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We Don’t Simply Get Remote Jobs, We Join Remote Teams

remotebase.io

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Re: We Don’t Simply Get Remote Jobs, We Join Remote Teams

#11

Post by jimmywanger »

I think the main point of this article (which could have been half the length) is that you can't just declare a job remote.

You have to have a culture and technology that supports it, or else if you take that remote job, you're getting set up for failure.

If everybody else is having water cooler conversations, and making binding decisions based on them without email or chat, any remote employee is going to be constantly blindsided, and not rewarded by the organization.

I worked on one (and am currently working on another) highly distributed team, and the amount of whip-cracking that my manager had to do to make sure everything was documented and accessible to everybody on the team was incredible.

Re: We Don’t Simply Get Remote Jobs, We Join Remote Teams

#13

Post by dasmoth »

I get what this is saying, but there does seem to be a nearly-unspoken assumption here that the "perfect" working environment involves high-frequency communication, including regular synchronous communication -- i.e. replicating the open-plan/daily standups/short iterations model of programming that seems to be the current thing for in-office programming jobs. That's a perfectly reasonable model, and clearly suits a lot of people well, but I do hope there's still appetite for exploring coarser-grained "trust people to go off on their own to solve problems" models as well.

Re: We Don’t Simply Get Remote Jobs, We Join Remote Teams

#14

Post by FuNe »

I'm partially remote working (RW) at an organization that is slowly rolling back its RW culture(1). The motto for this goes like 'teams work better if they are collocated, yada, yada'. The real reason is that managers want to feel in control (plus they want to drive away a lot of people by taking RW away). "Culture" is used as a smoke screen for more sinister incentives. (I can say that with confidence because I can see that RW is working fine while what hinders productivity is mammoth bureaucracy and politics put forward by the same people that keep blabbing about "culture".

To me it's clear that remote working is (should be) the way to go (why on earth tech jobs and consequently tech workers should cluster in small geographic areas, spend hours in commuting and feed our salaries to landlord rentiers is beyond my understanding). Then again other things in the past were a no-brainer future (e.g. less working hours - see experiments in Kellogs) but the world spinned to a different direction.

PS: Of course RW makes your tech job even easier to offshore which makes the whole thing more of a mixed bag of blessings and curses - like everything else in life :) .

(1) I think the trend started off by M.Mayer's move to roll back RW in yahoo (leading to the spectacular yahoo growth we all know of) but I'm not sure.

Re: We Don’t Simply Get Remote Jobs, We Join Remote Teams

#15

Post by alex-yo »

prawn wrote: post #10
alex-yo wrote: post #3

There is no shortage of remote job boards and job aggregators That's true, there is just a shortage of the job offers. I'm looking for a remote job now. All the job boards have between 2 to 5 job offers per day. To each of them answer thousands of people. The aggregators are even worse. They are automated. That's why they contain an ad even when it has no remote allowed .

If you're looking for a job, put a bit more info in your HN profile about what sort of work you're looking for, and what you specialise in.

Good point, thank you.

Re: We Don’t Simply Get Remote Jobs, We Join Remote Teams

#16

Post by matt_wulfeck »

> In remote team, we get to experience the culture at its most naked form. There is no catered lunch or a hip office with table tennis table. Everything artificial is stripped away.

I totally disagree with this. The most naked form of communication is (and IMHO always will be) face to face. I can't tell how many countless times many emails were exchanged before simply speaking face to face solved the problem.

Working remotely is awesome. All power to remote workers, but no amount of collaborative tools replaces the value of face-to-face communication.

Re: We Don’t Simply Get Remote Jobs, We Join Remote Teams

#17

Post by Domenic_S »

My team just started a large project; a few of us work remotely and a few are in an office. For the project, we opened a Zoom video channel, and all sit there with video chat running on our second monitors. It's working out great. We very much have the be-able-to-pop-in-for-a-question thing going on like you would in a project war room.

I'm thinking of making it a standing thing one day weekly to work this way. There's certainly a distraction tradeoff, but the communication bandwidth is just phenomenal.

Re: We Don’t Simply Get Remote Jobs, We Join Remote Teams

#18

Post by Domenic_S »

matt_wulfeck wrote: post #16

> In remote team, we get to experience the culture at its most naked form. There is no catered lunch or a hip office with table tennis table. Everything artificial is stripped away. I totally disagree with this. The most naked form of communication is (and IMHO always will be) face to face. I can't tell how many countless times many emails were exchanged before simply speaking face to face solved the problem. Working…

Very few issues that are easily resolved f2f can't be resolved on the phone. It just takes people who are really great at communicating to make it work.

f2f is way better for teambuilding though. Hard to go out to dinner together over Slack.

Re: We Don’t Simply Get Remote Jobs, We Join Remote Teams

#19

Post by Domenic_S »

FuNe wrote: post #14

I'm partially remote working (RW) at an organization that is slowly rolling back its RW culture(1). The motto for this goes like 'teams work better if they are collocated, yada, yada'. The real reason is that managers want to feel in control (plus they want to drive away a lot of people by taking RW away). "Culture" is used as a smoke screen for more sinister incentives. (I can say that with confidence because I can…

> RW makes your tech job even easier to offshore

I don't think so. Offshore comes with its own challenges.

Re: We Don’t Simply Get Remote Jobs, We Join Remote Teams

#20

Post by hackits »

alex-yo wrote: post #15
prawn wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're looking for a job, put a bit more info in your HN profile about what sort of work you're looking for, and what you specialise in.

Good point, thank you.

Interested in your `conference talks about databases` is there any online links to your talks? also your email address strikes me as being a bit odd. I guess you don't want the bots finding your real email address.

cheers.

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