Telecommuting
A guide on how to be a successful telecommuter
Anthony Reeves
Copyright 2011 Anthony Reeves
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Preface
Let me start by saying I have been a full time telecommuter for 16 years now working from my home office. I live in an area, that when I moved here, was very rural and about 100 miles away from the nearest large city. You may be asking why I move out here. What were my reasons? In my case it’s all my daughters fault. Like many of you that may be reading this, I once lived in a major city with millions of other workers. I worked for a large defense contractor and had a steady job. Then my daughter came along and my thinking started to change. You see, each day I had to get up and take my daughter to a child care center, where later my wife (who also worked for a defense contractor) would pick her up each evening. Each day for five days a week the same routine, wake – day care – home –sleep. When my daughter was 3 or 4 we noticed we had little time to really get to see her or play with her. Then the local day care started to teach the older kids like ours what to do if a drive by shooting happened, you know, big city stuff like hide under a table. That is when I decided I no longer wanted to raise my daughter in a big city.
I knew it was not going to be easy, and I was not sure of how well it would work out, but after talking to my wife we decided to quite our jobs and head to the country. Just like one of movies you seen in the theater, except our story is still playing out. I can’t wait to see the ending! Sure we knew it was going to be tough, we knew we were going to give up promotions, career advancements and the move up the old corporate ladder. It was no small task; my wife had been with her company for close to 18 years, I was with mine for 11 at the time. We both had moved into positions of responsibility and positions of trust. I worked as a computer specialist with responsibility of over 17 UNIX machines in various locations around the company and her being a supervisor in a materials operation area. But we decide that our daughter needed to grow up where the sky is clear and at night you see stars, lots of stars. Not like the 3 or 4 you see in the city. She would go to a school that had kids who never heard of drive bys or duck and cover drills. So we made the plunge. We looked around till we found the perfect community with small town values and nice views. We had purchased some land back in 1988 in a small rural area for retirement, we looked it over again and decided it was a good place to raise a child; so in 1994 we had a house built on the land and in 1995 we moved to the new small town. We moved out of the city and this is where my tale of remote working starts.
My wife’s employer was sad to see her go; they held a big party and wished her well. My company freaked out. You see a month before I left one of the administrators of the systems I took care of got caught downloading some questionable images on to his workstation. Once this came to light he was walked out rather quickly. Another of our support people found that he could make a lot more working for a computer company, the same company we buy our servers from. That left only me, the only one who knew the whole topography of the server network, the only guy left who knew what scripts were running where and what they did. So when I told them I had to leave to start my new life they were about ready panic. It was near my last days when my supervisor came into my office and asked if there was any way I could delay my move, or perhaps let my wife go on and I join her later. I explained that I could not do that; it would be just unfair to expect my wife to unpack the new house and take care or a 4 year too. So half joking I said ‘I could work remote for awhile to help out as a consultant, I do have lots of computers at home. I can easily duplicate what I have in my office. This is where I expected my supervisor to say something about jumping into a lake, but her response was startling. After all I was set to quit, have my security clearance debriefing, and hit the road. But her response was startling. She said ‘We can do that, it might take a week to get the process figured out, but would you be willing to work as a consultant if we can make it happen?’ I sat there amazed and all I remember is saying sure. Later that night I told my wife who thought I was kidding. As a Christian I gave thanks to the lord and prayed it was not a pipe dream. My last day came and I had my final paper work completed, then had my security de-briefing and turned in my company badge. I was scared and had no job.
We made our move to Arizona and started the fun prospect of unpacking and getting ready to start our new lives. As we got our home in order, we found the boxes we needed and my new home phone rang. It was my supervisor with word that my contract as a contractor was done and I can start the following Monday as soon as I receive some special equipment. This I will talk about later in the book. It seems I was off and running and starting my new adventure as a telecommuter. My contract with my old company was for 6 months. Little did I realize it would lead me to being a long term telecommuter. At first things were a little rough, where I moved to had poor phone service and in 1995 broadband service was not available yet in many areas. Where I lived there was no cable TV for a few years. We used to have one of those big giant satellite dishes that you point to different satellites to watch TV called a C-Band receiver. So getting connected to work was a rough option. So in the early years I had to connect by means of a dial up modem. This was slow and painful to use. I quickly learned a few tricks to get around the slow speed. 6 months later they still needed me so my contract was renewed for 6 more months. By now I figured out that if I had to do any programming I could do it on my local machine setup to mirror the work machine. Then when I was sure all was good start up the modem and upload the changes to the work server and then run them there for real. This worked out well for a few months. The my 6 month contract was up, so they renewed it again for 6 months and this time we found out that ISDN (sort of a super modem) was available in my area. So the company setup ISDN line for me to use. This was far faster and more reliable that the modem. Now I was able to take control of machines on the network and work on them via a secured ISDN line. I was able to do more and work faster, plus since I was remote I never had to worry about people dropping by and interrupting me. My productivity soared. Soon I was not only working on my original issues, I was getting asked to help on other projects as well. It seems my ability to produce fast complete work made me a resource that others wanted. Then it happened, my 6 month contract was up and I got the call from my supervisor I feared. She told me that it had been 2 years now that I have been working as a contractor and 2 years is the limit that can go on a single contractor. I figured my ride was over, I knew someday it would be. So then she asked me how I felt about coming back to the company as a full time employee, and I’d get my seniority back and still work remote. I had to think about that for few seconds.
Of course, I said yes and thus began my journey onward in the work of telecommuting.
This is sort of how I looked at it, a journey, one that leads me down paths I never thought I would go. Over the last 15 years I’ve learned a lot, discovered a lot, and created a way to work that has been very successful for me. What I gained for me in this process was a way of life that allowed me to spend time with my daughter. I was there to see her off in the morning to school; I got to be here when she came home. When the school had special events like ‘Donuts with Dad’ I got to be there and because I was able to work from home; I just made up the time by working a little later that day. Your goals may be different or perhaps they are not that far away from what I wanted. As my daughter gets ready to go to college this fall I look back on those times and thought I should find some way to share this. This is that attempt, I plan to show the things I have learned that worked, things that did not, and most important how to be a successful telecommuter.
I hope the journey for you will be a good one like it has for me.
Telecommuting – How to survive and function
Table of Contents
Chapter 1 – History of Telecommuting?
The idea of telecommuting may bring on the idea of working in your pajamas and sitting in a big easy chair with your feet up and with the TV on in the back ground, or perhaps sitting out on the deck of your home sipping an ice tea while you work away with the sun setting. You may be thinking that, and perhaps a few lucky people do that, I wish I did. However, in real life the image is not as romantic as it may seem. To be honest I’m sometimes busier than I would be at the office. At least at the office you can get up and wander to the bathroom, or take a quick step out to the local vending machine. At home you have nowhere to hide, no place to walk away from, unless you leave the house. But I’ll deal with that idea later in the book. Right now I want to talk a little bit about the history of telecommuting, its roots and the technology that made it happen.
The term ‘telecommuting’ was actually coined by Jack Nilles1 back around 1973. Mr. Nilles was a forward thinker, someone that could see where the world was heading, and was able to construct a thesis on what it could mean to the future worker. What is really amazing is he came up with the term a few years before the first micro-computers were created. So the idea of satellite offices working remote from the main office was very much far forward thinking. While the idea was born in the mid 1970’s, it really did not take off until personal computers became less expensive in the 1980’s. The rise of microcomputers like Apple, Radio Shack, Commodore and even Atari helped to usher in a new way of thinking and working. For the first time in history people were able to do a wide range of things that either were impossible or seemed infeasible to do. The new small computers like Apple II, Radio Shack, and Commodores opened the door to word processing, bookkeeping and business processes to small business owners and home owners. In turn these new abilities created opportunities that did not exist before. Of these the ability to do work like record keeping or reports allowed workers to do it from home, and thus the beginning of our telecommuting began in earnest. When I started my career as a telecommuter there were very few people that worked from home using a Personal Computer (PC) full time. There were a lot of people doing it a few hours here, or one day every now and then. It was such a new idea that some managers where I worked that could not grasp the idea. The idea of someone being self driven and self motivated to work without someone watching them seemed impossible. Then there was the idea that could you get connected long enough to do your work or make it worth wile. You have to realize that in early 1990’s the idea of cable modems, fiber optic feeds, clean data lines, and satellite internet was so new it was just a lot of talk and predictions in computer magazines. If you wanted to access computers together in the early 1990’s you needed a modem (see fig 1) on your end and a modem on the other end you were calling.
Fig
1
Many people today still use a modem to connect to internet services like NetZero, except they use the phrase ‘dial-up’ more often now. The idea of the dial up was exactly what a modem did. The modem was just a computer device with a phone in it. You connected the modem to your PC and then you would enter a telephone number in the software you were using with your modem and it dialed a phone number. At the other end was a modem that hopefully answered. You would hear a high pitched squeal and then some strange electronic sounds and then your software would proudly announce you’re connected. That was what it was like back then, nothing to glamorous about it I guess, but when you take into account what it means you could do it was amazing at the time. Most computers like IBM clones had to have a special program to run the modem, unless you had that new operating system like Apples, Linux or Microsoft’s NT OS. For me I used NT 4.0, which at the time was Microsoft’s professional work station software. It allowed me to configure the modem to contact my job and link to the next work there just like I was sitting in my office. This same feature was also common on Apple machines and on many of the early Linux versions out there as well. So in this case the modem became an extension of the PC that allowed it to join the company network over a modem. Apples were very easy to setup for modems and accessing networks, for a time I had both PC and Apple computers so I can support work form different points of view, so to speak. I also had a Linux box and found it to be a little harder to setup, but once done it worked very well and seamlessly with work.
For a few years, using the modem and a telephone line seemed like the best way to do a job telecommuting. Modems in 1990 were at their peak of technological standards. You have to remember that when old Mr. Bell created the phone system he only thought of voice as the means to transmit data over it. So there was limit to how much data you can actually send over a telephone line that was created for voice (often called analog) there is a speed barrier if you will. That speed barrier was 56,000 bits a second, or more commonly referred to as 56K2. In reality it was unlikely that you would ever see this kind of speed. This is because anything that caused static or noise on the line would make the modem fall backwards to a slower transmission rate. So if you had a perfect phone line and you spared no expense to shield it out of your house to the telephone pole, you might connect at that 56K speed. In reality most people would fall back to a slower speed like 49,000 bits a second (49K) or 33,600 bits a second (33.6K). For me, living in a rural area, I almost always connected at 33.6K or the slower still 19.2K. Once late at night on a cold winter’s night I got 49K, I guess frozen lines are quiet lines; it seemed for me that I was doomed to this slower rate because I choose to live out in the country. That was until the phone company upgraded our telephone lines to fiber-optic down at the main highway. Then they were able to provide ISDN.
ISDN is like a modem on steroids, the letters actually stand for: Integrated Services Digital Network. There is a lot of technical jargon that goes along with an ISDN and how it works, but I’m not going to put you to sleep with that. Let’s look at it from a workers perspective. Using my old 56K modem, the best connection you can ever hope to get is, well, 56K. For me the best was 33.6K speed on my little system at home. Now ISDN arrived and I ordered it. You see ISDN is a digital network not an analog network like the voice system. It allowed more bandwidth using standard phone lines. ISDN can be very technical to talk about; you see there are different modes you can use an ISDN modem for, such as half digital and half voice. In half digital mode the modem connected at 64,000 bits a second (64K), twice as fast as I could hope for with my standard modem and 14% faster than a 56K could be achieved on a perfect line. Another mode allows you to use both lines to connect to a remote computer network using a special protocol called x.25. In that mode you have 128K of speed. This was fast enough to be considered broadband. I’m not going to explain what x.25 is, for those that feel they have to know I recommend going to Google and look up x.25 for all the fun details. This mode was the fastest I could get to my company in California, so we used it. At 128K I no longer downloaded files to work on then uploaded later in the day, now I was able to stay connected all day long just like I was in the office. Now that I was able to stay connected all the time, and was connected just like I was sitting in the office, I was able to do more work than before. The idea of using the company resources remotely was still a new idea even when ISDN was available. So those first few years I was of work I had access to everything. Corporate email, different web servers, database servers and anything else connected to the network. If you understand anything about security these comments should be setting off a large alarm about now. From the very beginning my company has always required a userid and password to access the remote systems. This was true for my ISDN access as well. However, a userid and password is never very secure. So it was about the same time that ISDN access was made available that my company also started trying out different access methods. Since I was full time remote, I got to try some of these. I’m going to talk about this in near the end of this chapter; I’d like to stay on course for just a bit to talk about the next leap in telecommunication.
As modems evolved and new systems like ISDN started to make the way clear for remote workers, they still had one thing in common. That is these modems were point to point. You connected your modem, either a voice 56K modem or an ISDN modem to another modem at a site like your company or office. For each person working out in the field or remote from the company you had to have a modem to answer the call from the modem that was calling in. If your company was a good size and you had 10 or 20 people working remote or out at a customer site then you had to have 10 or 20 modems and 10 or 20 phone numbers aligned with those modems. It was possible that if you had 25 people out and 20 modem that some people could not get in. That happened to me more than once. There we several solutions to this problem from vendors like AT&T and modem makers like US Robotics. The best solution that came around was already on the rise. Unless you lived in a remote spot on the planet by 1999 the term ‘The Internet’ was becoming a household name. Everyone wanted to get on the internet. This led to some great and not so great ideas and companies. While many companies in the internet years busted, the technology of the internet increases and became better and better. It was around the 1999 time frame that companies like Cisco developed internet switches to allow remote access to company resources. All one needed was an internet account. It was about this time that my local cable TV Company laid new fiber optic cable all the way out to where we lived and beyond. My rural street was not so rural any more. They paved my dirt road, moved the mail boxes from the highway to our front driveways and now we had cable TV. Not more than a month after I get a notice that new cable TV was coming that they also announced cable modems were also available. Two days later I got a mailer that advertised satellite internet by Hughes Net as well. As the mille mum approached the new world of the 21st century seemed bright. I compared both and decided the best cost for me was the cable modem. A cable modem is very similar to a voice modem or ISDN modem. Except it’s on all the time and it’s always connected to the internet. It stands alone as a separate device that is plugged into your computer. So anytime you turned on your PC you were ready to surf the web, cowabuga! So what was the speed difference? I know you asking so let’s talk about. My local cable provider was new to the idea of cable modems and was not sure what the service would be like. It was still new when I got my cable modem, not just for my local company but in general. Cable modems up to this point had been available in the big cities like Los Angeles, New York and such. But there was no real standard on them yet. By the time my little cable company got them most of that had been shaken out and some standards had shown up. But the speed you ask, well to begin with our company allowed 1.5MPS on the modem. That is 1,500,000 bits a sec or more than 10 times faster than ISDN. This was amazing speed. My company installed a Cisco remote access hub and in a short time I said good bye to my ISDN and was now truly as fast as if I was there. A few months later my cable company pushed the speed to 3MPS, and then to 5MPS, today they are at 10MPS. Today we have choices that are amazing. You can use Digital Subscriber Line (DSL), Cable Modems, satellite based internet, microwave and you can even get some broadband on your phone from version or sprint. As I write this today the choices for fast blazing speed to the internet is wide and varied and new technologies are still coming. I plan on writing about them near the end of the book, but there is one more development I need to go back to.
Remote access had to lead to secure access. This is something I’ll cover in a later chapter. The biggest issue is as it got easier and faster to access company data to do work, it also became easier for crooks and vandals to also gain access. I understand crooks; they are looking for some way to make money. It’s the vandals I don’t quite understand, and I will give my view on them later. Just as modems have evolved from slow boxes that once were 300 bit/s to the amazing 56K, so has access control moved from userid/password to complex systems. The first of these was a challenge password system that used a hardware item that looked like a calculator called a SNK-004 or token key (fig 2).
Fig
2.
This was the first system we tried by a company called Digital Pathways Inc. who use to be located in Mountain View, California. They have since been sold and now are in the U.K.. The system was not hard to use, you would logon to your work and enter your user id and password. Then it would respond back with a token challenge. This was a number, normally 4 digits long that you would enter into your token key and then you press enter like a calculator and it then shows you an 8 digit number. This number you would enter into the challenge response on the screen and hit enter. If you typed in the code to the token correct and then typed in the response correct then you had access to the network. This type of access control was used by me for about 6 to 8 months. There were some issues with it. The main issue was if your key became un-synchronized with the companies server you had to re-program the token key. This was sometimes a confusing process. The little calculator token only had a small display and limited values it could display. Most were cryptic like E0 ---- or ES 1234. You had to have a small manual to explain how to re-program it. So after short time users like some traveling V.P.’s got tired of it and asked for a new way to access the system. This lead the way to a new access method that was software based on the same idea. In this case the software ran on your machine all the time and when you connected to the connection to work it would detect the challenge and then do a response right way. Sounded great in theory, but it suffered flaws in the same way of losing its sync to the main system or worse it would respond with the answer to fields it should not. Like in an accounting form it would sometimes just pop a number in the field for no reason. So this idea did not last long and we moved back to the calculator like token. Around this time companies that make network systems like routers and switches began to release a hardware solution to VPN access. These were VPN routers that had built in access controls. One of these companies Cisco created a product that the company I worked for wanted to try so they got one and my little token was replaced with a small key chain like device called a SecuriD card (fig 3).
Fig
3.
This whole system was just a little different, I still logged on with my user id and then a password as usual, but then I would have to enter whatever the number was on my SecuriD card. The little card would change numbers at regular intervals, Every 6 or 7 minutes a new number would appear in the screen. This system worked very well and it’s the same system I use today. The logon screens have changed over the years, today the VPN servers are so configurable and programmable that you can build a custom screen for each purpose or need. Now I use the internet to connect to work and connect up using the screen that was created by my company using the tools that the VPN controller provided. To me it looks just like a web page that has a place to enter my user id and password and one more space for the SecurID number.
We have seen how the in the span of just 15 years that telecommuting has evolved into a powerful tool for companies to use. In the early days a few used slow connections to do work in batch related projects. Today users can access the work place at the same speed as if they were in the office it’s self and enjoy an amazing amount of work that can be done remotely. Companies now are able to see this as a tool and often create virtual teams that may be separate by hundreds or thousands of miles and yet all work as one. Using these teams they are able to bid for contracts that otherwise they would not have been able to do so before. The future is wide open now and the path that telecommuting is heading is a bright one. Companies that realize the benefits of using telecommuters are still on the upswing. However, there are still many that use it as a last option as well. In time I believe these companies will see the benefit of it. As you read this book I hope to give you the information you need to be a successful telecommuter. I’ll show you the things to avoid and the things you need to have ready to meet your challenges. While the technology for allowing telecommuting to exist has improved office skills and the way to use them have to change a little to allow for this kind of work. My next few chapters should help with that.