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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 10 2020, @06:59PM
I've been working from home for more than 10 years now and I agree with most of the points made in the article. A dedicated office space is essential and I would go as far as saying this must be behind closed doors if you have young family in the house. This also makes it easier to define when you are "at work" and when you are not and I personally find it helps me compartmentalise my time and ensure that I'm fully focused on work when I'm supposed to be. I worked for myself previously and still have the full office furniture that I bought back then.
My company supplies a standard work laptop and I hook it up to a spare port on one of my existing monitors. All data is accessed over a corporate VPN and the applications are a mixture of locally installed, remote Citrix and remote Secure Desktop. Luckliy my broadband is rock solid and I've never had any problems with anything running remotely - if anything the network is far faster when at home than the crowded Wi-Fi in the office. Various co-workers have stated that they couldn't work at home permanently due to the isolation/loneliness but I've never found that much of a problem. I'm constantly on Skype and on calls/in meetings throughout the day - the advantage being I can keep working with my headset on rather than sitting in the room doodling.
I carry the extra costs of electricity, heating and lighting without complaint because compared to the cost of the commute these are negligible. And given that my office is a 3.5 hour round trip away the time savings outweigh any of the negatives I can think of. I'm lucky that my manager supports me and has no problem with my homeworking, several others in the organisation have insisted that colleagues limit their homeworking to one day a week and we've lost some good talent because of those petty rules.