I'm kinda astonished that this even needs to be negotiated. It should be the default at any half-decent employer.
And also due to some bad apples, the entire category of people willing to work from home is considered as a bunch of slackers - so you want to "work" from home, uh?
What they don't know is that when I work from home I produce 1.3-1.5x more than when I work at the office - do I like to work everyday from home, though? No!
I accept that it's possible to have a team that would do significantly better than that, but definitely don't agree with the utopian view that you can offer WFH to just any employee and they'll be productive, and crucially that it won't affect other employees who might need their input.
Maybe this is because this is the day they actually used to implement stuff free of people asking them questions about other stuff...
Not all personality types are willing to solve problems (aka working) for their own intrinsic motivation.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=204240
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=943722
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1675197
- It's interesting / challenging
- A sense of duty / professionalism
- A sense of teamwork / camaraderie
This is entirely anecdotal of course. I also will often head to a cafe to get some 'human/ambient' time (another motivator). Being at home can be lonely.
I'm just saying that HN is really biased toward known problem-solving personalities, this should be taken into account in the context of this discussion :-)
I always see people criticizing all sort of tests because they are not good regarding to some criteria. Well, this is true for all of them. Those tests are trying to divide billions of people into few categories, you lose information anyway. There are 8 billions of personalities that should be split into 16 categories, some people will match exactly, other will lies in-between and will not match the characteristics.
I don't know these big-five or hexaco tests, but by the principle they also try to reduce the dimensionality of 8 billions people to n<100 categories, the same as MBTI. They may be better than MBTI, probably, but this does not mean the later may not bring useful information for our discussion.
I made some quick stats one of the HN pool (probably not statistically significant, but still a good indication), INTJ are 2.5% in the real population but 30% of HN, INTP 4% but 28.7% on HN, ENTP 6% but 10% on HN, and ENTJ 5.5% but 7.5% on HN. The four together represent ~80% of HN, but only ~20% of the real population. Those are also the four most represented categories on HN, and curiously belongs to the "Intellectual" class of personalities [1], as you would except to find on HN.
Maybe it's not the best test, maybe it has some problems, but it is still a tool that can give us some bases for thinking and discussions.
[1] https://mypersonality.info/personality-types/population-gend...
Example: witches didn't float, yet you can probably assign some properties that would cause people to label them as such.
I disagree with the notion that wanting to solve problems necessarily leads to having the discipline or desire to work.
The problems I choose to solve in my spare time are almost always more interesting than the ones I solve for work because I choose them out of interest, whereas the ones for work are chosen due to more practical reasons.
There's also the issue that some problems are shitty and boring. You're not "solving" a problem when you're writing another boring CRUD app.
My guess: these people aren't very productive or useful when stuck 8 hours in an office either.
Be micro-managed (by your manager, or by peer pressure in an open-space) is not a reasonable way of having productive engineers.
Well, that's half the problem. The other half is the tendency of many managers to view all requests to work from home as a request to stay home and goof off on the clock. I've worked places where the apparent measure of productivity is how many aggregate ass-in-seat hours the department put in.
My direct manager is OK with that but the guy one level up always makes comments about people not in the office so I guess for promotions and raises it's better to be in the office.
I'm now always a bit wary about hiring someone who has never worked remotely because I know the chances it won't work out are high.