Nicholas,

I work for The Linux Foundation and have worked from home for the past 2+
years. Almost all of our employees work from home (or remote locations).
Here's my take on your questions, inline, of course.

On Fri, Dec 19, 2014 at 4:10 PM, Nicholas Stewart <[email protected]>
wrote:
>
> I apologize if I shouldn't send this email because it's not related to
> Linux.
>
> I know many of you have IT and software jobs and I'm wondering if you
> periodically work from home. If you do, how do you to stay in
> communication with members of your team and department?
>
> Do you send an email in the morning about what you're going to work on?
>

A couple of our staffers do this, I do not. We use weekdone, before that
trello, to track our status.

>
> Are you expected to be available on IRC or some other chat platform?
>

IRC is our main way to communicate. Recently, we moved to slack for this,
since it made it easier for our customers to communicate with us, but it
has an xmpp and irc gateway. My experience is mostly the same as the day I
started.

>
> Do you phone in for standup or some scrum-like meeting?
>

We use Google Hangouts. About 30ish minutes. This has grown in the past
few months due to the growth of our team. We'll probably have to figure out
another alternative in 3-6 months time.


>
> Do you spend a lot of time on Skype?
>

None. Some coworkers like it, but Linux doesn't play well with it in
SELinux enforcing mode, and I refuse to create a policy for an inept
product. Mostly, I'm just lazy and hangouts work better.

>
> In short, how do you maintain the lines of communication while working
> from home?
>
> Overall, I report my status each week in our standup. I update weekdone
each time I finish a task and communicate over IRC and email. We also use
RT for ticket tracking, wikis for documentation and SOPs, racktables for
managing our physical server space, and openvpn for getting into the
network. Most everything is available remotely these days. It's very nice
to sit in a quiet office at home (now that the kiddo and wife are at school
and work respectively) and get work done. Sometimes, it does get lonely,
that's when I head to either the coffee shop or cowork with others at their
office.

Hope that helps.

herlo


>
> Thank you,
> Nicholas Stewart
>
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