101–110 of 148 posts
It is quite weird that we have all these up-votes (including my own) but no answers. I think that the real answer might be something quite embarrassing, and politically incorrect.
I think it has a lot of up votes from people who want remote jobs but can't find them. They want to see what people say here so that they can better form their objections/arguments for making a job remote.
Reasons against remote working: 1. Timezone issues - this is, imo, the biggest one. Especially after working with people in China, India, Europe or even eastern USA (with me in SF bay area). People all over the world usually start working around 9-10, and stop working around 6-7. Meetings, code/design discussions are very difficult on those schedules, especially when you want a decision on smaller issues where a quic…
2. and 3. shows your organization has communication problems. One of my favorite ways to combat that is to do some pair programming. You'll get to know people quite rapidly if you are talking to one each other 8 hours a day.
Our management wants onsite for better control. I think it's all feelings based. We want to hire in Seattle. We had some remote not work out, therefore all remote is "bad". I think BS. We just got a new remote QA team and they are doing great. We have two remote devs also who are doing good work. I interpret the evidence to show that remote does work. I still get push back on it but the rationale is based on words li…
(I'm looking for examples to include, so details are helpful!)
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>When I was at the office for a decade, 90% of the insight and productivity came from informal conversations in the hallway, lunches and things I overheard in passing The issue is not remote working, the very thing you wrote is the issue. Virtually every time, remote working doesn't create new issues but reveals and - embarassingly - exposes existing ones. You can no longer take a chance by letting things such as hal…
Okay: So how would you advise someone to create that "real management for it"? Any references or suggestions you would recommend a well-meaning manager to gain the wisdom and skills necessary? (Because I also will be writing, separately, about how to do remote work well, and this is exactly the kind of info I want to impart.)
I really wish Moral Mazes was required reading in college. It would have helped me prepare for the shocking business world dysfunction that awaits virtually every employee, in every field, after graduation.
Peopleware is a classic within specifically software management, and deals with many of the same human-affirming principles that you see in Moral Mazes, but deals with them in formats that are specific to software. There are a lot of connections between the two books, but the connections haven't been well formalized as far as I know.
I love these two books because as you read them the slow feeling of horror comes over you as you see the true diff between how companies operate and how a company should operate if it is to maintain even the tiniest degree of humanity-affirming ethical commitment or even the tiniest degree of genuine concerns for (even from a market competition point of view) how productivity should be marshaled for general human progress.
I find there are more or less two types of reactions. Some people read them and go, "Yep. I've seen all that. No surprises here. Oh well, back to work." and just don't care because they just want to focus on local instrumentally rational actions even if it means participating in what is making the entire concept of employment so shitty. Some other people read them and find that it makes their soul glow again a little and they have a hard time ever fitting back into a company now that they have some formalized tools for recognizing how shittily they are being treated at all times.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Mazes
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopleware:_Productive_Project...
Also a good popular article drawing on Moral Mazes: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/the-banality... >.
As someone who has worked 10+ years remotely (based in South America) I think it's a combination of factors: Supply and demand. Why hire remote when there's plenty of warm bodies locally? Most companies do not need, and cannot afford, top-tier talent. Labor shortages are a myth. Managerial incompetence. How many of the managers have any experience managing a remote team? Do they know what to do and what not to do? Re…
What are the skills that someone needs to manage a remote team? How could someone measure whether he has them?
I am a remote worker and if I ever ran a company I wouldn't allow telecommuting. Here is why: When I was at the office for a decade, 90% of the insight and productivity came from informal conversations in the hallway, lunches and things I overheard in passing. As a remote worker, nearly all communication is very deliberate so I am not exposed to those ad-hoc conversations. Everything is very deliberate: I receive an…
That said, I'm extremely flexible with informal WFH arrangements, as long as it doesn't impact individual productivity & team effectiveness.
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Is that for real?
It was, at least. About 15 years ago I got a demo at a Gartner conference from a company doing just that. The vendor's primary goal, they said, was to measure where the developer was spending his time (coding vs debugger vs editor... I think it was a Visual Studio add-in?). But they admitted employers could use it to track what the developer was/wasn't doing. ...and that was before Facebook.
I live in a rural area in upstate NY. I can't relocate because I live close to my wife's family and she teaches kids to ride horses. A while back I was in a dead end job and working on a side project that was an image search engine that had nearly perfect relevance in a time when both Google Image Search and Bing Image Search were both embarrassingly bad -- at least at the time I started. It took about a year to get…
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20 people, but the processes we have in place should be scalable to way higher.
I am not doubting that, I was unsure if this would be too "formal" for a small team of 5 or less.