Advantages to working smarter…
Now I know that this may not even apply universally to everyone in the Information Technology field but I felt that I needed to share anyway.
One of the greatest things about my current job is the ability to work from just about anywhere using just about any computer as long as I have an Internet connection and a SSH client. I frequently find myself working from home on my personal laptop, or from friend’s houses using their own computers and I am as effective as I would be at the office. Today really cemented that fact with me when I made the Monday morning blunder of arriving to work without my laptop. Instead of driving all the way back home (and wasting even more of the morning) I just grabbed a spare laptop that is laying around the office and using that today.
I remember a number of nights earlier in the year when I was on-call and out somewhere either without my laptop or without an Internet connection. Though it was slightly slower than I would have been on a laptop I managed to resolve a number of production critical emergencies using nothing more than my BlackBerry and MidpSSH.
I leverage a few tools to make this happen but the most important one I think of them all is GNU screen. The usefulness of this to anyone who wants to be able to use any computer in the world to be productive cannot be over-stressed. I recall one evening while I was on vacation in Australia last month where I noticed (via our internal IRC channel) that people were trying to troubleshoot a problem with our network storage infrastructure and was able to connect in to my work computer 12,000 miles away and fix the issues with nothing more than a terminal application on my laptop.
For IM and IRC I have as much connected to Irssi as I can reasonably manage. Irssi is a really great compliment to screen and there are a number of sites advocating that particular use case. I never miss anything with this configuration as I am always online and Irssi is kind enough to log everything and provide a pretty lengthy scroll-back buffer. What I end up with is essentially one screen session that contains my e-mail (using mutt) for both home and work, IRC, IM, and many of our internal web-based tools (thanks to w3m). Thanks to work being almost exclusively a Linux shop all of this can sit running all the time on a system sitting in one of our data centres with what essentially amounts to a Gigabit Ethernet connection to the Internet. From there all I ever really need is ssh(1) to connect to any of several hundred servers scattered across the United States and I can manage to be just as productive as if I was sitting in the office.
I honestly can’t imagine considering a job where I’m tied down to an office, or at the very least one where I was tied down to an office and then expected to work non-normal business hours. With pretty simple tools it is extremely easy to allow IT people to work from anywhere happily and securely. The ability for employees to continue to do their job from anywhere on the planet should the need arise is not only great for morale and general quality of life (you mean I can work from the beach?!) but makes sense when business critical applications and services require specific expertise that may not be replicated anywhere else in the company (what do you mean Bob is on vacation in Fiji?!).
Tags: technology, telecommuting, work