I would take an 8% raise. If I'm working from home, that is one less capital expense the company has to invest in me, in the form of office space and office perks. I would not volunteer to work from home if it had any chance of decreasing my productivity. As such, that is more money in the company's pocket that they should reinvest back into the employees so they have the option of replicating office perks back at home (equipment, coffee, snacks, things like that).
My company probably spends millions to rent it's office. It also has a kitchen with a lot of free food and coffee available. So, they'd probably save a lot of money to have a smaller office with fewer people in it, and I'd spend more money on coffee if I worked from home. There are certainly pros and cons for both, and costs associated with those things.
I admit, I'm biased. My day job is fully remote (the entire company), and the company treats us extremely well. In return for saving them rent on an office space, we have no commute, the ability to work from anywhere with an internet connection, and so on (vacation time is easier to use when you're already living somewhere exotic versus having to travel from some major metro in the US). Saved office expenses are dollars that can go into growing the business or employee perks. I don't mind paying for the coffee; I'm still ahead thousands of dollars a year from not needing a car and commuting each day. To each their own of course!
In and of itself? No, not really. But in my case, I've got in-person access to coworkers, drinks+snacks, a nicer desk and work area than I have space for at home, occasional catered food and social events, etc. So I feel like it's a perk in my situation, even if it isn't in someone else's.
Would you not say then that employees who opt in to going to an office should make less then? As they're costing their employer significantly more than a remote worker.
It's easier to quantify the costs than the benefits, IMO. I think it's easier to collaborate when I'm sitting right next to my coworkers. I think it's reasonable to say that it saves 30 minutes a day for each employee on the team. So, for costs: a couple bucks a day in drinks, the floorspace I take up, electricity, climate control, etc. Benefits: increased communication efficiency, mental separation between home and work, and fewer work-irrelevant distractions.
It's not clear to me whether the pros outweigh the cons or not.
Being able to work from home when I need to is a perk.
Having to work from home is not, because I enjoy being able to quickly reach out to my coworkers face-to-face (especially when I need to talk to more than one), I enjoy having a delineated work/home demarcator, and I enjoy all of the perks that my employer provides (snacks, drinks, weekly catered lunch) and ones that come for free with the office location (a nice view, a good selection of places to eat, a convenient commute).
Not personally, at least from a social aspect. I work from home. I haven't spoken to people in so long that when I finally saw my friends from out of town (everyone moved away), my face hurt from talking and laughing so much I could't flex a muscle in my face for a week.
Those with families and already established social circles, and significant others, are in a great position to work from home.
It's great for me because I have a lot of anxiety and do better in solitude but the social aspect is depressing.
I mainly went this route when I got a job in an open office that drove me absolutely insane. Every little sound and interaction would distract and subsequently infuriate me. Plus watching a bunch of 20 year olds line up 3x a day with their plates in their hands was disgusting, having employers infantilize their employees to such a degree, I couldn't take it anymore. It went far beyond the food but that's a story for another time.
No. I get paid to do a job on a computer screen. The location of that screen is irrelevant as long as the job gets done.
The 'perk' is for the company. They don't have to pay electricity for my computer, provide desk space, commuter benefits or have me drinking their coffee, or using their bathrooms. They also don't have me on premises, so that's one less employee to insure. One less 'head' to add to their on-premises liability insurance. Less heating and cooling expenses and less expense for real estate. You have productivity gains because rarely is someone late for work when they're already at work. You also have fewer sick days because if I'm contagious but still functional, that means I can keep working whereas otherwise, I'd have to stay home.
It's a win-win for both parties, despite many employers trying to frame the conversation as an employee 'benefit.'
Obviously some jobs won't work (for example hardware or physical goods,) but for a job where you're on a phone or in front of a computer screen -- what's the difference?
> but for a job where you're on a phone or in front of a computer screen -- what's the difference?
I like the work-home separation and don't have a space that I could reasonably use as a home office, right now. Also, meetings have much lower friction in person than over a phone. My coworkers and I are often in each other's cubes, collaborating and switching off between who's at the keyboard.
I agree with the general statement, though: If I'm doing something that doesn't inherently require physical presence, then it shouldn't matter where I'm doing the work from. In my case, working at the company-provided office is more convenient on most days than working at home would be.
I sure do. My commute is about 5 minutes. Most other jobs I've considered add at a minimum an hour of commute, and some are close to two hours. If I took public transportation it would be even worse.
I generally only work an 8 hour day unless there is a major issue at work. Just working offsite can make that a 10 hour day, 2 hours of which are going to be frustrating traffic. Screw that.
The social aspect can be a downside, but it is possible to have friends outside of work.
When I work from home I tend to be more productive: I start earlier, finish later, and take more breaks away from the keyboard and screen so my work later in the day is better than it would have been otherwise.
In my case I save an hour a day commuting, I'm not subject to the bunch of network operations staff in the next aisle who punctuate their day with loud conversations about computer game, politics, pranking and trolling each other. The office I work is in a noisy, crowded environment which is entirely distracting and frustrating to me.
The computer I have at home is ideally suited for the work I do (I bought it specifically for the task). The computer I have at work is about six years old, underprovisioned for the work I do.
My employer should consider it a perk to have me work from home, and should pay me extra to do so since I'm happy to provide a comfortable work environment with adequate infrastructure for the work I'm doing.
I think 10% extra for working from home is a suitable compensation given everything the employer gains.
We used to enjoy work from home at the discretion of our immediate supervisors, but due to a falling out between senior management and one of my colleagues who was working from home when one senior manager wanted to drop by their desk to talk about an issue that was being actively discussed on email and HipChat, all staff lost their work from home privileges.
Which highlights another benefit of working from home: more of my communication will be via email and other recorded formats, so it is harder to forget what I've communicated to you, and you have to take time to formulate your questions rather than simply walking into my personal space, interrupting whatever I'm working on, and asking a question I already answered yesterday.
Allowing work from home indicates that management is competent. Retracting work from home privileges already granted indicates the opposite.
The problem I have with working remotely is that you're not part of the conversation. I work with a co-located team and I'm based in satellite office and could work from home 100% of the time. It works fine within the team, but when politics starts happening outside of the team, we don't know about it until things hit the fan and we are playing defense.
Even not regarding the politics, it's a lot easier just to walk over to someone's desk to get their input then reach them on Slack and try to do a hangout.
So yeah having the option to work from home is great when you really need to be heads down, you are contagious but you are able to work, etc., but I wouldn't want to be in situation where I'm always remote.
By accepting remote work, they open the candidate pool to the whole world. You compete with people having potentially much lower living costs.
Why would they pay "market rate" if they are in a city with high rates?
Personally I think a big factor is the kind of work involved. I'm a home-based security consultant and I'm pretty motivated to deliver as I know that each engagement is pretty short and there's a clear deliverable at the end of each one.
More vague work can be trickier, but I still think home working can work for a lot of people...
I actually have a fairly unpopular view on market rate. I tend to look at the U.S. as a whole for determining what constitutes fair compensation. This is strictly regarding developer and tech employee pay.
I don't take location into account at all. If you want to save money and live in the middle of nowhere then go for it. You should have the exact same pay as the person in SF doing the exact same thing as you.
There are challenges and costs employing remote workers in significantly different timezones. So you mostly compete with other workers in nearby timezones.
I live in France and work East Coast hours. My time zone is my problem, not the employer's. The 'boss' needs me for a 6pm Eastern Time meeting? I'll be there. If I am employee, I work when I am needed; my location shouldn't be their concern.
Most people are not excited to work super weird hours. More power to you, I guess, but I wouldn't be pleased to be asked to attend a meeting at midnight.
A lot of the problem employers have with "work from home" employees is centered around this fact. Working from home almost always requires extremely good communication skills and extroverted employees. The problem is that working from home appeals more to introverted employees than extroverted ones. I've met several fellow extroverts who left work at home positions because they were lonely and several introverted employees who were let go from positions and had no idea why they weren't successful. Even as an extrovert, I've struggled in this area, going so far as to create tasks with reminder alerts to call specific employees for social reasons on specific days. You have to go out of your way to fill in the communications vacuum and it occupies a chunk of your work-life with tasks that an in-office worker never has to think about.
Hiring for this skill set is also difficult. In my case, I had been working remotely for a manager who was in a different time zone both in-the-office and at home for about 12 years, so I had learned these skills over time and could speak directly to them in an interview. I'm not perfect at it[0] but have learned some tricks along the way and most of it is being willing to assert yourself, to interrupt others (carefully) and to speak openly about your life outside of work over channels where this doesn't necessarily happen naturally. I've found arriving to video/teleconferences a few minutes early and breeze-shooting with anyone else who arrives early helps. Adding video to every call regardless of whether or not anyone else enables video is also a good thing (and learning to look into the camera lens rather than the screen -- expressing emotion visually -- has a psychological impact as well).
[0] Far from it sometimes, especially if I have a large work-load. In the office, it'd be obvious to my manager that I'm struggling under the pressure. At home, I have to be deliberate about communicating these facts while avoiding sounding like a complainer. Consider that if you're in the office, dropping by the boss's cube/office to complain about your work-load would be something that you'd only do in extreme circumstances because it'd be obvious to them by just casual observation. At home, you have no choice but to complain -- it's natural for you but it still feels the same to your boss if the rest of the team he's managing is in the office. He doesn't hear any of them complaining regularly about work-load, but he knows their work load through indirect observation. It makes matters even worse that you're bitching about being over-worked on a conference call you're conducting from your bed (cry me a river, right?). The best "cure" for this is a standing, weekly, informal "touch base" meeting that's designed to discuss work-life-related things which is scheduled and kept even when there's no problems.
I'd hate to work from home , I just don't find it as a benefit. Home is home. The office is where the work happens. I like to keep these things separated..
Office space is cheaper per sq ft that residential in most US cities. If I was a long term remote worker, I would rent a small office somewhere. It is also easier to deduct off your taxes that way.
I run my own small company (just a few of us, in different places), and after a couple of years of working from home, I had to rent a little office space. Too much rolling out of bed and sitting down to the computer. Too much realizing I was still in my bathrobe at 2pm.
A tidy, quiet little office space felt like a godsend afterwards. Of course, it was still only me :)
You're not an outlier. I know several software developers who feel exactly the same way. I would have probably been one of them but after doing it for ten years or so, I love working at home and have found ways to adjust to the things I don't like about it.
But your attitude is shared by a lot of people, it's just not necessarily talked about all that often and it falls into the often ignored category of "there are real downsides to working from home" that seems to be pervasive in the world where "working at home" is seen by some as "not working at all" or as this article states "a job perk" rather than a set of trade-offs that have positives and negatives for both the employer and employee.
Personally, I will probably never take a job that isn't work-at-home, again, if I have any say in the matter. While there were substantial down-sides (almost all of which I wasn't prepared for in the beginning) there's substanial up-sides. And I'm one of those folks who elects to ignore the "work-life" separation boundary entirely. I accept that as a work-from-home employee, I can basically be seen as someone "working all of the time" and I allow myself to work when inspiration hits even if it isn't during "normal business hours". On the flip-side of that, my kids will tell you that "Daddy's always here". I get to be here for my family at all times. My dad was a traveling sales-man and pilot when I was growing up. He was gone most of the time[0]. I can work 50 hours during the week and have it feel like 30 to my family and 40 to me. I can get in the middle of an emotional problem one of my daughters is facing when it happens because I'm in the home all day -- provided I'm not in a teleconference. I'm home to see my kids when school lets out. At the same time, I might be working at 8:00 or 9:00 PM when they're settling in for bed. Or taking a conference call with a group team on the other side of the world at 2:00 AM. There is no office where work happens for me and that can positively suck at times.
[0] I deeply respect and look up to my dad -- he was there as much as he could be and had to work the hours he worked in order to provide for our family. He grew up in a two bedroom home with 6 siblings and never had a bedroom or even a bed to sleep on when he was a kid. He also "made it to all of the important things" and actually got his pilot license to reduce the amount of over-night travel he had to do.
I think the model of working remotely from distributed coworking spaces would be a decent one. If employers started subsidizing them you can only image how many quality places would pop up.
Working from home may sound good only to those who haven't done it for a longer period of time. Having flexible hours is good to have, but only when you really need it (e.g. family visit, some delivery, some time off). Cut itself makes no sense, at least here in Denmark (Lithuanian here) if you work at the office you don't have to worry about food and coffee - at home you would.
It's kind of amazing what it does for your marriage. I've seen both sides of it, myself. In both cases, my wife was also stay-at-home.
My first marriage was actually damaged by working at home. My wife was an introvert and I think having me around all the time hurt things (we were not particularly compatible to begin with which was exacerbated when I went from working 50-60 hours a week away to working most days at home).
My current marriage is greatly helped by it. There's nobody I'd rather share my time with than my wife and she feels the same. A lot of people will say what I said in the last paragraph applies to them -- they'd hate their spouse if they had to spend every waking minute with them and couldn't get away from time to time, but her and I thrive in the situation. I think it helps that her dad and mom were both small business owners who ran things out of their home and worked together on everything. It helps me because my wife is non-technical and by being around while I'm working/talking on conference calls, she understands more about what I do and the things I struggle with at work so she can offer more support/understanding to me than if I had to explain it all to her (it also avoids me having to spend hours explaining things). My four children love that I'm at home at all times. Even though they're respectful of the fact that I have to work and try not to bother me while I'm busy, they know I'm there if something important comes up. This is especially important since two of my children are step-'s and we're blending a family. The complexity of emotions that kids go through is helped by the stability of the fact that I'm seen as "always present" in the moment and at the time.
Yep, I understand your situation. Somehow I lucked into the second situation that you outlined. I think I'm exceedingly lucky that I missed the first situation - it seems to be the common case these days.
I've worked from home for about 5 years now, my wife has worked from home for about 10 years and we think it's great.
We get flexibility about where we live (so can choose a nice rural area) and cutting out the hours wasted on commuting time means we can fit in a nice 60 mins of excercise (in our case hillwalking) before starting work.
Personally I wouldn't want to revert to office based life...
I'm a little surprised at the down-voting. Your feelings on the subject are completely valid and shared by many. I've written enough comments on the subject within this thread that I won't repeat myself yet again, but briefly: a lot of extroverts dislike working at home -- I can name several off the top of my head that share your opinion and prefer an office job[0]. Additionally, introverts run the risk of being less successful working at home unless they extend themselves and force continual communication rather than fall into a natural pattern of putting their head down and getting work done. So the environment that may appeal most to introverts can be one of the more difficult for them to achieve success career-wise and the environment that may work well for an extrovert may not appeal to them at all.
[0] Though I think this is the first time I've heard "food and coffee" be a major factor. Perhaps it's something not understood by me as an American, but working at home means I can prepare a hot meal in 10 minutes for lunch with the wealth of food in my cupboard rather than eating out at fast food or enjoying whatever thing I managed to throw in a bag while I was rushing out the door in the morning that often doesn't appeal to me by noon.
> traveling and adventuring through the world while working
I have been trying to do this for years, and it's much harder than it sounds on the surface. I'm in West Africa now, for reference.
When you work for a company (or even just take a contract of some form) the company wants you to be available on their schedule. So you have to live the hours of the country you're "working for".
This gets really hard when you have travel days (or weeks), when you want to go someplace remote, have limited or no connectivity, want to do something with locals in the plae you're in, want a social life, etc. etc.
Maybe you can do it if "traveling and adventuring through the world" means staying put in a large city in a more-or-less developed country, but otherwise, it's very hard.
As long as you're in the same time zone (as another commenter has alluded to) and have decent internet, what's the difference between working from a suburb of Chicago and Mexico City?
TLDR; Well, it was a good situation and my skill set is not ideally suited for a freelancer, as I'm a predominantly backend engineer.
If you want details, I'm going into them now.
1) Good situation
The entire team is pretty much remote now. Working at the office is the exception, not the norm. Trying to be the first remote worker on a team is a chore, not only do you have to come up to speed, but you have to institute a remote culture as a newcomer, which is not easy. A fight I don't want to have.
2) Skill set
I've been focused on backend systems. I don't have any front-end experience, especially stuff that you can put in a portfolio and wow potential clients with. That tends to cut down on freelancing. If you don't mind me asking, what hourly rate do you generally charge your clients? And what true hourly rate, factoring in meeting clients and writing RFPs? Freelancing is looking increasingly attractive to me.
3) Personal connections
Somebody who I used to report to referred me to the job, and I enjoyed and will enjoy working with him. It's always nice to know somebody on the inside who vouches for the team and can show you the ropes.
Drawing conclusions from call center jobs (the article) to developer jobs is fraught with problems primarily as call center jobs are about delivered service time (availability for and handling of calls) and developer jobs are about delivered value (written and/or deleted lines of code).
A lot of people travel 2 hours per day in a commute. If they take the train, it can be around 3900 a year in season ticket rail passes. No one pays you for it. What a bloody waste of time.
It's my understanding that the Caltrain charges $18,000/yr to give an unlimited number of employees a GoPass (unlimited travel). Pretty good deal if you are running a mid size or larger company in the bay area.
I am sure many developers (and not only) enjoy coming to the office, having free coffee, socializing with their colleagues, doing pair programming, etc. On the other hand, for some, working from home gives them an opportunity to be much more productive. This is like working in a private office, with the door closed. That is, unless, of course, you have a lot of distraction, such as having to do chores or kids running around and making all kinds of noise. Many escape to the office for that exact reason.
Then I'm stuck living within commuting distance of the employer -- that means a position I could be perfect for would be ignored. That limits the talent pool to those that are willing to work in a particular location. That also means companies have to locate to insanely expensive locations just to be around talent -- which is less money that goes into growing the business.
I tend to be hesitant of this model, but I've seen it work. It depends on the team and the people.
In the cases where it works the hallmark of success is a team that is highly engaged. If it's a start-up or a company where everyone has a vested interest -- financially -- for the company's success, the probability that it'll work is high. The probability that eliminating the formality and just letting everyone work from home all the time will work is also high, though. Maybe the schedule is useful because in-person collaboration is so deeply needed for the remaining days that it's worth keeping to a smaller schedule for work-at-home[0].
Where I've seen it fail was at a few larger employers where engagement was moderate/low. Many of the employees were working their exclusively to collect a paycheck and didn't have a lot of passion for the work they were doing. The "work at home" day was really "a day off". Management scheduled this day to occur two days after the weekly release cycle -- the one considered to have the least impact after a release where employees not being available on-site was going to be less of an issue. The problem with that thinking was that it further encouraged the mentality that it was really a day off not a work from home day. I'd hear stories from my friend about how he'd schedule all of his personal stuff on that day -- he'd take the kids places during the work day and otherwise do things that he would not "get away with" in the office. This policy stopped after about a year because enough employees abused it. Unfortunately, for those who didn't abuse it, they got punished.
By making it "part time", you also have less pressures to put in place the tools necessary to make work-at-home successful. Highly motivated teams won't suffer because they'll naturally gravitate toward tools that make it possible to complete work -- getting the work done is the driving factor. Unmotivated teams will fail because that driving factor is missing and will be filled in with an attitude of "well, I can't do this because there's no way to get what I need to do my job, so I'll sit on it until I'm back in the office". There's also the issue of not having parity between the equipment in the office and the equipment at home. If you have 2 workstations at your desk in the office and a laptop -- you're probably using your workstations at work and rarely using the less powerful laptop. As a full time work-at-home employee, I have two servers with several virtuals, two laptops and a very high-end desktop ... at home. I'm full productivity all the time. Yes, you can probably remote into your workstation at the office. It's not the same -- I've tried it -- maybe it's the lack of three monitors in your home office or the network latency of the remote desktop, but something just makes it "less than".
By making a schedule, you're also forcing employees who might not want to work from home to work at home. It sounds crazy, but over the years I've met several software developers who don't fit the stereotypes -- they'e extroverted and enjoy the office. They see the office as an extension of their college life where they had a bunch of friends who were forced to get together -- in person -- and get along and feel lonely working at home. I might have been one of these people -- I get lonely from time to time working at home full-time but have found ways to combat that.
On the flip side, there's potentially a benefit to the forced schedule for introverted team members or folks who require intense focus to accomplish work. They'll most likely drop completely off the map when working at home because they can isolate themselves completely and pour into work. Keeping some in-office days helps those personalities get pulled into the larger team and can focus on th...
8% less than a Bay Area market-rate salary to be able to work from wherever I want? Sounds great. There are co-working spaces all over the place now. Get a floating desk at one of them and you can still get that office atmosphere when you need it.
This is the one area where I think a pay-cut might be warranted. If the cost of living is sufficiently different from the employer's location and my own, I'd expect a pay cut.
However, the impression I get from the article is that people are willing to take the pay cut of the prevailing wage they'd expect to be paid for the same job in the area they currently live. I live in a suburb of Detroit. I'm employed full time for a US/UK/Australian company working for a team in the UK and am paid at around the market rate for the area I live in. I accepted this job with a pay increase from my previous employer who also paid me at around the market rate for where I live despite my working from home for several years. At no point did my previous employer ask me to take a pay cut when I started working from home, nor did they reduce the compensation increases/bonuses once I started working from home.
My work from home arrangements at my previous employer were "semi-official". The company had a defined "work from home policy" and outside of myself and one other member of my team, it was expressly forbidden. I began working from home by using the "rockstar method" -- I became a critical member of not just my team, but the organization. I was given flexibility to conduct my work in whatever manner I required as long as my obligations were met (which they always were). I left that team, though, mainly because part of the agreement was that I keep quiet about working at home. I was located in an office that no other members of my team were in, so this meant not making it obvious during conference calls because management didn't want to receive grief from other high-performing team-members who were disallowed from working at home due to upper management disliking the practice (they routinely performed work-site walk-throughs to see how many empty desks there were). This "butts in chairs upper management" style spoke a lot to how the company was managed -- in general -- and was ultimately the reason I left. I'm still cautious of this if for no other reason than habit, but mostly because it is unprofessional to have children yelling or dogs barking in the background of a teleconference where people are already expecting you're only half-paying attention, anyway.
I've been working remotely for the last few years, and I don't miss the office at all. However, I wouldn't really mind driving to work or taking a train. You get some time to listen to podcasts, or think, or just do nothing and clear your head. I have to actively make time for that now that I work remotely. Sometimes I get too busy and forget to do nothing for a while.
There's also something nice about traveling to and from work, where there's a separation between work and home. I've just moved into an apartment where I have one room as an office, so that should be nice.
Another thing is that when you're freelancing as a software developer, sometimes you can turn that into a pay raise. It works especially well if your plan is to have long stretches of time without paid work, so you can work on your own side projects. There's also some clients who are happy for you to work 20 hour weeks, which is very easy to get used to. I find context switching to be really hard though, so I prefer to work two 10 hour days. And sometimes I enjoy going full-time on a project for a few months, and then taking a long break for a few months.
But yes, I would still be prepared to take a pay cut in order to work from home. Well, if "home" includes anywhere in the world.
I hear ya on the podcasts. When I had a 2-hour round-trip commute for several years, I listened to a few hundred audio books. Up to that point I had read probably two fiction books over the course of my entire life (outside of required reading for school)[0].
After a few years I could hold my own in conversations about literature and found myself really enjoying some of the classics. I find it almost impossible to listen to audio books when I'm not driving or doing some muscle-memory exercise like cutting the lawn/driving/riding a bike, so without that consistent drive time, I haven't gotten to enjoy a good book in several years. It's not even worth downloading them any longer because I know it'll take two years to finish one book and I'll forget where I left off between listens.
[0] I'm a speed reader (skimming/scanning style, not the "gimmicky" speed reading that is advertised these days) and find it difficult to read fiction without using my training. Speed reading fiction is like turning to the back of the book to see how it ends before starting the book -- it ruins fiction -- so the only fiction reading I enjoy is narrated to me (by Scott Brick, if I'm lucky) on Audible.
Absolutely not. I've advised everyone looking for remote work to never undercut their salary or treat the remote job as a "perk"[0].
There are downsides to working at home -- disconnection from the team (if the team is not entirely remote), additional pressure to be deliberate about social behavior, the elimination of the lines between "work" and "home" and having to keep yourself in check to make sure you don't end up just "working all of the time" and the perception that working from home isn't working at all which is often the case when an employer thinks that they can reduce a person's salary if they offer them the opportunity to work from home.
The problem with accepting a lower salary is that you're opening yourself up to a working environment where the bosses believe they're doing you a favor and will expect more in return than just that salary. There's a risk that they will respect the work you do less or assume you're on a perpetual vacation because you're working from a home office rather than a building they've paid for. Your work and contribution should speak for itself and your management should understand that it takes a special skill (and valuable) skill set to work from home successfully. By treating it as a perk, these facts are ignored.
After 7 years of working in an office, 4 of working split between home and office and 7 working exclusively from home, I can say from my own, anecdotal, experience that working from home makes me far more effective at the job I'm tasked with. To start, switching to working at home eliminated a 2-hour round-trip commute. That time didn't all get shifted to work, but at least half of it did. Because I work from home, I have the most effective tools for doing my job with me at all times. When I was in the office, I had two workstations that I did most of my work on and a laptop that I rarely used except when at home. Working in development, I tended to have moments of inspiration hit at non-work times (9:00 PM) and when that'd happen, I'd look at the laptop and run through in my mind all of the things I'd have to set up to be able to take advantage of that inspiration and would often think "yeah, I'll just wait until the morning". And by morning, that inspiration had expired. Because I do my entire job at home, I can take advantage of this inspiration without any friction, now. I'm currently employed by a team that is entirely located in the UK. One of the reasons I was hired was because I'm located in a time-zone that matches many of our customers. This benefits my employer which makes a pay-cut inappropriate.
In the office, you've got an unofficial social pressure to keep the same schedule as your coworkers: 8-5 with a noonish lunch, usually. There are several "personal things" that can't be done over the internet still, today[1]. These places often have a day or two a week to accommodate day-job folks, but you'll be waiting in line with all of the others about five times longer than you would if you picked a more ideal time[2].
All of this equates to more time available to work and I probably work an average of 50 hours/week without even trying. The difference is that at home it feels like a 40-hour work week and sometimes it feels like far less than that. To my family it feels like a much shorter work-week because I'm home for them. I can sit in the living room and work while my kids play. I can be there when the little things come up. My kids will tell you "daddy's always there" because ... well ... I am! They can even sit in on a conference call and get to know what it's like to have a career.
This is not to say that there aren't downsides for the employer. There's less collaboration[3] and collaboration intensive work may suffer as a result, especially if...
I am taking an indirect pay cut staying with my current employer which allows for remote work rather than getting a much higher paying job that requires a daily commute. Working from home 4 days a week and then going into the office around 10 am after traffic settles is definitely a perk. A daily commute would probably require me to buy a newer vehicle which would definitely eat into any gains in salary anyways. My employer has struggled lately with layoffs so I am constantly evaluating my job prospects. So instead of commuting I am building up my consulting business.
I've seen this play out a few times and I hesitate to offer advice only because I don't wish it to be taken negatively, so please accept this as respectfully as I can offer it.
I worked at a company that performed layoffs about every 6 months of around 10% of the staff of the entire company for around 17 years. You're doing the right thing by constantly evaluating your job prospects. The risk you've taken, now, though is that you've made yourself less visible and easier to lay off. Your manager will feel less badly about letting you go because you're not around to be reminded of. By taking a 4-day work-week, you're also getting less done which will further make the case for "not needing you". The staff who is not working at home -- assuming they are not allowed to do so -- will also start to resent the fact that you've been treated specially and may start to sabotage you subtly/unconsciously (or if they're particularly nasty people -- intentionally). This will further make the case for why you should be the next to go.
There is a large plus-side though, particularly if you're like many HN readers and are employed in software development -- you are in a good position to find a remote job elsewhere. Hiring good remote employees is difficult and makes employers uncomfortable because it's hard to know how someone will fare with a work-at-home position. One of the key factors looked for in any position is experience and you can now state on your resume/in an interview that you have experience working, successfully, remotely. That experience is further bolstered by the fact that you're employed by a struggling company who routinely lets people go and you're still employed there despite being a remote employee. I'd strongly advise updating your resume if you are not interested in consulting full time or putting enough energy into your consulting business to be able to transition to it full time.
I've been working remotely for the past 6 years. More and more I am having to compete with offshore, and with the boss's expectations that working "in the comfort of your own home" means you deserve a pay cut.
I make it a policy of mine to visit the office once or twice a week for design and planning, so the social aspect keeps me sane. I find it a good balance.
I've recently started looking for a job for the pay increase due to cost of living pressures and because of the culture prevailing of bosses needing to see butts in seats it will most likely be on-premises.
We've been priced out of the market for housing, so we have to live further out. It would involve three hours commuting a day. The pay increase is almost negated by the erosion of your hourly rate when you factor in time and expense of the commute. Not to mention the time being in a car and train rather with my kids.
I can say without a doubt YES, because I did exactly that 3 years ago. It ended up being about 10%, and bit drop in quality of insurance. After three years at home I can't imagine going back to working in an office again. I'd take another pay cut to stay working at home until the day I retire, or die (which may come first if I keep taking pay cuts to work from home).
I save so much time and money working from home, but by far the best thing is being able to manage the kids and other assorted family stuff would just be impossible if I wasn't here.
I've been remote working for the past 10 years or so.. with a large part of it for a mostly remote company.
However, When first got into remote working, I accepted a lower amount for the benefits outlined.. but then learned nobody else did... So I short-changed myself.
I wouldn't now.. either I take the rate I need with WFH provision, or I don't take the gig.
I took a 8% pay cut to work from home when I accepted a new position. The company said they couldn't match my currently salary but living in NY and being able to move to a lower priced housing and not having to pay for the commute more then made up for the loss in income. Not to mention the peace of mind and flexibility of working and not having to deal with the NYC commute, I think it's been well worth it personally.
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[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 139 ms ] threadIt's not clear to me whether the pros outweigh the cons or not.
Having to work from home is not, because I enjoy being able to quickly reach out to my coworkers face-to-face (especially when I need to talk to more than one), I enjoy having a delineated work/home demarcator, and I enjoy all of the perks that my employer provides (snacks, drinks, weekly catered lunch) and ones that come for free with the office location (a nice view, a good selection of places to eat, a convenient commute).
Those with families and already established social circles, and significant others, are in a great position to work from home.
It's great for me because I have a lot of anxiety and do better in solitude but the social aspect is depressing.
I mainly went this route when I got a job in an open office that drove me absolutely insane. Every little sound and interaction would distract and subsequently infuriate me. Plus watching a bunch of 20 year olds line up 3x a day with their plates in their hands was disgusting, having employers infantilize their employees to such a degree, I couldn't take it anymore. It went far beyond the food but that's a story for another time.
I agree with the raise.
The 'perk' is for the company. They don't have to pay electricity for my computer, provide desk space, commuter benefits or have me drinking their coffee, or using their bathrooms. They also don't have me on premises, so that's one less employee to insure. One less 'head' to add to their on-premises liability insurance. Less heating and cooling expenses and less expense for real estate. You have productivity gains because rarely is someone late for work when they're already at work. You also have fewer sick days because if I'm contagious but still functional, that means I can keep working whereas otherwise, I'd have to stay home.
It's a win-win for both parties, despite many employers trying to frame the conversation as an employee 'benefit.'
Obviously some jobs won't work (for example hardware or physical goods,) but for a job where you're on a phone or in front of a computer screen -- what's the difference?
I like the work-home separation and don't have a space that I could reasonably use as a home office, right now. Also, meetings have much lower friction in person than over a phone. My coworkers and I are often in each other's cubes, collaborating and switching off between who's at the keyboard.
I agree with the general statement, though: If I'm doing something that doesn't inherently require physical presence, then it shouldn't matter where I'm doing the work from. In my case, working at the company-provided office is more convenient on most days than working at home would be.
I generally only work an 8 hour day unless there is a major issue at work. Just working offsite can make that a 10 hour day, 2 hours of which are going to be frustrating traffic. Screw that.
The social aspect can be a downside, but it is possible to have friends outside of work.
In my case I save an hour a day commuting, I'm not subject to the bunch of network operations staff in the next aisle who punctuate their day with loud conversations about computer game, politics, pranking and trolling each other. The office I work is in a noisy, crowded environment which is entirely distracting and frustrating to me.
The computer I have at home is ideally suited for the work I do (I bought it specifically for the task). The computer I have at work is about six years old, underprovisioned for the work I do.
My employer should consider it a perk to have me work from home, and should pay me extra to do so since I'm happy to provide a comfortable work environment with adequate infrastructure for the work I'm doing.
I think 10% extra for working from home is a suitable compensation given everything the employer gains.
We used to enjoy work from home at the discretion of our immediate supervisors, but due to a falling out between senior management and one of my colleagues who was working from home when one senior manager wanted to drop by their desk to talk about an issue that was being actively discussed on email and HipChat, all staff lost their work from home privileges.
Which highlights another benefit of working from home: more of my communication will be via email and other recorded formats, so it is harder to forget what I've communicated to you, and you have to take time to formulate your questions rather than simply walking into my personal space, interrupting whatever I'm working on, and asking a question I already answered yesterday.
Allowing work from home indicates that management is competent. Retracting work from home privileges already granted indicates the opposite.
No I'm not bitter, why do you ask?
And you tend to work longer even if it's just the commute time.
This isn't about it being a perk or not, it's about who is making a financial gain and who is baring the costs.
In this case the company is transferring some of the expenses to you while eliminating others, adding a pay cut to this is not a wise decision.
Even not regarding the politics, it's a lot easier just to walk over to someone's desk to get their input then reach them on Slack and try to do a hangout.
So yeah having the option to work from home is great when you really need to be heads down, you are contagious but you are able to work, etc., but I wouldn't want to be in situation where I'm always remote.
As a remote worker I'd suggest paying people their market rate and then some. Finding good remote workers is very difficult.
More vague work can be trickier, but I still think home working can work for a lot of people...
I don't take location into account at all. If you want to save money and live in the middle of nowhere then go for it. You should have the exact same pay as the person in SF doing the exact same thing as you.
This.
A lot of the problem employers have with "work from home" employees is centered around this fact. Working from home almost always requires extremely good communication skills and extroverted employees. The problem is that working from home appeals more to introverted employees than extroverted ones. I've met several fellow extroverts who left work at home positions because they were lonely and several introverted employees who were let go from positions and had no idea why they weren't successful. Even as an extrovert, I've struggled in this area, going so far as to create tasks with reminder alerts to call specific employees for social reasons on specific days. You have to go out of your way to fill in the communications vacuum and it occupies a chunk of your work-life with tasks that an in-office worker never has to think about.
Hiring for this skill set is also difficult. In my case, I had been working remotely for a manager who was in a different time zone both in-the-office and at home for about 12 years, so I had learned these skills over time and could speak directly to them in an interview. I'm not perfect at it[0] but have learned some tricks along the way and most of it is being willing to assert yourself, to interrupt others (carefully) and to speak openly about your life outside of work over channels where this doesn't necessarily happen naturally. I've found arriving to video/teleconferences a few minutes early and breeze-shooting with anyone else who arrives early helps. Adding video to every call regardless of whether or not anyone else enables video is also a good thing (and learning to look into the camera lens rather than the screen -- expressing emotion visually -- has a psychological impact as well).
[0] Far from it sometimes, especially if I have a large work-load. In the office, it'd be obvious to my manager that I'm struggling under the pressure. At home, I have to be deliberate about communicating these facts while avoiding sounding like a complainer. Consider that if you're in the office, dropping by the boss's cube/office to complain about your work-load would be something that you'd only do in extreme circumstances because it'd be obvious to them by just casual observation. At home, you have no choice but to complain -- it's natural for you but it still feels the same to your boss if the rest of the team he's managing is in the office. He doesn't hear any of them complaining regularly about work-load, but he knows their work load through indirect observation. It makes matters even worse that you're bitching about being over-worked on a conference call you're conducting from your bed (cry me a river, right?). The best "cure" for this is a standing, weekly, informal "touch base" meeting that's designed to discuss work-life-related things which is scheduled and kept even when there's no problems.
A tidy, quiet little office space felt like a godsend afterwards. Of course, it was still only me :)
But your attitude is shared by a lot of people, it's just not necessarily talked about all that often and it falls into the often ignored category of "there are real downsides to working from home" that seems to be pervasive in the world where "working at home" is seen by some as "not working at all" or as this article states "a job perk" rather than a set of trade-offs that have positives and negatives for both the employer and employee.
Personally, I will probably never take a job that isn't work-at-home, again, if I have any say in the matter. While there were substantial down-sides (almost all of which I wasn't prepared for in the beginning) there's substanial up-sides. And I'm one of those folks who elects to ignore the "work-life" separation boundary entirely. I accept that as a work-from-home employee, I can basically be seen as someone "working all of the time" and I allow myself to work when inspiration hits even if it isn't during "normal business hours". On the flip-side of that, my kids will tell you that "Daddy's always here". I get to be here for my family at all times. My dad was a traveling sales-man and pilot when I was growing up. He was gone most of the time[0]. I can work 50 hours during the week and have it feel like 30 to my family and 40 to me. I can get in the middle of an emotional problem one of my daughters is facing when it happens because I'm in the home all day -- provided I'm not in a teleconference. I'm home to see my kids when school lets out. At the same time, I might be working at 8:00 or 9:00 PM when they're settling in for bed. Or taking a conference call with a group team on the other side of the world at 2:00 AM. There is no office where work happens for me and that can positively suck at times.
[0] I deeply respect and look up to my dad -- he was there as much as he could be and had to work the hours he worked in order to provide for our family. He grew up in a two bedroom home with 6 siblings and never had a bedroom or even a bed to sleep on when he was a kid. He also "made it to all of the important things" and actually got his pilot license to reduce the amount of over-night travel he had to do.
Maybe my situation is a little different - I have 3 kids and my wife is a stay at home mom.
It's been great and I highly recommend it if at some point you realize you are a family man (or woman).
My first marriage was actually damaged by working at home. My wife was an introvert and I think having me around all the time hurt things (we were not particularly compatible to begin with which was exacerbated when I went from working 50-60 hours a week away to working most days at home).
My current marriage is greatly helped by it. There's nobody I'd rather share my time with than my wife and she feels the same. A lot of people will say what I said in the last paragraph applies to them -- they'd hate their spouse if they had to spend every waking minute with them and couldn't get away from time to time, but her and I thrive in the situation. I think it helps that her dad and mom were both small business owners who ran things out of their home and worked together on everything. It helps me because my wife is non-technical and by being around while I'm working/talking on conference calls, she understands more about what I do and the things I struggle with at work so she can offer more support/understanding to me than if I had to explain it all to her (it also avoids me having to spend hours explaining things). My four children love that I'm at home at all times. Even though they're respectful of the fact that I have to work and try not to bother me while I'm busy, they know I'm there if something important comes up. This is especially important since two of my children are step-'s and we're blending a family. The complexity of emotions that kids go through is helped by the stability of the fact that I'm seen as "always present" in the moment and at the time.
We get flexibility about where we live (so can choose a nice rural area) and cutting out the hours wasted on commuting time means we can fit in a nice 60 mins of excercise (in our case hillwalking) before starting work.
Personally I wouldn't want to revert to office based life...
[0] Though I think this is the first time I've heard "food and coffee" be a major factor. Perhaps it's something not understood by me as an American, but working at home means I can prepare a hot meal in 10 minutes for lunch with the wealth of food in my cupboard rather than eating out at fast food or enjoying whatever thing I managed to throw in a bag while I was rushing out the door in the morning that often doesn't appeal to me by noon.
Is there a distinction between working remotely and working from home?
I have been trying to do this for years, and it's much harder than it sounds on the surface. I'm in West Africa now, for reference.
When you work for a company (or even just take a contract of some form) the company wants you to be available on their schedule. So you have to live the hours of the country you're "working for".
This gets really hard when you have travel days (or weeks), when you want to go someplace remote, have limited or no connectivity, want to do something with locals in the plae you're in, want a social life, etc. etc.
Maybe you can do it if "traveling and adventuring through the world" means staying put in a large city in a more-or-less developed country, but otherwise, it's very hard.
As long as you're in the same time zone (as another commenter has alluded to) and have decent internet, what's the difference between working from a suburb of Chicago and Mexico City?
If you want details, I'm going into them now.
1) Good situation
The entire team is pretty much remote now. Working at the office is the exception, not the norm. Trying to be the first remote worker on a team is a chore, not only do you have to come up to speed, but you have to institute a remote culture as a newcomer, which is not easy. A fight I don't want to have.
2) Skill set
I've been focused on backend systems. I don't have any front-end experience, especially stuff that you can put in a portfolio and wow potential clients with. That tends to cut down on freelancing. If you don't mind me asking, what hourly rate do you generally charge your clients? And what true hourly rate, factoring in meeting clients and writing RFPs? Freelancing is looking increasingly attractive to me.
3) Personal connections
Somebody who I used to report to referred me to the job, and I enjoyed and will enjoy working with him. It's always nice to know somebody on the inside who vouches for the team and can show you the ropes.
Hint: I'm in the EU.
So you still have in-person collaboration on the other 3 days, say, Monday Wednesday Thursday.
This is exactly what we do, down to the exact days.
(Fun note: gitstats says that Tuesday is the most productive day and Friday the least)
Face to face is overrated.
In the cases where it works the hallmark of success is a team that is highly engaged. If it's a start-up or a company where everyone has a vested interest -- financially -- for the company's success, the probability that it'll work is high. The probability that eliminating the formality and just letting everyone work from home all the time will work is also high, though. Maybe the schedule is useful because in-person collaboration is so deeply needed for the remaining days that it's worth keeping to a smaller schedule for work-at-home[0].
Where I've seen it fail was at a few larger employers where engagement was moderate/low. Many of the employees were working their exclusively to collect a paycheck and didn't have a lot of passion for the work they were doing. The "work at home" day was really "a day off". Management scheduled this day to occur two days after the weekly release cycle -- the one considered to have the least impact after a release where employees not being available on-site was going to be less of an issue. The problem with that thinking was that it further encouraged the mentality that it was really a day off not a work from home day. I'd hear stories from my friend about how he'd schedule all of his personal stuff on that day -- he'd take the kids places during the work day and otherwise do things that he would not "get away with" in the office. This policy stopped after about a year because enough employees abused it. Unfortunately, for those who didn't abuse it, they got punished.
By making it "part time", you also have less pressures to put in place the tools necessary to make work-at-home successful. Highly motivated teams won't suffer because they'll naturally gravitate toward tools that make it possible to complete work -- getting the work done is the driving factor. Unmotivated teams will fail because that driving factor is missing and will be filled in with an attitude of "well, I can't do this because there's no way to get what I need to do my job, so I'll sit on it until I'm back in the office". There's also the issue of not having parity between the equipment in the office and the equipment at home. If you have 2 workstations at your desk in the office and a laptop -- you're probably using your workstations at work and rarely using the less powerful laptop. As a full time work-at-home employee, I have two servers with several virtuals, two laptops and a very high-end desktop ... at home. I'm full productivity all the time. Yes, you can probably remote into your workstation at the office. It's not the same -- I've tried it -- maybe it's the lack of three monitors in your home office or the network latency of the remote desktop, but something just makes it "less than".
By making a schedule, you're also forcing employees who might not want to work from home to work at home. It sounds crazy, but over the years I've met several software developers who don't fit the stereotypes -- they'e extroverted and enjoy the office. They see the office as an extension of their college life where they had a bunch of friends who were forced to get together -- in person -- and get along and feel lonely working at home. I might have been one of these people -- I get lonely from time to time working at home full-time but have found ways to combat that.
On the flip side, there's potentially a benefit to the forced schedule for introverted team members or folks who require intense focus to accomplish work. They'll most likely drop completely off the map when working at home because they can isolate themselves completely and pour into work. Keeping some in-office days helps those personalities get pulled into the larger team and can focus on th...
They're expensive in the UK. It's not uncommon to see people spending four thousand pounds and up for their annual train ticket.
However, the impression I get from the article is that people are willing to take the pay cut of the prevailing wage they'd expect to be paid for the same job in the area they currently live. I live in a suburb of Detroit. I'm employed full time for a US/UK/Australian company working for a team in the UK and am paid at around the market rate for the area I live in. I accepted this job with a pay increase from my previous employer who also paid me at around the market rate for where I live despite my working from home for several years. At no point did my previous employer ask me to take a pay cut when I started working from home, nor did they reduce the compensation increases/bonuses once I started working from home.
My work from home arrangements at my previous employer were "semi-official". The company had a defined "work from home policy" and outside of myself and one other member of my team, it was expressly forbidden. I began working from home by using the "rockstar method" -- I became a critical member of not just my team, but the organization. I was given flexibility to conduct my work in whatever manner I required as long as my obligations were met (which they always were). I left that team, though, mainly because part of the agreement was that I keep quiet about working at home. I was located in an office that no other members of my team were in, so this meant not making it obvious during conference calls because management didn't want to receive grief from other high-performing team-members who were disallowed from working at home due to upper management disliking the practice (they routinely performed work-site walk-throughs to see how many empty desks there were). This "butts in chairs upper management" style spoke a lot to how the company was managed -- in general -- and was ultimately the reason I left. I'm still cautious of this if for no other reason than habit, but mostly because it is unprofessional to have children yelling or dogs barking in the background of a teleconference where people are already expecting you're only half-paying attention, anyway.
Working at home is boring, and unmotivational.
There's also something nice about traveling to and from work, where there's a separation between work and home. I've just moved into an apartment where I have one room as an office, so that should be nice.
Another thing is that when you're freelancing as a software developer, sometimes you can turn that into a pay raise. It works especially well if your plan is to have long stretches of time without paid work, so you can work on your own side projects. There's also some clients who are happy for you to work 20 hour weeks, which is very easy to get used to. I find context switching to be really hard though, so I prefer to work two 10 hour days. And sometimes I enjoy going full-time on a project for a few months, and then taking a long break for a few months.
But yes, I would still be prepared to take a pay cut in order to work from home. Well, if "home" includes anywhere in the world.
After a few years I could hold my own in conversations about literature and found myself really enjoying some of the classics. I find it almost impossible to listen to audio books when I'm not driving or doing some muscle-memory exercise like cutting the lawn/driving/riding a bike, so without that consistent drive time, I haven't gotten to enjoy a good book in several years. It's not even worth downloading them any longer because I know it'll take two years to finish one book and I'll forget where I left off between listens.
[0] I'm a speed reader (skimming/scanning style, not the "gimmicky" speed reading that is advertised these days) and find it difficult to read fiction without using my training. Speed reading fiction is like turning to the back of the book to see how it ends before starting the book -- it ruins fiction -- so the only fiction reading I enjoy is narrated to me (by Scott Brick, if I'm lucky) on Audible.
There are downsides to working at home -- disconnection from the team (if the team is not entirely remote), additional pressure to be deliberate about social behavior, the elimination of the lines between "work" and "home" and having to keep yourself in check to make sure you don't end up just "working all of the time" and the perception that working from home isn't working at all which is often the case when an employer thinks that they can reduce a person's salary if they offer them the opportunity to work from home.
The problem with accepting a lower salary is that you're opening yourself up to a working environment where the bosses believe they're doing you a favor and will expect more in return than just that salary. There's a risk that they will respect the work you do less or assume you're on a perpetual vacation because you're working from a home office rather than a building they've paid for. Your work and contribution should speak for itself and your management should understand that it takes a special skill (and valuable) skill set to work from home successfully. By treating it as a perk, these facts are ignored.
After 7 years of working in an office, 4 of working split between home and office and 7 working exclusively from home, I can say from my own, anecdotal, experience that working from home makes me far more effective at the job I'm tasked with. To start, switching to working at home eliminated a 2-hour round-trip commute. That time didn't all get shifted to work, but at least half of it did. Because I work from home, I have the most effective tools for doing my job with me at all times. When I was in the office, I had two workstations that I did most of my work on and a laptop that I rarely used except when at home. Working in development, I tended to have moments of inspiration hit at non-work times (9:00 PM) and when that'd happen, I'd look at the laptop and run through in my mind all of the things I'd have to set up to be able to take advantage of that inspiration and would often think "yeah, I'll just wait until the morning". And by morning, that inspiration had expired. Because I do my entire job at home, I can take advantage of this inspiration without any friction, now. I'm currently employed by a team that is entirely located in the UK. One of the reasons I was hired was because I'm located in a time-zone that matches many of our customers. This benefits my employer which makes a pay-cut inappropriate.
In the office, you've got an unofficial social pressure to keep the same schedule as your coworkers: 8-5 with a noonish lunch, usually. There are several "personal things" that can't be done over the internet still, today[1]. These places often have a day or two a week to accommodate day-job folks, but you'll be waiting in line with all of the others about five times longer than you would if you picked a more ideal time[2].
All of this equates to more time available to work and I probably work an average of 50 hours/week without even trying. The difference is that at home it feels like a 40-hour work week and sometimes it feels like far less than that. To my family it feels like a much shorter work-week because I'm home for them. I can sit in the living room and work while my kids play. I can be there when the little things come up. My kids will tell you "daddy's always there" because ... well ... I am! They can even sit in on a conference call and get to know what it's like to have a career.
This is not to say that there aren't downsides for the employer. There's less collaboration[3] and collaboration intensive work may suffer as a result, especially if...
I worked at a company that performed layoffs about every 6 months of around 10% of the staff of the entire company for around 17 years. You're doing the right thing by constantly evaluating your job prospects. The risk you've taken, now, though is that you've made yourself less visible and easier to lay off. Your manager will feel less badly about letting you go because you're not around to be reminded of. By taking a 4-day work-week, you're also getting less done which will further make the case for "not needing you". The staff who is not working at home -- assuming they are not allowed to do so -- will also start to resent the fact that you've been treated specially and may start to sabotage you subtly/unconsciously (or if they're particularly nasty people -- intentionally). This will further make the case for why you should be the next to go.
There is a large plus-side though, particularly if you're like many HN readers and are employed in software development -- you are in a good position to find a remote job elsewhere. Hiring good remote employees is difficult and makes employers uncomfortable because it's hard to know how someone will fare with a work-at-home position. One of the key factors looked for in any position is experience and you can now state on your resume/in an interview that you have experience working, successfully, remotely. That experience is further bolstered by the fact that you're employed by a struggling company who routinely lets people go and you're still employed there despite being a remote employee. I'd strongly advise updating your resume if you are not interested in consulting full time or putting enough energy into your consulting business to be able to transition to it full time.
I make it a policy of mine to visit the office once or twice a week for design and planning, so the social aspect keeps me sane. I find it a good balance.
I've recently started looking for a job for the pay increase due to cost of living pressures and because of the culture prevailing of bosses needing to see butts in seats it will most likely be on-premises.
We've been priced out of the market for housing, so we have to live further out. It would involve three hours commuting a day. The pay increase is almost negated by the erosion of your hourly rate when you factor in time and expense of the commute. Not to mention the time being in a car and train rather with my kids.
I save so much time and money working from home, but by far the best thing is being able to manage the kids and other assorted family stuff would just be impossible if I wasn't here.
However, When first got into remote working, I accepted a lower amount for the benefits outlined.. but then learned nobody else did... So I short-changed myself.
I wouldn't now.. either I take the rate I need with WFH provision, or I don't take the gig.