Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Building Remote Teams for Startups

vadimkravcenko.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 91 posts

Re: Building Remote Teams for Startups

#41

Post by synergy20 »

Some ideas to 'manage' remote-work:

    when you're working, always turn on the camera but in fuzzy mode, i.e. nobody see your real facial expression but knows you're there most of the time.
    make technical document a personal performance review item.
    make a system for all to fill out their daily progress, everyone does it before the day is called off.

Re: Building Remote Teams for Startups

#42

Post by thraxil »

hnuser847 wrote: post #9

When I’ve asked friends and coworkers how they like remote work, the answer depends on how comfortable they feel being candid with me. Publicly everyone says they’re more productive being remote. Privately, people admit that their productivity has cratered, being home is very distracting, and the lack of separation between work and home life makes both realms more difficult. I definitely empathize with the answers I’…

I've worked remotely for almost eight years now. Much of that from home; the last couple from a small office space that I rent down the street from home. I worked in open plan offices for about 15 years prior to going remote.

Both situations are a mixed bag. There are productive days and heavily distracted days in a shared office and there are productive and not so productive days working remotely. Working remotely but not from home is the easy winner for me in terms of overall productivity with a much higher percentage of productive days. Working from home (before the pandemic, when my partner also started working from home) was still significantly better than working in an open plan office, though it did take me the first couple years to work out that I had to be very strict about keeping a separation (work machine gets turned off at 5pm and no work email can reach me outside working hours). When the pandemic hit and my partner started working from home as well (and she's a university professor so it was a lot of loud video calls while she taught her classes), my productivity crashed (but also, pandemic stress). If your home is distracting than, yeah, your productivity is going to crater. But the same is really true for something like an open plan office (I used to get most of my work done by going in extremely early so I could have two productive hours a day before everyone else showed up).

Re: Building Remote Teams for Startups

#43

Post by kache_ »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #18

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 wo…

>managers who weren't former engineers

woah, those exist?

Re: Building Remote Teams for Startups

#44

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

MattGaiser wrote: post #39
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #23

> However, they probably need a stricter environment to function correctly, more robust control over their work – meaning they thrive when someone is looking over their shoulder. A remote gig is not a good fit for these kinds of people. There's a lot more of those folks than you might think. We have a fairly "skewed" sample set, with geeks (especially the ones that frequent HN). A lot of us love to work, and we'll do…

> Also, personal self-discipline is crucial. That is not necessarily something they teach in college. I attended a vocational school, where that kind of thing was a significant part of the curriculum. How did they teach this?

Strict attendance. Strict schedule. Behavioral rules. Dress code. Inflexible deadlines, etc.

Tough gig, but just like a workplace.

Re: Building Remote Teams for Startups

#45

Post by gumby »

axiosgunnar wrote: post #30
youerbt wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is a remote-first economy perhaps a system fundamentally at odds with human instincts? Seems like office-first, 9 to 5 economy is at odds with human instincts, if you have to physically keep humans from "gaming the system".

In that sense, taxation is against human instincts, if you have to force people to contribute to welfare payments. And yet we still do it.

Taxes pay for far more than “welfare payments” unless you expand your definition of “welfare” to include the general welfare (functioning roads etc).

Re: Building Remote Teams for Startups

#46

Post by PragmaticPulp »

pengwing wrote: post #24
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #18

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 wo…

Let me expand on that point: "Don't accidentally throw out good apples with the bad ones because you are looking at the wrong metrics." What I mean is: Bad apples are real, but don't ever do time-tracking or fast response testing in an effort to identify them. There are some excellent apples who will get your 8h-day deliverables done in 2-4h. Don't ever establish any system to find them. If you have a problem with th…

The thing is: Some of the worst remote workers are actually the best at appearing always online. They’ll go out of their way to remind everyone that they were “working” at 8PM or on a weekend because they need to compensate for the lack of actual work done.

One of the worst remote work offenders I ever dealt with had a routine of doing things every Saturday morning that would ping the team: Lots of Slack “@channel” questions. Lots of name tags in Slack to generate pings. Some e-mails with unnecessarily huge recipient lists. If someone had only measured time online or number of Slack messages sent, this guy would have been at the top of the list.

But it was all a show. It was all low-effort, high-volume content designed to give the impression of working hard, and it only came in short bursts. Anyone paying attention knew he wasn’t delivering much but he was generating huge fanfare over tiny things he did.

So yes, focusing too much on perceived hours worked or activity in Slack or e-mail is one of the worst ways to do performance management.

> Kick people based on repeatedly violating the deadline for deliverables.

This is the other game they play: Come sprint planning time, they’ll invest huge effort in exaggerating how long a task will take. Then they’ll go to great lengths to find ways to be “blocked and waiting on so and so” during the week. Eventually they’ll push their deadline back so far that hitting it is trivially easy.

Which is why it’s important to have managers who can spot these exaggerations and investigate the actual code and deliverables when they arrive. Engineers are good at spotting when someone has been lying about effort, but managers without engineering backgrounds can often (but not always) be fooled by charismatic remote workers.

Re: Building Remote Teams for Startups

#47

Post by zerocount »

codegeek wrote: post #28
pengwing wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me expand on that point: "Don't accidentally throw out good apples with the bad ones because you are looking at the wrong metrics." What I mean is: Bad apples are real, but don't ever do time-tracking or fast response testing in an effort to identify them. There are some excellent apples who will get your 8h-day deliverables done in 2-4h. Don't ever establish any system to find them. If you have a problem with th…

Work is not all about deadlines. It also requires discipline to be present for meetings (no matter how much you hate them), be available to solve problems (sometimes immediately), collaborate with other team members and many other things. It is called "Team work" for a reason. Good developers can get away with a lot of things for sure especially if they produce code but as someone who runs teams, it is not enough. I…

Yes, it is about the deadlines. That's what keeps me getting a paycheck, which is the reason I'm working. What you describe as teamwork is just every day development activity. There is no discipline to attending a meeting when the meeting is mandatory.

I can always spot someone who 'runs teams' by the way they prioritize the company and piss on the workers in the name of the customer and 'teamwork.'

This is why you can't trust a manager. You can't seperate their nose from the company's ass.

Re: Building Remote Teams for Startups

#48

Post by PragmaticPulp »

snicker7 wrote: post #37
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #18

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 wo…

For software engineering, four hours of actual work per day is probably average even on-site.

Yes, but communications, meetings, and being available to answer questions are also part of the job description.

The more someone becomes unavailable for communications, knowledge sharing, and meetings, the more work they create for their teammates and managers who have to compensate by tracking everything down, re-hashing missed meetings, re-communicating things that should have been covered the first time and so on.

It’s not enough to just write four hours of code every day and then disconnect, even if the average coder is also only writing four hours of code.

Re: Building Remote Teams for Startups

#49

Post by PragmaticPulp »

kache_ wrote: post #43
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #18

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 wo…

>managers who weren't former engineers woah, those exist?

Yep! There’s an entire school of thought that management and engineering are so entirely different that managers don’t need to have an engineering background.

I personally disagree, but I have a friend who insists that the best engineering managers are those who come from professional management backgrounds (project management, then people management usually) instead of engineering backgrounds.

Re: Building Remote Teams for Startups

#50

Post by zerocount »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #46
pengwing wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me expand on that point: "Don't accidentally throw out good apples with the bad ones because you are looking at the wrong metrics." What I mean is: Bad apples are real, but don't ever do time-tracking or fast response testing in an effort to identify them. There are some excellent apples who will get your 8h-day deliverables done in 2-4h. Don't ever establish any system to find them. If you have a problem with th…

The thing is: Some of the worst remote workers are actually the best at appearing always online. They’ll go out of their way to remind everyone that they were “working” at 8PM or on a weekend because they need to compensate for the lack of actual work done. One of the worst remote work offenders I ever dealt with had a routine of doing things every Saturday morning that would ping the team: Lots of Slack “@channel” q…

No post body was provided.
Post reply on HN