Working from Home

For my entire career until I joined my current company about a year ago, I worked in pretty much every conceivable office configuration. Huge cube farms, small team bullpens and everything in between. I even had an office once (how that happened is another story). But now, I work from home almost all the time. This isn't a personal choice, it was a requirement for the job. In fact all engineers at my company (all 13 of us) work from home, leaving the support and sales folks as the only people in the office.

It was a huge adjustment coming from large offices to working in solitude at my house. Letting people work from home when they want can be a boost for morale and tells me that a company values it's employees well-being. But, like most things, it has its pros and cons:

PROS:

• I can work in blessed silence all day long
• I can play my music as loud as I want
  
• I can change my venue when the mood strikes me--Starbucks, the Library, Quincy Market, wherever, so long as I can get a network connection.
• I don't need to worry about when I arrive in the morning or leave at night. As long as my stuff is getting done and it works, we're all good (within reason of course--if I get something done two weeks ahead of time, I can't take two weeks off of work)
  
• I don't have to drive anywhere. If I need to go into the office (on the rare occasion I do), the T is nearby.

CONS:

• It's isolating. I have weeks where I don't leave my apartment complex.
  
• Communications can be a problem. We work via email and IM, with the occasional voice chat and desktop sharing session when things get too complicated to explain via text. This works relatively well, but there are definitely times when I wish we were all in the same office and I could just pop into someone's cube or office instead of sending them an email and waiting potentially hours for an answer.
• I haven't really gotten to know the rest of the company. Remember when I mentioned the support and sales folks above? I only know their names from email and when I see people in the office, it can be somewhat awkward. You can't really develop the kind of relationships you sometimes need in an office to get things done.

And while it's not really a pro or a con, you have to be very self-directed. Just like I said there's no one there watching when you come in and when you leave, there's also no one there watching your current activities and forcing you to be on task. And because you're at home, temptations abound. You have to be in a job where you want to work all day on whatever it is you do. If you don't like what you're doing, working from home will most likely be a disaster.

So, after doing the office thing and the work from home thing, I'd say the best work experience would be a combination of the two. Come in one or two days a week to say hi to people and have meetings, and then work from home the rest of the week. Thankfully, our office has expanded and this approach may be an option for me in the near future.