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by tallanvor
5332 days ago
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The problem is these people are only thinking about themselves, and not considering the affects of their actions on coworkers. They need to understand how to be a member of the team first, and after that they'll understand how much flexibility in terms of devices, working hours, and location is appropriate. My office lets people have too much flexibility when choosing their work hours and location. --It's not that people don't work hard, but when you have inexperienced people coming in at noon, that ends up being several hours of time that they're working in the evening without being able to get help from more experienced people. If I had a dollar for every time I found out a coworker struggled for hours on an issue only to have me or another more experienced person provide an answer in 5 minutes, well, I'd have a much healthier retirement account. Working remotely is also difficult as it can be much harder to properly explain things when you're not able to sit next to each other, point things out, and even grab a piece of paper to sketch stuff out in order to clarify things. |
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I am near the start of my career (3 years in or so) as a programmer, and I spent much of the first part of that working remotely. Though I enjoyed not having to get dressed and drive in traffic to be at the office by 8am, this severely stunted the development of my work skills. Now, when I was working for a startup, I would spend hours and hours at home on projects and remained fairly disciplined, but that was due to the passion I felt for my work. When that startup folded I had to enter the regular workforce for financial reasons, and I found it much harder to be motivated about what I was doing. When working remotely, I found myself constantly distracted and unfocused, and even though I felt I had fairly strong communications skills, my ability to communicate with co-workers did not develop.
There are numerous problems with younger employees working remotely, but the way it stunts one's development as a professional is probably the worst. Now that I'm in an office, I am constantly exposed not only to people more knowledgeable than I, but also people who have learned how to be a professional and how to work in a team.
One thing in particular that struck me is that I didn't really know how to behave in an office. True, there are a lot of ways that the modern office is kind of depressing, but developing decent working relationships based on mutual respect with your co-workers does a lot to make a workplace tolerable and even enjoyable. This respect is not developed in most cases unless you actually observe and learn some office behavioral norms.
Working remotely can be awesome, and stodgy companies should learn that flexibility has its advantages. But these advantages are often strongest for experienced employees who know how to organize themselves and motivate themselves to get a job done wherever they are for little reason other than professional pride and a paycheck.