Rob Reynolds - The Fervent Coder : News

Chocolatey featured on LifeHacker!

Rob Reynolds — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 14:44:21 GMT

Chocolatey was just featured on LifeHacker! http://lifehacker.com/5942417/chocolatey-brings-lightning-quick-linux+style-package-management-to-windows

I was ecstatic to hear about this, of course now I need to write an actual comparison between chocolatey and other windows package managers.

Comments on Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/commandline/comments/zqnj6/chocolatey_brings_lightning_quick_linuxstyle/

Remote Work: Placeshift and Stay Highly Collaborative Part 2–Focus on YOU

Rob Reynolds — Sat, 28 Jul 2012 11:50:00 GMT

Companies want to hire the type of person that is cut out to be a remote worker. The type of person that can be a remote worker is the type of person that excels at their work and that is what companies are always looking for.

In the first part of this series we talked about what remote work is and how a business benefits from remote workers. In this article we are going to focus on you. What does it take to be a remote worker? Is remote work possible in your job? How do you work from home when there are distractions?

NOTE: The following is not a definitive list and not true for every situation. Some of this represents what works well for me in my experiences over the last few years.

Can YOU be a Remote Worker?

Are you the remote worker type? This is always an interesting question. You can learn behaviors, I don’t believe this is a type that you are either born into or not. I think this is something you can learn and become if you just know how. So what are the key behaviors to being a remote worker? Surprisingly they are strikingly similar to what companies prefer in their best workforce:

Self-Sufficient
Self-starting
Disciplined / Focused
Motivated

With that in mind, it’s not a huge gap that companies would actually want to hire the type of worker that is cut out to be a remote worker. “Wait a minute, didn’t you say this was learned?” Yes, many of these are learned behaviors. Let’s take a look at each in more detail.

Self-Sufficient

You must know how to do your job well enough that you don’t need someone helping you through the work (until you can stand on your own). This doesn’t mean you need zero guidance; we all need help from time to time. I won’t put a number on what determines self-sufficiency, I think most of us know that we know our jobs or not. If not you can probably ask your peers if they feel you are self-sufficient or not.

If you are paying attention, you may have just realized that this means someone “junior” (or just starting out in a new industry) should not be a remote worker. Why? To be able to work effectively without high amounts of guidance usually comes when you have good knowledge of how to do your job and how to do it well.

Folks new to an industry should probably shy away from trying remote work until they are more comfortable in their roles, responsibilities and simply put, skills and abilities. The biggest reason a “junior” worker should shy away from remote work is that the most important career objective for them is to learn and that is harder to do when they are remote. As a junior worker you should want to pair with others to learn how to do things better. The best type of learning is always face to face. It’s hard enough to teach someone face to face, doing it remotely compounds all of the issues that come along with paying attention to the non-verbal cues of whether someone is catching on or not.

Self-Starting

When you are not physically around others working towards the same goals it can sometimes be unclear what you should be doing. Keep in mind it is not the company’s job to make sure you have something to do. It is your responsibility. To be actively engaged, you need to take an active role in making sure you have work to do. Being a self-starter is a high value to a company because they know you are not just going to sit around and wait for something to do. You are going to ask when you need something to do so. That means you are producing something for the company to offset your costs to the company. You want to make the company more money than the opportunity cost of you. This makes you valuable to the company, which is especially important when you are not physically present.

Disciplined / Focused

Discipline and focus means you can work when there are distractions around you. Does that mean you don’t work to eliminate distractions? No, in fact, eliminating distractions is extremely important for many of us. Being able to concentrate with distractions can be very difficult and stressful in the long term, so I would highly recommend removing distractions. How do you do that? We’ll get to that when we talk about how you help your home support remote work.

Discipline is a learned behavior. How do I know? Like many folks I know, I’ve been in the military. I have seen first hand how people become disciplined. It’s really a matter of habit. You do the same thing over and over until it just becomes a habit. So if you want to be disciplined you just practice discipline for some amount of time (some say 21 days straight) and from then on it will become a habit.

Focus is a little harder to achieve. I believe with discipline comes focus. If you are distracted by the twitters and you have the discipline to only turn it on at breaks, you can achieve focus on what you are working on when you don’t have it on. You gain focus by removing distractions until all there is in front of you is what you need to accomplish.

Motivated

I left this last because motivation is a weird animal. People are motivated for different reasons. It’s really about learning what motivates you. To be motivated in this sense really just means to accomplish goals of the company.

When I was in high school I remember listening to a Tony Robbins lesson on how you can categorize folks into two types of motivation: positive and negative. I can’t find the source of this but it boils down people being motivated in two ways, pain and pleasure. You cannot motivate a person that is negatively motivated with positive reinforcement and you would offend a positively motivated person with negative reinforcement. I digress. The point I’m trying to make here is to find what motivates you and adapt some if needed so that it aligns with the goals of the company that you work with.

I believe that motivation can be a learned behavior with the proper conditioning. At the root of all of everything about being a remote worker is motivation. You need to be motivated to succeed at remote work. You need to be motivated to try remote work. You need to be motivated to possibly pursue a new home with a good setup for working remotely. You need to be motivated to learn new ways to enhance your communication with those surrounding you at work.

You

Now that we’ve talked about you, let me say that some or all of these qualities will lend well to remote work. Does that mean that this is true in all situations? Absolutely not. Each situation is unique and what lends well for one situation may not lend well for another or even make sense. If you are motivated to make remote work work for you, you will find a way to make it happen. And this list may not even describe you at all.

Next up we are going to talk about jobs that lend well to remote work.

Remote Work: Placeshift and Stay Highly Collaborative Part 1

Rob Reynolds — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 14:38:57 GMT

The biggest complaint most remote workers have in regards to working on a team? Feeling disconnected. The biggest complaint an office has about remote workers? They forget the remote workers are there and don’t always trust what they are doing. Want to learn how to get past both issues?

Hi, my name is Rob and I have a confession to make. I’m a remote worker four days a week. I’m a placeshift remote worker, and yet I am still highly collaborative with my team. “Placeshifting?” you say. “Highly collaborative?” you say. Over the next series of articles I am going to show you how this can be done.

If you are a business and you have not seriously looked into a technology known as Embodied Social Proxies, you are paying opportunity costs. You are losing money. More on that below. This series is for you so pay attention. I will highlight both business benefits and worker benefits.

If you are a worker and you have considered working from home (or just remotely) but you are not quite sure how you would make it work, this series is for you. Or you are already doing remote work and want to learn how to collaborate better.

Two Types of Remote Work

Timeshift – This is when you perform work at different intervals than the mainstream office may perform the work. Many folks have done this kind of work in one respect or another, even when working a regular full time job. If you ever went home and continued working in the evening, you have done what some might consider timeshift remote work. This series is not geared to this type of remote work.

Placeshift – Placeshifting is when you perform work at the same time as everyone else, but at a different location. This is what most people think of when they hear the term remote workers. If you ever have work from home days, you know what it is like to placeshift. This series is geared to this type of remote work.

The terms placeshifting and timeshifting are borrowed from media industry (television, music, etc) with respect to devices like DVRs. Not quite clear? When you record a TV show and watch it later you are timeshifting the show. Timeshifting dates back to the 1970s with VCRs and Betamax, while placeshifting media is a newer concept made possible by devices like the Slingbox. When you use a Slingbox to watch a show from a device like your phone at the same time the show is playing, you are placeshifting. The difference should be clear when you think of placeshifting as same time, different location and timeshifting as different time, location irrelevant.

This same terminology can be applied to remote work. Although I was hoping to coin the remote work types terminology, Anybots and GigaOm beat me to print with their recent article (How and why robots are placeshifting remote workers). At least this means the terminology is sound.

Bottom Line

Placeshifting remote work is not for everyone and not for every type of business work either. Some jobs have physical requirements or security requirements that negate the ability for remote work. Not every person is able to be productive in a setting outside the office (and the converse is also true). The world is not fair, okay? Get over it. If you are someone who can work by yourself and do so well without being easily distracted (read: there are ways to remove distractions in a work from home situation – I’ll touch on those), then it’s possible you have what it takes to be a remote worker.

Business: We Tried Remote Workers Before, It Didn’t Work

This is the argument I hear the most. The biggest problem with this argument is that it is subjective. Remote work itself is subjective/situational. No two remote workers are going to be alike, no two situations are going to be the same. It’s possible you tried remote work with an individual who was not able to work remotely effectively. It’s highly possible you had an employee who moved away and you wanted to keep them so you allowed them to work remotely. But you may not have set yourself (and the individual) up for success. How much planning and research did you do prior to these remote work situations? How much enabling were you towards your remote worker? Did you attempt to manage your remote worker in the same way as the centrally located folks? Have you even heard of Embodied Social Proxies prior to reading this?

The awareness I am trying to raise with you is that there are situations for businesses to make it work. And you can benefit hugely from remote workers if you do the proper planning, research and understand guidelines for making it work in your situation.

How Do I Benefit as a Business?

Talent Pool

Here’s a hard pill to swallow – you are limited by your talent pool. If you require people to be onsite for work, you are limited by the area in which you do business. I hate to be the one to inform you, but you are not the most awesome place to work. I’m sorry. No matter how awesome you are there is somewhere else that is more awesome and does x better. It’s a losing battle. Get over it already.

In this day and age less and less people will move just to work for you. If you expect the most talented folks in your industry to relocate for you, I have to tell you that 1990 called. I’m sorry to inform you it’s not going to happen in every case. And if it does, it’s borrowed time. Because someone else is going to attract them away.

It’s likely the most talented people in your industry will never work for you if you don’t have a remote option available. There are many reasons, but it boils down to where you expect your talent to live.

Happy Workers Are Superfans (and Productive Workers)

This is so huge I can’t even begin to give it the proper amount of attention. You want your workers to be happy. Tom Preston-Werner, cofounder of GitHub, speaks to this in a presentation called Optimizing For Happiness. Please go there now. The bottom line is that you keep your workers happy, and they are much less likely to leave your organization. Turnover costs are huge to a company. If you are not making your employees happy, they are talking to others about not working for you. They have their ears open to new opportunities. They are likely looking for other jobs as you read this.

If you think you are making your employees happy, I would ask what metric you use for evaluation. I’ll be the first to tell you that you are not doing enough to keep your employees happy. If you give out raises once a year and they are around 3-5% across the board, you might be doing it wrong. Not every employee is created equal, not every employee performs at the same level. Why would you pay them the same? Why would you give them the same raises?

I’m going to make a bold statement here: Your best people outperform your middle of the line folks by ten times. If you are not paying them ten times as much or even five times as much, you might want to re-evaluate how truly happy you are making your employees. If you are not challenging your employees, you are boring them and they will find something more exciting. If you are not doing x you are likely not making your employees happy. You need better metrics into what makes for happy workers.

Facility Costs

Your facility costs are significantly cheaper when it comes to remote workers. A remote worker or semi-remote worker can take up a lot less space than a full time worker. If they come into the office once or twice a week, they will take up some space during that time, but the rest of the week that space could be used by other remote workers when then come into the office. Think of this as space sharing.

Remote workers don’t bring/keep a lot of items in the office. Seriously. Get up and walk around your office. Take a look. Notice how much stuff each worker has surrounding their areas. Notice how much space they take up. Go ask how much it costs for the space of each worker you have in the office per month. If you don’t have this number on hand, you won’t understand what it costs for that worker.

This actually isn’t that hard to calculate if you don’t have it. Just find out the costs of your office space on a monthly basis. Electricity, rent, etc. Now take that number and divide by the number of workers you have on site. This will give you a rough estimate. There are ways to get more accurate estimates, but this is a good start.

For the space of that one onsite worker, you might be able to put 5-10 remote workers in there (if you build and use embodied social proxies which are highly recommended and will be discussed during this series). Imagine that. 5-10 remote workers in that same space. That means for every 10 remote workers you hire, you can only hire one onsite person. Kind of sounds weird to hear it like that, right?

Bigger Staff – More Work In The Pipeline

This is probably the most overlooked opportunity cost when it comes to remote workers. You are limited by the number of folks you have into what you can accomplish. When you open up to remote work, you also open up to the fact that you can take on more work. More work in some terms means more revenue for your business. This is huge.

Final Thoughts For Businesses

Remote work is not without its challenges. I can tell you that the benefits far outweigh the challenges. If you’ve tried remote work in the past and it didn’t work out, don’t let that be a limiter to trying again. If Thomas Edison quit the first time he failed, he may not have been credited with the invention of the light bulb as we know it! Failure is a step on the road to success. Food for thought.

Remote Work Series

Next up I’ll talk about what individuals need to be successful remote workers.
Building an Embodied Social Proxy, aka, the Remote Portal for a practical cost
Possibly other follow ups to come

MVP Renewal and News

Rob Reynolds — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 05:22:03 GMT

It appears that my work in the community and the nominations received from others has secured my status as an MVP for a second year.

Thank you all for the award and thank you everyone (including Microsoft) for valuing my contributions to the community.

I noticed last year I did quite a bit of travelling and talks. I’m going to need to work hard to keep that up this year. I’m also hoping to gear up for the v1 release of RoundhousE and DropkicK as well as something new I’ve been working on known as chocolatey (more on this in a future post – stay tuned!). This year as well hope to get out to some of my favorite conferences (like Iowa Code Camp), start v2 of UppercuT (that Dru and I have been talking about almost as long as UC has been around), and get some of these other tools to work on Linux (UC already does).

I’m pretty excited about this year and recently changed jobs back in February for those who may not have heard. Now instead of working for a bank that has no money inside and the doors are always locked, I’ll be playing with Crop Insurance.

Do me a favor and nominate Dru Sellers for MVP (Visual C#). His contributions to where many people are as developers/individuals (including me) would not have been possible without his influence and mentorship. His investment in others is huge and that is a defining factor of the MVP program.