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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?

#61

Post by snuxoll »

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 ?

This is what we do, we have 3 senior developers, 2 intermediate level developers and 3 juniors on our team. Even before we hired the juniors we ALWAYS had GoToMeeting up and conversed throughout the day and worked together on projects, it's more imperative with the Jr's so we'll usually pair someone up 1:1 with them on a separate call to mentor them on a project. We haven't felt a need for a physical office except as an occasional meeting space (which is why we are working on getting one built-out in the city where the majority of our remote team lives).

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

#62

Post by anotheryou »

I could be more productive remote, because it's less chair-time and more working when I'm really concentrated, 1.5h less commute, less distractions (i really love to block out the rest of the world with music and don't like headphones), real food and a bed for a quick nap at home. We are partly remote, but I'm sadly not.

What is nice about non remote though:

- you can see if a college has time for your questions

- you can scribble stuff easier while explaining complex things

- less language barrier. I find it really hard to understand non-native speakers over a bad skype connection (high quality headsets would fix this I believe)

- you can sense how the other feels and act accordingly

- It's easier to guide inexperienced people when they feel more free to ask questions. Probably fixable through good culture, but an effort to be made. It's also easier to see when they really got what you mean. (had trouble with the remote people here, though being forced to write even tighter specifications or more making more detailed mockups is not necessarily bad)

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

#63

Post by mountaineer22 »

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,…

What is the team size?

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

#65

Post by bps4484 »

_ix wrote: post #25

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…

[note: I work at a company that allows telecommuting and I currently manage 5 engineers in two different locations]

I wanted to expound on "The bar to communication is lower when they're so accessible."

I think a lot of communication involves understanding the culture (and by this I mean 'the way someone views the world' and not a more the mainstream sort of 'they are asian' type of definition) of a person. The speed at which you are able to understand a person's culture (what technologies they like and don't like and why, what they're previous jobs were like, what type of family did they grow up in, what jokes do they like, etc, etc, etc) increases drastically when they are working on site, and it's usually small bits of downtime (lunch, coffee break, shooting the shit late night) when you learn a lot of this stuff. Not having this understanding comes with a communication cost, and it's not just for the managers, it's also for the engineers they work with (and it goes both ways, the telecommuter is going to have a tougher time understanding the culture of their coworkers/manger).

Which isn't to say this why my company doesn't allow telecommuting (on the contrary, we do), but I think this nuance is hard to put a tangible dollar amount on but is very real. Additionally this does happen eventually with remotes (I have two great ones that I really think I understand) and there are things you can do to facilitate it, but it is harder.

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

#66

Post by aylons »

turnip1979 wrote: post #42
reikonomusha wrote: post #13

At a few companies I've worked at, remote wasn't viable due to hardware development. It was difficult and expensive to replicate test setups for remote employees when unit costs for some of these devices range from 10 to 100k USD (e.g., VNAs).

VNA=Vector Network Analyzer?

Given the price range, yes. Even though USD 10K sounds a bit too low for a VNA, even a simple one.

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

#67

Post by NobleSir »

jedberg wrote: post #28
NobleSir wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

ah yeah, I actually use a macbook and surface pro 2 at the same time as pictured: (http://imgur.com/a/fqf3P) combined specs are actually similar to a new mb pro (combined 512 gb ssd, 16 gb ram, ~4.7 pounds), and cost is less, given that the sp2 was bought used so total ~ $1900.

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

#68

Post by mountaineer22 »

snuxoll wrote: post #61
aggieben wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is what we do, we have 3 senior developers, 2 intermediate level developers and 3 juniors on our team. Even before we hired the juniors we ALWAYS had GoToMeeting up and conversed throughout the day and worked together on projects, it's more imperative with the Jr's so we'll usually pair someone up 1:1 with them on a separate call to mentor them on a project. We haven't felt a need for a physical office except as…

So you do remote pair programming?

I have found this to be quite productive.

Real-time communication with voice, but also the visually shared WIP.

Is this your experience?

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

#70

Post by jldugger »

Our last hiring round was for a senior system administrator. We currently have 10 student workers "underneath" this position, and something like 30 percent of the employees time is spent mentoring students to do the work. We're okay with occasional work from home days, but a 100 percent remote person is basically a non-starter.

There's a number of tasks that cannot easily be done remotely:

1. Recruiting and Interviewing students. 2. Installing equipment into datacenters. 3. Letting customers into the datacenter after hours. 4. Face-to-face student mentoring.

Hiring a 100% remote employee essentially means a substantial shift in in the other employee's (ie me) duties.

We recruited for this position globally, but a number of prospects were only interested in working remotely. It makes sense for the prospects -- remote work frees up a family to follow one spouse's career. It makes filling positions harder obviously. But the only way we'd be able to accommodate that equitably is by dropping the focus on student employees, and we'd need a lot more cash flow to make that happen.

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