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Hello!

I’m currently in networking, I’m enjoying it and plan on sticking around this company for a few years. However, the idea of remote work sounds really appealing for the next jump. My current job can easily be a hybrid situation, however my boss is very much a “40 hours in office” kind of person, so some remote work is not currently an option. Regardless, this kind of work definitely requires some hands-on time, so I’m thinking I may need to change paths a bit.

I wanted to feel out from those of you who currently are (or used to be) working fully remote, what type of work do you do? How do you like being fully remote? Anything else I should know?

56 Spice ups
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They both have their pros and cons. If you’re in the office, you get human face to face interactions, get a routine down of getting ready to go to work, get to “leave your work at work” kind of mental off-switch. But there’s also meetings you have to attend in person you might not want to, a forced commute, adhere to dress codes, having to budget for eating out, etc.

If you’re remote, you don’t have a dress code, no commute, work in the comfort of your own living space, etc. But you’re more likely to be sedentary, might have a harder time turning off work-mode, sometimes feel overworked since there’s less distraction.
I’ve been hopping around different companies for the past few years, some purely remote and now I’m back in the office. When I was remote, I got really lazy. Didn’t want to get out of the house, packed on 50lbs, felt more stressed cause I felt like work was always there. That’s not the case for everyone but I’ve seen it amongst my colleagues how easier it was to develop unhealthy habits while we were remote. Now that I’m back in the office, it kind of kicked me in the but to start taking better care of my health and image. Nothing like shopping for work clothes that don’t fit to help you realize it’s time to get back in shape. But the more important part, when I leave the office, I leave my job there unless I’m on call or it’s an emergency. The amount of stress lifted from not thinking of work 24/7 is insane.
Ultimately it depends on how well you can manage that work-life balance. I will say, going into the office was missed even though I always thought I could do my jobs from my bedroom (which I’m sure we all did at some point). But you can’t replace the human element of looking a person in their eyes and having a conversation in person versus a Teams call. Also it kind of forces that balance to go into play, at least for me and I’m glad I landed were I’m at. Already down a shirt size :sunglasses:

Do what’s best for you and your quality of life.

9 Spice ups
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Our org has supported working from home since the start of the pandemic, and has just finalized a remote telework policy letting us work from home 2 days a week max. About a year ago I started coming into the office more often than working remotely, I missed the human interaction (even though I’m not a people person), and the work life separation was hard. I was working where I lived and living where I worked, and it was really getting to me. Even though I’ve specified that I want to telework for 2 days, I will probably only rarely use it. I also feel like being onsite adds greater value to my team, there have been days where no one in my position has been onsite, and things need to get put off until someone is back onsite, and that’s not the kind of customer service that we value. We want to look like rockstars, but having to put something off because no one is physically there makes me feel bad.

7 Spice ups
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Agree about the unhealthy habits! Its like, if no one is seeing me, why not let myself go a bit?? Plus we have a gym at the office that was closed because of the pandemic, made it way to easy to just say “F it!”. Pants didn’t fit but who cares, wasn’t wearing pants anyways!

5 Spice ups
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From the other side of the coin, having to contact and deal with workers who are at home. I have had all of the below happen to me over the course of the lockdowns:

  1. Barking dogs

  2. Children running in and asking questions while I am trying get support.

  3. TV with some sports game cranked up.

  4. People randomly walking in and you start talking to them while I am still on the phone

  5. Eating

  6. Garden equipment, while this can happen in an office it rarely seems to approach the volume level of your gardener outside your window

Really it seems that anything you would never consider doing while in the office seems fair game in WFH situations. WHY?

This kind of stuff is the reason many companies view WFH as unacceptable and for some jobs I believe it is because too few people can regulate their behavior.

12 Spice ups
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Snacks at work are my kryptonite :joy:

I do prefer interacting with people in person however, the commute can be arduous.

The number of meetings hasn’t changed for me being remote vs on-site.

With 3+ decades in the IT industry, I’m wired for more on-site than remote though my current position is 85-90% remote.

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I can’t imagine going back into the office after having been remote since 2008.
I have a great work life balance and make it a point to leave at lunch to the gym and shut down work at COB.
You just have to determine if you can manage the responsibility of working from home. They see you in the office; and assume you are working. At home they don’t see you and assume you aren’t working.

9 Spice ups
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Like some spiceheads have mentiond WFH both fully or partially definitely has its own pros and cons. My manager/workplace did offer a much more flexi work after post covid lockdown. I know some other department have not gone back to the office since C-19 lockdown and they are loving it. On that note, for us IT team there can be ups and downs. When that user sends us ticket we can only remote support them and relying on their availability. If that person in the office we could simply ask leave their laptop to us for a day while we do all updates/maintenance etc.

Personally, for me though having to go through multiple lockdowns as well as school age online learning, the idea of at least 1 day going to the office is helping my sanity ifykyk. I also working towards finding or being employed by an International employer where they don’t have physical office here where I’m and that everything is the cloud. Wfh fully will not a problem the only problem would be covering the timezone :smiley:

2 Spice ups
9

I think going forward 80% WFH and 20% WFO will be better for IT Admins and the team. To achieve this your company become 100% cloud. All your applications ( Employee management, CRM, Marketing & Sales tools, Accounts etc ) can be moved to cloud to facilitate work from anywhere. We moved in that direction.

3 Spice ups
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I’m 50/50 and the rest of the office is doing hybrid too.

We’ve always had remote workers (sales team) but not generally for the office staff. TBF, we’ve not had the infrastructure to formally do it either. But this time round, we’ve all got laptops, we have additional screens & kit at home, the only bit that doesn’t work is the phone system where I’ve only got 3 softphone licences (discontinued product, cannot buy any more) with a massive outlay to upgrade/replace. But as we don’t use phones much anyway, there seems little point and it all works well (enough).

Before the pandemic I had my own office which was great - I hid myself in there and if people wanted me they had to phone or walk in - ok, they could shout, but I couldn’t always hear them. Quite often, if I was on the phone (headset) people would walk in and start talking, which was annoying, but for the most part I was left alone and I could get on with my sys-dev.

Now, we’re in an open plan, shared desk (although we tend to stick to our own), it’s much noisier and people just call my name when they want some help - which is rather annoying as I can’t get on with the coding I was up to. They can tell if I’m on the phone (rare) though, so don’t get that interruption. What is more annoying for me is tuning into one of the conversations when I don’t want to be part of it. I use earpods to listen to music and tune out.

At home, we have a dedicated room (shared with my wife) for home working - so no working from the kitchen table or sitting on the sofa, unless I want too! It’s quiet, although the wife is on the phone a lot (teams) we’re generally heads down, get on with the work type. WFH has allowed me to flex my hours, so I can do early starts & finishes which helps with the childcare and schoolruns are a possibility without messing up the working day. Colleagues can still get hold of me - email, teams, whatsapp, text or even the odd phone call, but it tends to be more limited to actual need rather than just as a whim - this leaves me with more time to get on with the sys-dev part of my role - and for the most part I don’t need to be in the office.

On the whole I prefer home working, although I’d concur that some “On Premises” presence should be maintained.

4 Spice ups
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I manage 3 data centers remotely with literally no reason to be in the office. I prefer to be in the office though for the camaraderie and I get more done in the office than at home. Not to mention no temptation to pick at food all day in the office.

4 Spice ups
12

I have the option to work from home if there aren’t any on-site projects or raging dumpster fires. I like it at home because there are less IT “drive-byes”.

Less distractions usually means more work gets done, but it also means I get the distractions from home. My wife is 100% remote and that gremlin likes to pop out of her office every so often and bug me. Usually when I’m in the middle of a meeting.

I even had to set up a little WFH nook for myself as the video gaems be too tempting. It also helps separate work from play.

I’m sure you can come up with a compelling argument to at least work on a hybrid schedule. Don’t let them tell you what you can do without listening to your side, first.

3 Spice ups
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We have about 250ish WFH staff here, myself included (my entire team, in fact).

We’ve never had any issues with any of the listed concerns. Do they happen? Sure… but extremely rarely. Sloppy people are sloppy though, no matter where you put them. They aren’t magically going to be unsloppy if you put them in an office. They will still find a way to be disruptive on calls or meetings.

I would say that since we’ve migrated to the WFH/hybrid model, I can count on one hand the number of times a meeting or call has been truly impacted by one of the above-listed concerns. I’ve had thousands upon thousands of calls and meetings in this model, as well… so we’re talking less than 1%.

Furthermore, #4, #5, and #6 happen to in-office folks as much as WFH folks.

11 Spice ups
14

Interesting.

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With pandemic, we are required to work at least 2 days at the office and telecommuting the rest. We also moved to a 4x10 schedule with one day off during the week. This works very well

3 Spice ups
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Have done WFH for a month and loved it. Saves me 1.5hrs ish on commute so more sleep. I want to work from home. My friends do WFH and they don’t want to go back and they do have social life as well.

Lets see where life takes me.

7 Spice ups
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I really think it depends a lot on you. Seeing all these posts about letting yourself go and not being able to leave work and think that’s the opposite of my experience.

I’ve been eating healthier and cheaper at the same time, actually manage to take some breaks during the day and often go for a walk. Actually taking some time off for lunch is great to, a nice homemade meal and a short nap in the middle of the day is awesome. I still have to work after hours and on weekends a lot, but now it involves walking to the room I’ve setup my office in instead of driving across town. It’s also a lot easier to get some comp time back during the week for those hours. The saving on gas and eating out have been great to, as well as the saved commute time.

I don’t see people in person at work, but I’m not a social person anyways and most of it wasn’t dealing with work. It was generally them chatting and gossiping about things I don’t care about and me having to waste time pretending to listen. I get more done without those interruptions and people can still contact me about issues just fine.

There are a few tricks though, I still dress for work while working and I’m in my office. At the end of the day when I leave the office and change out of work clothes I’m done working. I also bought myself a desk and chair for my home office, but the cost of that is less than the money not going to the office has saved. Neighbors dogs barking is still easier to ignore than someone standing beside your desk talking to you while trying to focus on a project.

So saving money and time while still getting the work done and having less stress means WFH has been all positives for me. Obviously not everyone, their workplace, or their home situation are the same.

As for the work I do my official title is Assistant Vice President / Network Administrator, I’m 1 step below the C levels. It’s a small team though and I’ve been around the longest and have the most technical expertise. So I handle switches, routers, firewalls, phones, security cameras, backups, VMs, DR, write policies, deal with 3rd party auditors, internal audits, OCC exams, O365, MFA, updates, imaging, support many vendor apps, and do basic help desk. I generally feel like I earn my salary and am generally pleasantly surprised when I keep getting bonuses when large projects get finished or we get a very good score from the OCC which has always just seemed like the base level of doing my job.

7 Spice ups
18

When I worked remotely I had a small office I set up, and during my work hours I was in that office.

I did not have my personal computer in there, I did not have anything for gaming systems or the like in there. I did have a TV that I would stream my music to (which was amazing)

I would sit in that office unless I needed to use the bathroom, get a drink etc. I would take small breaks and walk around the house to stretch my legs. I was the most productive I ever had been before, my mental health was better, I was eating better everything.

I had a coworker who hated it. They could not stand not being able to talk to us in the office like we were before. They were eating more junk food, and they were in their living room with the TV going in the background and felt that they were being distracted by their family more.

It’s all personal preference and what works best for you. Some will have great success, others will struggle.

8 Spice ups
19

Thank you everyone for the awesome feedback! It helps to put things in perspective when I see all these views. My husband currently works 100% from home and he loves it, he gets out on bike rides during down time or takes the dogs on a hike. He is usually very good about turning work off at 5. But that doesn’t mean I’d be like that, it seems like it depends on the job, the physical location in my home where the work would be getting done, and my own willpower. I’d like to think I wouldn’t hit the junk food or be distracted, but I won’t know for sure until I’m actually working from home. So, I may bring that conversation up with my employer in the future and see about working at least 1 day a week from home.

4 Spice ups
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Had a sales guy pitch to me fairly recently from their home “office”.

#3 was a killer for me. Was a show about stock – basically the ticker with some person blablabla on about - would have been fine if no volume (I get watching stock), but good lord “DOW IS UP BY .0000000000006% SELL YOUR STOCK IN xxxxxxxxxx”, etc, pushed so loud it was resonating the mic. It was so bad I’m not really sure what they person was selling me (attempting…).

There really should be a code of conduct for WFH (though how enforceable that would be…). I don’t care if a person is in a suit or not, just have pants (seriously the times i’ve seen … things… in the last few years…). Really the pants thing and not having something turned up so loud… That’s the biggest for me; oh and almost forgot:

  1. In the bathroom; for any ***** reason, but mainly the waste removal process. Yes we all do this; no not one person wants to have that shown to them at a business meeting.
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