Looking for a Tier 1 ISP Mentor for career advice.

Scott Weeks surfer at mauigateway.com
Fri Dec 2 20:30:53 UTC 2011



--- bicknell at ufp.org wrote:
From: Leo Bicknell <bicknell at 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 at ufp.org wrote:

From: Leo Bicknell <bicknell at ufp.org>
To: nanog at 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 at ufp.org - CCIE 3440
        PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/






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