Experiences and Realities of an Homesourced IT Worker 114
toygeek writes "Some companies have small corporate offices with a few desks and some basic staff, and the balance of their staff works from home. I have worked for two companies that have home-sourced their staffing. I wish to take you through my journey in working from home in the IT world and share some facts that I've accumulated along the way."
Do not want (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Do not want (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
To fix the redundancy in your first sentence: s/ sadistic/n
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe you should fix your projection first.
Re: (Score:2)
I think being on the call 24/7 is fine... if I'm paid for 24/7 as well!
Re: (Score:2)
That really depends on the task. In some cases, like being a high level manager 24/7 on call is a reality today. The job description assumes this and compensation also accounts for this.
In some other cases, like base level IT workers, it can happen if you work from home without any kind of extra compensation and you're not strong enough to resist the employer's push. Many people fall into this category.
Re: Do not want (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Do not want (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Do not want (Score:5, Funny)
I used to work for myself. But my boss was a jerk. And my employee was an idiot.... :)
Re: (Score:2)
Woops ;-)
At least you figured it out, so both cannot be completely true...
Re: (Score:2)
Your boss was a jerk, but I heard he gave handjobs pretty much whenever you wanted. That's a perk.
Re: (Score:2)
Exactly. I've done both, currently working for myself. All my friends say, "Oh man, that's great, you can take the day off if you want." Sigh... when you work for yourself you don't get a day off.
I work for myself, and I force myself to take vacation. Sure, it causes problems when I'm on vacation, but what the hell is the point if I can't spend time with my family?
Re:Do not want (Score:5, Interesting)
Another problem of working from home is that it hinders the building of contacts. A lot if what I can do is through chance contact: I go for a smoke and get chatting with a person in logistics. I receive and email from somebody, who I realise is in the building, so I go chat with them. Face to face makes a difference. It's way easier to fix something if I've had a beer or two with the right people. It's not deliberate; more serendipitous resultsof wanting to be social, and more easily done in person.
Re: (Score:3)
this is a fair criticism (Score:5, Informative)
It is true that telecommuting can hinder networking with people in water-cooler/cigarette breaks.
For the company I work for, a very large healthcare, the offices are all distributed nationally, no no real chance at face time with those units, even if I was in the office every day.
Not probably as good a substitute, but we end up using instant messaging a lot and get to do a bit of social networking that way, like in the old dot-com days.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Same here. I supervise a team of 5 network and system engineers spread across 3 physical locations at a large US based law firm.. We are responsible for all things network and system related for 15 offices in 6 different countries. When I am doing my day to day I don't know if the engineer I am talking to is home or in their designated work office or at a remote office and they don't know where I am either. It does not matter. If I need them they are just an IM, phone call, or an email away and the sam
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, chatting greatly helps. From personal experience though I found chatting was more about sustaining the relationships I built after visiting colleagues in other regions. I suppose I'm more a face to face person.
Re: (Score:3)
For me, I prefer the janitorial service at the office to the lazy SOB who cleans up at home. Also the fridge has more stuff in it at the office, it has air conditioning, a larger desk, and a full set of lab equipment.
Re: Do not want (Score:1)
Im a software developer that can work from home 95% of the time (I go in for design meetings once or twice a month.) I'm sorry you have had problems setting boundaries.
Re:Do not want (Score:4, Insightful)
Thanks to my current work position I am out of on call rotation, so other than the odd big outage or emergency (well customer needs it yesterday) server build I rarely put much extra time *knock wood*. But due to long ago lack of desk space the company decided to push server admins in to telecommuting cause a cable internet is cheaper than desk space. Not that they pay for it anymore and there is still no permanent desk space but it is cheaper than gas on the 40 mile round trip if I had to drive it every day. My biggest problem is remembering to get out every day for a walk or something, while I am good at locking the work machine/setting away at quitting time sometimes it is a yeah still the same old walls I have been looking at all day stir crazy that really gets to me.
Re: (Score:2)
Work from home is a trap.
Unless you're a schizoid.
Re: (Score:2)
Work from home is a trap.
Unless you're a schizoid.
or maybe even a trapezoid
Re: (Score:2)
This is what i read the grandparent post as.
Work from home a trap? Depends .... (Score:5, Interesting)
I currently work in I.T. for a company that is fairly flexible about my working from home. Truthfully, the biggest issues with it are the more subtle things. Since many of the people I do support for have to be in the office the vast majority of the time, there's that psychological issue where they don't see me, so they begin to feel like I don't put in as much time/effort as they do. (And by the same token, I eventually start feeling a sense of guilt or concern that I'll get perceived that way if I don't make an appearance sometimes, despite there really being no pressing reason to spend money on the gas to drive 45 minutes into work and back again.)
The "always on call" thing is definitely a problem, especially since there are only a few of us working in I.T. supporting around 150 users in multiple time zones. If one of us is on vacation, you can bet on getting at least a few calls or emails about "need it now" issues happening after you should really be done for the day. But I don't find it's any worse working from home than in the office? Either way, people are going to put in their requests whenever they need to and you either see it on a PC at home or on a PC at work, or on your smartphone while you're out someplace. If you don't push back a bit ,saying "This time is now MY time... so I'll just ignore this one until tomorrow.", then yes - you're caught in a trap. But it's a trap you allowed yourself to get locked into....
Re:Do not want (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
I do work from home without fixed work times. As all time spent working goes into my time-sheet in 1/4 hour increments, I do not see any trap here. True, "work-time" cannot reasonably be accumulated anymore by staring out the window at the office, but if I have an idea while doing something private, that goes into the time-sheet as well.
It does require honesty though, against your employer and against yourself, and it does require trust in the other direction.
Re: (Score:2)
Depending on where you work, the line between work life and home life has been blurred for years, or it never will be no matter what.
I've had work-from-home jobs where I worked 8-5, never any overtime nor after-hours calls. I've also had jobs where remote work wasn't aloud, yet I'd be on-call once a month, and get several calls, and need to drive-in to the office. The work environment, not your locatio
It's hard to put a price on being able to... (Score:1)
work while living out in the countryside. I'd put a pretty high value on that myself. Good luck to you!
Re:An Homesourced? (Score:4)
Actually no its just a typo more than anything. I thought I'd fixed it but because of the way Google's blogger service works, it got stuck in the URL that way and for some reason carried over into it when I submitted it to /. Isn't that odd.
Been doing it for 2 decades now - love it (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
iOS developer for over two decades? Is that like being a quantum physicist for over 150 years?
(Apologies, embarrassing myself by using that line has been on my todo list forever. Check.)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, because OS X has over to decades of life.
Re: (Score:2)
Let's examine the sentence you're insisting on continuing to pick at:
I'm an iOS developer (and used to do OS X) who has worked at home for over 2 decades now
Where did the poster say he's spent his entire working life on OS X? 10.0 was released on March 24, 2001, which was over 12 years ago. He's an iOS developer now, has worked on Mac OS X in the past, and didn't say that was the only thing he's developed on in his entire life.
If we assume the poster entered the professional IT workforce at 22 and spent his first 3 years or so working conventional office jobs, adding 20 years of working remote
Re: (Score:2)
I was out on the road and couldn't respond. Glad you did for me.
Yes, I did OS X before then. And before then it was MacOS 9 and then 8. And before that was System 7. And before that was System Software 6. Before that was SunOS (not Solaris, and MassComp, remember them?). Before that was VMS and before that was RXS-11M. Before that I was at MIT, best one I remembered was called Q on Perkin-Elmer hardware. You had to call out "Ok to to compile" before compiling. Of course some ITS and a smidge o
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Wage scale is wrong (Score:4, Informative)
$20/hr ... So much for that high paying job.
$20/hr is not a high-paying job anymore, (unless you're comparing it to stocking shelves at the discount store, which you shouldn't).
Re: (Score:2)
Where I live you are luck to get $10 for labor and construction.
Re: (Score:2)
$10/hr isn't a high-paying job, either.
Re: (Score:1)
I've since moved onto programming/development - and make substantially more money (ironically, with less stress).
Re: (Score:3)
You're adjusting for the type of work being performed. ("$20/hr is good money, for what I'm doing.")
I am not.
If we assume that $50,000/yr in 1986 is good money (as the song says, that will buy a lot of beer), and adjust for inflation [bls.gov], that's $53/hr (I use a 2000 hour work-year, which gives a lousy 2 weeks of vacation, but simplifies the arithmetic).
Re: (Score:2)
You can make $20 an hour driving forklifts at a unionized warehouse. And you get OT.
Re: (Score:3)
$20 an hour goes fairly far in Central and S. America and most of Asia. It puts you in the top 10% of wage earners.
Re: (Score:2)
Perhaps I should had said "well paying" instead. $20/hr for the average folk is pretty decent. More than that, it gave me some nice easy numbers to play with ;-)
Re: (Score:2)
Depends on location. Rent or mortgage will be the majority of your expenses.
If you're somewhere that they're just about giving away abandoned houses, $20/hr would be very good money.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Wiring and plumbing is easy enough to do, and fairly inexpensive. Building a whole new house costs several orders of magnitude more than fixing even extensive damage, and can be VERY cheap depending on how much of the work you can do yourself.
Not especially new or even novel (Score:2)
1998-2004: worked from home as a freelancer; 2004-2007: full-time job working from home (the company didn't even have an office in the country where I was living at the time); 2007-present: after transferring to my employer's home country, have continued to work from home whenever I feel like it (which is most of the time).
Somebody would have to give me a LOT of money before I'd agreed to be forced to work in an office 40 hours/week again.
The writer missed two advantages (Score:5, Informative)
1) Money savings by not eating out. Where I work most people I see eat out either in the company cafeteria or off campus. I estimate would be about $10/day, or $160/month. Which could be about an insurance payment or a wifi plan. Personally I only eat out about twice a month as a treat, right after payday. Otherwise it is normally leftovers and sandwiches. Working from home you just walk over to the fridge.
2) Free gym membership! Get some weights or an exercise bike. Then take a break over lunch and work out.
Re: (Score:2)
That's very true! I didn't even consider the cost of eating out. There can be a significant savings for sure. Plus, admit it: You don't go to the place that sells healthy sammiches, you go down to McDonalds and buy 5 $1 items and hog out. Working from home all but eliminates that.
Re: (Score:3)
That's very true! I didn't even consider the cost of eating out. There can be a significant savings for sure. Plus, admit it: You don't go to the place that sells healthy sammiches, you go down to McDonalds and buy 5 $1 items and hog out. Working from home all but eliminates that.
I've been telecommuting on and off for 15-20 years and have found it has numerous benefits for myself, the employer and my own business.
First the diet issue. When I'm at home I found that I eat healthy food because I actually make a meal at lunch, consequently over the years, I have become quite a good cook.
Avoiding traffic has made me extremely productive as my output is generally higher than when I commute simply because the "slog" of driving isn't there and my brain is permitted a slow start for creat
Ryan knows what he's talking about... (Score:5, Interesting)
There is the benefit of saving gas, avoiding car maintenance, less time involved in a commute and the convenience of having access to things like juicers or blenders for a healthy bite to eat when I think about it. I can also change throughout the day as the weather changes and that's always convenient. However since I'm in a seasonal climate there are additional energy costs that would be absorbed by an employer.
I suppose additional benefits include the ability to loudly listen to whatever music I like if I'm not actively voice communicating and I suppose I'm less likely to die in a car accident.
The question is, is this a big deal that seriously affects the quality of my life? No, not really, there are also pros and cons about working in an environment with more structure and the time I save in avoiding a commute, I could make it up at an office with less personal distractions. I wouldn't say one way is better or worse than the other for me, they're just different.
Re: (Score:2)
Thanks for the reply! I'm glad to see that this post resonated with people in the way that it has. Your comment about changing clothes as the day goes by hits home with me too (pun intended). Shorts, jeans, socks, no socks, back to shorts, oops spilled lunch on my shirt...
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:1)
Working from home is green (Score:1)
Another great thing about working from home: no more traffic jams and computers left on in the office...I wake up and walk down stairs, exuding 0 green house emmisions and only usually turn on my laptop and speakers, consuming (on average) around 200kwh. Driving to office usually starts and ends me in a traffic jam for a total of 2 hours a day (another bonus, time back from commuting), producing some grand number of metric tons of CO2 a year, top that with all of the office lighting used becuase building ma
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Careful what you wish for... (Score:5, Interesting)
If your job can be done from home, it can be done from India.
Re: (Score:1)
Not necessarily true. IT support has to communicate in real time with both customers and with L3 engineers, who tend to be the regular feature developers of the software product. True, this could be done in India but with a time zone shift of 9 1/2 hours, the better talent in India will probably find 9-5 work.
Re: (Score:1)
Whatever. If Indian IT workers can be gainfully employed, more power to them. I have worked (and currently work) with colleagues from India, Russia, Romania, you name it. A large part of it has taken place from home because the coworkers wouldn't have been in the local office anyway.
I'm hired for a job and I need to do the job well without getting entangled in ethnic animosity. It may well be that the Western coder goes the way of clocksmiths, but at the moment I'm busy with interesting development work. So
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It could be, if people in India were able to work instead of just play office politics to a science.
You don't outsource IT work to India if you want the product to be of any use to anyone 2-3 years from now. That's twice the case for systems or DBA work. (Just ask an immigrated Indian if it's a good idea... they won't even do it.)
Definitely good parts and bad with WFH (Score:4, Interesting)
I just started WFH in April after 13 years doing L2 support for enterprise storage equipment. The team I came from was, to be totally honest, really great to work for. We had a great manager (the same one) the entire time up until he retired in April, and there was nothing wrong with his replacement other than being a little green. We were a tight-knit group with little turnover (which is good, as it took about 2 years of OTJ to train somebody new), and most of us worked from home rarely, even though our manager encouraged us to do so at least once a week if we were so inclined; the nature of the work (solving new, unique, and subtle ways customers found to break our stuff) involved a lot of collaboration and whiteboarding that would have been nearly impossible remotely. Lots of eavesdropping over the cube walls and hearing a co-worker describe a problem that vaguely resembles one you just fixed five months ago. I left not out of any deep-seated problem, but rather it was time for me to move my career forward; I had no complaints about my pay or anything, but there was no way for me to advance, as there was an engineer senior to me (and just as good) next in line for the team-lead position.
My new team (pre-sales DR architecture) is spread out all over, and only one even bothers with a desk to go to. While we all get along, and chat on the phone and over IM all the time (I'm on the phone for 3-4 hours every day), it's not nearly the same. With the new job, the work definitely comes and goes in spurts, so the flexible work hours are a plus; sometimes I take a long lunch and clock-punch right at five, and others I have to work a long day to get a sales proposal rolled out in time. I miss carpooling with my wife (20 minute commute), and I miss shooting the $hit with my coworkers.
I need to do better job finishing the setup of my home office, so I have a "real" place to work besides the kitchen table or the screened-in porch (namely, I need a whiteboard and bigger monitor.) I need to be better about getting dressed in actual clothes in the AM instead of when it's time to leave the house next. I could get myself a cube assigned by my employer at my former site (probably the same cube I left if I wanted it) but it's just not the same hanging around your former co-workers if you are now doing a completely different job (not to mention I'd probably routinely get asked for my advice there.)
In the end, I won't say it's better or worse, but it IS very different. My new job works better from home than the office, and my old one was better done in the office.
telecommute from home 4 days a week - love it (Score:5, Informative)
Mondays - in the office. Face time. Dept meetings.
Tuesdays through Fridays - telecommute from home.
Tools work provided: laptop, VPN RSA dongle, cell phone.
Tools I provided: DSL, home network (netgear router connected to the DSL), desk, chair.
Love it! Allows me to sleep in till 8:15am, then walk to work PC, boot it, and start my workday at 8:30a. I do not have to drive to and from work. Saves a tank of gasoline a week, and wear-and-tear on the car. No worries about fwy traffic, car accidents, or road rage making me late to work.
Also allows me to be home, working, when the kids get home from school. Money savings there, too, by not having to have them in after-school daycare. Money savings not having to eat out, can eat what is in the fridge.
Stress is lower, too. No having to hear nonconsensual gossip or phone calls from co-workers in office cubes around me. Do not have to wear 'office attire', and usually wear t-shirts and shorts at home. Can play music I like, as loud as I like, as long as I am not on a work phone call. Can use my network to listen to youtube, or surf the web on my non-work PC while I work, no worries about triggering IT alert that I am accessing non-sanctioned websites, as for that I am not using work's network or PC.
Caveat: a person has to have a strong work ethic, and make sure to get the work done, and even do extra work, to keep boss 'happy' that you are deserving to be allowed to be a telecommuter. I always pick up work phone in first or second ring. I always work an extra hour a day, minimum (I never work under 45hrs a week).
My story (Score:1)
I did freelance for over a year once I learned enough programming to quit my day job. I would find a job that took 2-6 weeks and work like crazy and then take 1-2 off, go to events, meet people, and look for more work (I highly recommend if you're not full-time "home-sourced," you find some job that pays enough regularly so you are not constantly worried about rent between jobs.). The greatest part is you can travel and work, and I think every developer with a yearning for adventure should try it. We're at
BA-From-Home (more or less) (Score:2, Interesting)
After a decade of working in the social work / child welfare world, I got headhunted by a smallish software company that noticed I was using some technical solutions I made up on my own to solve some of the issues I had with structural/process gaps in the landscape of the job ... a wiki of social services providers here, a small app that visually mapped out family risk factors there, simple stuff. They hired me as a proto-Business Analyst - they needed a guy with industry intel with a little technical back
A home office is hard to pull offf (Score:5, Insightful)
The article is rather light on the cons of working at home. I have been self-employed for 7 years consulting for my ex-employer. Over the years I've come across various pitfalls of being paid hourly, such as:
My goal was 6 hours a day of work, and it was difficult most days to fill this amount. I got crazy after 6 years, and am now renting an inexpensive office space. It's a much better environment for many reasons, and the additional hours I can put in per month makes it pay for itself within a day. I have an office mate, and even though he works in a different field, it makes a difference having someone else around. It has been great being able to work in a real office environment, and I'm a more cheerful person as a result. Lessons learned the hard way.
Re: (Score:2)
Working at home is not for everyone. It sounds like you're not doing a great job of managing it.
Re: (Score:2)
All of these fall into two categories
1) Environment- You have contorl over this. If you fail to control your rnvironment, it is your own fault.
2) self employment- True even if you worked at a clients office
None of these are elated to 'working from home' except maybe the 'being at home for days on end and no place to walk to. Both can be fixed by getting off your ass and exercising.
Grammar in heading? (Score:2)
Come on editors, that should be "a Homesourced IT Worker". There should be an "a" before a consonant sound and an "an" before a vowel sound. Just google it, here's an example [dailywritingtips.com].
Re: (Score:2)
It was actually an typo that stuck, sorry about that. I thought I had fixed it.
My own experience WFH (Score:2)
At the first job, pay was good, benefits were ok, and work paid for my phone, unlimited data plan, and a high end laptop, with a docking station and a big monitor, and loads of licenced commercial software including a $10,000 GIS platform. We used Skype chat a lot, both video and audio, and email. There was a monthly newsletter and an annual meeting whe
More Productivity & Exercise is what I got. (Score:1)
They don't like not being able to micromange you. (Score:2)
I'm in a job search at the moment, and pretty much every time I raise the possibility of working remotely (hellish commute for any jobs in nearest big city) I can hear my resume hitting the circular file over the phone. Most workplaces do not value employees as the asset that they are, but instead view them as walking cost centers who work as little as possible not out of valuing their time appropriately, but out of spite for their employer. The first rule of managing costs is know what is going on with t
Re: (Score:2)
Interesting. I usually pretend to have sex when a telemarketer calls.
Yes, it may be kinda embarrassing, but then again, I didn't ask him to call, so why should I care for his well being?
Re: (Score:1)
Obligatory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=co_DNpTMKXk [youtube.com]
Re: (Score:2)
I remember something similar where my then (now ex) girlfriend was feeling pretty damn frisky while I was in the middle of doing some on-call work on a Saturday afternoon. Well things started happening and unfortunately at that point I had to call one of our data centre guys to eyeball something for me. I kept on the phone and tried to keep a straight face, all while there was some reverse cowgirl happening at my desk. Funny enough I managed to not cut the call short and we both burst out laughing the inst