To Commute or Not to Commute

I am sure that I will get a couple comments from this post.

I have heard that current IT companies are requiring commuting restrictions on their employees.

Here are the following restrictions I have heard:

• You have to work from the Central Office
• You have to work from a Branch Office
• You have to live less than 30 miles from a cooperate office

Working at my current position as a System Administrator, there are very few tasks that cannot be handled remotely.  I also hold the undisclosed title of Architect. I design project and stage them.  A jack of all trades. These projects can range from virtual projects to simple domain upgrades.

When I am working on projects/playing Architect, I need to be onsite to stage and test the equipment.

When there are no projects at hand, I can handle the day to day tasks and the Data Center issues from my house.  I have a VPN that connects me back into my work network. From this VPN I have have complete access into the Corporate Data Center and clients systems.  If there is no access in specific systems, I have a tool call ISL.  Take a look at their website here.  This tool has been a life saver a couple of times when issues have arose and I needed to view the clients desktop directly.

Phone support is another key issues that these IT companies face. My current employer uses ShoreTel for their phone system.  With this system I can forward my office number to my cell phone and/or house phone.  Yes I know, house phones are dead. So I can take support calls and inter office calls from anywhere that I have cell service.

So this takes care of phone support and remote access.

So why do you have to live 30 minutes form the office.  I am not for sure on this reason.  If I, as a future employee, would like to commute 1.5 hours to the office, why should that be an issue?  I should have remote phone and network access. If this companies current infrastructure cannot support remote support/employees they need to think about why they are in IT industry.

The IT market is becoming very competitive.  Companies need to start looking at their employees and giving them the ability to work remotely and compensating  them according to abilities and not their job title.