More distraction, less diverse social interaction, more requirement for stringent routines (assuming for a percentage of people)... It would be interesting to weigh up the pros/cons.
Wait, these are cons to working from home? If you get distracted at home, you probably get as equally distracted at work. I have been working from home for close to 5 years now and for me it's been the exact opposite - less distractions, more work done in shorter amount of time it would take me to do it in the office. Less social interaction - sure, but it doesn't have to be that way. Social interaction lost one place can be gained elsewhere. Stringent routines? What's wrong with discipline and having the ability to engage and disengage when you please?
Home gym, quiet working environment with walls and a door, ability to receive online orders, monitors as large and high res as I wish to pay for, fridge and kitchen to myself stocked as I wish. Friends and family nearby if you want to lunch with them.
You bet it's healthier. Except perhaps slightly increased exposure to the three germ incubating kids under 5 that live here, but there's not much I can do about that now apparently.
My cycle to work and back is half an hours hard cycling each way. I am in good shape since I started this job. (Previously it was a <10 minute roll down a hill followed by 15 minutes cycle back up).
no doubt there are positive outcomes! I guess what I'm speculating about specifically is a reduction in the number of people one socializes with in a collaborative way and a blurring of the line between work and home that may affect a significant portion of the work-from-home population in a negative way.
for me the best situation has always been being a few minutes walking distance from the office. work stays at work, home stays at home, no commute, no bullshit.
I disagree with your first assertion :) And I have a long daily commute which takes a lot of time and energy that would otherwise be available for my family. I'd argue that the little interactions throughout a workday at home are more valuable than few or no interactions from the office - quality time or not.
1. Poop any time you want
2. Take a nap vs. pretending to work
3. Less stress - no dealing with assholes in person, now you can simply click away.
4. Spend time with kids
5. No driving needed, avoid polluted highways, more sleep, less stress, less frustration.
6. Eat healthy home made. No need to ingest preservatives every day.
7. Keep sanity by working only when you are most productive vs. pretending to work when you can't get anything done.
8. Less stress from seeing asshole "managers"
I am most productive in early mornings and late evenings. Should I go ahead and tell my boss that I won't be doing anything mid-day and they should be cool with that? Name one place where people will okay this.
I can already hear the argument - "but, working at home doesn't mean you can take the afternoon off!!!" I'm sorry to say this, but anyone who thinks they are 100% productive all throughout the day has not had to try hourly work where you get paid by the hours you work and not by the full day. Hourly freelancers know what I am talking about. I will go on record to say that most if not all people can NEVER function at 100% capacity. To believe that looking busy all day long = working is just wishful thinking, ignorance or foolishness, take your pick.
So your fictional boss trusts you enough to allow work from home but somehow does not trust you when you propose to work early mornings and late evenings?
I can not comment on the hourly freelancer part, but as I understand the US law that keeps getting cited in this thread: "it's illegal to require an independent contractor to be on site or to even set hours".
Guess the answer needed a study but to me it was answered when Yahoo killed work from home options back when they tried to give it another go. We all know how well that worked.
I don't think it ever stops. If I had to venture an answer as to why, I'd say "fewer interruptions" - most interactions are asynchronous (email, IRC in my case but slack just as much). The only times I need to have synchronous discussions are either our "watercoolers" (social face-to-face over google hangouts) or the eventual meeting.
Note: the companies I've worked for in this setup are all committed to 100% remoteness, and understand that keeping meetings to a minimum is a good thing (note, not abolish - but make sure "meetings" are only called for when actually needed).
Distractions are indeed costly, and productivity (as in technical throughput) i can see increase quite a lot. That might end up keeping one happy for quite a long time - i noticed my happiness for a day depends a lot on how much stuff i got done that day.
I think it's important to be cautious here. People have the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one's preexisting beliefs.
So we need to look at the issue in a rather more elaborate way and look for both its upsides and downsides.
For example Ray Dalio may have not succeeded applying this technique to his own company; Bridgewater. Because for him, creating a culture of radical transparency and truthfulness is so important. I wonder how he would be able to create such a culture and preserve it if the employees were not working in a common building.
It depends a lot on the type of work you do and the company setup.
As a developer in regular software companies I like working from home one or two days a week. That gives some nice focus time while still giving enough days for meetings and communication.
Working from home 100% probably only works in remote only companies (like GitLab), otherwise there a huge information gap.
In general I'd love to see a right to home office as a law. That could help to cut a lot of emissions and useless commuting back and forth.
It doesn’t need to be at an entire company level. Where I work, some teams are mostly co-located, others are more distributed, some are pretty much fully remote. And things can shift over time.
First para hits the nail on the head. The issue is: trust between managers and employees.
Also, "work from home" paradigm will only succeed when management paradigm changes from managing time to managing outcome. And changing that management style is not easy. Managing outcomes requires managers to understand not only the strategic agendas set by the bosses higher up but also the technical paths to achieve them confronted by the "serfs" under. It also requires that managers themselves are empowered to make decisions on budgets and execute on outcomes - managers who can't make decisions daily without checking in on higher up bosses for authorisation will be unlikely to agree to a work from home scenario.
> Also, "work from home" paradigm will only succeed when management paradigm changes from managing time to managing outcome. And changing that management style is not easy
I've been working 75-80% from home for several years now, and I've had 5 managers during that time. Before that, I mostly worked in an office, but my managers were located in another country. In that whole time, even having some terrible managers at points, all of my managers were more focused on managing outcomes - it always just seems to come naturally.
I'm in the UK, working for a Norwegian company - maybe things are just more progressive here than in the US?
>maybe things are just more progressive here than in the US?
Probably. For many in the US, managers tend to do very little to actually help things, but take all the credit (and rewards) for the positive outcomes. I suspect the US is successful in spite of how we do business, not because of it.
A task will take the time that have been reserved for it. That is inefficient. Changing to a result-orientated approach where an employee is giving weekly or daily tasks (if it isn't too complicated - which is really a good question) would also mean that if an employee is finished with his weekly tasks after 3 days, he gets to go home. For many seems counterintuitive (fixed time management is essentially used from the first day of school and is pervasive in society) and it does have it own difficulties changing. For instance, how does co-workers feel when one fast employee always gets to leave early? How easy is it to pick tasks for employees?
Freelance programmers are one group where this result-orientated approach works, not sure it can be extended to other sectors easily.
I don't think "managing outcomes" means your tasks are strictly limited to what your manager you you could finish and then you'll go home.
In my situation, at least, there's a never ending list of tasks to accomplish.
If you finish the "must do now" tasks, it's expected that you'll let them know and pull something else off the pile; not that you'll do nothing for the rest of the sprint.
A lot of our work is done on a "Time and Materials" basis, so going home means that the company can't charge my rate to the client. Getting done early only helps my list of tasks and gives me more work to do. We deliver early and get on with the next project. There's little incentive to get done early.
I don't know about you, but when I finish the stuff I have tasked for the [time period], I immediately start building tools that scratch itches I've had. Some of these have gone on to be rather impactful where I've worked, and I'd never have built them if my time were tightly managed.
> Also, "work from home" paradigm will only succeed when management paradigm changes from managing time to managing outcome
Problem with this is that it puts the burden of bad estimates on employees. They'll end up working more hours to cover the mistakes in estimates in order to meet the expected outcomes. And that is exactly the same issue that makes freelancing suck, except that freelancers charge more in order to cover for those unexpected situations.
Almost all estimates are based on past experience. So good luck with such estimates when you are entering new domain or even new tech. I honestly believe that there is no need for estimates. Your delivery date is set by the customer or the market or competition. So it's a lot healthier to work backwards from that date and figure out which of the features can be delivered, than to breakdown the work into quite meaningless chunks, figure out the estimates for those chunks and god forbid, build a Gantt chart.
Think of a video chat feature for a code pair website. Maybe you can deliver it faster if you build a central server based video chat model using a standard VP8 than if you go WebRTC and a heavily customized codec.
In some cases, you'll have a specific client that wants something specific and you'll just have to make your best guess. But, at a lot of companies, there's no specific client who needs feature x by day y. Estimating in those companies is almost always a waste of time, a nonsense exercise designed to make managers feel like they're in control of the situation.
I come to work at the same time every day for the same amount of time every day and I work on our product that whole time. What's going to get done is going to get done. If a situation requires more, then we'll work late. (And it's almost always obvious when something is important enough to require this.) The process of guessing how long each task is going to take is a complete waste of our time. Of course, we do it. And management thinks it's super important, because they spend their days making spreadsheets and Jira filters based on those guesses. But, the reality is that it simply doesn't matter one way or the other.
We make a bunch of guesses, then we do the work we were going to do anyway and it takes as long as it was always going to take, and then at the end we have another pointless meeting, called the "retrospective," where we talk about how good or bad our guesses were.
It's like a Tennessee Valley Authority make-work program for under-challenged product managers.
Trust is a continuum. If I'm a manager, I can't afford to know every single detail of what you're doing. Managing outcome sounds nice, but suppose I assign you a task that I think will take two days in my limited understanding, and it takes you two weeks. I have to figure out the cause. Some common ones are:
1. Neither of us understood the full complexity of the task at the outset. If we want to improve, we'll have to put in more work upfront to figure out the problem.
2. You're less capable than I thought you were -- it just takes you longer or you make more mistakes than I had expected.
3. I didn't adequately describe the job to you, and you spent time going down blind alleys and readjusting trying to figure out what exactly I want.
4. You're a slacker, you didn't work very hard on it and so it took longer.
It's easy to say that I should manage outcome, but if you repeatedly fail to achieve the outcome, what should I do? It depends on why. If you're remote, you're going to say it was #1 with a fallback position of #3. If you're in the office I can probably get a reasonable sense of whether or not it's #4, and if it's #3, we're naturally going to communicate more and so I'm more likely to fix it sooner. This is why office space in SF costs so much.
In practice, being a slacker when working from home is not really an option. I know very well that if I don't perform well enough, I'll be fired. Why should I take the risk? Also, when I realize a job is going to take longer than expected, I notify my boss immediately and clearly explain the reasons. It's not that I wake up after two weeks that I'm 12 days late - I probably realize something is wrong immediately or after a couple of hours at most.
It works for you, it may not work for others. Unfortunately slackers do exist (I know some people who boast their ability to be unproductive and deceive their boss) and working from home may make cheating easier.
> but suppose I assign you a task that I think will take two days in my limited understanding
Why would the manager be the one making estimates? That's a task either for the team, if applicable, or for the implementer.
edit:
I work from home, every sprint we have a planning meeting where we do the estimates together, my manager isn't even involed in it.
Only if we're expecting to exceed an estimate by 20% do we contact the project manager (not my manager) so we can figure out how to proceed.
How we work: we have a bunch of tasks available that we create during the sprint planning and we pick them as we have time, some may be marked as priority. My manager only hears from me if I'm ever blocked for some reason and need him to either get in touch with the person that is blocking the task or similar, otherwise we don't.
For us at least the manager is someone who enables us to spend our time productively, generally speaking he'll have no idea what I'm doing most of the time. I guess you could say we're self-managed.
Assuming that "the "manager" knows his 'stuffs', should know that TaskA requires 5 hours, and TaskB requires 1 hour. Now to that add a 20% for interruptions, emails, etc.
With my team(s) I (almost) always knew (more or less) the time for various tasks.
I was also expecting any feedback/'negotiation' to happen at the time of task assignment OR as soon as someone can see that deadline is at risk.
I know that Tasks from Tasks vary, but hey, this setup requires knowledge from both parties AND trust.
What I've often experienced is the manager estimates what he wants to happen (typically fairly arbitrary or based on company goals) then the team kills themselves trying to accomplish the timeline because they don't like to fail. This is great for short term productivity but long term leads to attrition and spitefulness from the team. I'm not saying it's not possible, but make sure what you think is happening, is happening (good sustainable estimates vs. constant crunch time estimates). Of course, situations warrant crunch time, but I've seen departments in a constant state of crunch just by the nature of their sprints. The saying goes, you can't sprint a marathon.
Also, depending on the organization, a 20% buffer seems on the low side. If you can guarantee zero distractions throughout the day, outside of 1 or two meetings a week, 20% is probably ok.
FWIW, if the developer makes the estimate, he is more likely to live up to it, because it's not just some number someone pulled out of their ass. I'm not saying that's you, I'm just saying how I've seen it happen time and time again. I like to think I give good estimates, but like you said, it's a negotiation and if a dev says it will take longer, it will take longer. They most likely know the codebase way better than some manager does.
> should know that TaskA requires 5 hours, and TaskB requires 1 hour.
I contest this. This assumes the manager is also some sort of software engineer plus I don't understand why would there be any negotiation: a project asks for an estimate and we give it based on how much we feel it's going to take, there is no negotiation; either the project manager accepts it or reduces scope and we make a new estimate, my manager is uninvolved.
I suspect this might be a work culture thing: in my country managers aren't timekeepers, their responsibility is making sure we have all the conditions we need to be productive and be "invisible" otherwise.
You will never be blindsided by #1. Because if the person finds it will be more complex than initial estimates they will tell you ASAP. If they don't, the problem is #4, not #1.
You -should- never be blindsided by #3. Because that's why daily standups exist. That's why tasking out a story. If the person is going down blind alleys, the -process- should be what brings that out, via daily standup or whatever. No amount of colocation will fix that, only explicit communication. You're not going to passively observe someone going down blind alleys.
If I want to make a 2 hour task take an entire work day, I will do that whether I'm in the office or not. Sometimes devs need to coast a little. The notion that they will just continue to vigorously attach a backlog of monkey work is silly.
It's ok to treat adults with respect and empathy. Knowledge workers need more latitude to manage their pace.
If you assign a task that is estimated at 2 days of work and it actually is going to take 2 weeks, it should be pretty clear way before that 2 weeks has elapsed. At that point you could get a second opinion from another employee in the same role as the assignee. That kind of difference in LOE vs actual development time should be rare. If it isn't, then your team needs to spend more time researching LOEs up front, getting solid requirements, and assigning tasks to someone that has the proper experience to complete the task on time.
I've worked as an engineer for a company that had ridiculous engineering turnover rates because engineers were treated like children, and management would always give these kind of excuses where one guy was a slacker one time so everyone has to abide by ridiculous policies around required office hours. If you want to retain talent and accurately measure employee performance, you need to put effort into measuring outcome rather than working hours.
For some managers its not just a trust issue but also about loosing control. So even if they trust their employees to work hard from home they don't feel comfortable with the idea.
I don't know why that is happening, but I have seen it first hand.
I'm continuously surprised how little attention social status gets here. People seem to always assume that all decisions in IT/Tech/SV are entirely or mostly due to economically rational factors.
I think remote work is yet another example where social status play at least some part, if not a significant. Employees, probably especially managers, will of course see their social status diminish if everyone were to be remote. In an extreme case we're going from an in-person small kingdom to a somewhat depersonalized title online.
Even beyond remote work, I think there's quite a few examples in tech, and white-collar work in general, where social status seems to trump economical rationality. But maybe it's hard to admit and thus best left out.
Social status IMHO is the single driver for most of middle-management decisions. Just as when an athlete says "It's not about the money...", it's always about the money.
For managers, social status is supreme. This status is measured in numerous ways; salary, trophy spouse, cars, office location, etc etc. Deny this at your peril.
On the other hand, it is also imaginable that working at home away from everyone else makes communication harder, and more opaque. Or it can make you lonelier. Not every company has policies and culture that makes it conducive to work from home.
> How can being at home ever make you lonely when it gives you more time to focus on relationships that actually matter.
Not all of us have kids or live with our family, and as such those 8 hours of office work are the only option for having a human presence around us during the day. Working 8 hours trapped in the loneliness of your house's walls each day, every day can be quite unsettling in the long run.
In my experience even family men get frustrated with working at home. Sure, 1 or 2 days per week is fine, but more than that is generally too much.
Work is probably the most common (or even exclusive for some) way adults meet new people, especially people they wouldn't otherwise meet. It sounds dumb when you don't experience it, but after spending a month or two working at home it start becoming apparent that you are getting too detached from society.
It's likely that you are the only one working from home in your household, so during working hours you are all by yourself.
By "relationships that really matter" I suppose you mean family. Those bonding happens outside of working hours anyways, so whether or not you work from home you can always relish those relationships.
I am a single, mid-20's male and I did work from home for a year for a software company. It was pretty isolating. I tried to work from cafes or co-working spaces daily, but it was not the same.
Now I WFH 2-3 days per week and the rest in the office which is more ideal. My commute is pretty brutal (~1.5hr) so WFH can help me get more done on those days.
This is true is obvious situations, but also false in some interesting ways.
While physical proximity helps for communication within a team for instance, it also makes it harder to know what happens in other teams, as they also communicate offline.
That means for instance that if you want an idea of the status of a team you'd have to physically go there (are they super busy ? is half of the team off for the day? are they under stress or not ?). If the team is in another building there will be enough enough friction that you won't bother except if it's important.
In contrast, having more people remote would allow to peek into their room and see their exchanges.
You'd also catch some issues or insight on stuff that they wouldn't be discussing with other teams otherwise for instance.
Basically, there is a lot of indirect advantages to have people chat by text instead of direct communication. Does it completely offset the other shortcomings ? I don't know, but it's still a pretty nice effect I think.
It does, but working in a noisy office makes concentration harder. As a developer, I communicate maybe 5% of the time but code 95% of the time; so what you are saying is true, but it's such a small part of what a developer does.
We certainly don't claim to have all the answers, but we've found it makes people pretty happy and we all seem pretty productive. If you want to give it a go, we're hiring! ;-) https://zapier.com/jobs/
I’m not sure realism/positivism is the best approach to empirical data on this.
Only one of my workers is more productive from home, in the IT department almost all the workers are more productive from home.
We haven’t done any research on the causality, but the personality’s profiles for or digitization and IT departments are vastly different, so too is the work we donald the way we go about it.
If you looked at us over all, there’s 20 workers in my department and around 60 in the IT department and around 55 of the 80 are more productive from home.
The setup I personally use to gain the most out of my employees is letting them work their own hours the way they want. I don’t check their hours but trust them to put in the hours they need, and they do, in fact the biggest problem is getting them to only work the 37 hours they are hired to put in.
Sometimes they come in late and leave early, sometimes they work from home and I can tell by what they produce they spent half the day doing something else. But then sometimes I’ll get an email at 2am on a Saturday because someone found his/her coding flow at an off hour.
This would be extremely unhealthy if I required it, but my employee satisfaction went up from 4.3 out of 7 under the previous manager to 6.3/7 under me and our performance output nearly doubled.
Working at home is fine, but I don’t think you can truthfully say that it works for everyone. I think it’s important to leave the option open along with other options in a framework that encourages team work and communication, and then trust your employees to do the right thing and only intervene in their schedule and where they want to work, when you begin to spot trouble.
> Sometimes they come in late and leave early, sometimes they work from home and I can tell by what they produce they spent half the day doing something else. But then sometimes I’ll get an email at 2am on a Saturday because someone found his/her coding flow at an off hour.
god bless you for this insight.
As a contractor I've worked at multiple places, and my current gig cares more about 'asses in seats' than output. It's incredibly demotivating, having come from an environment where output was the goal.
Not really true, it’s easy to make the case that work must be done on site. Company policy prevents source code from leaving, or network resources are not available outside the office or something.
In the US, it's illegal to require an independent contractor to be on site or to even set hours. It's a purely output driven venture. The government sees it as a form of tax evasion, so companies need to be mindful of it.
No, as an employee you can be fired. As a contractor, well, that all depends on the language of your contract... it can be broken or not-renewed, but it's closer to losing a repeat-customer than being fired.
> the biggest problem is getting them to only work the 37 hours they are hired to put in
When I started working from home 10 years ago, this hit me hard. I used to work about 10 hour days in the office. When I started working from home I was working 13-14 hours most days.
Over time that lead to burn out and that made me even less productive. Some of it was because I felt a little guilty working from home so I put in even more effort to ensure people didn't think I was goofing around. In hindsight, that was unnecessary and a bad way to handle my insecurity... my bosses trusted me fully.
Secondly, when you always work from home... you're always at work! So, it's important to have that distinct work time and personal time otherwise they bleed together too much and you just end up working all the time.
It’s important to have a separate computer, and ideally a completely separate room, where you do ‘work’. When your office hours are over, the work computer goes off and you exit your at-home ‘office’. That’s helped me separate work and keep my sanity.
>Sometimes they come in late and leave early, sometimes they work from home and I can tell by what they produce they spent half the day doing something else.
Honest question.
You say you manage 20 people. How are your able to judge for 20 people at least weekly if the work they did was in line with your expectations?
I feel like I basically have to read and understand every line written by each developer on my team in order to really get a grasp at whether they're productive or not.
Sometimes people produce very little code but maybe that little code solves a very hard to find bug.
It's something I'm really struggling with as a manager:
My boss asks me if the people on my team are worth their money and I am really not sure how to answer this.
I manage a mix of developers, architects, project managers and business processors/developers. I measure their productivity on team results compared to their team predictions as well as my own experience. I do have a long history of doing development projects in the public sector with a primary focus on increasing efficiency and benefit realization, but a lot of it is honestly gut feeling and softer management strategies where I encourage openness.
If people aren’t feeling well, maybe they are going through a divorce, maybe they’ve run out of motivation I want them to share it, so we can help them get to where they want to be or give them time to process.
I guess I could have a single inefficient worker and never spot it through measurements, but I typically notice because it changes the team dynamic and the way people interact.
I understand why this would worry some managers, but I don’t believe you can apply factory line thinking or strategies to brain-workers because it doesn’t suit them, especially not if you want them to cooperate in actual teams and not just be a bunch of grouped individuals competing not to be measured as the bottom 15%.
I am Scandinavian though, and our work-culture is very different from the American.
> I understand why this would worry some managers, but I don’t believe you can apply factory line thinking or strategies to brain-workers because it doesn’t suit them, especially not if you want them to cooperate in actual teams and not just be a bunch of grouped individuals competing not to be measured as the bottom 15%.
I agree and I hope you're not suggesting that I'm doing that.
My problem is that "I trust my gut" doesn't work very well either as a strategy fot me because I just don't have that body of experience to draw from.
For development stuff like planning poker works in that it gives you an estimate to go from. Maybe they exceeded their estimate for good reasons, but it’s a good place to start a discussion from. It also makes your programmers better at estimating.
For things like project management you have schedules and plans.
And then there is always customer/client satisfaction.
Aside from that you also have a boss who has expectations for you, are you meeting those? If your boss is not just satisfied but happy with your perfomance output you’re probably doing well.
So, at my company, we have yearly reviews. Instead of looking at how productive people are from week to week, people are allowed to vary in their productivity throughout the year. Theoretically (although this never happens in practice because humans) an employee could deliver enough tangible value in the first half of the year and take the rest of the year off. It is the employees’ responsibility to show how productive they have been. That productivity is preferably measured in relatively tangible terms (backed by data), such as number of customers impacted, cost/revenue changes, or time savings. This requires a lot of trust, and places a lot of importance on the hiring bar, but it pays off.
Enter Bloom, who helped design a test whereby 500 employees were divided into two groups--a control group (who continued working at HQ) and volunteer work-from-homers (who had to have a private room at home, at least six-month tenure with Ctrip, and decent broadband access as conditions).
Came here to find this. Precisely what I thought - I think that some people work better remotely and some work better in an office setting (like myself).
If you ask people to volunteer for remote work then people who are better remote workers are likely to volunteer and more likely to work harder to prove it can work.
I've previously seen accounting docs at a major defense firm I worked for. They tallied the exact dollar amount spent on each employee's square footage of office space on a monthly basis.
The paper mentioned how randomization (a lottery draw on odd/even birth dates) was done among employees who expressed interest. So it is a randomized experiment.
Yeah you're right. Randomization at least ensures internal validity of the study as applied to people who are interested in WFH. Whether it generalizes to others is an open question.
I don't know what it means to "have incentives to validate the study". The study is useful but the participants are biased and that will necessarily influence the results.
> Or if the opportunity is presented as a privilege they might be less engaged to begin with?
Very likely, but even ignoring that, the sampling bias means that the study is confirming that people who want to work from home do better with that arrangement, rather than demonstrating that work from home is in general a better arrangement. If you want to study X vs Not-X and draw your sample population entire from the group that prefers X, you will like find that X is better in whatever ways you choose to measure: happiness, productivity, retention, etc.
Imagine you want to study open office floor plans vs private offices. If you include only open office advocates in your study, you'll probably find very different results than an study that includes only private office advocates.
> After a lottery draw, those employees with even-numbered birthdays were selected to work from home, and those with odd-numbered birthdates stayed in
the office to act as the control group.
Don't think it was a mistake as much as a way to increase clicks. Nobody would be interested in the title "Stanford study shows people are more efficient when they work where they prefer"
According to the paper, the random selection was done on participants who expressed interest.
> Approximately half of the employees (503) were interested, particularly those who had less education and tenure, their own rooms, and faced longer commutes. Of these, 249 were qualified to take part in the experiment by virtue of having at least six months’ tenure, broadband access, and a private room at home in which they could work. After a lottery draw, those em- ployees with even-numbered birthdays were selected to work from home, and those with odd-numbered birthdates stayed in the office to act as the control group.
Did their sample involve men with a 2 year old at home that constantly needs their attention as long as they are at home, and thinks that when their father is sitting on the laptop, he's making pink and blue spheres in paintbrush?
Honestly, I can achieve little at home these days and feel like I'm doing injustice to both, work and the kid.
Honestly one of the biggest motivations I have to work from home which I otherwise dislike is to be there for my children when they're 2.
Especially since where I live (Israel) like most of the world men and women are still usually not equally responsible regarding child care and I personally think remote work could help with that (as well as personal motivation to be there for my kids).
I work from home, and my wife looks after our children during the day.
Working from home has been great for us all - we get to have breakfast and lunch together every day, and I'm around to help out at those times (if you've got young kids, you'll know meal times can be stressful at times!).
Of course it's not, sounds like the OP has a problem with discipline, both his own (actually work rather than play with child), and the child (who hasn't been told to leave alone)
I'm assuming that there is someone else actually looking after the child, you can't leave a 2 year old alone for more than a couple of minutes (and even then you have to keep one eye on them)
I'm amazed to see some people here on HN could be that judgemental. You don't even know me and you somehow think that I wouldn't have asked my kid to let me work alone. My wife is there all day to take care of the child, and even though she does everything she can in her capacity, I don't know how much can you discipline a 2 year old who just can't resist being with her dad. Not sure how understanding/wise toddlers are in your part of the world.
Nope. Whenever I try to work from home, I work from a separate room, and close it - but then the room does not have an attached bathroom inside, and there are other things (water/food etc.) for which you have to come out - and once she knows I'm at home, she will bang the door every few minutes to come in, to talk or play with me.
This has to be a different strokes for different folks kind of situation (the modus operandi for parenting) but just in case you truly are in need of the answer: discipline.
You need a home office with a door that closes (and maybe even locks). You also need to be explicit on your work hours with your family. I have none of the problems you have identified.
Agreed. I've been working from home for 10 years and my wife and I homeschool our 7 kids. When Daddy's in his office he's not to be disturbed. And I absolutely love being able to be around to help and enjoy those special moments.
There are times when I'll message my team "Beautiful day here - I'm taking the kids to the park for a couple of hours." and then shift my work scheduled to after the kids go to bed.
I worked from home large portions of the time from pregnancy into middle school twice and this was never an issue for me. My office was always off limits to the kids (no hope of baby proofing anyway), I had structured work hours where my wife knew to push note cards under the door and I would address them when the time was appropriate. When the kids were unable to be quiet, and I was working on tasks that needed deep focus, the wife took them to the park.
Very similar situation as you. Kid will love to hop on my lap and play with the mouse. He's even participated in a few conference calls! Luckily, his grandparents are nearby so I will drop him off every single day. Huge peace of mind and doesn't get in the way of work. I'm considering day care now as I don't want to continue to burden the grandparents (they say they love it, but they have lives too!) Is day care an option for you?
Yes, it's an option, but my wife is a stay at home mother so she takes care of her mostly. It's just that my kid can't resist knocking my door to see me or talk to me. And I'm surprised to see all others who are chiming 'discipline', she's just 2, so not sure how much can we discipline her right now.
That's sweet. I can see how that can be tough though, how do you say no? It'd be a welcome interruption for me, but I think I'd be able to shut the door/block it out when needed. My wife is home during the summers (works at a school), so I could have her play interference as necessary.
I work from office (40min train) and some days from home. Home working enables me to recharge quickly and stay healthy. Office is good for seamlessly collaborative work. If I had to choose just one mode I would go for "home". It's just saves huge amount of time and energy. Feels much healthier. You can still collaborate fairly well if you have internet.
I have worked exclusively remotely for a couple of years in my career and I'd say the perfect world for me is this hybrid. I can go to the office when I need or want, it's better to collaborate, to do pair or mob programming and to get discussions going on.
Working from home is great when I have a clear view of priorities and the task at hand but I sorely missed the social interactions of an office when I didn't have the option for it.
As most things in life, it's a spectrum, there are some people that probably work much better away from the office, personally I still need sometimes the social aspect of work to be my most productive self.
With the population exploding and space to build new houses growing ever so scarcely I can not imagine a long-term future in which working from home would be profitable. Instead of working from home, living at work seems to be the more logical step forward.
Personally I'd prefer living at a shared-workspace or company campus as long as work and living facilities are clearly separate.
> Personally I'd prefer living at a shared-workspace or company campus as long as work and living facilities are clearly separate.
May I ask why? I'd prefer living close to my family and friends, many of which may not work for the same company as I work for. I'm trying to see what your motivating factors are because I, for one, could not disagree more.
A shared-workspace campus for you and your friends would work out then? You can picture it as a shared-workspace town if that is more appealing to you. Living quarters, parks, etc. on one side of the highway. A shared-workspace campus hosting multiple companies/teams on the other. Living and working stays strictly separate, everyone has a short commute and you still have all project members available on-site at the same time to reliably work together and gasp actually meet up when required.
To answer your question, I do not want to bring work into my home. BYOD resolves most of the factors that would make me want to provide my own office at home.
May I ask how you currently manage to live close to your family and friends and (because I have to assume you are surrounded by like-minded individuals) their families and their friends and so on? Frankly, I find this very unrealistic, but maybe that's because my friends and family are spread out across the globe.
> Frankly, I find this very unrealistic, but maybe that's because my friends and family are spread out across the globe.
I make very conscious decisions to work and live close to my family (Southern California). It's not unrealistic at all. In fact, having a solid social support system is by far more important (for mental as well as physical health) than making (slightly more) money in the Bay.
I must be one of the few devs who doesn't like working from home. I do it when I have to but feel lonelier, out of the loop on the project/news, don't like that there's no distinction between home and work place. I think it's important to be able to switch off and mixing the worlds doesn't do it for me.
As a manager: some people can work from home, and some just can’t. The problem is, you don’t know which is which when recruiting, and firing someone even remotely in a protected class is a huge hassle.
Even so, if I were to start a company today, I would try very hard to hire remote, for many reasons, the most important of which is this would dramatically expand the talent pool, and (I believe) lead to less stressed employees and better results. People who lack intrinsic motivation typically don’t perform well even in the office.
> As a manager: some people can work from home, and some just can’t. The problem is, you don’t know which is which when recruiting, ...
Interesting! So, has it ever happened to you to hire a remote worker with a proven track record (say, 3-5 years, references checked) and then realize after some time that this person "doesn't fit the bill" for working remotely for you?
(If it has happened, I'd be interested to know details -- was it because of the specifics of your company's procedures, or something else?)
I had employees who would ask to “work from home” and then not actually do much, hoping I won’t notice. But good managers do notice, of course, especially when some of the peers work from home as well and turn in reams of high quality code at a rapid clip.
I never had anyone who had a track record of _remote_ work specifically, though.
> 500 employees were divided into two groups--a control group (who continued working at HQ) and volunteer work-from-homers (who had to have a private room at home, at least six-month tenure with Ctrip, and decent broadband access as conditions).
That's a huge selection bias - if the 'treatment' group are self-selecting volunteers from your pool of all employees then that causes a whole host of issues.
Not really, this increases its applicability as this is the usual case in which people are considering working from home - as an option at a non-fully-remote company, or as an option to join a fully remote company.
It is selection bias, but the study shows more work being done. If people who self-selected for working from home would do so to try to avoid working, then why there would be positive result (and more work done)?
> After a lottery draw, those employees with even-numbered birthdays were selected to work from home, and those with odd-numbered birthdates stayed in
the office to act as the control group.
I wonder how many years of rediscovery of basic knowledge about productivity it will take before these ideas are widly accepted: open plans offices are bad, remote work can be done, etc.
This really needs to be higher, and the paper actually read by us, as it addresses the nature of the work, the study size and methodology, as well as sociological issues. All things that these other comments speculate about
Crucially it's not IT, the work is a call centre travel agency (and it's also in China).
"First, the job of a call center employee is
particularly suitable for telecommuting. It requires neither teamwork nor in-person face time. Quantity and quality of performance can be easily quantified and evaluated. The link between
effort and performance is direct. These conditions apply to a
range of service jobs, such as sales, IT support, and secretarial
assistance, but they are far from universal. Second, the firm can
closely monitor the performance and labor supply of the employees thanks to its extensive centralized database. Team leaders and managers could generate a report from the database of
the performance of the team members daily and easily detect
problems in individual employees’ performance. Third, the
extent of WFH was limited, so that it did not require a significant
reorganization at the workplace. Team leaders continued to supervise their teams with a mix of home and office workers without
any major reshuffling of team membership."
Geez, a call-centre? I thought "virtual call centers" are common nowadays, i.e. you can be at home doing laundry, when the phone rings, it will say "Call for $COMPANY", you pick up and say "Hello, $COMPANY, Angela speaking, how may I help you?"...
PhD student here so take my opinion with a grain of salt. I personally love the fact that I can choose to work at home or at the office.
I can really concentrate at home (private room where I feel comfy) but on the other hand it is also significantly easier to distract yourself from work. Netflix is just one tab away and there's no one to look over your shoulder and whisper in your ear "Don't watch Netflix when you're working".
It also depends a lot on my mood. When I feel down and worthless because my research feels like its going nowhere I distract myself more easily. If I feel optimistic like I'm a predator hunting some prey because my research is leading somewhere fruitful I can work anywhere with great focus without the need for distraction.
I'm currently working somewhere that more or less requires a typical M-F 9-5 schedule. I often don't feel in the "mood" on various weekdays, while some weekends I get that "predator" feeling you described and can code non-stop for hours on end. However, since I need to be in the office M-F I more often feel, and give in to, the pressure to not work weekends lest my family and social life/general well-being suffer.
I wonder how many productive hours I've lost due to this conundrum, and beyond that how many productive hours have been lost in my company or the modern workplace.
It's interesting that you describe feeling pressure to not work; usually I think people talk about feeling the pressure to work.
But I know what you mean. It's hard to know how to balance the two. On the one shoulder is a little voice saying "Don't be a sucker and spend your free time making money for the company! It's just a job! Go have a life". On the other is the pride of craft, and the thrill of having a really good idea that you want to see to the end.
I've been thinking a lot about this, not least because my relationship was a bit strained last year due to both of us probably putting too much emphasis on our work. I don't know if ultimately one side or the other is the right answer. Doing good and creative work is important and fulfilling. But friends and family are equally important and fulfilling. Maybe the only way is to carefully guard against either one predominating.
I think the big dirty secret is that even in the office, there is a need for down time. The problem is that my options are limited, so I sit at my desk and look at the same stupid web sites in a clandestine manner. Or I get up and go for a walk, and try to get some fresh air. But my office building sits on an interstate and there are no walking paths or benches in sight.
At home, my breathers are more energizing, which is the point.
I can't believe how ridiculous it is that managers feign surprise when they are told that a task estimated at 4 hours will take a calendar day to complete. That is the nature of the work.
> I can really concentrate at home (private room where I feel comfy) but on the other hand it is also significantly easier to distract yourself from work. Netflix is just one tab away and there's no one to look over your shoulder and whisper in your ear "Don't watch Netflix when you're working".
I don't understand people with this problem. The problem I have is switching off from work
> If I feel optimistic like I'm a predator hunting some prey
That's like me trying to find a seat and socket in the office.
“If companies want hackers to be productive, they should look at what they do at home. At home, hackers can arrange things themselves so they can get the most done. And when they work at home, hackers don't work in noisy, open spaces; they work in rooms with doors. They work in cosy, neighborhoody places with people around and somewhere to walk when they need to mull something over, instead of in glass boxes set in acres of parking lots. They have a sofa they can take a nap on when they feel tired, instead of sitting in a coma at their desk, pretending to work. There's no crew of people with vacuum cleaners that roars through every evening during the prime hacking hours. There are no meetings or, God forbid, corporate retreats or team-building exercises. And when you look at what they're doing on that computer, you'll find it reinforces what I said earlier about tools. They may have to use Java and Windows at work, but at home, where they can choose for themselves, you're more likely to find them using Perl and Linux.”
Oddly my most productive place is the train -- especially the shinkansen (I'm in Japan). My next most productive is MacDonald's. It is super weird. However, I think part of the productivity increase is due to it being an unusual place. I don't live anywhere near MacDonald's and I only work there when I visit my mother in law (who lives in a fairly big city). I couldn't possibly afford to travel on the shinkansen all day (although the prospect of travelling for 8 hours and then spending the night in a new city every day is really compelling -- One of these days I'll go up to Akita or somewhere that will take a whole day :-) ).
I like working from home, but I actually hate the fact that I'm basically forced to work from home every day (because I live in the countryside). Quiet is nice, but quiet all the time is a bit hard to bear. At least for me.
It's both. The whole point of that quote is that the programmer is in control when they work from home. If they want to work in their quiet 2nd bedroom with a door, they can. If they want to be around people, they can go to their neighborhood coffee shop, and work there.
But most importantly, they can leave those two locations when they feel like it.
Counterpoint: I work in a very quiet open space office and I like it. If people want to chat they go to the kitchen.
Have to say however that other departments are intolerably noisy.
Counter-Counterpoint: In my almost-never quiet open space office, if people want to chat, they do it at their desks. Right next to my desk. I don't like this. However, with enough people complaining, it has slowly been getting better...
300 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 439 ms ] threadYou bet it's healthier. Except perhaps slightly increased exposure to the three germ incubating kids under 5 that live here, but there's not much I can do about that now apparently.
EDIT: I think kids-flu is hard to avoid at that age, home office or not :P
You could homeschool them.
for me the best situation has always been being a few minutes walking distance from the office. work stays at work, home stays at home, no commute, no bullshit.
I can already hear the argument - "but, working at home doesn't mean you can take the afternoon off!!!" I'm sorry to say this, but anyone who thinks they are 100% productive all throughout the day has not had to try hourly work where you get paid by the hours you work and not by the full day. Hourly freelancers know what I am talking about. I will go on record to say that most if not all people can NEVER function at 100% capacity. To believe that looking busy all day long = working is just wishful thinking, ignorance or foolishness, take your pick.
I can not comment on the hourly freelancer part, but as I understand the US law that keeps getting cited in this thread: "it's illegal to require an independent contractor to be on site or to even set hours".
I don't think it ever stops. If I had to venture an answer as to why, I'd say "fewer interruptions" - most interactions are asynchronous (email, IRC in my case but slack just as much). The only times I need to have synchronous discussions are either our "watercoolers" (social face-to-face over google hangouts) or the eventual meeting.
Note: the companies I've worked for in this setup are all committed to 100% remoteness, and understand that keeping meetings to a minimum is a good thing (note, not abolish - but make sure "meetings" are only called for when actually needed).
So we need to look at the issue in a rather more elaborate way and look for both its upsides and downsides.
For example Ray Dalio may have not succeeded applying this technique to his own company; Bridgewater. Because for him, creating a culture of radical transparency and truthfulness is so important. I wonder how he would be able to create such a culture and preserve it if the employees were not working in a common building.
As a developer in regular software companies I like working from home one or two days a week. That gives some nice focus time while still giving enough days for meetings and communication.
Working from home 100% probably only works in remote only companies (like GitLab), otherwise there a huge information gap.
In general I'd love to see a right to home office as a law. That could help to cut a lot of emissions and useless commuting back and forth.
Also, "work from home" paradigm will only succeed when management paradigm changes from managing time to managing outcome. And changing that management style is not easy. Managing outcomes requires managers to understand not only the strategic agendas set by the bosses higher up but also the technical paths to achieve them confronted by the "serfs" under. It also requires that managers themselves are empowered to make decisions on budgets and execute on outcomes - managers who can't make decisions daily without checking in on higher up bosses for authorisation will be unlikely to agree to a work from home scenario.
I've been working 75-80% from home for several years now, and I've had 5 managers during that time. Before that, I mostly worked in an office, but my managers were located in another country. In that whole time, even having some terrible managers at points, all of my managers were more focused on managing outcomes - it always just seems to come naturally.
I'm in the UK, working for a Norwegian company - maybe things are just more progressive here than in the US?
Probably. For many in the US, managers tend to do very little to actually help things, but take all the credit (and rewards) for the positive outcomes. I suspect the US is successful in spite of how we do business, not because of it.
A task will take the time that have been reserved for it. That is inefficient. Changing to a result-orientated approach where an employee is giving weekly or daily tasks (if it isn't too complicated - which is really a good question) would also mean that if an employee is finished with his weekly tasks after 3 days, he gets to go home. For many seems counterintuitive (fixed time management is essentially used from the first day of school and is pervasive in society) and it does have it own difficulties changing. For instance, how does co-workers feel when one fast employee always gets to leave early? How easy is it to pick tasks for employees?
Freelance programmers are one group where this result-orientated approach works, not sure it can be extended to other sectors easily.
In my situation, at least, there's a never ending list of tasks to accomplish.
If you finish the "must do now" tasks, it's expected that you'll let them know and pull something else off the pile; not that you'll do nothing for the rest of the sprint.
Problem with this is that it puts the burden of bad estimates on employees. They'll end up working more hours to cover the mistakes in estimates in order to meet the expected outcomes. And that is exactly the same issue that makes freelancing suck, except that freelancers charge more in order to cover for those unexpected situations.
I come to work at the same time every day for the same amount of time every day and I work on our product that whole time. What's going to get done is going to get done. If a situation requires more, then we'll work late. (And it's almost always obvious when something is important enough to require this.) The process of guessing how long each task is going to take is a complete waste of our time. Of course, we do it. And management thinks it's super important, because they spend their days making spreadsheets and Jira filters based on those guesses. But, the reality is that it simply doesn't matter one way or the other.
We make a bunch of guesses, then we do the work we were going to do anyway and it takes as long as it was always going to take, and then at the end we have another pointless meeting, called the "retrospective," where we talk about how good or bad our guesses were.
It's like a Tennessee Valley Authority make-work program for under-challenged product managers.
1. Neither of us understood the full complexity of the task at the outset. If we want to improve, we'll have to put in more work upfront to figure out the problem.
2. You're less capable than I thought you were -- it just takes you longer or you make more mistakes than I had expected.
3. I didn't adequately describe the job to you, and you spent time going down blind alleys and readjusting trying to figure out what exactly I want.
4. You're a slacker, you didn't work very hard on it and so it took longer.
It's easy to say that I should manage outcome, but if you repeatedly fail to achieve the outcome, what should I do? It depends on why. If you're remote, you're going to say it was #1 with a fallback position of #3. If you're in the office I can probably get a reasonable sense of whether or not it's #4, and if it's #3, we're naturally going to communicate more and so I'm more likely to fix it sooner. This is why office space in SF costs so much.
Why would the manager be the one making estimates? That's a task either for the team, if applicable, or for the implementer.
edit: I work from home, every sprint we have a planning meeting where we do the estimates together, my manager isn't even involed in it.
Only if we're expecting to exceed an estimate by 20% do we contact the project manager (not my manager) so we can figure out how to proceed.
How we work: we have a bunch of tasks available that we create during the sprint planning and we pick them as we have time, some may be marked as priority. My manager only hears from me if I'm ever blocked for some reason and need him to either get in touch with the person that is blocking the task or similar, otherwise we don't.
For us at least the manager is someone who enables us to spend our time productively, generally speaking he'll have no idea what I'm doing most of the time. I guess you could say we're self-managed.
With my team(s) I (almost) always knew (more or less) the time for various tasks.
I was also expecting any feedback/'negotiation' to happen at the time of task assignment OR as soon as someone can see that deadline is at risk.
I know that Tasks from Tasks vary, but hey, this setup requires knowledge from both parties AND trust.
Also, depending on the organization, a 20% buffer seems on the low side. If you can guarantee zero distractions throughout the day, outside of 1 or two meetings a week, 20% is probably ok.
FWIW, if the developer makes the estimate, he is more likely to live up to it, because it's not just some number someone pulled out of their ass. I'm not saying that's you, I'm just saying how I've seen it happen time and time again. I like to think I give good estimates, but like you said, it's a negotiation and if a dev says it will take longer, it will take longer. They most likely know the codebase way better than some manager does.
I contest this. This assumes the manager is also some sort of software engineer plus I don't understand why would there be any negotiation: a project asks for an estimate and we give it based on how much we feel it's going to take, there is no negotiation; either the project manager accepts it or reduces scope and we make a new estimate, my manager is uninvolved.
I suspect this might be a work culture thing: in my country managers aren't timekeepers, their responsibility is making sure we have all the conditions we need to be productive and be "invisible" otherwise.
> This assumes the manager is also some sort of software engineer plus I don't understand why would there be any negotiation:
We have whole methodologies based on the premise that we (software engineers or managers) are incredibly horrible at estimating software.
You -should- never be blindsided by #3. Because that's why daily standups exist. That's why tasking out a story. If the person is going down blind alleys, the -process- should be what brings that out, via daily standup or whatever. No amount of colocation will fix that, only explicit communication. You're not going to passively observe someone going down blind alleys.
It's ok to treat adults with respect and empathy. Knowledge workers need more latitude to manage their pace.
I've worked as an engineer for a company that had ridiculous engineering turnover rates because engineers were treated like children, and management would always give these kind of excuses where one guy was a slacker one time so everyone has to abide by ridiculous policies around required office hours. If you want to retain talent and accurately measure employee performance, you need to put effort into measuring outcome rather than working hours.
I don't know why that is happening, but I have seen it first hand.
I think remote work is yet another example where social status play at least some part, if not a significant. Employees, probably especially managers, will of course see their social status diminish if everyone were to be remote. In an extreme case we're going from an in-person small kingdom to a somewhat depersonalized title online.
Even beyond remote work, I think there's quite a few examples in tech, and white-collar work in general, where social status seems to trump economical rationality. But maybe it's hard to admit and thus best left out.
For managers, social status is supreme. This status is measured in numerous ways; salary, trophy spouse, cars, office location, etc etc. Deny this at your peril.
How can being at home ever make you lonely when it gives you more time to focus on relationships that actually matter.
Am I alone in thinking that those who expect any kind of meaningful bonding at work are misguided?
Yeah, one can enjoy smalltalk and the like but I'd much rather change that for a chat with a friend or my dad early in the morning.
Not all of us have kids or live with our family, and as such those 8 hours of office work are the only option for having a human presence around us during the day. Working 8 hours trapped in the loneliness of your house's walls each day, every day can be quite unsettling in the long run.
Work is probably the most common (or even exclusive for some) way adults meet new people, especially people they wouldn't otherwise meet. It sounds dumb when you don't experience it, but after spending a month or two working at home it start becoming apparent that you are getting too detached from society.
By "relationships that really matter" I suppose you mean family. Those bonding happens outside of working hours anyways, so whether or not you work from home you can always relish those relationships.
Now I WFH 2-3 days per week and the rest in the office which is more ideal. My commute is pretty brutal (~1.5hr) so WFH can help me get more done on those days.
This is true is obvious situations, but also false in some interesting ways.
While physical proximity helps for communication within a team for instance, it also makes it harder to know what happens in other teams, as they also communicate offline.
That means for instance that if you want an idea of the status of a team you'd have to physically go there (are they super busy ? is half of the team off for the day? are they under stress or not ?). If the team is in another building there will be enough enough friction that you won't bother except if it's important.
In contrast, having more people remote would allow to peek into their room and see their exchanges.
You'd also catch some issues or insight on stuff that they wouldn't be discussing with other teams otherwise for instance.
Basically, there is a lot of indirect advantages to have people chat by text instead of direct communication. Does it completely offset the other shortcomings ? I don't know, but it's still a pretty nice effect I think.
It does, but working in a noisy office makes concentration harder. As a developer, I communicate maybe 5% of the time but code 95% of the time; so what you are saying is true, but it's such a small part of what a developer does.
We certainly don't claim to have all the answers, but we've found it makes people pretty happy and we all seem pretty productive. If you want to give it a go, we're hiring! ;-) https://zapier.com/jobs/
Only one of my workers is more productive from home, in the IT department almost all the workers are more productive from home.
We haven’t done any research on the causality, but the personality’s profiles for or digitization and IT departments are vastly different, so too is the work we donald the way we go about it.
If you looked at us over all, there’s 20 workers in my department and around 60 in the IT department and around 55 of the 80 are more productive from home.
The setup I personally use to gain the most out of my employees is letting them work their own hours the way they want. I don’t check their hours but trust them to put in the hours they need, and they do, in fact the biggest problem is getting them to only work the 37 hours they are hired to put in.
Sometimes they come in late and leave early, sometimes they work from home and I can tell by what they produce they spent half the day doing something else. But then sometimes I’ll get an email at 2am on a Saturday because someone found his/her coding flow at an off hour.
This would be extremely unhealthy if I required it, but my employee satisfaction went up from 4.3 out of 7 under the previous manager to 6.3/7 under me and our performance output nearly doubled.
Working at home is fine, but I don’t think you can truthfully say that it works for everyone. I think it’s important to leave the option open along with other options in a framework that encourages team work and communication, and then trust your employees to do the right thing and only intervene in their schedule and where they want to work, when you begin to spot trouble.
god bless you for this insight.
As a contractor I've worked at multiple places, and my current gig cares more about 'asses in seats' than output. It's incredibly demotivating, having come from an environment where output was the goal.
https://legal.uncc.edu/legal-topics/contracts/contract-check...
https://www.consumeraffairs.com/news/employers-must-follow-s...
https://www.reuters.com/article/businesspropicks-us-findlaw-...
Maybe I'm wrong. If I'm not, he/she has very little say in their environment. At least that's my experience.
When I started working from home 10 years ago, this hit me hard. I used to work about 10 hour days in the office. When I started working from home I was working 13-14 hours most days.
Over time that lead to burn out and that made me even less productive. Some of it was because I felt a little guilty working from home so I put in even more effort to ensure people didn't think I was goofing around. In hindsight, that was unnecessary and a bad way to handle my insecurity... my bosses trusted me fully.
Secondly, when you always work from home... you're always at work! So, it's important to have that distinct work time and personal time otherwise they bleed together too much and you just end up working all the time.
Was this pure development because that seems so unfeasible (at least for me).
Honest question.
You say you manage 20 people. How are your able to judge for 20 people at least weekly if the work they did was in line with your expectations?
I feel like I basically have to read and understand every line written by each developer on my team in order to really get a grasp at whether they're productive or not.
Sometimes people produce very little code but maybe that little code solves a very hard to find bug.
It's something I'm really struggling with as a manager:
My boss asks me if the people on my team are worth their money and I am really not sure how to answer this.
If people aren’t feeling well, maybe they are going through a divorce, maybe they’ve run out of motivation I want them to share it, so we can help them get to where they want to be or give them time to process.
I guess I could have a single inefficient worker and never spot it through measurements, but I typically notice because it changes the team dynamic and the way people interact.
I understand why this would worry some managers, but I don’t believe you can apply factory line thinking or strategies to brain-workers because it doesn’t suit them, especially not if you want them to cooperate in actual teams and not just be a bunch of grouped individuals competing not to be measured as the bottom 15%.
I am Scandinavian though, and our work-culture is very different from the American.
I agree and I hope you're not suggesting that I'm doing that.
My problem is that "I trust my gut" doesn't work very well either as a strategy fot me because I just don't have that body of experience to draw from.
So I'm a bit lost.
For things like project management you have schedules and plans.
And then there is always customer/client satisfaction.
Aside from that you also have a boss who has expectations for you, are you meeting those? If your boss is not just satisfied but happy with your perfomance output you’re probably doing well.
Enter Bloom, who helped design a test whereby 500 employees were divided into two groups--a control group (who continued working at HQ) and volunteer work-from-homers (who had to have a private room at home, at least six-month tenure with Ctrip, and decent broadband access as conditions).
If you ask people to volunteer for remote work then people who are better remote workers are likely to volunteer and more likely to work harder to prove it can work.
I've previously seen accounting docs at a major defense firm I worked for. They tallied the exact dollar amount spent on each employee's square footage of office space on a monthly basis.
Furthers the argument you make.
The cost of that building divided by the number of people there.
There's then power, heat, cleaning, etc, but that's all small fry compared with the rent or opportunity cost of an office building.
The technical infrastructure (Cisco switches don't come cheap) is probably offset by the cost of supporting remote infrastructure, vpns etc.
The cost per deal in central London is on the order of $10k-$20k a year. I'll take that in cash thanks.
http://www.cityam.com/233082/london-office-rents-tube-map-he...
Or if the opportunity is presented as a privilege they might be less engaged to begin with?
> Or if the opportunity is presented as a privilege they might be less engaged to begin with?
Very likely, but even ignoring that, the sampling bias means that the study is confirming that people who want to work from home do better with that arrangement, rather than demonstrating that work from home is in general a better arrangement. If you want to study X vs Not-X and draw your sample population entire from the group that prefers X, you will like find that X is better in whatever ways you choose to measure: happiness, productivity, retention, etc.
Imagine you want to study open office floor plans vs private offices. If you include only open office advocates in your study, you'll probably find very different results than an study that includes only private office advocates.
And people who are better in-office workers volunteer not to go home :) I guess this does mimic real life, no?
> After a lottery draw, those employees with even-numbered birthdays were selected to work from home, and those with odd-numbered birthdates stayed in the office to act as the control group.
> Approximately half of the employees (503) were interested, particularly those who had less education and tenure, their own rooms, and faced longer commutes. Of these, 249 were qualified to take part in the experiment by virtue of having at least six months’ tenure, broadband access, and a private room at home in which they could work. After a lottery draw, those em- ployees with even-numbered birthdays were selected to work from home, and those with odd-numbered birthdates stayed in the office to act as the control group.
Honestly, I can achieve little at home these days and feel like I'm doing injustice to both, work and the kid.
Especially since where I live (Israel) like most of the world men and women are still usually not equally responsible regarding child care and I personally think remote work could help with that (as well as personal motivation to be there for my kids).
Working from home has been great for us all - we get to have breakfast and lunch together every day, and I'm around to help out at those times (if you've got young kids, you'll know meal times can be stressful at times!).
I'm assuming that there is someone else actually looking after the child, you can't leave a 2 year old alone for more than a couple of minutes (and even then you have to keep one eye on them)
There are times when I'll message my team "Beautiful day here - I'm taking the kids to the park for a couple of hours." and then shift my work scheduled to after the kids go to bed.
I wouldn't trade this for any office job.
Working from home is great when I have a clear view of priorities and the task at hand but I sorely missed the social interactions of an office when I didn't have the option for it.
As most things in life, it's a spectrum, there are some people that probably work much better away from the office, personally I still need sometimes the social aspect of work to be my most productive self.
Personally I'd prefer living at a shared-workspace or company campus as long as work and living facilities are clearly separate.
May I ask why? I'd prefer living close to my family and friends, many of which may not work for the same company as I work for. I'm trying to see what your motivating factors are because I, for one, could not disagree more.
To answer your question, I do not want to bring work into my home. BYOD resolves most of the factors that would make me want to provide my own office at home.
May I ask how you currently manage to live close to your family and friends and (because I have to assume you are surrounded by like-minded individuals) their families and their friends and so on? Frankly, I find this very unrealistic, but maybe that's because my friends and family are spread out across the globe.
If you’re reasonably happy with open-plan offices, that might be true. If you’re not... there seem to be few alternatives nowadays.
I make very conscious decisions to work and live close to my family (Southern California). It's not unrealistic at all. In fact, having a solid social support system is by far more important (for mental as well as physical health) than making (slightly more) money in the Bay.
If you are talking about the US, I think you are neglecting to take into account the hundreds of millions of square acreage between the coasts.
https://demographics.virginia.edu/DotMap/
Even so, if I were to start a company today, I would try very hard to hire remote, for many reasons, the most important of which is this would dramatically expand the talent pool, and (I believe) lead to less stressed employees and better results. People who lack intrinsic motivation typically don’t perform well even in the office.
Interesting! So, has it ever happened to you to hire a remote worker with a proven track record (say, 3-5 years, references checked) and then realize after some time that this person "doesn't fit the bill" for working remotely for you?
(If it has happened, I'd be interested to know details -- was it because of the specifics of your company's procedures, or something else?)
I never had anyone who had a track record of _remote_ work specifically, though.
That's a huge selection bias - if the 'treatment' group are self-selecting volunteers from your pool of all employees then that causes a whole host of issues.
> After a lottery draw, those employees with even-numbered birthdays were selected to work from home, and those with odd-numbered birthdates stayed in the office to act as the control group.
But suddenly if you are programming, reading and writing code, you require less concentration?
TV dramas show people talking over their desks and try to convince people this is what being productive looks like, but that's far from reality.
Joel Spolsky said it in 2000: "Do you programmers have quiet working conditions?" https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s...
I wonder how many years of rediscovery of basic knowledge about productivity it will take before these ideas are widly accepted: open plans offices are bad, remote work can be done, etc.
Crucially it's not IT, the work is a call centre travel agency (and it's also in China).
"First, the job of a call center employee is particularly suitable for telecommuting. It requires neither teamwork nor in-person face time. Quantity and quality of performance can be easily quantified and evaluated. The link between effort and performance is direct. These conditions apply to a range of service jobs, such as sales, IT support, and secretarial assistance, but they are far from universal. Second, the firm can closely monitor the performance and labor supply of the employees thanks to its extensive centralized database. Team leaders and managers could generate a report from the database of the performance of the team members daily and easily detect problems in individual employees’ performance. Third, the extent of WFH was limited, so that it did not require a significant reorganization at the workplace. Team leaders continued to supervise their teams with a mix of home and office workers without any major reshuffling of team membership."
I can really concentrate at home (private room where I feel comfy) but on the other hand it is also significantly easier to distract yourself from work. Netflix is just one tab away and there's no one to look over your shoulder and whisper in your ear "Don't watch Netflix when you're working".
It also depends a lot on my mood. When I feel down and worthless because my research feels like its going nowhere I distract myself more easily. If I feel optimistic like I'm a predator hunting some prey because my research is leading somewhere fruitful I can work anywhere with great focus without the need for distraction.
I'm currently working somewhere that more or less requires a typical M-F 9-5 schedule. I often don't feel in the "mood" on various weekdays, while some weekends I get that "predator" feeling you described and can code non-stop for hours on end. However, since I need to be in the office M-F I more often feel, and give in to, the pressure to not work weekends lest my family and social life/general well-being suffer.
I wonder how many productive hours I've lost due to this conundrum, and beyond that how many productive hours have been lost in my company or the modern workplace.
It's interesting that you describe feeling pressure to not work; usually I think people talk about feeling the pressure to work.
But I know what you mean. It's hard to know how to balance the two. On the one shoulder is a little voice saying "Don't be a sucker and spend your free time making money for the company! It's just a job! Go have a life". On the other is the pride of craft, and the thrill of having a really good idea that you want to see to the end.
I've been thinking a lot about this, not least because my relationship was a bit strained last year due to both of us probably putting too much emphasis on our work. I don't know if ultimately one side or the other is the right answer. Doing good and creative work is important and fulfilling. But friends and family are equally important and fulfilling. Maybe the only way is to carefully guard against either one predominating.
Tools like https://selfcontrolapp.com/ and https://freedom.to/ are really helpful here.
At home, my breathers are more energizing, which is the point.
I can't believe how ridiculous it is that managers feign surprise when they are told that a task estimated at 4 hours will take a calendar day to complete. That is the nature of the work.
I don't understand people with this problem. The problem I have is switching off from work
> If I feel optimistic like I'm a predator hunting some prey
That's like me trying to find a seat and socket in the office.
http://paulgraham.com/gh.html
> They work in cosy, neighborhoody places with people around
Which is it?
That article did not age well.
The statements are not contradicting each other. The first statement is on the in-building level and the second one is on the out-of-building level.
I like working from home, but I actually hate the fact that I'm basically forced to work from home every day (because I live in the countryside). Quiet is nice, but quiet all the time is a bit hard to bear. At least for me.
But most importantly, they can leave those two locations when they feel like it.
fixed that for you