I enjoyed this article but I wish those GIFs were not there, constantly trying to grab my attention.
Try putting this in the console: `jQuery('img').remove();`
Managing Remote Teams
21–30 of 48 posts
Re: Managing Remote Teams
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you worked on this small of a team before? When the team is actually small (not a small part of some mondo corp), you get a lot of great team dynamics, and it's very easy to know that 'ken doesn't like being interrupted. Working with a small team in the context of an open office w/100 people where 10-20% of the team is actually remote is what I've found to be the most unique intersection of terribleness.
Yup. I've worked at a company of 2! The last software team I was on was about 3 or 4 (depending on how you count), in a company of about 10. Nobody in management or sales ever really learned the "doesn't like being interrupted" lesson. In my experience, as soon as a company is big enough to hire non-programmers with physical access to programmers (usually around 4-6), this problem rears its head.
A: "Do you have a minute?"
B: "I do, now..."
A: "Oh good, could you fix this please?"
Re: Managing Remote Teams
#23author here thanks for posting the article on HN - i am a daily (more or less) lurker and a huge fan :) let me know if any parts in the article aren't clear or major points are missing - happy to extend or answer here
Great article! Just throwing this out there - the animated gifs are cool and fun but make reading the text next to them almost impossible.
I second this, very distracting considering how the human brain works.
Re: Managing Remote Teams
#24I manage a fully remote team with staff in time zones from Sydney to LA. In fact I've just messaged people in both zones. Culture is key: - People have to be of the mindset that meetings are short and purposeful. Nobody is in the meeting because they are the boss, or forced to join in order to soak up the atmosphere. (Both of those are real things, somehow). - People exercise judgement in deciding how many people to…
» People exercise judgement in deciding how many people to write to: either DM, or 3-way, or dump it in a public channel.
I still haven't figured this one out. Unless it is a criticism or "hey you broke this", my thought is the default should be a public channel, no?
Re: Managing Remote Teams
#25Scrum methodology is what works for us - creating different apps.
Re: Managing Remote Teams
#26Scrum methodology is what works for us - creating different apps.
As a counterpoint, in my last company we used scrum and every developer hated it. In fact, I've never seen scrum work...
Re: Managing Remote Teams
#27> In contrast, if you are 5 people co-located you just stand up and say: “everyone over there - we talk now”. I much prefer working on software teams with other people in the same office, and yet this is one of the things I hate about it. Just because I'm physically near you doesn't mean there's zero cost to interruptions. Working remotely is like memory protection and pre-emptive multitasking. Maybe in a perfect wor…
Right, I don't understand why interrupting everyone's work in a local team is acceptable...
Re: Managing Remote Teams
#28You make a long passionate speech about what the team needs to do to win the market, just to be followed up with a “Sorry Sarah, your internet connection dropped for a second, what did you say?”
That's why you use text based communication, if the internet drops for someone all they have to do is scroll up a bit when they rejoin...
Re: Managing Remote Teams
#29I manage a fully remote team with staff in time zones from Sydney to LA. In fact I've just messaged people in both zones. Culture is key: - People have to be of the mindset that meetings are short and purposeful. Nobody is in the meeting because they are the boss, or forced to join in order to soak up the atmosphere. (Both of those are real things, somehow). - People exercise judgement in deciding how many people to…
> - We tend to only hire highly experienced people. There's nobody with under 8 years of work on the team. Juniors will have to somehow convince us they can do it; it's somehow more believable that an older person will be able to work independently than a younger one.
Hm, does that imply that you don't have any process or provisions to train up juniors / begineers?
Re: Managing Remote Teams
#30You make a long passionate speech about what the team needs to do to win the market, just to be followed up with a “Sorry Sarah, your internet connection dropped for a second, what did you say?” That's why you use text based communication, if the internet drops for someone all they have to do is scroll up a bit when they rejoin...
The problem is that video calls are broken.
There are many reasons for that, mostly people using inadequate equipment and bad internet connections.