[fleitz]

Working from home reduces visibility, you don't work from home to make more and get promoted, you work from home to avoid the retardation of a commute, busy work, excessive meetings, etc.

You work from home so you can put in 2 hours work, accomplish as much as anyone else did and spend the remaining 6 enjoying your life.

I'm pretty sure that everyone who decides to work from home did so for quality of life reasons rather than climbing the corporate ladder reasons.

[umjames]

Thank you, I'm glad I'm not the only one who sees the benefits.

It's true, some jobs are soul-crushing enough that you'd rather not be there. You might have family and/or financial responsibilities that make you have to keep such a job. You may be bootstrapping a business on the side so you can escape from such a job, but in the meantime, you still need your regular paycheck.

Not every job has you working with self-motivated co-workers and great bosses. Some jobs put you in a cube farm in a room where everyone fights over the thermostat. Sometimes you have to head a weekly meeting where you have to explain to other programmers why you get NullPointerExceptions on line 5 when line 4 initializes the variable to null. Some jobs still make you use CVS. The office talk at some jobs is never about learning anything, but it sure is loud and distracting.

If you were offered a chance to work from home and avoid a lot of that, I'm sure you'd also jump at the opportunity. Getting a promotion in such a job isn't worth it.

[monksy]

That can actually turn into a good thing. When you're not facing the other person, you should become better and better at communicating what exactly is the issue. At the very worse this leaves a paper trail that can indicate "see I worked on this"

[otoburb]

Absolutely agree with this. Two sides of the spectrum:

1) I've noticed that of all the remote positions in various departments, marketing is the one that is almost always co-lo. They tend to have the most say in product direction (duh) and in turn strategic, company-wide policy changes.

2) Sales is the counter-example here. I've seen talented remote sales people rapidly and deservedly climb the corporate ladder. However, the catch is that they tend to have brutal travel schedules (which they'd probably have anyway if they were in corporate HQ), so it's arguable whether they are reaping the same benefits of working from home as other remote workers.

[rogerbinns]

Note that sales people are usually trivial to measure. Look at their quota and their sales and you are pretty much done. With other departments it is considerably harder.

[otoburb]

I agree with your basic premise that it's harder to objectively measure other departments as easily as sales quotas and top-line revenues.

However, I'd like to provide some additional metrics that I know other field organizations [have] use[d] (including ours):

Services - Professional Services (PS) margin, bookings, customer satisfaction scores, normalized mean project completions, budget ($ or hrs) actuals vs. estimates

Support - mean time ticket resolution, ticket volume, Maintenance & Support (M&S) margin, cust sat scores, # feature enhancements

You and every other HN reader know that all metrics are flawed in some way, but I'd still like to point out that although Sales quotas are easily judged, many organizations struggle to quickly/easily quantify the frequency with which sales people sacrifice longer-term sales for short-term quarterly wins.

[sreyaNotfilc]

Yes. I love being able to sleep in and avoid meetings.

It takes me an 1 1/2 hours to commute into work. By that time, I'm exhausted from dealing with traffic. Next, you have to deal with coworkers and their noise noise noise. Everyone wants to small chat at my job. That's fine, but don't hang around my desk and try to get my attention while I'm staring down a bug (death stare). Its rude and I can't concentrate.

As a software engineer, I try to avoid as many meetings as possible. I just want to build the things that are needed to be built. Avoiding meetings helps with that for two reasons... 1) You have more time to work on a task 2) You don't have to break your thought pattern to fixing a bug/solving a problem

As you said, with telecommuting you get more done with less time. Its basically a daily mini hack-a-thon in your living room/Starbucks. I normally get in about 2-5 hours of solid developing. It really depends on the task and when I can review the changes to my boss for the final push. The rest of the time I can relax and think out the problems.

At work, I just can't concentrate that well. You're stuck at one location for 8 hours. At the same time, you just want to go home. With telecommuting, I can wake up later (which makes me more alert), work for a few hours, relax, and come back to the problem when I have those occasional "eureka!" moments.

Now, I like to say that working at home is the be all end all. I still need to show up to push code to production. I still occasionally need to talk to staff about what projects should be next on the list. But, if your main job requires you to just be imaginative and churn out code, then being isolated is where its at.

[bradfa]

You're stuck at one location for 8 hours. At the same time, you just want to go home.

I think this is a big deal. You feel stuck. You want to go home. When you're already home, there's not usually an urge to go to the office, you're already where you want to be. Also, if you do feel an urge to go somewhere, if you're at home already it's much less guilt inducing to head to Starbucks for an hour or two than it is to leave work to go to Starbucks for some time.

[pwaring]

"You work from home so you can put in 2 hours work, accomplish as much as anyone else did"

Agreed. I'm the only technical person in the company - if I went into the office every day I would spend half my time being asked to fix printers, 'can you just take a quick look at this?' etc. which would kill my productivity.

The other problem for me with 'being seen' is that I spend a lot of my time planning relative to writing code - e.g. for a major project I might spend half the time thinking about how to break down the problem into chunks which can be dealt with individually, then chaining them together for the final result. From an outsider's point of view, it would look like I was just sitting at a desk doodling all day. So it's actually better for me to announce a new feature every so often, because that output looks productive, whereas the process of producing it doesn't.

Having done home and in-office working, I've found that if it's a company of engineers (including managers with that background) then I prefer working the office, because I get to converse with like-minded people, and they understand that sometimes days can go by without churning out vast quantities of code. If I'm working for a company where the technical side is less central, then working from home tends to win out.

[jere]

Agreed. The topic of a more liberal teleworking schedule came up at work recently. It seemed widely agreed upon that working from home would be for those people who are happy where they are on the ladder already and don't intend to move up.

[otoburb]

Unless you have a unique culture that was founded by remote workers (admittedly rare), or you have a large enough company that needs to have a sizable field organization.

I guess this is why living close to work combined with a flexible teleworking schedule would be the best of both worlds. You'd at least get the option of dialing up the social hobnobbing on an 'as needed' basis.

[gwern]

> I'm pretty sure that everyone who decides to work from home did so for quality of life reasons rather than climbing the corporate ladder reasons.

Which alone might cause the observed penalty: by opting for telecommuting, you are indicating you are a slacker and disloyal.

[paulsutter]

If these tactics work, you are working for a shitty company and need to find a better employer.

[paulsutter]

The original post got edited, so now my comment doesn't make sense - apologies.