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Ask Slashdot: How Do You Find Jobs That Offer Working From Home? 318

Posted by samzenpus from the pajama-day dept.
jez9999 writes: I'm a software developer in the UK, and I've found that it's very rare (maybe 5% of the time) to find an employer that will even consider any working from home, let alone for the majority of the time. I see it as a win-win; you're able to work in the home environment you are most productive in, and you can use the time you would've been commuting to work a bit longer for the employer. Not only that, but you're not adding to road congestion either. Skype, etc. make communication with coworkers a snap these days. So how do you go about finding homeworking jobs? Is it better to demand it from the get-go, or wait a few months and then ask for it? Is it more common than 5% of jobs in the US (in which case I guess it's a cultural thing the UK needs to catch up with)?
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Ask Slashdot: How Do You Find Jobs That Offer Working From Home? More

Ask Slashdot: How Do You Find Jobs That Offer Working From Home?

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  • trick them into it ... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    One trick I learned just recently: Tell them at the interview, that you got another offer, and you have to think about which one is better for you.

    Then they'll ask what the final decision critera will be, and then you tell them "well, at the other company, I will be working from home.".

    In my case that got them to say "well, home-office is not a problem at all, as long as you show up for the meetings" :-)

    good luck!
    andi

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jbengt ( 874751 )
      Tried that (I did have an actual job offer)
      I got one day a week work-from-home, then got laid off two years later in the recession (I made it through the first two rounds of layoffs, though.)

  • On lamp posts (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07, 2015 @05:46AM (#50061125)

    I'm always driving past flyers on street sign posts offering jobs earning £5000 a week from home!
    However I'm happy earning tuppence in an office away from the kids, so haven't ever given them a try...

  • Generally? You don't. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by tlambert ( 566799 ) on Tuesday July 07, 2015 @05:48AM (#50061131)

    Generally? You don't.

    The trend is away from this for software developer positions, unless you are willing to do contract work. There are several major things driving this right now:

    (1) The employer doesn't have to allow it in order to be able to recruit talent, so they don't. A lot of managers engage in "management by walking around", and you are unlikely to get one of these types to sign off.

    (2) Stacked ranking. If you're not in the office, and not "seen as being a strong contributor by your nominal coworkers, you'll get ranked poorly, and you will be the first person "PIP'ed" (Performance Improvement Program), and, if there are layoffs, you get to be near the top of the list.

    (3) If they don't care where you are working from, be pretty sure that the job isn't going to be landing in a country with expensive labor, like the U.K., the U.S., and so on; if they are going to take on a remote worker, it's not going to be from your neck of the woods.

    (4) Employer culture is considered important; if you want to have an employer, expect to come into the office so that they can culturally indoctrinate you. Yahoo laid off all their remote employees over this, and it's been the trend at Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, and so on. This is somewhat part and parcel with the stacked ranking, but it's the other side of the coin.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      This pretty much happened to me at HP. I worked the first 10 years mostly in the office, and the last four years as a remote worker.

      At the end of 2003 HP announced they wanted all employees in the office again.
      http://www.marketplace.org/topics/business/no-more-working-home-hewlett-packard-employees

      I lasted a couple more years after that, but I knew it was only a matter of time. I didn't want to go back into the office anywhere, so I became a medical marijuana caregiver. By the time I was laid off I was abl

      • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

        by TheRealQuestor ( 1750940 )

        the esp8266 will blow your freakin' tits apart.

        I love these little modules. I have some 01s, 03's, and 11's and they are a blast to play with hooked up to my teensy 3.1's
        A real blast until you forget the 3.3v issue and they really smell bad @ 5v.

    • Re:Generally? You don't. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by GeekWithAKnife ( 2717871 ) on Tuesday July 07, 2015 @06:11AM (#50061211)

      Firstly to say I am not arguing against what you said. I do however want to add to point 4.

      Getting employee buy-in is important. An employee that is engaged, that believes he has a higher purpose than just working for this company will put more effort and pride into his work. In theory higher quality and more work is the result.

      This internal marketing helps employee retention as well as getting many of them to do more for no additional pay because they are committed and feel it is their duty.
      Most new employees will eat this up and feel they are part of a larger group, a wider family, with a purpose beyond just plain old Monday work. After a period of time people, being smart, wisen up and read between the lines if they have not already. then the "engagement" becomes a game of pretending. Managers pretend to be engaged and pursue engagement activities (that include making sure no one works from home) and employees pretend to be engage and embrace the "culture" as a valued framework.

      Many companies will cite Yahoo's experience and many managers will see it as "proof" of something. I believe it all boils down to the employee in question.

      Most employees will be very concerned that they may be viewed as not doing much if they are working from home and will often do more "just to make sure". but perception is the name of the game. If your manager thinks people that wear jeans are not serious about work well...we know what happens if a candidate shows up to an interview in jeans.

      As a society we are still a bit far off the holy grail of working from home. The old way of thinking is still prevalent and despite having the technology this way of thinking is holding us back as a society. Imagine the cost savings if you did not have to provide your employees with environmentally controlled facilities and giant office spaces. Imagine how much traffic will be saved if 50% of us do not have to actually be physically at work.

      Personally I find working from home easier. I can sleep more and have an environment that I enjoy and helps me concentrate. I don't need a manager to interrupt me as he reads through his emails or colleagues playing music wanting to gossip over coffee or deal with the less than gourmet food on offer.

      In conclusion I think that a person wanting to work from home needs to find the right employer and that is where the real challenge lies. Most do not advertise that you can work from home so it's still a matter of finding out manually. It's one of the questions I'd ask of a future employer.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by BVis ( 267028 )

        Getting employee buy-in is important. An employee that is engaged, that believes he has a higher purpose than just working for this company will put more effort and pride into his work.

        While that is definitely important, I find that management buy-in is more important. More specifically, director/VP/C-level management. Managing remote workers or teams is more difficult than helicopter micromanagement. Bad, insecure managers need to see you working; good managers look at your productivity. Measuring prod

    • It depends on the company: in companies where there is a culture of working from home at least some of the time, ranking, perception, and opposition from management are much less of an issue. And if you prefer to work from home most of the time, an employer who is used to remote working may still appreciate someone from a similar culture who can be called in for the occasional face to face meeting over someone cheaper at the other end of the earth.

      So, if this is important to you, the right time to ask i

      • It does seem to be rare. I had one job in the UK that allowed it, but I was reporting to a US project team and my UK manager didn't really give a fuck as longs the cash kept flowing through his department.

        I've seen some terrible abuse and it's quite clear that some people just can't be trusted to work from home. In the US i've never had a job that didn't allow it at least some of the time, though at one place I had to spend at least 40% of my time in the office or I'd lose a permanent desk.

        It seems like a g

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by myurr ( 468709 )

      I'm a UK employer with around 50 employees in the business, with 6 in the dev team. The sales team are mostly remote and whilst my development team are office based I'm not that worried where they're based as long as they get the job done. Our head office is oop north and the dev team down south anyway so there is already an element of remote working involved.

      However I've yet to see anyone make a truly compelling case for routine remote working. My developers tried it when we first started the business a

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Xest ( 935314 )

      I'm a little surprised at the original asker's question, and his suggestion that the UK may be culturally behind on this aspect because what you say is true, of the US.

      I've had 5 dev jobs at different employers and all of them have allowed home working. To address your points relative to the UK:

      (1) I don't think this is true in the UK, developer salaries are still very much on the increase and have been for years. Companies are still stuck having to improve terms and salaries to get the necessary staff. If

    • For point 3, it really depends where you live. Some of our employees have 2-hour commutes each way. While we prefer for them to first move closer to the office, it often is not possible. The least likely position in our office we recently agreed to let work from home two days per week-- someone that needs to coordinate with all the executives on tight deadlines.

      If someone is good, you try to make it work. This person will have an uphill battle, but we will try.

    • To expand on this, it also depends a lot on the job. While you're absolutely correct for software developer positions, there are other completely different positions that offer work from home that actually works.

      One prime example is my job. I'm a consultant who works for a (very) large technology company. In my role I have very clearly defined deliverables that require me to get off my butt and do stuff; namely customer visits, presentation, system designs and so forth. And my pay is structured such that I

  • $ curl http://job.list/ [job.list] | egrep -i 'from home | homeworking'

  • Tried it and hated it (Score:5, Interesting)

    by soccerisgod ( 585710 ) on Tuesday July 07, 2015 @05:55AM (#50061151)

    Up until recently I was an independent software development contractor. In the beginning of my career, I was working from home on semi isolated components, and I really hated it. It's very hard to concentrate on anything with all the distractions, you can't talk to anyone (even if it's just bitching about something), you don't get to know what's going on in the company, and when you have as small an apartment as I had back then, it's very hard to "switch off" from work after work, because in my case, my desk and bed were in the same room, and that makes it hard to "switch".

    Add to that the obvious problem of constant distractions... but then, you get those in the office, too ;)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Bert64 ( 520050 )

      Well your example shows that working environment matters a whole lot, and it's different for everyone.

      A small apartment is not good, you really need a separate room with somewhere comfortable to sit. Then there should be very few or no distractions at home, but you also have the convenience of somewhere to go and relax when you need a break, and an ample supply of food/drink etc.

      If you want a lack of distractions, a typical open plan office is a terrible environment because there are usually many distractio

    • One way to get to work from home is to become indispensable. For example, I told my boss that I will move to another country and he asked me if I could continue working from there. I accepted and it had many advantages, the biggest for me being the fact that I then moved to a third country, still keeping the same job. But it is true that you have many distractions and it is hard to separate your working from non-working hours, which poses problems if you have a family or at least a wife. And the lack of the

    • It takes adjustment and patience - I've been doing it for 15 years now and there's no way I could possibly go back to a shared office.

      My suggestions:

      1. use chat clients, not email - they're more personal and frequently funnier
      2. try to have a group chat channel for the whole team
      3. have regular (daily) calls - we have daily scrum meetings these days, and that helps a lot to keep you in the loop
      4. separate your work, hobbies and life as much as possible - you cannot possibly work if you're constantly

  • Easy:
    https://weworkremotely.com/ [weworkremotely.com]
    http://37signals.com/remote/ [37signals.com]

    Difficult:
    Software is usually developed in a team.
    Working remotely in a software team: simply does not work!

    • Re:Easy ... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by soccerisgod ( 585710 ) on Tuesday July 07, 2015 @06:07AM (#50061189)

      Working remotely in a software team: simply does not work!

      o_O

      You mean .... like the loosely organized software team that has developed the Linux kernel hasn't worked out?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by BVis ( 267028 )

      Working remotely in a software team: simply does not work!

      Found the shitty manager.

  • Ask.

    If employers are reluctant, ask for a trial -- say, commute everyday for the first two month (settle in, build relationships). Then the trial - work from home a day a week for two months. Then, the employer considers changing your home/office mixture.

    Please remember -- more productivity at home is often at the expense of less productivity of your colleagues at the office. Simply because its easier to walk up and interrupt them in person. Acknowledging this fact will go a long smooth toward smoothing ov

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Bert64 ( 520050 )

      If still no, and the job's a keeper, try moving closer to work.

      This is often a big problem... A lot of businesses want to have offices in certain areas, which are generally the areas where other businesses are based... You end up with dense commercial zones, where residential properties are very scarce, very expensive and very small usually with no gardens.
      You also end up with massive congestion on all travel routes at specific times (i.e. travel conditions that would be illegal for transporting livestock), and wasteful over capacity at other times.

      Moving closer to wor

      • That last point was really a throwaway, but even moving enough to cutting a commute by half (say) saves that much time over the years its like the second job you didn't need to keep.

  • Find somebody who has money, and keep him happy. That's what the best hookers do, and it has fed me and my family for 25 years. I found a (Chinese) family with money and I build whatever software / servers / sites they ask me for. I even live where they asked me to live.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Lumpy ( 12016 )

      You back to basement and build more server! NO SLEEP YOU SLACKER!

    • Find somebody who has money, and keep him happy. That's what the best hookers do, and it has fed me and my family for 25 years.

      WTF?

      I found a (Chinese) family with money and I build whatever software / servers / sites they ask me for. I even live where they asked me to live.

      Oh, that sounds a little better :)

  • Here's how we do it (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I am the hiring manager at a software development shop. We allow working from home, and it works well for us. I don't think we ever have 100% of the developers in the office at any given time, but work still gets done. Some developers work from home 3 or more days per week.

    From my company's perspective, here's how we do it:

    1. If we hire you but don't know you personally, you'll be expected to be in the office daily for a few weeks to integrate with the team, get used to everyone's work style, personality, e

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by isj ( 453011 )

      It sounds like you are doing it right. I wish you'd tell your story more places.

      Whether remote work is accepted or not does depend on culture. Some of it may be due to the particular country culture. Eg. if the companies in a country generally have deep hierarchies and generally view the employees as peons and the employees in return do as little as possible then remote work is unlikely to be accepted. But while the overall country culture has an impact the company culture has more impact.

      My story:
      After get

  • I imagine that part of your desire to work from home is self-actualization and better use of time? I think a good way to achieve this is to try to build a strong foundation and cut your living expenses. This way you can be selective about the types of employers and jobs that you work on. You might need to offer a very competitive rate initially, or just start working from home (open-source) and let people know you're for hire, but once you've got your foot in (your own front) door, opportunities should stea

  • I've been working from home for the better part of 10 years now across two very different jobs and employers. At first I thought it was dream! When I took the job I had no idea I would be allowed to work from home. My first day on the job they gave me a very high-end laptop, docking station, monitor and company cell. They also allowed me to expense the entirety of my internet connection and a second phone line dedicated for business. This was in addition to very comfortable in-office space. Dream job!

  • My most productive hours are from 10pm till midnight, at home.
    Everybody else is sleeping, nobody calls, no colleague can bother me.
    I listen to a CD I've listen to a few hundred times, and I work in a very focused manner on important new features or bugfixes.
    Before going to bed, I send a short email to my boss describing what I did.

    After about a week, we have our usual meeting, during which colleagues say "we should do this and this, it'll probably take a month or two", with the hope that they won't be the o

  • Usually has to be earned (Score:5, Insightful)

    by petes_PoV ( 912422 ) on Tuesday July 07, 2015 @07:26AM (#50061457)

    homeworking jobs? Is it better to demand it from the get-go

    I doubt there's a company in the land that would recruit an unknown, straight off the street, give them a salaried post and let them work 100% from home.

    For a start, there's no guarantee you wouldn't just goof around for the 6 months or so it would take for them to realise you're a lazy freeloader and then go through the process of firing you (sacking people in the UK and the rest of Europe is a long-drawn out process: employees have rights). Second, they'd have to install a load of kit in your house which would take time and you'd also have little or no "induction" into the company, your boss, the goals and culture.

    So on the occasions where I have worked for places that do have home working: either as perk for trusted employees or as a cost-saving measure for the one that seriously messed up its estate management, it's not something you go "demanding" and definitely not from the start - or "get-go" in your language.

    Finally, home working has many, many disadvantages. Apart from being isolated, you become an invisible part of the team - and therefore disposable. You never interact with your work-mates and never get to hear "grapevine" stuff, like where the promotion opportunities are. Neither does your boss "see" you, so you never bond and can easily get passed over for pay rises or interesting projects. Some people also find they instead of working, they spend all day with their face in the fridge and pile on the pounds.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by jez9999 ( 618189 )

      For a start, there's no guarantee you wouldn't just goof around for the 6 months or so it would take for them to realise you're a lazy freeloader and then go through the process of firing you

      Of course there is - daily Skype meetings. Have an agile board of work on TFS or something and check what people are doing on a daily basis. I've seen this work in practice. People goofing off will be noticed *very* quickly.

      sacking people in the UK and the rest of Europe is a long-drawn out process: employees have ri

    • I work for such a company. We set targets and expect them to get done and they do. Communicating by text messenger works well for us because it allows us to multitask freely. I'm really shocked that other companies have so much trouble with work from home. To me it seems like a no brainier, as companies are constantly complaining about how there are no resources in their geographical location.

  • I see it as a win-win; you're able to work in the home environment you are most productive in, and you can use the time you would've been commuting to work a bit longer for the employer

    I've worked from home in years gone by. Speaking for myself I'm definitely NOT most productive working from home. Far too easily distracted. I also know several other people who have worked from home and had the same experience. Furthermore people generally do not use the commute time to squeeze in another hour of work in general. Some people can work effectively from home. I would say most are more effective in an office.

    Not only that, but you're not adding to road congestion either.

    True, though most companies really don't care about that much if at all. They r

  • Look hard and long (Score:5, Informative)

    by DoofusOfDeath ( 636671 ) on Tuesday July 07, 2015 @07:53AM (#50061575)

    I managed to do it, but it took almost a year of looking, even in a job market supposedly favorable to programmers.

    My strategy was to basically scour the job boards, looking for remote jobs, and apply when it looked like a good fit. Some boards I found helpful for remote, non-contract work:

    • https://careers.stackoverflow.com/jobs/remote
    • http://www.indeed.com/l-Remote-jobs.html
    • https://weworkremotely.com/
    • http://www.flexjobs.com/jobs/telecommuting-remote-jobs

    Job sites which don't have a specific category for "remote" tended to produce a lot of noise, because searching on "remote" would get hits for things like "remote work not allowed".

    Two other things which seemed very helpful in landing a job:

    • Experience with using Github
    • Having been involved in open-source development.

  • Check your spam folder
    There are tons of mails in there containing the secret of getting rich by working from home.

    I can give you such a job myself, just send me your résumé and transfer the required hiring fee of 249.50$ to the following account ....

  • https://careers.mozilla.org/ [mozilla.org]

    HTH, HAND. :-)

  • I'm a software developer in the UK, and I've found that it's very rare (maybe 5% of the time) to find an employer that will even consider any working from home

    I have not yet had an interview where the employer would not allow any working from home. "Full time" home work (i.e. show up once a week for the meeting) type offers are rare, yes. But I can't remember a single interview where 1 day a week would not be offered.

    Perhaps I don't scout as many job interviews as you do, as I am happy with my current job (which doesn't put a limit on my telecommuting, so it ends up with 2-3 days a week, which I find a nice balance). So perhaps I just pick my interviews more care

  • I work for a leading enterprise in the US.

    Among our ~50,000 US/Can employees, the leading office location is "remote". More of our employees work remote than at our largest fixed point facility.

    Not making a guess at this; it's lately been my job to research it.

    My wife also works at a US enterprise, from home, all day, every day. She's a project manager working with teams worldwide. She has a VERY long work day, due to time zone math, but is very productive, and has flexibility through the day to tend to wha

  • You create them. All examples I have ever seen or heard about working from home were following the same pattern:
    - A guy works in his company
    - He builds lots of trust with his manager, boss, whatever
    - (optional) he wants to move to another place for whatever personal reasons
    - He asks if remote work is possible
    - If enough trust was built, it happens. - If he dedicates a room to it, without distractions, he has a proper internet connexion (good enough for reliable teleconferencing), it works.

    • Or you make your own job. You become an independent consultant. Sell yourself and build clients.

      As a point of reference, my accountant said that if you can make it for 18 months and start producing a solid income stream, you're likely to keep it going for as long as you like (major market force shifts notwithstading). I'm in year 12, fwiw, and it's got it's ups and downs, but it would take a *lot* to trade it for a 9-5 office job again.

  • Many of the items you mention as "win-wins" are myths.

    While it is true for some, most people are not more productive at home. There are more distractions. There are fewer opportunities to engage with coworkers, and the management resources are further away. (yes, management is supposed to be a resource to help you get things done more efficiently. If that's not the case, then someone is doing something wrong)

    Most workers don't consider the commute time to be "company time" so when they move away from that c

  • I also work 3rd shift, as a network operator for a rather large ISP (3rd shift being something of a requirement, since folks don't like it when we do disruptive work during waking hours. Can't imagine why....)

    So for me, the distractions are pretty minimal. Everyone else is asleep when I'm working, and other than my cat occasionally deciding she wants to play when I have six figures of customers down at the moment, there's no problem. When I'm in the office, the distractions are non stop.

    Now, I'm a loner typ

    • Do you have enough contacts to start free-lancing/troubleshooting/consulting? If you can swing it financially (and it sound like you can), you might find it's a better option in the long run. It might take 12-24 months before you're pulling even a basic salary, but it can be both rewarding and liberating.

  • If so just subscribe to some mailing lists (I could name some but you give very little useful information when you say "software developer") - those sort of jobs come up all the time (weekly). Generally you're dealing with the people you'll be working with - not there HR department or some agency so the usual channels won't get you many leads.

    Recently there have been a few jobs in the EU every week, which has been a consistent pattern for the last twenty years (UNIX and Linux).

  • I kinda stumbled into telecommuting with my company about 6 years ago.
    We'd just replaced our phone system and the new one allowed for remote extensions.
    It started out as a day or two a week and converted into full time work-from-home with only occasional trips to the main office.
    Mostly because I proved to my employer that I could be trusted to work responsibly from home.

    And, even though I've only got a short commute to work (24 miles round trip), the amount of money I've saved in gas (about $1000 a year) an

  • you think I kid. Try it. I did a throwaway one a while back just to see what'd happen, in less than a day I'd had offers of free money from Nigerian princes, claims that people were making $7,000 a month from their kitchen table, and even marriage proposals from lonely Russian brides.

    Now, out of all that spam, if just ONE of those work-from-home things was genuine, out of all the THOUSANDS that're floating around just on Facebook, I'd've been set.

    If you decide to try it and get lucky, please let the rest of

  • Easy (Score:2)

    by msobkow ( 48369 )

    Stop looking for a "job" and start looking for contracts.

  • It has its pros and cons... (Score:3)

    by Krokus ( 88121 ) on Tuesday July 07, 2015 @12:33PM (#50063545) Homepage

    I've been working from home as a salaried employee for the past five and a half years. Prior to that, I worked in an office and commuted for seven years. There are pros and cons to both.

    Office: The daily commute, which sucked up two to three hours of my life every day. It was definitely the worst part of my day.
    Home: No commute. I spend $20 on gas every two months for short jaunts to the store, etc. The mileage on my car is ridiculously low given its age. I tend to feel less irritable, though that may have other causes.

    Office: Fixed work schedule. I consider this a pro.
    Home: No fixed work schedule unless you're disciplined enough to establish one (I now am). Without discipline, there is a horrible tendency to either work way too much or work not nearly enough.

    Office: Rigidly separates personal life from work life (pro).
    Home: No such separation exists unless you are disciplined enough to establish one (I now am). Still, days can sometimes blur together.

    Office: With open-floor offices (like the one I worked in), there was always some loud conversation or other disturbance going on nearby that ruined my ability to concentrate. People walked up to me at my desk every day to ask me questions rather than send an email. Lots of unproductive meetings.
    Home: Just as many distractions, but different ones (dog barking, people coming to the door, etc). However, I evolved a schedule that shifts the majority of my work time into the night/early morning hours when everything is comparatively quiet. I have far more frequent and more lengthy periods of "zoned" concentration at home than I ever did at an office A secondary benefit here is that I can plan my work around my day rather than the other way around. If I want to take five hours off in the afternoon to go drink a couple of ciders on my patio in the sun, I can do that. Or watch a football game on TV, etc. As long as I put in my eight hours, it's all good. With regard to meetings, there really aren't any other than Skype chat. I have to drive into town once every two or three months for a company meeting, typically only if we have to meet new clients face to face.

    Office: Clothing is mandatory.

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