Working From Home

As a remote employee at Cloudera for three years, I've never had a desk at any one of our offices.

When I tell people that I work from home, I usually get one of the following responses:

“It must be hard to stay motivated.”
“That's awesome, you should come meet me for lunch!”
“So you work in your underwear?”

There are many little quirks about working from home, I've tried to organize some of my thoughts on the matter.

Motivation

Working from home isn't for everyone. I'm not even sure that it's for me, but motivation isn't any different than if I were working from an office. I'm accountable for my work and that's enough for me.

Do I suffer lapses in motivation due to fatigue, boredom, illness, or distraction? Sure, but how’s that different from working in an office?

Setting Expectations

There's a lot of misconceptions about working from home, mostly from those who never have, the biggest of which is that you can do whatever you want, whenever you want. That's simply not the case.

I have meetings. Phone calls. Deadlines. Things that need to get done. These responsibilities are no different than those an office worker might have, except that their boss might pop in at any time. If the fear of being found slacking off is a continual thought in your mind while you're sitting at your desk (whether you're being productive or not), working from home might not be for you. If you have difficulties separating work from the rest of your life, beware.

The time of remote workers seems less respected (or at least misunderstood) compared to office workers. Often we're the last to be invited to meetings; I always assume it’s an oversight, but in the back of my mind I think we have HOW MANY remote employees? how is this a new thing? The state of remote conferencing is abysmal: the technology, though quirky at times, seems to be less of a problem than people. If there's a group of coworkers in a conference room at HQ and a group of us dialed in by phone, rarely are questions repeated and even more rarely are side-discussions summarized. We're still here and we can't hear, so why did we bother dialing in?

The solution isn't just educating our colleagues, but pushing the company to embrace remote workers completely. Most companies seem okay with remote workers to an extent, but still have deep roots in office-based culture. We need to continue to speak up when our needs aren't being met.

It's not just colleagues. Friends and family don't get it either. While I don't need to ask my supervisor's permission or worry about someone seeing me leave my house, my time is still valuable. Can I meet you for lunch? Sure, but you can bet I'll be working later to accomplish the goals I had set for the day. Maybe we meet halfway next time, huh?

It's important to communicate your availability and routine to colleagues. I set my office hours on Google Calendar, so that coworkers trying to schedule meetings know what times are generally off-limits. I make it very clear to my team, and anyone who will listen, that I don't check email after hours, and then follow through on it. I may not win any awards for hardest-working, but I'm not going to “win” most-overworked either.

Although the business world treats email as a synchronous method of communication (meaning people expect a near-immediate response), it isn't, and I strive to treat email as asynchronously as possible. Strangely, I find that most people won't resort to the phone despite it being a truly synchronous medium. It's almost as if the telephone serves as a mental block to what's really important, since we know that we'll almost certainly be interrupting whoever we're calling. The scientific study of interruptions is ongoing, although it’s a fairly well accepted problem within the tech industry.

Potentially Hazardous for Your Health

I have zero medical training, but I can say with certainty that working from home has impacted both my physical and mental health.

When working from home, you're isolated from other human beings, especially if you live alone. Your colleagues are just a click away on HipChat or Hangouts, but it's not the same as seeing them in person at lunch or at social events. Even if you only see them in passing, there's something about physical presence that can't be duplicated when working remotely. Just because I'm introverted doesn't mean it's not valuable to spend time with my colleagues; fortunately my team lead, believing this in-person time is important -- works to schedule onsite events for us all to get together once a quarter. I try to organize and host coworking days for local colleagues to get together and work from the same space, simulating the office environment if only for a day.

It's disturbingly easy to go full days without leaving the house. I'm almost certain this isn't healthy behavior. I'm pretty sure that this sort of behavior contributed to some health problems I experienced in 2014. I now make a point to take a daily walk around the neighborhood during my "lunch hour" -- in addition to getting regular exercise, it allows me to clear my head. While I'm not required to do a time card, I still count this towards my work day. I'm not sure if it's the physical activity, getting away from the computer screen, the fresh air, or just the change of scenery, but I solve a surprising number of problems on those walks.

Daily Routine Makes a Huge Difference

Without a routine, I feel lost. I need structure. Working in a office, the routine was largely set by external factors such as the office's hours or customer's needs. When I started working from home I recognized that I had the freedom of flexibility, to shift the day around as I needed or wanted to. I quickly discovered that I needed to maintain a daily routine.

I usually wake up naturally, without an alarm. I think it's important to get as much rest as the body needs -- rather than stick to a rigid number of hours of sleep per night -- so I don't set an alarm unless I've got an early flight to catch. I've found that barring environmental chances (late night out, sickness), I wake up around the same time every day.

I get up, go downstairs to grab a quick snack, then go back upstairs to my office (more on that in a moment). And I work. I take breaks when I need to. I leave my office for lunch and my walk. And when I'm done for the day, I leave.

That’s my routine. It works for me.

The Physical Office

This is important. Just like keeping the bedroom as place for proper sleep, the home office is a place for work; a separate room that's dedicated to the purpose, nothing else. Short of hosting coworking events where I might utilize the living room, I don't work anywhere else in the house; along similar lines, I don't have work email notifications enabled on my phone.

That one room in my house is my office. Treat it as such.

It's a simple concept, a physical boundary that enables a context switch between work and home. That boundary allows me to "step out" of the office when I need to and to leave work behind; the fact that I don't have to leave the house to do so is vital, else I'd always find myself "at work" even while making lunch, doing the dishes, or folding the laundry.

Maintaining a separation between work and life is vital and it's something that a lot of people in the tech industry are horrible at managing. It's harder still for people who work from home, especially if there's no dedicated space and when there are other people in the household; just because we're in the house doesn't mean we're not trying to work. I've been told it's difficult to educate family members about those boundaries, especially children.

Mutually Beneficial

There are definite perks to working from home, but it’s a different sort of benefit than health insurance, vision care, discount gym membership, or any of the other things offered to employees. It’s nuanced and difficult to put into words. The option to work at home isn’t something that I’ve earned through good behavior, but rather through a mutually beneficial arrangement between my employer and myself; we both give up certain things in exchange for other benefits.

The financial aspect is not insignificant for my employer.

Consider, if I were working in one of our offices:

RENT. The rent on office space costs hundreds of dollars per month per person, even using very conservative metrics of 100-150 square feet per person which doesn't account for all those sprawling conference rooms and play areas. If you think the San Francisco Bay Area has expensive office space, consider the rents in Washington DC often top those in NYC.
LUNCH. While I won't get into the reasoning behind (or my thoughts about) daily lunch service, suffice to say it's a non-trivial expense.
EVERYTHING ELSE. Consider the multitude of ancillary costs of operating an office: utilities, coffee, snacks, sodas, juices, cleaning services, high-bandwidth low-latency Internet, telephony, release parties and social events, etc.

By comparison, working from home:

RENT. Nothing.
LUNCH. Nothing.
EVERYTHING ELSE. My telephone expenses, a portion of my home broadband bill, and a company-provided MiFi (for travel).

I'm happy to have those expenses covered and while the overall financial arrangement is a boon for Cloudera, most of my benefits aren't financial at all. For starters (and this is a biggie), I don't have to live in the Bay Area, which means I can afford to live more comfortably on my salary. I don't have to spend time driving several hours each day to and from the office, which means more time for me and less traffic-induced stress. When traveling, from jetway to driveway takes 30 minutes. I can play the music as loud as I like during my work day or seek quiet space without having to wear noise-canceling headphones. If the office is too hot or too cold, it's my thermostat to adjust as I see fit.

Working at home is the easy part, just ask anyone who’s been given the chance to work from home for a day or two. It’s the long-term “remote” part that’s hard, especially for those working in physical isolation for days or weeks at a time. Learning how to mitigate isolation is a continual, life-long process. The Internet doesn’t bridge this gap as easily as it should.

But yes, I can work in my underwear if I want.

Last Modified: 2020-08-08

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