Remote work on HN: Who is hiring? – 69% jobs in 2023 are remote

I think the key part of moving elsewhere is that you have much less access to the in-person segment, assuming moving represents a significant hurdle to you.

> How were they measuring productivity per employee?

Productivity was ultimately measured by talking to the people and asking what they've been working on, what the challenges were, and why it was taking so long. When we'd talk to some of these people, they could barely come up with a story for what they had been doing all week.

The metrics were used as an indicator of where to investigate, not as an ultimate measure of productivity. The key metrics were actually entirely in control of the teams themselves: We would estimate our own story points and could even close our own tickets as completed if we wanted.

When some employees go from doing 20-25 story points per week down to 3-5 and the only change was that they started working remotely, something is wrong.

Remember, these were people rating their own story points!

IMO, they could have gamed the system if they wanted to by inflating story points and churning tickets (though this would only delay their managers catching on, not avoid it). These people weren't even doing that. They just... stopped working more than a couple hours per week and assumed nobody would notice.

I know this cuts against the Reddit, Twitter, and Hacker News narrative that everyone is more productive remote, but I watched it happen in real time. It wasn't just a few people, it was a significant number of people who couldn't handle it.

Not everyone can handle remote and the number of people in this category is a lot higher than the internet suggests. I don't know why that's controversial for some people.

I work remote, and we talk about this topic among the team from time to time. One thing I always add to the conversation is the importance of simulating a work day. I wake up 30 minutes before work and get ready. I raise my desk and work standing the first 4.5 hours every day. I greet the team in work chat on the dot, and begin working on tasks for the day.

Being successful at remote work as a developer and creative is using the right tools when it comes to collaboration. This means having a good A/V setup that doesn't need regular futzing with to work. Know your OS's sound and camera settings. Know your team tools inside and out. Another thing that I work on daily is better written communication skills, specifically, better commit message, taking that extra 5 minutes to write up a concise PR.

Screen capture is another tool I regularly use, and have refined my skills in. I often screenshot things and add drawn and text annotations to highlight important information and supplement with a chat message. That can often help solve problems much faster. I have us all using more digital whiteboarding tools. We're learning what too much or too little Kanban board granularity is. Adjusting workflows both in project management and remote communication is super important. Finding the inefficiencies and efficiencies requires a lot of open-mindedness and humility.

We had an employee who wasn't finding success in remote work and I realized a lot of his struggles were with not knowing how to use core desktop publishing and digital communication tools. He was from the save it on your hard drive and email-it-to-me generation. He missed standing at the coffee machine and chatting. He didn't care to learn advanced features of the Google Suite, or get OBS up and running. Those factors combined didn't help him succeed in remote work. It was unfortunate to see.

One thing that can be done to positively influence opponents of remote work, in your organization or in the industry in general is emphasizing the importance of core modern computer literacy. I think that being a highly productive remote employee requires one to develop and maintain a high degree of core computer literacy (using office productivity tools, communication software, and managing A/V hardware).

I feel like in a hybrid work situation it's unfortunate that it can fall into the worst-of-both-worlds type situations.

Shifting coordinating doc habits are hard, but a lot of times they're being generated in pieces in an uncoordinated way already. Or it could be a matter of team leadership pointing back to the right contexts - issue discussion etc.

I have a coworker who creates work tickets for me and a fair bit of my work time is spent deciphering what they meant in their tickets.

It's not uncommon for me to interview him on almost every ticket, writing extensive notes with clarifications on his instructions and to fill in gaps.

I don't see anything necessarily wrong with having to write notes. I think that's part of a healthy work process. I just think it happens too often.

It's partly due to the fact we do not have a very organized system, but also due to him not valuing writing as a tool to enhance his work.