Hello World

Hi All... and welcome! I'm Rich Brown and I've been an engineer at Sun for about a dozen years, but I've been a full-time telecommuter for the last 7+ years. (My manager is *literally* 1000 miles away.)

Now, you might be asking yourself: "How does one get a sweet telecommuting gig like that?" Here's my story...

In 1993, I moved my family from the Chicago area to take a job with Sun at their Rocky Mountain Technical Center (affectionately known as RMTC) in Colorado Springs. I started out in the UFS group fixing bugs. Great place to live. Great people to work with. Great projects to work on. On top of all that, I had a view of Pike's Peak out my office window, just to the right of my monitor... Life was gooood...

Fast-forward to 1997: There was this startup called ChannelPoint where a bunch of good ex-Sun engineers were going. Oh, you know the story: Stock options... Great people to work with... We're gonna build the next "killer app". (Well, not really, but it sounded good at the time.) And we're all gonna be (cha-CHING!) RICH!!! So I left Sun, joined the cool kids, learned Java, and lived the life (such that it was) of an engineer at a startup.

23 months later I came to my senses and left ChannelPoint. ("What the heck was I thinking?!?"). Sun had closed RMTC, so that was no longer an option. We moved back to Chicago and I took a job with Sun as a Systems Engineer in the Telco group. Eight months later, I decided that wasn't such a hot idea either... So I was talking to another ex-ChannelPoint friend of mine (who also came to his senses and went back to Sun, but in Broomfield, CO) and described my situation. That conversation went something like this:

Rob: "Why don't you come back to the file systems group?"
Rich: "I'd really like to stay married. Telling Jacki that I want to move halfway across the country again would be counter-productive to that end."
Rob: "Why not work from home?"
Rich: "You think Sun would let me do that?"
Rob: "It wouldn't hurt to ask..."

Two months later (January, 2000) I was a full-time telecommuter in the Solaris File Systems group. Keep in mind that this was long before Sun had an official work-from-home program such as OpenWork.

Now, you may think that working from home and being 1000 miles from your manager seems like a pretty ideal situation, but...

Be Careful What You Wish For

• Definite savings in time and money. (Gasoline is currently $3.29/gallon in this area.) After all, the commute consists of falling out of bed, rolling down the stairs, and climbing into your chair.
• Personal appointments and family emergencies are much easier to deal with. (Um... Just to be clear. Getting a call from your brother to go fishing doesn't constitute a family emergency... We'll talk about self-discipline later.)
• Every day is "Casual Friday" (Waitaminit... this is Sun... that's a no-op...)
• You can sleep 'til 7:55 and still make it to an 8AM meeting. (Assuming, of course, you set up the coffee pot the night before.)
• All-Hands Meetings are much more productive with a cordless phone and a headset. (I average 3 loads of laundry per meeting!)
• Hair care products? Mouthwash? Deodorant? A jedi^H^H^H^Htelecommuter craves not these things!
• No one comes knocking at your door. (Probably due to the above.)

Like everything else in life, there is a flip-side:

• No one comes knocking at your door! ("Lonely. I'm Mr. Lonely. I have nobody...")
• It's easy (too easy) for work and life to start blending together. The warm glow of a monitor to a passing engineer is like the Sirens' song to a sailor. Next thing you know, it's 2AM, there's nothing but "paid programming" on TV, and the rest of the lights in the house have been turned off. (Has anyone gotten feedback from their manager that they were working too many hours? Me either.)

  NB: Contrary to popular opinion: work != life (I am so going to blog about this someday!)

• Family/friends/neighbors figure they can call you any time of the day. After all, you're just sitting at home, right?
• Speaking of neighbors... You start to wonder what they think you *really* do for a living... Especially on warm summer afternoon when you're on the front porch with your wireless laptop (running Solaris, of course!) and talking on a 2-line cordless phone with a Plantronics headset and a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale on the table next to you. Oh yeah... that's me! (Why does that guy in the sunglasses and the DEA jacket keep walking past the house and staring at me?)
• How do you justify calling in sick? (Believe it or not, this is a real issue for telecommuters.)
• After the "honeymoon" period wears off, you realize how isolated you are. Especially when there is any kind of social event such as:
  • Company event celebrations (like April Fools' Day at Sun)
  • Personal event celebrations (promotions, birthdays, etc.)
  • Team building events (bowling, slick-track racing, PAINTBALL!!!!)
  • Picnics, holiday gatherings (sometimes company-subsidized, sometimes not)
  • Beer busts! A fine Sun tradition! (Sure, you can have a beer bust at home by yourself, but that's just sad and pathetic. Okay! Okay! Yeah, I did it, but only once! And I was on the phone with another telecommuter who was doing the same thing. It was a virtual beer bust.)
  • "Bike to Work" Day
• And the biggest potential risk to one's career: Out of sight, out of mind or Lack of visibility

  Maintaining visibility and communication will be the topic of a subsequent blog entry.

This starts to beg the question: "Is It Possible To Be A Successful Telecommuter?"

The short answer is... Yes!

How does one do that? There's a lot to it and it's best to save that for another time. After all, I started this around 10PM and it's my first blog so I figured it might take an hour or so but now it's around 2AM, there's nothing but "paid programming" on TV, the lights in the house have been turned out and I lost track of time because I was reading e-mail and... well... you get the idea. ;-)

For now, let's just say that it takes some self-discipline (not at much as you might expect, but more than some might be willing to maintain) and a little creativity.

Did I mention that my office is in the basement?

Bike to work day... OpenWork style!