Working from home, what did/do you do ?

[scotview]

Not sure if this the best place for this post.

All of my working life was spent in a workshop/office environment, like the majority of the UK working population over the last 20, 30 years.

Quite a lot of contributors on this site have voluntarily said that they have worked from home for the last 10, 20, 30 years, AND made a jolly good income.

If you home working guys and girls don't mind, would you be good enough to elaborate on exactly what you were/are doing in a home working environment.

Intrigued to know the details of what you did/do exactly and what your earning capacity was/is ?

Thanks in advance.

[seekingbalance]

Not sure this will be much help, as I worked in a number of different roles, for a major FTSE company.

Programme manager, Project manager, Service Director, IT Director.

This involved some travel, and some semi-commuting at times, but always home based home working at the core.

I always found I was much more productive working from home, though I did largely work with widely dispersed teams anyway - from all over the UK to India, USA and across Europe, depending on the project, role at the time.

Most work these days, other than manual work or shop type work where location is essential, can be easily done from home, especially with the recent rise of easy use video and ubiquitous broadband (when I started working from home a great internet speed was 32kb/s (approx 1600 times slower than my home broadband), as it almost all involves working on a computer (which can be anywhere), making and receiving calls, and attending meetings. Modern collaboration tools, such as come as the secondary parts of the Microsoft office suite of applications, easy web publishing, in-house facebook and Twitter type applications all make sharing and working together almost as easy as being sat next to a team member or in a meeting, but without the travel and bs that goes on in and around meetings. I recall vividly, even 5 years ago, attending meetings with my team, just so we could meet up, but then us all each using our laptops in the meeting in the same way as if we were remote.

Income depended on seniority and role, but for me and my UK based team, anywhere between £40k and £120k as salaried staff, plus bonus plus pension and healthcare. This was more than 5 years ago, so salaries would be much higher now.

But as I say, perhaps not what you were looking for - more the "I work from home and earn £15k per week working only 5 hours a day!" type headline may be more what you are looking for, being more on the self employed type of thing? Not sure I can help with that.

[JohnB]

IT contractor, then employee doing a very specialust job optimising supercomputer software. Few jobs, few people, so they accepted me working fron home. It wasn't very sucessful, my heart wasn't in it by then.

[AleisterCrowley]

...
But as I say, perhaps not what you were looking for - more the "I work from home and earn £15k per week working only 5 hours a day!" type headline may be more what you are looking for....

Plenty of 'people near me in Reading" earning that sort of money, if you believe the pop up ads.
They appear to be quite flashy young women, fond of sitting in piles of cash in Lamborghinis. Quite unlike most people I see in Reading.

[servodude]

They appear to be quite flashy young women, fond of sitting in piles of cash in Lamborghinis. Quite unlike most people I see in Reading.

do you need to find a more exciting book group?

[bungeejumper]

[Flounce] "Creative" [/Flounce].

I started out with one seriously lucky break, doing four years in London with a major City publisher, and then I got out of London as fast as I could, and back to my Somerset cottage where I could hear myself think a bit more clearly. (And where my girlfriend was. ) I never could stand the London commuting, or the long boozy lunch breaks which used to pass for normal in the Square Mile - or the very long working days, which might have been shorter if it hadn't been for those lunch breaks.

The job could pay very well in those days, and I was lucky enough to have had my share. But rates have been stagnant for the last twenty years and most of my ilk barely scrape along these days. Blogging and free stuff on the internet have seen to that.

As the song goes, take it while it's there, don't grieve when it's gone. Don't let your children go into publishing!

BJ

[EssDeeAitch]

I worked from home between 2003 and 2008 as a one man recruitment company. The financial crash arrived and as I was wondering "what next", I received a call from an old colleague whose company needed a UK and Ireland Sales Director. Perfect timing! I worked for that company until my (early) retirement in 2016.

Despite leaving employment as a Managing Director of a division of a global company I earned more in recruitment but then took a step back to go back into full time employment. I was not complaining though.

In both cases, I was not a prisoner of the home office. Regular meetings with clients and candidates as a recruiter and internal/staff/client meetings made sure that I always had a legitimate reason to be either home or away. Ideal really. As was the fact that I had a large enough home to accommodate an office.

I envisage a lot of employers/employees electing to have a mix of home/office work. My daughter is a CA with one of the big four companies and they are already taking opinion from staff as to the desirability of this mix.

[redsturgeon]

I started off in a field sales role in the medical market. I progressed to regional management and on to a national management role, that was when I was required to work in a office.

However we then had a major reorganisation in the 1990s that meant we organised regionally with regional business mangers, again home based.

It paid very well and came with very nice benefits and wasn't that difficult as a job.

I was lucky.

John