
Why Five Days in the Office Is Too Many - dekayed
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/jobs/in-defense-of-working-mostly-from-home.html
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com2kid
In contrast, I am energized by going into the office and working side by side
with my peers to solve hard problems.

I dislike programming by myself, it is dull, boring, and much more error prone
than when I have someone to bounce ideas off of. (Rubber Ducking only goes so
far!)

Really every time this topic is brought up the overall consensus seems to be
"it varies for different people." Some people seem to really benefit from
working at home, some benefit from working in an office.

The real thing that gets to me is those who, for whatever reason, do not seem
to understand that different people have different needs!

~~~
quaunaut
I'm new into the industry, but I thought working from home would be a blast.
But surprisingly, I'm finding I hate just having nowhere to go during the day,
no reason to go outside, see the world, aside from exercise. It saps me of my
energy.

Sadly, the company I work for is based in a place I couldn't stand to live,
but it's telling that even despite that, I'm genuinely thinking about moving
there.

~~~
obviouslygreen
I don't mean to be condescending, but the only "telling" thing about that is
your inexperience. If you already know it's a place you couldn't stand to
live, it's an extremely bad idea to move there. Do not second-guess yourself
like this! You will end up regretting it.

Telecommuting is not for everyone, but being new to the industry, your
perspective is likely to change over the next few years if you stick around.
I'm not saying it'll reverse -- you may find that your first impression was
right -- but your point of view will be altered by your experiences, and
without those experiences to draw on, you cannot expect to have a well-formed
impression of this arrangement.

Not liking working at home is not a good reason to move to a place where you
won't like going outside.

~~~
quaunaut
This is incredibly true. Though, the main thing keeping me in line right now,
is that I'm just over a year away from moving to where I really want to be-
Seattle!

Once I'm there, I don't know what I'm gonna do. Probably program at a cafe
every day.

~~~
jcheng
When you get to Seattle, check out Office Nomads in Capitol Hill. Sounds like
you will find lots of like-minded people there.

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Uncompetative
I find it disgusting that people are forced to commute at great expense to our
planet's dwinding natural resources, their finances, time and stress so that
they can physically congregate for an 'inspiring water-cooler moment' that may
catalytically lurch their company towards an original, otherwise
undiscoverable, profitable path or endless corporate meetings to please
unnecessarily multi-layered paranoid management when we have telecommuting,
telepresence and the good old fashioned telephone in technology-centric
industries.

I could understand 'going to work' if 'work' was a Foundry, or a Mine, but if
we are sitting in traffic jams and on crowded trains for hours every day,
unpaid, just so we can sit in front of a computer and program software when it
is clearly more likely that we will be interrupted to 'sign a card for Jane
from accounts who is leaving to have her baby' and lose our flow as a result
then the corporations of the future will be leaner and more agile by being
virtual.

~~~
smrtinsert
Its a false premise quite honestly. Look at some place like Google, absolutely
brilliant people work there and brainstorm there, yet their greatest "ideas"
are acquisitions.

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methehack
The very term "work from home" suggests separation. That's the wrong model.
This is not about introverts and extroverts.

Working with a remote team is not a choice about whether to collaborate or
not. When a team is set up properly, remote work is no less collaborative than
any other kind of work. The tools are there, widely available, and free.
Everyone on a team needs to be using them, yes, but duh.

As near as I can tell, there is a shortage of talent. Smart companies will
exploit the newly available infrastructure and realize that they can have
"face time" remotely. Then, they'll have access to a much wider pool of
talent. Win!

Is it me or are silicon valley companies -- startups, in particular -- really
not into hiring remote people? Seems like, with the cost of living in the
valley and the dramatic shortage of talent, and the volume and enormity of
ideas, they'd have the most to gain. If I'm right about not liking remote
hires, anyone have any ideas why? Provincialism? If you were worth hiring,
you'd live here already? Hahahahaha.

~~~
onemorepassword
I'm all in favor of letting people work from home and facilitating remote work
for certain kinds of projects, but if you seriously think remote work is no
less collaborative or technology can replace "face time", I assume you're
missing _a lot_ of human communication skills.

Not only does physical interaction have a much higher bandwidth, it goes well
beyond just the work. The more you interact, at lunch or in the hallways, the
better you will be able to communicate with each other on all levels, and the
better you'll be able to collaborate. And this is not a one time thing, this
is a continuous process.

I would never hire people who lack the ability to recognize that vast
difference to work remotely. For one thing, you don't have the ability to
compensate if you don't even understand there is something to compensate for.

Hell, I wouldn't even hire a person like that to work on site.

And the fact that there appears to be a strong overlap between people who
favor remote work and short-sighted people who seem unable to recognize its
disadvantages is not exactly encouraging companies to hire remote workers.

Yes, hiring managers read HN, and these kinds of comments aren't helping to
promote remote work. Quite the opposite. The pro remote working crowd comes
across as a bunch of immature self-entitled whiners.

~~~
Illotus
Similarly pro office crowd come across as bunch of draconian overlords with
little regards to the nature of the work and circumstances of other people.
Such is the joy of the internet. Both crowds are likely to be much more middle
ground in real life conversation.

Perhaps that highlights your points even more.

That aside, in my experience working at a good office is much more fun and a
lot of the time nearly as productive as remote working. However I currently
work remotely as the two hour daily commute is way too much, though I find
that visiting my own office or other, nearer offices tends to help brighten up
the work week. It certainly seems to me that communicating mainly via text
makes it harder to restrain negative comments as you don't get the facial and
body language cues. It takes much more effort to be polite and consider other
peoples feelings. I wish it wasn't so.

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iuguy
At Mandalorian we have to work 9-530 days, our customers expect to be able to
contact us in this period. What we do though is allow everyone to work from
home unless they absolutely need an office environment. Once a quarter we meet
up face to face, have a day set aside for meetings, discussions, presentations
and that's about it. We have IRC for techies and Google chat for non-techies,
along with Google Hangout for when we need some face to face discussion.

So far it's working pretty well. People who need to pick kids up from school
pick kids up from school. People who need to receive deliveries or have
plumbers round don't have to worry about taking time out to do so.
Additionally everyone's travel costs are miniscule when not on customer site,
which I think is a massive positive for all of us. On the whole I believe that
a happy workforce is a productive workforce, and that creating stress for
employees is counterproductive. If we need meetings we can have them. If we
need physical space together we can arrange it. Aside from that, I'd rather
focus on the results than the time put in.

------
RougeFemme
I think the mix of introverts vs. extroverts is relevant, too. Generally,
extroverts are energized by being around people, while introverts need some
mental downtime to recharge their batteries. And at least for me, downtime is
hard to come by while in the office.

~~~
soneca
I always wondered about offices with "loneliness rooms". Not to sleep, or
meditate, but to work. Some place where anyone can go if he/she don't want to
be around other people. A mix of open spaces and discreet rooms, where you can
go and people won't even notice you are going there. I wouldn't even put doors
in there, not to be mistaken to a place where you hide. Just a very small
room, with no space for hanging around, just one chair and desk. Thinking more
about it, maybe open, gardened spaces, but with lonely chair-desks, which
disposal and landacape shows it is suposed to be distant of eveything (so it
isn't so claustrophobic as the first scenario I imagined)

~~~
seanmcdirmid
We have focus rooms in our semi-open plan. They suck, they aren't fairly
utilized and usually monopolized, or they are quickly turned into the service
of other purposes (like store rooms or guest offices).

~~~
enjo
In the open floor plan offices I've been in, those "focus rooms" quickly
become de-facto offices for whoever can stake a claim to them first.

~~~
donw
Ideally, every pair gets their own space to work -- I'm not a big fan of open-
plan offices. But, if you have to go down that road, you need to put some
strict policies in place to ensure that the small meeting rooms don't become
offices:

1\. Rooms are strictly first-come, first-serve.

2\. At the end of the week the room is cleaned and everything in it other than
the base furniture is thrown out. Period.

3\. The focus rooms provide no storage (no drawers or shelves). Just a desk, a
whiteboard, two chairs for pairing, and either a display or a workstation.

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ifben
I treat college like a 9-5 job, going to the library to study at 9 am and
attending classes throughout the day. I don't need to do this, but there are
very specific reasons why I do:

\- If I study at home, I have no sense of urgency. Home is the place I
associate with relaxation, so it's kind of cruel to expect myself to get work
done there. The general public in the library holds me accountable to make it
look like I have a purpose to be there.

\- There are places I'd rather be than the library, like home. This motivates
me to get my work done as quickly as possible and move on to other things that
are important to me.

\- We are social creatures, and interacting with others is important to our
well-being. Given two days where I get the same amount of work done, I'll feel
more accomplished on the day where I adequately socialize. This is true even
if my interactions are largely superficial.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
College was more like a 10AM to 11PM job for me. The library was a place to
sleep, the best place to work was the eating areas.

Now, I prefer coffee shops for out of office working. Home is too comfortable,
while I can hit Starbucks early and grab a taxi when the roads aren't so
crowded after rush hour.

------
flurdy
I would have even looser guidelines, but still suggest some facetime in the
office if possible. Mostly the team themselves should be able to mandate their
own locations and hours to fit their needs. If they are productive...

Some teams may prefer heavy pair programming and thus may need to be most of
time in the same location. Others(most) would use some sort of hybrid where
the 5 hours 3 days a week probably works well. And then some will be very much
independent tasks where then locations are mostly irrelevant apart from
whenever syncing is needed and general communications with other teams and
stakeholders.

But teams and even when pairing you do not always need to be permanently
physically in the same location if they know each other well and can
communicate freely across chat and screen sharing etc. However mostly in
person will trump all communications.

~~~
jmspring
It should be up to the team, that is what is key.

Way too many times management will try and dictate based on what they think is
right without taking in the desires and the makeup of the team. This usually
is shown in the form of all hands meetings on a very regular basis -- more
than one startup I've been at have fallen into this trap.

~~~
trhtrsh
"all-hands" meetings are an artificial attempt to instill a social-heirarchy,
by elevating the presenters over the rest of the staff. Being invited to speak
at an all hands is attempt to award social currency, by telling the presenter
that they are special. All-hands have no value, with one exception:

If they provide an open mic for questions, it's a rare opportunity to put an
exec on the spot in front of everyone.

------
stfu
Not relevant to the subject, but I was just wondering if anyone can enlighten
me on the use of is/are. Why is the headline _Why five days in the office >is<
too many_ and not _> are<_ too many?

~~~
aaronblohowiak
The collection as a whole is the thing that is being compared.

400 computers are on the desk.

200 students are better than you. (everyone one of those students are
individually better than you.)

200 students is better than none. (the total number is being compared as a
singular item to the quantity 0)

~~~
huffman
Would "200 students are better than none" be invalid? When you swap out the
number with some other word i.e. "Some students is better than none", using
"are" is the correct choice.

~~~
corin_
Anybody would understand you, but there is a difference. Using the word "none"
doesn't help explain, so change that to "me".

"200 students are better than me" means that there are 200 all of which are
better than me, it's not grouping them together, just counting them. "200
students is better than me" would mean that as a collective they are better
than me, but I might well be better than each of them individually.

~~~
DanBC
_This_ is the kind of thing I want an infographic for.

Someone should design a small set, each in monochrome, to fit on A4 / Letter
size paper, with simple explanation and example sentences.

~~~
corin_
I really don't understand what would be on this infographic you want.

------
jonathanjaeger
Personally I like the routine of getting up every morning having my coffee and
going to the office. But you need a good working environment. I'm not a
programmer though, and I often realize some people can get a lot more down
without the pull of meetings and unintended interruptions throughout the day.
Perhaps I'm just lucky my job is devoid of meetings, for the most part.

------
AndrewKemendo
Prerna is a good CEO and did some great things at Khush which helped her
acquisition. Even still this intro is maddening:

>The freedom to work outside a traditional office was one of the main reasons
I left the corporate world eight years ago, at age 23, to start a software
company.

Maddening because she spent about a year in that "corporate world." Hardly a
good sampling period.

I don't disagree with her conclusions, however to cast that wide of a net
seems a little cheap considering not all business structures and markets are
conducive to the same flexibility "knowledge workers" have.

~~~
marquis
I spent less than 3 months total in the corporate world at her age and quickly
knew I wanted out. I haven't been back in over 10 years and don't believe it
makes my thoughts on the matter irrelevant.

~~~
cbs
I've been to Tahoe. It doesn't make my thoughts on California in general
irrelevant, but incredibly suspect if I make a statement about any part of the
state that is not a high elevation desert currently covered in snow.

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peachananr
I love working at the office but not the whole 8 hours. I love it in the
morning but when it's afternoon, I find myself more productive elsewhere,
maybe a cafe.

This is an interesting approach that allows experiments. Would love to see how
this will turn out. :)

~~~
textminer
I agree with this. I find the convention most stifling-- my instinct in the
afternoon is to go work somewhere else, but quickly guilt* starts to pop up
and tell me I'm doing something wrong, even if it's just to do work more ably.

(* - this guilt is a weird thing I can't really describe. It also lessens as I
advance further in my career and am more sure of myself.)

------
Illotus
At first glance I thought that this was an article for moving to 4 day work
week.

