Working from home

[dolphins4life]

How many of you do it right now?

I can't for either of my jobs.

Also, if you could work from home, why wouldn't you do it all the time?

[fyo]

How many of you do it right now?

I can't for either of my jobs.

Also, if you could work from home, why wouldn't you do it all the time?

If I lived alone, sure, it might be nice sometimes, but I really don't like working from home.

1. Too many distractions. I have small kids and even when they know Dad is working, I inevitably wind up being disturbed by them.

2. Intelligent adult contact. Having been forced to spend the past couple of weeks trying to work from home surrounded by my kids, I really miss interacting with adults. And when my wife comes home from working at the hospital, well, our needs aren't quite the same.

3. Efficiency. There are times when I'm more efficient at home, but a big part of my "output" at work is making sure other people work well, either by helping them understand/solve some issue or just taking it off their plate and doing it myself. In the office, I can tell when someone starts to get frustrated and jump in before they get completely bogged down. When everyone is working from home, that's just not possible. I also can't use body language to assess whether someone actually understands what I'm trying to explain to them. Often people are hesitant to admit they don't understand verbally, but show it clearly in body language. Also, if I need "just someone" to do something *right now*, or if I help myself, I just look around the office and see who isn't in the middle of something. In my experience, people are productive in bursts and I'd rather not interrupt the one person actually getting something done. Better to interrupt the one who's been grumbling over the same thing for a while and has gotten up to get coffee half a dozen times.

4. Related to #3, communication. I use a lot of body language when communicating with people. Hand waving, pointing at lines of code etc. The collaborative tools just aren't there at this point. I expect this pandemic will result in improvements, but that's of little help right now.

[Fau Teixeira]

I work from home, my kid is 7 so he's fairly self sufficient with the online schooling he's doing. His class even had a video conference yesterday.

My job was mostly code and helping others code. With working from home, that's gone from a 40-60 split to more of an 90-10 split now .. which i find to be great for me personally. I find that I've missed getting my hands on code to this extent.

My wife is wonderful, but we've both been missing human contact, and adult conversation. I've heard all her stories and she's heard all of mine. She told me i needed to get kidnapped so i had a new story to tell. Last week my neighbor stood in his driveway and I stood in mine and we had drinks and chatted from about 10 feet away from each other. It was very this:

[Pappy13]

How many of you do it right now?

I can't for either of my jobs.

Also, if you could work from home, why wouldn't you do it all the time?

I worked from home occasionally before the current situation started, typically because I had a doctors appointment or needed to run an errand near my home and commuting to and from work made that difficult or maybe my wife was out of town and I needed to take care of my dogs and again because of the distance I couldn't just run home for lunch or something, etc.

I don't do it everyday because I don't need to do it every day and because my employer would much rather see me sitting at my desk at the office. Not my manager mind you who has absolutely no problem with me working from home, but upper management can't get used to the idea that people can actually perform their jobs equally as well from home as they can from the office. My manager KNOWS that I do.

My kids are all grown and out of the house, so I don't have that distraction. I have an office at home where I go and can shut the door to avoid distractions as well if I'm on a conference call or the like. My wife will only occasionally bother me while I'm working and only for something small, nothing that would take away from my working for an extended period of time. So basically me working from home is pretty much exactly like it is working at the office. Most of the people that I work with I don't see them face to face even when I'm at the office. We communicate largely through e-mail, chat, slack or teams and conference calls because we don't all work in the same building, same city or even the same country. My company could save some money just allowing me to work from home every day and if they would, I would do that except for those few times that I actually do need to be in the office, but the US for the most part has not yet accepted what much of the rest of the world has.

[Dave Gray]

I am working from home now and loving it.  The job is slightly harder to accomplish because of the technology mechanics.  But it's minimal. 

But the benefit of cutting out all that extra time in the morning means there's so much more work:bullshit ratio that it's insane.  I feel like my day is 5 hours longer.

[Tenshot13]

I wish I could work from home...

[Phishfan]

I worked at home  exclusively for about 10 years. It isn't possible with my current job. Sometimes I miss it but human interaction is good too.

[Brian Fein]

I'm working from home right now and extremely thankful to be able to do so.  I am a lot more efficient working from home, despite the perception that people at home screw off more.  Quite the contrary.  I feel like at home, the day flies by and often times I find myself working later and taking fewer breaks.

[fyo]

I work from home, my kid is 7 so he's fairly self sufficient with the online schooling he's doing. His class even had a video conference yesterday.

That describes my 6-year-old not one bit. He requires near-constant attention if he is to do anything sensible.

My job was mostly code and helping others code. With working from home, that's gone from a 40-60 split to more of an 90-10 split now .. which i find to be great for me personally. I find that I've missed getting my hands on code to this extent.

That describes my job and my experience pretty well. The problem is that although I'm more efficient when coding than our average, overall team productivity is way down. I may be churning out more lines of code, but since I'm not managing and helping everyone else, average output is down from most others.

And, frankly, code quality isn't doing too hot either. I blame the lack of a sounding board when deciding how to tackle a problem. People seem way more reluctant to ask for help/advice/feedback in writing that face-to-face, where they can modify their questions mid-sentence depending on non-verbal cues.

How do you handle not helping as much? Or are you just that efficient yourself that you can make up for those you would've spent time on in the office?

[Fau Teixeira]

How do you handle not helping as much? Or are you just that efficient yourself that you can make up for those you would've spent time on in the office?

My company laid off most of our developer staff, the only ones left are seniors and they don't need hands held as much.

[fyo]

My company laid off most of our developer staff, the only ones left are seniors and they don't need hands held as much.

Ahh, well, that will do it, I guess :-(

[CF DolFan]

I worked at home  exclusively for about 10 years. It isn't possible with my current job. Sometimes I miss it but human interaction is good too.

My wife has worked from home about 8 years now. Last year she started with a company that has them come in to the the local office one day a week (except for the current situation). She has several former coworkers who are here as well.  She has enjoyed the interactions and going to lunch with friends that she had been missing but gets to stay home as well.