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

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

#21

Post by FuNe »

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…

Not sure if I agree with that. Lots of times I catch myself editing my messages again and again thus making them up to the point. You have to be a very good communicator in talking and have very good listeners to get the same amount of accuracy. Communication throughput is less though and what goes missing for sure is context (facial expressions, posture, etc) but for some people that is not a bad thing per se.

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

#22

Post by cookiecaper »

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…

I don't think the author is claiming that more expressive or rewarding friendships form as much as he's claiming that remote really makes you focus on the meat and the content of the colleague's output. That's actually something I LOVE about working remotely. There are far fewer politics because instead of saying "Oh man, Jimmy looked at me cross-eyed last week, I don't want to do anything with him anymore", you just say "Oh, Jimmy needs help on this issue. I'll send him a reply in a minute."

I have literally had colleagues complain that they were offended by the way I sat in my chair (and, I've since learned that at least one of my friends has been subjected to this same criticism at a separate workplace). Remote work strips away all of that inconsequential crap and leaves you to focus on the data.

This is one of the major unsung benefits of remote work: it removes a huge amount of office politics and allows employees to concentrate on working and think less about campaigning.

I've had colleagues resent me for not bringing enough free snacks into the office when I was in a supervisory role. Yes, really. Anything that can help mitigate that kind of thing is great.

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

#23

Post by dasmoth »

FuNe wrote: post #21
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…

Not sure if I agree with that. Lots of times I catch myself editing my messages again and again thus making them up to the point. You have to be a very good communicator in talking and have very good listeners to get the same amount of accuracy. Communication throughput is less though and what goes missing for sure is context (facial expressions, posture, etc) but for some people that is not a bad thing per se.

This is probably a personal thing. I'm definitely an e-mail editor, but plenty of people prefer real-time or near-real-time communication to the precision of a carefully considered e-mail.

At least Slack allows editing of messages...

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

#24

Post by cookiecaper »

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…

Yes. There is a pernicious group of candidate employees lurking outside of every organization all of the time, and if you let these people in, this is the kind of output you get.

People who've made their careers as "non-technical people managers" have no. freaking. idea. what to do when you put them in a "remote office". They've gotten by with their free donuts twice a week, their wry smiles, their nice suit, their good posture, and their firm handshake all of these years and work makes no sense to them if you can't have these things. Reading technical mumbo-jumbo in a Slack channel and having to pretend to know what it means is their worst nightmare.

It seems that every technical organization these types touch quickly begins to adopt nonsense practices and make really dubious overall business decisions. Sometimes the manager/executive's connections can help give the company a kick in the pants, but it usually won't survive the new employees' MBA-informed directives too long before fresh MBAs come in to issue a fresh kick in the pants or someone competent eventually ascends (rarely happens).

The really scary thing about the MBA-types is that once you let one in, they invite their friends, and then they're impossible to extricate. Then you start getting "technical" people (read: management's buddy who fixes his computer on the weekend) getting big titles, pretending they know what they're doing and making technical decisions that are absolutely, criminally disastrous in the medium and long term.

Then they call their friends at the trade mag and get an article written about their new revelation, which starts a trend that a lot of normal tech people inexplicably try to copy. :|

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

#25

Post by flukus »

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…

> I can't tell how many countless times many emails were exchanged before simply speaking face to face solved the problem.

I can't tell you how many times being able to look something up to respond in a more concrete way has solved countless meetings.

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

#26

Post by fsiefken »

anirudh24seven wrote: post #5
cwyers wrote: post #2

Okay, look. This is easy. I can't pay rent or a mortgage with a team. When my kid asks me what's for dinner, I can't feed her some groceries I got with all the team spirit and esprit de corps that I've picked up. When I need to go to the doctor and he says I need something expensive, all my fellow teammembers aren't going to immediately offer to pitch in and help with those. The author says "I think that we mistakenl…

I think there are 2 sides and both sides are important. I think that the author was focussing on the half of our awake time that we spend doing our job, while you are focussing on the other half. The author is probably talking about naive remote job seekers who focus on the job but don't consider the team culture. I was one such naive job seeker and used to think in that manner until a few years ago.

Can you elaborate on the challenges you encountered with dealing with remote team culture? What realizations or adaptations made you less naive and more realistic and pragmatic in dealing with it?

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

#27

Post by elcct »

jimmywanger wrote: post #11

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 constan…

Technology is there - Jira, Slack, Skype, GitHub, email...

There is absolutely no excuse to not have remote jobs.

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

#28

Post by MarkMc »

I love working remotely because it has allowed me to run my business while travelling around India. But I still feel my work would be more efficient if I was sitting next to my co-workers. There's some intangible quality involving instant feedback, body language and social interaction that would make our communication more direct and engaging.

Despite all the advances in technology for working remotely, face-to-face remains the best even for digital businesses. Facebook and Google are evidence of this: working remotely for these companies is the exception rather than the rule.

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

#29

Post by collyw »

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…

Not in every case. It was often an excuse for my last manager to not do anything like write down requirements. "I thought we talked about that." "Yes you changed your mind three times and I can't remember what the final outcome was."

Personally I like having things done in writing as you have something solid to refer to afterwards.

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

#30

Post by jimmywanger »

elcct wrote: post #27
jimmywanger wrote: post #11

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 constan…

Technology is there - Jira, Slack, Skype, GitHub, email... There is absolutely no excuse to not have remote jobs.

Did you not read most of my comment?

The technology is there, it wasn't ten years ago.

Now, it comes down to management setting strict guidelines and enforcing them.

What good is it to pay for Jira accounts when nobody uses them? Or what good is it to have Github and everybody ends up hosting their own private repos?

That is definitely a management mandate, and logistically, it's a lot easier to manage a group if they are all in the same place.

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