« You are here | Main | Esquire: What I Learned Looking for Steve Fossett »

The age of the Remote Worker has arrived

An Atari 800 Acoustic Coupler, circa 1984. I tried explaining what a modem was to my 14 year old son the other day, I wasnt entirely successful. The concept of an Acoustic Coupler was completely foreign to him as it is to most people of the current generation. He is 14 and has lived his entire life in the age of the "always on" internet. For roughly half of his life, his father has not commuted to work from the suburbs to the urban office but has worked from an office in the home.

A couple of years ago when I wrote a post about what its like to telecommute, I got some odd responses because to many people it seemed to be a bit too far out on the bleeding edge. Now that gas is on its way to 5 if not 6 dollars a gallon, it doesnt seem so odd or bleeding edge. Since the end of the year, I have had a large number of people tell me that they have now switched to "remote working" on at least a part time basis and many are on full time "remote work"

Heres the link to that post.

As I have said, I have telecommuted (I prefer the term "remote work") full time for the past 8 years. This is partly because my boss is a genius and knows how to keep his people happy, but its also a direct result of the forces at work in the world today. You see, once the IT industry (the industry that I work in) decided it had to work with people in India, then it became a daily if not hourly experience to work with people on other parts of the globe as part of your daily efforts. In 1998, it was unusual for me to work closely with people all over the globe. To be sure there were contacts with people overseas back then, but you didnt work in the same level back then that you do today. Today I work with people all around the globe every day, in fact the person closest to me that I work with is 800 miles away. My direct managers are three time zones from me and my nearest peer is 8 timezones away.

In 10 years, things have changed and they have changed dramatically. In 1998, this "remote work" concept was highly unusual, today I am in no way unusual. In 1998, I flew daily to Los Angeles and home at the end of the day. All I did was sit in meetings. Today, no client would suggest or support such an agregious waste of time and money. In 1998 I had a low speed DSL line. Today, A 20mb Fiber-To-The-Home connection. ( for nostalgial purposes, I still have a 1200baud US Robotics desktop modem. It came with my 1984 vintage Macintosh which I also still have. The 128k first generation Mac which I bought for 2400 dollars in Febuary 1984, still works. Yes, I once paid 2400 dollars for a computer that could only run 5 pieces of software. Today my cellphone has more software, more memory and storage and it only cost 200 dollars three years ago. )

Because of the global nature of our marketplace, because of the internet, because of the incredible rise in commodity prices, the working world is being transformed. The single most importatnt difference between todays Oil Surge and the 1970s is that today a great deal of work can be performed without leaving the home. In the 1970's you had to go to work because thats where the phone was, thats where the data was, thats where everyone you worked with was going to be. Today, thats simply no longer true.

One of the things that will fall out of that is the rise of the "Remote Worker". The "Remote Worker" will replace the factory mentality that our fathers and grandfathers were forced due to their circumstaces to live with. The central factory that came with industrialization transformed cities, changed our culture and modified the daily habits of the human race.

But because of my experience over the past eight years,and watching how it has transformed my life, I have no doubt that the "Remote Work" revolution will be as transforming to our society and culture as what occured in the early industrial age to the world of the past.

My advice to those of you who havent already, take advantage of the price of gas to transform your work. You will find that your biggest impediment to becoming a "remote worker" isnt technology, but a long series of ingrown organizational inefficiencies( sometimes called "middle managers") and cultural expectations. Trust me on this one, you can use this time to make a major positive transformation to your life by becoming a "Remote Worker".

Posted @ June 07, 2008 11:33 AM | Current Affairs

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://varifrank.com/MT/mt-tb.cgi/1091

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference The age of the Remote Worker has arrived:

» Buy cialis. from Cialis best price buy online.
Generic cialis. Cialis best price buy online. Cialis free sample. Low blood pressure cialis tadalafil. Cialis. [Read More]

Tracked on August 20, 2008 10:16 PM