Teleworking

Andrew Birkett has posted about his experience with working remotely. The remote job he took was at a company that focused on developer tools. I think I'd really enjoy working at a similar job, so I'm vicariously glad he gave it a shot. He lists some of the difficulties he encountered:

It's hard to use your living room as an office, if you live with someone. This wouldn't affect me, since we have enough rooms in our home to have a separate office space.
You miss out on casual discussions with your coworkers. I think his suggestion of using IRC is a great idea, if you can get the rest of the team to use it, too. IRC lets you see other people's conversations, as opposed to IM which is only supports one-to-one communication. On the other hand, IM does have the advantage of indicating you're idle status.
It might be hard to keep work separate from non-work. He used a dedicated laptop for work that he physically hid away when not working.
Travelling. I find it amusing that he also has trouble sleeping on the night before an early morning plane trip. However, he seems to only wake up every two hours, while for me it's more like every 45 minutes (fortunately this habit has come in handy once for me, when not one but two alarm clocks failed to go off). I second his conclusion that youth hostels are not the best place to get a good night's sleep. Especially if you're going to sleep before midnight.

We actually have someone in my group who recently started working remotely most of the time. It took me a while to internalize the idea that even though we can't see him, he's still "around". People in my group tend to work on projects alone, so seeing someone at their desk typing is pretty much the only way you know they're actually doing anything. In a group like that, working remotely can be politically hazardous. Fortunately the guy in our group has been in the group for several years, and I don't think anybody doubts that he's working 10-12 hour days.

It sounds like for Andrew, the traveling part was the most draining. He made the trip every two weeks, and stayed for two days. The guy in our group only travels once a month, and stays for a week. I wonder whether that makes it easier.

Posted on December 16, 2003 08:07 PM
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Comments

Our company has about five remote workers, and we've been extremely happy with using IRC as a collaboration tool. We keep a channel open for each active project, and a general company channel open. It goes quite a way to creating the feeling of an office team. We've tried other tools, like instant messaging and even iSights, but haven't found anything that beats simple IRC.

Posted by: Matt Henderson at December 23, 2003 10:22 AM

When I worked for Sonique, we all were on IRC (on the same channel) all the time. We were in the same office, but it still was handier than going to the other guy's desk.

When I worked at AOL we all used AIM, which was also very convenient even for dealing with people in the same office.

I think they both worked about as well, though definitely differently.

Posted by: Jesse at December 26, 2003 12:15 AM

I'm wary of instant messangers - mostly because of how they perform from a user-interface point of view is far more 'intrusive' than the way that IRC clients perform.

Someone talks to you on irc (says your name) and probably the most that will happen is a quiet sound will be made and the irc client will flash in the system tray.

Someone talks to you on an instant messanger, and you immediately have a focus thief telling you things.

I don't like the idea of my train of thought and work process being interrupted like that.

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