What Types of Jobs are Best Suited for Telecommuters? 226
upwardlyAndconstantly-Mobile asks: "I'm a systems engineer in the IT department of a bank. My wife is a PhD candidate looking to graduate in 4 years or so. Due to the nature of academia, she may need to move several times for post-docs and professor jobs once she gets her credentials. Her job opportunities may come from any number of cities or towns in the US or around the world. My current skill set ties me to only a handful of major cities, so I am trying to figure out the best path to prepare myself for being uprooted. Besides running something like Slashdot, what are the best tech jobs that are mobile? How many people have jobs that can actually be done from anywhere they can get email and web access? What's the best way to prepare for something like this? I have time to prepare, but what should I be doing? (I write this anonymously because I don't want my current employer reading it!)"
Consulting (Score:3, Interesting)
Easy
Re:Telecommuting not Nirvana (Score:2, Interesting)
It takes the right kind of person to do this effectively. You need to learn discipline and the ability to communicate in various mediums. We use phone, email, and instant messaging; there is place for each, but effective use is paramount. The discipline comes in because the benefit of working at home is also its liability. You are always at work! Don't let yourself or anyone else take advantage of that.
The part about the office is key. A separate room is the only solution.
One last point. You need to be supportive of your coworkers. Not seeing people face to face can allow negative feelings to grow where they would otherwise not. Always give your coworkers the benefit of the doubt and be generous. I work with about 6 other people up and down the east coast, all telecommuting, and we have been doing great/profitable work for the past 2 years. So I know this works.
Commuter Marriage (Wrong Question?) (Score:4, Interesting)
Despite what you might expect, statistics show that people in commuter marriages are actually less likely to divorce than married people who are actually living together. At least according to the textbook of my sociology of the family class...
There are obvious problems (like not being anywhere near each other), but you can arrange things such that you see each other on weekends.
My Dad's a college professor and spends a semester in Washington D.C. every 2-4 years. My Mom stays home (she's an elementary school teacher). So far (some 20 years into this arrangement) it goes okay.
Granted it's not the same thing as staying home while your significant other begins her career, but at least for a couple years, it might be a worth considering.
At any rate it's better than heading off to get another degree (as suggested above...).
Re:what are the best tech jobs that are mobile? (Score:1, Interesting)
I cut a heap of code from home, and was an IT journalist for years working from home
Regards,
Confessions of a former ISP Admin (Score:5, Interesting)
Turns out, if you are willing to move out of admin and more into marketing and research, the skillset is highly valued by many companies.
I ended up going to work for a small linux-based ISP equipment manufacturer that within a year got aquired by a major telecomm equipment manufacturer. I'm still with the larger company, though they have had some layoffs during the tech crunch of the last couple of years.
I started out as a field technician for technical support doing remote problem diagnosis and some travel for on-site issues. I was transferred to Sales (not my choice) for a couple of years as a Sales Engineer, where I basically worked as a system engineering consultant helping customers define exactly what products they needed (in many ways, this position can be the antithesis of the dreaded sales rep position since I got to say when the rep was wrong and both sides valued the fact that I was honest in my recommendations). During this time I started working with the product groups to define new products right before the smaller company was aquired. Later, after the aquisition, I found an opportunity to exit Sales (yay!) and went to work for the product definition group as someone who helps define various technical areas of a product that they were not familiar with, as well as provide real-world feedback on feature requests.
All of the above areas are good for someone with practical experience in the field who doesn't mind public speaking. I still work from remote and have moved twice in 3 years. Lately my company has faced lowered travel budgets, so I'm expected to travel less and get to stare out my back office window at the rocky mountains on a daily basis.
During this time I've been approached a number of times (without scouting for them) by other companies who are looking for a similar combination of problem solving/technical knowledge/public speaking for similar jobs. Note that you don't particularly enjoy crowds of people (I don't), but you do need to be able to hold technical discussions with strangers and write/give presentations to large groups (250 is my largest crowd so far) intelligibly and warmly. I usually retire to my hotel room after such a gig and chill out with a movie and room service while the sales and marketing folks go out and party.
I have been considering finishing my degree (I started working at the ISP and dropped out of school due to lack of time) so that if my company cuts more workers I feel confident going back into the IT workplace, but so far it appears that marketing and product definition jobs get cut at a far less rapid rate than remote sales positions at my particular company.
Web Design (Score:3, Interesting)
Remote Program Phones (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Telecommuting not Nirvana (Score:2, Interesting)
I found the solution to overworking myself by moving my computers into the *hot* room over my garage, which is not connected to my house, and getting a seperate computer for the house. I now have an office, and a home. Not both. My computers are not shared, so I can't even access my files from my home if I wanted to. (well, I could, but why would I?)
If you have that option, DO IT!
What a Fraud (Score:3, Interesting)
Telecommuting isn't being used mainly to save on transportation or infrastructure costs. Transport is borne by the worker, but the authority to telecommute is with the worker's management. Telecommuters also tend to have their own desks, cubes or offices at the company workplace.
"Telecommuting" is mostly a code word for the subtle authorization of management, salesmen and programmers to take time off at home while still getting paid. This is laziness and thievery, but since they are expensive and privileged labor, few have the position or gumption to call them those names.
Note well how call centers are filled with people who must commute every workday to do a job that is structurally well suited to working at home over the telephone. But that's not telecommuting as currently practiced -- that's for privileged types and not for the sweatshop laborers no matter how heavily the system revolves around pure telephony.
Exception-That-Tests-Rule: I do know somebody personally who successfully telecommuted while being on the bottom of the corporate totem pole. But the same impetus to allow a telecommuting employee like that, was part and parcel of cutting all kinds of costs, such as in-office management, rules for work (yes, I asked for the rules and regulations for employees and was basically laughed at for my trouble), and also abiding by federal and state regulation of their medically-oriented business. She was eventually fired for not following the unknown rules, and the last we heard, the state was all over the company anyway for noncompliance.
Work-from-home schemes are rife; they are always scams when advertised remotely, or half-scams when advertised by a local office; and the popular perception of telecommuting is equally out-of-touch with reality (the AT&T commercials being fine indicia of that). I am at a loss to envision how real telecommuting can become as pervasive as it needs to be, given all the work that could be done at home and isn't yet, as well as all the work that will need to be done outside of the continued downsizing of workplaces.