Questions on Work from home?

StorageNinja · 2020-03-11T04:23:27.000Z

I know some people are suddenly having to learn “work from home” but I’ve been doing it for 5 years and work for a company that executes it pretty well (We have a lot of WFH people, and a lot of tech to help out with it).
I recorded a Podcast on this topic, but I’m also curious what questions people have, and who’s making the transition this week to WFH. Error 404

adriannewgate · 2020-03-11T06:47:42.000Z

This is a great podcast. Nice guests.

Thanks for sharing!

sianday3 · 2020-03-11T06:48:14.000Z

I work for an MSP, so being able to work from anywhere is pretty important for us. I actually worked from home yesterday afternoon!

As it happens, one of our clients held a BCP test last week which was actually reasonably successful. They’re a bit old fashioned in that they really don’t trust that people will actually work while off-site. They’ve invested heavily in making sure the remote apps solution has a lot of redundancy, although that brings its own set of problems - for example, one of the core apps was installed on 3 of the 4 remote servers! Get routed to the 4th server and that app ain’t ever going to work. That said, the biggest issue I faced was that people didn’t read the instructions, and weren’t able to connect because they’d done something wrong.

I was onsite at a different client yesterday who have suddenly decided that they, too, need to be able to work from home. While a lot of their day to day apps are run as remote apps, the solution is far from robust enough to allow everyone to work remotely. I’m hoping to be able to run a similar test for them to iron out the problems before it becomes a necessity. We’ve also planned for extra RAM to be added to the remote server.

I’m a huge fan of being able to work from wherever you find yourself.

scheff1 · 2020-03-11T09:04:23.000Z

StorageNinja:

I know some people are suddenly having to learn “work from home” but I’ve been doing it for 5 years and work for a company that executes it pretty well (We have a lot of WFH people, and a lot of tech to help out with it).
I recorded a Podcast on this topic, but I’m also curious what questions people have, and who’s making the transition this week to WFH.

I wanted to do work from home, from satellite office or some other suitable place already for more than 2 decades. About 22 years ago, I’ve been promised that option but when I refused to renew contract unless this offer gets implemented for me, I learned that the manager in charge had cheated and never was willing to implement it, used it only a cheat method to attract potential staff. During my time with that company, I implemented this working method for several project members. And we all didn’t want to work only from home. We all wanted alternating work from home with working at the office. When not constrained for security or health reasons, this alternating mode seems to me the best option. And it’s not suitable for every kind of work place. And this working mode is not suitable for every employee neither as it requires some capacity of self-discipline.

In my country, there are quite a lot of legal constraints which don’t present an obstacle. There exist guides and recommendations as work contracts often need some extension too. I provided all such information to the manager as the organisation had appropriate guides and corporate rulings already agreed with its trade unions and its workers councils.

I also worked for a global company in this ending decade where I didn’t get such an offer but I successfully tried if the measures they’ve put into place were sufficient and working as I had to be ready to work on call on one weekend from home. Their implementation was more sophisticated than I expected and it worked.

So, currently, I’m not on this transition this week. And I didn’t lookup yet your podcast to see any differences to what I already know. Legal constraints are probably different for your case while aspects of mind-set are probably the same.

felipepena · 2020-03-11T12:08:07.000Z

We are mostly a manufacturing and equipment repair shop. So working from home is very limited to a few software engineers. No one from IT works from home at all. We’re needed physically at the office.

So for us working from home would have to be seriously evaluated with just admin staff (managers, Accounting, Execs, Finance, HR, Purchasing, Customer Service) working from home. The worker bees would still need to report to the plant.

Making it happen even for the people mentioned above would be a trick. We’d need to make sure they knew the ins and outs of connecting from home via vpn and everything that goes along with that. Not easily done is all I’m saying.

brianinca · 2020-03-11T12:42:56.000Z

We already have an extensive remote-work infrastructure, just a reality when so many projects are active out in the real world. Most of management down to the Superintendent level has a notebook to hand when offsite, and quite a few of the back office staff do as well. The majority of folks remote back to their own workstations in the office, but we have a big old RDS server for folks permanently offsite (satellite offices, job trailers, etc).

StorageNinja · 2020-03-11T13:50:23.000Z

FelipePena:

We are mostly a manufacturing and equipment repair shop. So working from home is very limited to a few software engineers. No one from IT works from home at all. We’re needed physically at the office.

I’ve supported Mfg sites from across the country. You typically need 1 person who can service a site, but beyond that I can’t understand why you’d need multiple people. One trick we used for sites with no IT staff is find a local 3rd party IT person/MSP or use something like Onforce that could get us remote hands on short notice. What kind of issues on a given day do you need someone physically there for.

FelipePena:

Making it happen even for the people mentioned above would be a trick. We’d need to make sure they knew the ins and outs of connecting from home via vpn and everything that goes along with that. Not easily done is all I’m saying.

We don’t use VPN for most staff. We have a SSO portal that people login to (2FA) and then all of the applications are accessible from there. What services do you use, that would need a VPN specifically? Stuff that needs to talk straight SQL to an app is generally better delivered over a webserver that sits next to the DB, or streamed out (We do have VDI, and RDSH backed streaming appps from our Horizon View farm).

joerademacher3424 · 2020-03-11T15:12:26.000Z

Don’t we already have a sticky on this?

What is your question about remote work? IT & Tech Careers

I see a lot of people wanting to find a remote work job. and as I've been working remote for 4 years (and know quite a few people in IT who work remote) I figured I'd start a thread to do some Q&A. Also I'll start with 2 questions. What do you want to know about remote work? Why do people seem almost desperate to find these jobs? (It wasn't something I explicitly went looking for).

StorageNinja · 2020-03-11T15:35:13.000Z

Figured I’d start a fresh thread