A few posts back I suggested that (American) employers would benefit from giving their engineers a lot more time off. In the comments section, Brad opined that he would very much like to work four 10-hour days. One of the reasons he gave was to avoid the stress and hassle of his daily commute. I agree completely with him. However, I’d like to take this one step further. Why is that (most) employers insist that their staff come to the office each day to work? This always strikes me as ludicrous. Of course there are days where one has to attend meetings, or where you need to use the specialized test equipment that your employer owns. In addition there are many of us who work for employers where secrecy demands that you be at work. However, for the vast majority of engineers there is absolutely no need to be in the office every day. Instead a decent home computer, a broad band connection and a VPN and you are pretty much all set to do exactly what you’d do if you went into the office for the day.
Now notwithstanding that allowing / encouraging / demanding that staff work from home whenever possible has great benefits to the the engineer and the environment, the real key is the boost in productivity that is possible. Any engineer I know will tell you that the best way to get a lot of (hard) work done in a hurry is to shut the door, turn off the telephone and block your email. Maybe it’s just me, but that’s exactly what can happen when you work from home.
But what about the staff that will go home and slough off for the day? Well I’m sure they exist. I’m also sure that anyone that managed to get through an engineering degree program has enough brains to work out how to goof off at work without being caught if that’s their inclination. In short I don’t see being at work as evidence that you’re actually doing anything useful.
What’s maddening about this is when you consider the list of jobs that don’t require you to come to the office each day. Examples that spring to mind include sales, truck drivers and home-care health workers. Apparently their employers somehow manage to come up with ways of determining whether they are productive or not.
So what to make of this? I think it’s largely inertia. Twenty years ago, the cost of engineering tools was so high that you had to go to work to use them. Today you can set up a well equipped laboratory for $10K. Despite this, the notion of engineers having to go to work persists. If I’m correct, and there aren’t any substantive reasons for most of us to go to the office every day, then ultimately logic should overcome the inertia – and working from home several days a week will become the norm. However it won’t start changing until more of us start pressuring management to explain why we shouldn’t do this.
Home
Times changes rapidly, if your manager is not from the same era is almost impossible to understand such subtle issue.Employee who realize such ‘obvious’ issue after some time simply start working on its own, or like consultants or similar if only possible.
While I’d like to be able to go to my own bench in the basement and crank something out when I’m under pressure, I am glad it is not the norm. I think an engineer can exert a lot of positive influence by being present in the workplace. Most importantly, the engineer is often the voice of the customer on the factory floor. Just keeping your eyes and ears open when you are fetching a tool can help find problems and potential improvements. It also often falls on the engineers to make technical and non-technical employees familiar with the company’s technology. No matter how well you have documented your product, a technician will remember what you have to say when they ask you questions about it. Finally, engineers are often in the best position to identify opportunities for a company. An engineer may find something valuable in a vendors that may otherwise be turned away by purchasing, or from a customer that sales may not think is a good fit. These advantages may not help you with your budget or schedule for your current project but I’ve always tried to find opportunity in what others find distracting.
A very well reasoned response Kyle. I especially like your “I’ve always tried to find opportunity in what others find distracting”. However, note that I wasn’t advocating that engineers work from home every day. I think 1-2 days a week would be optimal for many jobs. With this approach I think you’d still get the benefits you advocate, while achieving the productivity boost I mentioned.
Actually, I am an engineer and work mostly from home doing embedded software development. I’ve been doing it for about 2 years now. Unfortunately, the only way I could accomplish this was to become self-employed. My employer didn’t want their employees doing this sort of thing. However, my former employer didn’t want to lose me, so that got me under contract. They equipped me with VPN and equipment for development.Advantages:I’m getting paid hourly (so paid overtime).Very flexible schedule. I can get work done around the house and yard, and work late at night if I have too. Can really crank the work out sometimes.Disadvantages:Communication issues to the point you feel a little left behind at times. I usually go onsite twice a week. Being able to sit down with other engineers over a whiteboard is invaluable.Paid hourly – well, sometimes it’s hard to get the hours in. When VPN goes down, it can be a pain.When onsite equipment goes down, you can’t just reach over and reset it.