Why We Still Believe in Working Remotely

The office is an open floor plan with very poor noise reduction. When not in meetings in that environment, it is hard to get work done even with headphones. Visual and audio distractions persist. That said, there are times where getting together is helpful.

When contacted by companies, I ask about telecommuting. Many play the "it is up to you and your manager once you are established" game. Result - thanks but no thanks.

Time spent in the car/traffic is productivity lost.

But things are different if you want to build the next big thing with cofounders and there I experienced three big disadvantages:

1. All big (and finally successful) ideas and ventures were born by sitting together, day for day. By being forced to stay together in one environment. And we haven't born those great ideas when we had meetings about our products or were specifying some API, no, it was always when we were jabbering around doing silly things. You won't get breaking ideas on Skype or Google Hangout, believe me. Maybe a group of people needs sometimes a kind of antogonist or some constraints to get even more creative and if it's just some "we have to share our workday together."

2. Just working alone and from time to time a face2face meeting won't establish a relationship which you definitely need to overcome conflict situations. You can't build real relationships at some artificial situations like meetings or team off-sites while usually working all the time alone. Once you have a severe conflict and you have missed to build a relationship before odds are small that you get things working again (or even a normal conversation). A lot of people are the type "forever gone", leaving the non finished code base untouched forever.

3. You have to be positive and think that everybody will contribute in the same manner and quantity as you but some are not able to do this because they are heavy procrastinators when left alone or just not persons of integrity. If you have somebody who is ambitious and is in control of his time and energy, great! Jackpot! But the probability that you end up with a procrastinator, somebody who never finishes something or somebody who quickly looses motivation (or is just depressive) is not so low as you might think and you hear crap and other excuses every update meeting like 'oh I couldn't do this because I had to reinstall osx and xcode blabla and the gem sucks anyway' or whatever. Some freelancers invoice the same time many times to many clients, just remember this guy recently outsourcing his work to some people in China. You never know who you work with and what the person is really doing if you do not know them too well. I know that freelancer could also do this shit onsite (you cannot watch their screen 24/7 and check if it's really your source they are working on) but being together in one office lets the person focus more on your work and your environment and they are not distracted by other potential projects or ideas. And integrity/work morality increase.

So, it's hard to say if remote work is good or bad. But to sum up, I feel that when working as freelancer for a client then try to do this remotely. As a dev I would try this, as a client of course not. But if you want to start something great with friends or just met new cofounders you have to be together for some time.

"I’ll let you in on a secret: most of our remote developers work longer hours than our in-office devs."

This reminds me of the 'unlimited vacation' policy, which, if I'm not mistaken has effectively showed that employees don't end up taking as many days off as they would if they were allotted the standard 15/20 days.

I generally feel that when you empower an employee, and give them ownership and responsibility, provided that they're passionate and capable, you'll see significant productivity gains. In the case of SE, this holds true because the problem that they're solving is so close to the creators of the product.

The employee will however most often have a few extra things to take care of themselves, compared to being "employed by the books". For example to report local taxes, pension arrangements, health insurance etc. The company isn't usually involved in that, but might pay for it indirectly through a salary that's adjusted for these aspects.

In some countries, local laws require the employee / contractor to have a company (sole proprietor kind). In others, the contracts can be made directly between the business and the individual.