[simonsarris]

The article does a good job of going over a few (seemingly obvious) biases, but I also expected an honest discussion of job duties (implicit or explicit) that get missed when one works from home. I'm disappointed that part of the topic was skipped.

I know the HN crowd is fairly pro- working from home, and I am too, but I was wondering if some of the more experienced (than myself) people here could chime in with examples of implicit/explicit things that are "missed" when team members work from home.

The only major one I can think of is mentoring, of new hires and interns, which seems to be done much better in person than over email. I would think that mentoring these two groups is an implicit duty in most companies, but it would seemingly always fall on the backs of those who are not working from home.

I would also think that actually being there in person for new hires and interns also helps shape company culture for those people, or otherwise make them feel like more of a team. I suppose that all of this could be mitigated by not working from home for the first month+ of interns/new hires starting.

[suresk]

Personally, I overwhelmingly dislike working from home, although it is nice to have the option to do so occasionally when I'm sick, waiting for something to be delivered to my house, the weather is poor, etc..

The main ways I think it is harder for you to contribute remotely are:

1) Whiteboard sessions

I've spent a lot of time sitting around a whiteboard, talking out a (software) design for something and collaboratively working it out on the board. I've yet to see software that can come close to this, and even those that sort of do involve a bit of overhead vs just walking into an empty conference room.

2) Debugging/working through things on someone else's machine

Sometimes you can solve a problem or work through some design much more quickly by just sitting down at a computer with someone and walking through the code. This is certainly possible to do remotely, but it always feels a lot more clunky, and I tend to avoid it.

3) Office talk

Not office gossip, but simply overhearing co-workers talking about something and either learning something or offering them a better way to do it. This adds happens fairly frequently in my experience, and it is hard to duplicate remotely.

Sure, if you have everyone working remotely, you can invest time to figure out ways to mitigate these losses, but if it is just one or two people working from home full-time, I think either way you are adding less net value than if you were there in person, all else being equal.

[mechanical_fish]

Agreed so far.

What's wrong with working from home?

When the CEO brings guests to the office so that they can "meet the team", you're never there. When the guests ask about your project, someone else on your team will represent you.

When your manager is muttering jokes to the team during the design meeting, you won't hear those jokes. Some of the jokes may involve the projects that are already being discussed in other parts of the company but which haven't yet officially arrived on your team's radar: You will tend to be the last to find out about those projects.

When one of your direct reports is fighting back tears, you won't see those tears.

When the VIP, whose schedule is booked so tightly that you can't get a meeting, is hanging out in the kitchen at the end of the day, you're not there to talk to her for five minutes.

Every time you present something, you'll be unable to see your audience's reactions in real-time, you won't see their raised hands, the remote slideshow software will take five minutes to launch, and the high-latency phone connection will drop at least once.

Now, I've worked at a company with a lot of remote employees, and a good company and a good manager who are conscious of these difficulties can compensate for a lot of this. But you're still playing at a higher difficulty level than everyone else.

[worldvoyageur]

The two parent comments from suresk and mechanical_fish are exactly right about the real, though unquantifiable benefits of being in close proximity to peers and bosses.

I work for a large organization with a big head office and dozens of smaller offices around the world.

I've received more than my fair share of promotions. However, of twenty two years in the same organization I've worked in eight different cities in three countries, eighteen years out of and four years in head office. Despite being consistently ambitious, every single one of my promotions was from my two stints in head office. And my organization prides itself in believing it has an uncompromisingly objective and merit based promotion process.

At best, rigorous reward systems will dampen the natural human bias toward the people you see every day. Humans are wired to be tribal and to coalese into groups. Plus, as the parent comments illustrate, there are actual benefits to being in close proximity that can't be replicated remotely. Were it not so, urban real estate would be no more expensive than rural and there would be no cities.

This is not necessarily a bug that needs to be fixed. Rather, it is a feature of the system to understand and use.

If ambition/money is high on your list of priorities, then work in close physical proximity to your peers and bosses.

If other things in life are higher on your list of priorities, accept that you are making a trade-off that is right for you. Work remotely and don't be surprised that the physical rewards fall disproportionately on those who work in court around the king. You have chosen different rewards.

[bstpierre]

> If other things in life are higher on your list of priorities, accept that you are making a trade-off that is right for you. [...] You have chosen different rewards.

Yes! I used to work with someone who, when someone suggested, "That's a career-limiting move", would say, "I don't want a career, I want a job." (He is a brilliant engineer, by the way.) His point was that he had other goals than promotions. Having that job was simply his way of having enough money to fund the toys that made his life fun.

Years ago I made a choice to move to a rural area; there are no decent tech jobs within a 1 hour commute. On occasion I've had to work away from home for extended periods, but for the most part I've been a full-time telecommuter. I drive a couple of hours to an office to spend a day every other week, or once a month, depending on the organization. I'm "missing out" on advancing my career, but the money is still decent, I get to put my kids to bed every night, I can water the garden at lunchtime -- and pick a fresh salad, etc.

[JoshTriplett]

Everything you just wrote applies to working from home when other people don't. Very little of it applies to working from home along with everyone else.

If most of your company/team goes to work in person at the same site, you'll miss out on some things by not doing so. If most of your company/team works in a distributed fashion, you can do the same without missing out. Prisoner's dilemma. :)

[adrianhoward]

Everything you just wrote applies to working from home when other people don't. Very little of it applies to working from home along with everyone else.

It still applies - it just applies to everybody. The disadvantages are still there if everybody has 'em :-)

[kamaal]

I guess working from home, you miss the 'Human Network'.

Painters, mathematicians, writers, programmers all need the 'Human Network'. But when they actually work on their 'real work', they crave and long for isolation. Undisturbed time(Tuits: Uninterrupted stretches of time), devoid of any distractions, disturbance- time all alone for themselves to produce something awesome.

[mechanical_fish]

You need both time alone to work, and time with other people.

There's also something to be said for doing both at once. My term for that is ambient sociability: Sit in the corner of the coffeeshop or the library, where there are people around, but not too noisy, and none of them focused on you, and none of them likely to disturb you.

[otoburb]

Mentoring is a funny one. It's much easier to mentor somebody who is local to the city, especially where the article implies a scenario where workers who telecommute are the exception rather than the rule.

However, I find that within field organizations (Sales, Services and Support), where working remotely is the norm, mentoring is easily achievable by spending quality, productive time in-your-virtual-face. Personal (i.e. non-intimate but beyond strictly professional) relationships can still be formed (and often do) but simply take longer.

Also, mentoring shouldn't be done over email, but over the phone and via WebEx/GoInstant. As you point out, email is the worst possible medium to mentor somebody. In our organization, if you attempt to pass off emails as 'mentoring' then you're in for bummer ratings during your quarterly calibration and review sessions.

To answer your original question, a few things that may be missed by team members who occasionally telecommute:

1) Sense of time and punctuality: The sense of time is important because people aren't generally wired to think about different timezones or lunchtimes when scheduling meetings or dialing out. And punctuality usually suffers when you don't make a conscious effort to always heed your 10-15 reminder warnings.

2) Picking up the phone: Onsite staff never seem to have a problem picking up the phone and talking to somebody (even for 10seconds). Maybe it's the close proximity and the option of being able to saunter over in case the phone call doesn't work out. Or the proximity of the lunch room or water cooler. But once these occasional telecommuters are home, it's as if they go into hermit mode and default to pure email. The irony should be obvious -- when you're working remotely, you should usually rely MORE on ad hoc phone calls vs. IM/emails to maintain the sense your sense of connectedness.

3) Productivity: This is the least reliable and is more tightly correlated with how social somebody's job needs to be in the office, but I often find that productivity drops for occasional telecommuters because they haven't been conditioned to fight against the usual distractions at home, such as losing track of time while in the zone (#1), napping & surfing (tied at #2), television/movies (#3), chores (#4), etc. You'd think that somebody would be MORE productive when they're in the zone and not answering IM/email/phone, and I'd answer that for a narrow subset of jobs this is true; but the majority of tasks often involve interaction with other parts of the organization or with customers, in which case all-day zone marathons are a net productivity killer when more than 2 people wasted their time waiting/pinging/fretting/bottlenecked by you.

The above 3 problems typically only happen to staff that only occasionally work from home. Regular remote workers typically don't exhibit the behaviours above because these slip-ups are more noticeable to other staff (both remote and onsite) when they happen on a regular basis.

EDIT: grammar

[reedlaw]

There's certainly a trade-off between having the convenience to talk to someone next to you and having a distraction-free environment. Working from home I enjoy hours of coding in the zone that makes me much more productive than in the office. On the other hand, in the office I enjoy hearing about the latest trends in technology and being able to rack brains with someone else on a tough problem. But working in an open office where others can similarly interrupt you is not ideal, so I advocate having personal offices along with shared spaces.