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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 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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