wurk»home {Your career. Your say.}

 The first professional writing job I had after graduating from college was working as a technical writer for Lockheed Aerospace at the Kennedy Space Center. The company hired about 50 technical writers in an effort to update more the 2,000 documents for NASA’s Return to Flight. Because of the large number of employees all starting about the same time, the department (Operations and Maintenance) literally did not have enough desks for all of us. As a result, they split us into two shifts. Some came in at 7 a.m. and the next group came in at 3:30 p.m. and we shared desks. Back then, working from home or telecommuting was rarely heard of and believe it or not, I didn’t even have a computer on my desk. I worked with a red pen, writing and marking up documents for someone else to retype on an ancient (errr..okay..at the time…a state of the art) word processor.

For some of the same reasons, lots of people and little space, some companies in India are taking similar steps and allow telecommuting and flexible work schedules.

From the Times of India:

“When companies are adding about 2,000-4,000 engineers every quarter, the necessity of seats is also making them realise that telecommuting is one of the best routes to take.

They are also recognising that the need to balance work and family is important. Some of them like Texas Instruments India, which has about 1,200 working on high-end chip design, pays a stipend to take care of the broadband and phone costs at home.”