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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: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 10 2020, @06:40PM
Well put. For your sake I hope that you aren't forced to work from home during this virus crisis|scare event.
As counterpoint to your situation, I'm now in my mid-60s and have always worked from home, an engineering consultancy with a few others who also work from home. Over the years I've done spells of up to a month at a variety of different customer sites and have seen plenty of bureaucracy, office politics and bs at all of them...enough distractions that working there just seems like it would not be productive.
The walk downstairs or across the house to my office is effortless and I can't imagine commuting to work. Most of my local driving/bicycling is during off-peak hours, but every now and then I have to drive during the local rush hour, which isn't any fun at all. I enjoy driving my stick shift car and suspect that avoiding rush hour has a lot to do with this.
One of the other threads mentioned backup internet--I'm fortunate that my sister's house is about 2km away and I keep an older laptop there which is (mostly) in sync with my main computer. If there is a problem at my house, I can work from the other house, use that internet, etc.