OT: Working from home / remotely

[Knight Shift]

Let me expand the thread now that we've had a lot of good responses. One of the benefits from working at the office are all the supplies at your disposal (large copier, easier IT support, etc). Do your companies make sure you are properly set up with supplies and stuff to make the WFH experience seemless, or if it's your choice to WFH, do you find yourself coming up with a lot of the equipment (computer, printer, scanners, etc. that people may not naturally have in their house)?

What is a copier? People still use paper? Tree killers!!!!
IT support? Ours is an outside IT firm, and they almost never have to come to our office. Everything is satisfactorily handled via remote login.
We have dual monitors in the office, and we purchased dual monitors for everyone to work at home. Once you have dual monitors, working on a single monitor is painful.

 

[JMORC2003]

Can't do it. I'm disciplined enough, but the wife and kids arent. To them, work from home is equivalent to I have a day off. I've even tried going the library or panera to knock out a few solid hours, but that's even worse in terms of having everything I need.

My work place is meeting crazy. Have a question? We have project managers that pull together meetings with 15 people for that. Upcoming meeting? Let's have a meeting to prepare for that meeting. 70% of my day is spent in meetings, in meetings about meetings, and meetings recapping meetings.

Biggest difference for me is not having to do the commute. I'm usually in the office until about 6, but people start checking out 5:15-5:30p, so if I'm working from home I close the laptop at 5:15 and check periodically for the next hour or so. Regular day I'm not walking in the door until around 7:30p

 

[Knight Shift]

Can't do it. I'm disciplined enough, but the wife and kids arent. To them, work from home is equivalent to I have a day off. I've even tried going the library or panera to knock out a few solid hours, but that's even worse in terms of having everything I need.

My work place is meeting crazy. Have a question? We have project managers that pull together meetings with 15 people for that. Upcoming meeting? Let's have a meeting to prepare for that meeting. 70% of my day is spent in meetings, in meetings about meetings, and meetings recapping meetings.

Biggest difference for me is not having to do the commute. I'm usually in the office until about 6, but people start checking out 5:15-5:30p, so if I'm working from home I close the laptop at 5:15 and check periodically for the next hour or so. Regular day I'm not walking in the door until around 7:30p

That's why I left corporate life. Too many meetings. Most of my clients cannot be reached for a five minute conversation during the course of the day because they are booked solid in meetings all day.
Reminds me of an old training video that we watched when I worked for a Fortune 500 company in a . . . . . MEETING!!!

 

[phs73rc77gsm83]

I spent 30 years commuting from Piscataway to NYC--no fun. Early on I established enough credibility so that by the time kids came along I was able to leave early for their sports/activities. Of course on the flip side were many days working into the night. I was going to retire 3 years ago but they asked me if I'd stay on if I worked from home. I really didn't want to work full time anymore so we settled on a three day work week, 100% of it from home. I'm much more productive working from home plus, I feel it's flexible enough so if I need to do something late or on a day off I don't feel it is a problem. I also occasionally swap work days and off days as needed. No supplies are needed except a computer and phone. I can access all my files and programs as if I were in the office.

 

[Knight Shift]

I spent 30 years commuting from Piscataway to NYC--no fun. Early on I established enough credibility so that by the time kids came along I was able to leave early for their sports/activities. Of course on the flip side were many days working into the night. I was going to retire 3 years ago but they asked me if I'd stay on if I worked from home. I really didn't want to work full time anymore so we settled on a three day work week, 100% of it from home. I'm much more productive working from home plus, I feel it's flexible enough so if I need to do something late or on a day off I don't feel it is a problem. I also occasionally swap work days and off days as needed. No supplies are needed except a computer and phone. I can access all my files and programs as if I were in the office.

It's nice to be wanted and needed.

 

[MoobyCow]

It's all about the commute. I get the occasional work from home day, but if I could get a regular day one a week, or even every other week I would be so much happier. My commute isn't awful, at about 40-50 min from JC to Midtown, that's still and extra 1:30 or so in my day if I'm not commuting.

As for being productive... I don't find much of a difference.

 

[RUBigFrank]

Its always been the same for me whether I work from home or office - same amount of work - likely more efficient in the office.

What I find is regardless where am - colleagues who abuse the privilege are harder to get a hold of and effect my work as they may running errands and are unavailable for consultation.

 

[Mr_Twister]

Worked for 40 years at one of the premiere research and development organizations in NJ. Just anecdotal ... work-at-home staff were most often overlooked for promotions and leadership positions.

 

[RUBigFrank]

Excessive WFH robs teamwork - I always do hear "I get more done WFH" - however if diminishes collaboration between coworkers and hurts efficiencies..

There is a lot of value at WFH, but it is overused and abused.

 

[DHajekRC84]

Over the past 33 years I've done it all... traveled a ton, commuted to the office 500 miles a week/3hrs each day, few days a week WFH here/there..then the p 4 years time WFH 100% when not on a business trip (had an office to go to, but nobody ever there now anyway). Team is all over the country.

It completely depends on the person and function. Instead of corp . position I moved back to field sales management. This laptop is on/connected 24/7. I bet I put more hours in per week round the clock then 90% of folks in the office who arrive at 9, leave to beat the traffic, and take the hour lunch. > 50% of the emails I get are from somebody's smart phone.

Nobody's here to distract me. I miss all the personal office interaction but all the folks like me with my interest were downsized years ago. I'm not getting promoted, so being treated like a big boy who can more than do the job and be left alone is fantastic. This is one area I really appreciate my corporation.

 

[bethlehemfan]

Worked for 40 years at one of the premiere research and development organizations in NJ. Just anecdotal ... work-at-home staff were most often overlooked for promotions and leadership positions.

Agree. Definitely not a good approach if you are looking to move up.

 

[RU4Real]

I work from home whenever I'm not traveling - the actual percentage depends on current project.

There's good and bad. The good is, I don't have to go to work. The bad is that if I'm really busy I could literally not leave my house for days on end.

Sometimes I miss the social aspect of an office environment, mostly as relates to women with casual moral standards.

 

[Knight Shift]

I work from home whenever I'm not traveling - the actual percentage depends on current project.

There's good and bad. The good is, I don't have to go to work. The bad is that if I'm really busy I could literally not leave my house for days on end.

Sometimes I miss the social aspect of an office environment, mostly as relates to women with casual moral standards.

You can't leave that last line without more details.
Lunch dates?
Conference rooms?

 

[RU4Real]

You can't leave that last line without more details.
Lunch dates?
Conference rooms?

The "world-renowned sports entertainment organization" that I used to work for had, at the time, a VERY stringent sexual harassment policy, which consisted of, "How many zeroes should we put on this check?"

 

[RUChoppin]

Excessive WFH robs teamwork - I always do hear "I get more done WFH" - however if diminishes collaboration between coworkers and hurts efficiencies..

There is a lot of value at WFH, but it is overused and abused.

Having teams working from different locations across the US and globe has already blown up any hope of teamwork in the office itself.

I work in NJ... my key partners work in upstate NY, North Carolina, Illinois, Missouri, Florida, and India. Of the 22 people on the invite for my all-day design call today, there was only one other person from my office.

 

[RUChoppin]

Let me expand the thread now that we've had a lot of good responses. One of the benefits from working at the office are all the supplies at your disposal (large copier, easier IT support, etc). Do your companies make sure you are properly set up with supplies and stuff to make the WFH experience seemless, or if it's your choice to WFH, do you find yourself coming up with a lot of the equipment (computer, printer, scanners, etc. that people may not naturally have in their house)?

Don't print or copy anything anymore, so there really isn't any need for supplies. Company provides my laptop, docking station, mouse, and keyboard. Most IT support is remote access at this point, but for the rare hardware support need I drive into the office.

The only reasons I absolutely *need* to be in the office are meetings with my supervisor, meetings with higher leadership from my building, and video telepresence calls. Also, pulling large files across VPN is slower than pulling them in the office, so if I'm dealing with really large files, I'll usually go in to work.

 

[RU848789]

Having teams working from different locations across the US and globe has already blown up any hope of teamwork in the office itself.

I work in NJ... my key partners work in upstate NY, North Carolina, Illinois, Missouri, Florida, and India. Of the 22 people on the invite for my all-day design call today, there was only one other person from my office.

90% of my work is with people at my site, most of whom are in my building and within a 50-yard walk of my office. Chemical process development is actually highly collaborative, so I can't even imagine trying to do it remotely - we've tried to outsource some of that work and it never really goes that well (good for job security), as there's no substitute for having a critical mass of collocated and highly talented chemists, analysts and engineers.

Personally, I have always really enjoyed those kind of interactions with various team members and stakeholders - probably why I enjoy managing and leading teams (for the most part). I'm actually one of those engineers who likes working with various customers, as I have people skills. As opposed to the engineers at Innotec, lol.

 

[RU4Real]

Chemical process development is actually highly collaborative, so I can't even imagine trying to do it remotely - we've tried to outsource some of that work and it never really goes that well (good for job security), as there's no substitute for having a critical mass of collocated and highly talented chemists, analysts and engineers.

So... they keep you around because of your bubbly personality, I'm guessing?

 

[rutgersal_rivals139582]

I can work from home and would probably be more productive. But then i would miss the camaraderie of the office. also its easier to collaborate when you're seeing people face to face.

 

[RU848789]

So... they keep you around because of your bubbly personality, I'm guessing?

Who knows, lol, but I have survived every cutback. All kidding aside, many of the people I work with are wicked smart (like top 10-20 in the world at some very specific scientific disciplines), but quite a few literally are socially inept and I'm just a bit less socially inept and moderately smart, so that gets you to middle management.

 

[phs73rc77gsm83]

Who knows, lol, but I have survived every cutback. All kidding aside, many of the people I work with are wicked smart (like top 10-20 in the world at some very specific scientific disciplines), but quite a few literally are socially inept and I'm just a bit less socially inept and moderately smart, so that gets you to middle management.

+100%. Be able to converse with top management, members of board of directors, investment bankers, lead attorneys, etc. if you can't do that then your smarts are limited to solving discrete problems. This applies most particularly to people aspiring to senior management, board positions and the like, not necessarily every position.

 

[Knight Shift]

Who knows, lol, but I have survived every cutback. All kidding aside, many of the people I work with are wicked smart (like top 10-20 in the world at some very specific scientific disciplines), but quite a few literally are socially inept and I'm just a bit less socially inept and moderately smart, so that gets you to middle management.

Admit it. They keep you around for the weather reports.
Question for you. We are starting to make a list for my son, a rising junior at Biotech High School. He will likely pursue something in Biology, Biochemistry, Chemistry or Engineering. What are the top schools you guys recruit from? What do you consider top schools in these disciplines?

 

[BigRnj]

Telehiding... some do it quite well

 

[Rufaninga]

Enjoy working from home. Saves 3 hours a day without rude in ATL traffic. I am working g with people scattered across the country and Boone at my office. So I don't lose collaboration, I just gain more time. I also let the Mrs. know when I'm working from home, I'm working. I'll gladly do something for her at lunch or after work day. It keeps me focused on work and she knows not I'm not on vacation or off that day. I get way more accomplished at home, but even at office I'm always the one working and not on fbook etc. while others are putzing around.

 

[czxqa]

I started out working from home one day a week about ten years ago, now I'm up to 3 or most weeks 4 days a week from home. I get twice as much done at home as in the office. Most days in the office are spent making sure I'm seen by management. I've done it long enough that the expectations have been set with my wife/kids that there is one hour or so in the day I can be asked for rides/favors/chores, and that's pretty much it unless they want me working till 8 or 9 at night. When we get crushed at year and and the next two months, I am chained to the computer for 12-14 hours a day and I just don't have the luxury of even taking the "half day" a day in the office entails.
Interesting article from the Wall Street Journal from the other day, also picked up by Morningstar, about how work from home is not going away.
And IBM, by the way, just lost Facebook's What'sApp messenger from their Cloud service, which is a huge kick in the teeth for a company who is trying to reinvent themselves for the fifteenth time in the last 20 years. So taking wfh away is just a strategy to save money on layoff packages, nothing more.

 

[RU848789]

Admit it. They keep you around for the weather reports.
Question for you. We are starting to make a list for my son, a rising junior at Biotech High School. He will likely pursue something in Biology, Biochemistry, Chemistry or Engineering. What are the top schools you guys recruit from? What do you consider top schools in these disciplines?

Actually, there's likely a small element of truth to your weather comment. I know people like to bust my balls over the weather posts, but I've been making weather "posts" for nearly 20 years at work on winter weather and tropical systems. It started as emails to 20-30 people in my area, including a very good friend and colleague who went from being my boss in 2000 (he was a senior director at the time) to my boss's boss's boss's boss within about 10 years of that, as he advanced a little faster than I did, lol, going from senior director to senior VP in 10 years (4 promotions), which was remarkable.

He's also a weather nut and loves my emails and he started sharing them with his boss (the President of the manufacturing division) and his boss's staff - not only that, but I started regularly getting emails from him and other senior execs asking for personally tailored weather input/advice. When you get requests like that, you do your best, and they all seem to like the info and I only get gentle ball busting if the forecast was off.

Around 2010, I moved from an email list of about 100 people to posting my weather notes on an internal website, which anyone can access and now there are over 1000 folks registered to automatically get my notes sent to them. I don't do posts every few hours or minutes like I do here and on FB - I only post the long posts I do here about once or twice a day at work (and usually not between 8 am and 5 pm).

So, has that helped me keep my job? Doubtful, really, but It's not bad for job security to generally make your senior management happy. Will be interesting to see what happens when I retire. Have had a bunch of folks ask if I can continue doing the reports after that, which is very unlikely - the answer might be to start a blog.

Sorry for the long winded reply, but you asked - will answer your college question later...

 

[T2Kplus10]

Actually, there's likely a small element of truth to your weather comment. I know people like to bust my balls over the weather posts, but I've been making weather "posts" for nearly 20 years at work on winter weather and tropical systems. It started as emails to 20-30 people in my area, including a very good friend and colleague who went from being my boss in 2000 (he was a senior director at the time) to my boss's boss's boss's boss within about 10 years of that, as he advanced a little faster than I did, lol, going from senior director to senior VP in 10 years (4 promotions), which was remarkable.

He's also a weather nut and loves my emails and he started sharing them with his boss (the President of the manufacturing division) and his boss's staff - not only that, but I started regularly getting emails from him and other senior execs asking for personally tailored weather input/advice. When you get requests like that, you do your best, and they all seem to like the info and I only get gentle ball busting if the forecast was off.

Around 2010, I moved from an email list of about 100 people to posting my weather notes on an internal website, which anyone can access and now there are over 1000 folks registered to automatically get my notes sent to them. I don't do posts every few hours or minutes like I do here and on FB - I only post the long posts I do here about once or twice a day at work (and usually not between 8 am and 5 pm).

So, has that helped me keep my job? Doubtful, really, but It's not bad for job security to generally make your senior management happy. Will be interesting to see what happens when I retire. Have had a bunch of folks ask if I can continue doing the reports after that, which is very unlikely - the answer might be to start a blog.

Sorry for the long winded reply, but you asked - will answer your college question later...

What? Who would dare do that?

 

[RU848789]

Admit it. They keep you around for the weather reports.
Question for you. We are starting to make a list for my son, a rising junior at Biotech High School. He will likely pursue something in Biology, Biochemistry, Chemistry or Engineering. What are the top schools you guys recruit from? What do you consider top schools in these disciplines?

I've posted about this a few times on here, but Merck is pretty damn picky in its recruiting, generally only recruiting from top tier schools in the various scientific disciplines we hire into (I don't know as much about the business/sales side, but assume it's similar there) - and those schools vary a bit between disciplines. I know eng'g recruiting extremely well, having been the lead for all eng'g recruiting at RU for the past 12 years and being one of the co-leads for our overall eng'g recruiting program at Merck. I know chemistry recruiting pretty well, since we work very closely with chemists.

So, in eng'g and especially chem eng'g (probably 75% of our engineers are chem engineers, since we manufacture chemicals and biochemicals), we recruit from top tier eng'g schools like MIT, Michigan, Cal, Princeton, Cornell, Delaware, NC State, Ga Tech, PSU, UVA, Penn, Purdue, and Villanova - that's a somewhat national list, but we also try to focus on the NE, too, since most of our engineers work in NJ/PA. In eng'g maybe 30-40% of our new hires have PhDs with the rest being mostly BS level.

And while RU is not rated quite as highly as those schools, we recruit engineers heavily from RU, since it's a very good school, close to the top tier schools and it's so close and we've done so well with RU grads - in fact, of our 8 person senior staff, half of us have RU degrees, including my boss, our department head (about 125 people), and there are probably 10-12 RU grads in the dept - so even though there's some occasional snobbery, I always say to look at the results.

In chemistry, the top schools we recruit from are Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Cal, Northwestern, MIT, Oxford, Wisconsin, Cambridge and a few others. We do recruit from RU, but not nearly as heavily as from those other schools. And 95% of the people hired into chemistry (and the other "hard" sciences, like biology, biochemistry, materials science, etc.) have PhDs and most of those have finished post-docs somewhere with someone very well known in those fields. The pedigree tends to matter more in those areas than eng'g.

Hope that helps.

 

[T2Kplus10]

I've posted about this a few times on here, but Merck is pretty damn picky in its recruiting, generally only recruiting from top tier schools in the various scientific disciplines we hire into (I don't know as much about the business/sales side, but assume it's similar there) - and those schools vary a bit between disciplines. I know eng'g recruiting extremely well, having been the lead for all eng'g recruiting at RU for the past 12 years and being one of the co-leads for our overall eng'g recruiting program at Merck. I know chemistry recruiting pretty well, since we work very closely with chemists.

So, in eng'g and especially chem eng'g (probably 75% of our engineers are chem engineers, since we manufacture chemicals and biochemicals), we recruit from top tier eng'g schools like MIT, Michigan, Cal, Princeton, Cornell, Delaware, NC State, Ga Tech, PSU, UVA, Penn, Purdue, and Villanova - that's a somewhat national list, but we also try to focus on the NE, too, since most of our engineers work in NJ/PA. In eng'g maybe 30-40% of our new hires have PhDs with the rest being mostly BS level.

And while RU is not rated quite as highly as those schools, we recruit engineers heavily from RU, since it's a very good school, close to the top tier schools and it's so close and we've done so well with RU grads - in fact, of our 8 person senior staff, half of us have RU degrees, including my boss, our department head (about 125 people), and there are probably 10-12 RU grads in the dept - so even though there's some occasional snobbery, I always say to look at the results.

In chemistry, the top schools we recruit from are Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Cal, Northwestern, MIT, Oxford, Wisconsin, Cambridge and a few others. We do recruit from RU, but not nearly as heavily as from those other schools. And 95% of the people hired into chemistry (and the other "hard" sciences, like biology, biochemistry, materials science, etc.) have PhDs and most of those have finished post-docs somewhere with someone very well known in those fields. The pedigree tends to matter more in those areas than eng'g.

Hope that helps.

Merck is a much different place now than 20 years ago. It's become just another company with tons of scandals, failures, and layoffs. They lost tons of talent since the SP merger disaster. Seems to be righting the ship over the past few years and I was pleasantly surprised when I interviewed 2 years ago. But just not attractive enough to make the jump to (low end of comp compared to the industry).

 

[Knight Shift]

I've posted about this a few times on here, but Merck is pretty damn picky in its recruiting, generally only recruiting from top tier schools in the various scientific disciplines we hire into (I don't know as much about the business/sales side, but assume it's similar there) - and those schools vary a bit between disciplines. I know eng'g recruiting extremely well, having been the lead for all eng'g recruiting at RU for the past 12 years and being one of the co-leads for our overall eng'g recruiting program at Merck. I know chemistry recruiting pretty well, since we work very closely with chemists.

So, in eng'g and especially chem eng'g (probably 75% of our engineers are chem engineers, since we manufacture chemicals and biochemicals), we recruit from top tier eng'g schools like MIT, Michigan, Cal, Princeton, Cornell, Delaware, NC State, Ga Tech, PSU, UVA, Penn, Purdue, and Villanova - that's a somewhat national list, but we also try to focus on the NE, too, since most of our engineers work in NJ/PA. In eng'g maybe 30-40% of our new hires have PhDs with the rest being mostly BS level.

And while RU is not rated quite as highly as those schools, we recruit engineers heavily from RU, since it's a very good school, close to the top tier schools and it's so close and we've done so well with RU grads - in fact, of our 8 person senior staff, half of us have RU degrees, including my boss, our department head (about 125 people), and there are probably 10-12 RU grads in the dept - so even though there's some occasional snobbery, I always say to look at the results.

In chemistry, the top schools we recruit from are Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Cal, Northwestern, MIT, Oxford, Wisconsin, Cambridge and a few others. We do recruit from RU, but not nearly as heavily as from those other schools. And 95% of the people hired into chemistry (and the other "hard" sciences, like biology, biochemistry, materials science, etc.) have PhDs and most of those have finished post-docs somewhere with someone very well known in those fields. The pedigree tends to matter more in those areas than eng'g.

Hope that helps.

That is a tremendous help. Thank you.
We had almost every school on our list that you provided. Yale not on the list?
Surprised you have UVa, Delaware, PSU and Villanova on the engineering list, particularly the last three, but I will take your word for it. Would have thought Va Tech over UVa. Any thoughts on RPI, Carnegie Mellon, Johns Hopkins, Duke, Bucknell and Lehigh? You are not going to hurt our feelings if you say any or all of these are not that strong, and if you would rather send a message offline, that works for me.

Don't want to hijack this thread too much, and I will add that years ago, my wife and I both worked as process engineers in a large manufacturing plant that made optical fiber. The work at home opportunities in such a job were and probably still would be minimal. Too much happening on the production floor and too much collaboration and face to face communication needed to effectively get the job done.

 

[Saint Puppy]

I've worked from home for almost 10 years, and actually had to start going into the office more because of restructuring. For me it's not even close - I am 1000X more productive at home, not to mention more happy. The 3 hours round trip on the train kills me - and when I told my boss this he sais 'well can't you work on the train' - to which I told him I could and I do, but it is not the same of working at a desk where I can see everything. On top of that there just is not enough time at the office to do what I need to do, and I find the office a lot more distracting than at home. The happiness of working at home is the free time - when I'm at home I can break up my time and don't mind working whenever, when I get home from the office I'm exhausted and don't really want to do that much more work, but have to because I'm so behind.

I will say some people NEED to be in the office. I have worked with, and currently work with people who are just not accountable remotely. They kind of ruin it for everyone. I have one co-worker who has decided that family has now become her full time job and that work has become an annoyance to her new found full time family roll. Bottom line is you need to do your work, and she took advantage. She is being forced to go back to the office because of this. I set boundaries with my family that I need to do work now, and they understand. You need discipline when you work from home - the major benefit to me is more time in general and time is more important than money to me.

 

[newell138]

I work from home whenever I'm not traveling - the actual percentage depends on current project.

There's good and bad. The good is, I don't have to go to work. The bad is that if I'm really busy I could literally not leave my house for days on end.

Sometimes I miss the social aspect of an office environment, mostly as relates to women with casual moral standards.

This is another reason I am better off working from home, I get distracted too easily.

 

[RaySt]

I work from home one day a week. I tried two days a week a few years ago when they took my office away and went to open concept. I also sometimes work a second day at home if there is a kids event to go to (field day, music concert), this flexibility I really appreciate from my company. I find one day gives me the balance to get away from the interruptions at the office, focus on some work, squeeze in a doctors appt and do some laundry (the machines are in the next room to my home office). But two days is too much for me, plus I got my own office back. That's the balance that works for me. It is nice to get out of the house and to the office to be a businessman and focus, but then after 4 days in the office I feel I really need Friday to get away from the constant "got a minutes?..." and get me and the family a bit ready for the weekend while I wrap up some end of week work without interruption. That is until the kids come home from school and a different kind of chaos begins!

 

[RU848789]

That is a tremendous help. Thank you.
We had almost every school on our list that you provided. Yale not on the list?
Surprised you have UVa, Delaware, PSU and Villanova on the engineering list, particularly the last three, but I will take your word for it. Would have thought Va Tech over UVa. Any thoughts on RPI, Carnegie Mellon, Johns Hopkins, Duke, Bucknell and Lehigh? You are not going to hurt our feelings if you say any or all of these are not that strong, and if you would rather send a message offline, that works for me.

Don't want to hijack this thread too much, and I will add that years ago, my wife and I both worked as process engineers in a large manufacturing plant that made optical fiber. The work at home opportunities in such a job were and probably still would be minimal. Too much happening on the production floor and too much collaboration and face to face communication needed to effectively get the job done.

No problem at all. My eng'g list does skew heavily towards chem/biochem eng'g, so that's probably why Delaware and UVA are on the list; PSU and Nova are similar to RU in chem eng'g - not quite top tier, but pretty local, so we recruit there. We do sometimes have trouble attracting/retaining folks from far away from NJ, so the regional element is there for us.

RPI, CMU, JHU, Bucknell, V-Tech, Yale and Lehigh are all very good eng'g schools too - we simply don't need to recruit from that many schools (it's not a trivial effort to get to know the faculty, set up info sessions/career nights, and go interview people), but we do occasionally interview/hire someone from those schools, if the right resume or recommendation comes along - it's just not a major source for us like the others I listed.

And completely agree that in a lab/pilot plant/production environment, opportunities to work from home are pretty limited, as I had also said - but we are pretty flexible for folks to work a day here or there or even a day per week from home and have a few folks, who aren't in that environment who work 2-3 days per week at home (usually related to a family situation).