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Working remotely with 150+ people

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Re: Working remotely with 150+ people

#11

Post by maxxxxx »

joeguilmette wrote: post #6
maxxxxx wrote: post #5

It's a nice list but could be a little more specific. I have worked in purely remote teams and I found them to be highly functional. You need a certain type of self reliant people though and really strong leadership. Somebody has to make and have the power to enforce certain decisions that affect everybody.

Can you describe in more detail what really strong leadership looks like in a remote work environment?

For example someone needs to decide how issues are tracked and define a process. That process then has to be followed by everybody. There can't be exceptions.

In general I think remote teams benefit a lot from a central person who has final say and had the ego to push things through. Somebody like Linus for Linux. You can't have people like you see in a lot of companies that need endless meetings to make decisions.

Re: Working remotely with 150+ people

#12

Post by maxxxxx »

jobvandervoort wrote: post #7
maxxxxx wrote: post #5

It's a nice list but could be a little more specific. I have worked in purely remote teams and I found them to be highly functional. You need a certain type of self reliant people though and really strong leadership. Somebody has to make and have the power to enforce certain decisions that affect everybody.

I strongly agree about requiring self-reliant people. I actually wrote about this shortly after posting this on medium [0], but the TL;DR is that you (as manager) should make it extremely clear what is expected of everyone and that people should be very self-sufficient / independent. [0]: https://about.gitlab.com/2017/01/03/set-expectations/

They have to be independent but still flexible and not stubborn. In short you need high quality people.

Re: Working remotely with 150+ people

#13

Post by DoofusOfDeath »

After completing my CS master's degree, I was hired by my advisor as a full-time software developer. My job was to coordinate the efforts of the students contributing to his main project, keeping everything moving forward.

For that job, I found that keeping things asynch was crucial. But so was keeping things lock-free.

My basic premise was to never assume that any grad student would get any particular task done. So I tried to create an environment where any time they had a useful contribution, it could be merged into the main code base. But to never put one student at the mercy of another.

I think that worked pretty well.

Re: Working remotely with 150+ people

#14

Post by exDM69 »

codingvelocity wrote: post #8

While i'm not 100% remote (i'm part of a small regional office that has a massive head office in another part of the country, but I can work from home). Something i've found incredibly important is jumping on video chat. There's something about seeing someone in a video while you talk to them that reminds you "hey i'm working with other humans, i should respond with a level of empathy i'd expect in return"

Are these individual or group chats? What kind of solution do you have?

I work in a small office of a big company and have a 10 hour timezone difference to my most important co-workers. We chat on the phone but I don't really enjoy it. I'm not sure video chat would help, but I might be willing to try.

But it would be slightly inconvenient because of the timezones. We might have 10-20 people from 5-10 locations around the world. This means that many participants call in from home before work in the morning or after work at night.

That said, I'm quite happy working remotely mostly from home.

I feel that travelling occasionally and meeting the people in person (and having lunch, dinner, beers together) makes it much easier to work together. There's no substitute for human contact.

Re: Working remotely with 150+ people

#15

Post by BurningFrog »

maxxxxx wrote: post #12
jobvandervoort wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly agree about requiring self-reliant people. I actually wrote about this shortly after posting this on medium [0], but the TL;DR is that you (as manager) should make it extremely clear what is expected of everyone and that people should be very self-sufficient / independent. [0]: https://about.gitlab.com/2017/01/03/set-expectations/

They have to be independent but still flexible and not stubborn. In short you need high quality people.

Sounds expensive.

Re: Working remotely with 150+ people

#16

Post by 91bananas »

exDM69 wrote: post #14
codingvelocity wrote: post #8

While i'm not 100% remote (i'm part of a small regional office that has a massive head office in another part of the country, but I can work from home). Something i've found incredibly important is jumping on video chat. There's something about seeing someone in a video while you talk to them that reminds you "hey i'm working with other humans, i should respond with a level of empathy i'd expect in return"

Are these individual or group chats? What kind of solution do you have? I work in a small office of a big company and have a 10 hour timezone difference to my most important co-workers. We chat on the phone but I don't really enjoy it. I'm not sure video chat would help, but I might be willing to try. But it would be slightly inconvenient because of the timezones. We might have 10-20 people from 5-10 locations around…

If you're ok with the Google machine and spending way too much money on a computer that does basically nothing, there are these from Google[0] which have been great for me and my team.

We have a Hangout open all day in the office, displayed on a 60" TV. Anyone that's working remote can jump in whenever and it's somewhat like they're in the office. Audio is my only complaint. Sometimes it is difficult to be heard

[0]: https://chromebusinessdevices.withgoogle.com/products/1677/h...

Re: Working remotely with 150+ people

#17

Post by [deleted] »

DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #13

After completing my CS master's degree, I was hired by my advisor as a full-time software developer. My job was to coordinate the efforts of the students contributing to his main project, keeping everything moving forward. For that job, I found that keeping things asynch was crucial. But so was keeping things lock-free . My basic premise was to never assume that any grad student would get any particular task done. So…

[deleted]

Re: Working remotely with 150+ people

#18

Post by tcrews »

I've been working remotely for 2 years now and my team has people from all over the world. People mostly talk on IRC but not a lot (about important stuff) and there is a HUGE number of periodic meetings. I can't stand them. What's worse, every time things start to appear to be going off track, the initial reaction is to always set up a new periodic meeting about topic X... this is supposed to bring people together but useful interaction never happens on meetings (too many people trying to save face). It's horrible.

When talking to external partners, our management brags about having a remote team with people from all over the world, but I don't think they understand how to make this work.

Sometimes I feel we should all be in a single office because of this, but then I remember other companies have figured this out so I don't have to feel bad about wanting to work remotely.

Re: Working remotely with 150+ people

#19

Post by jobvandervoort »

tcrews wrote: post #18

I've been working remotely for 2 years now and my team has people from all over the world. People mostly talk on IRC but not a lot (about important stuff) and there is a HUGE number of periodic meetings. I can't stand them. What's worse, every time things start to appear to be going off track, the initial reaction is to always set up a new periodic meeting about topic X... this is supposed to bring people together bu…

Periodic meetings mean the end to remote work. Avoid them whenever possible.

I try to be proactive about cancelling the periodic meetings that we do have, whenever there's nothing to talk about.

Traditional meeting strategies also work well: never start a meeting without an agenda, set a short and fixed time slot for it and always end when the time is over.

Re: Working remotely with 150+ people

#20

Post by k__ »

neebz wrote: post #9

We focussed a lot on async collaboration and unfortunately we get issues of team associations. You just miss out on any water cooler talk and struggle to build relationships with individual employees. This impacted our employee turnover massively even though we gave competitive salaries, flexible work hours and work-from-home.

I have the feeling this water-cooler talk thing is mostly an issue if there is no focus or the management is bad.

If everything is fine, I don't talk much "privately" with people at work and some "more social" individuals talk about their private things, when "at the cooler".

If there are problems in management, we talk about these "at the cooler".

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