Why We Still Believe in Working Remotely

It's "early spring" already in Silicon Valley, and the distinct smell of the brisk, moist air and the sight of the fresh, yellow-green-Crayola-colored grass that has sprouted up all over the hills following the winter rains made me think, "ah, it's this time of year again."

I couldn't help but keep looking at the rolling hills, the bright green grass growing naturally everywhere, and the old, tired oak trees. And it came to me: how can I live anywhere else? I love it here.

I've considered moving to places like NYC several times in the past, and even recently. I know that NYC is a great city, and having gone to an East coast school, I have many people I'd be able to call friends there. But I know that this is home for me, and a hypothetical marginally better employment situation won't be able to overcome its gravity.

I happen to live in SV, but not because it's SV. I live here because it's home for me, and home to the friends I've known since childhood and adolescence seem to keep hanging around here along with me. I am lucky to have the best of both worlds right now. But if the world changed tomorrow and all the tech jobs moved to NYC, you'd probably still find me turning left out of my driveway like I always have. Just like you I guess :)

Usually opinionated is a bad thing - you seem to have the good opinionated. It's your opinion that rugged mountainnscenary and the well being of family and friends is worth more to you than salary and fussball.

I am seriously coming to the belief that setting clear tasks and assigning them to developers is a negative - I work much better on an idea I can see being great than I do on some half baked imposed task

I believe google uses an auction / pricing system - the more the boss wants it the more points it gets.

I think I know what I want scrum points to mean now - prizes

There should be at least one "water cooler" room where people are free to share youtube links or BS about non-work stuff. In short, the chat system becomes the virtual office. The team room becomes the virtual shared room where anyone can jump in on a conversation that interests them, or start one up casually.

The company MUST have a day to day internet communications based culture for a remote team member to be successful. If a team has a key remote member from the start it's easier. All remote teams are of course the easiest.

It's hard to add a remote member to a team that is used to being in the same offices. A lot of people will resist changing the entire culture for one "new dev". Office members will talk about a design problem at the physical water cooler instead of the virtual one. The on site team will go for beers together after instead of having a couple on a google hangout/skype video chat. The remote member will feel more like a contract dev assigned work than a creative member of the team. This is no good.

Where I've seen adding a remote member done successfully, requires management and team buy in of remote working. The manager/team lead should work a few days a week, or even a week a month, remotely. So should the other team members. After the team lead sees what it's like to be the lone person on speaker phone while everyone else is in the meeting room, you understand why if a remote member is in the meeting, everyone should be using skype/google hangout for it. The offices should become more of a shared coworking space that happens to have your company name on the door.

I myself prefer to work remotely. It's not for everybody or every company though. For a startup I think a remote culture from the beginning makes a lot of sense. Unless you require it to show off to investors/clients, skip the office. Have the cofounders work from home. Meet up atleast once every 3 months in real life for beverages and discussion. Talk on chat, every day. That's my thoughts.

One last thing worth mentioning, chat logs are great for when the new guy wants to understand a design decision. Why did we use $nosql instead of $nosql2? Here, read the logs from 6 months ago. For operations events (downtime etc) the timestamped chat logs are great for after action reviews. Can you brainstorm better in a physical room or a chat room? I've found the ability text chat gives you to allow everyone to talk at once, without talking over anyone, allows for discussion to proceed at a more rapid pace and more paths followed. This can be of course good and bad, such is life. :)

While I have no familiarity, I doubt it is legal in many other countries with a socialist state that requires employers to pay things like national insurance.

Basically if you walk like an employee, and talk like an employee, you're an employee and shouldn't pretend to be an independent contractor and you probably should not set up your own company as you'll be double hit with taxes if they catch you (company taxes for employees and standard employee taxes). That could leave you with several years worth of some serious taxes to back pay.

Don't want to be doom and gloom, but be aware what you're getting yourself into if you're going to pretend to be a consultant/contractor when you're not.