Any others work @ home?

Just curious how many others work out of their house in an IT capacity.

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Not in a FT capacity although i have worked from home many times before. It has its positives and negatives but some days i can get sooo much more done project wise working from home! Thankfully my current workplace has no problems with this aslong as you dont take the p*ss and can justify it!

Corporate environments ive worked in previously havent taken to kindly to the idea. Not sure why, it can be a good thing.

gunbunnysoulja

I agree with the negatives and positives. I'm currently in a FT capacity and very much enjoy it. Most of my work is Project Management, Reachback/Continuity and lots of Research.

My last physical location implemented a Work @ Home program once a week for the government counterparts and that seems to be doing very well for morale and productivity.

One of the downsides is social interaction. I do miss working directly with people although alot of my day is teleconference or VTC.

It's certainly nice sleeping in though and not having to pay for gas/dealing with traffic!

And while I have a nice office at my house, I do enjoy typing this from my couch.

Everyone

For me, working from home as been both awesome, and awful at the same time. I love that I can wake up minutes before starting work in the morning. I love that when I am done working for the day, I just lock my computer, and I'm already home. Walk right upstairs and go right into spending time with my family.

How long have you been doing it?

I'm about to hit 6 months of working from home full time. The company I work for was reluctant to hire me starting from home. There are other people that work from home full time, even on my own team, but all of them started out in the office, then transitioned to working from home full time later. It basically came down to I wasn't going to take the job unless I could work from home, because it wasn't (and still isn't) a good time for me to relocate.

I spent 2 weeks at the office (which is 2 states away from me) for on-boarding, and haven't been back since. I was supposed to spend 2 weeks per quarter at the office, all expenses paid, which I thought was great. However shortly after I started, the company put a freeze on all travel. It kind of sucks, because being out there and getting some face time in with my co-workers and management was good. Now I'm not getting that.

I try to talk to people over the phone, over IM, or via e-mail as much as I can, but I'm getting to the point where I feel like I've been forgotten.

gunbunnysoulja

I'm only 3 months in but so far it seems great. Luckily I have great management so contact is not an issue. I travel to a remote office about once a month to do misc tasks and link up with co-workers/mgmt.. I'm the only one in the company fortunate enough to be full time work at home.

That is pretty impressive however to be direct hire for WAH. What type of work do you do remotely?

Skype has become my best friend. Although I can't wait to have Polycom capability via Real Presence.

MAC_Addy

I primarily work from my office, and travel to a lot of our remote locations, though I have the ability to work from home and do it all the time.

I wish I didn't have to work out of my office, since a lot of the tasks I can do straight from home.

Everyone

gunbunnysoulja wrote: »

That is pretty impressive however to be direct hire for WAH. What type of work do you do remotely?

I was hired to do Tier 3 support for Messaging services. Exchange, OCS, BES, and Rightfax. I was reluctant to go into a support role (I was really looking more for an Architect or Engineer role), but it was time for me to find a new job, and I couldn't pass up getting paid more to work from home. Very large Enterprise, over 70,000 employees worldwide, plus a ton of contractors.

However, I haven't done too much support stuff. They had me start working on a few process improvement initiatives right away. Then a couple projects got handed to me. Which is fine by me, I'd rather be working projects than doing support.

A couple months after I started, one of the Engineers on my team got fired. I wasn't expecting that (don't think anyone else was either.) I figured it would be a few years before an opportunity to move up into an Engineer slot opened up. I asked to be considered for the position, but was told that company policy is that you have to have been in your current position for at least 1 year and have a good performance review before you can move to another position. $:\$ So now all of this Engineer's projects have been dumped on me while they try to fill the position. Yup I get to have the responsibilities and do the work without the increased title and pay.

So the only support stuff I'm actually doing, is stuff that probably previously would have been escalated to Microsoft or RIM, etc. Like today I fixed a Public Folder replication that must have either been unnoticed or ignored for years. 50k folders and 200 GB of data only had 1 replica, when it was supposed to have 2.

For projects, I'm cleaning up and completing migration of data (e-mail) from an acquisition of another company, and working on building the Exchange 2010 environment as we prepare for that migration.

shodown

I've been working from home since summer as my wife got a job in another city and we had to move away. I'm about 2 hours from the job so I still go in for important meetings and parties.

As others said its great and it sucks at the same time. I do Tier 3 support so I get a million request at 1 time since everyone assumes no one else is talking to me. The great part is I get more work done as I could easily get drawn into a convo at work. The bad part is I feel I'm a tad bit overworked and I tend to get a lot of work since i get all the request. If I was just doing design and less support it would be awesome as I could really buckle down and concentrate.

Webmaster

In a couple of weeks it'll be 10 years since I started working from home, for myself, didn't even realize that until a few weeks ago when I started looking at jobs again. When I quit my regular job my manager asked me if I wasn't worried "my world would become smaller" - I wasn't, and it obviously didn't. It also wasn't a major change since I frequently worked with people 'remotely' over the globe from either my own office at a company or from home. So I basically slowly got used to the idea before working from home full-time.

The most important thing is that it's a job you enjoy doing. Although that goes for any job really, it weighs even heavier when you work from home, especially if you can spread the working hours freely throughout the day. When you don't work from home it's easier to leave your work at work, which at the less enjoyable days all jobs have, is a major advantage to be considered especially if you don't live alone, i.e. have a family or spouse at home.

Essendon

I envy you guys, most of my work (if not all) can be done from home. But as I work for an MSP, the client wants all of us to be on site just about all the time. With Melbourne's traffic conditions getting worse by the day, I will ask/coerce my next employer to factor in some work-from-home into my contract. Seriously, I really envy you all.

njkt

I'm doing that now with my pc repair business, horrible horrible idea... completely god aweful idea if ever there was one.

Only because I have a 10month old baby so my wife doesn't care too much about my side job and throws the baby on me at the first opportunity.

Everyone

njkt wrote: »

I'm doing that now with my pc repair business, horrible horrible idea... completely god aweful idea if ever there was one.

Only because I have a 10month old baby so my wife doesn't care too much about my side job and throws the baby on me at the first opportunity.

Yeah you have to control that. I have a 4 month old, a 3 year old, and an 8 year old. The 8 year old is in school most of the day, so he's easy. The baby is actually pretty easy too, but my 3 year old can be a nightmare. I made it very clear that even though I'm home, I am at work. I set aside a private office for myself in my basement, and the door to the basement remains locked while I am working. I am to be left alone unless it is an emergency.

the_Grinch

When we moved to a new office I worked from home for a month and hated every minute of it. I was ok with the commute, but other then that it was a real pain. At work I had two screens (large ones) while at home I was stuck on my laptop and another old monitor. Also, I really had not designated area to truly work in. So while we have a computer room, it is right next to the living room and I get distracted easily. It might have been better if I had an office and it was for work only. But I found my biggest issue was that I felt like there was no separation between work and home. It eventually started feeling like I was at work all the time so that weighed on me. Maybe someday I will like it, but I don't suspect I will have to worry about lol

undomiel

I've been working from home for nearly 3 years now. When I was hired on it was pretty much only 3 guys doing the job and we were hardly ever in the office. It's grown to be a much much larger company since then. I go onsite at a client maybe once a week and into the office maybe once a month. I have to say that I love it. I'm way more productive at home when I can just hole up in a corner and not have the chatty coworkers about. Bouncing ideas off of people is nice, but unfortunately there is only one guy on board who can understand most of what I talk about. So when I do need to talk I can just pick up the phone and give him a call. The few times I'm up at the office my productivity drops significantly since I have lots of people coming around to see what I'm working, ask me questions, and get me to figure out the problems that they're having difficulties with. Working from home is definitely one of the biggest perks of this job and I'll be sad to see it go when I move on. It's definitely nice to be able to take a 15 minute video game refresher before jumping back into that nightmare of an Exchange migration or continuing that seemingly endless XenServer deployment. Plus it makes it really easy for me to pull an all nighter and not have to worry about someone locking me in (or out of) the office.

Xcluziv

For the individuals who are working at home....are you all employees of the company or consultants? I was wondering does that play a factor in the ability to work at home or in the office. Currently, I work in the office, but we do have the ability to work remotely, but it is rare to do so a=unless we surely have to or inclimate weather.

Everyone

Xcluziv wrote: »

For the individuals who are working at home....are you all employees of the company or consultants? I was wondering does that play a factor in the ability to work at home or in the office. Currently, I work in the office, but we do have the ability to work remotely, but it is rare to do so a=unless we surely have to or inclimate weather.

I am an Employee, and as I mentioned, was hired to work from home full time.

My previous job was more like yours, we had the ability to work from home, but didn't get to do it too often. My boss would let me work from home if I had a sick kid who couldn't go to school or daycare. We'd also work from home if we were sick but not too sick to not work at all. In fact if you showed up at work coughing, everybody would pretty much demand you go home and work there.