, you shouldn't have this problem. Unless there's something specific about your code that means you have to send really large files?
A lot of "enterprise" type situations just don't get github or similar solutions. They might have something like Visual Source Safe or no version control at all, and Windows servers setup so that the only access to them is by VPN and copying files to a Windows network share. Unfortunately it's just the way some organizations work and there isn't much you can do to change it.
If you're working on source code, can't you just upload patches (diffs) and apply them on the other end via remote desktop or SSH? Likewise with compiling executables; instead of doing them on your end and uploading the result, could you do it server-side?
I work from home and have a great setup. I'm also a moderate introvert, but I end up going to work at cafes and outdoor space because I also love to be around the intangible energy of other people, even if I'm not saying a word to any of them. Plus, I sense the ability to add novelty to my environment helps trigger a certain bump in creativity.
I have worked from home for two years and it is definitely a life-ruining experience with some upsides; I work longer hours, take calls in the evening, feel guilty every time I take a toilet break, never have 'cooler-chats' and miss the daily interaction with colleagues where I get to remind them who's boss; also I have to buy my own stationery. Upsides? Working in the nude, answering the front-door to survey people and inviting them in for a long chats about nothing, getting to slope off and write reams of useless code for no good reason. OK, so there's the whole 4 Hour Work Week idea of starting a business but I feel too guilty to do that.
Of course most companies are global and so my development team are in Poland and my home office is in England or Switzerland, so I would never get to interact with them in any 'high-performing-team' kind of way; but that's what big companies like to do anyway - split up their workforce, divide and conquer, choose mediocrity over performance.
So, if you work for a big dumb organisation, work from home. If you work for a small agile organisation, work from the office. If you work for yourself, give up.
I work from home on occasion, but I also consider my workplace to be a society that I enjoy being a part of.
I like talking to the people in my office throughout the day. I like going to lunch with them sometimes. I like that I am in a building of experts and collaborators.
I suppose I am more fortunate than most in that I can walk to work and that my work is on Main Street, surrounded by many wonderful cafes and restaurants. But that many people do not share such suitable conditions I think is an argument against their conditions (poor commute, poor workplace location), and I don't think their conditions necessarily point to teleworking as the best solution, while it is certainly a better alternative than a miserable commute, I don't see it as an ideal.
So I must Ask HN: If your work was closer to you and in a pleasant location, would you still want to work from home primarily?