Telecommuting (was Re: Looking for Python programmers--where to search?)

[Mats Wichmann]

On 23 Aug 2000 15:36:06 GMT, aahz at netcom.com (Aahz Maruch) wrote:

>In article <39a3d9cb.4496054 at news.laplaza.org>,
>Mats Wichmann <xyzmats at laplaza.org> wrote:
>>
>>(Hint to employers:  there are lots of competent folks who are willing
>>to help on projects - part-time or full-time, consulting or permanent,
>>who don't understand why that should mean being tied to the SF Bay
>>Area... think: telecommuting.  I've done it productively for years.
>>If you bend a little on location your lives will get a whole lot
>>easier trying to fill those difficult spots!  The Bay Area has priced
>>itself out of being a place most people can live).
>
>I dunno.  It depends what kind of work you're doing, IMO.  If it's
>something reasonably "standard", then what you're talking about makes
>sense.  OTOH, I've certainly seen telecommuting fail miserably; while
>it's not clear that the telecommuting was the problem, I do think that
>telecommuting makes it easier to hide problems.  In addition, I think
>there's no substitute for face-to-face brainstorming.


I can certainly agree that it doesn't always work, and some of that
does depend on the kind of work... I wouldn't consider sysadmin work,
say, as a great candidate for telecommuting from a distance (I'm not
talking about "living in the area but doing some work from home" when
I use the term here). When the pager goes off and you're 1,000 miles
away you've got a big problem!

Organizational skills will overcome most of the problems.  You need to
physically meet at reasonable intervals, in my experience.  Sometimes
a crush might call for being on-site for a while - I've certainly done
that; for example a week or two-week long testing pushes.

But email and reasonably designed collaboration tools (I don't
necessarily mean complex commercial tools: mailing lists, web pages
and a network-accessible bugtracking and source code control system -
stuff which most companies need to have in place for internal use
anyway) will do the trick for development work.  I've found plenty of
examples where folks within the same company use email /far/ more than
face-to-face situations for actual problem-solving; the face-to-face
time gets spent on chat. It's easy to tell when email isn't working,
then you just reach for the phone.

What I find somewhat frustrating is that a lot of companies come in
with the mindset that they can't "build a team" without putting them
in adjacent cubicles, and won't budge off of that.  It just plain
isn't true; I've been part of a wonderful team that was spread all
over the world.  Some subset of us did meet nearly monthly in various
suitable locations, but I think the continuing advancement of the
large number of collaborative internet-based developments going on
around us shows even that often isn't strictly necessary. Granted, we
can't go out together and play softball and drink beer :-( but I think
that sort of thing is somewhat overrated as to being essential to a
professional, productive work environment.

I agree with the poster who didn't put much faith in the
teleconferencing systems, by the way.  I've gotten no real productive
work out of them either.  They don't even work well in a corporate
campus environment with a pretty solid backbone net (I'm sure there
are places that make it work, before someone stands up to dispute).

Sorry, I got sucked into drifiting far off Python topics... so I'll
shaddup now.

Mats Wichmann

(Anti-spam stuff: to reply remove the "xyz" from the
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