Working from home

07 May 2015 - sjl

I find it surprising and frustrating that roles that allow working remotely are still not overly common, at least not in my part of the software development world.

This debate was re-ignited back in 2013 when Yahoo banned its employees from working from home. In fairness to CEO Mayer, she later acknowledged that “people are more productive when they’re alone, but they’re more collaborative and innovative when they’re together”. More collaborative when they’re together? Obviously. More innovative? I really don’t know, but I’d be interested to find out if that’s true.

Yahoo claim that the results are as planned: “engagement and productivity are up”. I can just imagine the meaningless metrics they used to come to that conclusion. Now maybe putting a stop to working from home was actually the right thing to do for Yahoo. But I’ve worked at enough self-delusional companies to know that management will more often than not tell itself what it wants to hear. And what it usually wants to hear is “We made the right decision, we’re on the right track etc.”

It’s often feared that workers take advantage of the freedom to work at home. For me, that really points to a broader question – how do you know if your employee is effective / productive? Unfortunately, too many businesses still equate having bums on office seats as productivity.

Now I’ve certainly had days when I’ve sat at my desk all day and achieved very little – but in the eyes of management that’s not recognized because too much emphasis is put on attendance or the appearance of being busy. George Costanza even had a technique for taking advantage of that.

Conversely if I think about the pieces of my work I’m most proud of, the things that might even be called innovative, they almost always resulted from being away from my desk. That is, an idea for solving a problem, or a particular approach or algorithm came to me while I was going for a walk. Or in the shower. Or drifting in and out of sleep in the morning. This matters because it’s those ideas that are without question the most valuable thing to my employer.

Now of course, it usually takes a lot of hard work to turn those ideas into reality and that definitely does require sitting at a desk, usually for long periods of time. But at that point, I don’t think it actually matters if that desk is in the office or at home.