Working in an office is hard. Especially when you complete work early and have to pretend to be busy. With remote working, when you finish your tasks you are DONE. I've had many relaxing 4 hour days.
Working remotely is hard
131–140 of 163 posts
Re: Working remotely is hard
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you get your work done more efficiently, you actually have more time to socialize, with the people of your choosing. Also, socializing in the workplace tends to be very superficial, because you're extremely limited in the range of topics you can discuss. God forbid that you say something unprofessional.
Weird places you worked in. Where I worked I could talk about anything I wanted and that's normal for every other office.
Dirty jokes are off limits if you want to avoid sexual harassment complaints.
Re: Working remotely is hard
#133I'm the CTO of 17hats. The entire engineering team works remotely. It's not as challenging as you seem to suggest. Right now is the best time ever to be remote. Excellent tools like Slack and Speak really help comms. We pair program very often by sshing into a tmux session which makes any lag close to nil. We use Trello for sprints. And Invision for product work. It's extremely efficient. We have our usual retrospect…
This is interesting. It seems that you at 17hats built remote work into the core business model, establishing the processes and tool sets to enable and encourage it. Your story stands out as your outcome is so much more positive. The difference in your approach vs. what what most clients/companies do is that they tolerate and accommodate remote work rather than embrace and enable it. The accommodation approach, in my own experience, leads to the comms and isolation issues.
Re: Working remotely is hard
#134I'm the CTO of 17hats. The entire engineering team works remotely. It's not as challenging as you seem to suggest. Right now is the best time ever to be remote. Excellent tools like Slack and Speak really help comms. We pair program very often by sshing into a tmux session which makes any lag close to nil. We use Trello for sprints. And Invision for product work. It's extremely efficient. We have our usual retrospect…
I'm in the middle of a blog post of what it's like to work 9 time zones from the rest of your colleagues. There are lots of good things, but there are also a lot of challenges.
If the entire team is distributed, a lot of those challenges are mitigated. If only a few people are distributed, then you can get problems like unequal access to information, or unequal access to people. Even though my team is used to remote workers and is very conscientious, it is not unusual to have things change direction without anyone thinking to inform me. The "everybody knows" problem is pervasive.
Access to people is even more difficult. When you are working locally, it is easy to brainstorm with someone while walking to the store to buy lunch, for instance. You have a certain amount of influence on the team because conversations are low cost. Remotely, you have to come up with the idea on your own, then send an email, wait for a response, etc, etc. It is not spontaneous, which means that by and large remote workers have much less influence than local workers. Even with hangouts, IRC and slack, it's hard to generate the same banter that you would have locally (especially when you are separated by 9 timezones).
If there is anyone local who is keen on political machinations, you pretty much have to be happy with letting them have their way. You will be outmaneuvered at every turn. This places a much higher requirement for trust on remote workers. You have to trust that people will tell you about things, and then ask for your input and then wait for your reply -- rather than just doing what they wanted to do in the first place.
As I said, if you are a fully remote team, this is less of an issue. However, there are still lots of challenges in this scenario. One of the biggest surprises that I had when I moved from local to remote on my present team was how my attitude towards my team mates changed. When I was local, I went out for drinks with people, and chatted about sports and basically hung out with them. When I was remote, most of my interaction centred around code.
In the local situation, if I was pissed off about a technical issue, or something that somebody did, then my attitude towards the person was tempered by my general good feelings about them as a person. In the remote situation, my interface with people is almost entirely technical, so when someone does something I don't like, I tend to feel badly about the person as well as the issue. This is something that I need to constantly remind myself about -- they are good people doing things I don't like. It is much easier to forget this when you are working remotely, I find.
There are many other challenges as well. It's not that these challenges are insurmountable, though. You need to build a culture where people operate in the way that works for your team. It sounds like you have done that on your team. On our team as well, I don't think there is anyone remote who would rather be local, so from that perspective it works well. There are people on our team who would much rather be local and I can understand their feeling. I suspect there may be one or two people who would rather that there weren't any remote people on the team because it interferes with how they would prefer to work. I respect that too and always try to accommodate my team mates. It's a balancing act.
Re: Working remotely is hard
#135I'm the CTO of 17hats. The entire engineering team works remotely. It's not as challenging as you seem to suggest. Right now is the best time ever to be remote. Excellent tools like Slack and Speak really help comms. We pair program very often by sshing into a tmux session which makes any lag close to nil. We use Trello for sprints. And Invision for product work. It's extremely efficient. We have our usual retrospect…
+1 for occasionally meeting up. My team works remote and while some of us do see each other more frequent, others are on the other side of the country.
So about two times per year, once for a tech summit we go to , and another we have our own summit, we take over a hotel and hang out. During this time we also gives talks and other things but it is half fun and half work.
I think occasional face to face time and bonding time is super helpful, but not everyone needs that every day, and I think in our case it had made these twice a year meet ups something we all really get excited about and look forward too.
Re: Working remotely is hard
#136I believe remote work is one of the greatest advances of modern labor.
Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that on-site work was just a temporary regression? Back in the time where almost everyone worked on a farm, the farm was also your home, and mirrors a lot of what remote workers experience again now.
Yes.
Re: Working remotely is hard
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
> No one can come to my desk to socialize Yeah who would want that? I've done both and both have their pros and cons, socializing is definitely a perk and introvert or extrovert should not be underestimated in keeping you healthy and happy and a skilled professional.
> socializing is definitely a perk No, it's not. It is a hindrance to the reason you are there, which is to get a job done. I do not wish to socialize at work, I do not wish to work when I socialize.
You're wrong to say this, but not because your opinion isn't valid. Many jobs get done much faster and better through the process of professional socialization. If you'd be working alone anyway, then you're likely right, but most jobs aren't completely isolated and having an actual team to be a part of is 100% beneficial.
I started my career working in an office, then spent about 10 years working from home, and am now in an office again. The flexibility of telecommuting is a benefit that can't be overstated, but I personally find that being in an office I solve problems faster and enjoy my working hours more, as a result of the people around me.
Re: Working remotely is hard
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've found, after coding+managing remotely[0], that it takes a specific set of traits to be a successful remote worker. - strong work ethic: no one needs to tell you that it's time to start working for the day/after lunch etc. - strong communication: not the same as being an extrovert. might even help if you are an introvert. Just comfortable with text being the dominant means of articulation. - strong 9-5 boundaries…
Why the 9-5 boundary? Personally, I get my best work done during non-traditional hours, e.g. past midnight.
I think it is figurative 9-5 rather than literal. In other words, knowing that there are boundaries and limits between work and non-work time instead of falling victim to the temptation of working all the time when you are at home.
Re: Working remotely is hard
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
... You realise that working remotely could mean working at a co-working space walking distance from your home, allowing you to live/work where you like...?
Sure, but I'd rather work with my coworkers.
Although I posted about the difficulties of working remotely, it is not impossible to work with your coworkers remotely. I actually pair program with my coworkers in the UK (I am in Japan) daily. It's hard on the sleep schedule, but that's about it. In fact, the physical set up for doing remote pair programming is so much nicer than being side by side, that I tend to do it even when I'm in the same room.
Basically, we use tmux and any editor that uses a terminal (tends to be vim, but sometimes emacs on our team). If you have good bandwidth and latency then you can use screen sharing tools for the same purpose. For audio, you can use mumble, which is really low bandwidth and low latency. It is really easy to set up the audio so that it is exceptionally good. You've got different channels (basically rooms) so you can chat all day, just like you were in the same office and move to a private room to shut out chatter. If you are in the same city then you can meet after work for real face time.
There are definitely some people who do not like working remotely, so I'm not trying to convince you that you should do it. I just want to point out that working remotely does not equal working alone.
Re: Working remotely is hard
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
> No one can come to my desk to socialize Yeah who would want that? I've done both and both have their pros and cons, socializing is definitely a perk and introvert or extrovert should not be underestimated in keeping you healthy and happy and a skilled professional.
If you get your work done more efficiently, you actually have more time to socialize, with the people of your choosing. Also, socializing in the workplace tends to be very superficial, because you're extremely limited in the range of topics you can discuss. God forbid that you say something unprofessional.
If you don't have any choice in the people you work with and you can't find topics to discuss due to the strictness of conversational rules at your job, the problems at your workplace run far deeper than can be solved by going remote.