
Working from Home Part 2: Why It’s Great - shimon
http://geeksinboston.com/2009/02/04/working-from-home-part-2-why-its-great/
======
mpk
Whether or not working from home is good or not really depends on your
situation.

I have a 40 minute commute to and from work which I use to read the papers or
a book. I have an official 'work-from-home' day (Wednesday) and the option to
work from home other days if there's nothing at the office that requires my
attention.

However, I usually just go in to the office every Wednesday and only sometimes
use the work-from-home-any-day option.

I happen to like the work environment we have. I have a nice clean office
space with a big desk, two large monitors, good lighting, a comfortable chair,
a kitchen with food and drinks, a rec room with couches and a pool table and
whiteboards everywhere.

I am frequently interrupted, but half the time it's by fellow coders working
on different problems who want to bounce some ideas off of me. There's an
unwritten protocol for programmers interrupting programmers where I work. You
walk by and say 'hey'. You get a 'hey' back and if the programmer doesn't turn
back to the monitor, they're usually open for interruption. Or they might suck
you into whatever problem they're working on.. :)

The other half of the interruptions are from the operations, business, sales
and management side. These can be very annoying and consume a lot of time, but
I encourage them (up to a point). For one, they provide a good finger on the
pulse of the wider company operations. They keep a level of transparency
between software development and the other areas of the company. They're also
good for social cohesion (a 'we' feeling as opposed to 'us and them').

Interaction just works better face-to-face. The pool table we have, for
example, is rarely used for actual games. Usually it's used by two or three
people that are discussing something and just making a few shots while doing
it. Or just goofing off for a bit.

Of course, I also have to get some code done. I can manage my time and do
this, but I also have a lot of freedom in this respect. If you're working with
a boss who micro-manages you, eh.. well .. that's a different story. (I
suggest getting another job. I've been there and it sucked).

------
ojbyrne
This is so matter-of-fact I consider that the more important question is - why
don't managers recognize this and how can we make them recognize it? If I was
a steel worker, they'd go insane over a 1% increase in my productivity, but as
a developer they chop up my time into tiny little increments, and then wonder
why the heck I can't get anything done.

~~~
shiro
I'm not sure, but probably because productivity of programmers is hard to
measure? You, as a programmer, solve different problem each time. Productivity
can be defined by

    
    
        (* individual-productivity-coefficient
           (/ (* amount-of-the-task difficulty-of-the-task) 
              time-to-implement))
    

Within these parameters, managers can only see time-to-implement clearly,
amount-of-the-task vaguely, individual-productivity-coefficient relatively (to
other coworkers), and difficulty-of-the-task hardly. Suppose you spend a week
to solve X in busy environment, then spend a day to solve Y when the noisy
manager is on vacation and you know X and Y are more or less the same amount
and difficulty, so it's 5x boost! But the only clue the manager has is that
you finish Y in 1/5 of the time of X, and each counts as single "feature" so
the amount of task should be the same, and they conclude that the difficulty
of Y is 1/5 of X instead of thinking that your individual productivity
coefficient raised 5x.

~~~
ojbyrne
Sure, it's hard to measure (the root of the problem) - but there's plenty of
people out there (Joel Spolsky for starters, Peopleware is another) that
suggest some of the things that adversely affect it. Why are those factors so
hard to communicate to managers?

~~~
shimon
The existence of those factors is not hard to communicate. Your manager will
probably understand and sympathize, but without a measurable cost or benefit,
how is she going to argue for them in a committee with other managers? Sure,
we get that your private offices are going to make your team more productive,
but is that $100k more productive or $1M more productive? If you can even
begin to answer that question without the rest of the crowd falling asleep,
you're amazing. There is always pressure to make simple, easily justifiable
decisions, rather than nuanced, complex ones; unless you can find simple terms
to argue in, you just brought a paintbrush to a gun fight.

~~~
ojbyrne
To quote my boss (it's almost like a mantra) - "whatever's easier." I'm sort
of a student of management (and in academic terms actually more than "sort
of") so this stuff fascinates me. It's easy to point to companies that don't
do whatever's easier, but actually do whatever's correct (Google would be a
good example) but day to day, the message doesn't get executed.

------
dougp
If I reinvented a Patricia tree I would be pretty pleased with myself.

------
wensing
Working from home is tough if you have a 4 year old and a 1 year old that
continuously long for attention. I haven't quite figured out how to balance
that need with the need for long concentration spans ... so for now (and
because my employer expects it on the vast majority of days), it's off to the
office for me.

