June 11, 2020 at 5:44 pm
Living in a small city with not too many opportunities, I spent years trying to get people to hire a remote worker. Only one (Siemens) would even consider that, and interviewed me. I read an editorial in a magazine (don't remember which, it was my husbands, and this was the mid 2000s) from a company that wanted more H1B visas because they could not find American developers, and threatened to hire a Mexican remote company. I wrote directly to him, and he said the job could not be worked remotely (even though he was willing to hire remote workers from another country).
At my current job, I was able to work remotely for a month, then called back. A few people at my job are, but it's been made clear that is only because of childcare and remote school issues. Too many bosses still want to see butts in chairs. I hope it changes. It's too late for me (almost 60 and eroded skills from working a general IT job in a small company - I change out more monitors than I write queries), but I hope the change comes.
June 11, 2020 at 6:35 pm
I've been working from home for four years now, and I think it's more about your management comfort level and the specific people involved that drive this decision. My manager and her manager are also work from home, so they're comfortable with it, and we're all "get the job done, regardless of the time spent" kind of people.
The VP is not. She was willing to entertain the idea, but then we had three people in a row that were remote just totally wreck the optics of work from home. one, decided to just stop doing his job. Completely. Think there may have been some mental health issues there too that needed addressed, but that didn't help my case. Second, decided to move BEFORE asking if he could go remote, and...well, that didn't go over well. Don't know why he thought it would.
Last guy, well, this one is just unbelievable, but he was working for a competitor the WHOLE TIME he was with us. Like a couple of years. working two jobs, both remote.
So now, although I'm not getting called back in, nobody is allowed to be remote that isn't already remote.
Me, I don't care about seeing people face to face. Hate traveling, means I have to leave my family and I get zero, zilch, zip from it. I work just fine through email/chat/requirements documents, and don't care about people's habits outside of work. That's just me.
However, flip side, my wife is annoyed that I'm home all the time. If I'm there, I can be expected to partake in conversation, help with the dog, make lunch, etc. Except my brain doesn't let me. I'm constantly answering "wait, what?" and getting in her way, having to rush off to meetings, etc. Once there is a vaccine, I'll probably be going to the library for a couple days a week just to get out of the way.
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June 11, 2020 at 6:42 pm
David.Poole wrote:Still wearing SQLBits clothes from 2014!
That's a really long time, David. You should at least change your underwear every one or two weeks. 😀
I think that's probably enough conversation about David's bits
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June 11, 2020 at 6:45 pm
The office cost is the big item, and I think it's like the cloud v my data center. If I own the data center and equipment, not sure the cloud is helpful, certainly not in the short term. However, if I need to build new space out or buy new equipment, costs change.
For a company that has a building, like Redgate, is this cheaper? Not really. We have IT staff supporting equipemnt + more VPN/networking, we have to ensure we have more bandwidth in the office. Well, not really because most of our stuff is in AWS, but some isn't. However, we were thinking to expand to a new, larger building. I think that longer term decision has been affected and is being questioned. Do we want to spend a lot rather than ahving more people work at home, or rotate who is at home? I wonder.
June 11, 2020 at 6:49 pm
Re: the value of a commute.
In 2002, I was looking for a job. Just prior to starting to work FT for SSC. At the time, I interviewed with a lot of orgs, and had a really nice one with a company in Denver. They are a large US org that many of you have heard of. They have an interesting business and I was excited about the position. However, I lived about 20mi from downtown and this would be an easy 40+ minute commute. Longer with public transport, but cheaper, or more expensive if I drove.
The salary was competitive with where I was, and I wanted the job, but not the commute. My kids were 2, 5, and 12. I had a long discussion with the VP for tech, and told him I'd take $15k less (I think this was around 80-90k offer at the time) if I could work at home 4 days a week and come in once. I'd come in if we really needed it, but overall, I didn't want to drive every day.
He countered with full salary, 1 day a week. He wouldn't budge, I offered 2 days a week, but no negotiation, so I politely declined the position.
I think I underpriced the value of my commute. Maybe I should have taken $20-25 less, but in any case, I'd have likely quit the next year anyway.
June 11, 2020 at 7:04 pm
I think I underpriced the value of my commute. Maybe I should have taken $20-25 less, but in any case, I'd have likely quit the next year anyway.
There's a value to eliminating the commute that cannot be measured in money - the physiological aspects of spending time in a car in traffic going 0 miles an hour each and every day! It's time spent than cannot be used for anything else. With public transportation, it helps a bit because you can read or work on a laptop somewhat. To me, that has value and is why I prefer working remotely.
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June 11, 2020 at 7:06 pm
Last guy, well, this one is just unbelievable, but he was working for a competitor the WHOLE TIME he was with us. Like a couple of years. working two jobs, both remote.
Wow, what can I say, but REALLY?? It's folks like that who will kill the concept for everyone else. I certainly hope that management realizes that one bad apple doesn't represent the whole barrel.
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June 11, 2020 at 7:11 pm
My husband calls it the <name of our city> discount. I have a 4 mile, 10 minute drive. Anywhere in town would be less than 30 minutes. My husband works 150 miles away and we have to rent an apartment across the street from his workplace. But he still makes much more money than he could in our town, even with commute + apartment. So that's probably $15,000, not counting auto depreciation (his last car had almost 300,000 miles in 14 years). He gets to work 1 day a week. I was single mom during the week. He's been there....not even sure, 20 years? He's worked in the remote city (different employers) our whole dating and marriage, and we just had 21 year anniversary. Now he's working from home during the pandemic.
June 12, 2020 at 12:45 am
jonathan.crawford wrote:Last guy, well, this one is just unbelievable, but he was working for a competitor the WHOLE TIME he was with us. Like a couple of years. working two jobs, both remote.
Wow, what can I say, but REALLY?? It's folks like that who will kill the concept for everyone else. I certainly hope that management realizes that one bad apple doesn't represent the whole barrel.
Honestly though, why would you care? Assuming they aren't moving IP/business from one to the other. If someone wants to get two jobs done, and they do, are you really upset? It sounds bad, but plenty of people moonlight, heck I do it with coaching. As long as someone performs and meets the goals set out for them, I'm not sure I'd complain.
June 12, 2020 at 7:54 am
I have refused to interview for remote positions. I have looked for years for a job with (a) a team of fellow developers of at least 4 and (b) a handy commute from home... and then found it last year. Now, here in the UK, it will probably not happen again for a decade. Top Tip: don't invest in shares in office space/rentals. Oh, and I'm a developer that's an occasional DBA.
I predict that (ok, again in the UK if not the US) that remote working, for software development, will follow the same cycle as outsourcing does: it starts with everyone happily saving maybe $2K a year on commuting from affordable housing, but over time the communication issues will start to dominate until the team is brought back under the roof... only to gradually go back to being remote as the people change and forget the lesson learnt.
The reasons why working from home is not good for software development? Many of the same as why out sourcing doesn't work: communication. It's fine if you've already been at the company for years, authored most of the code and know it inside out. But for newer staff the experience is constantly frustrating: whereas once you could just call someone over to explain something when they went for coffee, now your 'seniors' are way too busy to get back to you on whatever tool you're using (slack, hangouts, etc) possibly for days... code reviews are weeks after you've done the work, and I've ended up writing quite extensive notes on my decisions because they will be challenged in a review that takes place when you're working on something quite different and forgotten all about it. The synergy of a team working together, bouncing ideas off each-other, and supporting each-other through the emotional roller-coaster of coding is gone. The chilling out and defusing of frustration together over lunch or even the pub, is all gone. Separating home and work life is difficult; the distractions/interruptions means it takes 10 hours to get 8 hours work done. Then I finish late, then work life stuff is not done timely and it's another late night, and the weekends turn into one long rush of chores.
What I forgot, when I thought I had found the perfect job, was that it was not about how good my commute was, but about my team mate's commutes (mostly 2 hours with changes from public transport to walking, or parking 20 mins walk outside the town's parking zones), and they were not good enough. Initially the WFH got me quite down, but the world moves on and you have to make the most of it.
So... not quite the same experience as most of you.
June 12, 2020 at 12:33 pm
Honestly though, why would you care? Assuming they aren't moving IP/business from one to the other. If someone wants to get two jobs done, and they do, are you really upset? It sounds bad, but plenty of people moonlight, heck I do it with coaching. As long as someone performs and meets the goals set out for them, I'm not sure I'd complain.
Moonlighting is different (I've done it myself) and if the person actually performed both jobs, that would be one thing. However, as the OP stated, the person completely ignored one job for another and still drew pay for the ignored job. That is completely unprofessional and just wrong!
At one time I considered taking on an additional full-time job so I could work both from home, but I could not do that if the work hours overlapped. If the second job did not have work-day hours and allowed me to work in the evenings and weekends, then that would be OK. However, I'm not sure I would be able to maintain such a pace for very long and eventually one job or the other would suffer.
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June 12, 2020 at 1:40 pm
I certainly don't recommend two jobs, and I do think if you had two dev jobs, you'd get burned out.
June 12, 2020 at 2:35 pm
The office cost is the big item, and I think it's like the cloud v my data center. If I own the data center and equipment, not sure the cloud is helpful, certainly not in the short term. However, if I need to build new space out or buy new equipment, costs change.
For a company that has a building, like Redgate, is this cheaper? Not really. We have IT staff supporting equipemnt + more VPN/networking, we have to ensure we have more bandwidth in the office. Well, not really because most of our stuff is in AWS, but some isn't. However, we were thinking to expand to a new, larger building. I think that longer term decision has been affected and is being questioned. Do we want to spend a lot rather than ahving more people work at home, or rotate who is at home? I wonder.
Very good points, Steve. I see this where I work as well. The state agency I work for owns the building I work in. So, rent isn't an issue and the properties taxes they pay would be the same whether its full or only 1% occupancy. Thus one of the biggest arguments I see for making people travel long distances to work.
But on the other hand, I also see that owning this building has resulted in putting more people into it than it's original capacity. Consequently, they've converted several offices with an open floor plan, by putting in lots of cubicles into those open areas. I've worked in one of those the last 5 years. It's noisy and very hard to concentrate, because all of my cube buddies have people coming in to talk with them about whatever need they have at the moment. I think it is overpopulated now. I'm wondering how they intend to handle this, because certainly it would violate social distancing the old way we've done things.
Kindest Regards, Rod Connect with me on LinkedIn.
June 12, 2020 at 5:32 pm
A couple years ago I nearly proposed a work remote idea to my boss. Would have meant relocating (back) to Utah from Miami. I was ready for a pay cut if needed, even as much as 20%, because I would probably have to be in Miami a few times a year, and my lower pay would help cover those costs.
In the end, I decided against it because of challenges a co-worker mentioned about her remote situation (i.e., keeping up with stuff that doesn't happen in meetings). And, not long after dropping the idea, I changed jobs and moved to Orlando.
If this corona thing had happened in the spring of 2018, I definitely would have proposed it (move back to Utah) to the boss.
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June 12, 2020 at 5:35 pm
However, flip side, my wife is annoyed that I'm home all the time. If I'm there, I can be expected to partake in conversation, help with the dog, make lunch, etc. Except my brain doesn't let me. I'm constantly answering "wait, what?" and getting in her way, having to rush off to meetings, etc.
Truth
Trying to figure out the world of SQL as marketing consultant for SQL Solutions Group https://sqlsolutionsgroup.com/
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