Doug Hellmann

I recently came across a few articles by Esther Schindler on
telecommuting which struck a chord with me.

The first, “Getting Clueful: Seven Things the CIO Should Know About
Telecommuting”, is directed at managers of telecommuters. It covers
the benefits to the company of having telecommuters (cost savings,
productivity, etc.), potential pitfalls (not everyone can manage
themselves well enough to work remotely, ), and how to cope with them.
She places a heavy emphasis on building trust in the manager/employee
relationship, especially through communication.

The second article is directed at the telecommuting employee. In
“Telecommuters Need to Develop Special Skills”, Schindler goes a
bit beyond the basic advice normally found in articles like this.
Unsurprisingly, most of that advice centers around communication issues
such as status reporting and “visibility”. One key item regards
conference calls and telling people sitting around a speaker phone to
speak up – we have that problem frequently at my company.

Both articles include specific advice from experienced managers and
telecommuters. I’m happy to say that my company gets most of this right.
We are based in Atlanta, and unless you live in the same building as
your company there is no easy commute in Atlanta. From the very
beginning, my manager told all of us he would rather have us working
than sitting in traffic and we have been expected to figure out how to
do as much of our work from home as possible. This went beyond the
grudging acceptance of telecommuting at my previous employer to active
encouragement. He saw the immediate cost benefit in office space and
productivity benefit in gaining as much as 2 hours per day of extra
work.

As far as remote communication goes, we follow the technology chart
laid out by Schindler pretty closely. We don’t have formalized rules; it
just seemed to work out that way naturally. One category of tools she
does not mention for status/discussion are online collaboration tools
such as wikis and issue tracking systems. We rely on both, with the
ticket tracking system used for asynchronous design discussions and the
wiki for historical documentation, how-tos, etc.

After an initial settling in period (2-3 months) where I got to know
my new co-workers and learned about the development environment, I have
been working at home as much as possible. These days that usually means
4 of 5 days in a week, sometimes 9 of 10 over 2 weeks. There have been
stretches where I didn’t go to the office for a few months at a time,
but those are rare. One day in the office per week works out well, since
most of the developers seem to talk better with a whiteboard in front of
us. I’ve looked into online whiteboard tools in the past, but haven’t
found anything to replace the nuance of the in-person meeting. Perhaps
if we installed some web cams…

We’re a small group, so we try to keep everyone informed of all design
issues. The code is usually implemented by just one or two developers,
but everyone has an opportunity to be involved in signing off on design
and implementation before anything goes into the svn trunk. We’ve been
doing this for 5-6 years now, so we’ve settled into a pattern. For small
designs, an individual developer may do the work and write up the
“approach”, explaining the design and tricky implementation details. The
approach (a wiki page in trac) is then submitted for review along with
the completed changeset. This works well for small changes or bug fixes,
but for larger projects we usually have some sort of conversation before
development begins. It might be a simple sanity check by one other
developer via IM, phone, or email. If a more formal review is needed, we
typically write a preliminary approach, without any code, and submit it
for comments. If we can’t agree on the approach it is time to schedule a
meeting, either as a conference call or in person.

Of course, we also make heavy use of instant messaging on our own
Jabber server. Most of our quick communication has moved off of email to
IM, and we use IM for “presence” notification. If I step away from my
desk to take care of something around the house, run an errand, or get
lunch, I use the IM status message to tell people when I expect to come
back. Email tends to be reserved for progress updates, issues that don’t
need immediate resolution, and sometimes scheduling times for more
direct means of communication.

A drawback to working remotely so often is that I frequently end up
the last to know about things like schedule or priority changes. If an
informal discussion in the hall results in a major decision, an email
still might not go out right away or the eventual message might assume
more knowledge of details than I have. This is a group communication
problem, and we’re working on it, but it can be frustrating at times.

Schindler does not offer tips for handling physical space for
telecommuters in the office. She mentions the opportunity to save office
space, but doesn’t get into what to do when all of those remote workers
do show up at the office. For a couple of years I had my own cube,
even though I was hardly ever there. We’ve recently grown big enough
that my desk was needed by someone who is in the office more frequently
than I am, so I gave it up. When I cleaned out the drawers, the only
things I kept were a handful of business cards and a couple of pocket
reference books. There wasn’t anything else in the drawers that belonged
to me!

Now I sit in the “hotel” room when I’m in the office for meetings;
that’s typically the only reason I go in, any more. Even if I don’t plan
specific meetings, I usually end up spending the day in informal
discussions rather than writing code. We converted a small conference
room by replacing the central table with folding tables along the walls
to serve as desks and by adding a few chairs. There are internet
connections (or wireless), a phone, and the old whiteboard from when the
room was actually a conference room. I used to spend most of my time at
the office in a conference room anyway, so this works out fine. :-)

And of course when I’m at home, I work at my desk here most of the
time. I do try to mix it up a bit, though. On nice days, I start on the
patio after breakfast. I catch up on email, read news, listen to
podcasts, etc. If it is cold or wet, I usually start out at the dining
room table, or on the sofa with a cat in my lap. When I am ready to do
some coding, I move to my home office, where I have a door to close and
space on the desk to spread out notes or reference manuals. I also have
a second monitor for my laptop there, which turns out to be a lot more
useful than I ever expected. Occasionally I take some reading or
documentation work to a local coffee shop, but their chairs tend to be
less comfortable and the people traffic can be distracting, so I don’t
usually do any coding while I’m there.

Our application runs on Linux, and my desktop is a PowerBook, so I
rely heavily on remote access tools such as ssh and VNC. I have a
development box at home, because the lag time to the office is
intolerable sometimes. Most of the collaboration tools we, such as trac
and Jabber, use can be tunneled, so my ssh configuration includes a lot
of port-forwarding. The end result is that I can access any of my work
systems or tools remotely, even from the coffee shop if need be.

I’ve been working remotely for several years now, and I have a hard
time imagining going back to the office every day. I do like being in
the office, but the commute is killer. If the job were closer, or we
lived somewhere else, it might not be as big of a concern. But this is a
good situation for me now, and I’ve had no trouble getting used to it.