What Not to Wear to the Office

[Tallpine]

I may work for a rather unique company, but we frequently have employees and managers geographically far apart.  My manager's manager is on the other side of the Atlantic.  Another coworker's manager is on the other side of the country (coworker TCs fulltime).  One guy works out of Hawaii full time from home.  I TC 2-5 days a week myself.

As for meetings, with customers and coworkers worldwide, I seldom have face-to-face meetings.  I do a lot of teleconferences with Livemeeting.  An average day for me is 2-3hrs of calls/meetings.  I've had weeks where fully 2/3 of the week was teleconferencing. Hard to get any work done those weeks...

Chris

Usually the farther away the manager is, the more productive work that can get done.    Last project that I was on, the senior manager for the client seemed determined to torpedo his own project and piss off everyone, at which he succeeded well. 

Some years ago I worked on a project that had elements in England, Indiana, Arizona, Montana (me), and sometimes Japan. 

[RoadKingLarry]

Being that my job is physical, hands on technical work TC is not an option. However, the shift I work has it's pluses. I sometimes go 3 and 4 days a week with out having to talk to another living soul.
 

[mtnbkr]

For the record, I've been working various TC jobs since 2003.

I've been TCing on and off since 1998ish.  I've never held a full-time TC job, but ever job I've had since school has involved some TC.  I was doing desktop and server support over dial-up with PCAnywhere in the late 90s.

Which is it? Is it, as you said in this post, that there are laws in your country that limit TC, or that, as you said in your previous posts, that data owners are often averse to TC?

It's both.  And it's not so much the data owners are adverse to TC specifically, but to the lack of control of the data if it's not in a secured location.  See, if you allow TC, then the person can TC from anywhere.  Home, Starbucks, bookstores, etc.  While you can encrypt the bejeezus out of everything, the screen has to be "in the clear" so the user can do their job.  A careless user will work in places where shoulder surfing isn't impossible.  That is the sort of things people rightfully fear.

Oh, and it's not just laws in this country that serve to discourage TC.  The EC has data protection laws as well (else my company wouldn't be spending large sums of money to duplicate functionality overseas).

Here is my prediction, which I think can be borne out statistically in the coming years. We can meet again in this forum as the time passes and check if Microbalrog was right:

I believe that the amount of jobs that can be implemented as TC jobs, technologically, is greater than the total of TC jobs that actually exist today. It is also constantly growing as technologies evolve. As such, we will see, in the following 5-10 years, a growth of the total number of actual TC jobs, both in absolute numbers and as a percentage of the economy. This is something that we will be able to verify statistically and check if I was right or wrong.

*sigh*

Technology isn't the issue.  It never was.  I also never said TC jobs wouldn't grow, but that not all jobs are suitable for TC.  I fully expect my current job to become mostly, if not all, TC in the coming years.  The precedent is there elsewhere in the company and I'm already nearly 50% TC today (ignoring the fact that even when I'm "in the office", my job is effectively TC since I do very little "locally").  However, my previous job would not be TC suitable even though all of the tools existed to make it technically feasible.

As long as there is that human component that can walk away from their PC with sensitive data on the screen and the system unlocked, or people working in public places who aren't careful, there will be ample reasons to ban TC in certain workplaces.  Think about the stories you've heard about people losing laptops with sensitive data on them.  Even if the drives are encrypted (and most companies do this today), it doesn't prevent a dedicated attacker from gaining access if the data is juicy enough.  Those types of issues make folks antsy about allowing TC.

Chris

[MicroBalrog]

Here's what I think is going to happen:

1. More jobs are going to become TC-based. This includes surprising jobs that one cannot even imagine being TC-based today (telepresence robots, remote-controlled equipment, driverless vehicles are either on the verge of hitting commercial markets or becoming mainstream.

As per the above:

2. Considerations of clothing vs. hireability will be eroded. I could pierce my entire face - all of it - and not a single one of my clients would ever know. In the 21st century you will see more pierced/tattooed people as people give less of a crap.

[RocketMan]

In the 21st century you will see more pierced/tattooed people as people give less of a crap.

I believe you will see fewer pierced and tattooed people as the fad fades away and something else replaces it.  Sure, there will always be some tattooed/pierced folks about, but today's numbers will decrease over time.
And there will be a lot of money to be made in tattoo removal in the coming years.