â??A strategy for survivalâ??
Durangoans take up telecommuting to make the mortgage

Bayfield telecommuter Jeff Hammett works on his laptop from the comforts of his back porch earlier this week. Hammett, now a systems administrator for a San Diego company, cut his daily commute from an hour and a half both ways to nothing. Aside from more free time, many local telecommuters also enjoy a higher salary./Photo by Stephne Eginoire.

by Kinsee Morlan

ver heard of the “Durango Tango?” It’s what people in the area call the necessity of getting two or three jobs just to make rent or the mortgage. As a rural community with an economy that depends heavily on tourism, a college degree in this town is more likely to land you a job requiring an apron and a spatula over one with a suit and briefcase.

But local residents seem to love cycling, hiking and skiing enough that they’re willing to overlook the ever-increasing cost of living and the lack of well-paying career opportunities. The median in-town home price in Durango these days is $404,000, according to 2009

For a few, that dance has taken shape

“This is a strategy for survival in Durango,” said Chris McMahon, a software tester who lives close to downtown Durango but recently scored a new

McMahon moved to Durango in 2003 and actually had a job working for a local tech company at the time. It didn’t take long, though, before the company was bought up and moved to another city. McMahon, a lover of the region’s canyon hikes in particular, wasn’t ready to move. Instead, he started to use the Internet to build himself a national presence and a vast resource of connections in his field. After a short stint working a job that required him to fly out of town every Sunday and return to Durango by Thursday, he found a telecommuting gig that allowed him to work from home. 4

That first telecommuting job didn’t last long either, but McMahon knew right away that this was a setup he could get used to. He got another job telecommuting for Socialtext, a startup in Silicon Valley, and he loved it right up to the minute he was laid off last month.

“When I found out I had lost my job, I thought I’d be facing a horrendous job search because of the economy,” McMahon said, “but I was shocked at what happened.”

Using some of the resources he’d picked up as a telecommuter for the last three years, he posted the news of his layoff on several listservs and “tweeted” about it on Twitter. The news spread like wildfire among the somewhat small, global network of software testers and, “Within three hours,” McMahon explained, “I had hiring managers in contact with me and one of them I eventually agreed to a job with.”

McMahon is now happily at work again telecommuting from his Durango home and making the type of money that lets him keep up with his mortgage and maintain his lifestyle. He says he thinks others in Durango should think about trying the whole telecommuting thing, too.

“There are so many technical fields that are wide open,” he said. “There are just so few experts in the realm of software development and systems analysis and all the sorts of things that tech companies do. Anyone here could become an expert in a short time … Within three years, if you were serious about it, you could be fishing for a Silicon Valley salary.”

“There are so many technical fields that are wide open,” he said. “There are just so few experts in the realm of software development and systems analysis and all the sorts of things that tech companies do. Anyone here could become an expert in a short time … Within three years, if you were serious about it, you could be fishing for a Silicon Valley salary.”

While it’s difficult to get an estimate of the exact number of people in the region who are telecommuting, according to WorldatWork, an international association for the human resources field, the number of U.S. employees who worked remotely at least one day per month recently increased 39 percent between 2006-08, from 12.4 million to 17.2 million. The only number that even alludes to the local figure comes from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2000 census, which says the average person in La Plata County travels about 21 minutes to get to work.

Nicole Hemsoth, an Ohio-based remote worker herself who maintains a blog called www.RemoteRevolution.com, would like to see the number of people who work remotely go way up and the number of miles people drive to work go way down.

“There are huge environmental benefits of cutting back the commuting population,” said Hemsoth, who cited the significantly smaller carbon footprint of working from home plus the decrease in urban sprawl. “There are all these technologies out there that allow employers to let their employees work from home, but people are too afraid and superstitious. I mean, this should have been happening 15 years ago.”

The biggest reason for the lag, says Hemsoth, who does viability studies for companies toying with the idea of telecommuting, is that employers are afraid of security (sending important data outside their secure server), they fear a lack of productivity from out-of-office employees and see the legal implications of hiring someone out of state as too complicated.

“Really, though,” says Hemsoth, “the tax thing is only a problem in a few states, and I see the solution to a lot of these other things as coming up with a really solid home-office policy or agreement.”

Jeff Hammett is a systems administrator who works for a small information technology company in San Diego from his home in downtown Bayfield. He just went from in-office work to telecommuting from across state lines and cut his daily commute from an average of an hour and a half to, “nothing,” he said with a laugh. “Now I commute from my bedroom to the kitchen to my office.”

Overall, Hammett says he feels he’s more productive as a remote worker. “When I sit down in my chair at nine in the morning, and I’ve just made a good breakfast and had the extra time to read the paper or whatever, I’m more prepared to work,” Hammett said. “I haven’t been sitting in a car for half an hour or an hour, I don’t have to wind down or cool off, and I just get to work.”

Hammett says he knows remote work isn’t for everyone. It can get lonely – a problem he combats by talking to his dog and keeping up with Twitter – and he knows that office jobs provide communal creative energy that lets people bounce ideas off one another. But he does think more companies should consider telecommuting, at least part of the time.

“I don’t think everyone is going to become a telecommuter in Durango,” Hammett said, “But I do think there is more room to do so.”