Telecommuting

Via the Suggestion Box, Jef asks how I manage to do my work from SoCal when the company resides in Austin, TX. Why, I telecommute, of course! ;-)

I started working from home a few years back when I needed to get out of Texas and move back to MN. So I've been doing this for a few years now, and honestly, I wonder how sensible it would be for me to go back to an office setting. My productivity was pretty high when I was working in an office ("indefatigable" was the word I believe one of our users used, actually). But since working from home, my morale has increased along with my productivity. I think I'm getting ahead of myself though, so I'll come back to that point.

I work remote, and one of my two jobs is to manage the rest of the programming staff. This can be challenging, but probably not for the reasons you might suspect. The team of people I manage are some of the best and brightest people I've ever had the chance to work with. Quite honestly, managing them really just boils down to two jobs. 1) making sure they're never distracted by "business crap" and letting them do their thing, because they do their things very well on their own. 2) Making sure they have all the historical and technical details they need when questions arise, so they understand how/why things are the way they are. So at no point do I ever need to do over-the-shoulder micromanagement. Instead, the majority of my time is spent talking (at least, when I'm wearing my manager hat -- my other job is the lead compiler architect, and that is very much a coding position).

Most of my managing job is spent in meetings (go figure), and for that I make use of two mediums: POTS and Skype. Personally, I *much* prefer my plain old telephone to Skype because I find that it gives me a lot more freedom. Also, because it costs money, it tends to keep the time-wasting to a minimum. ;-) But we've also been using Skype more lately for multi-person meetings. It works ok, but truth be told, I dislike the call quality and the fact that it ties me to one machine. I have terrible luck with VoiP technologies, so I'm also skeptical that the benefits outweigh the costs.

Most of my meetings are either "management stuff" (figuring out schedules, features, discussing current topics, etc) or "technical stuff" (explaining how some part of the code base works, why something behaves that way, etc). Working remote really has no bearing on my meetings except to make them more productive. In face to face meetings, when things start to drift off-topic, you're forced to sit there and deal with it. In remote meetings, I just put myself on mute and get back to work. :-P Thankfully, I've also noticed that the more remote people in the meeting, the shorter the meeting lasts.

For my technical meetings, I use three mediums fairly exclusively: phone, IM and email. Phone to actually do the talking, IM to be able to initiate the discussion (I don't like to call people if they're busy getting stuff done) and to share snippets of code, and email to share larger snippets of code. The typical way this works for me is: someone IMs me and says "hey, are you there?" I respond with "yup!" and then the phone rings. We talk for a while, and discuss code. There's a bit of "look at blah blah.cpp, line 1234", and a bit of "here's the interesting part of the code: paste, bloop!" This works really well for all of our technical discussions, and the absolute only thing I miss out on is the ability to whiteboard more high-level designs. So to get around that on those occasions, I just draw on my whiteboard, take a picture of it and email the picture. lol

So that's my "interacting with others in a remote fashion" blurb. Now I want to talk about how it actually affects me. As I intimated earlier, I love working remote. I'm so much more productive and happier to boot. The reason is because I'm a work-a-holic. So I get up in the morning, start working. I work my normal hours. And then I usually do some email checking/other work related stuff "after hours" as well. But I don't feel screwed out of anything, because I also go grocery shopping in the middle of the day (when there's no one out), or go to the bank, etc. The flexibility telecommuting offers is awesome for morale, and I honestly believe work gets the better end of the bargain. I'm happier, so I work harder and better, so my output is better. And I work longer hours than I would if I was at an office (on average). Win-Win!

But telecommuting has its personal challenges as well. You have to have a good enough work ethic to get up every day and do your job, and do it for 40 hours a week. For some people, that's really hard -- they actually need someone to motivate them, and working in a group setting is what does that for them. Also, working from home can get kind of lonely. I find that I also enjoy going shopping, etc during the day simply because it gives me the chance to interact with other human beings. Of course, it also gives me time to mull over work problems too. ;-)

For me personally, there's no doubt that telecommuting is a great way for me to work (for any company, really). I've done it long enough that I know what works and what doesn't. I also know how to work around the things that I'd otherwise miss out on, and still be an effective employee and manager. The biggest piece to the puzzle is communication: if you're not good at it, or not comfortable doing it in large amounts, then telecommuting will be difficult for you. But if you're comfortable talking to people over the phone for long periods of time, willing to reach out and ask for help when you're lost, and able to describe just about anything in at least two or three different ways -- then telecommuting will probably work out well for you. Of course, this also depends on the others you have to interact with in your workplace, since communication is a two-way street!

Hopefully this answered Jef's questions, and provided a bit of interesting insights for you.