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Want to attract top tech talent? Offer telecommuting

management.fortune.cnn.com

121–130 of 182 posts

Re: Want to attract top tech talent? Offer telecommuting

#121
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't you find it gets a bit lonely after a while? I've been working as a full-time programmer from home for about a year and a half now, and it's beginning to get a bit weird. Aside from not having physical coworkers, I don't leave work, go home and do something else, because work is always all around me. There's this never-ending pattern of 9-5 quickly becoming 2 PM - 8 AM, until I finally pull an all nighter and i…

> Don't you find it gets a bit lonely after a while? At work we spend 80% of the day pairing over voip and SSH. It's ironic because I moved from California to Seattle because I got tired of telecommuting all by my lonesome from down there, but these days with pairing it doesn't bother me at all.

What is "pairing"?

Re: Want to attract top tech talent? Offer telecommuting

#122
post #69
post #55

My advice would be, talent /= experience. I'm sick and tired of companies being super picky because I don't know their technology stack or maybe just one element, they don't even offer a technical test these days. I wont learn Cassandra or Scala because they are popular on super-webscale sites, I did, though, learn Haskell, Node, MongoDB, Redis, Python, Ruby, not because they teach that in college. I think that tells…

One less to compete against... :) I know Scala, Cassandra and Hadoop, execute across all of the SDLC, as well as just flat out code, and available I might add. Telecommute only.

New record for HN I think, from +60 to -5 karma points. Tough crowd. Miss the HN early days...

Re: Want to attract top tech talent? Offer telecommuting

#123
post #76
post #41

In the past 4 hours I have exchanged ones and zeros with people and computers in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Florida, Arizona, California, Germany, Singapore, and India. And got 3 "office days" worth of work done. And I haven't even brushed my teeth yet. :-) You know what telecommuters say, "Once you've deployed a killer app in your pajamas, you can never go back."

Don't you find it gets a bit lonely after a while? I've been working as a full-time programmer from home for about a year and a half now, and it's beginning to get a bit weird. Aside from not having physical coworkers, I don't leave work, go home and do something else, because work is always all around me. There's this never-ending pattern of 9-5 quickly becoming 2 PM - 8 AM, until I finally pull an all nighter and i…

Agreed, same experience here. That's why (shameless plug) http://letslunch.com has saved my sanity: now I can meet peers (entrepreneurs, engineers, geeks like me) for lunch.

Re: Want to attract top tech talent? Offer telecommuting

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On top of that you usually can cut out quite a bit on child care costs. I left a job I had for 5 years that allowed me to telecommute for contracting where I was expected to be in the office but made about 160% of what my full time salary was. After about a year of that I returned to my previous job and much lower salary to get the benefit of telecommuting once again. With a family, the benefits of telecommuting (at…

Heck, you can even move to a different country where the cost of living is lower :o) [Posted from Santiago, Chile....]

Heck, you can even move to a different country where the cost of living is lower :o)

[Posted from Lima, Peru....]

Re: Want to attract top tech talent? Offer telecommuting

#125
I've never had a proper job in an office - I started working an online gig in uni, and I've been working for them ever since. It's great not needing to be in one place. I've started taking round-the-world trips - live cheap in hostels, work in coffee shops using their WiFi. Hanging out in Singapore and Tokyo sure motivates me to work a lot more than my apartment at home.

Re: Want to attract top tech talent? Offer telecommuting

#126
post #113
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could probably afford to be aired in the "is college a waste of time and money?" threads which crop up here every day too.

I doubt it, the correlation does not imply causation. My hunch is that the people graduating from college are the kind of people that would find it easier to find a job anyway.

There was actually an interesting study about this which got mentioned recently on the Freakonomics podcast (you can see a transcription of the segment at http://freakonomicsradio.com/does-college-still-matter-and-o..., the original study is at http://faculty.arts.ubc.ca/tlemieux/papers/unintended.pdf).

Basically, it uses men who were eligible for the Vietnam draft (who enrolled in college in greater numbers than they otherwise would have, to avoid military service) to demonstrate that success from college graduates is more than a "these people are the ones who were already going to succeed" thing.

Re: Want to attract top tech talent? Offer telecommuting

#127
post #41

In the past 4 hours I have exchanged ones and zeros with people and computers in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Florida, Arizona, California, Germany, Singapore, and India. And got 3 "office days" worth of work done. And I haven't even brushed my teeth yet. :-) You know what telecommuters say, "Once you've deployed a killer app in your pajamas, you can never go back."

Yeah, but it requires a lot of self-discipline. Many people lack that power.

Re: Want to attract top tech talent? Offer telecommuting

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Don't you find it gets a bit lonely after a while? At work we spend 80% of the day pairing over voip and SSH. It's ironic because I moved from California to Seattle because I got tired of telecommuting all by my lonesome from down there, but these days with pairing it doesn't bother me at all.

What is "pairing"?

my guess is 'pair programming'. descriptions online.

Re: Want to attract top tech talent? Offer telecommuting

#129
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt it, the correlation does not imply causation. My hunch is that the people graduating from college are the kind of people that would find it easier to find a job anyway.

There was actually an interesting study about this which got mentioned recently on the Freakonomics podcast (you can see a transcription of the segment at http://freakonomicsradio.com/does-college-still-matter-and-o... , the original study is at http://faculty.arts.ubc.ca/tlemieux/papers/unintended.pdf ). Basically, it uses men who were eligible for the Vietnam draft (who enrolled in college in greater numbers than t…

Thanks for the link, that is interesting. Of course, there were no startups willing to eschew traditional hiring practices back then.

Re: Want to attract top tech talent? Offer telecommuting

#130
As with many things, working from home entails tradeoffs whose [dis]advantages will be weighted differently.

For me, it's great when I need to concentrate and bang out the code. No distractions, and I can poll IMs instead of needing a context switch when someone drops by. If I'm stuck on a problem I'll go for a walk, cook food, or take the laptop out to a coffee shop to work. I enjoy the flexibility.

Downsides for me: I do miss some of the random office chatter -- finding out cool problems coworkers have solved and generally learning by osmosis. And I have yet to find a great replacement for 3-4 people standing at a wall of whiteboards. IMs, skype and meeting highlights solve some problems. Our group is 2/3 remote spanning 8 time zones, so we're used to working a bit harder on communication.

As for social factors, it was hard at first. I'd find myself not leaving the apartment for weeks, which was less than good... I'm making an effort to get out of the house daily, whether hitting the gym, buying groceries, or just strolling around. This is getting easier, especially as spring seems to finally be hitting Boston.

The biggest non-technical advantage for me is not needing a car. I detested commuting. Instead of spending an extra hour or two driving I can take breaks (or even naps) in the day and have the same "door-to-door" time. Financially, it's also a winner. I don't even know how much gas costs here. There are 4 zipcars within a few blocks if I need them.

Work-life separation is trickier. I'd love to have an apartment with an extra room for an office, but that would likely cancel out any vehicle savings. Getting a separate desk to split work and personal computing helped a ton here.

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