From the Editor’s Desk: Feeling Remote (Premium)

30 years ago this coming year, I started working from home full-time, which set me apart from virtually everyone I knew. And while some friends and family members joined me in doing so in time, most workplaces that could accommodate working from home did not do so for all the obvious reasons. Reasons that were later proven wrong when the 2020 global pandemic forced their hands. As it turns out, many people are just as productive, maybe even more so, at home as they are when forced to commute into an office.

Or maybe not.

Three years after we all emerged uncertainly into the world again, we’re all still fumbling around trying to figure out what normal means now. What I can tell you is that normal for me hasn’t changed in the slightest, at least from a work perspective. And that my initial thoughts about working from home in the 1990s are just as relevant today.

Put simply, it’s not for everybody. A conclusion I arrived at after a few years of experiencing it first-hand. It feels like a million years ago.

In the mid-1990s, we were living in Phoenix, Arizona, and my nascent new career in writing had taken off, first with books and then with web publishing, or what we’d later call blogging. But the transition started in 1993 when we moved to Phoenix so that I could pursue a degree in computer science at Arizona State University (ASU). In the span of just a few years, I attended school and then dropped out, wrote several books, started a few websites, worked remotely for a tiny web publishing start-up in San Francisco, went solo, and then was hired by the company that published Windows NT Magazine back in an era where paper publications were both important and prestigious. Everything changed.

I’ve been lucky in many ways, and I’ve had many unique life experiences, several of which happened during these critical years.

For example, because I unexpectedly couldn’t get in-state tuition during our first year in Phoenix, I had to get a job and attend a local community college part-time at first. That job ended up being a temporary return to banking, which was unwelcome, but it also led to the bank robbery stories I hold in the Thurrott Premium newsletter a few years back. And in attending Scottsdale Community College (SCC) instead of ASU that first year, I met Gary Brent, the professor who mentored me and kickstarted my writing career out of nowhere, another story I’ve told before.

There was also the time I visited a professor at ASU after my transition there so I could find out which books we’d be using in an upcoming class, only to discover that I’d written one of the contenders. After conferring with the higher-ups at ASU, who told me I couldn’t just get credit for that class---I suspect this circumstance had never come up before---I dropped out to write full-time.

Given all this, I place my work-from-home start date somewhere in early 1994, and I probably forget half of the jobs I was able to perform...