Shane and Casey » Shane http://www.shaneandcasey.com Family, House, Home Fri, 18 Nov 2011 17:42:49 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Working Remotely http://www.shaneandcasey.com/2011/11/18/working-remotely/ http://www.shaneandcasey.com/2011/11/18/working-remotely/#comments Fri, 18 Nov 2011 17:42:49 +0000 Shane http://www.shaneandcasey.com/?p=1129 I haven’t worked in non-home office in over two years. As most telecommuters will agree, the situation is a mixed bag. With working on my project, I’m a 9 hour drive away from our main office building. Learning to work remotely by yourself is a challenge. Learning to manage employees is a endeavor that is impossible to appreciate until you’ve done it. Not tooting my own horn, just reflecting on the task it has been.

What I’ve learned about working remotely:

  • Have your own dedicated office space. Working from the couch in your living room where the kids play just isn’t productive. Thankfully I’m not a couch-working type of guy.
  • Try to dress the part. While working remotely is stereotyped as working in your boxers, I wouldn’t advise it. When you dress lazy, you tend to work the same way.
  • Get a good webcam and decent internet connection. You’ll want to video conference at least once a day to stay in the loop.
  • If your main office doesn’t proactively try to support you working remotely, you’ll be the most miserable person in the group. I cannot emphasis this enough. Finding out about new hires, big features and news releases the day of isn’t enjoyable.
What I’ve learned about managing employees remotely:
  • Following along with the last bullet point, you need to keep your employees in the loop just as much as you expect your team you work with to keep you in the loop. If you do not, they’ll either feel like they are not part of the team, or they’ll ask around the main office until they get in the loop. I’ve learned this point the hard way.
  • Constant contact. You need to communicate with your team as much as possible throughout the day. This is something I still struggle with (terrible memory), but I know that things run much more smoothly when you talk as often as possible. This is the equivalent of stopping by their cube and asking how things are going :)
  • That I don’t know all of the answers to this yet. I’m still finding ways to improve as I go.
I’m going to beat this point to death. If you work remotely, your team around you has to proactively work with you. They cannot skip talking to you about something just because they didn’t want to Skype you in. That takes just as much time and effort (arguably less) than to walk across the room and wait until you have a free moment to talk. If the team doesn’t see a Skype call as the same as walking over to your desk, or IM as the same as asking across the table, or email the same as, well, email, then you’ll run into major communication issues.
Does anyone else telecommute and have comments to share?
]]> http://www.shaneandcasey.com/2011/11/18/working-remotely/feed/ 1 Life changing moments http://www.shaneandcasey.com/2009/10/25/life-changing-moments/ http://www.shaneandcasey.com/2009/10/25/life-changing-moments/#comments Mon, 26 Oct 2009 01:20:48 +0000 Shane http://www.shaneandcasey.com/?p=697 In the last month, we made a couple decisions that are of the variety that will shape our lives tremendously. If you would have asked me a year ago if I thought I’d be making a blog post with these two items in it for the world to read, I would have said you were crazy. But many of you have become friends of ours, even if we have never met in person. If you ever end up in northeast North Dakota, you’ve got a warm bed and good eats waiting for you :) .

The bigger of the two decisions we made, was to expand our family. Casey is roughly 6 weeks along. After being inspired by The Macs, we are going to wait until out child is born to find our if we’ll be blessed with a little girl or another rambunctious adorable boy. So we now have another room to get baby’d. It’ll be a little different not knowing the sex, but I think we could have fun with it while making it work for whatever little bundle calls it home. We’ll be making the other upstairs bedroom into the nursery. I’d love to talk for paragraphs about this topic, but it is a bit difficult at this stage to come up with much more than what I provided :) .

The other big decision made is a major career shift on my end. We currently are blessed to be able to have me be the sole provider in the home, allowing Casey to raise our kids. It is the most underpaid (monetary) position in the world, but the reward of being able to spend your day with your kids are worth it (just don’t ask her on a bad day :) ). But, anyways, that big career change I mentioned… I’ll be transitioning from a full-time, salaried job to owning my own software development contracting company.

I’ve been paid to program since I was 15. I’m going to give you my story, whether you want it or not :) . I started out with one of those free websites with a full template back when I was ten. I’m pretty sure it said something like “I’m Shane, I’m ten. I have a website.” Impressive, right? I was mighty proud of it. From there, I transitioned into learning HTML to do some basic markup. Next, I transitioned into learning PHP so I could do cool things like tell you the date or something else jaw dropping like that. Then I got crazy and decided to write my own forum software. It was surprisingly successful until a huge security hole was discovered and I didn’t have enough time between school and it so I ended up selling it for some other poor schmuck to fix. I was 14 years old then.

Next, I started working for family doing some basic manufacturing to save up enough to buy parts to build my own computer. I was 15 at that time. With that new computer (using my futon as a chair, and the edge of a hand-me-down entertainment center as a desk) I started doing some free work to get my name heard. It wasn’t long until I was getting paid to do that work. I didn’t make much. Mostly enough to pay for gas and some gas station pizza at high school lunch breaks every now and then. Once I moved to college, I took up a job at Sears while moonlighting doing freelance programming. I lasted there for a year, and did another year at Napa until I landed a job after my sophomore year working for the company I do now. After graduating, I took a job at a $40bln company 5 hours away. It ended up being too hard to be that far from family, so we jettisoned back up here around the time this blog started and I went back to working for the company I am at now while letting them know I eventually wanted to go out on my own.

That takes us to now. As of November 1st, 2009, I’ll officially be self-employed. I’ve got my work cut out for me (speaking of which, contact me if you are an aspiring programmer [web or Windows based] and want to take on some work). I imagine this will explain the rush to get my downstairs office finished up soon.

Sooo, if you need any website or software development done, let me know. Also, if you are, or know, a good website designer, please let me know. Good designers are hard to come by, and I’ve got so much work I could dump on someone as long as they don’t expect to get paid a gazillion dollars per hour :) .

Sorry for rambling on so long about a career and leaving a paragraph to the more important point. I’m sure there will be much more to come on the baby, but little on self-employment :) . If you are coming over from houseblogs.net and are wanting to get baby updates, be sure to subscribe (http://www.google.com/reader, “Add Subscription,” “http://www.shaneandcasey.com/feed“) to our blog as I won’t be tagging it in a manner that will cause them to show up on there.

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