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from the all-the-better-to-identify-what-can-be-outsourced? dept.
Dustin Kirkland has written a blog post about telecommuting for over two decades. He goes into a lot of detail about his particular setup. He closes asking what other people's remote offices look like and what, if anything, he missed.
In this post, I'm going to share a few of the benefits and best practices that I've discovered over the years, and I'll share with you a shopping list of hardware and products that I have come to love or depend on, over the years.
I worked in a variety of different roles -- software engineer, engineering manager, product manager, and executive (CTO, VP Product, Chief Product Officer) -- and with a couple of differet companies, big and small (IBM, Google, Canonical, Gazzang, and Apex). In fact, I was one of IBM's early work-from-home interns, as a college student in 2000, when my summer internship manager allowed me to continue working when I went back to campus, and I used the ATT Global Network dial-up VPN client to "upload" my code to IBM's servers.
If there's anything positive to be gained out of the COVID-19 virus life changes, I hope that working from home will become much more widely accepted and broadly practiced around the world, in jobs and industries where it's possible. Moreover, I hope that other jobs and industries will get even more creative and flexible with remote work arrangements, while maintaining work-life-balance, corporate security, and employee productivity.
See similar article at the BBC.
How much, if any, can you work from home? What tools are on your "gotta have it" list? What cautions, suggestions, and resources do you suggest for your fellow Soylentils?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday March 10 2020, @05:18PM
Starting around 8 years ago, I chanced into a 93% work from home role, with ~2 days every 6 weeks on-site (single hop 4 hour flight) for face-to-face time. We let that stretch to 9 weeks once and all concerned agreed that it was too long an interval away, even with a weekly dedicated 1 hour conference call and e-mails / Skype on-demand as-needed.
That role has morphed into something with an office 10 minutes from home, and upper management that's less than enthusiastic about "remote work" but starting to come around, and my direct manager is very much in favor of work-from-home though lately he's only getting to do it a few days a week. Even though they disliked work-from-home, they failed to provide me a desk to work at for ~2 months after I transferred and, since I was already setup for work from home, I started at 80% work from home in this location - coming in for a few hours a week and meeting with whoever was necessary to meet with in conference rooms, and/or squatting in open cubicles. Being so close to the office, I do tend to drive in at least 2-3 days a week, though rarely for more than 4 hours - which helps to miss the rush hour traffic, and, then, there are the occasional meetings called by "teammates from other silos" which have been known to run to 5:30pm, thankfully that kind of "team spirit" has been averaging less than 3 events per year.
As for space/equipment, I dedicated a 4' corner of the master bedroom to a workstation which has the added benefits of an en-suite 30" monitor and decent speakers, which we typically use about twice a year - preferring to keep entertainment in the common spaces of the house. The monitor is more often used to watch the "bus cam" since the school bus pulls up on a blind side of the house the camera gives early notice of bus arrival and time catch the kids. There's a work imaged laptop which gives me all the IT approved stuff and VPN access, then there's my home system which consists of a couple of NUCs running Ubuntu - one upstairs for work, and one downstairs running the living room entertainment system / NAS hub. The locking door is important on occasion, maybe 2% of the time, but during that 2% it is semi-critical to the "professional image," otherwise the kids are invited in to see what's going on - they're usually quickly bored and leave on their own. Clear phone connection can sometimes be a problem even with voice over WiFi (Comcast is the weak link in that chain), in extreme cases I'll get out of the house and walk around the yard for better cell signal - that has always worked well enough, but of course you lose screen sharing capability then.
Every case is unique - in our previous house I would have taken over the 4th bedroom as an office, less than ideal, but that's how the space was chunked up there. Other houses we have considered would have gotten a separate structure in the backyard - one already had a much larger than needed structure that we thought would make an ideal office during the day / family AV entertainment cave in the evening.
Covid-19 has been an unspoken motivator for a recent shift to more work-from-home, since upper management still frowns whenever it's mentioned. Still, after having lost more than one star team member due to a lack of willingness to accommodate remote work, we've managed now to retain two team members who moved away but were willing to work remotely. There's also a push from upper-upper management to cut travel expenses, so of course Covid-19 is the perfect excuse for that, and most of us are fairly competent with the conferencing software even if just used to meet with colleagues from other sites, support from vendors, etc.
Like green energy and sane healthcare finance, remote work coming, slowly.
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