I am fascinated/jealous of work from home people!

[SueInBoston]

I've been in the tech & Op side of various big banks my whole career. We went hybrid probably around 20 years ago, Covid put us totally WFH. There're some noise about us returning to office 2x a week, but my manager hasn't made that mandate for us.

 

[_19disnA]

It depends on the type of work and your specific job as to whether working from home is possible/practical. If you work in manufacturing, then clearly you have to be in the plant to do your job. If you do phone payments or make reservations (like Disney), then you can do that job from almost anywhere that has a phone & PC. A lot of engineering work requires access to labs/test equipment/facilities/etc. Some types of jobs were done from home even before covid.

 

[EACarlson]

I do taxes and audits for trucking companies. I work about 80-90% from home, going in to the office once every couple weeks and more often when we are filing those taxes every quarter. The pandemic forced my company to move many things that were paper based to digital and about half of my department is work from home or hybrid.

 

[nancipants]

I write documentation for a software company. Our company has a headquarters and collaboration hubs around the country, but I was hired as a fully remote employee in Fall 2021. My previous job had switched to WFH during Covid and was requiring people to return to the office on a hybrid basis, and by that time I was firm on the WFH bandwagon, especially with a toddler.

 

[georgina]

DS works for a video game company and has been working from home for 7 years. He worked in the office for 2 years in Manhattan and decided he wanted to move across the country (Seattle area), so the company gave him a laptop and off he went. He has a degree in video game design and development.

DD2 has a computer science degree and works for a smallish software company in SF. She worked from home during covid and now splits her time between home & office, but if she wants to go somewhere else in the world for 2 weeks and work from there she can. They recently promoted her to a manager so she may be in the office more in the future.

DD1 has degree in economics and an MBA. She works in consulting for a large firm and also worked from home during covid and splits her time now. I have been at her house taking care of grandson sometimes when she is working and she spends most of her time in meetings online.

 

[wvjules]

My wife's firm has begun insisting that people come back in office.

Since nobody in her group is local (they're scattered all over the country, plus in India), she's still mostly WFH, although she goes into the local office once in a while.

I think my firm is heading that way too. Luckily for me though, my client is out of state so no need for me to come in.

 

[Karin1984]

Marketing.
If I have a laptop and an internet connection I can work wherever I want. I work hybrid, 2 days at the office, 2 days at home.

It has perks as no commuting time (aka sleep longer, being able to throw in a batch of laundry etc), but downsides are that I like having colleagues. I know a lot of what goes on at other departments because I like to visit them and just chat. You learn so much what they are doing and how that can benefit you, how you can help them, by walking by and having a chat. You do not do that when you work from home.

My entire team does a 50/50 split and I think it is one of the reasons why we don't feel like a team. When people are at the office their days are filled with meetings.

Another downside is private/work life balance. More easily I check my email on off hours.

 

[easyas123]

Construction.
Prior to Covid we had no WFH employees. Once Covid hit we started rotating the office employees in & out so we did not have as many people in the office at once. That lasted about 2 months, a lot less for some of us. We all just needed to be in the office & on site. We did a lot of progress meeting via zoom/teams. Now a lot - but not all - of our meetings are still on Teams with about half the attendees in the room and the rest of us in our offices.
We've recently hired a few new project managers, and had some folks get thru to interviewing only for them to expect us to offer them WFH - um, no. We need you on site. That's why the job description included that in the job description.
Myself, personally? I'd go crazy sitting at home in a home office setting. But that's just me. I know some folks like it a lot. Just not a fit for our line of work.

 

[jimmymc]

I'm an engineer. Most of my day consists of:

• Writing workorders - online system
• Meetings over Zoom or Teams
• Writing/Reviewing regulatory docs
• Writing test plans
• Reviewing parts with designers using 3d modeling software
• Talking to people at the factory

The days I do need to go in are usually to actually run tests, although most of them are run by a supplier.

 

[sam_gordon]

Marketing.
If I have a laptop and an internet connection I can work wherever I want. I work hybrid, 2 days at the office, 2 days at home.

It has perks as no commuting time (aka sleep longer, being able to throw in a batch of laundry etc), but downsides are that I like having colleagues. I know a lot of what goes on at other departments because I like to visit them and just chat. You learn so much what they are doing and how that can benefit you, how you can help them, by walking by and having a chat. You do not do that when you work from home.

My entire team does a 50/50 split and I think it is one of the reasons why we don't feel like a team. When people are at the office their days are filled with meetings.

Another downside is private/work life balance. More easily I check my email on off hours.

The bolded was my biggest issue when we went WFH during Covid. I like interacting with others. Yes, there is Zoom, Teams, Slack, text, phone, etc, but it's just not the same. I want/need that human interaction.

 

[pezgirlroy]

I am a Success Manager for a Learning Management System company. The company is based many states away. I am a 100% remote employee. I hopefully will be going to the main office next year once or twice. As others have said there are advantages and disadvantages. I am on a different time zone so that can be tricky at times. It is nice that I no longer have to worry about snow days and early release days with the kids. But I do probably work longer hours just because there is no turn off. I miss having a place to go and eat with other people. I miss seeing people all day.

 

[dizneegirl]

DH always thought he'd like to work from home, until Covid made that possible for him. He decided he didn't really have the personality to do so. He needs that alarm and somewhere to go to get up, get dressed and get moving. Plus, he really needs human interaction during the day.

If it's going to work, you really have to be self-motivated, and you have to be perfectly happy working with/by yourself. And you have to have family that will respect your work time. Even though you're at home, you're not available to play. You're working, just not at an office.

I've worked from home for 12 years... "in-house" graphic design for a small company. It suits me perfectly... I'm not great at being creative first thing in the morning - I work better later. Working at home, I can optimize my schedule to take advantage of that. I also am not really a people person. I'm happier not being in an office, and the office is happier that I'm not there.

 

[tony67]

So lots of issues with working from home IMO - been doing it for a very long time - about 20 years now.

Since you don't meet people they have no loyalty to you, you don't really know them.

Not everyone is disciplined enough to do it. Too easy to slack off, or worse they are monitoring you constantly.

If you can do the job from home then they can probably find several people to do it for less from another country. Many folks are finding this out. For what they paid me the got 5 or 6 folks overseas.

There is a lot to be said for meeting people in person and talking out issues, especially when you are designing something. The whiteboard on a PC is just not the same.

I think Hybrid is more preferable, go into the office one or twice a week on the same day as everyone else so there is face time.

No matter how unreplaceable you think you are -trust me - everyone is replaceable. And if they can replace you for less then its worthwhile to them.

 

[thanxfornoticin]

While I agree with the more hybrid method being best (perhaps 50%-75% WFH, 25%-50% in office) - I disagree with the concept that working from home leads to people slacking off. People slack off in the office, too. I had a boss who took years to adjust to IT work being done from home much of the time, until he had to admit we actually got more done than we did in the office - mostly because it was so easy to have us doing off-hours work from home, when necessary. Our shop was WFH way before Covid, so that time period was a non-event for us from a work standpoint. But the boss who eventually came around to WFH was one of those types where 'if you are not in the office at your desk at your computer, you are not actually doing work for the company'...... I got tired of that generalization is a hurry!

But if there's a reason to be in the office in person, with other team members (like for a periodic team meeting), then I was fine driving into the office for the day. Otherwise, I got out of bed, checked my email for anything urgent, grabbed breakfast, and got to work without the 1-hr commute - each way.....

 

[DizneyFamof4]

IT at a Natural Gas company. The only bonus that Covid brought was that the office people had to work from home during that time and our company realized that everything was still getting done. Customers were still being helped and IT was still supporting the employees, servers and websites. Once it was time to come back, my boss let 3 of us WFH 2-3 days a week. We have 1 person that has to be here because he has to physically work on phones and computers and he cannot do that at home. I believe that working 2 days at the office and 3 WFH is a perfect mix, this way it's the best of both worlds and you can still do face-to-face meetings and discussions. I also believe a lot can get lost in text/email conversations. Our support and projects are getting done and morale is better etc. We are always on call and can go into the office when needed on special days, so we could not move away and still keep our jobs.

 

[SC Minnie]

We are hybrid-- 3 days in the office but some of my team is 100% remote.

I work in corporate logistics at a manufacturing company. Dealing with contracts, rate negotiations, and escalated issues. None of this I really need to be in the office to do.

 

[nw6675]

100% remote in health care. Pay sucks, but Disney $$$ lol

 

[mikehn]

Working remotely isnt all that. I've spent way more money than ever before shopping online for things I dont need. I'm drinking way more than ever before simply because I dont have a 6am commute.

 

[Kathryn Merteuil]

My days of working from home seem to be long gone. During the height of Covid, I worked from home for a few months. I was doing kind of a "collections" thing. I work in a financial institution. Unfortunately, that ended a long time ago and I was brought back into the office and my assignment was even changed to be doing more "quality control". In theory, a lot of that could be done from home, but they choose to have us physically present.

 

[loves to dive]

Hubby has worked from home for at least 20 years. He is in IT and has a degree in computer business management. The first 18 years or so he owned his own small IT consulting company, just himself. He doesn't do break fix, more of the backend stuff. Now he is the security director for one of the companies he consulted for. He is in our basement office right now on a video call but 75% of the time he is working from our couch on his laptop. He works for a large accounting firm that has 3 offices in Alabama, 3 in Georgia, 1 in Tenn., 1 in SC, 2 in Florida. About 3 times a year or so he has to travel to some, if not all, of those offices to help set up new equipment. We own a RV so I usually go with him. He is basically on call 24/7 but does get vacation time when he can say, don't call me. My problem with him working from home is if he's upstairs on the couch working there is the possibility he will have to get on the phone so if I'm watching TV, that has to pause. He does go down to his office in the basemen more now that he works for a company instead of himself since he often needs access to the desktop computer and two monitors if he is working on servers.

For the past year or so I've worked part time from home for the IT company I've worked for since 1990 as the bookkeeper. That is actually where hubby got started, he was still a college student and worked for us part time. It's just the boss and me now and he has been in the process of shutting the company down this last year. I don't mind it but find I liked it better when I had a physical office to go to. At one point we had over 100 employees and two locations, the last probably 5 years it's just been he and I but we had a small office. He was gearing up to shut down by that point.