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Tuesday, September 08, 2009

Telecommuting

If you work in a large city there is a good chance you have to commute to work. It is also likely that your commute time is non-trivial. Here in Los Angeles it is not uncommon for people to spend over an hour in their car everyday. No fun!

If you search dice.com for sas jobs 1115 jobs are returned. If you tell dice to restrict to telecommuting jobs a whopping 0 are returned(!). So why isn't telecommuting more of an option? We have laptops, cell phones, secure VPN, high speed internet, Skype, etc. Why hasn't the distributed work force become the norm? As a SAS programmer, do you telecommute? If not, why not?

If you do telecommute, could you share your setup with us? What has worked for you and what hasn't? The more specific you can be the better. If I can get enough feedback I will put something together along the lines of A SAS Programmer Telecommuting/Home Office Best Practices.

Some questions I am thinking of:
Do you have a plan for backing up data? Is it local? There's a lot of really good online backup that is really cheap.
How do you protect your data? Encryption tools?
Do you use a revision control system to track your source code (Git, Subversion)?
How do you connect to servers? VPN, SSH?

Any other issues I am not thinking of?