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Why I Only Work Remotely

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Re: Why I Only Work Remotely

#71

Post by ylhert »

ebbv wrote: post #46

The main problem I see with this article is the author is totally focused on himself. If you are a solo developer this is fine, but if you are part of a team then his attitude is detrimental. I work as part of a team and we all work remotely most of the time, but we work the same hours because working different hours would cause problems. It's hard to conduct a daily stand up if everyone's working weird hours. We hav…

I love the teams I work with, but that doesn't mean I want them to interrupt me all day long while I'm trying to do meaningful work.

I think it's important to be flexible with work hours, but that goes both ways. My concern is with places where strict requirements are set up for hours, and places that are not willing to be more open minded about crossover work hours. As far as I am concerned, 4 hours of overlap per day amongst the team is sufficient. If more overlap than that seems necessary, it is probably a process problem.

I love pair programming! However I cannot pair program in an open office plan with tons of noise/distractions.

Re: Why I Only Work Remotely

#72

Post by ylhert »

pbhowmic wrote: post #32

I have been working remotely for nearly 3 years now. It is a necessity for me, my kids are very young and some some medical issues, so there is a lot of therapy and special schools involved with 1 pm dismissal times. I love the flexibility but my wife has trouble distinguishing between work-from-home and stay-at-home-dad and that is constant struggle.

I've heard people with families kids can struggle with this. The people I know who've been successful at it seem to always have some kind of office work space where they can close the door and get a bit of isolation, or, they invest in an offsite office of some kind.

Re: Why I Only Work Remotely

#73

Post by ylhert »

Klathmon wrote: post #12
elliotec wrote: post #5

I work at a company which has a beautiful building, I spend the majority of time in the office which is fantastic, the social aspect plus internal networking is very good. I work from home on average maybe 0.8 days a week, for various reasons, but I get lots of work done and am quite productive from home. There are some things that you just can't do the same from home. You can be much more agile when working in proxi…

My workplace is 80% remote, but not in the way you might think. Just about everyone works from home 4 days a week, and comes into the office one day. It expands the hiring pool by a pretty significant amount, one of our devs is 2 hours away (4 hours round trip, and he still commutes less than his wife does every week), it lets us get a lot of the "face to face" benefits done in one day, and the rest of the time is re…

IMO this is a great tradeoff and in some ways an ideal work environment!

Re: Why I Only Work Remotely

#74

Post by late2part »

Richard Hamming said [1] it best:

Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, ``The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.'' I don't know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but enough that they miss fame.

[1] - http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html

Re: Why I Only Work Remotely

#75

Post by ylhert »

seanwilson wrote: post #27

The time to travel to the office is often ignored too (it sounds lazy to even mention it because it's the norm). If you're working remotely and it takes 30 mins to get to the office, you're at an absolute minimum burning 5 hours a week going back and fourth from the office when you could be doing something else. Add in the extra time changing to and from work clothes, and having to leave the office to get food instea…

Such a great point, and I regret not touching on this!

Re: Why I Only Work Remotely

#76

Post by ylhert »

imsofuture wrote: post #65

Yep, I've been 100% remote for 5 years now (wow, it feels weird to see that number!) and am never going back, for the same reasons. The only caveat is that it's important that you work in an organization that is aligned with remote work, if not remote-first. Just scoring 'permission' to work remotely somewhere not used to it, is probably a recipe for a pretty bad time.

5 years is a long time, I'm sure you've got some great experience on the subject, would love to read more about your experiences!

I really agree with your caveat, and I've seen a number of places that have some pretty unmotivated individuals try it, and have it fail. This left a bad taste in everyones mouth, and they wrote off remote work. The reality was that they had crappy employees, and not that remote work can't work.

Re: Why I Only Work Remotely

#77

Post by NumberSix »

d357r0y3r wrote: post #52
NumberSix wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are the notions of: o clear written requirements expressing the business and high level technical needs. o well defined acceptance test procedures to ensure that the delivered software (or hardware or whatever) meets those requirements o thoughtful partitioning of the work between team members to minimize the needed communication and enable the team members to focus and work on their part without having a commi…

These are good ideals and they're hard to get right in practice. There's always a certain amount of ambiguity that arises when pen meets paper and it's ambiguity that puts any given task at risk of being done incorrectly or not at all. A positive trait in an engineer is the ability to resolve ambiguity. That isn't to say that all ambiguity can be solved by a single engineer working in isolation, though. What you don'…

A few points.

I have seen remote work go very smoothly and go very badly. It depends a lot on how well specified the remote work is.

The "agile" and "issue tracker" methods currently popular do not teach good organizational and design skills needed to partition projects well for remote work. We've gone from one extreme -- rigid up front requirements and designs, the much maligned "waterfall" -- to the other extreme of disorganized, short-term chaos where the big picture is lost. Micromanagement without the big picture planning that is the proper role of project managers.

The OP is arguing for remote work versus cramped, noisy, interruption filled open offices modeled on garment industry sweat shops. Somehow most companies are doing this as if they got together in a back room somewhere and formed a cartel to impose garment industry working conditions in a bizarre attempt to magically lower costs by pretending engineers are seamstresses from poverty stricken nations making sub-minimum wages doing piece-work.

Are quiet offices either with high-walled quiet cubicles or offices with doors where engineers can concentrate and focus on difficult work but still walk over to someone and quietly discuss a pressing issue better than remote work? Probably so, but these sensible working environments seemed to have been banned by some mysterious executive decree.

Re: Why I Only Work Remotely

#78

Post by framebit »

Lone wolves can and do produce a lot of valuable output for businesses. However, on bigger teams, somebody's gotta take care of the juniors.

Junior devs, interns, even moderately experienced devs can all benefit immensely from mentoring by senior devs. Mentoring is a fuzzy thing that happens in the margins, and that's exactly the kind of thing that's hard to replicate in full-remote work.

Of course, everything in moderation. Senior devs need some time alone to churn and burn through tasks, but less experienced devs need guidance, leadership, and experienced perspective. And sometimes you need a mercenary like the author to just run solo and get it done. Different strokes for different folks.

Re: Why I Only Work Remotely

#79

Post by jasonpeacock »

d357r0y3r wrote: post #31

I rarely work remote even when I have the opportunity to do it; I'll explain. The author seems to have a single-mindedness about optimizing their own performance. If performance in terms of your value to the business was about sitting down at a computer and coding, getting in a "flow" state, etc, I would agree. Problem is, personal efficiency doesn't necessarily align with value generated. I've seen engineers spend m…

"I don't want to get blocked from doing my work because you've gone dark on slack."

That's poor project/task management if your whole day grinds to a halt because of a single blocker. There should always be more/other work to be done while waiting on a blocking issue to be resolved.

Re: Why I Only Work Remotely

#80

Post by ryandrake »

ClayFerguson wrote: post #59

I agree with every word of this article and after 25yrs experience as a developer I have all similar experiences. Being a computer programmer is about the same as being a 'writer' (book author), and no one expects an author to sit with other authors in a special building to be able to write. With modern technology, and the wastefulness of time and energy spent commuting, there is just no longer any reason for a progr…

Most books don't require 10-100 authors, each focusing on the paragraph that they are experts in, needing to hold the pages together with APIs that are agreed upon by all co-authors. The collaborative aspect of a software project is much greater than that of a book.

Yes, there are books that have a multiple of co-authors, but these co-authors tend to not operate lone-wolf.

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