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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: 3, Insightful) by canopic jug on Tuesday March 10 2020, @04:54PM (2 children)
What cautions, suggestions, and resources do you suggest for your fellow Soylentils?
The BBC link is just an advertisment dressed up as an article. The cause is that too many executives there are the BBC are "former" microsofters to get any truth out of them in regards to tech, especially standards. So that makes the link a prime negative example of the biggest warning heon the topic of distance work. That is the necessity to ensure that all solutions are based on open standards so that people can work independent of platform and location. An open standard is one for which:
The risk otherwise is that carpetbaggers, frauds, and charlatans (looking at Redmond there) will use the rush to separate fools from their money and tie their machines and their data into proprietary silos unfit for purpose. That's a double blow when the tools are both unfit for purpose and locked into a specific vendor. We need the opposite. We need commodity services to get the ability to swap out components of the work environment for ones best suited to the task, not just suited to the vendor's sales bonus. Only open standards can achieve that.
There was a lot of recognition 15 years ago, pre-Facebook, among most of the multinationals and a few governments about the importance of using open standards to create commodity markets. Most involved at that level have retired or moved on and it's essential to bring that knowledge back post haste. It's really the only thing which will allow people to work remotely without locking the whole team into an expensive silo where the vendor decides on your company's budget.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday March 10 2020, @05:27PM (1 child)
Not remote work, but messaging layer software, I had a sales call the other day where the "pitcher" absolutely astonished me by basically crowing about how "locked in" our colleagues who had chosen their messaging layer had become, they basically had no choice but to continue with the proprietary licensed and monetized solution due to all the effort expended on tools and infrastructure around the messaging layer. While I don't necessarily think that supported licensed software is a non-starter, cases like this illustrate how a vendor can ratchet up fees to near painful levels basically at will once the customer is "locked in." For us, if we're going to have our new products talk with our colleagues' "locked in" products, we're looking at $25K to start plus ongoing commitments of, well, basically whatever the vendor decides they can squeeze us for in the future - since these products have a 10-15 year lifespan, 2-5 year development cycle, and they overlap generations where each generation is expected to interoperate with the previous one, we'd be looking at at least 20 years of lock-in to whatever solution we choose. I can't see how anyone could believe it's good business to hand that much power to your vendors.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 11 2020, @07:26AM
IBM tried to do this to us. They had us locked into their products which included licences that the business came to depend on. The day came to evaluate the cost. Yes, we were locked in. But. There were open source alternatives. True, other products didn't have the integration or features, but they were free. The change was painful for some. Most switched easily.