How many IT people work from home?

I do sometimes, I would more often if my company didn't have such an old school mentality about it.

With VPN and out of band management 95% of System and Network Administration can be handled remotely.
There is still the odd physical hardware problem but if you are replacing desktops/servers every 4 years it is unlikely.

Yet I still see some IT staff saying "I haven't had a sick day in 5 years, as the company relies on IT to run"

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Comments

ajs1976

I work from home 1 day a week. It is a benefit that is earned after a year of good service. Others in my department work from home 4 days and in the office 1 day a week. It saves the company money.

gunbunnysoulja

I'm a work at home employee (only one in my company). It's great and I highly recommend it.

At my last contract assignment, the Army organization implemented a work at home program for the GS workers, once a week.

Telecommuting seems to be getting more popular. I know there are many here that are full time work at home employees (and I don't mean for telecommute only organizations).

Sure some people need full-time on-site staff, but many "could" do their job remote. I think higher metrics could be met from home vs. at the workplace. Now of course work at home isn't for everyone. But for those who can prioritize and work independently it's great.

I still meet with leadership several times a week over Google Hangouts/DCO/Skype so I still get a lot of interaction.

Everyone

I work from home, but I also travel for work quite a bit. Around 75% travel right now.

My last job I worked from home with less than 10% travel.

Bloogen

Work from home most of the time. Other time meetings over Skype and IM through Google Chat. We do an office day at least once a month.

illuminus

If i'm not at home then I'm travelling. I'd say its was about 50/50 this year. Last year i was on the road about 75% of the time. I racked up the airline miles and hotel points but I'd much rather work from home. Airport security sucks!

the_Grinch

We've always had a limited work from home policy (limited as in no work from home), but recently due to injuries and illness a couple of the programmers have worked from home. One broke his foot and was out for three months. It actually worked out because they had a website redesign and he put in about 90 hours that week, much easier from home. I think with it happening recently, they will end up letting them work from home more often. I on the other hand, really couldn't and I did remote support from home for a month...hated it. Too easily distracted!

RomBUS

I dont but sometimes I definitely wish I did at will like some of my superiors over here. We dont really have a high volume of calls and during downtime I doubt when they do work from home they're sitting there idle waiting for the next call.

cyberguypr

I don't like working from home for the fact that my wife also works from home. We share the home office so it can be hectic. The benefit does come in handy for those times when i'm somewhat sick and don't feel like burning up PTO. Also, my company is a Google-type so it's always fun to be at the office dodging Nerf bullets and foam rockets.

Claymoore

Like a couple of the other consultants already stated, I'm either working from home or I'm travelling. My first year here was about 80% travel, which is unusual for my company. I have been home for last three months and it has been great. I would prefer 25% travel, but 50% seems to be about right for maintaining my status with the airline, hotel, and rental agency. I don't want to have to go back to standing in the normal traveller security line.

I like working from home, although I would have fewer distractions if my wife and son weren't also home. Sometimes my wife forgets that just because I am home does not mean I am not busy at work. I was home so little my first year that I did not bother to set up a desk and worked off the dining room table. Buying a new desk and chair and setting up a dedicated work area has improved my productivity.

Working from home does have it's challenges. If I am not on site I am easier to ignore. Email isn't the same as being able to walk into someone's office or cube and ask them to get something done. Often I am working with clients in different time zones and that throws off the home schedule. Being home does give me the flexibility to take a break and play with my son while my wife makes dinner, and then sit back down later in the evening and get back to work.

ptilsen

I work from home once in a while if I need to be there for something, maybe once every three or four weeks. I agree that my job could be done 90% remotely, but I will admit there are advantages to going into the office. I do feel the office environment is more conducive to efficient work, for the most part. Having my team members nearby, a desk phone, any equipment I could ever need, etc. is all nice, and there are lots of distractions at home. Still, I'd love to be able to work from home once or twice a week, just to avoid wasting time with the commute, have flexibility to run errands, and eat at home.

But as with discount81, my company has a fairly old-school mentality. WFH isn't permitted for most other employees, so they don't want us to do it. The fact that we're salaried and expected to be available constantly and work extra when needed (not on-call, but still) to me does mean we should have that flexibility as a perk, and for the most part, we do. A big part of the reason I left my last job is that there was on-call and evening/weekend project work constantly, yet I was expected to commute over an hour to work 8:00 to 5:00 every day, even if I knew I had a 12-plus-hour day ahead of me.

I think as my generation and technology become more dominant in the workforce, this will chance for a lot of office workers, not just IT. Work-from-home and flexibility are necessary to have happy, high-performing salaried employees.

msteinhilber

I work from home now and then, especially when I have a large project I'm working on or anything else that requires more focus - I'm far more productive when working from home. I wouldn't have felt too comfortable working from home a short while ago. We used to spend a lot more time than we do now putting out fires often due to very aged equipment or equipment that was SOHO quality in a large environment failing. I've made a lot of progress here over the years getting new servers, introducing virtualization, replacing Linksys equipment with Juniper and HP ProCurve gear and currently implementing storage from EMC. Now I feel far more comfortable that the equipment we have isn't going to be failing at any given moment.

lsud00d

As an on-site contractor we are often allowed to telecommute when the customer is out on holiday, which is great because sometimes they reduce building facilities and it can be really uncomfortable in the building

vanquish23

Every 6th week I get to stay home and work remotely managing network equipment. Within that week its on call 24/7 for 7 days.

jmritenour

Not every day, but in my current role I can work from home pretty much at will. I like to maintain a presence at the office, so I usually only do it once or twice most weeks, but it's nice to have the option.

CodeBlox

If I have to work saturdays, I can VPN in from home instead of coming into the office. If I have extra work that extends my work day I just go home and remote in to finish.

SteveO86

Got the option to work from home.

It's nice in the aspect I don't have to spend 2 hours driving in my car, and I can cram out a lot of stuff when I am not distracted by people coming to my desk in person. However it is boring and lonely.

paul78

lsud00d wrote: »

... we are often allowed to telecommute when the customer is out on holiday...

I am so curious about what you said - what industry do you support and country do you work in? I've never come across any companies where the entire staff is out on holiday at the same time.

For me - I do work from home occasionally. And sometimes, I will work in a satellite office which is close to my home than making the trek to the HQ. Realistically as a global company, there really isn't much of a reason for me to work in an office. Most of the people are deal with are in other parts of the world.

As a side-note - my sister in-law works for a European pharma and very recently, the converted all their US-based employees to virtual work - instead of having fixed work-space - they instituted hotel-ing work-areas at their US HQ. Interesting concept.

There is definitely good and bad with virtual remote work-at-home for both the employee and the employer. From a pro-prospective - I think that most people would prefer not to commute and there can be substantial cost-savings for the employer in terms of facilities expenses.

On the con-side, some people simply don't do well working without interaction. And without that face-to-face, there can be some lost of efficiency and collaboration will take a hit.

W Stewart

If we're talking about one of the upper level IT jobs or a job where you can just VPN into the office rather than come in for the day then I've never worked in a job like that but I've worked on call before outside of a regular fulltime schedule that forced me to deal with network and credit card issues at home.

Now I've also worked for an ISP at home for about a week which was just about the worst IT job I've ever had (mostly due to the low pay of $8/hr). Basically all the downsides of a call center job but amplified since your managers don't know you in person and won't hesitate to treat you however they want over the phone. Telenetwork was the company and I provided DSL support for century link. I only stayed for about a week or two doing classroom training the first 3 or 4 days and on the job training after that. They were planning on throwing me on the floor early with barely enough training but luckily I got the job at my current place of work in a NOC. I was only forced to take that job because another work at home job that I read a lot of bad reviews about basically gave me the job and had me fill out all the paperwork and even take a drug test (I specifically waited until after the drug test before giving my 2 week notice with my current employer to make sure nothing went wrong), they then proceeded to screw me over by cancelling on me the friday before I was going to start. I will never do I work at home job like that again. And I'll make sure to warn any and everybody about a crappy company called PlumChoice.

undomiel

The company I've been with for over 3 years now started out as working 50% at home and 50% onsite. As we picked up more employees I was able to hand off more of the physical stuff to the other guys and concentrate more on project work and high level escalations. It eventually got to the point where I was working nearly 100% from home so after a talk with the owner I was allowed to move to Seattle and now work 100% from home. No travel yet though I'm sure a project or two will come up eventually that will require flying me out to the client. But we haven't hit that point yet.

I know I find my productivity the highest when I'm at home and am able to set my own schedule. When out at a client's site I can't work multiple clients at once and also there is all the travel time involved. From home it is a whole lot easier to be working a project or two and several escalations at once. That works out much better for my employer. I've also found that when I work in the office I would constantly have people coming into my office and interrupting me with minor issues or just to chat. Working from home I do feel detached from my coworkers, but it seems to work out fairly well for me.

Another downside is that it is very easy for my hours to snowball. The past several weeks I've been hitting over 80 hours with no end in site, and even before it would be rare that I would work as little as 40 hours. I'm usually the only one that is willing to pull any late nights to get the job done with little interruption for the client. Also with being a remote worker it is more difficult for other coworkers to accurately see the work load on my plate so I find myself ever week or so having to call in management to keep me from drowning in unnecessary escalations and thereby not getting projects done and not getting enough sleep.

I would say that overall working from home 100% definitely fits well with my work style and personality. When I decide to move on it will be a pretty tough call to give up this work environment. Of course it may be different once I have kids. Then I may want an office to be working from.

I can definitely relate with Claymoore by the way. Currently working from folding chairs and a card table. Looking forward to that getting fixed in the next few months and having a real home office to work from.