Not really feasible for me. If I worked at home, patients would end up coming to me!

Even that aside, generally speaking I'd hate it. Work is the main reason I'm out of the house so I'd more likely to just stay indoors. Reduced social activity and life is also important. One of the girls at work had a birthday today and we went out ar lunch. Would not happen if we didn't know each other well enough. Can then lead on to depression, alcoholism, social isolation etc. I see enough depressives as it is. I don't want more. It might make me depressive and suicidal!

To be fair, that's the way it used to be done..


Some of the people I've worked with in the past could probably drive you to depressions and alcoholism...

Jon

Not necessarily. The front room of a house was often used as the office. But then there were fewer patients and less work.

For some of the work yes. But constantly redirecting phones and making conference calls between the staff and customers all day long would get old quickly.

Additionally would be the licences for the VPN on the Firewall, luckily the Cisco firewall wasn't suitable, so that would save us several thousand for licences, but the Juniper licences aren't exactly free either. Then you have the added security problems:

1. You can't guarantee that the user has "industry strength" anti-virus software (including Macs and Linux machines) - we work with clients who have terms in their contract that say that all machines attached to our network need to be secure and up to date with security patches, in order for us to access their network and perform maintenance and development work on their servers.

2. There are real problems with data protection, if the person doesn't live alone, do they have separate accounts, where the other people in the house cannot access any business data - especially personally identifiable data (data over other employess, about customers and creditors etc.)?

3. Physical security of the devices - related to number 2, are the PCs physically secured, are they encrypted by default and can the owner remotely wipe them, if they are stolen?

4. Do the employess have fixed IP addresses? Again part of the security precautions in place at our office, all external connections have to be built up from pre-defined fixed IP addresses.

A lot of our developers need exotic hardware for testing or development work. I'm not sure our customers and our boss would be too happy with developers taking a 200,000€ piece of hardware home with them, so they can test that the code they are writing interacts correctly with the device.

I have worked for two kinds of control freak. One was the kind where if he didn’t see you sitting at a desk working, then you were‘t working. I doubt very much that he would see tele-working as the way forward. Thankfully we parted company in around 1997. Despite me being able to do far better work on my Mac and home, he insisted on giving me a crappy Windows PC with Windows 3.1 and a Word. I think he felt that was all I needed to do the job.

The other control freak is quite happy for me to work at home. In fact he’s said to me on more than one occasion that I me best work comes happens when I’m at home. I still work for him on various projects. Yes, he can be a pain with his control freakery, but he know when to back off and let me get on with stuff. We’ve been bickering over the phone and Skype about pixels for 10 years.

Som managers are, as my other half’s father (whose specialism is management training and consultancy) describes it, galley slave drivers. They want to see the oarsmen in place on their benches. These people don’t trust people to get on with it on their own. This is why we are still commuting, despite the internet offering enough connectivity to allow communication between remote workers.

I might be doing it anyway. Couldn't find a damn petrol station that had any this morning and I'm down to about 1/5 of a tank. If this carries on, I'll be 'working from home' by about Wednesday.