Having been working for the same company for the past six years in London, last month I actually took the step of moving abroad (to Cannes, France...); for reasons split between reducing living costs and wanting a change in lifestyle.
Being responsible for a company network and also doing production (websites, graphic work) this isn't too much of a problem to carry out remotely and was easily arranged due to a reduction in the size of the company - in fact we're giving up the office altogether, resulting in everyone starting to work as a remote team, although due to our fairly specific roles communication follows fairly direct routes between each other.
For the past month I have even managed to work over a dialup connection (no, not ideal but it takes time to get ADSL installed when France Telecom engineers go on strike) much to my suprise finding that it is actually quite easy to cut back on badwidth usage (latency is my only problem...) this would have been hard had the company been larger and if I were supporting more users though!
This kind of situation is easy enough to support using IM, screen sharing and project management tools, I also have a UK number which makes it look to clients like I'm still in the country! But one has to be careful to choose the most appropriate method of comms, for example it can be hard to explain a concept by IM when it's not clear what both parties are talking about and easy to waste hours when a telephone call could have bee a lot easier, but it doesn't have to be more expensive - if one uses a SIP/VOIP system for example (although dedicated handsets are really required). And the PM system is important - the employer or project manager needs to know they can easily keep track of what remote workers are doing and where there are with a project. Personally I use a to-do list with a sharing capacity, but I found nobody ever looked at it and always wanted to ask me directly, this is only slightly less true with the PMS and one can find that you spend far more time explaining what you are doing when working remotely, reassuring the employer that you arn't lazing around on the beach with a beer (but then if there was Wi-Fi on the beach...).
Previously I lived about a 15 minute scooter ride away from the office so travel was not an issue, although at previous times I used to be up to an hour away, now I'm a mere 10 second stumble from my bed - but as a result I do miss observing and interacting with the world every day, working from home could lead to becoming somewhat divorced form the real world. Working in the same physical location as colleagues does also install a little more necessity into ones work ethic, wheras in ones own home you must have a very strong will not to become distracted, developping a schedule to which you can stick to, although this is less true of a support-role where working from home is actually ideal - you can distract yourself easily but still be ready to respond - without being bored! "Helpdesk, Hello? Yes It'd be my absolute pleasure to help you with that horizontal rule you're having trouble deleting in Word, anything to distract me from the blue skies and cold beer whilst you're stuck in your miserable little cubicle". Think of the karma that could be generated by shipping entire support teams to a remote island somewhere with gigabit dark fibre back to the realworld. Actually this why they get outsourced to India, no that's the cost, the sunny disposition is third after being slightly harder to understand...
I think remote working has many benefits for certain professions (paticularily ICT service industries, key knowledge-holders and anyone just manipulating data), but will never be practical for most others.
Cost wise it is obviously cheaper not to travel, and you can choose to live somewhere cheaper, but you will also see communication-related charges go up, but these should be covered by your employer as they should see reduced overheads, unless you are working for yourself, but working f
SSH to your colleagues computers and run osascript -f 'say "insert witty comment here"' obviously the possibilities are endless but you'll need to know the login for the current user (made easier if your're the sysadmin;) and have to be running OS X on the target computer.
But unless you have a webcam in the office you won't be able to see the victims response...
This also has productive uses too, e.g. if my boss isn't running IM and I need to chat I just SSH in and launch it for him...
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Having been working for the same company for the past six years in London, last month I actually took the step of moving abroad (to Cannes, France...); for reasons split between reducing living costs and wanting a change in lifestyle.
Being responsible for a company network and also doing production (websites, graphic work) this isn't too much of a problem to carry out remotely and was easily arranged due to a reduction in the size of the company - in fact we're giving up the office altogether, resulting in everyone starting to work as a remote team, although due to our fairly specific roles communication follows fairly direct routes between each other.
For the past month I have even managed to work over a dialup connection (no, not ideal but it takes time to get ADSL installed when France Telecom engineers go on strike) much to my suprise finding that it is actually quite easy to cut back on badwidth usage (latency is my only problem...) this would have been hard had the company been larger and if I were supporting more users though!
This kind of situation is easy enough to support using IM, screen sharing and project management tools, I also have a UK number which makes it look to clients like I'm still in the country! But one has to be careful to choose the most appropriate method of comms, for example it can be hard to explain a concept by IM when it's not clear what both parties are talking about and easy to waste hours when a telephone call could have bee a lot easier, but it doesn't have to be more expensive - if one uses a SIP/VOIP system for example (although dedicated handsets are really required). And the PM system is important - the employer or project manager needs to know they can easily keep track of what remote workers are doing and where there are with a project. Personally I use a to-do list with a sharing capacity, but I found nobody ever looked at it and always wanted to ask me directly, this is only slightly less true with the PMS and one can find that you spend far more time explaining what you are doing when working remotely, reassuring the employer that you arn't lazing around on the beach with a beer (but then if there was Wi-Fi on the beach...).
Previously I lived about a 15 minute scooter ride away from the office so travel was not an issue, although at previous times I used to be up to an hour away, now I'm a mere 10 second stumble from my bed - but as a result I do miss observing and interacting with the world every day, working from home could lead to becoming somewhat divorced form the real world. Working in the same physical location as colleagues does also install a little more necessity into ones work ethic, wheras in ones own home you must have a very strong will not to become distracted, developping a schedule to which you can stick to, although this is less true of a support-role where working from home is actually ideal - you can distract yourself easily but still be ready to respond - without being bored! "Helpdesk, Hello? Yes It'd be my absolute pleasure to help you with that horizontal rule you're having trouble deleting in Word, anything to distract me from the blue skies and cold beer whilst you're stuck in your miserable little cubicle". Think of the karma that could be generated by shipping entire support teams to a remote island somewhere with gigabit dark fibre back to the realworld. Actually this why they get outsourced to India, no that's the cost, the sunny disposition is third after being slightly harder to understand...
I think remote working has many benefits for certain professions (paticularily ICT service industries, key knowledge-holders and anyone just manipulating data), but will never be practical for most others.
Cost wise it is obviously cheaper not to travel, and you can choose to live somewhere cheaper, but you will also see communication-related charges go up, but these should be covered by your employer as they should see reduced overheads, unless you are working for yourself, but working f
SSH to your colleagues computers and run osascript -f 'say "insert witty comment here"' obviously the possibilities are endless but you'll need to know the login for the current user (made easier if your're the sysadmin ;) and have to be running OS X on the target computer.
But unless you have a webcam in the office you won't be able to see the victims response...
This also has productive uses too, e.g. if my boss isn't running IM and I need to chat I just SSH in and launch it for him...