Alternative sources of Perl programmers

[James Laver]

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?

I managed such a team once. The hard part is time zones, but luckily they all agreed to keep UK time (they were pretty nocturnal anyway).

Pick a lightweight ticketing system (I'm currently a huge trello fan) so everything is visible to everyone. Assign tickets yourself and don't standup, actually have a chat for a few minutes on IM with each team member individually and see if they need some help with things. And make yourself available in case it happens during the day.

Then the usual thing with in office staff goes - different people respond well to different management styles. One worked great if you outlined things and left them to it. Another worked brilliant if you broke things down massively and kept checking up.

Honestly, it's no harder to manage than in-office staff. And I wouldn't hesitate to do it again.

James