Work From Home option in Job

BostonB

iDigian wrote: »

My apologies nobody told me it was opposite day.

You should have spotted the typo...

BostonB wrote: »

That usually the problem. Places withOUT proper systems and procedures in place for managing projects, have no way of tracking whats done at home, and/or they want to micro manage it.

My bad...

BostonB

Hellm0 wrote: »

I'd agree for the most part but I've work on several collaborative projects remotely(though not without problems).

I meant my current situation specially. Not in general for everyone. I've worked from home for other companies and contracts no problem.

G-Money

My company provides access to let people work from home however the people on my team don't really use it as a regular replacement for coming into the office. It's handy when the weather is bad like during the winter when we had all the snow and ice.

And to be honest, sometimes I feel like there are a lot less distractions at home. The amount of mobile phones I hear ringing and going off all day long in the office can become very annoying. There's also a lot of foot traffic and people talking loudly which I find quite distracting and I can find it very hard to concentrate.

At home things are a lot quieter so sometimes it's easier to focus.

Malice

Out of curiosity and because I don't think it really warrants its own thread, how many of you listen to music while working? Unless I'm on a call or talking to someone I'll nearly always have my headphones on. I find it does a good job of blocking out all the distracting office background noise.

Sparks

Sometimes. Mostly though, I just have a pair of Peltor Optime IIIs...

Evil Phil

Work from home, outsource your development to a company in India for 10% of your annual salary, play CoD all day.

I'm just saying ...

Yahew

Quite. The only issue there is giving the companies IP away, unless you can discretely package bits of code up.

Yes, I have thought about it.

E39MSport

60% WFH for me

was.deevey

Work from home, outsource your development to a company in India for 10% of your annual salary, play CoD all day.

I have outsourced some stuff to India / Pakistan in the past and for the most part ended in spending more dollar time "babysitting" and disputing the projects than I was getting paid in the first place.... I've pretty much stopped outsourcing any jobs that I know I can do myself.

Indian companies are not THAT cheap anymore either, I've found out stuck freelance western developers working for almost the same rates as some of the indian companies are charging, but at least with realistic delivery times and know that a Table is not something you put your coffee cup on.

croo

Many years ago I worked for a large multinational in the Netherlands. Their offices were so big that it caused huge traffic problems for the town in which it was based. While I was there they trialled a number of ways to address the problem and one trial they ran was to allow people to work from home. As I said this was many years ago and before the internet and not every role was considered but engineers and software developers were considered particularly good candidates, even thought they required a big investment on behalf [in hardware to kept them connected to the company network] of the company. Even after this investment they found that the vast majority of people were more productive from home. It seems when people came to the office the fact they were in the office counted as work, so 8 hours in the office equaled 8 hours of work. But, when they worked from home they tended to only count their productive time so the eight hours of work meant eight hours of productive hours for the company.

matrim

I've worked in jobs that give the option to work from home for one or two days a week (at most) and one downside about working from home can be your hardware. If you are in the office always you can have a nice powerful desktop, 2 monitors etc, while if you work from home sometimes, you'll need a laptop which isn't likely to be as powerful and is likely more expensive.

There's always remote desktop from your laptop to the powerful desktop but then that requires 2 pieces of kit and personally I don't like it as if there are connection issues on either side your productivity is ruined.

COYW

Malice wrote: »

Out of curiosity and because I don't think it really warrants its own thread, how many of you listen to music while working? Unless I'm on a call or talking to someone I'll nearly always have my headphones on. I find it does a good job of blocking out all the distracting office background noise.

In my last job, I used headphones a fair bit and it was great. To be fair, it was a pretty quiet office anyway. Current place is a lot more lively with lots of people yapping all day. At the start I put in my headphones to allow me to concentrate but remarks were passed that it was an ignorant thing to do, so I had to stop.

BostonB

The ignorant thing is to be yapping all day when people are trying to work. The odd chat is fine. But some people never stop. I use headphones a fair bit, I'm much more productive with them as I have no distractions.

As for working from home, I can do it for a while but I miss the social interaction of people at work. I remote into my desktop machine. The connection can be a bit slow. My UPC connection is pretty poor. The other side is tend to start much earlier if working from home. Even with small kids at home its far less distracting than the usual office buzz.

Malice

COYW wrote: »

remarks were passed that it was an ignorant thing to do, so I had to stop.

Wow, sounds like a lovely environment to work in. You have my sympathy. Surely it's far more ignorant to be "passing remarks" about a co-worker? If the music was so loud it was distracting people nearby and you couldn't hear your desk phone or something then maybe they'd have a case for telling you to turn it down. Otherwise surely it's none of anyone's business what you're doing once the work is getting done and you're not distracting anyone.

I remember a friend telling me before that they couldn't wear headphones because they shared floor space with sales people who were on the phone all day and got jealous when my friend put on headphone in an attempt to block out the incessant sales calls. His boss took the view that it wasn't fair on the other employees if the developers got "special treatment".

Evil Phil

Malice wrote: »

I remember a friend telling me before that they couldn't wear headphones because they shared floor space with sales people who were on the phone all day and got jealous when my friend put on headphone in an attempt to block out the incessant sales calls. His boss took the view that it wasn't fair on the other employees if the developers got "special treatment".

I was put on the floor with sales people many years ago, couldn't get a damn thing done with all the banter going on. Wrong place to seat a dev, but they listened to me and moved to another floor. Actually, they moved me into a store room for 2 weeks until a desk was free. The sales people thought this was hilarious, I actually managed to get some work done so I didn't mind. I was kind of funny.

Ludo

COYW wrote: »

In my last job, I used headphones a fair bit and it was great. To be fair, it was a pretty quiet office anyway. Current place is a lot more lively with lots of people yapping all day. At the start I put in my headphones to allow me to concentrate but remarks were passed that it was an ignorant thing to do, so I had to stop.

Jeez...I find that incredible. I couldn't work without having music on. I wear headphones a lot as does nearly everyone in all the development companies I have worked for.

As for working from home....I think it does work as long as the person is in the office at least a couple of days a week. I personally don't think someone working from home permanently when the rest of the team is in the office works that well. There is nothing like talking to people face to face and working through issues on a whiteboard etc etc. Online meetings work most of the time but not as well as everyone sitting down together.

The company I work for currently give the "architects" laptops rather than desktops as they are allowed work from home from time to time. During the last couple of cold weather snaps, the boss was nice enough to email them telling them to stay at home as it was too dangerous to drive...the rest of us plebs were expected to turn up in the office. Well screw that. I demanded VPN access and a laptop when I was due a new pc last month. They finally relented and gave in. Worked from home only twice since then while working on design/documentation and found it much better but I would still want to be in the office during development time.

jester77

My company are nice and flexible, they allowed me do remote office from Oz a good few times last year (gf was living there). But I prefer to be in the office, miss the banter plus our agile board is all sticky notes (old school ) so not so easy interact with it from the house