Why I Only Work Remotely • Hacker News Board

Re: Why I Only Work Remotely

#81

Post by pjmlp » Wed, Dec 21, 2016, 7:38 PM UTC

iguanayou wrote: post #21

el_benhameen wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you generally look for and find jobs?

My first remote job started as an on-site office job, and I was able to convince my boss over time to eventually go 100% remote. My current contract is with a local company that happens to support remote work. I found this job through a recruiter. But like I said, it was a rare find. The recruiters I work with know that I'm looking for remote-only, but those positions are few and far between. My contract is ending so…

> The recruiters I work with know that I'm looking for remote-only, but those positions are few and far between.

The biggest problem is that many companies that refuse remote work, don't have any issues outsourcing big piles of it to the other side of the planet.

Re: Why I Only Work Remotely

#82

Post by vonnik » Wed, Dec 21, 2016, 7:38 PM UTC

I've worked remotely for years, I've worked in an open-office where presence was mandatory, and now I run a startup with a distributed team of engineers on several continents.

While working in a shared office has pros and cons, the benefits are huge. One of the main benefits is in how information is shared. Sharing an office, you overhear conversations, and the chances of random but important information about how things work and how people relate to each other is much higher. In addition, the bandwidth of the non-verbal and paraverbal information is much richer. People working remotely forego most of that information, and their understanding of the org and its culture is diminished.

So why do we have a distributed team? Because we hire the top contributors to our open-source project without imposing a geographic filter, and it's the best, most efficient way we've found to build a really strong engineering team. We're aware of the shortcomings of how information flows, and struggle constantly to improve how we communicate.

Re: Why I Only Work Remotely

#83

Post by dkarapetyan » Wed, Dec 21, 2016, 7:39 PM UTC

Did this at a previous workplace and it seemed to work but the company culture has to be aligned as well. There is an intangible touch-feely stuff that gets lost behind the unfeeling glare of the monitor and if the rest of the company is ill-equipped to deal with that missing piece then it won’t work out.

Re: Why I Only Work Remotely

#84

Post by ebbv » Wed, Dec 21, 2016, 7:40 PM UTC

ylhert wrote: post #71

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 d…

Four hours of overlap CAN work but it depends on the overlap.

For example, if the rest of the team is working more "normal hours", starting before 10am and you don't start until 3pm, that means they can't have the whole team can't have a stand up meeting until 3pm when you get on. End of the day stand up meetings CAN work, but the natural flow is to start the day with it so you can talk about what you WILL be working on today and what you DID work on yesterday, rather than what you think you'll be working on tomorrow.

Also, it's hard to ensure the whole team has overlap if the times are too flexible. I have a teammate who starts at 7am, if we had another teammate who wanted to start at 4pm, they would never overlap.

Re: Why I Only Work Remotely

#85

Post by ebbv » Wed, Dec 21, 2016, 7:40 PM UTC

eip wrote: post #63

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…

There are a lot of good code review tools. If you want to do pair programming then do it async using code reviews. Doing it sync is just wasting two peoples time.

Code reviews != pair programming. Code reviews are great, but it's not remotely the same.

Re: Why I Only Work Remotely

#86

Post by LeanderK » Wed, Dec 21, 2016, 7:43 PM UTC

Having to work remotely is one of the main reasons why it's so hard for me to contributed to open source projects (i am a student btw). I guess it's not for everyone.

I need people to function, people to work with, people to talk about work, people to discuss decisions with and people to not talk to one another. It's what's motivating me, what keeps thinking for hours about problems.

Re: Why I Only Work Remotely

#87

Post by amichal » Wed, Dec 21, 2016, 7:46 PM UTC

None of the authors headings are necessary in an in-person office environment. We have both "open" areas and offices with doors. We don't enforce a specific work hours and we most definitely could care less about butts-in-seats, results are what matter. That said I just spent an hour in an office with a co-worker comparing notes on our two separate projects with similar needs and scored a sample of some nice fudge his partner made. Yesterday i spent the morning at the cafe and last week I sat at my desk and got 9hr straight coding without talking to anyone.

Re: Why I Only Work Remotely

#88

Post by ryandrake » Wed, Dec 21, 2016, 7:46 PM UTC

noxplode wrote: post #37

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 love the flexibility but my wife has trouble distinguishing between work-from-home and stay-at-home-dad and that is constant struggle. Sooo hard to do. I worked remote over the summer and tried convincing my wife that yes, I am working, even though I am home and sitting down staring into a screen. Not sure she ever got it but I'm working in office now so not an issue anymore. If I were to do it again I would defi…

Same issue here. Spouse/kids/pets who can't respect "work time" make remote work impossible. I have more distractions at home than I do in an open office at work. There's no way I can get anything meaningful done there.

Re: Why I Only Work Remotely

#89

Post by xemdetia » Wed, Dec 21, 2016, 7:48 PM UTC

jasonpeacock wrote: post #79

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.

Many people are in situations where task stand up and tear down are the most expensive things in their universe. If something comes up after you have spent 20 to an hour standing everything up but you need someone to do one thing, context switching will be brutal. If you are in the same physical location at worst case you can go find them, or you can ask around to know when they are next available. If they are 100 miles away on slack and not responding or otherwise not being able to get a hold of them, you are blocked and now have to swap to something else.

Re: Why I Only Work Remotely

#90

Post by dahart » Wed, Dec 21, 2016, 7:52 PM UTC

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…

Really well said. It has taken me a long time in my career to realize the things I wanted - to be left alone to code - weren't translating into the product getting done any faster when I actually was left alone.

I've watched other programmers fight for and get left alone, and then watched as they went off into the weeds coding things that solved problems we didn't have.

Sometimes being left alone even increases my stress and reduces my productivity in the long run because I choose to work on harder problems and try to solve things I think people want, only to discover after I deliver that it wasn't very helpful and I could have chosen something much simpler to do and finished faster. In the mean time, I've delivered more code and increased technical debt more than I should have, and I end up getting interrupted with more maintenance issues down the road.