61–70 of 277 posts
Obviously it had nothing to do with the fact that they gave me 3 days of parental leave after the birth, so I was trying to help a recovering wife take care of a needy child.
A good culture doesn't depend on location between participants.
I've always wanted to switch to fully remote. I worked from home for a couple weeks after my son was born and my current company didn't like it. My productivity was down and they noticed so they informed me I wasn't allowed to work remotely anymore because of it. Obviously it had nothing to do with the fact that they gave me 3 days of parental leave after the birth, so I was trying to help a recovering wife take care…
Start interviewing! Find a company that provides better benefits, better pay, and supports flexible work arrangements. Can't fix your current org having garbage parental leave unfortunately (I mean, you could, but it's a more effective use of your time to just bounce).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19797594 (May 2019 HN Who's Hiring Thread)
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I am full time remote for past 6mo. Never been less productive in my career. I'm looking to switch back to onsite as soon as I can. Edit: I'm not saying remote is bad - just that in my experience I'm definitely less productive.
What metrics do you use to realize that you are less productive?
As an example, I'm currently working on a proof of concept using Rust to replace some existing C++ that coordinates some Gstreamer pipelines. This sounds like the perfect task for remote: self contained task, redoing existing code, fairly small scope. But remote (or more specifically the time difference) makes it pretty difficult. I don't know Gstreamer that well, and I don't know the existing code that well. I'll often run into a problem that I KNOW someone on my team could answer in 2minutes, and unblock me. Instead I need to push through wasting valuable time trying to figure it out myself, or wait till they are online. Perhaps this is the time difference not the remote aspect at fault. If they were on the same timezone, it'd be a quick Slack message away
Now, I am reduced to writing code that slots in around my team. As for actual empirical metrics, I don't have many. We tend to track achievements as a team (OKR's etc), and my team has been hitting there goals mostly. I do feel we could achieve more though if I was onsite. A probably non valuable one might be Github commit count, which dropped from ~ 3500 for the 2018 year to ~ 300 for the last 6 mo. So at least on code alone, I am churning substantially less of it out.
I'm not poo-pooing remote btw. I think my story would be totally different in a 100% remote company, or a company with substantial remote presence. I think for me though, in this situation, I prefer on site.
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"And though we intend to hire remote engineers in Europe and Asia eventually, our hubs in Dublin and Singapore are not sufficiently established to support remotes just yet."
I read that, but the timezone problem doesn't really explain why south america was slashed. Overall it seems a bit strange to explain "we officially have a remote hub" and "remote workers need to be supported by physical hubs".
Each country you want to pay salary in comes with legal aspects. Therefore they have to be a bit tactical with where they try to hire people.
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Why would you expect remote to be less efficient? Working in an open office is incredibly distracting—of course there’s productivity gains from going remote.
My experience is that some people genuinely are less productive without the social pressure net of their co-workers around them, or literally the boss on-hand as a sort of "productivity enforcer." It's varied wildly from job to job, office culture to culture, and at an individual level, but I take all those experiences with me and it tints my perceptions of productivity as well. I remember when I was a recruiter it w…
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I am full time remote for past 6mo. Never been less productive in my career. I'm looking to switch back to onsite as soon as I can. Edit: I'm not saying remote is bad - just that in my experience I'm definitely less productive.
Are you by chance just noticing all of the empty space that was previously filled with non-productive time in an office? I've worked remotely for about 5 years now. Without the water cooler talk, chit chat, and misc distractions, I can easily fit a 8+ hour day into less than 6 hours when I work from home.
I hope other companies follow Stripe's lead here. Anecdotally, I've never been as happy and productive as I've been the past few years as a remote worker. It seems to me too few companies are taking advantage of the opportunity here. The few challenges I've encountered seem solvable: (1) effective team culture building: can be solved with travel budget & prioritization of good team cultural norms by team leads (2) wh…
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I am full time remote for past 6mo. Never been less productive in my career. I'm looking to switch back to onsite as soon as I can. Edit: I'm not saying remote is bad - just that in my experience I'm definitely less productive.
It’s not for everyone. I’ve been remote for the past 6 years and love it, but it definitely had a learning curve. Friends of mine have tried it and went back to the office. One thing that has really helped me I’d having a non-work group of online friends who also all work remote. We can commiserate and trade tips.
I work half of the time remote and sometimes feel very unmotivated due to lack of human contact. Having someone to just chat with would be awesome. Neat idea I wonder if there is a discord chat for that.