Building Remote Teams for Startups

I think anyone who says remote is strictly better is fooling themselves. There are definitely down-sides.

We’ve been doing a lot to try to bring back the benefits of being in-person while maintaining the flexibility of being remote.

Wrote about our specific tactics here: https://blog.roboflow.com/remote-not-distant/

I've been remote for over 10 years, and this article mostly rings true. The employer has to put extra effort into communication and documentation. But that ends up being good for everyone - even in hybrid companies we're not everyone is remote.

I think my current employer, FullStory, gets a lot of this right. Even before they went fully distributed, they were really good at documenting things - from PTO policies to postmortems on every outage we've ever had. The onboarding process is the best I've ever seen.

> There is no Pair-Programming,

That's just not true. I do frequent pair programming, it's just over a screen sharing / video call rather than sitting beside the person I'm pairing with. There's a million tools you can use for this.

The other thing I'll say, is that as a remote employee, having a dedicated quiet space to work in can be really beneficial. Especially if you have young children at home. Usually that means a spare bedroom, where you can shut the door.

For a couple of years after my daughter was born, I actually rented a small private office that was a short bike ride from my house. I didn't go there every single day, but the days that I did were definitely my most productive ones during that time period. It was really the best of all worlds from my perspective.

> The employer has to put extra effort into communication and documentation.

Not just the employer. The employees also need to put extra effort into their own communication and documentation. This needs to be actively mentored to the employees and included as part of performance management with clear expectations.

A common mistake for first-time remote companies or managers is to think that the managers alone can make up for the communication deficits inherent to remote work. Not so. It’s everyone’s job. Managers should be setting examples and mentoring everyone though.

Good article. Having a lot of experience managing remote teams, I wanted to expand on this point:

> Try to focus on the employees who thrive in such environments rather than those few bad apples.

You can’t let the bad apples define the work experience for everyone, but you do need to identify them and remove them as fast as possible so they don’t poison the well.

One thing I didn’t realize at first was that remote work attracts bad apples at a much higher rate than in-person work. There’s an idea that remote jobs are an easy way to get away with doing less work, so you’ll be flooded with applicants who read books like “The Four Hour Workweek” and think your remote job is their ticket to traveling the world while they answer occasional emails from their phones. Or more commonly, a ticket to working a few hours (or less!) per day while they try to convince their boss that the task is just harder than it looks.

Good performance management is important in any job, but it’s even more critical in remote work. If you let remote slackers thrive at your company, the good employees will notice. They’ll quickly burn out after working normal amounts plus also picking up the tasks that aren’t being done by the remote slackers. Resentment grows quickly and the good employees will be leaving quickly if let the remote slackers coast without consequences.

I actually favor engineers-turned-managers for remote management positions over managers with non-engineer backgrounds for this reason. Former engineers are much better at spotting when someone is lying about the complexity of coding tasks.

Yeah, that's a fair point. Everyone has to put in the effort.

My thinking was that the employer has to make it part of the duties of the employees, and, more importantly, ensure employees have the time, tools, etc. available to do it.

E.g, when there's an outage, an entire day of someone's time might be spent writing up the post-mortem.