I work for the big G. and I work from home. There's a couple hundred employees that work full time from home, a minuscule amount in comparison to the work force.
I travel to the office every two quarters and I usually get nothing done (meetings, interruptions, etc...)
VC, chat and email makes it possible to do work. Folks saying that they can't, err, "ideate" when they're not together making noise and preventing other people from working just don't know how to use the tools they have.
I do as well. It's very rare, and I've accepted that my career is probably ended at T5 (which is what I'm at). I've had team members promoted to T6 for being individual contributors but I recognize that I've got a very long uphill battle.
Furthermore I have to travel to the office for a week every month and a half or so. That amount of travel sucks, but it's the price I pay for being able to work remotely so I pay it.
T5 is senior software engineer. Some of them have reports, some don't. Some are team leads, some aren't. I'm an "individual contributor" (no reports, not a team lead).
From what I've seen in my team, it's very subjective. I think it's more of a "you need to have a reason to WFH", it's fine if once in a while you just stay home and work and all that matters is your deliverable, but ideally you should attend to all the meetings you need to and be reachable. If you keep doing WFH every day then yes, that's frowned upon.
I'm honestly neutral on this, I prefer when my coworkers are around me because it's easier for me to interact with them (I noticed I'm a big procrastinator with remote communications, I keep thinking "I'll message them later" or "I'll send the email later", but that's a personal thing), it's easier to have the casual chat that leads to some form of rubber duck debugging or simply just an innocent exchange of opinions that ends up solving a problem/implementing a feature. I honestly don't get that while WFH.
However, some people feel the opposite of me and think they are more productive at home so I'd say leave it to the person to decide and, as the author of the article said, calibrate your employees based on deliverables, not on their presence in the office.
Personally, I have reasons... I prefer it, I get more done, it cuts out the commute time (which includes a lot more than actual time in the car), it lets me work on things at night when I want to...
Sure, there are negatives too, but there's a heck of a lot of positives, too.
> you should attend to all the meetings you need to and be reachable
Working from home has no real impact on either of those.
> I prefer it, I get more done, it cuts out the commute time (which includes a lot more than actual time in the car), it lets me work on things at night when I want to...
Don't get me wrong, I absolutely agree with you. I don't prefer it but I understand where you are coming from and I think you should be allowed to do so if you find it's better for your productivity.
I find I prefer working from home when writing design docs rather than doing dev work, for design docs I like simply sitting on my couch with my chromebook and be "lazy", whereas if I am developing I prefer a more customized setup with multiple screens and stuff so I have that better at work than at home. Also more coworker interaction.
Whenever I need to write design docs, I simply tell my team I'll be working from home that day and nobody so far has complained.
>Working from home has no real impact on either of those.
Yes and no. I agree with you that it doesn't have a significant impact especially since we usually have people from the other side of the world dialing in the meeting so it's not a huge difference, but I personally think that if everybody is participating in the meeting remotely, it gets harder to talk because there's more chances for talking over each other and the audio/video quality is always impacted by the connection or by the headset quality. So many people have terrible headsets/microphones that really it gets confusing if everyone does so.
But all these are problems that can be simply fixed by providing your employees with the appropriate hardware for it, obviously.
whereas if I am developing I prefer a more customized setup with multiple screens and stuff so I have that better at work than at home.
That may be true at Google, but there are a bunch of supposedly high-tech companies which are happy to give people seriously cruddy workstations. Even though my home setup is actually a 5-year-old monitor on a standing desk I bodged from an off-cut of worktop, it's dramatically nicer than what I have in the main office.
But no thanks, I get to WFH every day. Life is too short to commute.