Working from home (was: Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers)

[Kieren Diment]

Very similar to my experience except I work as a contractor with a bunch of other contractors across three or more continents to develop and support a reasonably high profile high value product in it's domain.  I meet a subset of the people I work with face to face once every couple of years (but was doing that before this work started anyway), and I've never met the principal in person.  We talk on the phone up to 4 times a year, but generally it all happens through IRC, bug tracker, wiki and git repo.  

For big companies where slacking or low value staff are a problem I don't think telecommuting is a great option  (hence Marissa Miller's recent proclamations), but could be solved with an organisational culture turnaround.  The very nice thing about perl from my experience is it seems to attract people from a greater diversity of social and educational backgrounds than other programming communities (in my experience), but you've got to make the working conditions good to take full advantage of that.

On 14/05/2013, at 12:40 PM, Sam Kington wrote:

> On 13 May 2013, at 23:27, Kieren Diment <diment at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> The management challenges for telecommute jobs are different to those for on site.  But it does increase the pool of potential candidates a lot.   Does anyone have any useful experience about managing mixed on-site/offsite staff?
> 
> Can't speak about management per se, but I can talk about how a team with off-site developers can work. [snip]
>