That is exact reason I negotiated "work from home whenever you want" with the employer. It was either I quit because I could not stand random daily useless noise and chatter of the office or I can work from home and be more productive.
Yes! And discussing this on HN is totally biasing our impression on the subject. HN is full [1-5] of INTJ, sometime refereed a "problem-solver", and INTP who I believe share, at least partially, the same love of solving problem.
Not all personality types are willing to solve problems (aka working) for their own intrinsic motivation.
> Not all personality types are willing to solve problems (aka working) for their own intrinsic motivation.
I disagree with the notion that wanting to solve problems necessarily leads to having the discipline or desire to work.
The problems I choose to solve in my spare time are almost always more interesting than the ones I solve for work because I choose them out of interest, whereas the ones for work are chosen due to more practical reasons.
True, being intrinsically motivated to solve problems doesn't mean people have discipline or desire to do so for work. Albeit it is not a sufficient condition, it is still helping to be a problem-solver I think. I may be wrong though.
I don't know if I buy into that as a line of reasoning. I'm ostensibly an INFP and I actually love problem-solving (hence being a programmer). When I work from home I am motivated to work for a number of reasons:
- It's interesting / challenging
- A sense of duty / professionalism
- A sense of teamwork / camaraderie
This is entirely anecdotal of course. I also will often head to a cafe to get some 'human/ambient' time (another motivator). Being at home can be lonely.
The fact that INTJ and INTP may usually be problem-solvers does not mean that other types may not be as well. A -> B doesn't mean than ¬A -> ¬B
I'm just saying that HN is really biased toward known problem-solving personalities, this should be taken into account in the context of this discussion :-)
I always see people criticizing all sort of tests because they are not good regarding to some criteria. Well, this is true for all of them. Those tests are trying to divide billions of people into few categories, you lose information anyway. There are 8 billions of personalities that should be split into 16 categories, some people will match exactly, other will lies in-between and will not match the characteristics.
I don't know these big-five or hexaco tests, but by the principle they also try to reduce the dimensionality of 8 billions people to n<100 categories, the same as MBTI. They may be better than MBTI, probably, but this does not mean the later may not bring useful information for our discussion.
I made some quick stats one of the HN pool (probably not statistically significant, but still a good indication), INTJ are 2.5% in the real population but 30% of HN, INTP 4% but 28.7% on HN, ENTP 6% but 10% on HN, and ENTJ 5.5% but 7.5% on HN. The four together represent ~80% of HN, but only ~20% of the real population. Those are also the four most represented categories on HN, and curiously belongs to the "Intellectual" class of personalities [1], as you would except to find on HN.
Maybe it's not the best test, maybe it has some problems, but it is still a tool that can give us some bases for thinking and discussions.
INFP are also strong problem solvers as can be any type when motivated... I think an INTP won't be deeply aware of motivations outside of the problem itself while INTJ will be much more selfishly calculated which is why they tend to make more money.
Unfortunately that's true. And the people who actually work better from home suffer from that. Sometimes I work several days from home and I really get into a flow and reach a depth of work that I can never achieve in a loud open office.
My direct manager is OK with that but the guy one level up always makes comments about people not in the office so I guess for promotions and raises it's better to be in the office.
And also due to some bad apples, the entire category of people willing to work from home is considered as a bunch of slackers - so you want to "work" from home, uh?
What they don't know is that when I work from home I produce 1.3-1.5x more than when I work at the office - do I like to work everyday from home, though? No!
The problem is that a lot of people aren't capable of working remotely and/or treat work from home as a day off.
Well, that's half the problem. The other half is the tendency of many managers to view all requests to work from home as a request to stay home and goof off on the clock. I've worked places where the apparent measure of productivity is how many aggregate ass-in-seat hours the department put in.
Well, I admit I slack more when I work from home, but that's usually because typically reason I work from home is that I'm so tired of working or depressed I can't convince myself to actually go to work. Now often I'll just take a sick day though but do some work.
As someone who has hired people for remote position, it's a problem I've run into. A lot of people who look great on paper , have a lot of experience and seem a great fit actually do poorly working from home. It takes a certain kind of mindset to work well from home.
I'm now always a bit wary about hiring someone who has never worked remotely because I know the chances it won't work out are high.
Really? That hasn't been my experience at all. On any engineering team I've ever worked with. What field are you in? Are you basing your statement off of personal experience? If so, how many people have you seen behave this way?
I'm not the OP, obviously, but have had similar experiences. At a previous employer my team had a WFH day once a week, on which maybe 10-20% of people would work from home and be roughly as productive as they were in the office, 60% would take it and not do much or be responsive (e.g. if you pinged them about something, you'd be lucky to get a response in less than an hour) and the rest of us rarely took it up. So that is based off experience, albeit anecdotal.
I accept that it's possible to have a team that would do significantly better than that, but definitely don't agree with the utopian view that you can offer WFH to just any employee and they'll be productive, and crucially that it won't affect other employees who might need their input.
Humans are all different, not everyone can work from home and not everyone can work in an office. That is just the way we humans work. Some love to work in a busy kitchen stressing the whole day and then cook when they come home too. Others can't see a kitchen when they get home.
I wonder how much "can't work from home" comes from lack of experience. Remote work is still rather rare, and when people first try it, it's quite possible they haven't grown the discipline it requires. Could it come with time? Could people change?
I'm not talking about dicipline, that is just an easy excuse to tell people to get their act together instead of just accepting that we all are diffrent. Some have troubles around other people, others cant be alone.
