| I've been working from home now for 6 years. I agree with all that you have said, but I do see negatives more prominently, so I'll list those as a balance point. Keep in mind as you read these that I live more than a day away from where I work, so that adds an isolation factor that not all home-workers will suffer. 1. Probably the biggest thing I miss is the informal conversations. The hallway conversations. I've become very detached from what is going on in my department, and I no longer have the pulse of what is going on. I used to occasionally stop by my manager's office and chat for a few minutes, just an informal query of how business is going, what I've been doing, toss out some wacky ideas for improving things, etc... A phone conversation is simply not the same. 2. I miss going somewhere else to work. I can occasionally rectify this by going to panera's or a coffee shop, but it's not practical to do if I'm going to be having meetings that day. And I do get random calls from coworkers and managers... 3. I have become a bit of a recluse. I have this as a natural tendency to begin with, but now that I work from home, I don't even have work to get me out of the house. |
Another downside that gets me sometimes is that I miss shared whiteboards. I'm a pretty visual/physical thinker. It's nice to have a whiteboard you can both see. We mostly supplement w/ screen sharing or SMSing iphone images of sketches. It works but it's not ideal. One of the things I'd love to work on someday is tools to make remote-work better/easier. For instance, I think it's rad that many of the 37signals folks work remotely and build tools that scratch that particular itch.