Working from Home as an IT Engineer

posted by Allan@TechCrammer @ 11:05pm, Saturday 1 November 2008.

A close friend and co-worker of mine had an idea several years back for an Internet startup. He moved out of state to another job, though we kept in close contact. He called me one day and I was shocked to see he had actually already started a small online business and had a fairly good customer base in just a few months. Well, I guess I wasn't too surpised after thinking about it some more. He is likely the most pioneering and IT savvy people I have met though my career.

I assisted with re-engineering some frontend design of the website and a few other minor things. It was exciting to see his business really going. He called me a few months later and we discussed partnering on the company.

We were both working full time jobs and spent sleepless nights and weekends growing the business. We got to a point where the growth was almost enough for one of us to really commit full time.

My software development contract was slowly winding down and I was ready for a change. After discussing this with my wife and son and with their support, I took the leap and started working full time from home.

This was a terrific opportunity for me to spend more time with my family, flexible work hours, and no commute was very easy to get used to. However, I think most people look at the pros too much without weighing in the potential difficulties as well.

One of the biggest challenges that I saw in myself was knowing when to quit working. Since I had devoted a small office space in our spare bedroom, it was easy to just walk over and check on things such as completing customer support queries, make some sales calls, etc...

You can very quickly get burnt out if you don't balance your personal and free time. The situation was compounded also since I was now a shareholder of the company and my work ethic would directly effect my salary. Also the system relied on many moving parts with servers in different geographical areas and constant alerts on my cell phone when issues would arise (at all times of the night).

Don't get me wrong I do miss many aspects of this and think that there are many people that, if organized properly, could really prosper and still not over or under perform. Also we really did grow the business quite significantly, to the order of at least 6 times when we started in that year.

Another opportunity came up back in my home town (with health insurance) so I have been back in the somewhat 9/5 schedule for almost 4 years.

The startup company is still going and we still work on things part-time again. Unfortunately, our customer base has decreased to about a third of that at our peak.

No more working in my PJs :)
-Allan

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