I like to think that managers who can't manage people who are working from home are bad managers.

In my former job, I had to take sick-leave one time because my wife's pregnancy wasn't going as planned and she had to be admitted to hospital. I had to be at home to watch over our oldest one (3 years old at the time). It was a bad time because we had several major projects going on at the same time and all the work culminated in this period. So I organized a VPN connection to our company network from my home PC and managed to setup the ODBC connections I needed. Luckily, the company had installed web-based e-mail a few weeks before and I was allowed an account. For three weeks, I did all the work I would normally do at the office just using MS Query. In fact, I got more of the structural work done because nobody was bugging me with issues all day and I was able to save those things for the evening hours. When I came back to the office, I discussed this with my manager but there was no way to convince him. He just didn't TRUST me doing my job remote and he wasn't able to define the criteria whether or not I had been productive enough.

And that's the whole thing: It all depends on defining the right goals and the right criteria to measure if these goals are met.Typically, salespeople are allowed to work from home easier. Not just because they need to be mobile, but also because it's easy for them to demonstrate their effectiveness. Sales and profit are being measured everywhere. How do you define the effectiveness of a DBA ?

A second point here is that salespeople are more used to having to account for their well doing. They can sell themselves as easy as the products or services they're selling. For us techies, that's not really part of our nature, at least not for most of us.