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>>>And for goodness sakes! Always save a question to ask late
>>>at night (just
>>>before you leave) ask your question, listen carefully to the
>>>answer, take
>>>notes, look at your watch, remark on the time, sigh, then
>>>mutter how it is
>>>going to take you another few hours to add this to the
>>>documentation. This
>>>scores points. ;-)
You know, you're right. And that ticks me off. What also has ticked me off
is the perception that family and home-life-obligations must be sacrificed
on a regular basis so you can be "one of the team" and regularly work beyond
40 hours . . . I don't do that, I estimate the time and deliverables of my
projects accurately, work hard to meet my deadlines, work over if needed,
yet I still get that sideways you-don't-put-in-enough-time look. Sigh.
An interesting thing happened today, I ticked off a programmer. I asked one
programmer to take ten and explain something to me and another programmer
got ticked because the programmer I asked was not assigned to my project.
Here's the tie-in: the programmers with whom I am working telecommute. They
are not in the office. They were having trouble finding a programming
workaround for something and I stumbled across the solution. It was then
that I asked the friend of mine to explain how what I had found worked,
because I had no opportunity to informally chat with my telecommuting
teammates (I didn't have PowerBuilder and needed to look at the code to
understand how my solution worked).
This was an interesting situation that points to a minor shortcoming of
telecommuting, the immediate accessibility of team members. However, all
things considered, I think telecommuting can work very well for some,
requiring full-time internet connection via a dedicated line, dedicated fax,
availability within 15 minutes or so during the workday, some
self-management on the part of the employee, and recognition and even-handed
treatment from supervisors and co-workers.
