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Ask HN: What's your experience with remote working? as employees/employers?

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Re: Ask HN: What's your experience with remote working? as employees/employers?

#81

Post by darrikmazey »

jamesbkel wrote: post #65
alexchamberlain wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There must be a share whiteboard app for iPad/Android?

Just this week I started looking into similar ideas. At the moment I've been experimenting with a Wacom tablet and screen capture software... I looked up the Khan Academy methodology and started there. But if anyone has recommendations for and iPad app that offers a shared whiteboard experience please let me know. We already use Skype on iPad as our sort of virtual office so that would be perfect. Or... make one! We'…

I'll make one if you want to fund it. :)

Re: Ask HN: What's your experience with remote working? as employees/employers?

#82

Post by fredBuddemeyer »

our companies bigredwire and littleBiggy are 100% remote worker based. the only person left in our office is the accountant who just seems to like it better. a cupla observations:

set meeting times are a substitute for proximity. and audio works better than video. instant messaging is perfect for the times in-between as it creates a presence and has a very flexible protocol between users.

asynchronous development is very, very helpful. dependencies between people that are physically separated is considerably more difficult. this is a tough one to learn but brings its own strengths.

not only do we hire contractors from all over the world but even our full time employees are able to live "in orbit", moving around the planet with the freedom of backpackers. they are tied only to their computer.

freedom is a substitute for pay. once you get to a certain point of income you prefer freedom. i dont know anyone here that could go back to the world of offices; it seems so involuntary, like indentured servitude.

Re: Ask HN: What's your experience with remote working? as employees/employers?

#83

Post by christiangenco »

alexchamberlain wrote: post #27
earl wrote: post #7

Working as a data scientist with a remote boss: communication was much more difficult. No telephony or software solution came close to standing on front of a shared whiteboard. Which sucks, because I really wish it did. Maybe what we need is actual The biggest win I've seen is with ops teams. I hope I'm not betraying any confidences, but a previous employer had an international ops team so as the americans were going…

There must be a share whiteboard app for iPad/Android?

http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-iPad-shared-whiteboard

SyncPad looks pretty good.

Re: Ask HN: What's your experience with remote working? as employees/employers?

#84

Post by christiangenco »

jamesbkel wrote: post #65
alexchamberlain wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There must be a share whiteboard app for iPad/Android?

Just this week I started looking into similar ideas. At the moment I've been experimenting with a Wacom tablet and screen capture software... I looked up the Khan Academy methodology and started there. But if anyone has recommendations for and iPad app that offers a shared whiteboard experience please let me know. We already use Skype on iPad as our sort of virtual office so that would be perfect. Or... make one! We'…

http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-iPad-shared-whiteboard

Re: Ask HN: What's your experience with remote working? as employees/employers?

#85

Post by pdenya »

I worked remotely from a home office for 2 years while commuting in monthly (about a 3 hour trip each way). I really enjoyed working from home and miss it now.

There were no communication issues or isolation things for me but that might come with more time. My wife would just leave me alone to work, if she needed something that could wait she'd just IM me and there were never any 'watch the kids for 30 minutes while I run to the store' kind of moments. It was great to be able to spend my breaks with my family.

The only issue I had with working from home is that it's more difficult to get to know new co-workers.

Re: Ask HN: What's your experience with remote working? as employees/employers?

#86

Post by chollida1 »

cgopalan wrote: post #78

I am an employee of a company based in Virginia but work from home in Rochester NY. Been only doing this since last December, but I am loving it and will have a hard time going back to commuting. Lots of people with prior telecommuting experience warned me about issues like isolation, putting on weight (because of proximity to food) and lack of discipline. Now after telecommuting, I feel that I have none of these iss…

> All in all, I believe remote work is the future. The so-called benefits of an "impromptu technical discussion in the hallway" might seem nice, but in terms of getting things done, it has no advantages over interacting remotely. Its really a puzzle why more companies don't adopt this.

I'd disagree with this.

As someone who has done both, I find if most of your team works out of one place then the lone remote worker often gets cut out of these impromptu discussions.

When 3 people grab a room and diagram something on a whiteboard it's usually easier to not include the remote worker due to issues, like: - time zone, the worker may not be working at that moment - how do you share a vanilla whiteboard in real time - how does the remote worker "point" to specific parts of a white board to illustrate a point or draw on the white board? - most people don't want to spend 10 minutes setting up for a 1 minute meeting, hence the remote worker gets dropped.

I'd say working together trumps remote workers for hallway discussions always.

Re: Ask HN: What's your experience with remote working? as employees/employers?

#87

Post by asarazan »

I worked at a small video game startup (at our peak we were around 10 full-timers).

Both our Design and Art directors worked remotely from other states. It was NOT a productive situation.

It did, however, teach me that design is something that happens organically, and in collaboration over lunch, beers, etc. It can't be handed down from somebody hundreds of miles away to implement.

The same for art direction to a large degree.

Re: Ask HN: What's your experience with remote working? as employees/employers?

#88

Post by skrebbel »

r4vik wrote: post #43
skrebbel wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * (locally I've been smashed into teams still on svn ... on new projects)* Completely off topic, but: is this necessarily bad? Does the world stop when there's a centralized source control server? I'm in an environment too where people are sometimes reluctant to move to newer, better software (svn is an example, our bug tracker sucks too), simply because of the learning curve / overhead involved. I started out by b…

I can't talk for TDD, BDD, MDSD. But after working with git/hg on all my projects for half a year, I'd flat out refuse to work on anything that used SVN now.

Genuine interest: why? I felt the same, until I realized that I also want continuous integration, preferably as continuous as possible. This means that if my coworker works on a feature that somehow affects what I'm working on, I want to find out now, not in a week after he merges his feature branch.

If there's a single central repository anyway (continuous integration, remember), plus you want people to share with master/trunk/whatever after being under water for at most 2 days, the workflow when using git/hg becomes awfully much like the workflow that SVN enforces on you. When I realized that, I stopped investing time in converting my colleagues to git. I use git-svn myself so that I can stash, move files without `svn move`, do local commits, etc, and everybody is happy.

But I may be missing a great argument.

Re: Ask HN: What's your experience with remote working? as employees/employers?

#89

Post by Vivtek »

thhaar wrote: post #53
Vivtek wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now wait - I'm a freelance translator, too, so naturally I am curious to know how you're avoiding deadlines...

Definitely not avoiding them in my freelance work - they help to keep me on schedule. The 'no deadlines' line at the end refers to the translation community/tools startup I launched recently - that's a new kind of remote work for me and will need adjustment from the world of deadlines. Once I start working on a site, I can be absorbed for hours and deadlines become superfluous as I could do in a day what would take a…

Interested in collaboration? I'm definitely passionate about open-source translation tools and community building, and there's a dearth of good technology in the translation industry, it's always seemed to me. My email is in my profile if you're interested.

Re: Ask HN: What's your experience with remote working? as employees/employers?

#90

Post by thhaar »

Vivtek wrote: post #89
thhaar wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely not avoiding them in my freelance work - they help to keep me on schedule. The 'no deadlines' line at the end refers to the translation community/tools startup I launched recently - that's a new kind of remote work for me and will need adjustment from the world of deadlines. Once I start working on a site, I can be absorbed for hours and deadlines become superfluous as I could do in a day what would take a…

Interested in collaboration? I'm definitely passionate about open-source translation tools and community building, and there's a dearth of good technology in the translation industry, it's always seemed to me. My email is in my profile if you're interested.

Agreed. While there is some good, open tech out there (OmegaT, MemoQ - for open formats, at least), there seems to be lots of room for improvement. Email should be in your mailbox now.
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