Telecommuting

Being a programmer I’m always curious about how people utilize technology to improve their lives. The section in the book about Organizational Technology was very interesting to me. I have had intermittent success with telecommuting for my primary job at an established company. Typically, I’ve found with well-established management styles in the western states that management frowns upon the idea of telecommuting. Personally, I feel that this primarily stems from either not trusting your employees to do their work without direct constant supervision, which in itself if loaded with fallacies. Additionally, I believe that this also stems from our environment, where there typically aren’t very many good reasons why an employee is unable to make it into a shared workplace. I have this perspective from having my direct supervisor located in the mid-west as well as on the east coast. Apart from the west coast, there are more severe weather conditions that physically prevent people from commuting safely into work, and they are very much more open-minded about the concept of telecommuting. It is very much an unfortunate condition of telecommuting however, that it is currently reasonably difficult for non-technical people to coordinate meetings, teams, or project work over these distances. On the other hand, for technical people, this limitation is very minute.