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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?

#21

Post by Throwawayabc123 »

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, we would be willing to consider 100% remote. For the right intermediate staffer, we would be similarly be willing to consider a split onsite and telecommute arrangement, or other flexible scheduling options.

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

#22

Post by anarchitect »

I have a remote member on my team who came to us as part of an acquisition. He travels to our London office once a fortnight. It works well, but I wouldn't hire remote workers for new roles.

The key reason for this is that our culture and processes within the company are not very well equipped to accommodate remote workers. We're spread across two sites (one of which is a factory), and communication is difficult enough as it is.

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

#24

Post by [deleted] »

BadassFractal wrote: post #3

Are there any success stories of early stage high growth startups that were started by a remote team? At least in the startup world, most people are concerned that you will miss that zeal and watercooler chat magic that is critical to early stage companies. I don't think anybody cares too much about your 1000th engineer being remote, the organizational DNA has already been set a long time ago.

[deleted]

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

#25

Post by _ix »

I admit that I'm not a great manager and more of a technician. I just happen to have the authority to make hiring and firing decisions for my tiny engineering team.

I prefer on-site employees to remote for two reasons:

1 - I find that on-site employees are a bit easier to manage. The bar to communication is lower when they're so accessible. Also, I'm working with legacy hardware and software, and there is so much to understand in order to get started on many projects, and it can be a lot easier to sit side saddle with a junior engineer to help them through the first steps.

2 - I don't have a lot of great confidence in my hiring practices and the owners of the company are a little more conservative. As such, I make the safer choice to hire candidates willing to work on-site instead -- I can see when they come in, I can task and re-task on a whim, and I have a much better sense of when they begin down rabbit holes.

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

#26

Post by aggieben »

aylons wrote: post #12
aurelianito wrote: post #4

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'm more prone to believe the answer is dull and not well-defined, on the likes of: - We really don't know how to deal with the differences, and it is scary to try; - There are some company process that we are afraid of changing to accommodate telecommuting; - The risks and costs outweigh the benefits, or the benefits are fuzzy while the risks and costs are clear; - etc

Yep. I bet this covers 95% of cases.

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

#27

Post by bambax »

brobinson wrote: post #2

How many decision makers are willing to admit that they are subconsciously using "chair time" as a measure of productivity?

It's much worse than that; they're using number of warm chairs as a measure of their own importance. Troops you can't see aren't troops and their general not much of a general.

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

#28

Post by jedberg »

NobleSir wrote: post #17
jedberg wrote: post #14

Not exactly what you are asking for, but I'll throw it in here: I run a fully remote company, and most of the objections I've heard from others we've found workaround for. The biggest unsolved problem is whiteboarding - there is no good collaborative online whiteboarding solution that doesn't require a lot of expensive equipment to be deployed to everyone.

for whiteboarding: onenote on surfaces? (which syncs almost real-time) This is what I use, for those kind of things, as someone working remotely

Not a bad idea, but it means deploying a surface to everyone, and frankly most people want to use Macs, so I'd have to give two devices to everyone, one of which would only get used for whiteboarding, which doesn't happen that often.

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

#29

Post by vonmoltke »

jedberg wrote: post #14

Not exactly what you are asking for, but I'll throw it in here: I run a fully remote company, and most of the objections I've heard from others we've found workaround for. The biggest unsolved problem is whiteboarding - there is no good collaborative online whiteboarding solution that doesn't require a lot of expensive equipment to be deployed to everyone.

> The biggest unsolved problem is whiteboarding - there is no good collaborative online whiteboarding solution that doesn't require a lot of expensive equipment to be deployed to everyone.

Maybe my company is just weird, but we don't use whiteboards all that much. At least for code our preferred collaboration method is pairing, which isn't as hard over a network.

We write NLP software, and most of our whiteboard usage is for drawing out linguistic constructs and often involves only one person doing the drawing, which seems like an easy subset of whiteboarding to handle remotely.

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

#30

Post by Grishnakh »

aurelianito wrote: post #4

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.

What up-votes? I can barely read the Ask-HN question, it's such a light shade of gray. Someone really doesn't like it it seems.

I gave it an up-vote anyway, because this is an interesting and highly relevant topic in the tech field, though I'm dubious of getting any substantive responses from anyone who's any kind of manager.

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