Would You Take an 8% Pay Cut to Work from Home?
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It's not clear to me whether the pros outweigh the cons or not.
Having to work from home is not, because I enjoy being able to quickly reach out to my coworkers face-to-face (especially when I need to talk to more than one), I enjoy having a delineated work/home demarcator, and I enjoy all of the perks that my employer provides (snacks, drinks, weekly catered lunch) and ones that come for free with the office location (a nice view, a good selection of places to eat, a convenient commute).
Those with families and already established social circles, and significant others, are in a great position to work from home.
It's great for me because I have a lot of anxiety and do better in solitude but the social aspect is depressing.
I mainly went this route when I got a job in an open office that drove me absolutely insane. Every little sound and interaction would distract and subsequently infuriate me. Plus watching a bunch of 20 year olds line up 3x a day with their plates in their hands was disgusting, having employers infantilize their employees to such a degree, I couldn't take it anymore. It went far beyond the food but that's a story for another time.
I agree with the raise.
The 'perk' is for the company. They don't have to pay electricity for my computer, provide desk space, commuter benefits or have me drinking their coffee, or using their bathrooms. They also don't have me on premises, so that's one less employee to insure. One less 'head' to add to their on-premises liability insurance. Less heating and cooling expenses and less expense for real estate. You have productivity gains because rarely is someone late for work when they're already at work. You also have fewer sick days because if I'm contagious but still functional, that means I can keep working whereas otherwise, I'd have to stay home.
It's a win-win for both parties, despite many employers trying to frame the conversation as an employee 'benefit.'
Obviously some jobs won't work (for example hardware or physical goods,) but for a job where you're on a phone or in front of a computer screen -- what's the difference?
I like the work-home separation and don't have a space that I could reasonably use as a home office, right now. Also, meetings have much lower friction in person than over a phone. My coworkers and I are often in each other's cubes, collaborating and switching off between who's at the keyboard.
I agree with the general statement, though: If I'm doing something that doesn't inherently require physical presence, then it shouldn't matter where I'm doing the work from. In my case, working at the company-provided office is more convenient on most days than working at home would be.
I generally only work an 8 hour day unless there is a major issue at work. Just working offsite can make that a 10 hour day, 2 hours of which are going to be frustrating traffic. Screw that.
The social aspect can be a downside, but it is possible to have friends outside of work.
In my case I save an hour a day commuting, I'm not subject to the bunch of network operations staff in the next aisle who punctuate their day with loud conversations about computer game, politics, pranking and trolling each other. The office I work is in a noisy, crowded environment which is entirely distracting and frustrating to me.
The computer I have at home is ideally suited for the work I do (I bought it specifically for the task). The computer I have at work is about six years old, underprovisioned for the work I do.
My employer should consider it a perk to have me work from home, and should pay me extra to do so since I'm happy to provide a comfortable work environment with adequate infrastructure for the work I'm doing.
I think 10% extra for working from home is a suitable compensation given everything the employer gains.
We used to enjoy work from home at the discretion of our immediate supervisors, but due to a falling out between senior management and one of my colleagues who was working from home when one senior manager wanted to drop by their desk to talk about an issue that was being actively discussed on email and HipChat, all staff lost their work from home privileges.
Which highlights another benefit of working from home: more of my communication will be via email and other recorded formats, so it is harder to forget what I've communicated to you, and you have to take time to formulate your questions rather than simply walking into my personal space, interrupting whatever I'm working on, and asking a question I already answered yesterday.
Allowing work from home indicates that management is competent. Retracting work from home privileges already granted indicates the opposite.
No I'm not bitter, why do you ask?
And you tend to work longer even if it's just the commute time.
This isn't about it being a perk or not, it's about who is making a financial gain and who is baring the costs.
In this case the company is transferring some of the expenses to you while eliminating others, adding a pay cut to this is not a wise decision.
Even not regarding the politics, it's a lot easier just to walk over to someone's desk to get their input then reach them on Slack and try to do a hangout.
So yeah having the option to work from home is great when you really need to be heads down, you are contagious but you are able to work, etc., but I wouldn't want to be in situation where I'm always remote.
Hint: I'm in the EU.
However, the impression I get from the article is that people are willing to take the pay cut of the prevailing wage they'd expect to be paid for the same job in the area they currently live. I live in a suburb of Detroit. I'm employed full time for a US/UK/Australian company working for a team in the UK and am paid at around the market rate for the area I live in. I accepted this job with a pay increase from my previous employer who also paid me at around the market rate for where I live despite my working from home for several years. At no point did my previous employer ask me to take a pay cut when I started working from home, nor did they reduce the compensation increases/bonuses once I started working from home.
My work from home arrangements at my previous employer were "semi-official". The company had a defined "work from home policy" and outside of myself and one other member of my team, it was expressly forbidden. I began working from home by using the "rockstar method" -- I became a critical member of not just my team, but the organization. I was given flexibility to conduct my work in whatever manner I required as long as my obligations were met (which they always were). I left that team, though, mainly because part of the agreement was that I keep quiet about working at home. I was located in an office that no other members of my team were in, so this meant not making it obvious during conference calls because management didn't want to receive grief from other high-performing team-members who were disallowed from working at home due to upper management disliking the practice (they routinely performed work-site walk-throughs to see how many empty desks there were). This "butts in chairs upper management" style spoke a lot to how the company was managed -- in general -- and was ultimately the reason I left. I'm still cautious of this if for no other reason than habit, but mostly because it is unprofessional to have children yelling or dogs barking in the background of a teleconference where people are already expecting you're only half-paying attention, anyway.
As a remote worker I'd suggest paying people their market rate and then some. Finding good remote workers is very difficult.
More vague work can be trickier, but I still think home working can work for a lot of people...
I don't take location into account at all. If you want to save money and live in the middle of nowhere then go for it. You should have the exact same pay as the person in SF doing the exact same thing as you.
This.
A lot of the problem employers have with "work from home" employees is centered around this fact. Working from home almost always requires extremely good communication skills and extroverted employees. The problem is that working from home appeals more to introverted employees than extroverted ones. I've met several fellow extroverts who left work at home positions because they were lonely and several introverted employees who were let go from positions and had no idea why they weren't successful. Even as an extrovert, I've struggled in this area, going so far as to create tasks with reminder alerts to call specific employees for social reasons on specific days. You have to go out of your way to fill in the communications vacuum and it occupies a chunk of your work-life with tasks that an in-office worker never has to think about.
Hiring for this skill set is also difficult. In my case, I had been working remotely for a manager who was in a different time zone both in-the-office and at home for about 12 years, so I had learned these skills over time and could speak directly to them in an interview. I'm not perfect at it[0] but have learned some tricks along the way and most of it is being willing to assert yourself, to interrupt others (carefully) and to speak openly about your life outside of work over channels where this doesn't necessarily happen naturally. I've found arriving to video/teleconferences a few minutes early and breeze-shooting with anyone else who arrives early helps. Adding video to every call regardless of whether or not anyone else enables video is also a good thing (and learning to look into the camera lens rather than the screen -- expressing emotion visually -- has a psychological impact as well).
[0] Far from it sometimes, especially if I have a large work-load. In the office, it'd be obvious to my manager that I'm struggling under the pressure. At home, I have to be deliberate about communicating these facts while avoiding sounding like a complainer. Consider that if you're in the office, dropping by the boss's cube/office to complain about your work-load would be something that you'd only do in extreme circumstances because it'd be obvious to them by just casual observation. At home, you have no choice but to complain -- it's natural for you but it still feels the same to your boss if the rest of the team he's managing is in the office. He doesn't hear any of them complaining regularly about work-load, but he knows their work load through indirect observation. It makes matters even worse that you're bitching about being over-worked on a conference call you're conducting from your bed (cry me a river, right?). The best "cure" for this is a standing, weekly, informal "touch base" meeting that's designed to discuss work-life-related things which is scheduled and kept even when there's no problems.
So you still have in-person collaboration on the other 3 days, say, Monday Wednesday Thursday.
This is exactly what we do, down to the exact days.
(Fun note: gitstats says that Tuesday is the most productive day and Friday the least)
Face to face is overrated.
In the cases where it works the hallmark of success is a team that is highly engaged. If it's a start-up or a company where everyone has a vested interest -- financially -- for the company's success, the probability that it'll work is high. The probability that eliminating the formality and just letting everyone work from home all the time will work is also high, though. Maybe the schedule is useful because in-person collaboration is so deeply needed for the remaining days that it's worth keeping to a smaller schedule for work-at-home[0].
Where I've seen it fail was at a few larger employers where engagement was moderate/low. Many of the employees were working their exclusively to collect a paycheck and didn't have a lot of passion for the work they were doing. The "work at home" day was really "a day off". Management scheduled this day to occur two days after the weekly release cycle -- the one considered to have the least impact after a release where employees not being available on-site was going to be less of an issue. The problem with that thinking was that it further encouraged the mentality that it was really a day off not a work from home day. I'd hear stories from my friend about how he'd schedule all of his personal stuff on that day -- he'd take the kids places during the work day and otherwise do things that he would not "get away with" in the office. This policy stopped after about a year because enough employees abused it. Unfortunately, for those who didn't abuse it, they got punished.
By making it "part time", you also have less pressures to put in place the tools necessary to make work-at-home successful. Highly motivated teams won't suffer because they'll naturally gravitate toward tools that make it possible to complete work -- getting the work done is the driving factor. Unmotivated teams will fail because that driving factor is missing and will be filled in with an attitude of "well, I can't do this because there's no way to get what I need to do my job, so I'll sit on it until I'm back in the office". There's also the issue of not having parity between the equipment in the office and the equipment at home. If you have 2 workstations at your desk in the office and a laptop -- you're probably using your workstations at work and rarely using the less powerful laptop. As a full time work-at-home employee, I have two servers with several virtuals, two laptops and a very high-end desktop ... at home. I'm full productivity all the time. Yes, you can probably remote into your workstation at the office. It's not the same -- I've tried it -- maybe it's the lack of three monitors in your home office or the network latency of the remote desktop, but something just makes it "less than".
By making a schedule, you're also forcing employees who might not want to work from home to work at home. It sounds crazy, but over the years I've met several software developers who don't fit the stereotypes -- they'e extroverted and enjoy the office. They see the office as an extension of their college life where they had a bunch of friends who were forced to get together -- in person -- and get along and feel lonely working at home. I might have been one of these people -- I get lonely from time to time working at home full-time but have found ways to combat that.
On the flip side, there's potentially a benefit to the forced schedule for introverted team members or folks who require intense focus to accomplish work. They'll most likely drop completely off the map when working at home because they can isolate themselves completely and pour into work. Keeping some in-office days helps those personalities get pulled into the larger team and can focus on the at-home days without interruption. We had a member of a team I was on a few years ago that worked at home two days a week and we knew when he'd return on Wednesday that he'd often come back having completed a mountain of work. We knew those days benefited him and the greatly benefited the team so if he asked to take another couple in a particular week, nobody ever questioned him.
[0] I'd argue that 4 days at home working and one day dedicated to pure collaboration would fit better, but it depends on the work/team.
There's also something nice about traveling to and from work, where there's a separation between work and home. I've just moved into an apartment where I have one room as an office, so that should be nice.
Another thing is that when you're freelancing as a software developer, sometimes you can turn that into a pay raise. It works especially well if your plan is to have long stretches of time without paid work, so you can work on your own side projects. There's also some clients who are happy for you to work 20 hour weeks, which is very easy to get used to. I find context switching to be really hard though, so I prefer to work two 10 hour days. And sometimes I enjoy going full-time on a project for a few months, and then taking a long break for a few months.
But yes, I would still be prepared to take a pay cut in order to work from home. Well, if "home" includes anywhere in the world.
After a few years I could hold my own in conversations about literature and found myself really enjoying some of the classics. I find it almost impossible to listen to audio books when I'm not driving or doing some muscle-memory exercise like cutting the lawn/driving/riding a bike, so without that consistent drive time, I haven't gotten to enjoy a good book in several years. It's not even worth downloading them any longer because I know it'll take two years to finish one book and I'll forget where I left off between listens.
[0] I'm a speed reader (skimming/scanning style, not the "gimmicky" speed reading that is advertised these days) and find it difficult to read fiction without using my training. Speed reading fiction is like turning to the back of the book to see how it ends before starting the book -- it ruins fiction -- so the only fiction reading I enjoy is narrated to me (by Scott Brick, if I'm lucky) on Audible.
I save so much time and money working from home, but by far the best thing is being able to manage the kids and other assorted family stuff would just be impossible if I wasn't here.
They're expensive in the UK. It's not uncommon to see people spending four thousand pounds and up for their annual train ticket.
A tidy, quiet little office space felt like a godsend afterwards. Of course, it was still only me :)
But your attitude is shared by a lot of people, it's just not necessarily talked about all that often and it falls into the often ignored category of "there are real downsides to working from home" that seems to be pervasive in the world where "working at home" is seen by some as "not working at all" or as this article states "a job perk" rather than a set of trade-offs that have positives and negatives for both the employer and employee.
Personally, I will probably never take a job that isn't work-at-home, again, if I have any say in the matter. While there were substantial down-sides (almost all of which I wasn't prepared for in the beginning) there's substanial up-sides. And I'm one of those folks who elects to ignore the "work-life" separation boundary entirely. I accept that as a work-from-home employee, I can basically be seen as someone "working all of the time" and I allow myself to work when inspiration hits even if it isn't during "normal business hours". On the flip-side of that, my kids will tell you that "Daddy's always here". I get to be here for my family at all times. My dad was a traveling sales-man and pilot when I was growing up. He was gone most of the time[0]. I can work 50 hours during the week and have it feel like 30 to my family and 40 to me. I can get in the middle of an emotional problem one of my daughters is facing when it happens because I'm in the home all day -- provided I'm not in a teleconference. I'm home to see my kids when school lets out. At the same time, I might be working at 8:00 or 9:00 PM when they're settling in for bed. Or taking a conference call with a group team on the other side of the world at 2:00 AM. There is no office where work happens for me and that can positively suck at times.
[0] I deeply respect and look up to my dad -- he was there as much as he could be and had to work the hours he worked in order to provide for our family. He grew up in a two bedroom home with 6 siblings and never had a bedroom or even a bed to sleep on when he was a kid. He also "made it to all of the important things" and actually got his pilot license to reduce the amount of over-night travel he had to do.
I make it a policy of mine to visit the office once or twice a week for design and planning, so the social aspect keeps me sane. I find it a good balance.
I've recently started looking for a job for the pay increase due to cost of living pressures and because of the culture prevailing of bosses needing to see butts in seats it will most likely be on-premises.
We've been priced out of the market for housing, so we have to live further out. It would involve three hours commuting a day. The pay increase is almost negated by the erosion of your hourly rate when you factor in time and expense of the commute. Not to mention the time being in a car and train rather with my kids.
I worked at a company that performed layoffs about every 6 months of around 10% of the staff of the entire company for around 17 years. You're doing the right thing by constantly evaluating your job prospects. The risk you've taken, now, though is that you've made yourself less visible and easier to lay off. Your manager will feel less badly about letting you go because you're not around to be reminded of. By taking a 4-day work-week, you're also getting less done which will further make the case for "not needing you". The staff who is not working at home -- assuming they are not allowed to do so -- will also start to resent the fact that you've been treated specially and may start to sabotage you subtly/unconsciously (or if they're particularly nasty people -- intentionally). This will further make the case for why you should be the next to go.
There is a large plus-side though, particularly if you're like many HN readers and are employed in software development -- you are in a good position to find a remote job elsewhere. Hiring good remote employees is difficult and makes employers uncomfortable because it's hard to know how someone will fare with a work-at-home position. One of the key factors looked for in any position is experience and you can now state on your resume/in an interview that you have experience working, successfully, remotely. That experience is further bolstered by the fact that you're employed by a struggling company who routinely lets people go and you're still employed there despite being a remote employee. I'd strongly advise updating your resume if you are not interested in consulting full time or putting enough energy into your consulting business to be able to transition to it full time.
Maybe my situation is a little different - I have 3 kids and my wife is a stay at home mom.
It's been great and I highly recommend it if at some point you realize you are a family man (or woman).
My first marriage was actually damaged by working at home. My wife was an introvert and I think having me around all the time hurt things (we were not particularly compatible to begin with which was exacerbated when I went from working 50-60 hours a week away to working most days at home).
My current marriage is greatly helped by it. There's nobody I'd rather share my time with than my wife and she feels the same. A lot of people will say what I said in the last paragraph applies to them -- they'd hate their spouse if they had to spend every waking minute with them and couldn't get away from time to time, but her and I thrive in the situation. I think it helps that her dad and mom were both small business owners who ran things out of their home and worked together on everything. It helps me because my wife is non-technical and by being around while I'm working/talking on conference calls, she understands more about what I do and the things I struggle with at work so she can offer more support/understanding to me than if I had to explain it all to her (it also avoids me having to spend hours explaining things). My four children love that I'm at home at all times. Even though they're respectful of the fact that I have to work and try not to bother me while I'm busy, they know I'm there if something important comes up. This is especially important since two of my children are step-'s and we're blending a family. The complexity of emotions that kids go through is helped by the stability of the fact that I'm seen as "always present" in the moment and at the time.
We get flexibility about where we live (so can choose a nice rural area) and cutting out the hours wasted on commuting time means we can fit in a nice 60 mins of excercise (in our case hillwalking) before starting work.
Personally I wouldn't want to revert to office based life...
[0] Though I think this is the first time I've heard "food and coffee" be a major factor. Perhaps it's something not understood by me as an American, but working at home means I can prepare a hot meal in 10 minutes for lunch with the wealth of food in my cupboard rather than eating out at fast food or enjoying whatever thing I managed to throw in a bag while I was rushing out the door in the morning that often doesn't appeal to me by noon.
However, When first got into remote working, I accepted a lower amount for the benefits outlined.. but then learned nobody else did... So I short-changed myself.
I wouldn't now.. either I take the rate I need with WFH provision, or I don't take the gig.
Is there a distinction between working remotely and working from home?
I have been trying to do this for years, and it's much harder than it sounds on the surface. I'm in West Africa now, for reference.
When you work for a company (or even just take a contract of some form) the company wants you to be available on their schedule. So you have to live the hours of the country you're "working for".
This gets really hard when you have travel days (or weeks), when you want to go someplace remote, have limited or no connectivity, want to do something with locals in the plae you're in, want a social life, etc. etc.
Maybe you can do it if "traveling and adventuring through the world" means staying put in a large city in a more-or-less developed country, but otherwise, it's very hard.
As long as you're in the same time zone (as another commenter has alluded to) and have decent internet, what's the difference between working from a suburb of Chicago and Mexico City?
If you want details, I'm going into them now.
1) Good situation
The entire team is pretty much remote now. Working at the office is the exception, not the norm. Trying to be the first remote worker on a team is a chore, not only do you have to come up to speed, but you have to institute a remote culture as a newcomer, which is not easy. A fight I don't want to have.
2) Skill set
I've been focused on backend systems. I don't have any front-end experience, especially stuff that you can put in a portfolio and wow potential clients with. That tends to cut down on freelancing. If you don't mind me asking, what hourly rate do you generally charge your clients? And what true hourly rate, factoring in meeting clients and writing RFPs? Freelancing is looking increasingly attractive to me.
3) Personal connections
Somebody who I used to report to referred me to the job, and I enjoyed and will enjoy working with him. It's always nice to know somebody on the inside who vouches for the team and can show you the ropes.
Working at home is boring, and unmotivational.
There are downsides to working at home -- disconnection from the team (if the team is not entirely remote), additional pressure to be deliberate about social behavior, the elimination of the lines between "work" and "home" and having to keep yourself in check to make sure you don't end up just "working all of the time" and the perception that working from home isn't working at all which is often the case when an employer thinks that they can reduce a person's salary if they offer them the opportunity to work from home.
The problem with accepting a lower salary is that you're opening yourself up to a working environment where the bosses believe they're doing you a favor and will expect more in return than just that salary. There's a risk that they will respect the work you do less or assume you're on a perpetual vacation because you're working from a home office rather than a building they've paid for. Your work and contribution should speak for itself and your management should understand that it takes a special skill (and valuable) skill set to work from home successfully. By treating it as a perk, these facts are ignored.
After 7 years of working in an office, 4 of working split between home and office and 7 working exclusively from home, I can say from my own, anecdotal, experience that working from home makes me far more effective at the job I'm tasked with. To start, switching to working at home eliminated a 2-hour round-trip commute. That time didn't all get shifted to work, but at least half of it did. Because I work from home, I have the most effective tools for doing my job with me at all times. When I was in the office, I had two workstations that I did most of my work on and a laptop that I rarely used except when at home. Working in development, I tended to have moments of inspiration hit at non-work times (9:00 PM) and when that'd happen, I'd look at the laptop and run through in my mind all of the things I'd have to set up to be able to take advantage of that inspiration and would often think "yeah, I'll just wait until the morning". And by morning, that inspiration had expired. Because I do my entire job at home, I can take advantage of this inspiration without any friction, now. I'm currently employed by a team that is entirely located in the UK. One of the reasons I was hired was because I'm located in a time-zone that matches many of our customers. This benefits my employer which makes a pay-cut inappropriate.
In the office, you've got an unofficial social pressure to keep the same schedule as your coworkers: 8-5 with a noonish lunch, usually. There are several "personal things" that can't be done over the internet still, today[1]. These places often have a day or two a week to accommodate day-job folks, but you'll be waiting in line with all of the others about five times longer than you would if you picked a more ideal time[2].
All of this equates to more time available to work and I probably work an average of 50 hours/week without even trying. The difference is that at home it feels like a 40-hour work week and sometimes it feels like far less than that. To my family it feels like a much shorter work-week because I'm home for them. I can sit in the living room and work while my kids play. I can be there when the little things come up. My kids will tell you "daddy's always there" because ... well ... I am! They can even sit in on a conference call and get to know what it's like to have a career.
This is not to say that there aren't downsides for the employer. There's less collaboration[3] and collaboration intensive work may suffer as a result, especially if the work-from-home employees don't have the required skill set. It's also too easy to focus on those downsides. It's better to look at it as a trade-off. Less facilities costs, more work time, greater "focused time", and (probably) happier employees. Employee happiness can equate to better work product and there are few things that will have a bigger impact on employee happiness than work-time/location flexibility provided it's managed properly. Management has to be better, too. No longer can you rely on "butts-in-chairs" management where a person's contribution is determined solely on how frequently you peer in and see that person working. Effectiveness has to be measured by project completion and more concrete variables.
[0] There's one case where this doesn't fit - cost of living. If you're taking a job in New York and you live in South Dakota, I wouldn't expect to be making the same amount of money as someone who is required to find a place to live in NYC and accept the accompanying expenses. This is one of the biggest perks to accepting remote employees -- the ability to hire in a cheaper part of the country from where "the office" resides and comes with much of the same benefits (and fewer of the downsides) of off-shoring to a cheaper-labour country. I also work in software development which I believe is one of the (many) jobs that can be done remotely with little sacrifice on the side of the employer and many benefits for both employer and employee. It probably doesn't fit similarly for many other jobs.
[1] Some driver's license related things, dropping off equipment at Comcast/Verizon's hell-hole, almost anything to do with a mortgage, that missed package that needed to be signed for requiring you to go to the Post Office, UPS or FedEx, doctor's office or lab work needing to be done and on and on.
[2] I've learned 1:45-2:30 is the sweet spot - the bank teller has no lines, the mortgage broker has nobody in their chairs, the salon will let you walk in without an appointment and see you immediately and even the DMV (Secretary of State in MI) will have about 5 people in front of you. Service is also better (particularly at the DMV) because the staff isn't stressed -- often having just returned from lunch.
[3] It's hard to argue that you'd get the same level of collaboration having entirely remote staff than you do when there's a shared, common, office. But given the right tools, collaboration doesn't have to be a problem. There's also the issue of over-collaboration. There are times when I need to keep my head down and be able to work on complex code without interruption. When you have a shared office -- especially some of these "Agile-type" offices where there's no separation between employees -- the office culture can become one of interruptions.