Wednesday, January 22, 2003

IBMers and Productivity While up at a ITKC meeting last week, I was talking to a PM from IBM's Global Services division. He mentioned that a rediculous number (like 90%) of their employees do the majority of their work at home. My brother-in-law has been an  IBMer for a while as well, so I've heard all about their "virtual offices," but I never really connected the fact that he does a lot of work from home with the idea of a standard policy. It would be quite interesting to work on one of these distributed teams. However, it seems to me that it would bring a lot of communication disadvantages that would end up minimizing the actual cost savings--after all, as pointed by many authors, communication is the major reason that productivity doesn't increase in direct proportion to the number of developers on a team. 4:41:30 PM    comment []