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Full-Time Telecommuting -- Does It Work?
beznadan asks: "I am software developer currently located in Silicon Valley, but I just bought a house in a neighboring state. The high-tech job market there is picking up, but doesn't come close to the market here (linux.com/jobs returns 0 results for the entire state in all categories). I am wondering if full time telecommuting (with occasional trips in for meetings, etc.) is a feasible option. Does anybody out there have experiences with this? Would prospective employers even consider an applicant who planned on working offsite all the time?" This is a topic for all of you who have ever wanted to (or currently do) work at home.
The telecommuting experience was one of the most satisfying and productive periods of my career thus far. The only reason I left my nice telecommuting job was the re-takeover of my company by one of its original founders who is a (unfortunately successful) egomaniacal tyrant. (The company is well known for building computers in fruity colorful cases.) I hated what he was doing to the company where I had worked very hard indeed for nine years, so I bailed. I still miss working there; I also miss telecommuting very much. Such positions can be very hard to find cold, but if you have been with a company and have developed a track record with them, they can be arranged. In my case, at least, it worked extremely well both from my point of view, and, I believe, from the point of view of my management.
At the company I work for, which I don't think I should mention, we have a programmer that lives in Florida and works out of his home that does a very large portion of our custom programming for us. This individual would never give up the ability to work out of his home. He makes his own schedule and pretty much goes unchecked as long as he turns in work on time and there are no bugs. His internet connection is a dialup and we don't provide it. We provide a phone line at his house and a line that he calls up here to drop off completed code. We cover work related expenses.
He loves this arrangement. He loves being able to get up at around 10:30, grab his laptop, sit out by the pool and write code. When he gets hot, takes a dip in the pool, dries off, and gets back to coding. When the kids come home, he plays with the kids and then does more coding. Interespersed throughout all this, he has the time to go buy and play all the latest computer games.
At the company headquarters, we don't care how he spends his time as long as he gets the work done. And by far, he is the most productive member of the programming staff, turning out far more code in much less time then any other person. And his code is almost always right on; very rarely do we find bugs.
(I personally liked that he lives in Florida b/c when it came time to train him on the new systems we implemented, I got a trip down there paid for by the company.)
Yes, Virginia, companies will pay you to work from home full time. I got my current telecommuting gig because I moved, and the firm didn't think they could finish the project without me. I've been telecommuting full time for about six months now. I was kind of a test case at the company. I'm a contractor, rather than an employee, so they might have been more flexible with me. As employers get more experience with people like me, opportunities should open up for others, including regular employees. But for now you might find it easier to work through a consulting firm than to get hired directly. There are also issues about registering to do business out of state, for example, that might be less intimidating to a national firm than they would be to a smaller company. My consulting firm needed to register in this state, and withhold income tax here, in order to keep me. Their incentive to do this was high, since their cut of the bill rate depended on me keeping the position. The direct employer might have been less interested in pursuing that, but as a contractor it wasn't their problem. So, it is possible to make it work! -- Bob Koerner
Did for about a month Sydney to New York - thru Internet+VPN And yes all windows technology ...
I telecommuted for 18 months solid. I was a Penn. Tester for a midsized Govt. Contractor in Fairfax, Va. I enjoyed the freedom that it afforded me. The lack of face to face contact wore me down emotionally, though. Sometimes to the point of talking to myself, playing simple games (much like I would imagine an only child woudl do), and actually creating work for myself by setting rediculous (sp?) goals.
All in all, though, it was a wonderful experience.
I lost my beltway-thickened skin for traffic, which was bolstered by a move to texas and this caused me to suffer a great deal when I started commuting through central new jersey.... I really miss working from home now
anyway, those are my two cents... work from home and the quiet and lonleyness wears you down. commute and traffic kills...
there are equal amounts of good and bad with either arrangement... what one has to do is figure out which situation suits ones on personality....
-johnny
"You'll get up in the AM, and log in, and then stay there till you go to bed. You'll go weeks without leaving the house except for food"
Your problem is you don't have a life out of your work.
You need to set up a room in your house just like you would your office. You need a dedicated phone line, a dedicated data line, a fax machine, printer, copier, coffee machine. :) I use an ISDN line and that takes care of all my conectivity needs.
You need to get ready for work just like you do when you go to the office. This does not mean you have to put on a suite and tie, but I find that if I get up and take a shower and put on some business casual, or casual clothes I feel like I am ready to work more than if I wake up and sit at the computer completely neked.
You can NOT work on "any ol system" in "any ol place" just cuz you are connected. One big mistake our company is making is that they belive a UNIX person can manage ANY unix resource ANYWHERE in the world. But it just does not work like that. You have to become familiar with each system you are working on. You cant go to a system you have never seen and just becuase you are a UNIX guru expect to be efficient. (that statement is directed towards my bosses who just dont get it)
So in summary. I think working from home is a great way for SOME people to work. Keep in mind, I am single, have no kids and home and have a 3 bedroom house. so I have the room to work and the environment. some people simply cant make a home environment condusive to working. so for SOME poeple it works quite well. I can get more done in 2-3 hours at home then I could during 8 hours in the office, simply becuase, when I put my head down and start to work I have NO interuptions.
Telecommuting kicks ass for one reason. Finally I am screwing my employer instead of the other way around. I am superproductive and spend the rest of my time doing activites I enjoy. I occasionally put on a serious face and go into the office looking all worried and stressed out. Then I come home and laugh at all those chumps.
"a" is very important. Not just bandwidth, but ensuring it's a stable connection too. A slow and stable connection will get you further than a fast and unreliable one. You KNOW it will go down when you least need it to. :-)
:-)
"b" is quite important as well. I have a wife and 2 kids, so when I work at home I do need to shut out the rest of the world. But as well, it's important to ensure that those on the other side of the door understand that tho you are home you are working. They can't just wander in, the wife just can't leave the kids with you all the time when she needs to run out for things, and please knock before entering the room.
"c" is probably the most important thing. It's very hard to draw the line between work and personal life when the 2 get more intertwined. Yes it does have benefits (as others have mentioned here), but it can also be really bad and you end up slaving away until the wee hours. Make sure that you get your work done, but make sure that you get it done within a "normal work day" (8-10 hours, or whatever suits you).
The hardest thing is just being disciplined enough to not goof off and get distracted, and to be focused on your work and getting it done. Frankly since you don't have a lot of office distractions, you can get more done in a day! Be honest with yourself and your performance. Too many toys in the room, clear them out. Too much noise in the house, talk with the others in the house. Just can't focus, work to change it. It's not easy, but it is rewarding.
There are downsides to working at home... you don't get a lot of interaction with people, you aren't always up on the things going on in the office and with the company. It can get to be lonely and frustrating. It can also be hard to get management to trust in you, just cause you're not there every day for them to see and get to know and work with. But if you're doing work and they aren't blind, they should see your results and that you aren't goofing off. And if you're uncertain, always ask the boss for some feedback on your performance. You sometimes have to go out of your way to get the feedback that you might automatically get if you were in the office.
But you just have to look at each situation and see how it fits you. Maybe the job and your life work well this way, maybe not. You just have to examine if it's really right for you, and make sure that all the while you evaluate the situation and your performance to see if it's really right for you, and/or what you need to do to improve your situation.
- Hsoi
http://www.hsoi.com/
I telecommuted from my home in Redmond, WA to my employer in Boston, MA for a year. I had worked on the same team for a year and a half before doing the telecommuting arrangement. That made it easy for management to say, yes, we trust this guy and for me to say, yes, I can do this working with this team.
The team consisted of several developers that were close friends, ate dinner together several nights a week, and could get in one another's face without stepping on any toes. I think that's essential for this kind of arrangement to work since the people in the office can just abandon you if you piss them off.
I flew to boston every other month or so for in-office design meetings and the like. It worked well but I'd echo the sentiment of others here who said it can become an obsession. I was often at the machine from 6am to midnight which wouldn't happen when I was in boston due to the traffic and massive commute. Still, I'd go back to that arrangement in a second if I could get it. I'm in the office now and I'd like to end a few people around here who make too much noise
;-) Sigh.
I'm a programmer and I have a choice of working at home or coming into the office. Luckily the office is only a 10 minute bicycle ride away. My only gripe about working at home is I work *TOO* much. I don't know when to stop. I'll work from 8AM to midnite without even taking a real break. The work I do at home is of extremely high quality and I'm extremely productive. I can usually get a weeks worth of work done at home in a day. But I like to separate my work from my personal life so I usually come into the office unless I'm really busy. Micah micah@xmoto.com
I've had to tackle the same problem of "slavery at home". Since my work seems more interesting than anything else I do on my own time, I end up spending the entire day online. We also had some communication problems within our development team -- but one of my bosses came up with a solution. We would, a) have regularly scheduled internet meetings as well as face to face meetings every couple of months (or every couple of weeks depending on which part of product cycle we were in) and b) bi-annual social trips, like kayaking in the rockies or various other trips where we could get closer as people. It's actually turned out to work pretty well, and I've made some good friends as a result of it.
I have telecommuted for my sole source of income since December 1999. Graduating at that time from the Computer Science department at Colorado State University, a very nice job with Agilent was turned down for the opportunity to telecommute with a wobly consulting startup based based out of Boston, Massachusetts. My reason? So that I could live anywhere I pleased (China, in this instance), and still earn (low) US wages. It will be interesting to see how this experiment plays itself out.
Based on my short experience, there is much to reccomend it, if you are: without a family; without debt; in transition to another career; more comfortable seeing to *all* of your affairs (e.g. no health insurance--a US concern); crazy. Otherwise, the evidence would reccomend against it.
The work has its definite upside: meetings are held online using (ugh) AIM (gratuitous plug for GAIM right <here>) and it's not uncommon to have individuals from New York, Boston, China, and Korea all signed in and participating, which pleases the futurist in me. Further, hours are extremely flexible (requiring a comensurate increase in self-discipline to manage them!).
My conclusion: telecommuting is not yet mature, and it will be some time before reasonable opportunities will arise for those with significant family and financial commitments.
Personally, I've telecommuted 100% for over 10 years, including raising two children. (the last half as a single parent) Working at home has been critical to our homeschooling based lifestyle, and as a result of my office being in my living room (where the wood stove is :-), my kids know alot more about computers, jobs, and companies than any other teenagers I know. When they were toddlers, it was a bit exhausting to get work done inbetween kid's naps, meals, nighttime, etc... For a few years I definetly burned the candle at both ends.
I see everyone mentioning they get lonely for techies, but I found with email and phones, I can keep in touch with my co-workers. When I feel particulary in need of some techie types to hang out with, I just go to local user group meetings.
"An option could be having a home where you really want to _live_, but renting (or sharing) an apartment where you want to work, with commuting on the weekends. Though that can get old awful fast. "
My employer owns 3 condos in san jose. Employees from all around the world come at different times and can live there for weeks to a month or two with one or two other people from work.
On a permanent or an often recurring basis (more than 2 or 3 times a year) I wouldn't recommend it.
Shouldn't this be an "ask slashdot" article?
I'd hardly say you're screwing your employer while being productive.
"Its almost impossible to exert a meaningful influence over serious decisions remotely"
If the management or company atmosphere is such that this is true, then you probably have to have regular in person meetings in addition to telecommuting.
Where I work, though, I manage many people, and it seems to work pretty well. Although, I come once every few weeks to exert my influence and track deviation from what my people say they have done and what they have really done.
It has to be a very well organised effort on behalf of you and the company. Makes thins hard on both of you. That is my expirience.
I do, however, have friends outside of work, have several hobbies, and make it a point to get out of the house at least a few times a week. All of those keep me from feeling lonely.
Many of my coworkers also telecommute, and that helps. We get together for dinner occasionally, and we often hold conference calls to work through difficult code or do some design review (or just chat). The network architecture and code control facilitate this type of thing.
I would say that the system can work well if you are dedicated, cognisant of the fact that humans are social by nature, and have a supportive company/coworkers.
In many environments, it is hard to make such a transition. This is especially true when people like getting off by themselves and doing their things and tend to ignore all outside stimuli until someone walks up to them and asks them a question. I think such a pattern of behavior can be changed, but you really have to create a balance between being physically there and remotely logged in and/or working.
One thing though, that I find, is our intranet servers are now infinitely more useful than before for employee's as well as new hires. We regularly have public conversations sort of like in newsgroups, but a lot more integrated and organized. This as well as every department having their own page with updates/papers/files (ie, financial data, project info etc). The file storage/etc is sort of like having employee private and public directories, but we also have tons of meta-data to go with, which ensures easy associative cognitive thinking, connecting files, text, and events - which effectively draws a picture of what's going on.
Of course, at first we had some problems with users saying something publicly which shouldn't have been said, and management got ahold of it - but that was fixed after implementing proper private messaging as well as access groups.
I've been working from home for about 4 years as a consultant. I have a frame relay link to my biggest costumer, the rest I handle via regular modem and ssh. I'm having the time of my life, not having to waste time in senseless meetings and company politics. The rithm of work takes a bit to develop, but once get used to it, you have a lot of freedom. If your brain takes a core dump, you go to the movies or for a bike ride, finishing the task later on. Tips: divide and conquer: have a task to accomplish every day. Always be available on the phone.
I think that it would be much harder getting a job that allows you to work from home than it would be to take your job with you when you move. I recently got married, and moved to a different state a few hundred miles from my company in August of 99, and I took my job with me. So far, things seem to be going well.
I have been doing this via a 56k modem because cablemodem/DSL isn't available at my home yet. A faster connection would be very desirable when I have to do things that require me to remote control PC's at the office via pcAnywhere, or VNC. But as a computer programmer, there are few things that I actually need to be on-site to do, and although I work with huge data files, I generally either have them burned to CD and mailed, or burn them to CD while I am on site... To keep in easy contact, we set up ICQ throughout the computer department. We can tell when each other are at the keyboard, can pop into a chat session, etc. But this will probibly change to voice once I get a faster net connection. Also, I go back to the main office about once a month... not because I necessarily need to, but because the people that I work with are really cool.
The thing to watch out for, however, is that telecommuting is not for everyone. I had a co-worker that did the same thing as me... about a month before me. He ended up leaving the company mainly because working from home with little human interaction drove him nuts. And people very often bring up the "out of sight, out of mind" I just don't see it.
The best site I have found for people considering telecommuting is:
Gil Gordon's Telecommute pages
OR
Pac Bell's work at home pages.
One last comment: I can't blame you for not wanting to live in Silicon Valley, but wanting to work there. Get the high-tech/high-pay job, but neither the rat race, nor the cost of living.
As a contractor I considered it a lucky find. It was discussed at the time of the signing, and after a month or so my boss was satisfied that I did good work and was diligent, so I began transitioning. Now I basically go in once a month or so, as needed.
Benefits? Well, I save 1.5 hours of commute, so I can work 9.5 hours a day and still have free time. That is most of it for me. Also I get to work of my linux box, with my custom X config, ssh, a browser not on the company's network, etc. I have a company laptop which dials up onto the intranet for company mail (Lotus). So I have a very comfortable environment and no commute.
Downsides? I avoided the big one; if you are like me, you HAVE to get to know people in person first. Seeing them once a month for me would not be enough. So you really need to transition to it if its a long term thing. Of course, you have to get yourself out of the house, and have a social group. I am not by any means a "people person", but I'm lucky enough to have friends I hang out with a few times a week, and live near nice places to get outside. The group I am in is very driven and I love what I'm doing, so I'd rather work than be distracted. This is important too; if the group doesn't have a lot of momentum, and you are not very motivated, you will sit on slashdot for 3 months, then either get fired or go insane.
I don't think telecommuting could be done well without the company having at least some structure in place. Once video telephones are common the initial "in person" period may not be important, but I found it was for now. And you and your group needs to be motivated, and you need a life.
With these things, I think its a big win for everyone involved. More efficent, comfortable, and enjoyable. I've renewed my contract twice and I'm making about 25% less than I probably could...
The company we run (circa 25 employees and hiring) is exclusively telecommute; new investors in us frequently ask when we're getting a building, and we say "never." It's true that some people can't handle it, but the employee is usually the one to figure this out. We have had three people quit in the last year, and several people that we've interviewed have declined our offer for essentially this reason. What we find, actually, is that telecommuters are MORE productive than typical workers, because they actually have to produce things; they can't just sit in a cube and look busy when the manager comes by; the ONLY measure of an employee's productivity IS their productivity. The upshot of it is that the company can put 85%+ of its capital directly into production, rather than dumping half of it into buildings, facilities, maintenance, etc. We maintain esprit de corps by means of frequent telephone conversations, chat sessions and other personal contacts, even between employees living on opposite coasts. And several of our employees do in fact have small children: in all of these cases, however, we have both parents working for us, and they have either hired full-time nannies or they work in shifts. So-- yeah. It does work. You just have to remember to NOT work some times.
It's probably done like that because their web designer doesn't have two clues to rub together.
I interviewed a web designer this week; his home page is the same way a splash page saying "click here to enter my site", and the link was javascript code instead of href... when I asked him why, his response was "Why would someone browse with javascript off?"
He seemed genuinely stunned when I told him that a lot of people do this for a number of reasons - because they dislike geocities-like popups, among other things...
Some people just don't "Get It".
I'm working on a business minor right now and we just talked about this in my Production and Operations Management class yesterday. Seems that productivity for telcommuters picks up by 33-50% and job satisfaction goes up by 75%. Just some interesting figures.
I was the owner of a ISP that used a linux server. I never meet any of my employies who lived in California. I live in Minnesota. We just used Chat software and talked every day about what needed to be done. But if you start to get lazy (like we did) bad things happen. You dont get your work done, you go out instead of doing the jobs that need to be done and you procrastinate. Self control is the biggest part of a work enviroment such as this. -Eric H. Misspelling is not a sign of a weak mind.
As long as both you and the company behave responsibly and honorably, it works fine.
If either of you breaks the implied contract, it will fail. If you don't put in the number of hours you should, it fails. If the company sees it as a cheap way to get more hours than allotted, it will fail. Both parties have to set the limits early and hold to them or it will fail. Both sides have to be grownup: you can't be a shirker nor can you be always available, the plus for the company is that they don't have to maintain bricks-and-mortar for you and that the quality of your work should be better. If either of you abuse the quantity side it won't work.
Just a matter of time.
From the article:
"At cashing-out time, the employee emerges into the open air like a groundhog after hibernation and tries, finally, to accumulate drag coefficient points. Unfortunately, when you're 38 and have forgotten conversational English, you're at something of a disadvantage."
hahahaha
I worked remotely for quite awhile, and it was like I was in an "Intellectual Siberia". Much of my work is creative/technical where bouncing ideas off co-workers can lead to very interesting solutions. You tend to miss that kind of interaction when your all alone.
At my company there is a matrix organization and the project manager of one project telecommutes. This is not working at all. Her project is circling the drain, and she seems unaware of that.
If you plan on being an individual contributor then maybe you can make it work. If you plan to manage a project you need to be on site - even if no one else is - and you need to meet each of the people on the project face to face before you ask them for anything.
If I were an individual contributor and someone said "your manager will telecommute" I would try to get the manager's job, or find another organization to work for.
"They were both underperformers, but I can't be sure if it was because they were lazy and did nothing or were just really bad programmers "
I have the same problem with in house programmers!
Why do you insist that someone has Javascript turned on (or even available) to view your homepage? Apparently I will never know or care what this company does.
"I cannot show him what is on my screen, he cannot see what is on mine. (not well anyway) "
As the other person said, you can use ytalk... or, just get IRC and cut and paste your shell. As for X, you can probably easily take screenshots or install VNC, which lets you view the same desktop at the same time by multiple people.
As for windows, I use netmeeting. Some guy in israel took control of my computer through netmeeting and showed me how to do something in Visual C++ once.
From a novelty point of view, I can tell you video-confrencing kicks ass. I use that and AIM/ICQ to keep in contact with clients and co-workers all around the world. From an efficiency point of view, it can be a lot better for big things, and you can stay more focused because you can ignore AIM requests and have to schedule video meetings (through aim or phone or whatever). What you do lose, however, is the ability to walk up to some guys cube and smack him on the back of the head and ask what the hell he's doing. And let me tell you, I've had the desire to do that multiple times.
"some clients get upset if they call you at 10am and you're walking the dog etc"
My employer really got pissed off about this at first. Then we negotiated a few regular hours where It would be guaranteed that I would be there (9-11am, and random afternoon hours). Once this was laid out, I still had a lot of flexible time to do independent work. I do most of my work at 5-11am, with maybe an hour or two in the afternoon, and I'm all done.
"it doesn't mean that you freelance out of your home."
It depends on what type of work you're doing. You can be doing freelance work which requires lots of collaboration with your clients/co-workers. You can also be doing freelance work where most of the work is independent and management only needs to do a random performance inquiry to measure how productive you are. The former is very similar to full time work telecommuting for one company.
I consult primarily for three different companies, but must collaborate as if I was a regular full time employee.
"Sometimes I'd get a mental block on some code I was working on, and long for feedback from other geeks"
Don't let the fact that you're hundreds of miles off get in the way. There is, of course, a barrier to casually asking a question, but I frequently ask questions over e-mail or AIM to other co-workers. If they don't know, I'll ask on deja, or call or AIM a friend of mine at some other business.
You're right though, that casual pseudo-social conversation will often get thought processes going which allows you to work as a group better. This is why I often fly to client/work locations and talk with a bunch of people, primarily status reports, but also building social relationships.
Unfortunately I don't get to do it full time; maybe once a week during projects I have to run into the office up a canyon and around the mountains. During planning it's more like three days a week (and one heck of a drive). Working from home is a lot more feasable most of the time for me to actually get work done; the problem is I still work when I'm ill. Ah well, it's a tradeoff.
When I left another friend left around the same time, and he telecommuted (I went to work elsewhere). His biggest problem was feeling left out of the loop. Eventually he got laid off.
The place I work at now has a completely different problem, and every employers's secret (or maybe not so secret) worry: employees not doing their job. One guy started to telecommute, and was doing it for two months. Two weeks before a major deadline, we found that he had acutally taken another full time job (also telecommuting) at another place! He quit (and tried to use up is vacation time on the spot so he wouldn't have to come in again). A little while later this topic came up, and another telecommuter (who wasn't at ALL productive while in the office) got really offended at the idea that people wouldn't be able to telecommute any more.
It really depends on the person, I'd say.
I recently found out that I'm losing my vision and am currently classified as legally blind. My gross pay is currently $4767 per month. As part of my benefits package, I have disability insurance that will currently pay about 88% of my net pay which is $2730 per month tax-free and will pay about $3,000 per month tax-free once my income gets to the next level ($5267 per month). I signed up for the disability insurance during an 'open enrollment' period so that I don't have to worry about pre-existing conditions and the like.
I have three choices right now. I can continue working in the office until I feel uneasy driving to and from work. I can ask to telecommute, which my company hasn't really started doing yet although it could easily work from a technical perspective. Or I could go on disability in the very near future.
I have a wife and one toddler at home (with another on the way this june). My wife would like for me to work from home but I am concerned about the interference from her and the kids. Otherwise I love the idea. I get the feeling that she doesn't like for me to go onto disability and I'm not sure what bothers her the most about it. Is it that she would feel like we would look bad socially or what? She doesn't seem very interested in learning about my condition and gets upset if I bring up the insurance issue. If there is a female reading this I would greatly appreciate any input. If I don't do either of the previously discussed options then I am forced to continue driving to and from work which I feel is getting to the point to where the risk level is a large factor (both from a liability as well as a health standpoint).
What would you do?
I spent 0.5 year forking for a French company and I could not wait for my contract to expire.
First 2-3 months were wonderful: no time wasted on commute, I was jogging in the middle of the day etc. Then problems started to accumulate: I started to spend time the watching day time shows, my wife and daughter started to load me with various midday errands etc. So, the work started to be spred from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. in chunks from 40 minutes to 2 hours, soon work started to spill over into Saturdays and Sundays, while still totalling a little bit over 40h/week. I found also it is quite uncomfortable to be deprived from normal office life: small talks, lunches, meetings etc.
So, it seems to me that (1)this is excersize is not for everybody and (2)using satellite office often makes sense.
"The bigger downsides are that I can't just pop over to someone else's cube whenever I want, attending meetings over the phone is really not the same as being there "
This is my largest problem. I like walking over to someone's cube, starting a conversation, and working in questions on technical details which I might not fully get on a project. I can do this over the net with AIM, netmeeting, and our intranet, but talking at lunch or at the coffee machine is just so much more fun. That's why I go in a day every week to touch base with everyone and keep up on office politics (info I get in e-mail and AIM is usually really biased to the person sending it.).
"At one point, I couldn't get a hold of my boss for a full week, with nothing to do"
:).
That's terrible. If that ever happened to me I'd fly down and ask them what the hell was going on. We have many offices around NA, as well as europe, so managers and employee's are used to collaborating over ICQ as well as videoconfrencing. Video is nice, because I can have a sit in talk with 3 or 4 developers, and at 300kbps downstream and 250kbps upstream (i have a cable modem), we can even do whiteboarding (300k looks awesome at full screen on 640x480, and 250 looks pretty good). We're even setting some of our big clients up now, so we can have meetings at any time, where we would otherwise have a crappy speakerphone sit in. Other technologies such as document or video markup (some of our clients are movie studios, so we or they can markup commercials or clips, or video reports).
As for work environment, it doesn't really matter to me. My work is really fun, so I like spending all the time I'd be spending watching television or playing games, doing research and development (I still go out, but I'm talking about when I'm at home). I have a laptop with 11mbps wireless ethernet to a hub in my server room downstairs, so I can sit at the pool drinking coke, and talking on the phone, while browsing the net and doing development. The only problem I have while outside is papers blowing into the pool
"On a negative side, you're always at work. During dinner, you're at work. In the bathroom, you're still at work. It becomes harder to get your mind off work to relax, enjoy your family, friends, etc because everywhere you look is work"
Aha. I know people who don't even telecommute and have this same problem. They come home and think about work all night, and even end up staying there until 7pm+ at night because they can't help thinking about it.
I think it all boils down to will power. If you're strong enough to separate the two, it won't make much of a difference. I would recommend spending some time dividing up different activities and then grouping them. Then you might give these different activities different values, and then calculate how much time you should be spending on certain activities per week. I created a web based application with perl and oracle (there's mysql or postgresql instead, whatever), that allows me to track how I use my time. Two times per day, at whatever time, I input how I have used my time. I then make value judgements on how I should be using it after some simple mining of that data. Note that I'm not advocating rigid time scheduling, as that is just stupid. I'm just advocating a system in which you can determine and differ different periods where you are free to do certain activities. After a couple of weeks on a tight development cycle, I might know that I have a lot of free time to get caught up on, and maybe take a day off, or work lightly, instead of thinking about the unlimited projects that come my way.
I have to say.. I agree with every line you've written in this post.
Fortunately, I work in the internet services research and development group for my company. That means we are pretty good proof of concept tests for many of the new remote business process, work-flow, and knowledge management systems that we build.
On top of relevant e-mail and IRC for all members of the work group, I would also advocate a central storage of project information, programming notes, collaborative message boards, digital assets, documents, financial information, and strategic planning, probably on something like a database backed web application on an intranet, which balanced closer to perfect information with security and secrecy requirements (private messages, etc). I've found such systems increase productivity by a lot, once the group gets used to using it. We build systems which are basically similar to things like lotus notes, but tailored to business processes, and even set up for b2b and b2c communication, as well as real time information regarding such systems.
I worked as a full time telecommuter for about two months, and my impression was that it sucks vigorously. I think though it depends a lot on your personal attitude and how disciplined you are.
:)
I found it very difficult to seperate "at office" time from "at home" time. A couple suggestions I'd make to you that would probably help:
1) Maintain an rigorous schedule of when you will be working. It doesn't matter what time of day, but make sure that you set a schedule for yourself and stick to it. I found that when I first started I kept a schedule and was able to get more done. As time went on I let this slide and I ended up working all sorts of wierd hours and my productivity went into the toilet.
2) Create a seperate physical space that will be the office. The more seperate from the rest of the house, the better. Make it clear to anybody else living in the house (wife, kids, dominatrix, etc) that when you are in that place you are at work. You may as well be on the other side of the continent for that part of the day.
3) Maintain strong communication with the office. It's really easy to get distracted and lose touch with what's going on at the office. I would suggest planning one day a week where you actually work at the office. This has the dual benefit of making sure you know what's going on, and it also insures your employer that you still work for them
I think ultimately though it comes down to a matter of self-discipline. If you consider yourself to be self-disciplined then you will probably do just fine. I know that personally, I am not great at this and thus it was a terrible two months for me. I ended up taking the last two weeks of the stint as vacation time figuring that it was better for the company if I was actively not doing anything so they wouldn't be expecting anything from me.
It worked out great for me. My productivity shot up when I did it. I was already working for IBM for about a year when I decided to move about 2.5 hours away and telecommute. I came in once a week for status meetings, etc.
Pros:
* No distractions. You'll be amazed to find out how much time is wasted in an office environment.
* No commute (duh). It was great waking up and walking across the hall to the "office" (I'd usually take a shower later in the afternoon).
* Easy to take care of household business (you're home for deliveries, etc.) Counterintuitively, this increases productivity because you don't have to take as much time off to do this stuff as you would in an office.
Cons:
* It can be lonely. You miss out on office socialization.
* You're invisible. Not good for trying to get promoted, etc.
* Probably a slower network than work (but I did it at 28.8, even using Lotus Notes, so it can be done). I actually turned this into a "pro"--it gave me a chance to see what the product we were developing would look like in "the real world" and tweak its performance accordingly.
* Sometimes you just need physical access to a machine--you'll have to call someone.
* Too easy to goof off if this is in your nature.
It takes a certain type of personality to make this work (based primarily on the cons, above). It also takes a certain type of project. It wouldn't work well if a lot of interaction with a team is required.
Tips:
* Set a schedule (harder to do when there's nobody to notice if you sleep in).
* If possible, set aside a room in your house that is the "office". This is especially important if you don't live alone (in which case, instruct those living there that when you're in the office, you're working. Period). If you have your desk in the same room as your TV, it will be difficult to avoid watching Judge Judy.
* If you do use a low-speed connection, you'll need two phone lines (obviously).
* You'll probably want to go physically to the site about once a week, even if it's not required. You need to catch up on office gossip if nothing else. You can use this long commute to your advantage. Get some training tapes to listen to or use the time to brainstorm new ideas.
I've been in sales for a long time, and "virtual" sales reps are the rage these days. Why pay for office space for someone who needs to be in front of customers? There is quite a bit of paperwork for sales reps, and those that are good spend a lot of time researching customers and crafting offerings (proposals) and presentations. Most large companies have home office plans that relieve cost of DSL or ISDN, cover the cost of getting a fax machine (or all in one printer), cover supplies and even leave $30-$50 a month for a new chair or whatever. At my last job, I managed the home office and sales automation program for several thousand sales reps, and it worked great. The hardest part of being virtual is: * No opportunity to politic, and no watercooler time. * You have to train the family to leave you alone when you are "in the office" * Having the discipline to work rather than play games, or surf for whatever turns you on... * Communicating - having one phone number for managers or customers to call you will go a long way towards making you a team player. * GET A WHITE NOISE GENERATOR IF YOU HAVE KIDS.
I'd also suggest VNC. windows/mac/*nix/beos servers, and clients for just about anything.. you can even run your X windows session off a palm pilot, just get used to scrolling =) CompWizrd
I currently do something similar - though my internet connection is a high speed cable modem.
:)
I do contracting work with compuserve(AOL) and I talk daily with various people there with AIM.
I also work for another company with offices in israel, toronto, austin, san jose, and france, and I'm in constant contact over ICQ/AIM, e-mail, video confrencing, netmeeting, and VPN to our regional intranets/knowledge databases.
The good part is I can pretty much keep my own schedule, except for a couple of hours per day, where I am expected to be available.
As for being lonely - which seems to be the biggest complaint here - I actually have friends in my city apart from work, so I don't think it's bad at all. I actually like being in so much contact with people all around the world. As well, I get to fly over every couple of months and do interesting things..
My mother does work from home on the computer working for a few new media companies, and she has four kids at home. It's hectic, but very possible. She drives the kids everywhere, does the shopping etc - but have made the kids do all their laundy and she has someone come twice a week and clean. Of course, the youngest one is four, and the older ones can take care of him, so, you might have to wait a couple of years until it is viable.
These days, I have to start out full time on-site and slowly migrate to doing some of the work off-site. You can't work off-site full time because the other employees get jealous thinking you're playing video games all day - it doesn't matter that the work got done.
I used to live in Illinois until I absolutely got fed up with the traffic and cost of living. Fortunately for me, my employer was willing to allow me to telecommute from a neighboring state. So far it's worked out great. Things that have made this a success so far are: 1.) Use of a well defined CM system and tightly integrated bug reporting system. 2.) Most HR functions are now accessible through the internal web sites. 3.) The fact that I know the job and aren't searching for answers. 4.) Constant contact with my peers at work either other developers within my group, developers in other teams, testers, or manglement (um I mean management) through email or the phone. Working with a team of developers who all sit near each other has been an interesting paradigm. Many of our internal processes have changed to accomodate me being remote and have actually improved the performance of the group. Things like code inspections that used to be scheduled to take place in a conference room now take place with each developer sitting at their desk taking part in a conference call. We went from a paper shuffling team to a paperless team. So the whole team has really benefitted. As far as I know I am the only full time telecommuting developer in my division (of 60,000 people). So I hope I'm paving the way for others to enjoy their lives and get out of the office. My ultimate telecommuting goal is to be sitting out in the middle of a lake on my boat with a wireless link writing software and participating in meetings all the while the poor slobs at work are wishing they saw the sun once a month!
No need to go that far. Even a company allowed one day of telecommuting per week would do a lot. The idea that "telecommuting == workers will slack off" must be purged from the PHB's head.
"with not alot of noise"
I'm guessing because most of the kiddieZ who regularly create sludge on this site were at school (or sleeping because they are unemployed).
I have been telecommuting for over five years and it has been working great. I work on most projects by myself so there is usually nobody else to communicate with other than the client. However when I have worked with other developers it has worked out very well. We setup a CVS repository for the code, an HTML repository for our design documents and use email and the phone a lot. Sometimes ten to twenty phone calls a day. Everyone on the last project enjoyed it so much that they've all said that they could never go back to an on-site job. The problem however is that you never know when you might be forced to go back. Always when a contract is coming to an end I'm worried that I may have difficulty finding my next telecommuting job. I'm paid by the hour and I live in a large grid-locked city, which means that the two hours a day that I would probably have to spend commuting to an office would lower my income by ~20%. This is a BIG difference. It just isn't possible for me to maintain the same income without working from home. BTW I have clients in other countries and even on continents.
Nice thought, but believe it or not, some of us freaks here prefer a high-bandwidth-connection to there spouse ;-) Back to reality: My experiences while beeing an it consultant for years now, is that its the best way to do consulting, as you can combine work and family life. but one must be aware, that it needs an awful lot of self-discipline to stay working. Distraction is all in and around the house, so take care!
The major problem with full groupware/business collaboration solutions (e.g., SAP) is that they make you conform to the software instead of the opposite. To be efficient and useful to remote and local employee's, you should have apprenticeship(where you go to their workplace and observe how they work) or other meetings(like a focus group where you present a problem and then brainstorm) with your clients/users to determine the best software implementation to develop or buy (beware most commercial off the shelf or otherwise software).
That's why I would stress the word tools as you said instead of solution. I've found consulting that different industries operate in a completely different manner - so even then, I end up creating different implementations of similar tools. As the user above stated, things like the arsdigita toolkit are pretty nice as a basis to start developing groupware or web based applications. I've ported a couple of ideas they have to a languages I prefer to use (java, c, limited perl). Most of the useful data though, is in building useful data models that actually work with a particular companies business process and employee work-flow. Otherwise you have to go in and school all the employees to actually use the system - and even then, they get pissed off having to use it.
Dave...
Dave.. I can't allow you to do this, Dave.
-HAL
"The best way to do mathematics is to be creatively lazy." -I. M. Isaacs
I see telecommuting as the next change in the way we live:
Old Old days - Ug went out to hunt, Ugette stayed home with kids.
Old days - Ezikel went out to work on the land, Sarah stayed home with the kids.
Yesterday - Bob goes to work, so does Sally, kids at child minders.
Tomorrow - 'You got a face to face today? OK I'll stay home' etc.
Think about it - You are at work one minute, then the doorbell rings or a child crys, and you are at home for a few minutes. Can't sleep? work and have a lie in in the morning.....As long as you put your contracted hours in (perhaps with a semi intelligent sensor on the computer to make sure you are really there) perhaps this would be real flexitime.
Is this how the career or children question will be answered for people in the near future?
Agree 100%. Have been doing telecommute for 2y now and would like to reiterate: Get a hobby or you will go stark raving bonkers. Get out of the house.
Interesting idea. In the interim, the ArsDigita Community System may be of interest. In essence it's web-based groupware, with lots of modules that can be added or deleted. It's written in TCL and is open source. Can be installed on any *nix that has a tcl interpreter and AOLServer as a web server (Apache, etc versions coming soon) and an SQL database. See www.arsdigita.com for more details.
I think that you might want to take a look at Jetspeed, a part of the Java Apache project. It is improving rapidly but needs some more developers to help Kevin out. In any case it is using several other key components such as turbine, in the project and the mail list discussions are pretty good. Take a look! There are several other groupware solutions that run on Linux. Some specifically for linux. Oh, also go to http://cvw.mitre.org and take a look at that project. It is a pretty cool approach to collaborative work, it is java based and runs on Linux. I wonder if there is sufficient community support to get a mailing list up on the topic. Or maybe run a slashdot article? I'ld be glad to help. Wyatt latimer@forestmarketplace.com
I won't delve into the stuff I've seen other posters say about marginalization, childcare distractions and such.
It's been my observation that most companies are ambivalent about telecommuting. If they support it, it's viewed as a suppliment rather than as a substitute for being at the workplace. I've heard lots of excuses for not adopting telecommuting but I suspect the real reason is if they can't see you, you ain't working. It will be a long time before corporate America is ready for fulltime telecommuting.
What about part time telecommuting? Why does this have to be an either/or proposition? Consider that if we could get most of the office workers to telecommute just 1 or 2 days per week, we could effectively reduce traffic congestion, fuel consumption and automobile air pollution by perhaps 25%. Why aren't the environmentalists advocating telecommuting? Where I live, they're proposing commuter trains and carpools. Fine. What if you work unpredicatble overtime or have to pick up kids from day care?
I say it's going to take a big shift in attitudes. Basically, we are going to have to wait for a bunch of the stodgy minded smokestack managers of yesteryear to retire and/or die before telecommuting becomes an accepted alternative.
I did it two to three days a week for a year to provide "local" support for a client. Since the parent firm was 1,100 miles away, being only 75 miles by freeway from the client site was a bonus. Bottom line: You can't do it forever. Not because you don't get work done -- in my experience I got MORE work done from home than at the office -- but because businesses(particularly in the Mid-West) still haven't adjusted to the idea of working from home as being a viable alternative. The mentality, right or wrong, seems to be that since you're working from home you have the day off. Bizarre, but true. Personally, I loved it. I got more work done, my house was never more clean, and I could drop off and pick up my kids from school with no nasty looks from the childless workers. For the "inconvenience" of having to add me to a conference call now and again, they client didn't have to give me a permenant desk, a computer, or any of the other ammenities we've taken as a given at a work place. When I go back to consulting after my current gig as a Webmaster, I intend to move towards firms that allow a 50/50 on-site/off-site work plan. Good luck.
Although I can't comment on what it's like to telecommute, I can point out for us younger Slashdot readers that homeschooling is possible.
I've been homeschooling now for two years, and am currently what traditionally would be a highschool junior. It is possible, and I recommend it to any young slashdot reader. The only distractions I have are fighting the desire to code since I'm basically sitting at my computer most of the day. As stated in some of the above comments about office work, it is amazing how much can be done outside of a school environment.
Honestly I made a policy about 3 years ago that I would never do anywork that required me to be onsite more than 5% of the time. Most of the people I work with now I've never even met before. However I think collaborating can be difficult, but as one poster mentioned your productivity level sky rockets.
I was never marginalized simply because of that productivity gain. People I work for often comment, "How did you do that so fast?". However I usually work on solo projects on putting the database glue to whatever the branch offices design teams have come up with. I'm the only one in the company that works from home, but I've never heard any complaints.
I have another friend that does graphic design work from home that does indeed involve a considerable amount of collaboration. He just sets up all his meshes, exchanges them via ftp, and has his co-workers render them on the server farm. Works nicely. The key is getting the boss to go for it. But frankly with as tight as the job market is, if you say, I'm going with or without you... chances are he's going to try out the work from home path. If your a sys admin... your screwed, but other things that don't require access to the hardware make good candidats for this kind of work.
Telecommuting jobs reduce emissions from vehicles even better than carpooling or using public transportation. Therefore, the government ought to require a certain percentage of jobs to be telecommuting jobs, just like a certain percentage of cars must have emissions below a certain level (this is why only so many SUVs can be produced each year). I suspect a great many jobs do not require an office presence, save for the occasional meeting.
> There are times when I do wind up working from home
[...]
>My theory is that it's because I don't get asked questions or I'm not hearing other's conversations over the cubicle walls
Unfortunately, we're nearly always limited to a choice between working in an open-plan (cubicled) office space, or working from home. Many people have trouble working in open plan offices due, as you point out to noise, interruptions, etc. etc. On the other hand, many of the same people also have problems working from home due to home noises, and home interruptions, plus the isolation etc.
My preferred solution would be to work in the central office, but in a central office that was divided into small (say 4-person) rooms/offices, offering the benefits of peace and quiet, while still offering the benefits of ease of communication with coworkers and management.
I've experienced this mode of work, and it's been my favourite working environment - I shared an office with the other 2 members of the unix admin team, and the support team were in another office down the hall, with shared printer area, canteen, etc. where we'd generally meet up at various times during the day. This, for me at least, was an ideal compromise between cubicleland and isolation. I wish more companies realised this happy medium existed!
I've tried the long distance telecommuting thing. I lived/worked for a company in San Diego, and wanted to move to the Pacific NorthWest. So, instead of risking loosing me (I was the Senior software developer there, and basically had my fingers in every pie in the place). I moved to Spokane Washington, and worked full time over a DSL line. Here are the experiences I've had.
ICQ *really* helps, and having video conferencing would have really helped. Having a good long distance plan really helps too. However, as time went by, they'd give me less and less to do. At one point, I couldn't get a hold of my boss for a full week, with nothing to do. Its difficult communicate with your co-workers, if they're not used to ICQ/text-based chat (talking to sales people at my company was basically impossible).
So, in my experience, if all parties involved (including all the people you interact with) are not commited to making it work, its not going to. People have a tendancy to forget about you too (out of sight, out of mind). I was lucky in that I was a straight coder (perl/mod_perl/apache/websites), so I could just SSH into the office servers.
Your work environment really matters. I had a separate room dedicated to my office (rather big, really), but it didn't have a door into the rest of the house. I learned, that I couldn't pay any attention to my cat during the day, but I couldn't shut the door (none to shut). I also found myself spending my entire day in the office, even after I stopped "working". I'd surf the web, or just waste my time away, all the while feeling like I was still at work.
I don't quite know how to solve that one, but having a home office really does encroach on the rest of your house. (I guess if you had a life, unlike me, it wouldn't be a problem).
I might try it again someday, when the technology is better, and video conferencing and VoIP is everywhere...
I worked out of my home for nearly a year. My SO was working during the same time period, so I was alone all day. My co-worker also worked at home (different than mine). My biggest problem is that I could not handle the total isolation. I have been working in an office for the last year or so. I do get annoyed when I am bothered while trying to concentrate on a program, but without the interpersonal interaction, I would go nuts.
The real silver bullet to good programs is caffeine; lots and lots of caffeine! *twitch, twitch*
I'm a co-op student on my 4th work term. This is my second term as a fulltime telecommuter. (A term is a 4 month period) I've worked for the same company for all 4 terms. The first two terms I had to work from the office for the most part, but once trust had been established and my employer got to know me better, there was no problem with me working from home. Actually, my company has a number of employees who work from home (coincidently all programmers). We talk via icq and email frequently and it really doesn't cause any problems at all.
Now, I think it really depends on your job whether or not working from home can be plausible. Generally, i'd say that a programmer will have the best chances of being able to work from home simply because surroundings tend to be irrelevant when you just need to be sitting in front of a computer. Of course, the occasional meeting at the office (or someone else's house!) will likely be required.
Occasionally i'm called upon to do tech support type work and i've never had any problems talking to people on the phone or accessing their systems remotely from my home. I just bring my phone bill to the office and get reimbursed.
A lot of companies are very understanding if you have young children at home and, if your job allows for it, wont stop you from working there.
I'll answer any specific questions you have, just reply to this and i'll respond.
I've worked as a full time telecommutor for 5 years, for two different companies. Both are located over a thousand miles from my house, and I fly in once a year for meetings.
I think it's great. I get to spend more time with my wife and kids, I can better allocate my time, and I'm much more focused than I was in the office.
It's important to (a) have a decent network connection, (b) have a separate office that you can close the door and keep out the rest of the world, and (c) have a strong sense of when to take a break. The last is very important. Everyone I talk to assumes it's hard for telecommutors to keep from being distracted, but for me the opposite was true. I used to work 80 hour weeks, because the computer was always at most 30 seconds away, and there was always work to do...this was
very unhealthy. You have to take breaks, and you have to resist the temptation to make the home-office your only life.
But I highly recommend the experience. I think it's the wave of the future, allowing people to stay in small communities and spend more time with their families.
Hi,
First, some back ground: I have been telecommuting since 1996, when I followed my wife to ALabama. There are few high tech positions here on the gulf coast, and I have been working for people in New England, wihch is rooughly a commute of 1500 miles ;-).
I initially worked as a critical escalation specialist, which is a PHB way of saying fourth level support or firefighting. That worked out well, since most of the time I was answering emails that filtered through to me, or heading out to the client site on 24 hours notice to handle crisis situations, and really there was no team or office work involved (I did get to visit Hong Kong and France ;-)
My current job is a more conventional integration/development position. In both these posts, I have realized that for the telecommuter, espescially a long distance full time telecommuter, you have to work harder to resolve issues. The most common are:
Manoj Srivastava Key C7261095 fingerprint = CB D9 F4 12 68 07 E4 05 CC 2D 27 12 1D F5 E8 6E
I've been working for a company that writes internet applications for the insurance business and runs a world-class website, www.Education-World.com.
On my side of the business, the insurance applications are hosted on Unix servers, and we SSH in from our desks. We can also SSH in from home via low-cost cable modems, but the usability of the connection varies widely from time to time, making work slow at times when at home. If you have all the development tools you need and don't need to edit files online frequently, working from home can work quite well. The downside we've had is that we're in 'starup' mode, and while we're small and trying to figure out our business, there's a lot of impromptu meetings, not a lot of specifications for the programs we write, and the specs we do have change often - in other words, we need a lot of face time. But we still have our assignments and can work 10-20 hours a week from home (out of 60!). When I was sick this winter I worked for a whole week from home, and while frustrating at times, it was successful overall.
On the other side of the business, Education-World.com has been doing telecommuting for years very successfully. The webmaster and several of her assistants all live in Hawaii, the content editor and writers live in Conneticut and surrounding states on the East Coast, and the servers, administrators, artists, and programmers all live in Oklahoma City. For the most part there are defined roles, and each remote team is remotely connected and pretty much autonomous. They conference call weekly and get together for a week twice a year to discuss major changes and issues.
I think the keys to successful telecommuting from our experience are the connection speed/stability vs the type of work being done, communication with co-workers on a regular basis with at least some face-time every so often, and whether you have either a lot of autonomy or can be sent detailed design specs.
As somebody else mentioned, having your own office with no kids, family, or other distractions is extremely important. I don't know if your town has one or not, but I've heard of 'telecommute' offices where consultants or telecommuters who are in town for who knows how long can rent a cube or office in an office building for a pretty cheap price. If you have some money and are in a city, you might see if you can get some other people to see if they want to do it, then buy/rent some office space or a house and be the landlord of your own 'telecommute' office! The company you work for ought to be able to tell you how much it spends per worker on office space/cubicles/etc, and could pay you for space at wherever you work in your town, espcecially if it's cheaper.
Good luck and I hope it works out for you!
For 3.5 years I worked full-time from Massachusetts for a company in New Jersey. Now I telecommute part time (work full-time) for a company in Massachusetts (the one that happens to own this site :). It can work -- it does for me -- but it depends on the people (employee and boss and coworkers).
After my last startup hit the wall I went looking for another place for my whole team to go as a group. I was interested in working in SV, but the whole team lived in LA. I stumbled upon a great little company in the fiber optics business that had a founder who was actually interested in finding ways to tap remote labor resources. The market in SV is, of course, very tight for tech types so this is a significant advantage for the company.
Well, we all signed up and I set about creating a VPN infrastructure to support this (linux, linux, everywhere). One year later it seems to be working very well. We have about five remote offices within about 400 miles of SV - some are just a long commute away (like San Francisco).
In our basic setup we use people who can come into the office at least one day a week. The company covers their transport costs if they fly. The other days they work from home or a remote office that we set up near their home. We are pretty much a no-paper outfit and we use email and instant messaging as our core communications mechanism, so being at home is not really much different from being in a cube. Don't get me wrong - it takes motivation and you have to become communications proactive - but it's a great lifestyle. Coming into the office every week really helps keep you in touch with the team and alleviates the cabin fever. You get the flexibility of being an offsite consultant without the headaches that go with running your own business. I'll never go back to the "old fashioned" way of work if I can avoid it.
BTW (here comes the plug) - we're growing and hiring like mad. Check us out at www.finisar.com, or you could email me at jdouma@NOSPAM.finisar.com if you want more details on how we do remote work.
this is not a sig
I live in a wired community (apartment complex wired with 100baseT and an high speed connection to the Internet) and one of my neighbors lives in Houston while his employers are in Phoenix (I believe). He flies there for those rare meetings he cannot avoid. I think it takes a strong committmant on the part of the employee and the employer.
I know in my present job, one of our developers moved away but we decided to allow him to telecommute. It didn't really work because no project manager seemed to want to work with someone they never had any "face-time" with.
I know for me personally, I try to separate work and personal life as much as possible. Instead of bringing work home I'll just work later. Home is home and work is work. Plus, I don't get in the proper mindset as well when working at home I don't think.
"Dogs and cats, living together...it's mass hysteria!"
I stay in daily contact with my work pals through internal IRC. Not to mention the occasional cracks into each others' home computers
Yes it is important to go out with the people, it's just a bit tough to organize something that would be fun for everybody.
I think, therefore thoughts exist. Ego is just an impression.
Yup, this poster sums it up perfectly... I had a terrific home office and work situation, but I finally stopped doing it last week and began a new job because the isolation is no fun - you lack contact with your known peers, and you can't establish proper working relationships with new employees, even though I went up to the office (600 miles away) once a month. It's a nice break for a few weeks, but I don't recommend it full-time.
Hourly contracting (e.g., programming) is a different matter; it's probably easier to do remotely.
--Philip
"It's amazing how our industry is strewn with beautiful, dead technology and bitter engineers." --M. Huyck
at Linux.com/jobs. If you'd like to write an article about telecommuting, please contact me at rednix@linux.com.
I've just moved from Auckland, NZ to Dunedin, NZ. Basically from the top of New Zealand to the bottom. Cold place, but beautiful. I left a fulltime salaried job and am now intending to do fulltime telecommuting. I already have a small contract for a month or so and several other possibles. Currently I don't require a high bandwidth connection because all my contracts will be for companies also based in New Zealand. I see two ways of getting in contact and getting data from companies. One CDROM media the other the Internet connection. At the moment my Internet connection is via Satellite dish, but with outgoing traffic going through a modem. Incoming speeds are up to 4mbps. As usual this depends on the route you get to a site or server.
So far not many of the companies I'm dealing with mind too much about the distance, just as long as the work gets done and doesn't cost too much.
When shit hits the fan get some of these https://youtu.be/pY-GncsZ-UE
We are a software conglomerate with about 200
developers in four major cities.
Maybe about ten are full-time telecommutors,
visiting every couple months. Another half
telecommute 2 days a week. The full-timers
are generally long-term employees with good
track records the company wanted to keep when
circumstances changed.
What I would say is that full time telecommuting is the best way to do things -- when it works, which in my experience, is only about 10% of the time. That said, here's my personal top ten list for when it will probably work well:
- 10. The commute is 45 minutes or longer each way.
See why only 10%? Remove any of the above, and it becomes progressively more difficult to get the job done.9. The project(s) you are on have clearly defined goals.
8. The company has a well thought out telecommunication policy.
7. A 56K or faster connection to the IntraNet
6. Adequate problem solving resources at the home office.
5. A tight communications loop with your boss.
4. Frequent reporting of progress and problems.
3. A non-distracting home work environment.
2. A focused, effective work methodology (how to get the tough work done...)
1. A personal integrity based work ethic.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
In a telecommuting situation, both parents can be there for the kids. When I needed to concentrate, I stayed in the basement office and the kids knew to stay away. Just like in a work situation there are times when you're interruptable and others when you're not. You just have to have equivalent telltales that your coworkers or spouse can see and stay away (or interpret as a green light to shmooze).
Socially, I had some techie friends I'd pick up a phone and call from time to time when I was stuck on a problem. They were free to reciprocate.
The most significant aspect of telecommuting was the impact it had on my relationship with my wife. She's a stay-at-home mom and she was watching kids while I was hacking. I'd take coffee breaks at the kitchen table and hang out with my wife. It really had a positive effect on our relationship. Similarly, once the kids were at school we could take the phone off the hook at lunchtime...
Downside was that I'd be expected to do those "just five minute" errands around the house during work hours. And I had a tendency to work 24x7, or it felt that way. If I had a knotty problem I couldn't solve, I'd get up and shovel the sidewalk or something, or I'd get up in the middle of the night and code up a sudden inspiration.
I tried it for 2 weeks. I was bored and lonely! I also found it very hard to concentrate on my work at times because of other distractions. 2-3 days a week works great as it allows me to take care of things that need to be done during 9-5 on a business day and still get my work done. Even with a DSL connection and VPN I find the office net more responsive. Our overworked admins and support people are much easier to communicate with in person: you can just bump into them in the hall with no worries of whether their SameTime "away" status just means they are ignoring people.
Blar.
The difference here, I think, is that the kind of work that is doable via telecommuting cannot be done by "child labor". I just don't see people keeping their preteen kids home from school to help the family do debugging runs, or site layout.
ObOnTopic: If you work at home you're always around to fix those scrooey little things that happen to her Linux box that you can't get to from your former office because of the steenking firewall...
--
The five minutes after 9am are far more productive than the fire hours after 5pm.
-- me, from years of experience
but I've never actually telecommuted full-time. As an IT consultant/contractor, I've found many opportunities to assist clients from my home office. This includes a great deal of system administration work that I've done remotely.
At least one person mentioned above that sysadmins can't get by without physical access. That is simply not true. Many servers can be set up in such a way as to allow full remote sysadmin capability. I do it all the time with HP-UX systems. I've done quite a bit of work for one client whose site I haven't set foot on in over a year.
You need a few things to be able to do this:
It also helps to have well-designed, sufficiently redundant systems to maintain whatever level of service is required by the end users.
That said, it's almost always a good idea to make an appearance once in a while for some scheduled maintenance or to just let people know you're alive. It helps to let yourself know you're alive too. :-)
There are plenty of companies that can meet the above requirements and hire telecommuting sysadmins. Some of them (especially those with too few servers to justify a full-time position) prefer to hire contractors like me.
Michael Ossmann
Ossmann Consulting
I've been working from home since June of 97 (www.artlogic.com). It was an odd adjustment. If I didn't have a family or other support network in place, I wouldn't have been able to turn work off, so that would be bad. I've also been successful in training my family that when the office door is closed, they need to call on the office line if they need me -- they have to pretend that my office isn't really there in the house.
Another important factor is the culture of the company you're working with -- our office is strictly administrative, and all the programmers telecommute, so there's no penalty. I've heard tales of serious problems where you're the only telecommuter -- being treated as an outsider, ignored, etc.
Even more important in this case is choosing a company that has an IT infrastructure that's telecommuting-aware. If you can't get to source code control, etc. from the outside, it's pretty useless.
dook, dook, dook!
I live in New York, and work for a Silicon
Valley company. It works for me.
Then again, it may not work for everyone.
I have no kids, so that is not an issue. My
fiancee comes home for lunch, so I'm not alone the
whole day, and friends stop in once and a while.
I don't know how responsive employers
would be to hiring people for an arrangement like
this though. I worked for my employer for two
years before moving back to New York. They then
hired me as a consultant for a while and are now
re-hiring me as an employee (the HR department
there must hate me).
Technically, it's no big deal. I dial-in
behind their firewall, send myself a few xterms
over my cable modem and hang up. Phone bill is
minimal. Sometimes I do the pppd over ssh vpn
thing.
In any case, it works for me.
As a manager, I've managed people who were full-time telecommuters. Given a few caveats, it seems to work fine.
1) The person has to be mature, dependable, a self-manager, and driven to excellence on his own. Anything less is a set-up for failure
2) You must get support from upper management. A person above me decided that one of my telecommuters wasn't reliable anymore, apparently because he wasn't in the office. As a result, that person discouraged new projects being assigned to that engineer, and downgraded an annual review.
3) Don't stint on resources. For my employees, at minimum a reliable 256k connection (Frame relay, DSL, etc), dedicated work phone, dedicated office space, and a work-provided computer with all the programs and access needed were provided.
4) Encourage the telecommuter to come in for important meetings and events. It really helps to both remind them that they're part of a team, and to remind the team that that person is there.
All that being said, I do not think I would ever hire someone to be a telecommuter from the start. I believe that our learning curve is steep and our processes are complex enough that to properly learn the job you'd have to be on-site, shouting
questions over the cube walls and talking with your cow-orkers.
--doug
Telecommuting is one of those things that is heavily dependant on the company and the person. I telecommute where i work, I am basically the IT department. I find I ge t more work done at home, the simple reason being the distraction of other ppl constantly asking me questions is gone. When I am at the office, which is once every couple of weeks, i get bombarded with questions while i am there, when im at home the same questions are in an email, which makes things alot easier to control.
The big problem with telecommuting i've seen is staying focused, it's too easy to goof off if you don;t have anything obvious to do.
this space for rent
Oh, Trust me, I do have a life outside of work, but when tight deadlines loom, things get pushed aside.
As for that life? A 3 YO daughter, a lovely wife, Live Steam trains (which requires a whole machine shop in the basement), Shooting etc (check my web site)
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
As I said in my reply, NOT getting out of the house is what killed me after 10 months or so. My wife took the car to work, so I was stuck.
Take the advice to heart. If you do this, get out of the house
If you DO have a clear cut project/section of code to work on, you can make great progress, when you don't (aka, you need more info), you can die waiting for info
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
I've done this, and would not do it again.
I had a job working for one of my best friends, who also turned out to be one of the best bosses I've ever had. The problems are social.
Picture you are a typical geek. You'll get up in the AM, and log in, and then stay there till you go to bed. You'll go weeks without leaving the house except for food. Gets REAL old after a few months.
The other problem (for both you and your employer) is that it gets hard to separate home from work. You never leave work, but you also never leave home. You know those "dead times" you always get at work? It's real easy to drift off into home mode, but it's also real easy to spend all day working, and it feeling like you are ALWAYS at work (like 24x7).
Another problem that isn't so bad today now that things like Cable Modem and xDSL are around is the cost of phones. We were using ISDN, and the phone bill from my end to the office ran around $1100 per month. This costs your boss some real $$$
I could see telecommuting 2-3 days a week, but NOT more than that.
I'm sorry to say it didn't work out, but luckily, it didn't hurt the friendship
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
I've found that it depends not so much on the distance but on the people involved. When I say "people involved" I mean both you and your co-workers. Some are passive about asking you for stuff if you're not there. As a result, their job stands still. Others send you email immediately and use the phone, so it might even work better than face to face communication.
Some people also don't get any work done when they are in their own home. Others - like me - code best when I'm totally isolated from the rest of the world. I don't have a land line home, just a cellular phone which is on "silent mode", and ADSL. If I want to, I can totally block out the rest of the world and focus 100% on my work.
However, I find that every now and then you have to go to work just to get "a feel" of what's going on. It can be once a week or once a month, but it's pretty much a must in order for you to really know and understand your co-workers.
I'm a freelancer living in Oregon. My primary client is in Southeast Michigan. I telecommute daily, connecting to their network via the Linux Citrix client. I love telecommuting. For five years I put up with commutes which ran anywhere from forty minutes to an hour and a half each way. Now I walk downstairs in the morning, log into my desktop box and start my day with a cup of tea, /. and the cat curled up on my desk watching the birds at the feeder outside my office window.
Yes, telecommuting can have its drawbacks, as with any type of job. In general, I've found the following to be true:
1.) Working in your bathrobe isn't fun after the second week. Sweats and a T-shirt, however, are wonderful, and you won't feel odd when the FedEx guy/mailman/&c. comes to the door.
2.) It's important to structure your time. Otherwise, it's easy to get out of bed late and putz around the house all day. OTOH, you don't have to be Orwellian about it. Once you get into a routine, you've usually got the problem licked.
3.) It's very important that spouses, family and friends understand that you're 'at work' even though you're physically at home. The first month or so, my wife tried to load me down with all sorts of 'honey could you' projects. She just didn't realize that I wouldn't have time to grocery shop, clean the house, run her packages to the post office and run errands all over town for her. After all, I was at home all day, right? Once we talked about it and she realized what she was doing, it stopped and hasn't been a problem since.
4.) Don't let yourself become 'housebound'. Get out and go for walks occasionally. Take the laptop and work from the backyard if possible. Forward your phone to the cellphone and take the laptop down to the local diner and work once in a while. Things like that. Generally, so long as your productivity is as good or better than most people working 'in the office', managers won't begrudge you a little flexibility in your schedule. There are exceptions, of course, but you can always tell them you were in the bathroom or had gone out to the mailbox to get the mail and didn't notice the message waiting on the voice mail when you returned. So long as your productivity doesn't drop and they think of you as 'reliable(TM)', you're usually good to go.
5.) Phone meetings and phone conferences are becoming more and more accepted in the business environment. I've yet to have to fly to Michigan. Everything's been nicely handled via phone and email. *Do* remember to keep in touch with your clients / managers. Some sort of minor email 'check-in' daily is generally a good idea, if they expect you to be working 'full time' on a project. "Out of sight, out of mind" isn't really much of a problem, if they hear from you regularly. OTOH, pestering people with inappropriate messages is a *bad* idea. Use proper judgement.
I've just been 'sniffed' by an IT outfit on the other coast, and am talking about the posibillity of working for them as an employee. While I might consider becoming a 'corporate lackey' again (keeping the free-lance business on the side), I wouldn't consider working 'on site' for more than a couple of weeks unless I was truly desperate. I find the stress level and other hassles are so much lower, working from a home office. I'm actually enjoying work for the first time in years.
It depends on what you do.This is fine if your work is a somehow independent part of the project. (e.g. I know a guy who workes as an AHPL programmer designing standard cells).
But if your work is connected to others' work, it'll be far more productive if all the team is available IMO.
even with IRC/ICQ/NetMeeting or any other instant messaging services, the face to face discussions and meetings are very helpful and can convey the ideas much easier.
I could do every durn thing related to my regular job as a logistics analyst, from home on a 28.8 connection, with my own equipment and setup the VPN myself.
I only meet face to face on work items occasionally and the rest of the time it is more social.
The company will not let anybody do that, no idea why, they just don't and they recently began VPN service for some managers.
On the writing-on-the-side-for-free gig, no problem at all, never met the cofounders of securitygeeks.com, everything I do there is from wherever my computer is connected.
I would swap the two in a second.
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
CONS:
1) The biggest problem, and not often addressed, is social isolation. When in Philadelphia, I loved working alongside my coworkers. It's a very fun environment. To not see or talk to another person all day, every day, is very depressing. [And, as an aside, you'll find that not opening your mouth nearly as much causes the smell of your breath to become worse, and to degrade more quickly.] There are cycles of good weeks and bad weeks. (Depression level exacerbated by project difficulty/confusion level.) I find that here, remotely, 3pm comes very slowly, and drags on forever into 5pm. At the office, 5pm would show up and I couldn't believe it happened. Time went much more quickly with others.
2) You need a VPN. I'm the first full-time telecommuter, and my company still doesn't have a VPN in place, so it's more difficult to work on the same project with other people. I don't have access to all the files I need, and have to make phone/email requests to get them pushed to the server I can FTP to.
3) Interactivity suffers. It's just not f2f. When working on a project without source control, it's important to be able to yell to your neighbor, "I have to do a mass find/replace...don't touch anything for 30 seconds." You just can't have that kind of interactivity remotely. Because of this it's most efficient to get large, isolated chunks of work that can be done solo with little interaction. However, I personally need variety in my day, and if I'm on a tedious project, there's no way I can do it all day long, even with 10 minute breaks interspersed.
4) It's harder to make friends in a new area. I moved fresh to St. Louis, and don't have co-workers to show me the local areas and to organize poker games with. Fortunately my fiancée goes to college, and I've found a pick-up group of Ultimate Frisbee players.
5) Distractions abound. I don't have children, so I'm safe there, but I do have cats, and delivery people and television. You must be committed to your work (or your office must have some good checks and balances in place to ensure that you aren't slacking). On the whole, I am more productive here (measured by work accomplished/time period). [This may partly explain why time disappeared so fast at the office--I got less done.]
6) It's easy to do too much work. My office is in my house...I try to stop at a certain time, but sometimes I find myself wanting to solve a problem and working after/during dinner. Great for the employer, not so good for keeping you from getting burnt out.
PROS:
1) Fabulous location. Depends on how nice your home office is--I have a fabulous room on the 2nd floor with windows on three sides that all open! In nice weather, overlooking my backyard and garden, as the trees swish in the window and warm air flows through...that's fabulous. And, even if you don't have a great office in the house, where your house is may be very important. For example, I love my job, I love my company, but I couldn't commute from St. Louis to Philadelphia every day.
2) You can easily do extra work. The flipside to con #6 above. You don't have to stay late at the office, annoying your spouse, when you have more work to do. You don't have to drive xx minutes to/from the office after dinner. You just go do the needed work and then *poof* you're home again. Nice.
3) Your own hours. Because the projects tend to be very 'me' oriented, if I feel the need to take a break and watch TV for an hour, or go for a walk, I can. I can always make it up later.
4) Work computer/home computer the same. No synchronization of email/programs/files. All work functionality is yours at home. Your company should pay for the equipment, too, so you may get nicer equipment at home than you'd be willing to pay for yourself. Add to that an ergonomic chair/desk (really should be bought by your employer) and you're getting some sweet equipment for off-work enjoyment.
Oh, there are other pros too, but I'm too lazy to type them all. :)
ADVICE:
1) Visit the office occasionally. Not only to keep from being 'marginalized', but to keep in touch with worker friends and keep social interactions alive. Find a way to make the company pay for the trip if it's a big one :)
2) Get a social life. Do something outside the house. It's important.
3) Finally, don't get the sole bathroom in your house remodelled--working all day without a working toilet is a problem! :)
The short of it is, it can work. The critical issues, as I remember, were:
I am a recent telecomutee, now working for a firm with offices in Boston and LA, while I live in rural Georgia.
I have to say that most of the comments I see are dead on. The problems I am experiencing are guilt over not being constantly 'on the clock', and the uncertainty that I am 'missing' something that the people in the offices are doing.
There is a small amount of boredom also, as even SlashDotting becomes a distraction I must force myself to avoid (not too successfully).
In closing, I would just like to say that, this type of article is SlashDot at its best. This is good, informative stuff, with not alot of noise. Just a frank discussion about how to cope with a not so common situation.
Kudos Guys!
PS: Does anyone here have kids, and attempt to home school them? Does anyone have any good resources on this subject? TIA.
"Don't try to confuse the issue with half truths and gorilla dust."
Bill McNeal (Phil Hartman)
As others have said, it can be good and bad. I've been telecommuting for 3 1/2 months. I've never worked at the office for this job. Here are the things that I do to keep sane.
We use instant messaging (our own, see shameless plug at: http://www.infoworkspace.com) and online collaboration to solve most of the "in-person" problems. All of my colleagues are also telecommuting, so that makes it easier. We're all in the same boat.
My job has some very clear goals, which make it easy to "prove" that I've been doing work at home. I think this is key for an employer to feel comfortable about not seeing an employee. I IM my boss nearly every day and send weekly e-mail updates about how I've been spending my time and what I plan to do in the future. This gives him a warm and fuzzy that he still is managing me.
I use music to set my day. In the morning, when I first get up (usually with my husband, sometimes early to go run), I listen to local radio. This is the time I get on the computer and check my personal e-mail and do my personal on line errands. Then, I switch to classical music until about 9 when I take a break to go shower, have breakfast, etc. Anytime I'm not actively working, I turn local radio back on.
I always leave the house every day to do something. Whether it's errands at the post office or a cup of coffee at Starbuck's, I have to get out of our place for at least a little while.
At the end of the day, I put on a particular CD (Meat Loaf, Back into Hell) to signify that my work day is over. Then I get away from the computer, clean the house, do dishes, watch TV, whatever. It doesn't matter what I'm doing as long as I'm doing it away from the computer.
The danger of having your place of work being the same as your place of play is that it becomes difficult to distinguish the two and you never stop working. Using music to "cue" me into different modes works quite well.
Don't underestimate the power of talking. Call people or do Voice-over-IP, not just e-mail and text chat. Voice inflections are important. Call your co-workers just to see how their weekend went. Build those friendships that you would if you were physically co-located.
Speaking of friendships, I found that I had to become active in another area to make friends. We're new to the area, so I joined a running club. My fellow runners are the support group that I need.
That's it. I do really enjoy working barefoot (85% of telecommuters don't wear shoes while working). I do think that a certain personality and job are required to make it work.
--
"You despise me, don't you?"
"You despise me, don't you?"
"If I gave you any thought, I probably would."
I have been doing it since Nov 1 of last year. We are working on a new database system a company in St. Louis. I live in San Diego with my partner in St. Louis. We fire up our video conferencing software every morning, leave it running all day, and its pretty close to being there.
I would agree with an earlier post about wasting time. Self control is the only hard part for me (since I have little to none) so I have to work hard to keep at the task at hand.
I am logged into the Novell server there, get my files, put updates, etc.
I think it is the mentallity of the employer that is the only real hurdle to overcome.
- I like pudding.
Hopefully this is not too offtopic, but how do you find such a job in the first place? Are most of the positions internet related or can just a hard core C/C++/Java programmer get them?
This is so one hundred percent correct. I started telecommuting in my first software job after college, and after being so used to living with 12 roommates crammed into two tiny adjacent apartments, being alone for the entire day (and living in the avenues in San Francisco... foggy and depressing) drove me bonkers.
I felt like the mathematician from Pi. I'd see someone I knew on the walk down to Haight St. to get lunch, and I'd be talking to them, secretly wondering in my head if I remembered how to communicate with people, and if I wasn't just spouting absolute weirdness to them.
The people at the main office of my company (in Boston) used to make fun of me 'cause to all of them I was just a voice out of a box.
I work in an office now and it's great. Do not work from home unless you have lots of social opportunity.
I've been working from home for about two years now. At first, I thought it was fantastic -- my commute was about 20 feet, I could wear sweat pants all day, got to work at my own schedule, usually late at night, etc., etc. However, I've got to be completely honest: I MISS PEOPLE. There's a lot to be said for human interaction during the day, and I can't wait until I move back to an office. The other problem I've discovered is that since my work is my home, I can never escape it. I wake up, it's there, I go to sleep, it's there -- I find that because it surrounds me constantly, I'm always working.
I think an ideal schedule might be to work from home 2 days a week.
I sort of telecommute, my boss and the bulk of the poeple I work with (for) are at RAL, in Oxford, while I'm at Keele University (a few hundred miles north). This is actually the standard way that the people I work for (the Starlink Project) hires programmers. There are six or seven of us scattered through different Universities thoughout the UK, we only meet up a couple of times a year to discuss stuff. Appart from those meetings everything goes over email, it seems to work okay.
Its not really working from home, although I have that option (and when I actually want to sit down and code something up I usually take it). However I don't really see much of a difference.
Wasn't one of the ideas put forward when people started talking about telecommuting back in the seventies that people would still go into central facilities and have a desk (and associated stuff) its just that these facilities wouldn't be owned by the company they work for, but it would be sort of clearning house type thing, and people from all different companies would work there side by side, the company they're working for only really existing in virtual space?
Al.--
The Daily ACK - Eclectic posts by yet another hacker
BTW, guys, Linux was created entirely by tele-commuters, incliding both developers and management !!!! :)
But this was primarily because my wife's job is mornings only - she's leave for work at 7 - I'd get the kids up, feed them and go out for a walk to a park and/or cafe - about 10:30 I'd come home and the kids would start their nap and I'd start work - my wife would come home about the time they'd wake and I'd work through to ~6. About the time they stopped needing a morning nap they were ready for preschool.
I had a full time job over the winter, and they were happy to keep me on while i went to college in another state for spring quarter. We discuess things on the phone, and i implemenet everything here, back it up, and he loads it up on their systems and test it further...its been working great so far. So ya, i think it works.
Its been my experience that employers want you in the office for the first few weeks of your employment so they know the time it takes you to get things done. Also they usually would like you in the office one or two full days a week if you have meetings and the like, not just coming in for the meeting and leaving.
Until the Industrial Revolution hit everyone
either worked at home or worked from home.
The farmer left the farm to work his fields,
the blacksmith walked from his house to his
smithy, other crafts people lived above their
shops.
The main obstacle to telecommuting is old-style
management. The technology exists already today,
the cost savings are evident. But a PHB feels
socially useless unless he cant face-to-face
manage.
I have been working from home since Dec, 1999
and will miss it very much if I have to switch
back. Prior to that I did work at home part-time
as a sysadmin (yes, even sysadmins can do this).
Unless you have to kick a machine in the ribs
physically, everything can be done from remote.
For the PHB it is all about control, and the
cost savings also includes needing less
management. They will fight that tooth, nail,
and claw.
The final caveat of course is, not everyone
can do this. Some people will always need
supervision and interaction in order to
function.
Also it helps alot to have clueful people on the other end. My company is very spread around, including offices in 5 or 6 different cities, plus a number of full-time telecommuters. So they're used to this sort of thing. You're less likely to find support for full-time telecommuting if your company or your boss don't really understand how it can work. Plus my direct boss is very technical and understands ssh, firewalls, etc., so he knows that it can work and work securely.
If you're a coder, developing software for Linux and Unixes and platforms whose development tools are available on Unixes makes it much easier to telecommute, than say developing windoze software, since the tools can all be operated remotely. While much of the time I use my development environment on my own desktop, often I will build something on a different platform that resides in the company office in California. If you have to push buttons on a GUI to build, it's much more difficult to work remotely. For example, we build for VxWorks (embedded OS) from a Solaris machine, which works great remotely. However, if the VxWorks target machine ever gets hosed running some code (and it does, it's all one big happy memory block), it stops functioning and just beeps incessantly. The only repair is to hard reset it, but I can't do that remotely.
Aside from some of the logistical issues, I miss some of the office atmosphere, interacting with colleagues, etc, but by and large I'm happier without it.
In general I highly recommend it, especially if your company can cope and the kind of work you do lends itself to it.
Regards.
-moibus http://moibus.jfm.net/
I think the succesful ingredients in this case were the usual things:
1. top-flight developers doing new development which interested them ;
2. an integrated (and functional) source code control and bug reporting system ;
3. a realistic development schedule ;
4. frequent milestones backed by useful periodic (weekly) meetings ;
5. an environment of respect and trust, as several of the developers had worked together (in various combinations) on previous projects.
I telecommuted for a company based in Mercer Island, Washington from my ranch home in rural King County, Washington for a year. I would say it was probably one of the *most* productive work years in my career. When I didn't have meetings with the company's clients, I got up at 10am, walked into my office at 2pm, and worked until 10pm-2am. The company was thrilled with my work, I got *far* more done by telecommuting than I do now (I *lose* 3 hours a day on average commuting to my current client), and I got to work in my PJ's and crank KISS tunes all day.. what more could you want... :)
Polymorphism -- It's what you make of it.
I worked at home for about 1 year on my own, and then maybe 6 months for a company. I've found that going to work actually makes a big difference. For one, you don't become a hermit. And second, while working from home can work out well, it's never as efficient or fulfilling as working with other human beings.
http://www.logient.com
While I'd like to telecommute because I could get a much higher paycheck doing so (Maine isn't known for high salaries), the one experience I've had with it was extremely bad. Unless the company you're working for has lots of experience with telecommuters, they probably won't be able to effectively farm the work out to you. You end up sitting around with no work to do, which is great at first, but then you start to wonder about your usefulness, and also stop enjoying the job.
Addlepated - punk & metal
Can you elaborate on this. What made this successful, what were the company policies, etc??
I'm so set on working at home that I put up this page for recruiters to read about how I wouldn't work at a client site:
Recruiters - Please Read This Important Note
If you're a consultant or thinking of becoming one, or just want more power in controlling your destiny, check out this page I wrote recently:
Market Yourself - Tips for High Tech Professionals
Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare, Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
The opposite was true. I was suddenly never away from work. I couldn't sit on my couch anymore and watch a movie with my wife without thinking of work -- because I was in the office all the time. I lost my home, really.
Part of the reason for this is that I had no separate office. My desk was in the bedroom, so even while I slept my 19-inch monitor stared at me, disappointed at my laziness.
So I guess my advice would be to try and carve out a separate work space if you're going to work at home full-time. Treat it as separate. Keep track of your hours -- not only for billing purposes, but to help enforce a delineation between your home life and your office hours. May sound silly in a world where our work IS life, but nevertheless it could help save a tiny corner of sanity and permit you to goof-off without feeling guilty.
Joe Ganley
http://ganley.org/
Joe Ganley
http://ganley.org/
For advice: set aside one area and call that the office. Put a lock on the door and treat it like an office. Get a seperate coffee machine etc. Get two mobiles, one for work, one for private and keep them strictly seperate: some clients get upset if they call you at 10am and you're walking the dog etc. I've gone as far as giving the girlfriend my original mobile and she answers it as my PA! If the client wants to send you some kit make sure you've enough room, 256 ticket machines doesn't sound many till they're up and down all the stairs, chairs and tables.
threadeds blog
I work at home 3 days a week and go into the office the other 2 days (Tue & Thu). It works well, you still need the interaction with the other employees on a face-to-face basis. I take care of the servers (Novell,NT,*nix) and routers where I work and most of my work is remote anyway to our plants. so who cares where I'm physically at when I do it.
i thought it was contempt ;) ...it might breed content also, but only if you're lucky :)
One of my co-workers has been telecommuting from Hawaii for the past few years. (We're in Silicon Valley.) The catch is he has to go to the Honolulu sales office to catch the T1 link (he does IC mask design for our department.) I suspect now that DSL is common he may go back home, though now he has kids.
He comes back to San Jose about every 6 to 12 weeks for a week.
FWIW, he gets a commuter pass from one of the airlines. He can travel an unlimited time per year (on standby) with restrictions on travel days. Generally, he's on the planes that'd be flying empty of tourists.
I've never telecommuted, but two programmers associated with my office telecommute full time (both are nearly 1000 miles away), and my wife holds two part-time telecommuting jobs. The two programmers are both single, no kids, and both seem happy with their work situation, especially since they finally got high-speed internet access recently.
My wife and I have no children, so she has no problem with kids distracting her. She likes being in the comfort of her own home, she likes not having to drive to work, and she likes having access to her kitchen so she can see to her unusual dietary needs. She does sometimes miss the in-person interaction with other employees and can get lonely (when I walk in the front door in the evening she starts yakking at about 1000 words a minute to make up for lost contact time).
Your satisfaction depends on your personality (do you need regular face-to-face contact), the quality of your net connection, your home situation, and the politics at your job. Study these factors carefully before jumping in.
No sig? Sigh...
Telecommuting is where you replace physical commuting with telephone lines (or some other means of communication), it doesn't mean that you freelance out of your home.
I telecommuted for a couple of weeks when the olympics were here in Atlanta. My office was near one of the venues. I didn't get a lot of work done, although I think I could be succesful at it if I tried again. At the time, the whole thing was a pretty big joke and the workload given to us for those two weeks was pretty light. I have, on other occasions, worked at home for a day or half day, depending on the circumstances, and it worked out well.
As someone else mentioned, I have a small child (11 months), and before I would consider trying to telecommute again (on any sort of a permanent basis), I'd need a door to my office at home - and also some house rules - you can knock on the door under the same circumstances you'd call me at the office (very rarely). I also don't believe that I could succesfully do it full time, but I do believe a day or two a week would be a good start.
Then again, I simply hate the physical commute. It wastes time and money, causes frustration, and burderns our already short parking situation, not to mention adding to the already overcongested traffic situation. I'd actually like to switch to four 10 hour days - one less commute a week, and three day weekends. While my company keeps talking the talk about our cities "clean air" campaigns, they haven't been walking the walk.
So my holy grail, as it stands, is 4 day work week, with one day being a telecommute day. I'm working on a proposal for my next review.
----------
Stupid sexy Flanders.
I work in the C++ development arm of an ERP vendor, and quite a few of our top programmers in the 200-person department telecommute "full-time" (meaning they only come into the office for important meetings/general facetime maybe 3-4 times a year). There are at least 6 guys that are fulltime telecommuters. The rest of us telecommute about once a week on average. Don't expect to be given the chance to do it fulltime if you aren't a proven code guru. Experience matters here.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
I tried the 'normal office job' thing for about two years as an accountant. I now am self-employed and work from home. I can say that the peace and quiet of working from home can be relaxing, however it does require a tremendous amount of self-motivation. Some days it would be much much easier to just roll back over and forget the day.
The comments suggesting you to make SURE you have a hobby that requires you to leave the house are right on target. I work out at the gym during the early afternoon and much to my advantage it's not crowded (no one but the retirees, self-employed, tele-commuters, and housewives/husbands). There are definite advantages to having your time completely up to you. Just make sure you're motivated enough to use it wisely. And invest in GOOD time management / project management software to help keep you on track!
"Say no more..." - Monty Python
I see an average of 3-4 days as the max, as you still need to talk to people, have something to ping-pong ideas to, getting feedback etc.
Even at work I sometimes spends 1-2 hours a day on the phone talking with a colleague in another end of country, talking about how to do stuff. Tis is more efficient than sitting in the dark pit at home.
Also expect to work more hours per day when at home.
At our workplace, we try to have people who is going to work at the remote office spend 2-3 weeks at the main office, so that people will learn to know the employees, and this is a good thing.
So one week at work/month is also a solution. Having things break up too much is bad.
I want to second this. I've been a UNIX sysadmin for about 10 years, a senior staff member at my current gig for 4+ years, and telecommuting the 600 miles ~93% of my work-time for the last 1.5 years. The benefits are many: improved quantity and quality of work, get all those mail-order deliveries the first time, etc. But i'm giving it up, for many reasons, most of which have to do with the isolation. Like many people, i saw most of my friends at work, and so it really is just kinda weird not to see anyone except my SO and cat for a week or two at a time, or realize i haven't been even nominally out of the house in 3 days. In the past, i have had a lot of 'net relationships (via email, newsgroups, netrek, etc.) and figured i was ready to do this. I think what i was forgetting was the amount of interaction i really did have at work. You may find that people who you have worked with for 5 years seem to forget you exist, which can have harsh consequences. Being a technically senior sysadmin means i should be training the junior staff, but this has proven almost impossible. There just seems to be a lot of questions that people won't pick up the phone to ask, but that they will yell over the cube wall.
I work at a very large telecommunications company and we do a significant amount of part time telecommuting. I have never seen our business unit hire anyone to do full time telecommuting in their first position with the company. Normally this kind of situation is earned. This seems perfectly understandable to me: why would I hire someone to work virtually and establish business relationships with co-workers whom they have never met and will see in person probably less than half a dozen times a year?
It is much more acceptable for an established employee to make a transition to full time telecommuting - for the employer and the employee. It is just too risky for a new hire.
Dave
I know several people who work in different states then the company they work for.
They like and hate it. You may think you interact rarely with your co-workers but you'll find out exactly how much you did once you start this.
It's much more difficult to manage other developers telecommuting so your work becomes much more focused. Your input on the front-end of it drops off dramatically.
But... Your time becomes your own. Want to run errands or hit the beach? Go ahead. As long as the work gets done, nobody cares.
If your work is clearly focused on specific items that nobody else has input on, telecommuting full-time can work. But you lose the social aspect of work and any real sense of belonging.
I recently become interested in telecommuting. Please let me know of any companies you have good experience with.
It remains to be seen whether I will consider the arrangement ideal, and for that matter, whether my employer will.
We do make heavy use of dialpad.com to cut down on phone costs.
Amazing magic tricks
I programmed the voice mail system with everyone's phone numbers. We hooked it to our LAN so it could know when someone was at home and when they were in the office and when they were on the road. The result was that clients could call our office and the calls would be seamlessly transferred to our staff wherever they were. Our computerized fax system would calmly route faxes through a receptionist who would place them in the recipient's email for retrieval wherever they were.
Nobody could tell that we didn't have everyone all in one place. In fact, our office didn't actually fit our whole staff. When we'd have staff meetings, we'd have to use a training center to fit everyone.
We realized many benefits from this. First of all, there was a substantial savings in office space. (In fact, if we had just installed an ISDN set at our receptionist's house, we could have eliminated the office entirely and just had a storage space for servers somewhere.) Second, we were able to retain extremely talented staff who otherwise would have had to leave us to pursue personal interests such as taking care of family. Third, we were able to keep our entire consulting staff on the road earning on-site commission yet still have them available when other clients needed them.
With notebook computers, palmpilots, lightweight portable color printers, and digital wireless phones, there's no reason a technology or professional services company couldn't eliminate its office entirely and let its people work wherever they want to whenever they want to, and save money and gain flexibility in the process.
You have to lay down the law. When you are working no one is to bother you. I hardly allow my wife to even talk to me when I am working. Fortunately I do not have any curtain climbers to distract me either. If I did they would be caged during the day. If distractions are a problem rent a little space somewhere that will eliminate that problem. I have been doing more and more telecommuting and it is just working out great for both myself and my customers. Corporate america needs to get it through their heads that a programmer does not need to be on site and it is actually very conterproductive. You would have to pay me four times as much as I make now to even think about working in SV, now does that make sense. Their is no real programmer shortage in Silicon Valley just a shortage of people willing to live there.
Last August, I moved across the country, where the company I was (and am) working for has no engineering group, so they offered to have me work from home, which I happily agreed to.
All in all, it's been OK, but not as great as I thought it would be. The best thing I can say about it is that I get to avoid traffic, which here is extremely bad, and I don't have to worry about trivial things like hygeine. Theoretically, I should get much more work done, and I do when it's something I enjoy and need extended periods of heavy concentration for, like design and coding. If I don't enjoy it, it's way too easy to surf instead, since I have a 1Mbs DSL connection and no need to avoid being conspicuous about it. So, basically a wash as far as efficiency goes.
The bigger downsides are that I can't just pop over to someone else's cube whenever I want, attending meetings over the phone is really not the same as being there - at least it's been hard for me to get used to, nobody to go to lunch with. I also think that not being physically there, it's really easy to lose touch with what's going on in general with everyone else, the group, the company, etc, and you don't get as much of a chance to influence things as you would if you were actually there.
I never thought I'd be one to say that the social negatives of working strictly at home make it basically unworkable over the long term, but that's the conclusion I'm coming to. The ideal situation would be to do it for 3 days a week, and be in the office the other 2, IMHO.
But there are downsides. As a on-site employee or contractor, on-site is on-clock: If you're there, it's billable time, even if you're really reading Slashdot or conducting an flirtation via email. But when I (at least) am working at home, I feel I have to be scrupulously honest about billing time. I have a little bound record book that I log start and stop times in, in ink, so that I have something to show the IRS and/or customers if I'm ever challenged. This isn't a very big deal - but it's amazing how often the distractions mount up so that it takes 'till ten or eleven to log an eight hour workday!
And, as has been mentioned, kids and/or SO's can be a distraction. Most projects do involve an awful lot of Same Old Same Old that you can do even with a houseful of happy kids (or talk drifting over from other cubicles!) but there's always the fun stuff that does require concentration. My kids, at least, are awfully good about being quiet when I'm on the phone or in a tough part, but all-in-all I do really hate working in a corner of the living room, and wish I had my own office with a door I could close.
But the hands down biggest drawback is that people want you in their office, both to see that you're actually working and for the interaction. Insisting on telecommuting knocks out 90% (or even 99%) of the possible contracts, leaving you with the small stuff that someone thinks someone working alone can do in six months or less (anything bigger and Time To Market considerations start to urge them to throw more staff at it) and the relatively few customers who are willing to work with a telecommuter. That can lead to your having to take just about anything that comes along, which can be dull and (which is worse) which can lead to career stagnation.
In my case, this filtering coupled with the fact that there's not a huge demand for Delphi programmers to start with, leads to a really exaggerated boom-and-bust cycle. I don't have busy months and slow months; I have good and bad years, with year-on-year income ratios as high as eight. This is emotionally fatiguing ;-) and means that I have to be awfully conservative, fiscally - I'd be a lot wealthier right now if I hadn't had to keep so much of my net worth in cash during the '90's.
It's hard in general for a contractor to pick up a new speciality - people want to pay you to do what someone else has already paid you to do, not what you say you've learned on your own - and it's even harder when you add that telecommute filter. I keep thinking of bagging it, but so far at least, the pluses still outweigh the minuses. YMMV.
I know that alot of companies in NY have policies that allow their techies to work from home at least 4/5 days a week. They give it as an option, and usually requires a VPN or something similar. My office, which is a small company, is soon going to set something like that up where I only have to come into work once a week for a couple of hours to coordinate with managers. We are getting a VPN where I'll be able to dial in (or connect through TCP/IP) and, from my home computer, be another one of the computers on the network. I am sure that similar oportunities exist out there by you if they exist here, you just have to ask.
Why is it that people always hear what I say, and not what I mean?
I'm working from home as a recruiter with two small kids (.5 and 2 year olds.) Some major lessons that I've learned... 1. A computer armoire is an essential piece of furniture! Whenever I start hearing a lot of "MY 'puter!" from my two-year-old, preparatory to her climbing into my desk chair and starting to bang on keys, I close and lock the cabinet. 2. Housecleaning help. It's depressing to work in an unclean environment. 3. Realistic expectations. I don't expect to work fulltime with two kids at home with me. I have a sitter for two mornings a week, and otherwise work during nap hours, early mornings, etc., but try not to stress about exactly how much work I can get done, since that just makes it worse. ---Lady Blue
that this would work, at least for me. I'm a programmer in a R&D lab, and I need to interact with my peers. I mean, you can call them, but I usually get voice mail and the response time is pretty bad. Email works better, but ironically, more often than not, I run into the these people in the halls or in one of the many labs when I have a question. There's other reasons that this wouldn't work for me, but the above reason seems applicable to just about anyone (except those that can work entirely independant, and those that prefer to reduce there human interaction, anyway).
The Other Nate
The Other Nate
Around our office, we've talked about it several times, working out the details between ourselves. We've figured out that we can use SSH to work with our server, instant messaging and video-conferencing software, and have our incoming calls forwarded from our work extensions to our home phones. It's very doable for us, but we've yet to try it. Almost all of us live in areas with cable modem service so bandwidth wouldn't be an issue. The only major obstacle is the PHB is a bit of a technophobe.
There are two major products that come out of Berkel
I am the manager of a team of software developers, system engineers, and network infrastructure architects working for a high-tech company in the San Francisco bay area looking for software developers and unix sys-admins: my company will let you telecommute. :) So, there are certainly some employers who see the light. Telecommuting has the potential to solve many problems companies are facing right now in the silicon valley: difficulty hiring good people; a shortage of affordable real estate; over crowding;etc. I believe it should be mandatory for people who can telecommute TO telecommute at least twice a week in large population centers. --Tim Richey
Hey there,
Interesting question you posed. I currently am a software engineer for Excite@Home located in Redwood City, CA. I lived in Silicon Valley for two years and then bought a house here in Houston, Texas. I arranged to work out here three to four weeks at a time and return back to the Valley for a week. It's been working out pretty well. As long as you have some kind of high speed access, a headset and a good travel agent, you're set.
Once thing that's important to note, you must stick to work when you're telecommuting. No fooling around. I try to not step out of my home office even to go grab something to eat. But if you do need to go somewhere, email your boss or your group and let them know what's up. Even if you have to do this a lot, they'll see that you're making an effort to be noticed.
Lastly, always present a responsible and approachable attitude. Especially if you're a softare engineer with customers (internal or external). People may forgot about you, if you're working remotely, don't let them! Be extra verbose in emails and promptly return all voicemail. Invest in some good groupware if you can (not only email), for instance get some kind of web messaging board and install it at work. Teach people to use it and to communicate.
Those are my thoughts, I'm enjoying telecommuting. It gives me a GREAT chance to concentrate and not be distracted.
j
Myself, I work for a small firm who work on behalf of a much bigger firm (no names, it's only /. - who cares?)
But much of my work is on customer sites, so while we have an office, I've done about 50-60 hours this week (not sure, not done the timesheet yet), so I'm gonna work from home tomorrow because I need a lie-in and see no need to put on a suit and sit bored in an office.
Fortunately for me, my boss is cool with this. And yes, I do think I get more work done, unless I need to do testing on big expensive systems, which are only in the office's Lab. I can't afford a large disk array / etc at home (surprise!)
Author, Shell Scripting : Expert Re
You get a lot of benefits by working alone, there's no politics, few work rules, no need to put up with the gum-smacking, finger-sucking, badsmelling beardo in the next cube (oh, wait, that was me!)
But you give up a lot too. You have to establish firm boundaries with your org. You have to let them know when you're gone for the day or they will call at home you all night, on weekends and holidays. You need space. It's too easy for kids, spouses, in-laws to forget you're supposed to be working and interrupt you. You need to remember you really are at an office and work when you're supposed to and walk away from it when you're supposed to.
You also lose the sense of belonging you get from working with a bunch of people. You need to build some other social structure, so you don't lose complete contact with humanity.
But mainly look out for your proximity to the kitchen!! I've gained a ton of weight, I graze when I'm working on a problem.
Even though this seems like more warnings that anything, I think it's the best way to work. I'll never go back.
Really, it depends on the company you plan to work for, and the applications they expect you to use. Here at IBM there are a lot of folks who work from home, of course, on my team we have to use that horrible M$ operating system. This is because there are certain applications, like Lotus Notes, for which there is no Linux port yet (Notes Client not available yet). Anyway, Win95 performance is crappy enough on the LAN at the office, without trying to do it over a modem connection. Therefore, I choose to drive 55 miles each day to the office and then another 55 home, unless I'm sick or something. My guess is that you will be more likely to be able to do this with a fortune 500 than with a smaller integrator/company. Good Luck. Jeffrey Johnson
I can do everything at home that I can do at work, except waste time chatting at the coffee pot and hovering over people trying to get what I want from them. If you can telnet to a box and use POP for your mail, what does it matter WHERE you work. You just drive in for face to face meetings when necessary, but most of the time you could just tele-confrence in or use NetMeeting.
If I could telecommute, I would feel more pressure to get the job done and do a good job; to prove to my supervisor that I'm not slacking off, but being productive with my time. In fact, I'd wager I'd be more productive at home. Of course, if they let me do that, they would have to let everyone do it. They'd have to have a bank of modems that would rival a small ISP. That's probably why right there. The extra overhead that a large RAS would need. Employees could use their own ISP and go through a fire wall, but a company would not want it's propriatry information passed around like that.
In the end, I would guess that the company does not want it's employees to telecommute because it has more control over them when they are on company property. Once you're in, they can shelter you from anything they don't want you to see, hear, or do and push the stuff they want you to see, hear, and do. Squeeze you for every minute of the time they pay you for.
I've been working from home for about 4 years, on and off. I leave the house for site work (router upgrades, and stuff that I would rather be doing on-site, than having to drive in a panic 'cause an OS upgrade didn't work out too well), but other than that, I'm home all day. Girlfriend loves it. I don't mind, most of the time, until 5pm rolls around, and all I can do to "leave work" is to go downstairs. Where I have a laptop. On the coffee table.
If you love your job enough to constantly be around it, then it's good... if you don't, think twice.
-JPJ
Feh.
I'd like to backup what Anonymous Coward (love that handle) wrote. Background - I was a salaried employee writing software for a firm on one side of the country and lived on the other side of the country . The only requirement was that I keep in touch & make a trip to the home office once every month or so for a couple days. (fyi - my employer was small ( 25) so I guess even the small guys do it too) - The obvious benefits don't need to be repeated.. no commute, concentration... yada yada. But the biggest downside I found was that I got lonely. Plain and simple. I found that I missed tossing ideas around on a white board and yelling over the cube walls for an answer to a question. I didn't expect those little things would make that much difference, but I found they did. Also, my code is better when I have a peer at my side often... Would I do it again? Sure, but I'd try to make sure that the office was much closer.
managers...why god invented purgatory
Downsides include what has been stated before, and the fact that you can get into a mode where you never leave work; "I could be going out with freinds, but I slacked today, so I really should be doing work tonight." That can cause a lot of stress.
At other times it can be th opposite, "well I can do some annoying gruntwork or I can do the dishes..." My house was the cleanest it's ever been when I had a bunch of work that I didn't want to do.
Even with all of these problems, this is still the best way to program. No distractions, just get the job done. I find that 4 hours at home usually equals 9-10 hours at the office.
Lately I've been having some trouble finding jobs/contracts that will allow me to keep my preferred schedule, probably a combination of living in Michigan, and my specialization (RT & Embedded Systems). Most places aren't interested in hiring you in with that stipulation (they want to get to know you before), or the're idea of flex time is different than yours, "sure we have flex-time, you can get in anywhere from 6am to 7:30am!" Now I'm looking for work in SF just because I'm expecting that most companies out there will be more tolerant of unusual schedules.
Related to this thread, I think I can share my experiences of working at home with a toddler. If you are thinking of telecommuting so you can take care of a small child, I would defintely think twice about it. That small cuddly little baby will grow up into a pouring-water-on-the-keyboard, document-deleting, coloring-on-the-wall toddler real quick. Currently I am teaching a computer class at night and thought "oh how hard could it be to write my notes during the day while at home?" It can be difficult, especially when you are the primary caregiver and have a deadline to meet. Diaper changes, juice breaks and parenting take your time (in addition to your paid job duties). I love my little one, but I will be surely thrilled when I am done teaching this class and just go back to consulting on my own time.
This is another view of the world.
I'd definately have to agree, with one addition. I worked at home for 5 years, and now I've been in an office environment for 2 1/2. As a writer, there are often times when what I need to do is think, and I find I can do it better at work. At home, writer's block and the need to think often led me to the certain conviction that everything would solve itself if I just folded the laundry, or loaded the dishwasher. At the office, I find I bounce ideas off of others, overhear conversations of co-workers that lead me to the right solution, and generally keep my brain focused on work, rather than on avoiding it.
"A facility for apt quotation marks the absence of original thought." -- Dorothy L. Sayers
Yeah, but everyone lauds the intelligence of younger and younger kids with computers. Maybe they could help mom and dad at home...?
I have had 2 experiences with telecommuting - one not so successful, and one that is working out fine. In my first attempt I was one of 2 remote telecommuters in an organization where all other employees worked in the same office. There was a lot of distrust amongst the office crowd of those of us who were remote because telecommuting was not part of the culture. In my current postion (been here 2 years), the organization is much more distributed and telecommuting is an accepted aspect of the culture, so it works out much better. My work is project oriented, and I make an effort to communicate with others in my org _a_lot_, primarily via email. A plus I might mention wrt telecommuting is that it works well when you are the primary caretaker of school aged children that require a lot of after school driving and involvment. You can generally work your schedule to free up time as needed, and don't have to burn that 1-2 hours you may have spent in a car driving to/from work.
I find that I'm far more productive as a programmer at home. Fewer unnecessary interruptions ("hey, check out this cool website!"). People have to think about what they want to tell you before firing off an email or picking up the phone. I always arrived at work on time :-).
Administration takes a bit more work. Longer phone calls are necessary to accomplish what can be done with the right facial expression in person. :-) But as long as the lines of communication are open on the social level this can work well. If they aren't you can get easily marginalized.
You need to setup your home work environment appropriately. Designate a room as your home office and only keep work related stuff there (this helps at tax time too). Get a separate phone and fax lines for business and have the company pay for it. (Your husband/wife/significant other will appreciate it and your company can be sure that they can get through to you) Get the best net connection you can and have the company pay for that too. (It is their business expense after all and they should be saving in health insurance since you work at home. :-) ) Get a file cabinet for all the extra paperwork the job will generate. Decide on specific times to start and leave work and make that clear with the company.
You do have to make yourself stop working and set limits with the company so that you don't get silly calls at 8pm asking how to setup a modem on a laptop for the umpteenth time because all the other tech people have gone home and you can always be reached at home. It is also too easy to continue working on a problem while you should be preparing dinner or giving your kids a bath or feeding the animals or any of a host of other necessary, if mundane, life tasks. You should have a real life outside of work. Go live it!
If you have small kids at home and both parents work, consider getting a sitter. You'll all be happier. Even if you both work at home. Otherwise tensions can rise when trying to decide who gets to watch the little one for parts of the day. If your kids are in school and somebody has to take them, consider putting some flexibility into your schedule so that you can share the task of taking your kids to school and picking them up. Sometimes the things they say in the car can make your day and put your work into its proper perspective!
When I need to collaborate on a project with other programmers we use CVS or something similar for source managment and we just sit on IRC or use email to discuss the details. It less of a hassle than setting up conference calls and people can come and go as they need to. Works just like being in an office except for visuals, which aren't always that important. Your descriptive skills improve enormously when you can't just say, "Look at this." You also tend to do a bit more background work when bugs come up to make sure you've covered all the possible problems before bugging other programmers.
Since leaving my old job, I've done consulting for another company in New York and one in New Hampshire. I work in a real office now, but look forward to working at home again. I just get more work done that way.
I work from home about 3 days a week (perl coding for e-commerce/marketing firm), but find that I get just about as much done if I can't find the right 'groove' and get focused. If I do get focused, however, I get tons done. I find that the people in my office are a bit too distracting ("Hey, could you come fix my NT box?" - umm, no.) Unfortunately, I seem to get focused when I'm a little behind and end up catching up on the weekend. I don't think it would work so well, if at all, with an hourly position, you'd have to be salaried or have a really good way of tracking time.
All in all, it is very very nice to not have to go "all the way" downtown from out here in the not-so-bustling suburbs. I hate having to use 11 hours a day to work for 8 (1.5 hour commute each way is worst case, and it's only ~20 miles). Even when I do, I can always stay for as long as necessary and then put in the rest from home.
I think that you might want to take a look at Jetspeed, a part of the Java Apache project. It is improving rapidly but needs some more developers to help Kevin out. In any case it is using several other key components such as turbine, in the project and the mail list discussions are pretty good. Take a look! There are several other groupware solutions that run on Linux. Some specifically for linux. Oh, also go to http://cvw.mitre.org and take a look at that project. It is a pretty cool approach to collaborative work, it is java (client) based and runs on Linux. I wonder if there is sufficient community support to get a mailing list up on the topic. Or maybe run a slashdot article? I'ld be glad to help. latimer@forestmarketplace.com
I'm wondering bout the legal aspects of a Canadian, working for an American company by telecommuting. From the research I've done, If you don't have your degree in a related field, you can't get your H1-B work permit.
I live within 5 minutes of Detroit, MI, so a physical work location in the area would be ideal, but INS isn't willing to give that needed work permit, because I don't have a piece of paper saying B.Sc. It's hard to justify going through the three to four years of boredom and financial costs, for a degree that will not be useful in the job market. I've found myself that hands on experience of a few years, far outweighs the potential of someone just out of university.
So, my question is, is it legal for someone to telecommute to work, from a foreign country? I would imagine the tax situation would be interesting to say the least. But does this get around the need for a work permit?
CompWizrd
I have been working from home full time for the past 2 years. I started with a small company (there was 5 of us) and we didn't even have an office - we all worked from home and got together at each others houses for meetings once a week. Then we were bought by a large company based in Los Angeles - luckily they decided to keep me on. (I live on the East Coast)
I fly out to the West Coast occassionally, and use programs like ICQ and AOL AIM to keep in constant contact with my co-workers during the day. The only thing you absolutely have to have to successfully work at home is a strong sense of discipline. Otherwise the call of housework, Playstation, and Everquest will kill ya!
I think more companies are trying to be open toward telecommuting, but are scared. On the other hand, those companies who already allow people to work from home are finding that the majority are getting more work done. Can't sleep? They get more work done. Need to take kids to the doctor? Don't have take off work and not get work done, they can do it when they get back home.
On a negative side, you're always at work. During dinner, you're at work. In the bathroom, you're still at work. It becomes harder to get your mind off work to relax, enjoy your family, friends, etc because everywhere you look is work. I think the only real conflict with me working from home, is by the time my husband gets off work, he wants to sit at home, and I'm ready to get out of there! :-) --Kara Pritchard kara@linux.com
Ahh, yes... the telecommuting question. I've been working as a telecommuter for about 8 months now, and couldn't be happier with it. I'm kind of a loner anyway, not that I'm anti-social, I just prefer to work by myself. I have a phone, ICQ, and email client, WebCams focused on me and lots of web bandwidth, so it's not like I'm REALLY by myself. I have a lot of interaction with others, just not face-to-face.
There was a point made about using the day for errands and the like, which REALLY is nice. No more checking with the boss every time I have to get a haircut or some other trivial thing. It's not like they weren't getting enough hours out of me anyway.
I wouldn't give this up for the world! How many of you office-types had ties on today? Ironed clothes? Uncomfortable shoes? Me? Sweat pants, and an industry-related T-Shirt. I'm lucky if I brush my hair in the morning (yes, I brush my teeth).
-Furo
BrainBuzz.com
-Furo http://www.furo.com
I'm working a a great web-java consulting shop that's dedicated to 100% telecommuting. I think it's great! They're in SanFran, I'm in Chicago. We use DSL. If you're interested email me here
First of all, a little background: I'm a software QA engineer for a networking company in Silicon Valley, I live in Brooklyn, NY. I lived in San Francisco for the first year that I worked at the company, so I got to know everyone and establish work habits etc. Some of my duties are things like writing test cases, writing Perl scripts as utilities or automated tests and actually running tests.
The first two of those duties don't require any special setup or speed, but the third requires quite a bit.
I need to be able to remotely control unix machines, NT machines... I need to be able to unplug network cables, power-cycle machines. I need to be able to communicate with developers and QA people. I also need to have a presence in the company. Here's how it all pans out:
Fortunately I have an extremely responsive sysadmin (read:kick-ass) who has set things up at the company side such that I can powercycle machines by executing simple commands, so that I can telnet into switches and dis/enable ports (simulates pulling a network cable). He has installed WinVNC on all the NT boxes so that I can run VNCviewer to control them (this requires pretty good bandwidth as it's basically a remote framebuffer). I have an UltraSparc sitting in a rack somewhere that is exclusively mine and I connect to it using GO-Global which works exceptionally well and doesn't require much bandwidth. Finally, we use Ravlinsoft's VPN. The company provides me with 384x384 SDSL which works great. Controlling my solaris box feels almost like I'm there. (for the first year I had 192x192 SDSL and it was also great. There really isn't much of a difference except where VNCviewer is involved.
Once you get the technical issues resolved, there's a lot more to deal with. You need to learn to allocate your time (at first I had trouble with not doing enough work, now I have trouble with spending far too much time working). Don't let yourself fall into the trap of pulling all-nighters (oops, looks like I'm pulling one tonight).
A couple of things to remember are: when you're in the office and you get burnt-out, you just go over to a co-worker and chat. At home, you should allow yourself breaks as well. Don't feel guilty about throwing in a quick game of Quake3 on your nice DSL connection, but don't let one quick game turn into nine.
Be sure to get out of the house. You will become trapped here if you let yourself. Make some friends at your new location and spend time with them.
Don't let the people you live with distract you. This one is really tough. I want to spend all my time with my SO, and she's more than willing to let me. You need to say "get out of here, I have to get some work done". I still have problems with that
Try not to procrastinate. It's very easy to say "Well, I want to watch TV now, I can always finish this up later" when your commute is so short (15 seconds or so) but I have found that the later it gets the more tired you become and the harder it is to get back on a roll. (Why am I posting this message rather than finishing up those tests... doh!)
In order to maintain a presence at the company, I am flown out there for about 2 weeks every two months. If you're company is willing to do that, it's pretty cool and be sure to eat steak often when you're expensing it. The problem with that is, I have gotten used to working in a mostly distraction-free environment (excluding the SO) and so being back in the office, full of people who would just love to take my time, can make it difficult to remain focused.
Try to minimize expense reports when you're at home. I found that I was calling the office a LOT but I'd never take the trouble to go through my phone bill and figure out what to expense. Once the company gave me a calling card, everything was much nicer. Along those lines, if you don't have a lot of credit or cash in your bank account, try to get your company to provide you with corporate credit card and car-rental card. This takes a lot of the headaches out of those trips to the central office.
So, the final bit: yes, it's possible- even when there are a lot of technical hurdles. The benefits are great, especially if your manager is a "results oriented" person rather than a micromanager. Note: if you plan to be a manager remotely, it's probably not too feasable. That brings up another point: working remotely can prevent you from progressing in the company. Assuming that you want to head toward a management position (which I don't) you might find that avenue limited.
I'm sorry this has been so rambling, but I hope it provides you with some useful information.
- Working with self-starters (peers and direct reports) and being a self-starter yourself
- Having a solid agreement with your employer about how you will work (hours of availability, who pays for what, etc.). I put mine in writing before I left the office full-time.
- Getting set up - get all the infrastructure in place and tested first, and get a damn nice phone (full-duplex speakerphone, 2.4Ghz cordless with headset, etc.) because you're going to live on it.
I can't imagine going back to work in an office fulltime again... I think I'd go nuts.I work at on Office in MN, and can in theory tellecommute anytime. (THere are dial in servers and the like to get around the firewall. As a Unix orianted enviroment we have it easier) There is one guy who lives in Arizona (For those who don't know US geography, he is about 1700 KM away) He gets his work done, I get my work done. However when we have to work togather it is difficult. I cannot show him what is on my screen, he cannot see what is on mine. (not well anyway) I cannot point to a line of code and ask what that does. He cannot take control of my screen for a moment to write a line of code that he understands better then me. I need to look over his shoulder when he does because I understand the pig picture of that function better then him, but he knows the function I want to call better...
OTOH, many of the guys around here will send a message once or twice a month "Working from home this afternoon". We find that once you know how a piece of code works, how it interacts with everything else, it is much more productive to go home where there is nobody around (Note, see the children comment someone else made) to get a lot of code written and tested quickly. Turn that around though, if you don't understand howyour part of the program works, or how it interacts with everything else, you are better off at the office where you can wonder the hallways: "Hey Dave, soon as your out of the restroom there, mike and I have a question for you." Meaning that if you need someone your better off face to face, maybe with a white board to sketch things on.
Telecommuting can work. Sometimes it works better, other times it is worse. My boss encourages us to tellecommute once in a while because he knows that once in a while you are more productive. (Besides, I'm in Minnesota, once in a while the snow gets bad enough that you cannot get to work, much less safely get to work. Tellecommuting doesn't cost him near as much.)
Just like regular in-house workers, telecommuters aren't much different. You can have your really crappy ones that sit out at the pool at home all day and do nothing and watch TV and embellish their weekly reports. On the other extreme you can have telecommuters who are far more productive at home and get twice the work done there that they would if they were being constantly bothered.
In my experience at my last job, we had two telecommuters. They were both underperformers, but I can't be sure if it was because they were lazy and did nothing or were just really bad programmers (it was most likely a combination of the two).
I personally wouldn't want to telecommute because I think the small daily interactions between coworkers are important. Just yesterday, a coworker and I just happened to start talking about a way to implement something which turned out to be perfect because our ideas fed off of each other. It's hard to get that via phone or email without a whiteboard.
--
I've been sitting here behind a 700kbps line for two years now. I love it and I hate it. Half of the company I work in does this, but I'm one of the most home-staying ones. Recently they bought me a laptop to use on way to work, to see me more often, but it doesn't have wireless net yet, so here I sit in my pile^H^H^H^Hpit.
Expect your phase to get even worse messed up. Expect a new kind of freedom (no clothes at work!) and a new kind of slavery - at home.
Request a perfect line. "512kbps should be enough."
If you're outgoing, social, don't do it. Unless people like you so much they come over, giving you natural breaks.
It's a stretch of sanity, both physical and mental
Maybe I should come back when I've thought a bit better what to say. Nevertheless, I take my situation as an interesting experiment. It is not actually a well-established way of working, so... You'll be on your own, after all, finding out your own way of doing it, I guess.
I think, therefore thoughts exist. Ego is just an impression.
My wife was telecommuting and was able to set up meeting as needed when a face-to-face meeting was more effective. She didn't find it isolating to be away from the office and she didn't find herself working 24/7 (picking up the girls from preschool was her daily break from work).
In her case, though, telecommuting did affect her career path within the company. The reason was totally stupid, though: they didn't allow full-time employees to telecommute, only contractors. Their reasoning was that (and as Dave Barry would say: ``I'm not making this up!'') if they allowed one full time employee to telecommute then they might have to let others. I guess that before you know it the managers don't have anyone's shoulders to look over and micromanage. (Justice was sweet, though, in that due to the unenlightened management policies, poor pay, etc., they were losing talent faster than you could say ``seller's market''.)
There are times when I do wind up working from home (like when you're waiting for a contractor to come and work on the plumbing, etc.) and I find that I am able to get twice as much done. It's a great way to get some quiet time when you can crank out documentation which I can take back to the office on tape. My theory is that it's because I don't get asked questions or I'm not hearing other's conversations over the cubicle walls. If it ween't for having to have occasional physical access to hardware (tape drives, etc.) I'd ask to work at home a lot more frequently.
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CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Or you can do 8 hours worth in 5 or 6...
BTW Linux and GNU was the ultimate telecommute
Well, I've been working for BSDI for years, and I've been at the central office for all of 3 days for orientation and getting to know a couple of coworkers. I don't think a single person in my department works at the central office.
Telecommuting is great. I love it. I probably work slightly longer hours than I would otherwise, but I feel productive, I get stuff done, and I haven't had to commute in something like three years.
(And, if you're curious, no, our jobs are not at risk with the merger. In fact, this is an excellent time to work at BSDI.)
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
I live in Toronto, the main group of writers and my manager live in the SF Bay area, our main database person is in Shreveport, etc.
:) I also hear that the IT folks are a bunch if weenies, so the less distractions the better. just MHO
Our parent company has 2 real offices here in TO, where the graphic designers and IT staff live for both companies.
I thought I'd never want to work at home until I was freelancing last year for an ad agency. They were constantly running out of machines to use, and I hated working in Windez. So my producer said if I wanted to work at home, by all means go for it. I was hopping back and forth to the office a couple of times a week, but for the most part we emailed files back and forth and talked on the phone to discuss things.
Then I got the job I have now as HTML guru and production guy, and there is quite literally no reason for me to go into the office: as I said, all the people I work with on a day-to-day basis aren't even in the same time zone as I am, so why would I go into the office?
I've been asked by coworkers why I don't work in the office, and I figure I get more work done here because I get to use the tools and OS I like instead of theirs
Pope
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
I have been working at home (as a software developer) for about eight months now. My company's "office" is super small and has no carpet or wallpaper. Working at home is nice, but sometimes there are too many distractions. And like you said, it is easy to feel cooped up. I live in Seattle, so it's hard to get out of the house when it's raining all the time! :-( I also miss out on some of those important, imprompto design meetings with other developers. For all it's problems, I don't think I'll ever want to go back to strict 9-to-5 office hours.
cpeterso
Me and a bunch of friends decided to start a small company (web & music) a couple of months ago. Since we're in different cities at both opposite sides of the country (we're in Switzerland), telework was the only way. And it works great! I just have to travel once or twice a month to the other city where the others are.
I achieve a lot more work being comfy at home, and most of all I can start late and work late (all night sometimes). So I work when I feel best for it. If I need a break, the balcony is in front of me and I can just breathe fresh air and think about what I'm doing in a much more relaxed way. And I don't have to deal with a boss, either!Not having to wake up in the morning is great!
When I compare my efficiency to when I was working in an office, I think it 50/50 at worst. The good days, I think I achieve twice more work being at home than at the office. It's all a question of self-disciplin, otherwise you get easily lazy.
Hey, when working at the office, we were mostly communicating by email and ICQ even though we were next to eachother...
Go for it.
-- It's always darker before it goes pitch black.
Now, as it has been said before, when you have a lot of heads-down, balls-to-the-wall coding to do, there's no substitute for being able to geek naked in the solitude of your own spare bedroom, and being just a few steps away from your own bed and your own snack cache and not having to worry about vending machine change.... and a really competent support geek can do a _lot_ with a DSL line and a headset for his voice line (I also know travel agents who work this way.... means Momma can stay home _and_ bring home the bacon). (AT&T does this with operators, too... voice line, data line, headset, "AT&T, how may I help you?")
But.
I really honestly have to say that when you're doing that sustaining, support-group kind of environment, cubieland is, in MY experience, more effective. For most things.
Perhaps the best approach is an employer enlightened enough to allow the employees to be flexible on the issue.... one of my previous ones was. A simple e-mail "I'm working from home today" was notice enough when one needed to be heads-down on something... on the other hand, everybody wanted to be in on Friday, because that's when the beer and chicken wings were served. :)
--
"It's cocktail time..." -- Skip Caray
The company I work for does it. We have programmers spread out over the entire US. It really a matter of whether the company is committed to it. If they are, then the company will do what is necessary to allow the people to work from wherever they are. That means cable modems/DSL, computers, laptops, fax machines, cell phone, etc.
I was a telecommuter until recently. In my case, it didn't work out, but I know that there are other employers/employees doing it successfully.
In my case, the major problem was lack of communication. Partly, this was because I was working for a small company in which the boss basically embodied the company, for all practical purposes. In other words, he spent a lot of time in and out of the home office, dealing with customers, and found that he often didn't have time to call me or email me with new or updated assignments. With the other programmers in the office, he could just verbally give them quick instructions as he buzzed through the office. But as the only long-distance telecommuter, I was a special case that he had to take extra time out for. Time he didn't have.
Also, I found after a while that I missed the social interaction that you get in a regular office. Sometimes I'd get a mental block on some code I was working on, and long for feedback from other geeks. Peace and quiet is great sometimes, but every once in a while you need a little distraction.
I think the keys to a successful telecommuting experience are: 1) good management. Yeah, yeah, I know "management" is a four-letter word, but it really is necessary in most job situations. The person signing your paycheck needs to know that he's getting his money's worth. You need some sort of regular communication -- structured, but not stifling. 2) contact and communication. Working in complete isolation can be disorienting and disheartening after a while. You probably need some way to communicate with your virtual coworkers. Stay in contact via ICQ or a company chat server or something. And when it comes down to it, having to visit the office once in a while can be a good thing. I had to drive up for a mandatory company meeting once a month. It was a 4 hour drive, but it was actually kind of refreshing to get away from the house for a while. The most important thing is that the company understands that just because you aren't in the office, it doesn't mean that you aren't getting work done. And of course, you should try to help them understand that by providing them with progress updates as often as is feasible. 3) discipline. You really have to be disciplined, or you'll wind up spending all day reading Slashdot instead of getting work done. Eventually, your boss is bound to notice :)
Telecommuting can work, as long your employer knows how to handle it. As for me, I'm back in an office, with a 45+ minute commute. Not my dream situation, but I enjoy the work, and I've got good people around me. And as long as it pays the bills, those are the important things.
--
Ernest MacDougal Campbell III / NIC Handle: EMC3
Got Spam? http://spam.gunters.org/
Ernest MacDougal Campbell III
geek ramblings
I agree with this 100%. I did the off-site thing for a couple years before I realized that I really missed having a bunch of people to goof around with.
So, I got a normal office job. But, I do kick myself every day the weather's nice.
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof which this margin is too small to contain.
It is good for the client also. They do not have to find me a cubicle or workstation, and I am more productive in my own environment anyway. For the right type of work and worker, this a total win for everyone involved. I expect this to trend to begin growing like wildfire... in fact, I am working on a business plan for a virtual consultancy. Anyone here want to join up?
Thad
The Bolachek Journals
We have quarterly meetings where everyone flies to DC, but aside from that, we all work from our homes.
I will agree with what others have said about needing to set aside space in your house as your 'office.' I have taken one room and it has been made my office. That has made a huge difference because I know the difference between work and home.
I've worked around 25% or more offsite for previous clients and the biggest advantage is that you get much more work done as you aren't interupted as much (and less prone to RAMs (Random Acts of Mangament)).
The problems however are coordination, it requires a lot of effort from the team leader to make sure that everyone is on track and on the ball. Once the pattern is laid out however its very easy to manage.
The biggest problem is Configuration Management and releases. If your company uses something like StarTeam or ClearCase it becomes unusable over a sluggish (less than 10Mb/s) connection for large projects.
The biggest win for the company however is the save in travelling time and the reduction in stress which produces better quality work.
The downside for the worker is the lack of face to face and the inability to physically threaten the sys-admin when they switch off access to something you need.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
I telecommute part-time. When I'm at home I get more work done, and use my time more efficiently. When I'm at work I spend time here. Go figure.
Bad things often happen to good people,
It is up to them to see that they remain good.
Pro: :)
:)
--No distractions from noisy coworkers.
--Reduced Commute!
--With a wireless LAN, you can work from the porch if the weather allows.
--Future tax breaks for telecommuting??? There's a bill in the Georgia legislature which would grant a carry-forward income tax credit of $1000 for the employee and $2500 for the employer. Fat chance of actually passing, but it's a start.
Con:
--Some lack of contact with valuable coworkers.
--Marginalization.
--Distractions from pets, children, spouses, pet projects, environmental noise (traffic, construction, etc.).
--Time-based projects don't transition as well as goal-based projects.
Miscellaneous things I've discovered while telecommuting:
--After work, instead of wanting to return home, I want to leave home for a while.
--I've spent enough time on speakerphone to be distracted by background conversation when I do go to the office.
--For non-sensitive work that does not require direct network connectivity, "Have laptop, will travel."
--I've been able to use a PC built out to my specs (PII/350), not the company specs(p-166!).
--Running bandwidth-hog distributed apps remotely from an office machine (of whatever type) tends to save runtime.
I worked with some AT&T employees a few contracts back that worked full-time from their homes via ISDN connections. All concerned seemed happy with the arrangement.
IMHO We (Linux geeks) have a real opportunity to be the first to define and develop some useful GNU remote groupware tools.
IMHO Most current groupware is brain-dead copycat sorts of things.
I've got a few new ideas myself. I bet you do too.
Linux is getting easy enough to code for that I bet with only a little effort we could redfine and implement the way remote work is done. IT COULD BE really useful and intuitive for all parties.
I could have a tube with a subscreen for each client/customer that becomes active when any of the group needs to communicate with whomever in whatever form..... Real time.... You get the idea.
At my own place of employment we have two out-of-state telecommuters, one in Ohio and the other in Colorado. Both were normal employees for a substantial period of time, before they had to move for family reasons. From what I can see, having that face-to-face period with colleagues and bosses before becoming a telecommuter establishes you as a real person in their minds which increases the chance of success of the telecommuting arrangement.
After two full years of driving 130 miles a day (I live in Palm Coast, FL. and worked in Jacksonville, FL.), I'd finally had enough. I had managed to scratch together two clients so I gave my two weeks notice at my job, then struck out on my own. I've been a "full-time telecommuter" since the beginning of this year, and I love it. The one thing you have to watch out for is the temptation to get distracted. I set up an office in a spare bedroom, away from the TV and such, and I make myself work. The only other problem I've encountered is the inability to stop! I tend to work for 10 to 12 hours a day now, instead of the standard 8, and I sometimes find myself getting up early on the weekends to go slam out some code before my wife gets up, but other than that, it's a blast!
No matter where you go... there you are.
This is dead on, but even more so for me. Although one can get a lot of work done due to the lack of distractions, and god knows it's easier to schedule errands during the day (and stick the "missed" work on the end or beginning of the day). However, think about all of the support that is gained from being able to bounce ideas off of others, especially if your job focuses more on creative problem solving. Having that extra brain nearby can make a world of difference.
Also, if you're inclined to "move up" at all, you'd best program in some regular face time. Familiarity may breed content, but it also breeds promotions.
I wish you luck. I think the era of telecommuting is starting to open up.
Personally its not God I dislike, its his fan club I cant stand (bash.org)
As another example, a friend of mine recently moved to Ohio from Florida. His company begged him not to quit. To benefit both parties, he agreed to continue working for them out of his home (in Ohio!) until their current project is finished in May.
So, I'd say it is feasible. As long as you can acheive good communication between the telecommuting employees and the rest of their counterparts, and can ensure that they will adhere to proper working hours, there isn't much difference! How many of us ever left our cubicles anyways???
I have to cast another vote against full-time telecommuting. While you are a *lot* more productive, unless you thrive on isolation, there is a psychological toll to be paid. Marginalization, as someone mentioned before, is also a problem; think of how many issues you become aware of by overhearing a conversation, or running into someone getting coffee, all the situations you won't encounter at home. If office communications were perfect, and if we only communicated through our phones and keyboards, this might work better, but...
Looking at the success of the open source movement, one might say full-time telecommuting works. Ok, it isn't exactly working for a company, but the problems with it a are very similar (CVS, project forking, other type of communication/management needed, clash of egos).
Some companies will not hire telecommuters because of these problems, other companies like the cost savings aspect of it (they don't need large office buildings).
-><-
Grand Reverence Zan Zu, AB, DD, KSC
I did it for a while as a consultant. It's hard to keep busy for 8 hours unless you have lots of heads down coding to do. You'd be amazed how much time we all waste around the office bs'ing with co-workers and going to the vending machine. If you take that away, you actually have to work instead. Then there's the out of site out ouf mind problem. You risk being marginialized.
I do contract work for O'Reilly and Associates, I know they are currently looking for software developers. I live in Scotland :)
I have a 64k leased line to the 'net (very expensive here - ~ £350 a month), and we have weekly meetings by phone. I talk every day with my boss on AOL Instant Messenger ("Gaim" here).
So I guess that answers your question - it can work, given the right employer. Most employers I've met just aren't willing. And that's all it takes - the willingness to develop a relationship with your employees so that you can trust them to do the work. No special hardware or special secure VPN links (although ssh helps).
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
I'm a software engineer and I used to work full time for a company in Denver. It was my first job, and I was there for three years (yes, that seems a long time for a first job!). I decided to move to Ontario for personal reasons. Upon announcing this, two people I used to work with offered me positions in their internet startup companies. I accepted with one of them.
:) I don't have to commute - I used to do that on a bicycle, I just don't know how people put up with traffic in their cars. If I had children, I would be there to be there for them to take them to/from school. Probably the biggest benefit is that I get to live where I want and still have the job I want - I can't stress how important that is.
The company that I work for (InterActual Technology, Inc - DVD company responsible for PC Friendly [please, no tech support Qs here, I don't work on that product]) is reasonably distributed, so they already have experience with my situation. The head office is in San Jose. The main software development office is in Denver, and there are also a couple of other people sprinkled around, such as in San Deigo. Last time asked we had about 30 people (and desperate for good people in CA or CO!).
So how do I find it? It can be hard! I used to be quite a social person, especially liking going down the pub for a quiet Guinness with friends. Now I don't get out nearly often enough. The time zones can play havoc with my evenings when we're really busy (although that should change if we could just find good people to hire). My girlfriend is a full time student, so she's often around whilst I'm trying to work. She has an expectation that as I'm home, I can take breaks at anytime - this is stressful as I don't always like breaking my concentration at those times. I really miss the social interaction that I used to get in an office environment. Careerwise, I really miss the exposure to other people's ideas and them talking about what's going on technologically - it's a paradigm shift when it comes to learning new things.
My work days are now longer as I haven't instilled good practices: everything gets drawn out. I get up, sit at the computer and read the news, look over my email. If there's some pressing work I look at that. Finally I decide to go and shower, then sit down at the computer again, before going off for breakfast. Maybe this lifestyle doesn't suit me. I've considered getting a small studio/bachelor apartment (cost of living is low in this city) so that I have an office to go to - this would also help me separate work from personal life, which I often unintentionally and mistakenly blur.
The biggest problem area is with communications. I'm completely reliant on what people tell me over the phone. If I don't get told what's going on, I can nasty suprises. Other areas are hard are when we're designing something new, or trying to tackle a problem as a group.
Tasks/projects must be clearly defined. I worked reasonably independently for several months. Initially I did some brainstorming with somebody through Yahoo! Messenger. It's great because I can copy and paste the transcript. Recently I've been working quite closely with somebody in the CO office - I'm sure I'll have a big phone bill! Sometimes I just wish I could get up and show what I'm trying to describe on a white board - it would be so much quicker and less frustrating.
There are some benefits too. I get to live somewhere I really like. I really get to work flexible hours (especially when I'm working on something alone and I don't need to be there to answer questions). When the under-staffed office is working hard I don't get so effected by the stresses there. I get payed a salary I couldn't even possible consider in this area
A good internet connection is paramount - I have DSL. The ISP is important too. I downloaded a 1.5GB slice of a DB the other day. Some ISPs have limits of 1-5GBs for residential customers. I can really be at the whims of the internet. The CO office is 17 hops away and when the main routers in Toronto and Chicago get bogged down things crawl (I can get ping times between 500-5000ms). The CA office is 11 hops away so I can get reasonable performance out of VPN/pcAnywhere/etc.
As for visitation. I've been down there once. At some point I have to go down for a company meeting. There's also talk of having me come in a few days a month. I can really see how that would be beneficial. It gives me short trips back to Denver - I can't complain about that!
The thing that made it easiest, and perhaps initially workable was that I already new all of the people in the CO office when I started. We were already friends as well as co-workers.
If I sounded at all negative, ignore it, I was just try to highlight some of the issues that effect me. I actually quite like the situation I'm in. I can probably last another year before going crazy (cabin fever anyone?) and need to find an office job again. It's really down to experience. Try it, if you like stick at it. It's very dependent upon your personality and situation and the people who you work with and the people you live with.
I can sit and write a long rambling posting like this without feeling guilty like I would at the office!
We (at suntech) have been doing that; so far as freelancing contracts (ie. we settle a contract with a freelancer, (s)he gets it done, and then gets paid), so the company isn't taking a big risk, provided that nothing critical is being outsourced to a freelancer.
:)
:). But we never know for sure.. :)
:)
However we'll soon setup an actual telecommuting contract with someone, too bad you didn't wait a few weeks to ask that, I would have had more to tell about this particular experience
So far we only had very good experiences with freelancers, but I knew people beforehand, and they are pretty wellknown for being serious (such as the excellent Andrew Apted of GGI fame
What I can say is that we only do that with people we really trust professionally, ie. that they'll get things done in the time we agree on, will be available in normal daytime for questions and problems, and will not disappear as soon as the job is done; we ask for a few months of post-coding maintenance, in case we bump on bugs and such.
Just be sure to put yourself in the position of your employer before you ask for that.. It can have many advantages (like getting top coding skills that you would never get in-house; if you're that good) but the risks are pretty high for the employer; think about it, and reassure them
I telecommute fulltime, being approximately 2,000 miles away from my employer (insert plug here for Dreamhost web hosting).
It takes some getting used to, though. When I first began it took me some time to get used to partitioning my time - you have to be (or become) very focused in avoiding distractions. I don't have kids at home or anything so that helps.
The one main issue I should mention for both employees and employers is that it's important to stay in contact. If your work is something that doesn't change too much from day to day it's not too bad, but if you do any sort of project work then you need to make sure anyone and everyone at the 'home base' knows you are alive. Things like ICQ or IRC can be very helpful in that regard. I never realized how valuable it is to have regular contact with coworkers until I left my old job. I fly down there for a week every few months or so which helps immensely - it's good to know who you work with.
There can actually be fewer distractions when you work at home. After a while you can get into a work pattern that, well, works - that's very beneficial. Also, hours tend to be more flexible for people like myself who are most efficient in non-standard work times (although I've been working on getting up earlier).
On the employer side, I imagine it could be cheaper in some respects. If you streamline things enough, the savings in office space, heating, etc. can add up. I'm not an employer, so I can't say this with much authority, but it could very well depend on what kind of work is being done and the kind of people you hire.
The upshot is that telecommuting can work quite well, but you can't do things 'business as usual'. You have to determine if the kind of work you're doing can be done from remote (mine can), and if you can stand being cooped up at home for long periods of time (I can).
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
I have just written a report detailing why recent attempts to promote out-of-office work has failed at my company. For reference, we're an Australian Real-Estate business.
For a start, there is a difference between the standard "teleworking" from home, and "remote access" from anywhere. The first reaction of staff is to think we're wanting them to work at home, but what we're actually trying to do is just get them out of the office. I'm trying to make it possible to let them work from anywhere - my ultimate goal is to make it possible to work while you're walking down the street.
Basically our Remote Access initiatives have failed because we're not yet a paperless office. To quote part of my report;
The company has been pushing notebook PCs and remote access for longer than I've been here, but we've got staff with their own portable who have never even taken it home. We're also migrating to technology that sends correspondence electronicaly, but staff still feel compelled to print stuff out...Other issues include not just the "go nuts over the silence" stuff that other teleworkers have mentioned, but problems with politics and promotions. Another quote;
Now, the report I wrote is about staff not wanting to telework, which isn't a perfect match for this specific case, but it does highlight some of the problems you might expect. I hope you find this post useful - I'd make the entire report available, but it contains some sensitive internal company references...--
Just chiming in here -- I'm an 80% telecommuter: I live in the SF bay area, and make the commute (1.5 hours one way) once a week to my company's office. I've been doing this for about five months now, and for the most part, it's great. The 12 hours a week I'm saving go right into family time -- playing with my toddler son, lunch with my wife. I'm FAR more productive at home than I am in the office, and have even been able to flex my schedule around doctor's appointments and the like.
Down sides? Trying to get answers from someone at the office -- they're not answering their email or phone, and I can't just swing by their desk. I miss a lot of events and impromptu meetings. Teleconferences generally suck, and I'm resisting a webcam, since it means I won't be able to go until the late afternoon before showering.
Tips: you *have* to have your own space for this, especially with a kid. My office is the extra bedroom, and I *close the door.* Get yourself a good pair of headphones, and keep that CD/MP3 collection close at hand. And impress upon housemates/significant others/etc. that you're not "really" home -- you're at work, it just happens that work is down the hall from your living room. Go into the office on a regular basis if you can: weekly is working good for me, and my in-office day is generally scheduled to the max -- that's OK: you're there to be seen. Keep a log of all the work you do, to show your PHB, esp. around performance review time.
Given the terrible commutes in the San Francisco and Silicon Valley area, the high-tech bias, and the shortage of engineers, I bet you can do this. You'll need to prove that you're a Responsible Person at work, but it's worth it.
Here is a web site I found with a list of telecommute friendly companies:
http://www.hartmanresearch.com/telecommute.html
-Carl
I am in Michigan and have telecommuted more-or less full time for the last three years. My situation was such that I started at the company as a regular worker, that got to know me and trust me. When I decided to move to the other side of the state they asked if I wanted to keep my job and work from home. After almost two years at that company I moved to another company, still on the opposite side of the state, and worked from home for them.
I think the key is to success is trust. It also helps if you are motivated and can concetrate without the distractions that you have at your home. I rarely work a standard eight hour day, I usually work a couple hours here and a couple there. I often get distracted and have terrible output for a day or two, but I will pull all nighters to catch up.
I make my self available via telephone and email pretty much all day everyday, because I trust my employer not to abuse my privacy. I actually encourage them to call me whenever so I can "stay in the loop".
I do go in to the office about once a week. Since it is almost a three hour drive, I usually only spend about 6 hours in the office per week. Since I am a full-time employee I cannot get a milage deduction for the commute, but I believe contract workers can.
The things I think are important are:
1. Trust between employer/employee (that may be hard to come by with out working in the office for a while)
2. Communication. You have got to stay in the loop. Many times I'll get busy and they get busy and we forget about each other. Thats not good.
3. Independent thinking. You need to be able to work without outside motivation, and without a lot of guidence. So you nede to know how to get the people your working for to give you all th information you need to do your job. Sometimes scope creep, and infered features stay locked up in the minds of the powers that be. You bust your tail to get a project done, then they say oops, we meant to tell you it needed this or that. Then nobody is happy. So its much better to ask a lot of questions up front, and COMMUNICATE.
4. Weird hours - It would be hard for me to imagine a programmer who can getup every morning walk to his orher home office in their pjs and sit down and program diligently for an 8 hour work day. Programing to me is like writing, I often get a case of writers/programmers block. (A full time internet connection doesn't help my work habits either!, nor does my baby boy, etc) So overcoming distractions and working when you can is important. I don't want to slack off and screw up the oppurtunity to work in my undies!
I am sure there are a lot of things I should have stressed that I didn't. I cannot imagine a better job. So good luck.
-MS2k
I have several children. I telecommute one day a week. I've found that having a separate office and working hours keeps the spouse and children away. I've also found that when I open my door, the children burst in. So, creating a physical barrier between "work" and "home" made telecommuting reduced the home distractions.
When work time is over, my time goes to the family. This is where telecommuting has been great for my morale. My "commute" is as simple as opening the door and taking a couple of steps. I can immediately help my spouse with the dinner routine, where before she would deal with it on her own during my two hour drive-commute. I also can participate with those evening activites that parents "should" attend.
This issue was one big reason I rejected a $15K salary increase. The offering employer did not want to make telecommuting arrangements.
I hope that employers will take note of this. I'm sure there are others who made a similar decision because of telecommuting.
The biggest downside for me is rather a mixed blessing - office politics - on one hand most of them sail over your head you don't have to get involved with the tacky trivia - the downside is that when they do matter you tend to lose out because you're not there. Make sure you have a manager you can trust to regularly keep you up to date with what's going on in the company.
I've worked at 2 companies this way now - the one common piece of experience was that things worked great for the first few years - but over time I find I tend to get disinterested managers and less interesting work than when I started - this may also related ton the size of the company - when they were small they were great - when they are larger it's easy to forget about the people who aren't there.
Oh yeah when it's free tee-shirt time you always end up with choosing from the leftovers - XXL :-(
I work for a company called Altemi Interactive and we have our server equipment located in the U.S. but we're a Canadian company and all of our employee's telecommute to the server and to meetings as well, we have programmer's located all over the globe working for us. We find it works, I mean it's nice to get up in the morning and work in your bathrobe and drink coffee reading slashdot when your supposed to be fixing sendmail security flaws. :-)
System Panel (Linux When Possible, WinDOH's when nothing else is avalible)
Telecommuting out of state will kill your Drag Coefficient as an employee. To be more competitive, you should consider a combination desk/hideaway-bed. You won't miss the morning commute! ;^)
While I was able to get a great deal of work done, there was the feeling that things were happening in the office that I wasn't party to. The social nuances of having a physical presence should not be underestimated. Its almost impossible to exert a meaningful influence over serious decisions remotely. That said, if you really want to "climb" in your organization, a physical presence at work is probably mandatory. If you're a contractor or simply don't care that much about advancement, telecommuting rocks.
I've been working out of a home office writing software for 10 years now - long before it was "cool" to do so, and before we had the 'net to make it easy. Here's one thing I can tell you - after a long while the isolation that was your friend (because you can get so much work done) becomes your enemy, as you totally lose touch and daily contact with your technical peers. I'm thinking about getting a regular day job just to get back in circulation with other humans again. So, my conclusion after ten years of it: it works, and with the 'net, it works really well now, and plenty of employers support it. Just watch and care for the psychological aspects of prolonged isolation if you decide to make this a lifestyle.
Rob Malda and Jeff Bates live in Holland, MI ... Timothy Lord and I live in adjoining Maryland towns ... Cliff "Ask Slashdot" Wood lives in VA ... Jamie McCarthy lives in Kalamazoo, MI (semi-near Holland) ... Michael Sims lives on Staten Island in New York ... Emmett Plant lives in Philadelphia PA ... Nik Clayton lives in England ... Jon Kats lives in New Jersey ...
... Jeff Covey, Steve Killen, and Dan Pearson live in Maryland ... Skud and Nathan live in Australia ...
:)
On freshmeat, scoop lives in Germany
Andover's HQ is in Massachussets. I fly there once or twice a month, and that's enough. The trick seems to be that people performing defined individual tasks can easily telecommute, but management work is easier if everyone is in the same place most of the time. But since we like to keep editorial separated from management and ad sales, it's probably a Good Thing that I'm 400 miles away from HQ and that Rob/Jeff are 1000 miles away.
Programming, writing, and editing are all essentially solitary tasks, and since that's what we do, telecommuting works for us.
I don't think it would work as well if we were running a machine shop or auto repair garage, though.
- Robin "roblimo" Miller
The single most important factor: Do you have small children that will be around the house most of the day?
I worked from home via modem/DSL for about three months, and it is very difficult if you have small kids (ours are 1.5 and 2.5 years old). No matter how hard you might try, it is impossible to actually "go to work" and isolate yourself from the bedlam. If you write code with complicated pointer arithmatic, you start to eat a lot of Advil.
And now that we have office space, and are moving into it, my wife really resents me not being around the house to "help out for a minute" several times a day. The kids are also having to adjust to having me out of the house most of the day...
I guess it also depends on your personal work habits. I like what I do enough that sitting down to do it does not require a manager in the immediate vicinity. Not everyone or every job is like that.
Bander
What we need more of is science!
The time that succeeded, I was able to get a lot more work done than I would have at work. I was able to fix gobs of bugs, and was able to develop near perfect concentration. And, when I was concentrating too hard, I'd take my two year old to the park. In this case, a happy employee was also a productive employee, and I cranked code at an astonishing rate.
The time that failed, nothing got done. I couldn't make any progress on the project. My wife was continually bugging me, and couldn't seem to understand that I needed to work, Damn It (Janet)!
I think the big difference was this: the time that worked, I had clear goals and objectives. I had a clear path ahead of me from management, and I was not given a lot of conflicting assignments. The other time, all of the above problems were present. The company didn't know what they wanted me to do, they didn't have a clear assignment for me, and I was continually being dragged to other projects unrelated to the one I thought was supposed to be mine. In fairness, all these problems existed in the office. But in the office, I had eight hours a day that I /had/ to work. At home, it was too easy to just slack off.
I guess the bottom line is this: if management is already screwed up, working at home will make it worse. If it is already working, working at home will make things even better. It's like anything else: telecommuting is a powerful tool, which can be used for good or evil. And it tends to amplify whatever it finds.
Incidentally: on the selection of a home office, may I suggest the smallest room practical? There are fewer distractions that way.
--
-- Slashdot sucks.
If your job function requires any significant interaction with other employees, it's not going to work. Video conferencing and e-mail can help, but isn't a substitute. If you're strictly a code jockey or tester you might be able to work effectively from home, but even then you'll need the occasional trip in from the office. I work for an insurance company, and here's how we handle things as a rule:
We have two 3/4 time claims analysts working out of home (they are both trained workers who left to have children). We set them up with ISDN Centrex for network access, regular Centrex for telephone and fax, and periodically they will come in to go over paperwork or meet with people in their department. They each work approximately 30 hours per week. It was a win for us because we kept office space open (it's especially tight in our claims department), and we kept two trained workers who otherwise would be lost entirely. Both live within commuting distance, though.
We also have four marketing reps who are in the office an average of one day per week and either work from home or the road the rest of the time. We accomodate them through dial-up from their laptops. We also handle our five claims adjusters (who are scattered all over the state) the same way. The adjusters rarely come in - they work mainly by PC, fax, and mail.
In IS, we will occasionally have people work from home, but not on an extended basis. I have a mainframe wizard/DBA working under me that I will have work from home sometimes when he's in a deep coding mode because he's demonstrated he's very productive that way without distractions. Other programmers in the department get nothing done out of the office and therefore don't have this option. We decide it on a case-by-case basis.
Basically, I think most companies don't hire with the objective of having people work from home full-time, since there is a group element that helps much of the time in a development environment (and most others). Telecommuting as I see it is more of an option that companies use to resolve situations that would otherwise result in losing a trained, high-skill worker, and even then sometimes not. Unless your work is the kind of work that is solitary by nature (like being a field claims adjuster, for instance - though that example doesn't fully apply here), don't expect a telecommuting gig. You probably are going to have to fish where the fish are.
An option could be having a home where you really want to _live_, but renting (or sharing) an apartment where you want to work, with commuting on the weekends. Though that can get old awful fast.
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
Couple of points from a geezer that used to sell industrial sewing equipment, before he became a technocog in the "new economy"...
At the turn of the century, the sewing machine was a close analog of the PC, in its potential to "free the nation's populace from the drudgery of manual labour." Like the PC, the sewing machine was a universally adopted device in both rural and urban homes, and considerable fortunes were made supplying ever improved and cheaper models to a large domestic and industrial market. Within 40 years of the patenting of the practical mechanical lockstitch mechanism, most American homes had at least one sewing machine, and virtually all commercial textile product manufacturers were fully mechanized. (Anybody see any real close analogy here?)
A price war in clothing developed, that continues to this day. In America and Europe, commercial manufacturers sought to capitalize on the large potential workforce of women who stayed at home, by supplying them with foot powered machines, and by setting up delivery and pickup services to bring them work, and take back completed bundles of clothing. Piecework pay systems were developed to reward those who would work longer or harder, or who could enlist the help of underage children, many of whom began to be held home from school, to increase the family income.
Eventually, organized labor unions (the first being the famous Ladies Garment Workers Association, headed by Samuel Gompers) brought political pressure to bear, to pass stringent "home work" and "child labor" laws that effectively ended the practice of employers setting up individuals to work at home. The enlightened thinking of the day held that only in commercial workspaces that could be inspected by government and union officials could adequate health and safety regulations be effectively enforced, and workers be compensated without the abuses of child labor, so prevalent in the home situation. Many of these laws are still on the books, and are probably applicable to employer/employee home work situations today...
But today, we call it "telecommuting" and we think that somehow the natural economic forces which mandate people getting other people to produce the most work for the least money may not apply. Perhaps "knowledge workers" are somehow immune from economic exploitation in a large, fast virtual services market? Perhaps, but how many people in the financial markets now "start" at 3:00 a.m. from home, via PC, when London opens, and don't "quit" until the wee hours, when the Far East markets start again?
I dunno. Perhaps a more perfect flow of information does, somehow, materially change relationships that once required law and enforcement to keep in equilibrium. Even in the early years of the 20th century, the end of abuses in "home work" and "child labor" didn't end abuse in the workplace, as the New York garment workers fire of, I think, 1907, demonstrated. In that case, a multi-story building full of sweatshops burned, with considerable loss of life, because the doors to fire escape routes had been chained shut to prevent employees from going into stairwells and out on fire escapes during working hours.
In our company's case, we have a couple of women who were formerly full time office employees, who left to have have children, that we've supplied with machines and software to work from home, at their request. They do special projects, mostly database maintenance and "key punch" work, not the jobs that they used to do in our office. Our sales people have laptops, and we've bought cell phones, Notes servers and bandwidth primarily to let them file reports and do paperwork anywhere, anytime (except for the limitations the FAA makes on use of these devices on airplanes). A few of us have voluntarily installed AS/400 and network access software on some of our own machines at home, and use it to do projects on weekends that would otherwise require us to come in. So far, it's all employee driven, and it's genuinely being done to enable people to better balance work and home life.
But as the IT manager, I frequently get proposals from companies offering cheaper and faster IT services using "virtual development teams", generally meaning that they have a bunch of people in India or somewhere else that are willing to work all hours for less than I'd pay for local talent. I haven't used them yet, but I know companies that have, and it's a growing business.
I do know that those who forget the lessons of history are doomed to repeat the mistakes of their forbearers...