April 26, 2011 at 11:26 am
Ninja's_RGR'us (4/26/2011)
Revenant (4/26/2011)
UMG Developer (4/26/2011)
Revenant (4/26/2011)
Two points you can make to your (prospective) employer.First, telecommuting saves the employer about $500 per month for workspace..
How do you figure? ($500/month/workspace seems like a lot more than reasonable at least in our market.)
. . .
That is what Microsoft charges a vendor if you want a small, humble office. Their number is apparently based on a comprehensive study that is posted on their Intranet.
So where do you work? I have a weird feeling that it starts with M, finishes with t and has a full name of 9 letters :w00t:.
Yes - as a vendor.
April 26, 2011 at 11:30 am
Revenant (4/26/2011)
Ninja's_RGR'us (4/26/2011)
Revenant (4/26/2011)
UMG Developer (4/26/2011)
Revenant (4/26/2011)
Two points you can make to your (prospective) employer.First, telecommuting saves the employer about $500 per month for workspace..
How do you figure? ($500/month/workspace seems like a lot more than reasonable at least in our market.)
. . .
That is what Microsoft charges a vendor if you want a small, humble office. Their number is apparently based on a comprehensive study that is posted on their Intranet.
So where do you work? I have a weird feeling that it starts with M, finishes with t and has a full name of 9 letters :w00t:.
Yes - as a vendor.
What products if it not too personal? Do you work in Canada?
April 26, 2011 at 11:50 am
Ninja's_RGR'us (4/26/2011)
Revenant (4/26/2011)
Ninja's_RGR'us (4/26/2011)
Revenant (4/26/2011)
UMG Developer (4/26/2011)
Revenant (4/26/2011)
Two points you can make to your (prospective) employer.First, telecommuting saves the employer about $500 per month for workspace..
How do you figure? ($500/month/workspace seems like a lot more than reasonable at least in our market.)
. . .
That is what Microsoft charges a vendor if you want a small, humble office. Their number is apparently based on a comprehensive study that is posted on their Intranet.
So where do you work? I have a weird feeling that it starts with M, finishes with t and has a full name of 9 letters :w00t:.
Yes - as a vendor.
What products if it not too personal? Do you work in Canada?
I work on the Redmond campus. Until January I was the performance guru on Zune BI; now I have the same role on Customer Assistance Portal. (That is the app used by people who answer customer e-mails and phone calls.)
April 26, 2011 at 11:50 am
Grant Fritchey (4/26/2011)
nico van niekerk (4/26/2011)
One can understand that employers would be reluctant to allow someone with whom they have no trust-relationship to work at home. There are a multitude of distractions at home, such as being closer to the refrigerator, the couch for frequent naps, and doing outside work on the side. This is especially true if the project is of such a nature that benchmarks and deliverables are not clearly quantifiable.At least the employer knows that the likelihood of moonlighting, excessive private calls, or frequent trips for household chores are far less likely if the employee sits right there in an open office. Cutting a couple of bucks off the payroll won't make that suspicion go away.
It takes time for a trust-relationship to develop and I have found a much lower stress-level at the employer if I work longer hours with measurable results. Granted, I am not a W2 employee, but an hourly-billing contractor and giving clients more than they pay for is just a solid investment in job security. A W2 employee suffers more from the perception of "having to be there" than an independent contractor does.
Predictably, my client's stress-level about remote working lowered considerably when we successfully negotiated a weekly flat rate with my undertaking to immerse myself in the project. Although that works both ways it still took almost a year before relationships were strong enough to make that change to the contract. But, they still demanded that I frequently show my face around the office in spite of state-of-the-art communications and video technology.
I cannot see a large W2-crowd working from home any time soon, exactly because of the suspicion-factor. It's common to the relationship.
So they don't trust me to work from home, but they give me the keys to the kingdom for the enterprise data, and probably the HR & Finance data. Oh, and in the middle of the night, I'm perfectly entrusted, encouraged even, to jump on to work and fix any problems, remotely. I'm also good for doing remote maintenance on weekends. I'm "trusted" all those times, but that 9-5 period, I'm just out to rip off the company... This is my fundamental problem with this approach. If you trust me enough to give me control over your databases, then I think you can also trust me to work from home.
That is the same problem that I don't understand. You are entrusted and expected to work remotely in the middle of the night and on weekends - but 9-5 we don't trust you. Great points Grant. If you need a seat-warmer hire a seat warmer but let the people you "trust" telecommute.
Jason...AKA CirqueDeSQLeil
_______________________________________________
I have given a name to my pain...MCM SQL Server, MVP
SQL RNNR
Posting Performance Based Questions - Gail Shaw[/url]
Learn Extended Events
April 26, 2011 at 11:51 am
I would seriously ponder taking less money to be able to telecommute because of all of the benefits it could bring.
Jason...AKA CirqueDeSQLeil
_______________________________________________
I have given a name to my pain...MCM SQL Server, MVP
SQL RNNR
Posting Performance Based Questions - Gail Shaw[/url]
Learn Extended Events
April 26, 2011 at 12:08 pm
When I took my current job, I told the hiring manager (an old friend of mine) that I needed to work from home about half the time. This was an unusual request, but since we had worked together before, he decided to trust me. I think the arrangement has worked out great. The pay isn't awesome, but having a 20 second commute three days a week is incredible.
The biggest help was the fact that I have a private office attached to my bedroom, so I can keep the family away when I need to concentrate. However, I can still keep tabs on what's happening around the house, which was invaluable in the latter stages of my wife's recent pregnancy. I can't imagine how that would have worked out if I was an hour or two away -- I would have been constantly running back and forth to take care of minor emergencies. And, not having to schedule leave so I can babysit for plumbers and the like is a great bonus. I think I finished last year with days to spare -- for the first time ever in my life.
I think the main thing that I am giving up is a topic that hasn't been mentioned much: opportunities to advance. Not being around the office pretty much squashes any chance I would have to get promoted to management. Personally, I don't care -- I'd much rather stay home and watch the kids grow up than run a department. But, it does translate to an opportunity cost of a much larger salary down the road.
April 26, 2011 at 12:19 pm
Work from home doesn't have to be impossibility for a management job.
A friend of mine worked from home full time and managed the IT infrastructure group for a large IT services company with thousands of servers, multiple datacenters worldwide, and 40,000 workstations.
It might make it harder to get that management job, but that depends on the culture of the organization.
April 26, 2011 at 3:28 pm
After decades of work in the business world, I have found that old habits die hard.
I remember when men (programmers) had to wear long sleeve white shirts and ties to work, and sit at their desks in $500 suits with their coats on, in 108 F degree weather in Dallas. It was many years before those requirements were relaxed. Why? Because that's the way it had always been done.
So it is with the business paradigm that we must commute and sit in close proximity for 40 hours per week: that's the way it's always been done.
However, necessity is the mother of invention. I think ever-rising fuel costs, outrageously expensive cars, and increasingly difficult and time-consuming commutes will force the reality of telecommuting as a viable way to run a company, especially for I.T., Operations, and Administration staff.
I can't help but recall what Grant Fritchey said earlier about his employer entrusting him with the "keys to the kingdom" but not trusting him to work an honest 40 hours per week at home.
The one paradigm does not fit the other, and for no rational reason, other than "that's the way it's always been done".
Ultimately, no matter what anyone thinks to the contrary, reality is going to have its way with all of us.
If a significant number of Americans could stop commuting, it would have enormous social and environmental benefits. What if we could remove 20% to 50% of all the cars and trucks from the roads? This would reduce fuel consumption, air pollution, and wear and tear on our infrastructure. It would likely add an extra 30 to 120 minutes per workday to a working person's quality of life, by being able to avoid the time and money spent commuting, and instead being able to spend it on something worthwhile.
There are many good reasons to telecommute, especially for I.T., Operations, and Administrative personnel. I can think of few negatives.
LC
P.S. My current employer has a dress code: 4 days of business casual clothing, only Friday in jeans. I asked about the necessity of the dress code policy for I.T., Operations, and Administration, since we have almost no interface with the public. A company officer responded that he'd gone to a university lecture where a professor gave a dissertation on his research on dress codes in the workplace. The researcher claimed that he's found that people sounded more professional when dressed up. I suggested to the company officer that he wear a suit to work every day, since the sound of his voice was more important than mine.
April 26, 2011 at 3:56 pm
April 27, 2011 at 7:39 am
that's the way it's always been done
There is no worse reason for doing something.
The researcher claimed that he's found that people sounded more professional when dressed up.
And of course, the company officer just accepted that, without question.
What does 'more professional' mean? You say 'Hello' instead of 'Whazzup'?
Was there a general problem with people not sounding professional enough?
Has the 'professional sound' of the office improved?
I suspect the company officer was trying to solve a problem that didn't exist.
This ties in with Steve's editorial on Drive[/url].
April 27, 2011 at 8:39 am
Michael Valentine Jones (4/26/2011)
Work from home doesn't have to be impossibility for a management job.A friend of mine worked from home full time and managed the IT infrastructure group for a large IT services company with thousands of servers, multiple datacenters worldwide, and 40,000 workstations.
It might make it harder to get that management job, but that depends on the culture of the organization.
Agreed Michael. There are many companies that are global at this point and as part of that remote management is done and works. There is nothing hindering that any more than any other aspect of remote support. Communication is a mindset, and there is not a physical proximity requirement on that.
...spoken with present experience....
David
@SQLTentmaker“He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose” - Jim Elliot
April 27, 2011 at 8:44 am
David,
I saw and had similar experiences when I worked at FedEx.
FedEx is a Fortune 70 international company with many thousands of servers all over the planet. FedEx I.T. employees work on just about every continent. We all worked together, sometimes without ever seeing each others' faces, to implement hundreds of large projects that spanned the globe.
It can be done. It simply takes a corporate commitment and/or necessity to make it work.
LC
April 27, 2011 at 8:58 am
Funny, I worked for UPS, and even though we remotely managed servers and collaborated daily with tech folks we never met face to face, my managers still insisted on my physical presence in the office every day. Strangely, this was in addition to the fact that I was required to maintain (at my expense) the ability to access the UPS global network from home at any time of day or night. But, they had the notion that if they couldn't see me, then I must not be working.
April 27, 2011 at 9:06 am
crainlee2 (4/27/2011)
It simply takes a corporate commitment and/or necessity to make it work.
Yes, that is the key.
J Thaddeus Klopcic (4/27/2011)
Funny, I worked for UPS, and even though we remotely managed servers and collaborated daily with tech folks we never met face to face, my managers still insisted on my physical presence in the office every day. Strangely, this was in addition to the fact that I was required to maintain (at my expense) the ability to access the UPS global network from home at any time of day or night. But, they had the notion that if they couldn't see me, then I must not be working.
Sadly that is the mindset of many. That is the very first thing that has to be overcome. I do see that changing though as the mindset of management is quickly coming to the place where remote workers are not only a possibility but a necessity. Consider how limited you make your corporation by limiting the talent pool to the area where your office is. You could be recruiting from anywhere, pulling the best talent, and potentially saving the company money in the process and the only reason you don't is because you can't have "face to face" communication with your employee's. That mindset will have to go very quickly. 🙂
David
@SQLTentmaker“He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose” - Jim Elliot
April 27, 2011 at 9:12 am
J Thaddeus Klopcic (4/27/2011)
Consider how limited you make your corporation by limiting the talent pool to the area where your office is.
That's not a problem. The company just pays the relocation costs - problem solved.
</sarcasm>
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