Remote permanent work

[yasockie]

Hi.

The main reason I switched to contracting many moons ago is I wanted to work from my home office remotely to avoid wasting life on commutes and boring meetings.
The nice side effect is a slightly higher income daily, but this is offset by bench time and constant need to find new contracts. I have calculated my average and I think I could be easily in the same financial position with a senior permanent role.
Do such positions exist and what are your thoughts on this, could this be a viable alternative for some?

[northernladuk]

Didn't do your homework then

I think pure based from home contracting is very rare in comparison across the board and even those I can bet will require a little travel from time to time.

I think a better indicator would be the type of work you are in. I wonder if some roles allow a much better chance of that level of flexibility. I am guessing here but trying to PM a project would be much more difficult to run remotely than some kind of web or data dev work.

Personally I worked from home full time for my last employer which was great for the first few months but after nearly it a year I couldn't stand it anymore and left the company. Not meeting people during the day for that length of time was just utterly soul destroying. Each to their own I guess.

EDIT : and are you going to break down the differences to include freelancing v contracting which could be markedly different?

[yasockie]

Personally I worked from home full time for my last employer which was great for the first few months but after nearly it a year I couldn't stand it anymore and left the company. Not meeting people during the day for that length of time was just utterly soul destroying. Each to their own I guess.

In all the remote roles that I have I pretty much always stay on-site initially and I do try and visit often just so that people remember how I look like.

As for remote PM it's definitely a lot harder than on-site, especially if your team spans all timezones and I think that is also why it should pay a little extra.
I am looking at different options, but basically one of the outcomes for me is I will transition to a virtual company and I will have the best developers in the world, ones that can and do easily refuse to such silly requirements as 9to5 or performance management. They are highly skilled, but often egocentric, with poor social skills and Asperger is common. Managing such a group, especially remotely is like herding cats via webcam so while it has a huge potential, it can also fail miserably so I am looking into other options as well.

[darmstadt]

At the contract before last I met a guy and although he was a contractor too he had been there for a good 10 years. He worked from home which was near the beach in Thailand and visited the site once a year for a few weeks. I have met permies who worked nearly permanently from home but that was when I was at IBM in Poughkeepsie in the USA (IBM have quite a lot of people who work from home)

[VectraMan]

PermieCo seems to have several people working from home from various corners of the globe, but I they're mainly people who did work at one of the main sites, and the company wanted to keep them when they wanted to go live somewhere else. I'm sure that's the case for most people who end up in that sort of situation.