Total Telecommuting - long

Subject: Total Telecommuting - long
From: Chris Despopoulos <cud -at- ARRAKIS -dot- ES>
Date: Thu, 22 Apr 1999 16:48:36 +0200

Hi all...

Sorry for the delay, but I had deadlines to meet. I posted
a little bit about telecommuting as an alternative to living
in the Silicon Valley of Darkness. Wow, did I get some
action from that! It became obvious I should post some
general reply to the issues that bounced right back at me.

Not only am I strictly telecommuting, but I'm very far
away... In Spain, as a matter of fact. Technically, I'm a
tourist, spending American money, and posing no threat to
the employment statistics here. If anything, I'm helping
improve things because we hire baby sitters on occasion, we
buy stuff, we eat out, etc. All this is possible through
the magic of the (dun, dun, da-dunnnn) ¡INTERNET! (Dig the
Spanish exclamation.)

First point, and I believe this is important... My family
and I have ZERO debt. I believe we would have never tried
this were it not the case. I fear TRW more than the IRS.
In California, if you have bad credit you stand a good
chance of going homeless. Probably the same in the rest of
the US these days, eh? By having no debt, we have the
flexibility to weather the lean times that come from bad
preparation, and from needing to convince people that all
this is possible.

Preparation... What's that? People asked how we prepared
for this, and I must say, rather badly. The original plan
was to keep my Corporate job, and telecommute from here half
the year. I had agreement for this when we started
preparations. Then we had a re-org, and my new chain of
command absolutely refused to discuss it. I decided to make
a go of it as a contractor... If I failed I would look for
a job at another company. I couldn't possibly find a job
that was less open to my plans than the one I left.

So there I was, no job, and tickets to Spain. I had never
contracted before, and I had 2 months to get everything in
order. A friend referred me to a job shop that needed
highly technical writers - he thought I might win my case
with them if I had what they needed. Indeed, I won my case,
mainly because they had a client in another state who always
worked remotely. California - Spain... What did it matter
to them? I worked with them from CA for one month, and then
we left!

I really had nothing else set up... I just hoped I would
find work because I am a specialist in FrameMaker, the Maker
API, and can write code. It turns out a Q/A engineer I
worked with referred me to another company that makes FDK
clients, among other things. So I got some work writing
Maker+SGML clients for them. Then somebody passed me the
address of a person I worked with 10 years ago. I sent a
message, and she asked if I was busy... I got more work
that way.

To summarize, I *met* the people who got me my first jobs,
was personally referred to my second situation, and
personally knew the person who arranged for my third
situation. This bodes ill for remote job hunting. In fact,
I have sent out many resumés, and received many replies that
ammounted to, "Great! When are you moving to California (or
Deluth, or N. Carolina...)?"

All I got from job boards was spam. It's my guess that at
least one of them sells names.

Anyway, for some specific questions:

How do you handle such trivia as showing your
samples, references, interviewing,
and such job acquisition tasks?

I answered some of this above. My samples include the
online developer docs for FrameMaker (MIF, Maker+SGML Dev
Guide, FDK docs), so I can just refer people to those. I
also end up using PDF alot. Right now we're using PDF for
review and it's great. I get markup in post-it notes.
Interviews ultimately involve a phone call. But both sides
do lots of screening via email. Why waste the
trans-Atlantic charges if we don't have anything to offer
each other? Finally, I receive much of what I need via
email. The main exception was a 15 meg exe... My
connection always crapped out before I got it. The answer
to that was burning a CD and sending it via FedX. If I need
to get paper, I get that via FedX as well. So far I have
never had to send a FedX, but the time may come.

You say you are in Spain. I guess this says
that Spain has a better telecommunications system
than
the third-world, bureau'ratically-paralyzed
hodge-podge
found in Italy? Or are you avoiding land-lines
and
connecting by cellular or satellite link?

Um... They have computers here, and everything. I use an
ISP... nothing exotic. Bandwidth is a drag, but I always
turn graphics off in my browser. Lest this question came
from a true Libertarian, let me add this. Spain used to
have a system where you contracted with an ISP. Then you
connected through the State-run telephone system... You
connected to Telefonica's backbone, and they piped you over
to the ISP. This gave Telefonica a chance to charge roughly
$0.70 an hour for every connection. But the actual phone
call was covered in that charge. Now, thanks to the IMF...
er, the Military-Industrial Complex... er, the Free Market
System (not! and never was!)... er the European Union and
its latest treaties for unification, Spain was compelled to
privatize the telephone system. I now enjoy flakey
connections, insufficient licenses at the local node, and I
still have to pay for the phone calls. What with all the
failed attempts to connect, it amounts to about $0.70 per
hour of net time. Let's hear it for better living through
privatization.

Ok, so is this interesting at all? I guess one lesson is,
don't assume that because you are a certified net-weenie
(er, guru) in the States, you know how it works in another
country.

What kind of projects are most amenable to this
approach?

I seem to get those rush jobs that nobody else can do.
People must be pretty desperate if they want to talk to me,
eh? That's how it seems. I'm still waiting for that holy
grail, the 6 month project. It's hard to plan your
finances, let alone a trip to enjoy the wonders of wherever
you are, if you don't know how long the bank account will
hold up. But this is just the beginning. Things are
looking more solid every day, and we are actually getting
ahead - after an initial slump where things looked pretty
bleak.

My distant dreams involve a troller-style
motor-yacht, a
ruggedized laptop and a satellite uplink from
anywhere in
the world. Did those dreams just get closer to
reality?

I guess the latter. But I suggest sail power. I remember
something about a guy who did this on a bicycle. And that
was about 10 years ago! What's stopping you?

Do you contract independently, or do you have an
agency/agent to do that? More than one? One for
each country? Are you specializing in an
industry?

>From the above, it seems I contract independently for
agencies that don't quite treat me like a regular. My
latest gig might be changing that a little... I might be a
regular for that company. But it is definitely
sub-contracting that I do. I'm branching out with my
current gig about hardware simulation. Previously, I was
strictly software. SGML, APIs, and products. Oh, and
again... I only work for US companies.

What, other than your own pre-conceptions, was
your
biggest obstacle to becoming a total telecommuter?

The preconceptions of others. H-R does NOT want to think
this hard. So you need to actually contact the person who
will be working with you. And you need to offer something
that's hard to find. If you do these things, then you can
talk. But then, that's sort of like looking for ANY job,
isn't it? I mean, it's not WHAT you know, it's WHO you
know, isn't it? (So that's cynical... but to at least a
small degree, it's true.) What's new is that you can't get
in peoples' faces.

Other helpful hints and good-to-know stuff,
relative to
techy-writing a-la-remote?

I can only think of two things... Be flexible, and keep in
touch with EVERYBODY. One of my current jobs came from a
long-time-ago associate. As for flexibility, you have to
take into account the inconvenience you carry with you. I'm
always ready to work till the end of day at the job site...
That means 2:00 or 3:00 am over here. I also am not afraid
to initiate phone calls... for FREE. Why should the client
pay extra to keep in touch with me? And for a longer
contract, I charge a rate that includes a two-week visit to
the site every quarter. If you don't need the visit, I can
charge you less... And that higher rate is what I would
charge if I lived in California, so I'm trying to keep with
my peers.

Whew! I think that about covers it. I really hope to see
more people turning to telecommuting as a solution to many
problems... Traffic, cost of housing, time with family,
control over personal life, etc. If I can do anything to
encourage anybody, that makes me happy. And if there's
anything encouraging in my example, I think it's the fact
that we did this with virtually no planning. We held our
noses and jumped in. Sure, the water's a little cold, but
you get to like it after a while.

¡Buena suerte! cud

From ??? -at- ??? Sun Jan 00 00:00:00 0000=




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