I want to talk about this particular topic because in the world of software development we have a lot of perks that could be the envy of others professionals even in the same company just because we are feel like we are the gods and we deserve everything (millennial thinking), but we should know those perks are not for free and some times could through you to conflicts with your partners or employees in particular free schedule and working remotely.
Free schedule
Having a free schedule does not mean that you can skip your team meeting or be late to one or just disappear for a day because you have thinks to do. As a professional you have to respect your time and time of others, and know that if you dont said you gonna be out some day the people are counting with you.
Working remotely
You have to justify your work and be available at least your normal journal, part of working remotely and having in particular the perk of work from home is having the right tools, communication and information necessary to complete your job, if you don’t have all that for example a good internet connection or maybe not enough understanding about your tasks, you should consider going to the office instead to reach the right person to clear your doubts.
How to improve or justify your perks
For free schedule, keep track of your working hours and how do you spend it, the normal journal is 8 hours and you are paid for that time, its ok say that you spent 2 hours learning how to do a new thing and other 2 trying to implement, you client or project manager have to know that it its not just coding .
For working remotely, list all your features and divided by taks and days, estimate the hours that you think it could take and everyday update the remaining hours in each task. I use an google drive excel and check with my project manager each day the progress in hours that we made yesterday, that give us a very good estimation when we gonna end our current project.
Conclusion
We have to take care about our perks, remote working and free schedule is not for everyone, even big companies like IBM are looking for a way that their employees come to the office and we have to start take more responsibilities to change the way that the other people see the young force, if we can prove to be enough responsible to manage correctly our goals in time with this perks, it could lead to better perks (like free beer) and preserve the current ones without been seen like spoiled childs.