Re: Cases for telecommuting/working remotely

[Jefro <jefro -at- jefro -dot- net>]

Coming to this conversation late...

I have been telecommuting as a technical writer full-time from the wilds 
of northern California for six years.  I live about 4.5 hours north of 
Silicon Valley.  I would never go back to living in the traffic and 
noise and pollution, but there are some pitfalls with nontrivial 
solutions.  These are things to consider carefully before making the jump.

1. Layoffs.  I work best as a captive, and have endured two layoffs thus 
far.  The first was in 2002, a very bad time to be laid off.  I finally 
convinced my previous company that it was awkward to ship product 
without documentation, so they hired me back two months later.  Last 
year was a bit worse---I had been with a startup for about a year when 
they crumbled, providing no severance or anything like it, and I was out 
of work from August until late November, almost 4 months.  Being out of 
work is difficult enough when prospective jobs are somewhat local.  
Competing from afar is highly stress-inducing.

2. Job hunting.  Remote job-hunting can be tough.  You are trying to 
convince someone sight-unseen that you can do a better job for them than 
the legions of writers who live locally.  This is actually often true, 
but you have to prove it, and you also must prove that you are not going 
to be a nightmare employee who does only the minimum while sitting at 
home eating bonbons.  Employers understand the risks of remote employees 
but often don't understand the benefits, or weigh them differently from 
the prospective employee.  It helps greatly both in interviews and 
during employment to see the situation from their point of view.

3. Interviews.  If you are coming from a long way off, companies 
generally pay travel expenses for prospective employees. If you live 
locally, obviously they don't.  I live half a day's drive away, which 
makes the situation murky, and in my experience they don't offer to pay 
unless you get on a plane.  I figure it costs a minimum of $200 to 
travel to the bay area for interviews, so if I'm job hunting I try to 
gang as many together at once as possible.  Once last fall I had three 
2-hour interviews in different parts of the bay area, and did it all in 
one day with no hotel.  Grueling.  It is better to spend the night 
before the interview in a hotel and arrive bright and fresh, but of 
course that adds to the expense.

4. Starting up.  Getting going with a new company can be the pits, as 
they generally want you on-site a lot at first.  This could mean a 
couple of days, or it could mean a couple of months.  This is often true 
for contracts as well as captive employment.  For me it involves staying 
in hotels, either away from my family entirely or with them along for 
the ride.  The latter is fun for a day or two, but not for weeks on end.

5. Interruptions and distractions.  Much has been written on this 
subject already.  It is challenging but manageable.  We are 
homeschooling, which makes it more challenging, but also much more 
rewarding to take 5 minutes to help debug a math problem or a paper 
airplane design, as opposed to a water-cooler conversation about last 
night's reality show or someone else's divorce.  I keep my door open as 
much as possible, and the family knows not to bother me when it is closed.

6. Networking.  It is tough to keep up with your employment-social 
network remotely.  I trade jokes daily with the lumberjack down the 
street, but it is pretty tough to find someone to discuss the relative 
benefits of 3G telephony networks when most of the people you know don't 
even own cell phones.  It is very easy to get complacent, far easier 
than when you see and experience the industry daily.  Lists like 
TECHWR-L help, social groups like STC (ducking for cover) can help as 
well.  I also spend some time every day chatting with ex-coworkers over 
MSN Messenger (or equivalent) while working.

7. Technical skills.  They can atrophy.  See #6 for starters.  I tend to 
spend at least 1/5 of my day keeping up with high-tech news, much more 
than I did when I was local, and I also not only maintain my own 
equipment but occasionally branch out into new projects at my own 
expense, sometimes paid and sometimes not.  Even if they don't seem 
relevant at the time, it really truly helps to keep my brain actively 
learning all the time.  I didn't realize how much of this was going on 
subconsciously without my knowledge when I was sitting down the hall 
from the IT guy who liked the way I made espresso.

Note that there are many, many benefits to working from home.  I think 
these tend to be discussed more often, so I have concentrated on the 
gloomy side, hoping more people will realize that none of these issues 
are insurmountable, nor do I believe they are any worse than issues that 
local on-site employees cope with all the time.  They are just 
different, and the solutions to them are different as well. 

I hope this helps someone!

Jefro

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