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Those of us that have worked as remote engineers for a lot of our career know that most companies in general are just plain not managed in a way that would work

Those of us that have worked as remote engineers for a lot of our career know that most companies in general are just plain not managed in a way that would work for companies that have lots of remote workers, especially larger companies. Policies that discourage and undermine remote work that are popular with large companies include: 1. Mandatory all-hands meeting times 2. Banning popular communications platforms like Slack, Google Chat, Skype 3. Expectations of all workers to be present continuously for their timezone instead of letting workers self-organize 4. Performance and productivity metrics based around KPIs that do not actually measure productivity but presence

im_down_w_otp 10y ago
You left out: 5. Incompetent IT Ops mostly staffed by cheap contractors to offset overpaying for terrible hardware and software from Cisco to ensure a complete inability to reliably utilize the corporate VPN.
- pat_space 10y ago
  It was a sad day when my old company shuttered the web-based VPN portal, which allowed us to access the company intranet through a browser window. Closing it down required us remote workers to connect and send all of our traffic through AnyConnect, killing our connection speeds. Come to think of it, we were still running Windows XP on all of our laptops when I left in mid-2015 (laboratory information systems).
- devonkim 10y ago
  Having been ops before I have to stand up a little. Not all contractors compete primarily on price (in my case I was paid substantially more than FTEs and even other contractors I found out - 20%+ more than my peers, in fact) but also based upon scarcity of qualified persons. I've rarely heard of VPN that's consistently stable that meets the conflicting requirements that IT managers ask for. Juniper, F5, Cisco, and even smalltime crap based upon OpenVPN just constantly breaks repeatedly in many real-world corporate networks. This doesn't mean that you're incorrect though - most IT O&S winds up going to lowest-bidding contracting companies and offshored resources that are measured upon the dumbest KPIs ever that completely leave out whether users are actually happy with anything at all. In fact, most IT in the F500 seems to have given up on ever making users happy. I'd say the better measure would be tickets / user filed - if a user never files a ticket, they're not complaining.
aphextron 10y ago
>2. Banning popular communications platforms like Slack, Google Chat, Skype What? Who would do this?
- devonkim 10y ago
  Almost everyone I've worked for in enterprise and defense, for starters. A couple places didn't allow chat applications that recorded history (too much liability during legal investigations was the excuse I heard). Doesn't mean that these policies weren't violated. This isn't the worst I've heard by far though. A lot of places won't give developers even power user access to their own laptops so you need to request installation of every application you might ever want, including git, Cygwin, etc. Many places will not allow users to run VMs either (and will disable VT-x mode in BIOSes that are locked out).
- pat_space 10y ago
  A lot more enterprises than you think, unfortunately.

im_down_w_otp 10y ago

You left out: 5. Incompetent IT Ops mostly staffed by cheap contractors to offset overpaying for terrible hardware and software from Cisco to ensure a complete inability to reliably utilize the corporate VPN.

pat_space 10y ago
It was a sad day when my old company shuttered the web-based VPN portal, which allowed us to access the company intranet through a browser window. Closing it down required us remote workers to connect and send all of our traffic through AnyConnect, killing our connection speeds. Come to think of it, we were still running Windows XP on all of our laptops when I left in mid-2015 (laboratory information systems).
devonkim 10y ago
Having been ops before I have to stand up a little. Not all contractors compete primarily on price (in my case I was paid substantially more than FTEs and even other contractors I found out - 20%+ more than my peers, in fact) but also based upon scarcity of qualified persons. I've rarely heard of VPN that's consistently stable that meets the conflicting requirements that IT managers ask for. Juniper, F5, Cisco, and even smalltime crap based upon OpenVPN just constantly breaks repeatedly in many real-world corporate networks. This doesn't mean that you're incorrect though - most IT O&S winds up going to lowest-bidding contracting companies and offshored resources that are measured upon the dumbest KPIs ever that completely leave out whether users are actually happy with anything at all. In fact, most IT in the F500 seems to have given up on ever making users happy. I'd say the better measure would be tickets / user filed - if a user never files a ticket, they're not complaining.

aphextron 10y ago

>2. Banning popular communications platforms like Slack, Google Chat, Skype What? Who would do this?

devonkim 10y ago
Almost everyone I've worked for in enterprise and defense, for starters. A couple places didn't allow chat applications that recorded history (too much liability during legal investigations was the excuse I heard). Doesn't mean that these policies weren't violated. This isn't the worst I've heard by far though. A lot of places won't give developers even power user access to their own laptops so you need to request installation of every application you might ever want, including git, Cygwin, etc. Many places will not allow users to run VMs either (and will disable VT-x mode in BIOSes that are locked out).
pat_space 10y ago
A lot more enterprises than you think, unfortunately.