Question of the Month: Should professional engineers have home labs?

My reply is complicated.

I work for myself so my work lab is my own. It's in a factory unit 14 miles from home ( a bit far, 2 miles would be ideal).

If I want to do my own stuff I can, but I don't want to take work home. It's good to keep them seperate. I don't see work emails at home (don't route them to my phone at all).

It would be very expensive for companies to duplicate a good lab environment at every engineer's home.

The main thing I miss about working on my own is the opportunity to bounce ideas or problems off other people, thats probably why I support E14.

MK

I sort of fall into the same category as you michaelkellett. On and off throughout my career, I have worked for myself (part and full time consulting). After retiring from full time work (the very next day) I continued to consult.  Back when I was starting my own company (and also doing consulting), I started to seriously build up my home office.  Now, after 7+ years of retirement, I am continuing to expand my home office (buying and building tools/instrumentation, along with getting some great pieces of equipment from element14 roadtests).

More directly, to the question, "Should professional engineers have home labs?" I think that there are good reasons to provide/loan employees equipment to allow them to be more efficient in their product development.  There have been times where I have been allowed to work from home for extended periods, and I was provided with the necessary tools to preform my job, from computers to a wide range of test equipment.  While developing some automated test equipment, I had built a desktop version of one of our testers that I had in my office, so that I could easily test the code that I was developing.  When I had a serious injury, and I was unable to drive, I had some friend load up my computers and test equipment from my office and deliver it my house.  While I was recovering, I was able to work from home (and this was back in the late 80's when working from home was not very common). Should an employer supply their engineers with everything they need to work from home?  I am not sure that in all cases that would be financially feasible.  I have had difficulty justifying the purchase of equipment that could be used by all members on site, having to do that for all engineers working at home would be nearly impossible. 

I sort of fall into the same category as you michaelkellett. On and off throughout my career, I have worked for myself (part and full time consulting). After retiring from full time work (the very next day) I continued to consult.  Back when I was starting my own company (and also doing consulting), I started to seriously build up my home office.  Now, after 7+ years of retirement, I am continuing to expand my home office (buying and building tools/instrumentation, along with getting some great pieces of equipment from element14 roadtests).

More directly, to the question, "Should professional engineers have home labs?" I think that there are good reasons to provide/loan employees equipment to allow them to be more efficient in their product development.  There have been times where I have been allowed to work from home for extended periods, and I was provided with the necessary tools to preform my job, from computers to a wide range of test equipment.  While developing some automated test equipment, I had built a desktop version of one of our testers that I had in my office, so that I could easily test the code that I was developing.  When I had a serious injury, and I was unable to drive, I had some friend load up my computers and test equipment from my office and deliver it my house.  While I was recovering, I was able to work from home (and this was back in the late 80's when working from home was not very common). Should an employer supply their engineers with everything they need to work from home?  I am not sure that in all cases that would be financially feasible.  I have had difficulty justifying the purchase of equipment that could be used by all members on site, having to do that for all engineers working at home would be nearly impossible.