Working from home

[Richard Foley]

I've found that on the whole, the specs. that the agent is giving out are badly
understood by them. You have to remember that *most* agents are placing a whole
lot of different people (developers) into a whole lot of different boxes
(clients). Very often they have no idea of what they're doing besides matching
up keyword searches. My point being that you sometimes need to get to the
client at the other end, somehow, before you can actually find out what the
requirements really are. Not what they say they want (rocket-scientist working
in-office for peanuts), but what do they need (someone who can get the job
done for a reasonable fee at whatever location is most sensible).

-- 
Ciao

Richard Foley

http://www.rfi.net/books.html

On Tue, May 14, 2013 at 02:19:16PM +0100, Richard Proctor wrote:
> I can report on both sides of this:
> 
> I have run a largish project from home with developers working
> beside me (my son), 5 miles away (in two offices) and 200 miles away
> (from his home).  In general it worked fine, I enforced strongly
> defined interfaces between the different people, working in
> different languages on different parts of the project and then left
> them to get on with it in their own style.  I developed much of the
> Perl (overall control), several others worked in C (the bits that
> had to be fast), one worked in PHP and Javascript (a modification to
> an existing product written in PHP).  We had weekly audio hangouts,
> frequent phone calls and met up rarely.   The project was 98%
> working when cancelled (due to two important people falling out).
> 
> I have been looking for a new role for some time now, I run into either:
> 
> 1)  You are over qualified for this role
> 
> or
> 
> 2)  My very wide experience of 35 years working in many
> environments, happens to not include knowledge of some esoteric new
> fangled term/type of programming
> 
> Who would like a Senior ( Perl | Real time) programmer/ System
> architect / Problem solver ?
> 
> Richard
> 
> 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]
> >>
> >
> >