Extreme Telecommuting 370
wiredog writes: "The Washington Post has an article about a company in Chantilly Virginia, most of whose programmers telecommute from Novosibirsk, Russia." Anyone out there in a similarly distant job?
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Extreme Telecommuting
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An authority is a person who can tell you more about something than you really care to know.
There is a downside, however, as the worker... (Score:3, Informative)
I forgot to add--while the above comment details some non-obvious benefits of a remote telecommuting force, there are some side-effects you should be aware of before deciding to telecommute from home.
I have been telecommuting from St. Louis to Philadelphia for over 2 years now. I've gotta say, full-time isolated telecommuting is NOT what it's all cracked up to by. From my own experience I've accumulated a good sized list of pros and cons of working at home [phrogz.net].
Distance does not define "extreme telecommuting" (Score:2, Informative)
I consider someone to be extreme telecommuting if they work from a <i>home office</i> more than 75% of their time. Distance from the corporate office doesn't necessarily dictate this.
I currently live in Spokane, WA and do customer support for a large company any geek would recognize the name of. The office I report into is in the San Francisco Bay Area. The good thing about this (for me at least) is no time difference. However, I deal with people in just about every timezone, so I'm quite familar with asyncronous communications. Anyone working for or with large multinational corporations will have to deal with the timezone thing, even if they don't telecommute, so I don't see this being a big deal.
One thing my boss makes a point of doing with all of the remote employees that work for our group is to have everyone come into the office for one week every so often. The economy of late has dictated this occur less frequently than he wants, but he does make it happen. Aside from training, we make it a point to do some non-work things together. Face time is important.
The other thing that goes along with "extreme telecommuting" is making sure is constant communication so that you feel "in the loop" with what's going on. As someone who has been telecommuting successfully for the past three years, I can tell you that it does take some work, but it is possible to telecommute and be "in the loop," at least on the important things. We've had to set up a few things like instant messaging, internal email aliases, and so forth to help this along.
In short, I look at this story and go "yeah, and tell me something I don't already know."
-- PhoneBoy