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Remote Only

remoteonly.org

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Re: Remote Only

#291

Post by speleding »

yosito wrote: post #269
speleding wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An an employer who allows people to work remotely. My experience has been that some employees cannot handle the responsibility and their output drops a lot if they're not behind their desk. Others are fine / better. (Because I found it hard to tell some people they're not allowed to work remotely, while others can, I ended up replacing the ones who performed poorly when working remote.) My point is that you cannot re…

If you give people more explicit feedback about their performance and hold them accountable only for their performance regardless of where they get the work done, the problem disappears. I get the sense that you're holding yourself responsible for the performance of your employees, but for remote work to be successful, you need to hold the employees responsible. If you find that some employees aren't responsible enou…

Yes, I came to the same conclusion: I need employees that don't need to be micro-managed. Changing their behaviour (if that is even possible) seemed to require more effort than I was prepared to put in, so I ended up replacing them.

However, I haven't found a good way to assess whether potential hires are good at this. Everyone claims to be an independent self-starter who is great at remote work whilst in the hiring process...

Re: Remote Only

#292

Post by JTbane »

Question for remote workers: how do you deal with the innate need for managers to know that you are busy?: i.e. that you're not just more or less slacking off for a salary.

Re: Remote Only

#293

Post by eequah9L »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #252
newscracker wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that writing well is important, but I would characterize this as beyond writing alone. Assuming that "remote work" isn't confined only to teams in time zones where working hours don't overlap, it's quite easy to start a chat or an audio call/conference. "Talking" directly is more important, and many a times yields quicker results than exchanging long emails or documents, whether it's with text (chat) or voice…

> it's quite easy to start a chat or an audio call/conference "Ok, we're all here. Wait, where's Mike?" "I think he was making coffee. Let's wait for him." "Hey, is Zhang saying something?" "Zhang, say something." "..." "I think your microphone is broken." "Can you disconnect and reconnect?" "Hey, he's typing something. I... will... reboot. Ok, let's wait for him to reboot." "Hey, Mike's back. Someone tell him we're…

Zhang was on mute. Happens to the best of us.

Re: Remote Only

#294

Post by pvaldes »

ScarZy wrote: post #233
nvarsj wrote: post #207

My somewhat reductive conclusion about remote work is that it boils down to the ability to be an effective writer. If you're not good at written communication, or you work with people who are not good at it, remote work will be miserable. People who are not highly fluent in the company's written language or those with some level of dyslexia will struggle. Also some people get frustrated with the more analytic approac…

This is the main reason I want to try and learn Emacs, OrgMode, and Babel. The stuff that Howard Abrahams discusses on the below video is something I think would be highly successful in a remote environment. Documenting your workflow as you go, including commands and output, then emailing it to your team that day or uploading it to a document store/gitbook: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dljNabciEGg

You can grasp org.mode pretty quickly, is all tab-tab-tab and a lot of asterisks here and there.

Emacs needs more effort but it is an achievable goal. Very customisable so you could even ask somebody to create your own comands and circumnavigate the hairy parts for a lot of time until building enough confidence. Finding a good tutor or having somebody interested in the program in your company would help a lot, obviously.

Re: Remote Only

#295

Post by IOT_Apprentice »

warcher wrote: post #11

Yo, you gotta tell me when you’re working. You must. You’re on a team that is depending on you and somebody has to know where the fuck your are and when you’re going to fix whatever is broken today. “Where’s will?” “I don’t know, our manifesto says nobody gets to know when he’s working.” “Well he broke the site.” “That’s his right as a sovereign citizen.” The end.

Yo, why isn't the site monitored with alerting that tells Will the site is broken? Why isn't the site set up so that if a change is deployed and breaks it, the site can be rolled back to the last working state? Yo, why don't you have change control and a roll back process?

Re: Remote Only

#296

Post by Fnoord »

kharak wrote: post #273
pricees wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been my experience, 100%. All of the jobs I have ever interviewed for casually listed "great oral and written communication" as a skill in the job reqs. I have felt that I had a problem in this area. I have worked as a remote contractor off and on for most of my life and have never run into an issue. For the past year and a half I have been on a remote team. It wasn't until my team lead, who did all of the o…

I'm mildly confused. Your post here seems fine and quit readable. How do you arrive at the conclusion, that you're lacking in written communication skills? (sorry for question instead of tips)

Sample size is one, and they might've discussed this before. Someone with good written communication skills can write effectively, without too much details, quickly on the fly. The same holds true for verbal.

I believe there's two important key points: confidence (but not overconfidence) and empathy/sympathy. Putting yourself in the other person's shoe and figuring what they need to hear ie. not what you want to express. The latter is secondary!

Sure, you can practice it, but only so much. I have autism, and I'm utter shit at this (even in my native language). I've been practicing it pretty much all my life (I remember having issues with it at elementary school). I'm terrible with being to the point and keeping communication short. And if it is short, its usually too rude.

Re: Remote Only

#297

Post by IOT_Apprentice »

jpatokal wrote: post #220
AstralStorm wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your process cannot revert a breaking change with a figurative snap of fingers, the process is broken. It is like driving a car with no brakes. About the only time where I've seen this fail is if it was a publicised feature launch that was way premature.

And when it's the build server itself that's broken? No process can account for every possible edge case, and you need to have flexibility to handle the unexpected.

if the build system is broken, then no new code gets built to roll to production. Your build system has no resiliency in terms of having more than one, or ability to roll back? Do you even have version control implemented along with a mature change control process, with automation and monitoring in place?

Re: Remote Only

#298

Post by ed_balls »

pricees wrote: post #271
nvarsj wrote: post #207

My somewhat reductive conclusion about remote work is that it boils down to the ability to be an effective writer. If you're not good at written communication, or you work with people who are not good at it, remote work will be miserable. People who are not highly fluent in the company's written language or those with some level of dyslexia will struggle. Also some people get frustrated with the more analytic approac…

This has been my experience, 100%. All of the jobs I have ever interviewed for casually listed "great oral and written communication" as a skill in the job reqs. I have felt that I had a problem in this area. I have worked as a remote contractor off and on for most of my life and have never run into an issue. For the past year and a half I have been on a remote team. It wasn't until my team lead, who did all of the o…

This helps a lot http://blog.dilbert.com/2015/08/22/the-day-you-became-a-bett...

Re: Remote Only

#299

Post by rodw »

jaggederest wrote: post #164
toomanybeersies wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because otherwise, after COL, you might only save $10k per year in a developed country, and $30k per year in a developing country. That would be just as lopsided and unfair to your remote workers as paying them all market rate, so that your employees in developed countries get paid $80k per year and your employees in India get paid $8k per year. Or do you expect your developers in America to relocate to India?

Why not subsidize everyone's lifestyle so they all save the same amount of money, regardless of spending? Would you pay more money for the exact same product made in a different city? How is hiring developers different?

If you've identified the "best" candidate for a position and want to hire or retain that person, you're now competing with the other offers available to that candidate (which include CoL-adjusted offers), not with the salaries you're paying other employees.

Re: Remote Only

#300

Post by alter_eco123 »

yosito wrote: post #274
alter_eco123 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Pay people what they're worth regardless of where they live. Note that people are fine with getting a lower salary in exchange for being able to work remotely. You could turn it around and say remote employees are "paying their employer what working remotely is worth".

Personally, if a company uses remote work as an excuse to pay less, that's a red flag for me. Pay should represent the value you offer to the company, period.

> Pay should represent the value you offer to the company, period.

Sure, but value works both ways.

"Your salary should represent the value working remotely offers to you"

If it's reasonable for you to think that way, why wouldn't it be reasonable for companies too?

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