Back in My Day, I had to Telecommute

I recently had the privilage to drive across Canada. It was a great trip but along the way it got a bit distrubing to see the number of small, abandoned highway towns, slowly being reclaimed by nature. More disturbing were the small towns and villages that did have people in them. There were a few towns that must of had dozens of residents. All of which were involved in the local industry (mostly agriculture). These towns are dying, how do I know? No young people. There are simply no opportunities in these towns.

This shouldn’t be. We live in an age where I can freely and easily have conference calls with multiple people around the world, send messages to my friends and family and get the local news from anywhere in the world. All at the same time. As a self employed software consultant, I do things like tweet, write blog posts (hello!) and share with the world things I’m working on. This is how I create and maintain my reputation and this is what I show potential clients when I need to assure them that I can help them with their problems.

And I’m not even that great at it. There are many well known and respected programmers making a great living doing similar things. Starting an open source project and selling consulting services is a great way to gain street cred. Indeed, experts and analysts (I use these terms loosely) have noticed work-from-home trends and have already started to coin terms and identify demographs in the changing ways people work. Why does this new class of worker need to be in large centers? Don’t get me wrong, there are obvious advantages to working from home in a large city, but surely technology makes it easier for people to make a decent living from even small towns in the middle of the Canadian prairies.

Certainly one of the reasons why rural areas are bereft of a skilled work-from-home workforce is the lack of connectivity. Many communities throughout Canada lack things like highspeed internet, they simply don’t have the infrastructure. But that is likely a minor reason. The major reasons are social attitudes. Most employers insist that they must see company employees in front of company computers for 8 hours of company time per day, seemingly oblivious to the possibility that watching a person in front of a computer doesn’t mean they are actually working. And most would-be employee’s don’t know how to market themselves effectively without being face-to-face with someone.

Also, how would someone in a small town catch on to this work-from-home thing? If you are surrounded by farmers, you less likely to research work-from-home jobs and put the time into learning how to do them and marketing yourself than someone who has access to people who already do that (in a city for example). Maybe people who left town might trickle back, perhaps they got a job that allows them to work from anywhere. They may be able to offer guidance to others. Certainly there is no shortage of online resources to teach people anything to almost any level.

I am sure that sooner or later work-from-home will be a common thing. The reason it will take time is simple: technology evolves much faster than society.