Remote has to be baked into the company culture, otherwise you'll forever be the outsider, and be the first to be let go when the company hits tough times.
This has been my experience thus far as well. It hasn't really mattered how well I could frame productivity or measurable improvements in my quality of life to an immediate manager or team - ultimately if the senior leadership dislikes the idea of remote work, each level beneath them will hesitate to fully embrace it.
I've found that companies that promote work-life balance as one of their strengths are the best places to ask or test the waters.
"It hasn't really mattered how well I could frame productivity or measurable improvements in my quality of life"
First, your quality of life isn't really a selling point from employers point of view. To raise your odds at negotiations you should focus solely on the employers problems. The same applies when selling something - you should not focus on the benefits that you as a seller get (like money), but on the problems that get solved from the employer.
Secondly, focusing on raw productivity on alone seems to be quite a common thing on these discussions. I think it is quite limited viewpoint, since a ton of other things matter as well in addition to productivity. Communication with others, spreading your knowledge, trust issues, where to focus, etc.
I don't necessarily disagree with the first point that you raised, but I would posit that if my quality of life sucks as an engineer, eventually that will become the employers problem when I update my cv and find work with a better quality of life, potentially too soon or at the wrong time.
Moreover, an employer is 'selling' their reputation to potential talent as well as selling their product.
Where in my comment did I suggest that the employee be given a handout?
Perhaps I'm not working for companies who are as ruthless as you and the other commenter, but as my previous comments alluded to, I actually have updated my CV, and left jobs for other, better jobs, mostly because there was a work-life balance improvement to be gained from the move. And yes, the work-life balance improvement in all situations was a more accepting and flexible remote-work policy. And that was after using available avenues (asking manager(s), 1-1s, etc) to see if a WFH arrangement was viable.
In all cases, I did so with tact and professionalism.
That might be getting lost in translation, because your comment seems to indicate that I just walked into my bosses office and complained that my life sucks and I need to work from home, or else. And that I should be given a handout.
In my opinion, you use what avenues are available to you to see if WFH is possible. If it's important to you, and you aren't getting met half-way, then it's time to start looking elsewhere.
In an office, many engineers surely _actually_ work well under 40 hrs most weeks. If you're remote, that time is yours to spend time with pets and family, do chores, run errands, relax, exercise, etc.
Ten minutes in the car on a 240-day work year is one work week. While commuting has some benefits, like decompression time and work life separation, even a short commute has an impact on your free time. Remoting has hazards that one ought not downplay, but the lack of commute is a bigger deal than we might realize.
Yeah, I was going to say the same thing. Find a company that hires only remote and you're golden. Plenty of them out there. In my experience they're a good mixture of casual and results-oriented.
You can't really fake anything with a remote company. You don't get any points for showing up. At the same time, the amount of time-wasting activities created by people who are searching for 'participation rewards' is small or none.
Or, put another way, if you wanted to be treated like an adult, find a company that hires adults.
Not necessarily. Pretty much any company that is spread out should have no problem dealing with remote workers. Once you have people reporting to people who are not local it doesn't really matter who's where because you're either in the same building or you're not. Once you're not in the same building doesn't really matter if people are working in a house in Ohio or from an office in Bangalore.
People routinely work from all sorts of places do so in a manner that causes problems for others it doesn't really matter. Most managers don't care so long as they know what timezone you are in and when you can be expected to be available on chat/phone/whatever.
It still really does: the remote offices might have self contained teams, managers, etc. So only cross team collaboration has to handle remote boundaries. With remote workers, it's all interactions.
This has been my experience. I managed to switch to working remotely 100% by saying "I need to move to another town, either I start working remotely or I'll need to switch jobs". My boss wanted me to say, but not enough was done (by anyone, me included) to really make it work. I wasn't let go, they were still happy with me, but I decided to leave after about half a year, even though there were definitely aspects of working remotely that I loved.
Agreed. I’ve worked remote for over 10 years but mostly all 100% remote companies.
My recent experience with a company that allowed remote work but was 95% in-office was absolutely miserable. They won’t accomodate any change in communication style, tools, and they’ll regularly have important discussions in the office without you. And you’ll never change their culture. Plus as others have said, those kind of places will never give senior positions to remote workers.
^ this is the answer. I'm currently working my first remote job, and we have a robust remote culture.
Remote work is hard to do well. We're constantly iterating on it and trying to improve it. It's not always intuitive. If your company isn't focused on it, it will not work.
I can second this. Working remotely is a skill that needs to be learned. I worked for a fully remote team. After that, I'm much more confident in convincing others I can be productive remotely.
As someone else commented in this thread, visibility into what you're doing is very important. Especially in the beginning, don't push your manager to just trust you. Show what you're doing.
Less context switching, less disruption, home as a quieter environment. When remote I feel I have to prove I've worked and tend to work more because of that. I've personally experienced a x2 gap in remote, compared to a noisy office. It's a bit like a code retreat.
The easiest way I think is to quit and work as a contractor/freelancer. You can offer your services to your ex-employer and if you actually deliver value there shouldn't be problems to have remote work as a term in the contract. Otherwise you can look out for other customers who accept remote work.
This is what I did. Next employer was a freelance client first. They make me a pretty good offer to become an employee that included continuing to work remotely.
Since then, I've done more freelance and employed work, but I've only accepted remote roles.
Should you expect a pay cut if you transition from on-site to remote?
Someone proposed something like that to me recently, arguing that if the cost of living in my home city is less than in the office city then I shouldn't be paid as much. I'm thinking pay should be based on productivity and value to the company instead of value to me.
"I'm thinking pay should be based on productivity and value to the company instead of value to me."
Value produced is the upper cap of the pay, the lower cap is dictated by how much competition there is on the market. The employer can look at it like buying any other kind of service. If you work remotely, you compete with all the freelancers/contractors around the world. If the company values local employees, and you can work locally at the office, there is much less competition for that kind of position.
Cost of living adjusted pay is a fact of life and you will struggle to find a firm that does not do it. GitLab the company has a cool salary calculator so you can at least see exactly how they do it. No one wants to be paid less for the same work, but if you take a small pay cut and are putting more money in the bank every month, is it a pay cut? :)
That's a good point, but looking at the other way, if a remote worker employed by a company in San Francisco moves from, say, Pecos, Texas to Manhattan, should he or she expect a significant salary increase?
(edit: moving for reasons unrelated to employment with the San Francisco company)
I think so. That can be hard for smaller businesses to manage, but it should average out for a larger one. It might also mean the business can’t support you (afford to pay you a SF rate). So that is always a factor.
Why would a boss want to pay you more because you live somewhere expensive, unless living in that place is part of the job description? The only reason I can think of is they believe that you might quit in favor of a local job which pays more, and so they need to raise your pay to remain competitive.
But if they know you're committed to remote work, this wouldn't seem to be a consideration. And presumably the possibility of taking a remote position at a company in a high-cost area exists no matter where you live, so by the same logic you'd think that a boss would want to always pay a rate that's competitive in expensive markets.
I guess the reality is that physical location is still enough of a determiner of job options that it influences what a boss understands your realistic pay range to be. But I wonder how this will change as more tech work becomes remote.
I've been on the receiving end of Gitlab's calculator. The pay cut isn't small at all; I was offered less than half the equivalent SF salary. And I live in North America, just not in SF.
Their calculator can be a little harsh for sure, I just appreciate how up front it is. Still, rent in SF is crazy if you compare it to anywhere that isn’t near a coast. I wonder do you think the pay cut was unfair based on other offers? I am biased because we only do genuinely minor comp adjustments for location.
Yeah, I appreciated the transparency of it too. The offer I got was okay compared to market rates here, so I do think it's pretty fair.
I guess I just find it a bit weird that your value to the company is so dependent on location that it can vary from 100% down to ~20% of the base SF salary. People living in SF _chose_ to live there despite the absurd rents, and it's not like that changes anything for a remote company.
Yes, but if they don't pay enough, they won't be able to hire those people to start with. On the flip side, considering if they starting hiring people from other countries and reducing your salary because you choose to live in a high cost country.
So is most companies' unwillingness to allow full-time remote work. If it is possible to alter the mindset about the latter, it should certainly be so about the former.
Hey, I am with you. We (my company) are a remote first company that trends to merit based pay with minor COL adjustments at most. We have bands for each role and generally stick with them. Still, the idea isn’t bad. You want people to afford a certain quality of life and operate the business effectively. If everyone is happy with the arrangement the business and its employees win. If the business is doing it for a profit motive it shows up in employee satisfaction.
As with all things in employee/employer relationship it is about leverage.
Why should you get paid less for doing the same amount of work? What does it matter to the employer?
The question is, how much will it cost your employer to replace you? Presumably, they will be hiring your replacement locally so your salary should be compared to local wages.
The trick, is to make yourself indispensable (or at least very, very expensive to do so). Focus on being the sole owner of crucial products and knowledge (we are after all, knowledge workers). If you find yourself in a position where redundancy is being put in place (i.e hiring someone to shadow you, etc. then it's time to move up the knowledge chain or to a different product).
I've pretty much gotten remote from my last two jobs. I was a full time employee for at least one year before i negotiated remote. I worked my ass off for the first year and proved that i was a valuable employee, negotiating for remote was made easy by that. I just asked my manager both times during our one on one meeting. No company likes letting valuable employees go, if you can prove that you can be just as productive as a remote worker, maybe by having a "trial" period, then i think your manager will be ok with it.
Also I think it gos quite case by case. Some employees can be seen as more trustworthy than others, and with others remote work can work better than with others for other reasons.
I'm the only remote engineer at my company, which has over 100 engineers. I'm also one of the more senior engineers. I told the company that I was moving closer to family (for medical reasons) and asked if I could continue working remotely. So far its been great. I've been more productive then ever. I did go back to individual contributor from team lead for a few months but now I'm back to leading a very small team.
So the steps for me were.
1) Establish myself as a valuable asset over several years at the company
2) Move closer to family and ask if I could work remotely
3) Work really hard to establish communication lines and insert myself into the same conversations that I would have been included in at the office.
You should first ask yourself if it's really true.
Being one of a company's only remote workers can be a terrible experience. What you gain in focus may easily be lost in terms of missed communications, being left out of spontaneous meetings, etc.
Also, depending on how far you live, missing out on company events. That can negatively impact your level of engagement with the company, which could also hurt your productivity.
I've been remote for 4 years and it all started at a company who didn't have a remote culture, but my boss wasn't too worried about me going remote.
I was on a software team for 2 months before finding out I needed to move. I told my boss I had to move in 4 months, but I really wanted to keep my position and wanted to switch to working remotely. More than half of the engineering team at the time was offshore; however, they were all in an office with close communication with the higher-ups there. My boss basically said to me that he'd been working with remote folks for his entire career and if the other engineers had no problem with it, he didn't see an issue either.
4 years later I'm still remote and I couldn't be happier. Not at that same company, but at a new remote position.
The offshore team, previous bias to remote employees, and potentially the need to keep me onboard to get shit done for cheap helped me here. There were other employees who inquired about going remote, but they were turned down - one even needed to move for their SO (same as my case), so they ended up leaving the company when they moved.
It's really hit or miss unless you find a remote position where the company expects you to be remote right off the bat or you just get lucky and your boss trusts you to switch. Just remember that trust goes both ways - if your company doesn't trust you, maybe don't trust that you'll retire there. Going remote is a great way to test both sides of trust.
> There were other employees who inquired about going remote, but they were turned down - one even needed to move for their SO (same as my case), so they ended up leaving the company when they moved.
We've been transitioning to be more supportive of remote work. We're a small company (~30), and have never had much an official policy. Generally, it's - you're adults, get your work done. But the culture was such that it was basically expected you'd be in the office most of the time, and whenever someone worked remotely they seemed to feel a need to explain why.
There were even times in the past where my boss talked to me about wanting me to be physically in the office more. These days I often only go in twice a week for less than half a day for meetings. Recently our boss worked remotely for a month from the other side of the globe. Our head of sales is considering moving 1000 miles away while staying on remotely.
We're tight knit and small enough that it hasn't been difficult to accommodate more remote work.
Not if you have pre-existing medical conditions that marketplace medical insurance won't cover, like dwarfism or albinism - there are others but those are the ones I know of. You need big-company insurance benefits for these.
What's your industry? Can you give any other details about the company? I've always been interested in these "lifestyle" companies but I'm not sure where to begin.
I started Em with the idea of a futuristic wysiwyg document editor, with the help of my brother's friend who wrote us a check for $50K to get started, "and cut me in appropriately" (which we later paid back since we never had a traditional start-up)). But after 6 months of writing a business plan (yeah, I know..) and talking to friends in the software business, it was clear we weren't going to get VC funding. (I think 1990 was the nadir of software VC investments.)
So in my deep-dive into the document production market (QuarkXPress, FrameMaker, etc) I came across the small idea of building data publishing plug-ins for XPress (Xdata, copying an idea I saw for Aldus PageMaker), and started there (then Xtags, Xcatalog).
We later (2000-ish) branched out into plug-ins for Adobe InDesign, initially the same XPress plug-ins just ported (underwritten by Adobe), and then later expanded into workflow plugins (WordsFlow, DocsFlow) which are our mainstay right now.
Funny how we're doing more or less the same stuff as 30 years ago (well, plus additional products) in a supposedly fast-moving market. I suppose print publishing hasn't changed a lot in the past 20 years.
For me, the number one indicator is what did you do on the last snow day. If you put in an incredibly productive day and wrapped up a bunch of bugs and stories, let’s talk.
By showing them an offer to go work remotely somewhere else. But it backfired because being the only remote engineer while the rest of the team is collaborating in person is hard. The company needs to support remotees. So I again found a new job with a boss who was remote friendly, and a company with remote-first culture.
For me, I've simply started freelancing. I love working remote so much that it became non-negotiable for me. I've then worked at one startup, where my hiring basically pushed the whole team to become remote (they were kind of on the fence before I joined, and the boss realized that not having an office was much cheaper).
I believe that the key to make it work is to have a remote-first culture, at least in the team you're on.
My wife got a job a couple states away and while I loved my job, I was moving with her. My responsibilities had been moving into more server-admin stuff for a while, so my boss was able to get approval to let me work remotely. It's been 3 and a half years now and still working well. I miss the ability to drop in on people and bounce ideas off them, but we talk a lot through IMs and calls.
I worked for my company for 1.5 years and then said I was moving in 6 months. So, with plenty of warning, my boss said he wanted to keep me... so here I am wor king remote.
I did have several things going for me:
1) We had a wfh day once a week
2) We had a few other employees (but not other devs) already working remotely
3) I already had a lot of freedom that came from tackling not fun (to some) issues, like build tolling, infrastructure interactions, etc. So I was already trusted to be proactive in what I was doing
4) I'd say perhaps the biggest thing that lead to it was having split management - a people top level manager over development and a tech top level manager of development. Both are great and work well together.
There is an extended discussion about this in Cal Newport's excellent book So Good They Can't Ignore You.
In short, build up "career capital" by making yourself valuable to the company, which you can later use as leverage. Or as others have said, just get a different job that's already remote.
My boss is in a different office in a different city anyway, so it doesn't matter much to him whether I'm in the local office or at home or wherever, as long as work gets done.
It helps that my company, SAP, has a strong home-office culture: A lot of employees are consultants, who spend most of Friday doing time-recording and other administrative activities, so Friday is traditionally home-office day (for those who want it). Last year, a new company policy was adopted that requires managers to provide an objective reason for why mobile work (such as home office) should not be allowed for their team members.
It's not just an SAP thing, it's got to do with German culture and German law. For example, the US concept of "sick days" looks really bizarre to Germans. When someone is sick, they get a doctor's note and stay at home until fully recovered. When someone goes into work sick, their colleagues and managers tell them to go see a doctor. There is a shared understanding that sick employees working regardless are a liability to everyone involved.
That said, it helps that IT is a white-collar industry. I have a few friends in blue-collar jobs, and working conditions sound worse over there, esp. for temp jobs where workers are considered fungible.
I accomplished it by showing first, although that's probably not very helpful for your particular situation. But for anyone else:
I started as an employee of a contracting firm whose offices are all in different parts of the country from my now-employer. As a contractor, companies can be much more willing to not have you on site, especially if you aren't independent. Demonstrate enough value, and you may get a full-time offer, in which case it's a lot easier to leverage the fact that you've already proved your ability to work remote effectively.
The biggest benefit in this case was that I was able to negotiate salary as if I lived where the company is headquartered, resulting in an almost 2x increase over what I could negotiate where I am physically located.
I just told my boss I was moving, and let them offer.
Working for HP in Atlanta, I'd already proved myself during the '96 Olympics, when even the 12 miles to work was impossible. In 2000, our rent went out of sight; we owned 7 rural acres -- about 800 miles away -- so we just decided to move. I figured my boss would let me telecommute, but I didn't ask for it: I just told him, very honestly, that I was moving, and why. He said, "That's fair. I support you in this move, if you understand that you won't have the same advancement opportunities as someone who's in the office." I agreed, and that was that. I worked another 15 years that way, until HP fell apart and I wanted to change jobs.
Seems to be quite a common pattern here. So, trying to convince your boss is probably very difficult and maybe even waste of time. Instead just quit and try to find a remote job instead (which might be your current job - just tell your employer that you are quitting because you want a remote job, and they might offer a remote position).
My company moved from Chicago suburbs to Tampa FL and I didn't want to relocate to Tampa.
I was already working 2 days per week from home, so I simply told them I wasn't relocating with the company and I would work remotely. It hardly matters at all since my manager and 2/3 of my direct reports are located in Germany so I would have effectively been remote anyway.
Same. I came back from a long work trip (3 mo in a foreign country) and said "I'm moving. I'm either moving and I'm going to keep working with you it I'm moving and I'm not. I'd like to keep working eih you." The reply was something like "Let us know when you get there." We a had no remote culture for a while but eventually started a couple small (3 people) remote offices. That opened the door and I've been working remote ever since.
I'm with a different company now. The original company didn't actually handle full remote well. Poor communication made everything difficult. The new job has a pretty strong remote culture. MKe sure you out in the effort of no one else does or you'll be unhappy.
same. i worked on-site for 1 year. then told them i was moving, from a 30 min commute to 1.30 hr commute (imagine DC beltway work-hour traffic), and that I'm not willing to do that every day. that's it, didn't say i'm gonna quit, or that i want to work remote etc.
they said 'would you like to try working remote for a few months, see if it works out for both of us ?'. I agreed and few months became 4 years. I'd visit the office once a month for department-wide meetings, so they wouldn't forget my ugly mug.
of course, database stuff is very well suited for remote work, so I might have lucked out there.. then again, when it came time for a promotion after 5 years, they gave me a decent raise, but on the condition 'you have to come in once a week'. i took the raise but left soon after.
I lucked out to be employed at a company with a culture permitting remote work. I don't have the 'answer', but I can describe some factors which make it a no-brainer.
Our company is located in NYC a few blocks away from PENN Station, where Long Island commuters arrive in Manhattan. Several top peeps in the company live on LI, and commute to work. Sometimes the commute is terrible, and they work remotely. And, there are peeps in the company who have family obligations which necessitate a flexible schedule. The schedule gaps in their office attendance is filled by remote work.
It all just works. I believe my colleagues recognize this situation is not common, and therefore the flexibility engenders loyalty to the company.
Also, senior colleagues are not micro-managers, and my fellow colleagues don't need constant supervision and instruction.
Finally, there's one argument which comes up in this cultue that might be helpful. Some senior colleagues say they can't get a lot done at work with interruptions from junior colleagues and phone calls. If you're in this position, then remote work could increase your productivity and help you meet deadlines.
In my experience if you need to convince them its not a good fit. An employer needs to embrace remote work as part of the culture for it to work well...in my opinion.
I used to manage a team with employees over 120 miles away. My VP was against remote employees, but I convinced him to allow my distant employees to work remote 4 days out of the week, and come to the office just on Thursday. The team remained productive and we slowly got approval to avoid even that one day in the office. It was a matter of trust, which was built over time.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 175 ms ] threadFind a job that already offers remote.
I've found that companies that promote work-life balance as one of their strengths are the best places to ask or test the waters.
First, your quality of life isn't really a selling point from employers point of view. To raise your odds at negotiations you should focus solely on the employers problems. The same applies when selling something - you should not focus on the benefits that you as a seller get (like money), but on the problems that get solved from the employer.
Secondly, focusing on raw productivity on alone seems to be quite a common thing on these discussions. I think it is quite limited viewpoint, since a ton of other things matter as well in addition to productivity. Communication with others, spreading your knowledge, trust issues, where to focus, etc.
Moreover, an employer is 'selling' their reputation to potential talent as well as selling their product.
Perhaps I'm not working for companies who are as ruthless as you and the other commenter, but as my previous comments alluded to, I actually have updated my CV, and left jobs for other, better jobs, mostly because there was a work-life balance improvement to be gained from the move. And yes, the work-life balance improvement in all situations was a more accepting and flexible remote-work policy. And that was after using available avenues (asking manager(s), 1-1s, etc) to see if a WFH arrangement was viable.
In all cases, I did so with tact and professionalism.
That might be getting lost in translation, because your comment seems to indicate that I just walked into my bosses office and complained that my life sucks and I need to work from home, or else. And that I should be given a handout.
In my opinion, you use what avenues are available to you to see if WFH is possible. If it's important to you, and you aren't getting met half-way, then it's time to start looking elsewhere.
When you walk out the door of the office, work should be over and done with until you return. Taking work home should be impossible.
Paid overtime helps greatly. It discourages the employer from trying to get free work out of you.
Having a non-zero commute doesn't have to mean commuting for 2 hours in urban traffic. You can pick a location where a tiny commute is possible.
You can't really fake anything with a remote company. You don't get any points for showing up. At the same time, the amount of time-wasting activities created by people who are searching for 'participation rewards' is small or none.
Or, put another way, if you wanted to be treated like an adult, find a company that hires adults.
People routinely work from all sorts of places do so in a manner that causes problems for others it doesn't really matter. Most managers don't care so long as they know what timezone you are in and when you can be expected to be available on chat/phone/whatever.
My recent experience with a company that allowed remote work but was 95% in-office was absolutely miserable. They won’t accomodate any change in communication style, tools, and they’ll regularly have important discussions in the office without you. And you’ll never change their culture. Plus as others have said, those kind of places will never give senior positions to remote workers.
Remote work is hard to do well. We're constantly iterating on it and trying to improve it. It's not always intuitive. If your company isn't focused on it, it will not work.
As someone else commented in this thread, visibility into what you're doing is very important. Especially in the beginning, don't push your manager to just trust you. Show what you're doing.
Since then, I've done more freelance and employed work, but I've only accepted remote roles.
Someone proposed something like that to me recently, arguing that if the cost of living in my home city is less than in the office city then I shouldn't be paid as much. I'm thinking pay should be based on productivity and value to the company instead of value to me.
Value produced is the upper cap of the pay, the lower cap is dictated by how much competition there is on the market. The employer can look at it like buying any other kind of service. If you work remotely, you compete with all the freelancers/contractors around the world. If the company values local employees, and you can work locally at the office, there is much less competition for that kind of position.
(edit: moving for reasons unrelated to employment with the San Francisco company)
But if they know you're committed to remote work, this wouldn't seem to be a consideration. And presumably the possibility of taking a remote position at a company in a high-cost area exists no matter where you live, so by the same logic you'd think that a boss would want to always pay a rate that's competitive in expensive markets.
I guess the reality is that physical location is still enough of a determiner of job options that it influences what a boss understands your realistic pay range to be. But I wonder how this will change as more tech work becomes remote.
Exactly. So why should a boss want to pay you less because you live somewhere cheap.
I guess I just find it a bit weird that your value to the company is so dependent on location that it can vary from 100% down to ~20% of the base SF salary. People living in SF _chose_ to live there despite the absurd rents, and it's not like that changes anything for a remote company.
So is most companies' unwillingness to allow full-time remote work. If it is possible to alter the mindset about the latter, it should certainly be so about the former.
Why should you get paid less for doing the same amount of work? What does it matter to the employer?
The question is, how much will it cost your employer to replace you? Presumably, they will be hiring your replacement locally so your salary should be compared to local wages.
The trick, is to make yourself indispensable (or at least very, very expensive to do so). Focus on being the sole owner of crucial products and knowledge (we are after all, knowledge workers). If you find yourself in a position where redundancy is being put in place (i.e hiring someone to shadow you, etc. then it's time to move up the knowledge chain or to a different product).
No, but you need to realize that you're being paid based on your value to the company.
So the steps for me were. 1) Establish myself as a valuable asset over several years at the company 2) Move closer to family and ask if I could work remotely 3) Work really hard to establish communication lines and insert myself into the same conversations that I would have been included in at the office.
Being one of a company's only remote workers can be a terrible experience. What you gain in focus may easily be lost in terms of missed communications, being left out of spontaneous meetings, etc.
Also, depending on how far you live, missing out on company events. That can negatively impact your level of engagement with the company, which could also hurt your productivity.
I was on a software team for 2 months before finding out I needed to move. I told my boss I had to move in 4 months, but I really wanted to keep my position and wanted to switch to working remotely. More than half of the engineering team at the time was offshore; however, they were all in an office with close communication with the higher-ups there. My boss basically said to me that he'd been working with remote folks for his entire career and if the other engineers had no problem with it, he didn't see an issue either.
4 years later I'm still remote and I couldn't be happier. Not at that same company, but at a new remote position.
The offshore team, previous bias to remote employees, and potentially the need to keep me onboard to get shit done for cheap helped me here. There were other employees who inquired about going remote, but they were turned down - one even needed to move for their SO (same as my case), so they ended up leaving the company when they moved.
It's really hit or miss unless you find a remote position where the company expects you to be remote right off the bat or you just get lucky and your boss trusts you to switch. Just remember that trust goes both ways - if your company doesn't trust you, maybe don't trust that you'll retire there. Going remote is a great way to test both sides of trust.
Do you know why they were turned down?
There were even times in the past where my boss talked to me about wanting me to be physically in the office more. These days I often only go in twice a week for less than half a day for meetings. Recently our boss worked remotely for a month from the other side of the globe. Our head of sales is considering moving 1000 miles away while staying on remotely.
We're tight knit and small enough that it hasn't been difficult to accommodate more remote work.
(29 years ago. I guess Em Software is a "lifestyle" company (just 4 of us working out of our homes, so you can discount the anecdata...).)
I started Em with the idea of a futuristic wysiwyg document editor, with the help of my brother's friend who wrote us a check for $50K to get started, "and cut me in appropriately" (which we later paid back since we never had a traditional start-up)). But after 6 months of writing a business plan (yeah, I know..) and talking to friends in the software business, it was clear we weren't going to get VC funding. (I think 1990 was the nadir of software VC investments.)
So in my deep-dive into the document production market (QuarkXPress, FrameMaker, etc) I came across the small idea of building data publishing plug-ins for XPress (Xdata, copying an idea I saw for Aldus PageMaker), and started there (then Xtags, Xcatalog).
We later (2000-ish) branched out into plug-ins for Adobe InDesign, initially the same XPress plug-ins just ported (underwritten by Adobe), and then later expanded into workflow plugins (WordsFlow, DocsFlow) which are our mainstay right now.
Funny how we're doing more or less the same stuff as 30 years ago (well, plus additional products) in a supposedly fast-moving market. I suppose print publishing hasn't changed a lot in the past 20 years.
I believe that the key to make it work is to have a remote-first culture, at least in the team you're on.
I did have several things going for me:
1) We had a wfh day once a week
2) We had a few other employees (but not other devs) already working remotely
3) I already had a lot of freedom that came from tackling not fun (to some) issues, like build tolling, infrastructure interactions, etc. So I was already trusted to be proactive in what I was doing
4) I'd say perhaps the biggest thing that lead to it was having split management - a people top level manager over development and a tech top level manager of development. Both are great and work well together.
In short, build up "career capital" by making yourself valuable to the company, which you can later use as leverage. Or as others have said, just get a different job that's already remote.
It helps that my company, SAP, has a strong home-office culture: A lot of employees are consultants, who spend most of Friday doing time-recording and other administrative activities, so Friday is traditionally home-office day (for those who want it). Last year, a new company policy was adopted that requires managers to provide an objective reason for why mobile work (such as home office) should not be allowed for their team members.
I was impressed at just how well they treat their employees. Kinda reminded me of the Simpson's episode where the Germans take over the power plant.
That said, it helps that IT is a white-collar industry. I have a few friends in blue-collar jobs, and working conditions sound worse over there, esp. for temp jobs where workers are considered fungible.
I started as an employee of a contracting firm whose offices are all in different parts of the country from my now-employer. As a contractor, companies can be much more willing to not have you on site, especially if you aren't independent. Demonstrate enough value, and you may get a full-time offer, in which case it's a lot easier to leverage the fact that you've already proved your ability to work remote effectively.
The biggest benefit in this case was that I was able to negotiate salary as if I lived where the company is headquartered, resulting in an almost 2x increase over what I could negotiate where I am physically located.
No convincing needed.
Working for HP in Atlanta, I'd already proved myself during the '96 Olympics, when even the 12 miles to work was impossible. In 2000, our rent went out of sight; we owned 7 rural acres -- about 800 miles away -- so we just decided to move. I figured my boss would let me telecommute, but I didn't ask for it: I just told him, very honestly, that I was moving, and why. He said, "That's fair. I support you in this move, if you understand that you won't have the same advancement opportunities as someone who's in the office." I agreed, and that was that. I worked another 15 years that way, until HP fell apart and I wanted to change jobs.
My company moved from Chicago suburbs to Tampa FL and I didn't want to relocate to Tampa.
I was already working 2 days per week from home, so I simply told them I wasn't relocating with the company and I would work remotely. It hardly matters at all since my manager and 2/3 of my direct reports are located in Germany so I would have effectively been remote anyway.
I'm with a different company now. The original company didn't actually handle full remote well. Poor communication made everything difficult. The new job has a pretty strong remote culture. MKe sure you out in the effort of no one else does or you'll be unhappy.
they said 'would you like to try working remote for a few months, see if it works out for both of us ?'. I agreed and few months became 4 years. I'd visit the office once a month for department-wide meetings, so they wouldn't forget my ugly mug.
of course, database stuff is very well suited for remote work, so I might have lucked out there.. then again, when it came time for a promotion after 5 years, they gave me a decent raise, but on the condition 'you have to come in once a week'. i took the raise but left soon after.
Our company is located in NYC a few blocks away from PENN Station, where Long Island commuters arrive in Manhattan. Several top peeps in the company live on LI, and commute to work. Sometimes the commute is terrible, and they work remotely. And, there are peeps in the company who have family obligations which necessitate a flexible schedule. The schedule gaps in their office attendance is filled by remote work.
It all just works. I believe my colleagues recognize this situation is not common, and therefore the flexibility engenders loyalty to the company.
Also, senior colleagues are not micro-managers, and my fellow colleagues don't need constant supervision and instruction.
Finally, there's one argument which comes up in this cultue that might be helpful. Some senior colleagues say they can't get a lot done at work with interruptions from junior colleagues and phone calls. If you're in this position, then remote work could increase your productivity and help you meet deadlines.
Good luck.