A friend of mine (and former coworker from Progeny) has been without full-time work since Progeny went under (I know that includes many former coworkers from Progeny :-( ). He's scraped by with a few contracts here and there, but nothing that would be considered full-time employment.

Anyway, he recently was offered a job (finally) and will be going down to his future employer's offices later today to sign some paperwork. This is a very good thing since he's also someone who has been without heat this winter (his furnace broke down a while ago).

Well, the funny bit is that I guess he was re-reading his resume/cover-letter that got him this job, and he found the following passage from the cover letter that he somehow missed upon submission:

....I'm interested in any opportunities that are available with $OTHER_EMPLOYER...

I personally think this may have helped get him the job. If I was reviewing resumes and I saw that I'd immediately be impressed that this person strives for efficiency because they actually attempted to script their resume/cover-letter process :-)

I have had a lengthy association with the "Work From Home" (or WFH) concept. As early as 2000, when I was at Intel, I wanted to WFH full time. At that time, I was working on a project that Intel couldn't have sold, but which was a tool that could make their internal testing much easier. This tool was something that my managers and I thought would be a perfect Free-Software/Open-Source project, and it seemed to be an ideal candidate for me working remotely. The concept of hosting a FLOSS project was rather alien to Intel higher-ups at the time, and it was decided to let the project die rather than FLOSS it and let competitors use it.

After Intel, I managed to make every aspect of my job at the U of A Physics Dept. able to be done remotely (Linux boxen were easy, of course, but the Win32 ones had a combination of Cygwin w/ SSH and VNC). This meant that I could WFH there, even though I very rarely did.

Then, at Progeny, we actually migrated to a mixture of WFH and working at the office for the last year of Progeny's existence. This worked better for some than others... but I'll get to that in a moment.

Finally, I landed at the Linux Foundation where I got to WFH full time. I have to say that I love WFH full time, and I tend to be a lot more efficient at my work when I'm WFH than when I have to drive into an office daily. However, there is one real problem with WFH. This problem is one of perception and attitude, and it's something that can be overcome. But in order to really be efficient at WFH you need to acknowledge this problem and rectify it.

For those who haven't seen the tiny coverage it's getting, Progeny Linux Systems has shut down. From the website:

We are sorry to inform you that Progeny Linux Systems, Inc. ceased operations April 30, 2007. Questions may be directed to:

board_at_p.c

Offers to purchase the progeny.com, progenylinux.com, progenylinux.org, progenylinux.net, componentizedlinux.com, componentizedlinux.net, componentizedlinux.org, or globalinuxsupport.com domain names should be made to:

webmaster_at_p.c