Last week, a client decided to give me more responsibility for his project. He told me to manage the writing tasks of the other writers on our team. Only after handling this task did I realize what it was like to work with a writer from Mexico, another from India, and another one traveling through Europe – all while reporting to the client in Kansas. Having an international team is commonplace in web work, in fact, it’s almost a given. But what effect does this borderless office have on the individual web worker and the team as a whole? Read the rest of this entry »
We’ve written before about some of the big-ticket telepresence systems – and our skepticism about their place in the average web worker’s life. But between the super-expensive systems and the cheapest of webcams, there seems to be another level of telepresence emerging – systems that are good enough to be worth using, and not so hideously pricey as to be out of reach for everyone. A recent blog posting by Microsoft’s Scott Hanselman gives a glimpse of one man’s experiments in this area.
Now, working for Microsoft does give Hanselman a leg up that many web workers won’t have – he can assume, for example, that all of his coworkers are available via Microsoft Live Meeting. But reading through his account, I was struck by how much difference comparatively low-tech solutions are apparently making to his ability to work remotely (he’s in Portland and the rest of his team is in Seattle).
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Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
