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posted by martyb on Tuesday March 10 2020, @04:30PM   Printer-friendly
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?


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by RS3 on Tuesday March 10 2020, @06:37PM

    by RS3 (6367) on Tuesday March 10 2020, @06:37PM (#969200)

    Sounds good, but is only somewhat true. One of my current occasional jobs is IT/server admin. I do it mostly from home or wherever I can remote access. However, sometimes (rarely really) a reboot hangs, or HD dies, or machines need dust blown out, or change/upgrade something in hardware, or reconfigure Ethernet, build up new machine, etc. About a 15 mile drive if needed- not too bad most times of day.

    True, you could have remote people doing as much as they can, and some local grunts doing hands-on, but that would be pretty bad management. Might save $, but if something goes wrong, esp. with communication between remote and local workers, you could have a disaster.

    So it really depends on the specifics of the work, communication, criticality, etc.

    And talk to Boeing about managing local and remote software developers...

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