Re: Looking for a Tier 1 ISP Mentor for career advice.
--- bicknell@ufp.org wrote: From: Leo Bicknell <bicknell@ufp.org> If you have telecommuters _everyone_ in the office should be forced to work from home at least 2 weeks a year, including the manager. It's only from that experience you learn to deal with your telecommuting co-workers in a way that raises everyone's productivity. --------------------------------------------- I have been bemoaning the lack of telecommuting positions available since I last did that permanently from 1998-2002. I could never figure out how to get the managers since then to understand how to manage remote workers effectively, as that's what I think the problem is. The manager's ability to value an employee in this century's methodology, rather than the old way: "wow, he was in the office 10 hours today. He must've gotten a lot of work done". When, actually, the person played around for 6 of those hours while looking busy. Having the manager work from home, even temporarily, would solve this. Now if I can just get them to actually do that... :-) --------------------------------------------------- Once over that hump there are huge rewards to having telecommuters. You can pay lower salaries as people can live in cheaper locations. --------------------------------------------------- The company gets to pay for less space, too. Have a "hot cube" where everyone uses it for the day(s) they need to work in the office. I really hope manager-types are listening. You limit yourselves to those available in your immediate area and the skills they have. Opening yourselves to telecommuting allows you to hire folks with skills that may match your needs more effectively. Personally, I am working at smaller networks than I would like to, but I get to live on Kauai and surf places like this every day: www.imagemania.net/data/media/22/Polihale%20Beach,%20Kauai,%20Hawaii.jpg when I'd rather get back into BGP and operating large networks because I enjoy it. However, I will not give up life's fun things just to do that for a living. I know I'm not the only one out there who thinks this way. scott --- bicknell@ufp.org wrote: From: Leo Bicknell <bicknell@ufp.org> To: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: Looking for a Tier 1 ISP Mentor for career advice. Date: Fri, 2 Dec 2011 07:37:08 -0800 In a message written on Fri, Dec 02, 2011 at 12:25:41PM +0000, Thorsten Dahm wrote:
The downside of this is that you are not around in the office in case someone wants to talk to you. I often end up with guys from our operations team or other teams stopping at my desk and ask questions. Or guys who want to have a quick chat about a problem and want to ask for an advice or idea. Or people who want to learn Perl and have a question that you can answer in 30 seconds.
I've both delt with remote employees and been a telecommuter. After those experiences, and reading a few books I've decided the hardest thing about having successful telecommuters is dealing with the folks in the office. Telecommuters quickly turn to technology, they want to video-chat with collegues. Are eager to pick up the phone and talk. They reach out (generally). It's the folks in the office that are reluctant. They don't see the point of figuring out how the video chat software works, of setting their status to indicate what they are doing, and so on. The "water cooler" conversations can be moved to Skype, FaceTime, Google Hangouts, or any number of other solutions, but it requires everyone to be in that mindset. If you have telecommuters _everyone_ in the office should be forced to work from home at least 2 weeks a year, including the manager. It's only from that experience you learn to deal with your telecommuting co-workers in a way that raises everyone's productivity. Once over that hump there are huge rewards to having telecommuters. You can pay lower salaries as people can live in cheaper locations. People in multiple timezones provide better natural coverage. People are much more willing to do off hour work when they can roll out of bed at 5AM and be working at 5:05 in their PJ's, rather than getting up at 4 and getting dressed to drive in and do the work. -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
On Fri, Dec 2, 2011 at 12:30 PM, Scott Weeks <surfer@mauigateway.com> wrote:
--- bicknell@ufp.org wrote: From: Leo Bicknell <bicknell@ufp.org>
If you have telecommuters _everyone_ in the office should be forced to work from home at least 2 weeks a year, including the manager. It's only from that experience you learn to deal with your telecommuting co-workers in a way that raises everyone's productivity. ---------------------------------------------
I have been bemoaning the lack of telecommuting positions available since I last did that permanently from 1998-2002. I could never figure out how to get the managers since then to understand how to manage remote workers effectively, as that's what I think the problem is. The manager's ability to value an employee in this century's methodology, rather than the old way: "wow, he was in the office 10 hours today. He must've gotten a lot of work done". When, actually, the person played around for 6 of those hours while looking busy.
Having the manager work from home, even temporarily, would solve this. Now if I can just get them to actually do that... :-)
Easy. Have the managers manage people halfway around the planet. Only a tiny minority of my team works in the same timezone I do; if I made my team members fit to my office-day work schedule, they'd quickly mutiny. Working from home lets me interact with them at more reasonable hours for them, without causing too much undue impact to my life schedule. It also helps when you're managing people 12,000 miles away; there's almost zero chance of "face to face" time in the office, so you quickly learn to use IRC, IM, and remote access voice conference bridges to do realtime or near-realtime interaction when needed, and email for longer-term threads.
I really hope manager-types are listening. You limit yourselves to those available in your immediate area and the skills they have. Opening yourselves to telecommuting allows you to hire folks with skills that may match your needs more effectively.
Some of us are; unfortunately, we're not the ones with open headcount for hiring, because nobody on our teams ever wants to leave. ;-P
Personally, I am working at smaller networks than I would like to, but I get to live on Kauai and surf places like this every day:
www.imagemania.net/data/media/22/Polihale%20Beach,%20Kauai,%20Hawaii.jpg
when I'd rather get back into BGP and operating large networks because I enjoy it. However, I will not give up life's fun things just to do that for a living. I know I'm not the only one out there who thinks this way.
Totally agree; I've been courted by companies that are eager to hire me, but once the subject of telecommuting is broached, they suddenly backpedal; to me, that's a clear sign there's an impedance mismatch, at which point I usually politely end the conversation.
scott
Matt
participants (2)
-
Matthew Petach -
Scott Weeks