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Comment by GuiA | Hacker News Reader

My organization requires personal presence because we work on prototype hardware that costs several hundreds of thousands/millions of dollars to make, so we can't just make one for each of us and bring it home. (And even if we could, these things require regular fixing, and if I'm in Japan and the girl who knows how to resolder a certain component in Chile, that's not very practical)

Sometimes I can work from home if I prepare work in advance to account for it (e.g. collect data from the hardware to enable offline testing), but it's extra overhead.

> If your organisation requires personal presence something in your organisation is broken

Please tell, what's broken in my org?

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> > If your organisation requires personal presence something in your organisation is broken

> Please tell, what's broken in my org?

What I'm getting at with this is that if personal presence is mandatory you should have an actual reason for that. Your organisation obviously does.

The more usual reason for mandatory personal presence unfortunately is "Because it's always been done this way and we like to see butts in seats because we don't trust our employees nor do we know how to manage what they're working on or how to measure their results."

Maybe you should avoid making wild, nuance-free pronouncements then.

Every situation is obviously different, but I've been there. Our equipment had a build cost of just under $100k when were at the pre-production stages.

The problem isn't just working from home, it's "how do you give enough developers/testers" access to the equipment when each unit requires such a high upfront cost and ongoing maintenance and physical space, supplies, etc? So even if everyone is working in the lab, it's still a problem.

Our response was to create extremely detailed simulations of every aspect of the behavior. The code ran on our laptops exactly the same way it would on physical hardware. By simply flipping a switch in a config file, the software would either run on real hardware, or start up with simulated hardware.

Of course, we still needed to test on real hardware, but because we were forced to create the simulation to allow enough developers simultaneous access, it also made it easier for us to work from home :-)

You clearly don't have site to site mass materializers (ie star trek transporters) then you could just move it to your location when you need it. Get on the ball!

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