Work From Home?

Alright, how many of you guys work out of your home? Whether it's for a major corporation or you're self employed I'm curious how many rocketeers deal with the daily struggle of work vs. play, spreadsheets vs. gluing fins, workflows vs. altimeter wiring, conference call vs. mixing propellant...the list goes on.

I'm fortunate enough to not have a daily commute beyond bed -> coffee maker -> work laptop. The days that I go into the office, I find the ambient noise and other people socializing really puts a damper on my effectiveness. I work for a major corporation with a GREAT group of people and I am thrilled that such an option is available to me.

So, how many other rocketeers will wake up tomorrow and work in their jammies?

I can if I want to or as needed. However as a hardware engineer I frequently have to be on site to deal with the carnage. We are making a slow push towards locating folks at home especially the applications team, and system admins. Our move to VDI will make that more and more possible.

Jammies, no. Gym shorts and a T-shirt yes.

Besides setting fins during a really pointless conference call is a real bonus here...

I have found mixing propellant at my desk can be looked on with a bit of disdain by those in charge (they are so unimaginative).

On the plus side to going into the office, It's a real nice 30 mile bike ride each way.

Being a mechanic, it's never gonna happen but...
If I could just figure out how to teleport the customer's equipment to my house, I'd have it made (although if I developed the teleport part, I probably would have it made). Heck we sometimes have a hard time convincing the customer they'd be better off bringing it to the shop even though the field labor rate is $10.00 an hour more.

Adrian

My office is in my house, upstairs next to the workout room. When I come down the stairs I leave all my "work" behind me. I don't find it hard to juggle work and play. Do the work first, then play. Sometimes I don't even get clothes on.....


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I am a field technician for a power plant equipment manufacturer, so I am kind of both. If I am between assignments, as I am now, I hang out by the phone getting a base salary. However when on a project, I'm away in a hotel for weeks to months depending on the contract.

When I owned a company in Dallas I had a home office. It was a big house and all, but my wife said "never again." So when we moved to Indiana and built our home there wasn't a provision for a home office, rocket workshop yes, but office no. My office now is right on the main street of our small town which is about an 8 minute commute from my property.

I am a "work from home" employee - a better name is a "telecommuter"

I have never worked in my pajamas. Agreed on shorts/jeans and a t-shirt though. No way i'm dressing up in work clothes. My wife is always amazed at how focused I am at work. Don't get me wrong, I can fire up a load of laundry or tack on a fin but as far as just being irresponsible and blowing off work I just don't do that. I tend to keep my work time and personal time separate - i learned a LONG time ago that if you mix the two it all becomes "work time".

I would love to work from home, but being a physician, it would be tough. I prefer for patients not to know where I live. I have to set limits.

I work in shorts and tee shirt from home , I have set hours service tech for at&t

95% of the time I'm in the lab, with an active scrubber on my fume hood exhaust. If I tried to do what I do for a living at home I could wipe out my block.

10 years ago I lost a job at a corp that did trade shows. I was the Autocad drafter that designed the floor plans for said trade shows. Pretty easy work if you know Autocad. I set up shop at home,dug my heels in for clients looking for the likes of me, and became independent. Granted, it's not easy being a prisoner to your home but this job does that to you.

YUP...I work in what I slept in. I have no gas budget, I have no boss either...HOW GRAND IS THAT???!!! I can call shots to when I want a vacation rather than having to deal with a company time frame. And I have mad cash more often than I ever did. Stress level is at zero these days.

I recommend everybody look into using what you know best, finding your REAL WORTH, and going solo. Bottom line, it's usually more affordable for a company to outsource jobs, than it is to have an insured employee that expects benefits and such. :2:

chris m said:

I work in shorts and tee shirt from home , I have set hours service tech for at&t

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"I can help you with that"

In my previous position I could work from home one or two days a week. In my current job I can only do it if I need to be at home for some reason. In 5 more months it won't matter; taking early retirement.

I have been working for a global software company for 24 years. Three years ago, I fortunate enough to get approval to telecommute full time. I moved halfway across the country to be closer to my aging in-laws and built a new home.

My morning commute now is a flight of stairs. Standard dress means sweat pants, t-shirt and bedroom slippers. There is a full kitchen and bathroom down in the basement, so I don't even have to come back upstairs the rest of the day.

It is both a blessing and a curse that my office and my workshop are side-by-side. It does afford me the chance to squeeze in some rocketry stuff during those bombastic debacles they call "conference calls". But the nature of my work requires some intense focus. Therefore, more often than not, the rockets have to wait until after quitting time.

As a street performer, much of my "behind the scenes" time is spent at home. Arranging my supplies of balloons/getting the materials ready for the next time I go out. When I "work" I'm usually doing Ok for my finances. However, since beginning school after losing my "Real" job (travel agent) back in 2009, my performing opportunities have been greatly reduced. This term is an exception, as I'm only taking one class, and it's not a foreign language (e.g. Mandarin, Korean, or ASL). My hope is to graduate, and move to Taiwan, or China as an English teacher. The pay will be steadier and there would be benefits that I don't have as a street performer.

It would be so nice to work from home. I work at a place where I repair electrical/hydraulic systems.

I'm a consultant; some clients are comfortable with work from home, others not so much. While I can't work from home at the moment, I am able to work 4 nine hour days, and a half day on Friday so I get a longer weekend.

Plus they're not picky about hours, so I start at 6AM and leave early.

-Kevin

troj said:

I'm a consultant;

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<cheap shot>

Consulting - where if you are not part of the solution, there is good money to be made in prolonging the problem.

<\cheap shot>

I had a full time WFH gig a while back, but there was lots of travel involved (technical sales). Now I only WFH if there's a snowstorm - I have people reporting to me and work in projects across the organization, so face time is important.

H_Rocket said:

Consulting - where if you are not part of the solution, there is good money to be made in prolonging the problem.

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I prefer to think of it as Revenue Protection.

-Kevin

You don't have to be at home to suffer from that challenge. I own a company and my office looks like a rocket factory, I even purchased a LPR Estes starter kit for one of my employees who keeps asking about "the rockets".

I have a job that I go to everyday. Currently my role is an IT Specialist. Really it doesn't mean anything to me. I show up to work and collect a check, which about all I really do. I'm on a 3 year contact with the company but after 6 months I'll start looking for something else. I like IT work, but sitting around answering phones isn't my kind of thing. I would much rather work on deployment projects, setting up new computer systems with new images, software and permissions and shipping them out. IDK - working on deployment projects you go in, you're not really dealing with the everyday issues the users have and you are just responsible for a certain aspect. That's just me. I think the longer I'm in this the less patient I have for it. Also as acontractor you are looked down upon as a "lesser" type of employee by your co-workers. You get paid less and no benefits, but it is a job and in todays economy it's better to be working than collecting unemployment. I could always play poker for a living?

Strange

We don't think of contract workers any less than we do the FTE team. In fact sometimes it is hard to discern who is actually on the payroll here. In fact the only time we resent contract workers is the higher end consultants who come in, tell us a methodology and we wonder why that exact same idea was not good enough when we suggested it months ago. Sometimes you need to pay $1500/day to get someone in senior management to accept an idea they could have had in place months earlier and for the peanuts they pay us (actually I can't complain as I am relatively well compensated for the minimal amount of work they can actually trick me into doing...)

H_Rocket said:

Strange

We don't think of contract workers any less than we do the FTE team. In fact sometimes it is hard to discern who is actually on the payroll here. In fact the only time we resent contract workers is the higher end consultants who come in, tell us a methodology and we wonder why that exact same idea was not good enough when we suggested it months ago. Sometimes you need to pay $1500/day to get someone in senior management to accept an idea they could have had in place months earlier and for the peanuts they pay us (actually I can't complain as I am relatively well compensated for the minimal amount of work they can actually trick me into doing...)

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I agree maybe not all places are like that. I work through an agency that places me at different locations for different clients doing a variety of IT work. Like I said I come in collect a check and put in a solid 8 hrs of work. No OT here because it has to be approved, but as an individual in my position you recognize the difference right away. It is what it is... I'm working that's what matters, but I'd rather be building rockets or something else .

H_Rocket said:

We don't think of contract workers any less than we do the FTE team. In fact sometimes it is hard to discern who is actually on the payroll here.

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That's how it is where I'm at. Sometimes something will come up, and I have to remind people that I'm not an employee, so I don't get that benefit, or I don't have to meet that requirement (typically HR paperwork).

They don't treat me any differently than they do the employees, and I do my best not to act like anything other than an employee.

-Kevin

troj said:

That's how it is where I'm at. Sometimes something will come up, and I have to remind people that I'm not an employee, so I don't get that benefit, or I don't have to meet that requirement (typically HR paperwork).

They don't treat me any differently than they do the employees, and I do my best not to act like anything other than an employee.

-Kevin

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The same goes for my company. Our computer techs and a lot of other support functions are contractors. They are essentially considered part of the greater good and we don't differentiate.

Like I said every company is different... just going on what I've experienced in the past.

As a Park Ranger, the Park Office was in my house. It shared space with the laundry room! Yes, I worked at home, but that meant the public was always knocking at the door, all hours of the day or night and there was no such thing as a days off. Oh, the winter was such a wonderful thing...no campers! Of course that changed as RV's became more popular. The agency even required that our personal phone numbers be listed so that the public and 911 could contact me. I was still receiving phone calls from 911 at 3 a.m., two years after I retired.

My parents came down to visit and early one morning a camper came to the door. My dad answered the door in his t-shirt, yes, thats right, just in his t-shirt!! :y: Oh, Boy! Did that creat a complaint letter. NO more home office for this kid.

AfterBurners said:

Like I said every company is different... just going on what I've experienced in the past.

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Oh, I hear ya. I've been on both ends.

The client I'm at right now is great.

Another client, I came in one morning and found someone else's stuff at "my" desk -- someone had decided they liked my desk better, so after hours he swapped us. Would've been nice if he had let me know, rather than forcing me to wander until I found my stuff.

Same client, after the magic swap, someone saw the monitor I had, and decided he wanted it on his desk. So, he took it and left me with no monitor.

This is a business that leases their equipment, and keeps VERY close track of where everything is so they can easily return it when the lease is up. I know this, because I helped write the system to keep track of some of it. The person in charge of tracking things for that department wasn't happy about either of these occurrences, as equipment isn't supposed to be moved without approval...

That particular client was great at constantly reminding me I wasn't one of them.

-Kevin

troj said:

Oh, I hear ya. I've been on both ends.

The client I'm at right now is great.

Another client, I came in one morning and found someone else's stuff at "my" desk -- someone had decided they liked my desk better, so after hours he swapped us. Would've been nice if he had let me know, rather than forcing me to wander until I found my stuff.

Same client, after the magic swap, someone saw the monitor I had, and decided he wanted it on his desk. So, he took it and left me with no monitor.

This is a business that leases their equipment, and keeps VERY close track of where everything is so they can easily return it when the lease is up. I know this, because I helped write the system to keep track of some of it. The person in charge of tracking things for that department wasn't happy about either of these occurrences, as equipment isn't supposed to be moved without approval...

That particular client was great at constantly reminding me I wasn't one of them.

-Kevin

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Exactly...been there before. I work at a county location. Most of the guys I'm working with are easily making $10-15 more an hour than what I'm being paid, yet they do less work and complain more. When there is a "dirty" job to do they dump it on me. For instance doing surplus, which I don't mine because I get to get away from my desk or crawling under someone's desk to fix their computer or moving something. Anything that has any type of manual labor they dump off on me, which is cool because I'm away from them and doing something with my time. The guy that trained me was a contractor from the same staffing agency...go figure right? Wouldn't you think one of the regular employees would take it upon themselves to do it? Nope....anyway the other contractor told me. The more work you do and the harder you work the more they dump on you because they expect it. I don't mind working, but when you work in a "team" environment it should be balance...but oh well.