Semantici.st

I’m not going to make a habit of posting memes on my blog here. My experience is that memes are the blogging equivalent of small talk – it’s just making noise so that people don’t feel uncomfortable in the silence.

As a result, there may be periods of silence here, if I don’t have anything to write.

Craig did ‘tag’ me for a meme, and I think it’s a useful starting point for talking about something else, so I’m going to present my results.

But first, some comedy.

I did this meme on my Linux box at my day job, and the results are quite amusing:

john@fairbanks:~$ history|awk '{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf "%5d\t%s \n",a[i],i}}'|sort -rn|head
814 +44
301 ssh
210 +44(0)
152 +442
100 +4420
86 cd
82 02
76 +44(0)2
64 +44207
63 ls


Look weird? That’s because I copy/pasted a screenout file (which the software I support in the day job uses to make sure that it doesn’t extract our clients’ phone numbers and other details when it’s processing their own clients’ documents) into vim, and when I realised it was going to take about a thousand years to copy I killed vim – which resulted in it pasting into bash. Closing the terminal tab fixed that problem, but it was amusing, and pushed anything meaningful out of my history file. Since then I’ve resized the history file to some tens of thousands of unique lines, so the amusing numbers will be around for a while, but so will all the SSH commands that I conveniently recall with control-r.

Running it on my home workstation (an iMac) tells you a lot more about what I do:

john@Pitchblende:~$ history|awk '{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf "%5d\t%s \n",a[i],i}}'|sort -rn|head
236 ssh
32 whois
29 host
28 dig
25 scp
24 ls
24 cd
16 vim
14 sudo
13 exit

The comparison to Craig’s tells the difference in what we do: I’m not a developer. SSH features heavily, since I do very little work on the machine in front of me, and most of the remainder is network admin and testing, or just everyday working with the filesystem.

Even if I’d been able to get sensible results from my day job machine, it wouldn’t show you what I do there, since again it’s all working remotely.

Apart from the keyboard and screen resolution, I’d be just as productive on my Eee PC as on my iMac – I don’t use the tools on the machine I’m in front of when I’m working.

That would be an untenable situation for a developer – no network and you can’t work at all, slow network and your productivity goes through the floor, and your frustration through the roof. For sysadmin and system support, it’s all about getting to the machine and working there.

I recently read Tim Ferriss’ ‘The Four Hour Work Week’, which is all about being able to work effectively from anywhere in the world. While the book is heavily focussed towards Ferriss’ style of entrepeneurialship (which largely relies on finding a magical product that can be manufactured, packaged, and shipped entirely by other people, and hiring cheap outsourcing to provide customer services), and the brief mentions of people doing this from their jobs seem to only be people who are already highly successful professionals (until a year ago I was outsourced customer services and technical support), I think that there’s still value to be taken from it.

I do my day job from home on Wednesdays, and I’m just as effective here as I am in the office for almost everything my official job actually requires. Some other tasks I take on are harder to do remotely, but with some work it wouldn’t be that hard to produce set-ups to reduce their need on my physical presence.

I’m not going to use this freedom to run off on weeks- or months-long ‘mini-retirements’. I mostly use it to not have to wear trousers one day a week, which significantly increases my quality of life by itself. I’m sure that I could probably negotiate longer periods of remote working if I did want to go to Japan for a month or something, but as I have a more modest salary than the kind of people ‘The Four Hour Work Week’ seems to be about, such a thing remains impractical for now.

It does make me wonder, though, how many of us could easily work remotely? While most developers would need tools locally, even something as minimal as an Eee PC could be sufficient, and a full-size laptop isn’t that much of a burden. Certainly almost everyone in a ‘desk job’ could, with some technological set-up, work quite productively from home. Route the voice calls over IP telephony, VPN for access to the company network, and Office applications are the same if they run on a computer in the office or at home.

Sadly, for most people this is just a pipe-dream. In the financial services industry which dominates the employment landscape in Edinburgh it’s normal for companies to still require suit-and-tie dress codes for staff which are not customer-facing. The idea of their employees sitting at home with no trousers would probably drive them into some kind of fit. It’s a pity, because working from home increases productivity and decreases costs. It make for a happier workforce and improves staff retention. In the world of ‘Business’ (complete with capital B, for self-importance) technology, investment strategies, products, and marketing all move quickly – but the underlying culture moves ever so painfully slowly.

There is movement, and eventually even the suits in the Edinburgh banks will catch on. In the meantime, I’m going to continue to fix people’s systems while not wearing trousers.