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by sreyaNotfilc 5099 days ago
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.
1 comments
bradfa 5099 days ago
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.

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