Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Ideal Development Job: Location

One of the things I left out of yesterday's post was Location. That was deliberate; I've got mixed feelings about this.

Working from Home
Working from home has a lot of benefits. You save the commute time to and from work. You can take a few minutes in the afternoon to put dinner on. With the time you save, you can do a little exercise, run some errands. If you need to run a mid-afternoon errand in return for doing a little work after normal hours, it's usually not a problem. However, you have to be disciplined. Distraction is a phone call, or power switch away. If you turn the TV or the Wii on at lunch, you have to be able to turn it off again.

If you always work remotely, and it doesn't matter where 'home' is, this can be even more powerful. You can move wherever you like without worrying about your job. You can live somewhere where the expenses are low, or in places where technical jobs are hard to find. If you want to look out in the morning on deer and blue jays instead of traffic and sirens, that's your choice to make. On the other hand, if you go this far, you better have a stable job that you love, because if you lose that one, you may have trouble finding another.

Working from home can be lonely; you lose a major point of human contact, and may find yourself feeling a little divorced from the world outside. It's also much harder to do co-ordinated teamwork over the phone, skype and IM than it is in person.

If you've got people or pets at home, working from home is a good way to stay in contact with them. On the other hand, if you have three children who haven't started going to school, and a stay-at-home spouse, this might make working at home very difficult.

Working from an Office
Working from an office is a great way to stay co-ordinated, as a team, and a company. The bandwidth of face-to-face communication is much higher than you realize until you try the alternatives.

It also helps maintain a work/life balance without discipline. It's easy to have life bleed into work and work into life, if you conduct them in the same basic spot. If you physically go to work and go home, it's easier to keep these somewhat separate.

If you are going to work in an office, it's great to have a lot of interesting, inexpensive, close food options. As I've moved from office to office, that's something that I've valued about some locations over others. It's also great if that office is convenient to get to -- either relatively close to your home, or at least, a rapid, painless commute, whether that's transit or traffic.

What's The Right Location
I've done both. I like aspects of both. One of our cats is distant and sleepy at night, but very friendly during the day. I loved the flexibility that came with this, but I did end up feeling very divorced from the world outside. You'd find yourself talking to someone, who'd say something like "I really hope the weather improves; it's been soooo cooold this week" and you'd think, "was it?" You'd realize that you hadn't actually left the house this week.

I also found that it was much harder to work as a coordinated team, and that's important to me. But when I see open-source jobs that don't have a required location at all, it's interesting to imagine that I could be living in a really incredible locale, move as I please, spend less on housing, and still have a job in technology that I love and that pays reasonably.

What's the right location for you?

1 comment:

Geoffrey Wiseman said...

It's ironic that as I was writing this, I was facing a 45-minute snow-clearing job as part of my daily commute.