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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: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday March 10 2020, @05:30PM (5 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Tuesday March 10 2020, @05:30PM (#969180)

    As much as I bitch about Comcast, I've only had to switch to use my 4G cell service once since 2013... they're "good enough" and, comically, over 10x faster than the service I get at my desk in the office.

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  • (Score: 2) by RS3 on Tuesday March 10 2020, @06:39PM (3 children)

    by RS3 (6367) on Tuesday March 10 2020, @06:39PM (#969202)

    That's bizarre. What's the office bottleneck?

    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday March 10 2020, @06:51PM (2 children)

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Tuesday March 10 2020, @06:51PM (#969211)

      What's the office bottleneck?

      Just your basic massive multi-national paranoid holding company mentality. The "mothership" doesn't trust the newly acquired business units so all packets go through a filter in the main office over leased lines, and our site initially leased our lines 20 years ago - I started bitching, LOUDLY, about the outdated bandwidth about 2 years ago and maybe, maybe next year they'll get around to re-evaluating the "campus needs" in that year's budget, if we're not bumped by higher priority things.

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      • (Score: 2) by RS3 on Tuesday March 10 2020, @11:45PM (1 child)

        by RS3 (6367) on Tuesday March 10 2020, @11:45PM (#969345)

        Wow, bizarre. I'm too much of an optimist- what are they afraid could happen?

        Could they put the filter boxes in local offices and access them remotely?

        Maybe you could suggest this and get a bonus for saving the $ wasted on the leased lines.

        Otherwise connect locations through VPN?

        I'm sure I'm missing something.

        • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday March 11 2020, @02:13AM

          by JoeMerchant (3937) on Wednesday March 11 2020, @02:13AM (#969420)

          What happens, in practice, is people stay home and work from there... which is ultimately much less secure.

          Bitching loudly and moving the needle on the bandwidth of the leased lines is about as good as I can hope for from my perspective, and I don't want to march in on IT and start suggesting how they do their jobs - I just tell them that a 2GB image download started at work at 10am doesn't finish until after 2pm, started at 6pm it might finish by ~6:40, but the same 2GB download at home is more like 5 minutes.

          Thing is, 95% of the headcount at the location never moves that much data, they just do e-mails, training apps, and various other things that the lame bandwidth serves "adequately" so the IT bean counters get their bonuses by not spending more than they have to, and not wasting effort on change.

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  • (Score: 2) by legont on Tuesday March 10 2020, @08:10PM

    by legont (4179) on Tuesday March 10 2020, @08:10PM (#969256)

    I do it more often mostly because falling trees or poles cut both - power and internet. My laptop over t-mobile G4 works well enough to get through this.

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