Originally posted by Tsun:
Originally posted by Metzen:
When you're remote your boss will trust the opinion of his cronies (your peers or peers one ladder rung beneath you) over yours.
That makes sense no? Being local, it is intuitive that those peers would be at least a closer working relationship with your boss than you. More communication = better understanding and trust.
Not that I haven't been burned by that situation.. I have..more than once.. ugh..
I think as a remote user there needs to be
more implicit trust between your boss and you then if you're local. The reason being is "the boss" will not have all the facts to make the best decision in a decent amount of time. You can try your best to commuicate your entire daily on-goings but things will get miss-communicated, forgotten, or if they're time sensitive then you need to be empowered to make decisions and have him trust you that it was the right one.
We do lots of sluething in our jobs. We listen to issues, understand them, troubleshoot them, and resolve them. (Warning: Analogy!) Could you imagine a detective in San Francisco not being able to start resolving cases until his boss in New York put it through his detectives all the way over there first? Then each time the detective wanted to persue something he needed to check with "the bosses" detectives and for them to give him the OK first? What if he was working with *lesser* detectives? The process would be ungodly slow, painful and frustrating.
There may be some remote situations that aren't as engrossing that this isn't applicable too. My current situation is a frustrating experience in "listen to issue, understand issue, troubleshoot issue, come up with potential solution". Then instead of "implement solution" I am currently required to: "inform boss of potential solution, have boss talk it over amongst his underlings, have boss come back with inferior solution, state your case back to him with a advantages/disadvantages chart, etc." This is for some of the simplest of problems. All of a sudden, changing an IP address on a printer devolves into a discussion as to whether it should be done via telnet or http and whether or not those services should be enabled in the first place. a 5 second job can turn into 2-3 days.
We ran into another issue where a system needed to be resoftwared because it's current state was so degraded that when I suggested that solution as it would be the fastest, easiest and would resolve the issue 100%; I was informed that the team needed to confer to make that decision (the system was a standard reception's desktop). It took them *4* days to get back to me that, "yup, we agreed with you, that is the best solution".
Meanwhile the receptionist is without a computer for 4 days because it was so unusable.
Not acceptable. If any organization feels that amount of time is acceptable, I feel for you. It's not right.
And to add to this thread:
I learned that if "the team" 1200 miles away hires a contractor to do equipment moves at a site 200 miles from you so you don't have to be on site and shit breaks, it's all your fault. It all falls on you because it's your site. Trying to get a hold of your boss to
rehire out said contractor to get them to go back to the site to resolve the issue because you don't have approval authority and having to keep trying for 3 hours just pisses off the workers at said site because they feel like they're in limbo
and their jobs are VERY time sensitive!
What a great April fools this was for me.
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