I’m a very introverted person, but telecommuting isn’t for me. I’ve come to realize that I really like office gossip. Not the sordid, soap opera stuff, but work-related grapevine news. Like positions that may be opening up, who’s getting promoted, who’s getting transferred, etc. I’ve even learned some unspoken professional don’ts that I wouldn’t have learned if not for hovering around the water cooler (like it is NOT COOL to call the hiring manager to schedule a private meeting before your scheduled interview and then try to gain access to her Outlook calendar when she doesn’t answer you right away).
Also, I don’t know what I would do without the cookies and donuts left in the breakroom.
I’m a socially awkward person and I have been working from home since I graduated college in 2001. At first I worked in a house with my business partner, then a couple years at my parents’ house (where I lived) and then I moved to working and living by myself 24/7 at the end of 2005.
I have always had social problems and working at home doesn’t help. I didn’t choose to work this way, this is just how stuff worked out (as in, it’s not like someone gave me the option to work in a bigger business).
I did work in many jobs before I turned 21 and I do know how to work as part of a team, but other than a summer internship in a digital newsroom, I’ve never worked in an office.
I can’t answer any of the OP’s other questions but I can definitely say that working in this isolation has fucked with me. I totally feel awkward around other people, all the time. But like I said that started from within.
That’s why I’m pretty addicted to the Dope, as it were. Interacting with you guys during the day is like having a buzzing office on the other side of my door, and a water at which to chat.
Don’t worry, ZipperJJ. Working at an office does not mean people are social adept. I’m very fortunate that I have a door I can close when coworkers start giving me a headache. If it weren’t for that door, I’d probably be a lot more open about working from home.
I’ve worked from home for the better part of 13 years now. If I’m nuts or socially awkward, I haven’t noticed.
That said, it can be a challenge at times. As others have said, the worst is when there’s a mix of locals and remotes; all-remote or all-local isn’t so much of an issue.
My current position has about a third of our team in the office and the rest working remotely. The company has put a huge amount of time, effort, and money into making the remote thing work; our current ratio of remote-to-local developers is something like 65/35. It used to be that I often felt like I was the last to know things and all that, but not anymore. Tools such as two-way videoconferencing, chat rooms like Slack, and having the majority of the team remote make it work.
And sure, you miss out on the office gossip and politics (but not all of it). That is not necessarily a bad thing. Lately I have a coworker or two who seem intent on making sure I know the scuttlebutt, and truly, at times I wish they wouldn’t. I’m happier in my own little bubble, thinking about nothing but the work itself.
Working remotely doesn’t turn you crazy, but that, and working after hours onsite instead of with the majority of the employees, does leave you a bit disconnected from the social culture of your workplace. I don’t care how socially adept you are, you have to learn the informal rules of any new group you join and until you do you won’t quite fit in(even when you seem to be fitting in right away, it’s less that you are actually attuned to the culture of the place than that you’re a shiny new object that people want to get to know, sometimes for office politics purposes).
Some of the traits mentioned in the OP are traits I’ve noticed in coworkers of mine when they are “away from where the action is”. For example, rambling even worse than usual (none of those people is very good at getting to the point in general). Note that when the action happens to be a deployment, the ones who are away from it are the ones in HQ.
I’ve had projects where we had people in five to thirty countries and we communicated just fine. People used the phone, VoiP, instant messaging, email, dropbox-style servers… as needed. Those same people also had the flexibility to understand that sometimes it’s better to have a picture, sometimes a table, and sometimes you need to spell things down. The culture of the organization was geared towards making remote contact easy. I’m remembering an ad for “EHS manager, Europe - location, any in Europe or ZA”: since this person was supposed to meet with his subordinates once a year in an “all-hands meeting” and once or twice doing rounds, the company figured there was no reason to make him move. The succesful candidate was from our Orleans factory and he stayed in Orleans.
I’ve had others where people were in the same location physically and still communication sucked. People who had all the subtlety of a jackhammer: everything was “red!” or “white!” or “black!” but when you actually looked at things in detail it turned out to be different colors in different cases. People whose connection to reality was tenuous. People who were so afraid to “look stupid” that they kept on driving over a cliff rather than admit this might be the wrong way. Others who, if they didn’t know something, didn’t ask because… “because! crosses arms and frowns” oh, ok, dude, very mature.
I know very sociable people who work remotely and/or by themselves: they’re translators, lawyers, accountants… and while they do occasionally meet someone for work, most of their job is done by themselves. The people they meet for work aren’t their coworkers; no chatting unless they happen to know each other in a different context. They get their socialization elsewhere.
I worked for IBM at a time when they claimed they were transitioning their workforce from mostly-remote to not-at-all-remote. They had gone from placing all their people at client sites, to having them all working remotely from an IBM site, to working from home once they found out that everybody had high-speed Internet access anyway. It was a great money-saver, but their stated reason for switching from 60% remote to 0% was that they found it was easier to train people in on new tasks if they were in the same room as the trainer, rather than watching a remote desktop demonstration on a conference call.
So, they gathered us all together at one office in Dubuque and had us trained on all our new tasks, using remote desktops and conference calls… In the fullness of time, it became clear that their long-term solution for the problem was not that they needed fewer remote people, just cheaper ones. See, the real problem wasn’t that working remote was bad–it was that American techs working from home were way more expensive than, say, Indian techs working from an office in Bangalore. They needed to divest themselves of all of their American work-from-home types, so they told them all, “Hey, your job’s moving to Dubuque. If you want to keep it, you’ll do the same.”
Not surprisingly, some people didn’t want to move to Dubuque, for various reasons: they had kids in school, they had family who needed them in, say, North Dakota, they didn’t want to sell their homes, they had health or home issues that required them to work from home… plus, Dubuque. They were told that the specific purpose of the new center was that nobody would be allowed to work from home (even from home in Dubuque) because that wasn’t the model they were looking to use. Once they got a building full of people all trained up and working, they then gave us so. much. work that we couldn’t get it all done, at which point IBM threw up its hands and said “See? This is why we can’t have nice things. Darn. I guess we’ll just have to get a bunch of Indians over here on temporary work visas so you can train them all how to do this and then they go back to India and get the work done (remotely) for much cheaper.”
Nah, I just hate commuting and I like working weird hours but still want(ed) to be near wife and kid. I started working from home when I started a consulting business in 1999ish. I made a lot of money doing that, but eventually went back to a ‘real’ job under the agreement that I would continue working remotely. Now my projects involve people from all over the US and the world, so there’s really no office to go to and I’ve never met most of my coworkers.
Socially I have lunch with some other people in the company a couple of times a month, and I have my own friends as well. And I’ve embarked on being newly single last year, so my social life is fun and interesting in other ways, and my work hours flexibility is often a plus there as well.
And, yes, I hate being in phone meetings where 1-3 people ramble for 30-60 minutes; I get to the point and share what I worked on and any issues in a couple of minutes, then I pretend to listen to the rest of the conversation while I write code.