It really depends on the type of work that you're doing. If the work requires a lot of communication and details that need to be hashes out with people from various disciplines (i.e. PM, UX, Eng), you need to be colocated to get the job done quickly. Doing this part remote will only lead to frustrations and missed deadlines. But if everything is fully spec'd out and split into bite-size pieces for engineers to simply fill in the wholes with code and follow the spec, then a remote team can work really well. I've seen this many times at past consulting companies and now a product company where we do have some remote workers.
We Don’t Simply Get Remote Jobs, We Join Remote Teams
141–150 of 184 posts
Re: We Don’t Simply Get Remote Jobs, We Join Remote Teams
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
I totally agree! I hate being stuck in a meeting and thinking, "If I could hit Google right now, we'd have this answered already." Luckily, this company doesn't have many meetings, so it isn't a big deal.
I sort-of agree that meetings are often a waste of time BUT if you have to google something _during_ the meeting, you haven't prepared sufficiently or the meeting organizer hasn't provided a clear agenda before the meeting. Meetings can be valuable if people take them seriously (and if there aren't too many).
Lots of problems come up in meetings that you can't adequately prepare for.
Clear agendas don't solve the problem of a bad agenda.
Meetings can be valuable but not nearly as valuable as peer to peer communication in the office. Meetings are almost always a waste of time where I work.
Re: We Don’t Simply Get Remote Jobs, We Join Remote Teams
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
We also do a lot of c and scala :D. That was the idea. One of the things I wanted to do was avoid using a degree or "pedigree" as an indicator. I myself dropped out of my undergrad at a no name university in the midwest. I don't have "pedigree". I'm also not a large believer in the way things are done in the valley (did 2.5 years, that was enough for me..). This is my opinion, I don't claim this is fact, but I know a…
Do you plan to include python in your roadmap in near future (I can possibly help if you don't have in-house expertise on it ;), or choosing to avoid competing with Tensorflow? I suspect Python would be fairly popular amongst companies looking to build deep learning based products.
Nah not our focus.
We are going to interop with keras with our scala api: https://github.com/deeplearning4j/Scalnet
That will allow us to benefit from what that community is building in terms of neural networks. We want to be the "deployment path" for those kinds of models while we focus on making c++ on the jvm as fast as possible.
We basically focus on the hadoop and spark crowd. We're already the industry standard in java/scala:
https://tech.knime.org/deeplearning4j https://www.rapidminerchina.com/en/products/shop/product/dee... https://www.lightbend.com/blog/meet-deeplearning4j-and-bidda... http://www.slideshare.net/agibsonccc/dl4j-in-the-wild
Re: We Don’t Simply Get Remote Jobs, We Join Remote Teams
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
A startup is a temporary organization searching for a repeatable and scalable business model. Speed and agility are your only advantages. Working all the time is practically essential for most startups. Are we seriously saying that startups should be comfortable 9 to 5 jobs? There are hundreds of millions of jobs out there that will give you that lifestyle, why complain about that exception where it is actually sensi…
> Speed and agility are your only advantages. Are you sure? Having experts in a given field isn't an advantage to look for? The mere fact that you're able to turn on a dime if necessary without having to reorganise thousands of employees and projects towards your new goal? If your definition of "startup" includes "doing things that literally anybody else with enough money could do" and "trying to establish a monopoly…
Really depends on how much distance that expertise leaves between you and your competition. If it's enough of a barrier to entry, then yes you have time, otherwise you better be going fast. A better funded competitor might Uber you after that first MVP has been derisked.
Re: We Don’t Simply Get Remote Jobs, We Join Remote Teams
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every single job across industries that I have ever worked at (and i've only worked in the US) has been inflexible on hours and location.
It's almost as if... different people have different experiences at different companies... as if, dare I say it, not all people and companies are the same?
Yep, that was my point.
Re: We Don’t Simply Get Remote Jobs, We Join Remote Teams
#146I work remotely. I'm from Romania and we have a team that's distributed across the country, with some members from other European countries as well. We do have a small office where I live, but it is provided just as a place to come to in case you don't like working from home and I do go to our office almost daily, but most of the team is on the other end of a Gmail/Skype/Slack connection. Today I got tired at 1 PM, g…
That is generally not compatible with the American way of working - especially in the startup scene - where ever second you're not working is considered a second that your competitor companies have over you.
> where ever second you're not working...
More lile, every second you are not at your desk appearing to work. I've seen this in established companies in the US too, so it's not exclusive to startups
Re: We Don’t Simply Get Remote Jobs, We Join Remote Teams
#147I work remotely. I'm from Romania and we have a team that's distributed across the country, with some members from other European countries as well. We do have a small office where I live, but it is provided just as a place to come to in case you don't like working from home and I do go to our office almost daily, but most of the team is on the other end of a Gmail/Skype/Slack connection. Today I got tired at 1 PM, g…
Sounds wonderful! I was recently working onsite at a Scandinavian bank that had office spread all over Europe. We had people fly in from Sweden and Poland to meet in person, but I loved how all of the remote teams were tied together. At the office I was in, every employee was wearing a Jabra Evolve headset, they were tied in to Skype, and had the Linc (I think?) LEDs sticking up from their monitors to show availability status.
The headsets had a little pad that sat on your desk for changing volume, music tracks, accepting/cancelling calls. They were noise-cancelling headsets, had a flip-down mic that stowed in the headband out of the way when not in use, and had a push-to-listen where you press in on an earcup to cancel the noise-cancelling functions and hear what was going on in the office around you.
I think most employees worked with others from remote offices regularly, though I'm not sure how many actually worked from home. It just felt like a very seamless system that allowed everyone to be connected to each other.
Re: We Don’t Simply Get Remote Jobs, We Join Remote Teams
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can't go based on something purely objective like lines of code, but a good code review will tell you if someone is working or slacking.
And when I spend the day planning ahead, or helping other team members research things, or bug hunting, or...?
Those things should also produce artifacts that can be reviewed by someone knowledgeable in tech.
Besides, it's not a day by day review, it should be week or month. If you haven't produced any artifacts in a week or a month then...
Re: We Don’t Simply Get Remote Jobs, We Join Remote Teams
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's almost as if... different people have different experiences at different companies... as if, dare I say it, not all people and companies are the same?
Yep, that was my point.
Right, but the person you replied to was giving the counterfactual that not all jobs are like that. It didn't need to be rebutted; they were not instead stating that ALL jobs are flexible, just pointing out not all AREN'T.
Re: We Don’t Simply Get Remote Jobs, We Join Remote Teams
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep, that was my point.
Right, but the person you replied to was giving the counterfactual that not all jobs are like that. It didn't need to be rebutted; they were not instead stating that ALL jobs are flexible, just pointing out not all AREN'T.
Actually, the argument was that "most" jobs in the US are flexible on hours. I really doubt that's true, given that there's a good many minimum-wage or close-to-minimum-wage jobs out there, and a lot of traditional 9-5 office jobs, and the US still has factories and lots of other companies which need to run to a schedule. And the idea that a single person could state that "most" jobs are anything based on personal experience is probably incorrect.