I Only Work Remotely

One of the opening lines resonated with me:<p><pre><code> &quot;...I cannot trust employers to provide me with an adequate work environment.&quot; </code></pre> This is becoming more and more the default position, especially in the contract market.<p>A recent contract I had, had quite poor office space - small old desks, old 17&quot; monitors, no personal storage, chairs in poor repair, and a badly working hot-desk system (I have yet to encounter &#x27;working&#x27; hot-desking). As a designer, I was expected to work on these 17&quot; monitors (or 15&quot; laptop screens) do multiple large document work, and loads of complex diagrams in Visio. Not a fun experience.<p>In comparison, my home office contains an executive office chair bought to my specifications, a large desk laid out just for me, and a nice 24&quot; 1920x1200 monitor (soon to be replaced with a 27&quot; 2456x1440 one). I have Skype for audio and video calls, and my kitchen has food and drink in it that I actually like.<p>When I&#x27;m in the zone, and working from home, my productivity is doubled compared to working in a poor open plan environment, so where I can, I request work from home arrangements in my contracts.<p>Like the author of the article, I too am not a morning person - people may scoff at this, but it&#x27;s a real thing. Before noon I am almost useless, the proverbial bear with a sore head. Once the sun is past the yard arm however, my focus kicks in, and I can power through my tasks until about 8pm-10pm. It&#x27;s a full working day, just offset.<p>I don&#x27;t really know the point I&#x27;m making here... but I do empathise heavily with the article author.

So to provide another point of view...<p>I worked exclusively from home for two years. The cabin fever was so bad I couldn&#x27;t take it anymore. I may be in the minority for programmers but I need other people around and I need the energy of an office.<p>From a management standpoint. A good whiteboard session goes a long way to kill communication issues on projects that are creative or not 100% straightforward. Although, of course, you don&#x27;t need to be in the office &quot;every&quot; day for that.

<i>&gt; I am a night owl. You can tell me I have to have my butt in a chair within your line of sight at 8 or 9am, but that is very wasteful.</i><p>This used to be me and I used to believe it was just the way things were. I&#x27;d naturally sleep 10+ hours until noon on the weekends, struggle to wake up for work, and then struggle to fall asleep before midnight. I had little energy for exercise and always felt stressed trying to find the time to stay on top of all of my other responsibilities.<p>But the truth is, it&#x27;s perfectly possible for anyone to adjust their sleep schedule and become a morning person. It just takes some conscious effort and the will-power to suffer through a week or two of re-adjustment.<p>1. Set your alarm for the same time <i>every day</i>, including weekends. Wake up as soon as it goes off and don&#x27;t snooze. Yes, it&#x27;s hard at first. But it&#x27;s not inhuman, so just deal with it. It&#x27;ll get easier.<p>2. You can have a cup or two of coffee as soon as you wake up, but no caffeine after noon.<p>3. Put down screens like phone, laptop, and TV after about 8pm. The artificial, bright light throws off off your body&#x27;s natural instinct to get sleepy when it gets dark. Spend some time preparing for the next day so you aren&#x27;t stressed in the morning, and then read a book or something until you feel tired.<p>Bonus points if you get a workout in sometime during the day. It&#x27;ll help you fall asleep earlier which will make waking up early easier. Also realize that alcohol reduces quality of sleep, so cutting back or avoiding it altogether will make waking up easier.

I have worked remotely for the better part of the last 15 years. I am now looking for a new job and am applying almost exclusively to positions that are several 100km away, if not on a different continent. The reason: the potential employer already understands that this will be a remote position. Any employer closer than 150km is just too likely to ask for &quot;can&#x27;t you just come in&quot;, and anyone 10 minutes from here will most likely not agree to remote work at all.

The &quot;I cannot trust employers&quot; statement struck me. I agree with it strongly, but react differently. Rather than dictate my working environment to people I do not trust to take care of me, I just say no. If I do not trust an employer, I am fortunate enough to have enough savings in the bank to be able to say no to the job offers and walk away until I find someone I can trust. It works well... It makes job changes take a bit longer, and the searches are difficult, but the end results are good.

It&#x27;s a comfort&#x2F;environment problem, at its core. Just like was pointed out in the article.<p>Do you know what the most popular type of monitor stand is in a major corporation? Paper reams. In fact recently where I work they came around to people with these and asked they not do it because it screws up their paper ordering&#x2F;estimation.<p>Why is this a problem? Because offices are super picky about the $100 equipment order but NOT about the $2000 plane ticket&#x2F;hotel. One is considered a necessary expense and the other is &quot;waste&quot;.<p>People are more productive when they are comfortable&#x2F;have the tools they need. The building doesn&#x27;t matter as much. Just an opinion.<p>You don&#x27;t want to allow work from home? Cool, give me my two large enough monitors, my adjustable stand, a motorized sit&#x2F;stand desk, and maybe something simple like free coffee&#x2F;soda so I&#x27;m not spending $X&#x2F;day on it. Let me come in at 10 and stay until 6 if it suits me.<p>At the office, make sure there are places I can go to escape from noise when I need to. What would even be MORE awesome is if you somehow worked it out if I could get a discount on noise cancelling headphones.<p>Pretty simple stuff, and really at the core of what is written here. The title is just meant to infuriate some of you.

There&#x27;s a much simpler reason that I only work remotely: companies are willing to let me.<p>I love being close to my kids, my wife, and the general comforts of a home office. There are many other reasons I prefer to work remotely. That said, if there were no companies allowing me to work this way, I wouldn&#x27;t say &quot;sorry, I only work remotely&quot; and become unemployed.

I smoke weed to get creative, drink a lot of coffee and do a lot of online meetings, have some crazy hours, but I also get my work done before(better?) everyone else.<p>I would never fit in any workplace (tried a few but none fit), I have a big chair, 3 big monitors and a bong, also can talk with my team fellows every time I want, but we really don&#x27;t need to talk too much, if you understand your product, understand your clients and your needs, that&#x27;s just not too much to talk, just hard work to do.

Formerly on medium.com and discussed a couple of times: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?query=https:%2F%2Fmedium.com%2F@yanismydj%2Fwhy-i-only-work-remotely-2e5eb07ae28f&amp;sort=byPopularity&amp;prefix&amp;page=0&amp;dateRange=all&amp;type=story" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?query=https:%2F%2Fmedium.com%2F@yani...</a><p>Primary discussion: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=13230508" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=13230508</a>

Some of us have been making these arguments for decades to little effect. The manager either has discretion to let people work at home or he&#x2F;she doesn&#x27;t. And if he&#x2F;she does it&#x27;s very much their personal preference. Rock star devs can work at home if their managers are allowed to make that decision and the rock star demands it. Most of the time it feels like a whim of management.

YES.<p>&gt;when I’m forced to be in a chair in your office at 9am:<p>&gt; - I force myself to be up early and rush to work, feeling ill prepared<p>&gt; - I try to focus and be effective in the morning, but struggle and the day is off to a bad start, killing my mood and momentum<p>&gt; - I’m tired in the afternoon and cannot work effectively at my peak work time. I drink tons of coffee trying to kickstart my productivity<p>&gt; - I go home when I’m finally starting to get going<p>&gt; - I am restless in bed and can’t sleep because I drank too much coffee and I’m worried about getting up early<p>&gt; - By the end of the week I am tired, frustrated, angry, and disappointed with my performance

The most incredible thing for me was avoiding getting sick. Been remote about 4 years now, the number of colds I get went from 2 per year to about 1 every 2 years. I shouldn&#x27;t have said that.

Employers need to take folks like this into consideration when setting their workplace policies, such as to what degree to allow flexible hours.<p>There are always trade offs. Thinking specifically about workplace hours, having at least some amount of time everyday where you know everyone will be in the same place physically has some major benefits: knowing you&#x27;ll have a chance to pair with someone, having some overlap where you get to joke a round while making coffee, perhaps eat a meal together, draw on a whiteboard (each of which have virtual alternatives that aren&#x27;t as good IMO). But if having any such constraints at all means you miss out on 5-10% of really smart creative people, is that too large a cost?

For me spending 8+hours in the office never really worked well. I&#x27;m effective for a few hours in the morning (unless interrupted by someone) and then just sit out the rest of the day pretending to be busy. For me the best part of working remote is that I can split my work day into a 2-3 chunks, few hours each. IMHO this is absolutely the most productive way to organize the time, it really helps me to stay focused through out the day. Also to be able to finish other things in life, beside work.

I feel as if I wrote this article.<p>Help I&#x27;m trapped in cubicle... and the programmer next insists on having a mechanical keyboard. (He is not old enough to remember real mechanical keyboards.)

If employers had to pay employees <i>from the time they left their front door</i>, instead of externalizing the cost to the employees, we&#x27;d find out pretty quickly just how &quot;inefficient&quot; remote working really was. That, and&#x2F;or salaries would start to compensate for real estate prices.

I currently work from home, but before I also worked in an openspace and also in the cubicle with just 4 people. I still can&#x27;t say openspace is worst... probably depends on one&#x27;s own preferences. Yes, sometimes it gets noisy and productivity goes down, but if I was stuck on something, and could just immediately get up and walk 10 meters and ask a more knowledgeable colleague made up for that.<p>But if your work is clearly defined and you have easy access to all the information, then probably yes, being completely alone is most productive for me. But for example in the past I worked on a project with ~100 other developers, and not every information required to do the job done was readily available...sometimes it was acquired only by discussing with a colleague, and doing that in person is often the quickest way.

It makes sense that the nature of management work (over-communicating) lends itself to physically connected open office areas. Of course, the other half of their job is getting out of the way of the producers. Could a manager answer a few questions I have?<p>Can you describe to me the difference between the nature of work that requires group creativity and individual focus (or rather, which employee roles fit more into one or the other)?<p>How much of each do the various roles of your employees spend their time on?<p>How much control (or influence) do your employees have over whether or not they are in an environment that suits their need for focus (and when that focus ends)?

tl;dr because he has the opportunity to.

I only work remotely. I will travel for meetings that should be face to face, but slack, skype&#x2F;hangouts, email and phone should be the main form of comms for day to day stuff. No open plans. No constant interruptions.

Kept reading until I hit<p>&gt; Remove the safety nets and let the bad actors fail<p>I like to have a safety net.

I wonder how this collides with the inane recruiting. Do you keep your mouth shut till you have the contract, then declare that you will only working remotely?

As a founder of startups, I take a bit of exception to the tonality.<p>Yes, lots of inexperienced founders&#x2F;leaders drink deep of the open office koolaid and do it wrong. But doing it right (allowing flexibility, having private spots, etc.) yields better overall results because people are more creative in groups. The chance serendipity of investigating new ideas with your fellows will always result in a better work product.

Wow, I feel like I wrote this myself. Unfortunately, I have had very little success being &quot;remote only.&quot; Maybe I&#x27;ll keep trying.

<i>I am a night owl. You can tell me I have to have my butt in a chair within your line of sight at 8 or 9am, but that is very wasteful. You are wasting my time and yours. I am not a morning person. I will start being very effective around 11am and I really get going in the afternoon&#x2F;evening.</i><p>So, er, everyone else has to be accommodating of this guy&#x27;s abnormal working hours, because the first two hours of the day that society normally considers to be working hours aren&#x27;t convenient for him?

Don&#x27;t you just love it when someone with zero direct reports thinks he can tell managers how to manage?<p>It&#x27;s a <i>job</i>, it&#x27;s not a fucking Montessori school, or a correspondence course. If you don&#x27;t want your employability to dry up once rockstar ninjas become commonplace enough that the demand bubble for them pops, you will cultivate the essential skills of showing up when and where your employer demands and otherwise being their huckleberry. Know what that means? It means someone who can be counted on. Showing up at the office on time is a first-line test of <i>dependability</i>. That&#x27;s why companies ask it of you.