Ask Slashdot: Would You Take a Pay Cut To Telecommute? 615
coondoggie writes "IT pros want to telecommute — so much so that more than one-third of those surveyed by Dice.com said they would take a pay cut for the chance to work full time from home. In a survey conducted by the careers site, 35% of technology professionals said they would sacrifice up to 10% of their salaries for full-time telecommuting. The average tech pro was paid $79,384 last year, according to Dice's annual salary survey, which means a 10% pay cut is equivalent to $7,900 on average."
Yes.. well... no.. but no but yes (Score:4, Interesting)
I've telecommuted for 5 of the past 6 years.
I've saved thousands of Pounds on the commute into London.
I can spend more time in the morning in bed.
But
You have to be comfortable with your own company.
It can get lonely.
You need the heating on all day in Winter.
On the whole it is great.
Now... If I had a job it would be great. If said job offered me the opportunity to work from home then even better
At the moment, this is all wishful thinking though.
Daycares (Score:4, Interesting)
I think some working families throw their children into daycares during the day after school (if the kids go to school) until they come home from work. I hear daycares can cost a lot too.
Not Me (Score:5, Interesting)
I work for Rackspace full time from home, and I'm paid the same as I would be at the office. Whether I work from home or not is ultimately irrelevant, because the most important variable of all is loving your job. I work where I do because it is a truly amazing place to work.
That said, volunteering a pay cut is risky business. Your salary is a gauge of how much your company values you, so you should try to get as much as you possibly can.
A few things to keep in mind:
1. If you telecommute, it's also cheaper for the employer (less electricity, water, bandwidth, etc)
2. If you take a pay cut, any time you get a raise it's going to be less than it could have been, since most companies do raises as a percentage of your current salary
3. The downside of working exclusively from home is that it's easier to not get noticed. If you're not getting much face time with your peers, you better be doing some amazing work
Just remember... (Score:4, Interesting)
If you can telecommute full time and do your job from the comfort of home, then so can anyone in the world. You're now competing with folks who would be happy to have your job at 10% of what you're paid -- not just a 10% discount!
Re:not logical (Score:4, Interesting)
Rebooting a server .. not so much. All our servers have lights-out management or are VMs. And if you're paying me to swap a stick of RAM, you're paying over the odds.
And I can prove that I score better on certain productivity metrics while I work at home (like hours worked, lines of code committed, etc). Whereas when I'm in the office I have to content with a noisy open-plan designed to destroy productivity, and I have to skip out of the door at 1700 sharp to catch my ride home, instead of being able to stick with any problem that requires my extended attention until my daughter gets home from school.
So on the whole, I think it would be fair play to pay me the same, even though I'm actually providing more value for less cost to the enterprise, because I also benefit from it - I can do things like slip out for a run in my lunch hour that I would never be able to do at work.
I'd take a bigger cut than that (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Just remember... (Score:4, Interesting)
Green Programs (Score:4, Interesting)
The absolute best money the govt could put forward towards green initiatives is a heavy tax break based on number of telecommuters employed by a company.
It is absolutely absurd the amount of fuel I waste every year to unplug from my network at home just to drive to work to plug back in and perform the same job. In fact there are very few people in my office that really could not perform their job full time from home.
Re:Yes (Score:5, Interesting)
my experience has been that telecommuters fall into 3 categories: 20% are bums, and need to be fired. 5% are typical workers who like the flexibility. 75% are insanely ambitious and should be paid more, not less, because the time saved commuting goes directly into productivity, plus they never have to stop working, so they put in way more than full days.