John, I spent about 9 years working remotely, most of it with IBM in various areas. I basically agree with all that has been said thus far, technically there is no reason this can't be easily done as long as you have the support of the network folks to allow you vpn access to HMC's, tape libraries etc. that you might be called upon to support.
The human interaction I found varied with what kind of environment you were working with. For example I started IBM with global services, where everyone else on the support teams were also remote, so meetings were held via conference call and a lot of adhoc communications via Sametime. Other areas I worked with were mostly all onsite people, and I was the only one remote. That was tougher when meetings consisted of a group of people in a conference room and one person (me) on a speakerphone, especially when more than one person was talking. Speakerphones cannot pick out one voice from a crowd like the human ear can, and it was sometimes hard to get a word in edgewise during discussions. And then inevitably someone would jump up and start drawing and scribbling on the white board...... And in environments like that, a lot of collaboration with coworkers and other departments happened in person in offices, labs, meeting rooms and the cafeteria, which also made it tough to be remote. In 7 years, and 5 managers at IBM, I only met one of them face to face once. This was all the early 2000's so meeting technology has improved, but you may still face challenges such as these. Dana ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
