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The title is very misleading. The content of the article doesn't support the title at all..
I'd be interested to see how many other of the team are unhappy, and more to the point how many are perfectly happy with the current situation.
The ability to manage work-life balance when working remotely is a very rare ability, and one that takes practice to develop. The same ability is required of startup founders. Those who can define structure for themselves, even without external instruction, and then execute within that structure, will always succeed before those who cannot.
Because this ability is so rare, and necessarily present in startup founders, we can logically assume that a higher percentage of startup founders have the ability than the percentage of others who do. Or, at least we can assume that startup founders are the most well-practiced in this ability to execute within their own structure.
This means many of (not all!) the people who are best at managing work-life balance (a requirement for a productive remote employee), are already founding startups. So the best remote employees are selected out of the hiring pool if they decide to found startups instead. This leaves you with a plethora of less-competent potential remote employees, who are not as skilled at managing their own work-life balance as the best of them.
A risk when hiring a remote team is that you recruit too many employees who cannot properly manage their own work-life balance, and therefore suffer productivity losses. I would imagine the effect compounds as you hire more employees sharing this weakness.
"I've spent the majority of my life surrounded by other people. I grew up with two brothers, played sports as kid, had a good amount of friends while going through school, have always had a pretty active social life, and lived with three friends in college." Does the entire staff of statuspage.io feel this way? Sounds like this is more of a personal issue for the author of this post. There's nothing wrong with admitt…
That is just one point out of several though so I thought it was fine to add here.
I see this more as a technology issue - no one has sufficiently solved the "remote creativity" problem of allowing people to communicate as seamlessly as they can in a room with a whiteboard. (Or someone has, and I don't know about it, and StatusPage doesn't either)
I don't know that this is the case. I feel like there just isn't anything that can replace consistently being in the same room with someone.
In any case, let me be the first to welcome you to Denver! There's no other place that I'd rather work non-remote. ;)
The title is very misleading. The content of the article doesn't support the title at all..
The article actually reads like this one individual got tired of working remotely (see "HAPPINESS SUFFERS (FOR SOME)") and then reverse-justified why it wasn't working so it didn't seem like that was the core of why he wanted to stop. I'd be interested to see how many other of the team are unhappy, and more to the point how many are perfectly happy with the current situation.
The main reason is really that we feel like we'd be more productive if we were together more often.
I like that you mention the disadvantage that "employees struggle with work-life balance." This is often overlooked when considering the feasibility of remote working. The ability to manage work-life balance when working remotely is a very rare ability, and one that takes practice to develop. The same ability is required of startup founders. Those who can define structure for themselves, even without external instruc…
I like that you mention the disadvantage that "employees struggle with work-life balance." This is often overlooked when considering the feasibility of remote working. The ability to manage work-life balance when working remotely is a very rare ability, and one that takes practice to develop. The same ability is required of startup founders. Those who can define structure for themselves, even without external instruc…
Even when I was bad at work/life balance when I first started working from home... I still saved an hour-and-a-half each and every day by not having to commute or iron clothes or make my lunch.
REMOTE DOESN'T WORK FOR GENERALISTS
and more this:
Some people just aren't wired for working remotely.
Nothing to beat yourself up over. And in my view not something that needs to apply to the full team - I've done a lot of work with a company where you get to choose whether you want to work remotely or not. Once every three months the whole company meets up for a couple of days and in between occasionally people will choose to meet up for a day to kick a project off or wind it up. Some people work full time in an office together. I think it works brilliantly letting people have the choice from a developer's perspective, although I can think of a few project managers that perhaps didn't get it.
Now I work in an office and work from home at least one day a week, sometimes more, and the freedom to work where I feel like working that day is quite nice. Sometimes you just don't feel like doing the commute, or you didn't get much sleep or whatever, and it's fine.
I agree the tools are not very good - using Skype-the-app sucks, but Skype is also the only video-chat solution I've tried where the audio isn't terrible or echo-y. (Sometimes the echo situation turns into straight-up feedback.) Actually, they all work fine for one-on-one video chatting, but when you start adding people to the call, things get ugly quick.
I solved the problem of being alone by working from a coworking space where I shared an office with three other people, none of us actually working together. All the benefits of being around people, but none of the downsides of being stuff in a small box filled with office politics and whatever other BS is going around that week.