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Ask HN: If you don't permit telecommuting, why?

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Re: Ask HN: If you don't permit telecommuting, why?

#131

Post by toddchambery »

stevecalifornia wrote: post #38

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…

> 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.

I could not agree more: I once bumped into someone in the bathroom on a different floor that I had met briefly years before during a re-org meet-and-greet. In a few moments of catching up, I found out he had worked on an in-house project that was essentially the same category as the products I was on a team to evaluate.

We didn't end up resurrecting his project, but his insight into the ultimate selection and experience with the rollout was extremely valuable.

A similar thing for a casual acquaintance who told me in passing about his private work in app development, and I was able to put him in touch with someone on our app team (it was a big company with a lot of silos).

I ended up later working remotely for a few months with the same company, and lost the serendipity of accidental human interaction when all my communication was low-bandwidth, narrowly focused, topic-at-hand meetings and communication.

I can sympathize with others complaining about the high cost of interruptions, but for the way I work and think, non-directed conversation is invaluable.

Re: Ask HN: If you don't permit telecommuting, why?

#132

Post by DanielBMarkham »

ohjeez wrote: post #96
r2dnb wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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've both hired and advised people hiring.

This is beginning to look like the blind men and the elephant.

The inside joke on remote/distributed work is "You know, if we just had 1) better managers, 2) better specs, 3) better tools"

We have been trying all of this for 30 years or so. At some point a reasonable person would look around and see that most all startups are colocated, physically in the same room having to deal with each other all day long.

There are plenty of theories as to why this is true. Another observation: people not in the office do best at rote work: fix the bugs, align the images on the website, and so on.

If your job could be done by robots -- if it required minimal interaction over electronic tools to get specs and deliver on them in an over-the-wall manner -- it will be done by robots. Creating technology is about people, not technology. You sitting in a room and getting into flow-state and cranking out code is nowhere near as important as you interacting minute-by-minute with messy humans and trying to determine the nature of the problem you're solving.

Best-case scenario: you work on a tightly-knit team for a few weeks/months on a fixed-length job. Everybody gets into sync on the customer, specs, terminology, and solution. The customer's problem is not changing that much. You deliver some stuff as a team that people like. At that point, and not before, who cares where people are? Just get the work done.

You can scale that out to working in BigCorp on a fixed domain, but only so much. And the scary thing is that there are no alarms that go off if you're doing it wrong.

It's not impossible, or bad. But it works under very limited conditions. Understanding that is critical. I know there are a ton of folks who want to work remotely. I am one of them. But wanting something and looking realistically at what works or not are two different things.

Re: Ask HN: If you don't permit telecommuting, why?

#133

Post by SNvD7vEJ »

I find remote collaboration with shared screens and headsets much more productive than sitting next to each other. You can quickly jump back and forth between the shared screen and other activities while collaborating.

We also do this even when being in the same room, just because the screen sharing is so powerful compared to physically sharing a display and a keyboard.

Also, you can quickly and easily call in any number of people and everyone can easily read everything on the screen.

I find this perfect for mentoring, pair programming, demonstrations, meetings, etc.

You don't have to go fetch your coworkers and drag them to your desk to show them something.

Also, you can quickly see if the coworker is busy in another session, or set your own status to busy if you need to work uninterrupted for a while. This is not possible when physically in the same location (unless you have a door you can close). People will still come up to you and interrupt you with a "quick" question, derailing your thoughts. A virtual call can simply be ignored.

Re: Ask HN: If you don't permit telecommuting, why?

#134

Post by SNvD7vEJ »

dijit wrote: post #7

I'm definitely not the person you're targetting, but I was interested in remote working for a long time- when I asked why I couldn't I was given a few reasons: 1) Spontaneous meetings become impossible, scribbling something on a whiteboard becomes much more difficult, the barrier to communication is too high. 2) We've had bad experiences with people who work in other studios/HQ. They tend to shirk responsibility, and…

I agree that 1) is a problem, although technical solutions are possible I find them awkward.

I think 2) has to do with people not feeling they are part of the team.

Our solution to 3) is a separate work machine (laptop) set up so that you can not access the internet in any other way than through the VPN to the office. So, to work remotly you need to bring your work computer with you. You can not connect using your private computer.

Re: Ask HN: If you don't permit telecommuting, why?

#135

Post by lamontcg »

up_and_up wrote: post #121
stevecalifornia wrote: post #38

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…

> For dynamic workers that move about the company and immerse themselves in lots of projects and want upward mobility, I can't recommend it. LOL. I work remotely and this is exactly what I do all day long. The problem lies with the companies communication processes. Thats all. If the majority of team communication is centralized in Slack, if documentation is stored in Google docs, if planning meetings are held on sky…

Yeah, and I sometimes have to close slack because there's too many people ping'ing me on it and asking my opinions of things which is precisely like having people doing fly bys on your desk all day long...

Re: Ask HN: If you don't permit telecommuting, why?

#136

Post by Throwawayabc123 »

aggieben wrote: post #31
Throwawayabc123 wrote: post #21

Throwaway account. In order to stay price competitive in our industry, we need to use a mix of junior, intermediate, and senior talent. We have never found a junior or newly-intermediate candidate successfully work remote. Part of the point in having senior people is for them to be available to guide the less learned staff, so it makes no sense for them to all be remote too. To be fair, for the right senior staffer,…

Have you considered letting your senior people, whom you apparently trust to be remote, mentor your juniors remotely ?

Yes. We have found it is very frequently no where near as successful as in-person mentoring.

Re: Ask HN: If you don't permit telecommuting, why?

#137

Post by SatvikBeri »

On my team we work from home roughly once a week, but don't hire anyone who's remote full-time. Honestly, I don't have super strong reasons for or against remote. It does seem like your culture needs to be either fully remote or fully colocated (to avoid the informal communication problem) but there's no major reason to pick one or the other. So I go with fully colocated, because it's the default.

Re: Ask HN: If you don't permit telecommuting, why?

#139

Post by invaliduser »

ohjeez wrote: post #97
up_and_up wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the problem. I would never work for a company that "Allowed telecommuting". I try to only work for companies that have a "remote first" mentality. Everyone in the entire company should have the ability to work from home or be traveling and working and be able to remain 100% productive. This is a culture issue at companies that will evolve over time. The focus needs to shift from "good their butts are in their…

Have you ever applied for a gig at a company that started out saying, "No telecommuting" and got the gig anyhow? If so, how did you make it happen?

Happened to me. Was hired as a freelance in a company that had the "no telecommuting" policy. After 1 year and a half there, I got slightly bored and wanted to leave (long-commuting, like 2h, is too long when the job is not that appealing anymore).

As I have been performing above average for all my time there, they insisted to find a compromise so that I wouldn't leave. Told them I would consider staying but with 2 days per week telecommuting, 3 days on-site. I already had their trust, they knew I delivered, so they agreed cheerfully.

Some coworkers who tried to get some telecommuting days before got slightly angry at management for a few days, but not that much, as they liked me staying and understood why management dit it.

I think it worked because I was just not bluffing, and after more than 1 year working there, they fully trusted me. It would have never happened if I had asked for telecommuting at day 1.

Re: Ask HN: If you don't permit telecommuting, why?

#140

Post by nfriedly »

I know this isn't exactly what the OP is asking for, but I'd like to share my experiences working remotely for 8 of the last 10 years.

* It's not for everyone. You have to be pretty motivated and driven, and also a good communicator. You additionally need some good non-work relationships. (Although, that's probably true regardless...)

* It's a lot easier when everyone uses phones/email/slack/etc. Being the 1 guy on the phone during a 30-person meeting sucks.

* Those little "water cooler chats" can and do happen on slack and phone calls. It's helped by having met the people in person before, but even that isn't a requirement. I was talking to a co-worker that I've never met in person about pokemon just yesterday...

* I usually shoot for about 10% of my time being spent on-site in 1-2 week chunks, perhaps a little more right after joining a new team. I try to go out for dinner & drinks and whatnot with team members for at least one night on a visit. This can help with those virtual "water cooler chats" later on.

* Mentoring can happen remotely as well. Mentoring and guidance is a large part of my current role, and I've never met the majority of the folks I help out.

* I do occasionally take time out of work for family things. But I also occasionally cut out family time to deal with pressing matters at work. So I think it works out in the company's favor overall.

* I've been told by more than one manager/CTO/CEO that I was fit for a leadership role but wouldn't get it because I worked remote :(

* I joined IBM a year and a half ago partially because of this: I believed that being remote wouldn't hold me back from promotion here but...

* A few months back, the Watson division got a new guy in charge. Everyone was told to either move on-site or find a new job. I managed to get a temporary exception until the end of the year but I'm still not sure which one I'm going to choose when the time comes. Maybe both (I've always wanted to see Europe... ;)

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