The effects of flexible work in the IT industry

Abstract

Flexible work can come in a variety of types, such as fully flexible strategy where employees are fully flexible in carrying out their tasks from any location in the world to strategies that allow workers to work flexibly over several days, weeks or months at a time. There are many types of flexible work strategies for companies, and the most common are hiring digital nomads, freelancers, using co-working space crowds and so on. This paper tries to compare and analyze the findings of Stack Overflow research from 2017 with the survey conducted as a part of this research, in Macedonia in 2019 regarding flexible work arrangements in the IT industry. The comparative analysis will represent the workers’ perspective. In the second part of the paper we will consider several obstacles and traps of flexible work arrangements from the companies’ perspectives, and offer principles to overcome them.