NYCPHP Meetup

[Jason Scott]

As a single developer there isn't much of a reason.

For a development team - needing to coordinate activities and debate designs on whiteboards - on site presence is required. Unless I were to spend lots of money on collaboration and video environments to facilitate a home-based workplace. 

Personally, I'd rather allocate the money I would need to spend on such a setup back into developer salaries, call me crazy. Not to mention that some of the more socially capable developers actually enjoy getting out of the house :-)

And just to keep the "how behind the times are you" comments at bay, every time I've visited Google in Mountainview, Cisco in San Jose, Citrix in Ft Lauderdale, or Microsoft in Redmond, the offices were packed with staff. Cavemen, huh?


-----Original Message-----
From: talk-bounces at lists.nyphp.org [mailto:talk-bounces at lists.nyphp.org] On Behalf Of Tim Lieberman
Sent: Thursday, April 17, 2008 3:47 PM
To: NYPHP Talk
Subject: Re: [nycphp-talk] Why IT Sucks

Jerry B. Altzman wrote:
> on 2008-04-17 09:18 SyAD at aol.com said the following:
>> This may have been mentioned already, but maybe the best people out 
>> there are independent?
>
> From just coming off of (and still trying to) hire PHP programmers, I 
> have to say that a great many resumes and interviews I've had are with 
> people who aren't willing to work on-site; they want to telecommute 
> 80-90% and work from their apartments in their jammies and slippers.
> Best, worst, in-between-est, I can't find someone who wants to work 
> full-time.
I'm certainly one of those people, though not in New York.

At the end of the day, I just can't justify spending time on-site very 
often.  I do a lot of work for a boutique development shop, and have a 
desk at the office.  Recently, I've tried to go in at least twice a week 
-- but it gets difficult.  I can do more, better quality, work if I'm in 
a comfortable place with all my toys.  It's only about a 20 minute drive 
to the office, and a pleasant one at that -- but between getting in/out 
of the car and drive time, that's an hour of billable time.  I've often 
fantasized about charging for travel time when someone has demanded 
on-site work when I thought it was not necessary.

Why people insist on on-site work is a bit beyond me.  If you're willing 
to pay well, you should be able to attract capable developers who can be 
trusted to work remotely.  If you want to hire a bunch of juniors to 
churn out hacks all day, and have someone supervise them, then it's 
probably worth it to have them on-site.  But anyone with 5+ years solid 
development experience should be allowed to work how they work best.  
That way, you get the best bang for you buck, IMO.

-Tim

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