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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, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 11 2020, @12:11PM
Everything useful I've accomplished has been accomplished at home. I only go into the office to satisfy people in suits who insist I sit there. Between the sales guy who spends all day yelling into his phone, the helpdesk guy whose phone spends all day yelling at him, the guy with the chronic cough in the next cubicle, the manager whose sense of self-worth is measured in number of interruptions produced, and the general distraction produced by being crammed into a 1955 style bullpen with a hundred other people, it's basically impossible to get anything done. No wonder people spend so much time in meetings - at least they can pretend to be doing something useful. After all this, I go home and do about three hours of actual work.
The only time I've accomplished a significant amount of actual work at an office, it was when I was working on hardware rather than software and I had to be in the facility to physically work with it. Even then - the design stuff all had to be done at home. The lab was for testing and assembly. In terms of software, I can set up a server or install an OS upgrade or something, but actually developing working code - it's just not possible.